Scum vs. Scum

There is perhaps no better illustration of the deep decay of the American political system than the Senate race in New Jersey. Sen. Bob Menendez, running for re-election [ed. he was elected], was censured by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting bribes from the Florida businessman Salomon Melgen, who was convicted in 2017 of defrauding Medicare of $73 million. The senator had flown to the Dominican Republic with Melgen on the physician’s private jet and stayed in his private villa, where the men cavorted with young Dominican women who allegedly were prostitutes. Menendez performed numerous political favors for Melgen, including helping some of the Dominican women acquire visas to the United States. Menendez was indicted in a federal corruption trial but escaped sentencing because of a hung jury. (...)

His Republican rival in the Senate race that will be decided Tuesday is Bob Hugin, whose reported net worth is at least $84 million. With Hugin as its CEO, the pharmaceutical firm Celgene made $200 million by conspiring to keep generic cancer drugs off the market, according to its critics. Celgene, a model of everything that is wrong with our for-profit health care system, paid $280 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a whistleblower who accused the firm of improperly marketing two drugs to treat several forms of cancer without getting Federal Drug Administration approval, thereby defrauding Medicare. Celgene, over seven years, also doubled the price of the cancer drug Revlimid to some $20,000 for a supply of 28 pills.

The Senate campaign in New Jersey has seen no discussion of substantive issues. It is dominated by both candidates’ nonstop personal attacks and negative ads, part of the typical burlesque of American politics.

Scum versus scum. That sums up this election season. Is it any wonder that 100 million Americans don’t bother to vote? When all you are offered is Bob One or Bob Two, why bother? One-fourth of Democratic challengers in competitive House districts in this week’s elections have backgrounds in the CIA, the military, the National Security Council or the State Department. Nearly all candidates on the ballots in House races are corporate-sponsored, with a few lonely exceptions such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, members of the Democratic Socialists of America who are running as Democrats. The securities and finance industry has backed Democratic congressional candidates 63 percent to 37 percent over Republicans, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics. Democratic candidates and political action committees have received $56.8 million, compared with Republicans’ $33.4 million, the center reported. The broader sector of finance, insurance and real estate, it found, has given $174 million to Democratic candidates, against $157 million to Republicans. And Michael Bloomberg, weighing his own presidential run, has pledged $100 million to elect a Democratic Congress.

“In interviews with two dozen Wall Street executives, fund-raisers, donors and those who raise money from them, Democrats described an extraordinary level of investment and excitement from the finance sector … ,” The New York Times reported about current campaign contributions to the Democrats from the corporate oligarchs.

Our system of legalized bribery is an equal-opportunity employer.

Of course, we are all supposed to vote Democratic to halt the tide of Trump fascism. But should the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, hate speech and violence as a tool for intimidation and control will increase, with much of it directed, as we saw with the pipe bombs intended to decapitate the Democratic Party leadership, toward prominent Democratic politicians and critics of Donald Trump. Should the white man’s party of the president retain control of the House and the Senate, violence will still be the favored instrument of political control as the last of democratic protections are stripped from us. Either way we are in for it.

Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux populism is a sham. Only the rich like his tax cuts, his refusal to raise the minimum wage and his effort to destroy Obamacare. All he has left is hate. And he will use it. Which is not to say that, if only to throw up some obstacle to Trump, you shouldn’t vote for the Democratic scum, tools of the war industry and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic control of the House will do very little to halt our descent into corporate tyranny, especially with another economic crisis brewing on Wall Street. The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.

The Democrats, who refuse to address the social inequality they helped orchestrate and that has given rise to Trump, are the party of racial and ethnic inclusivity, identity politics, Wall Street and the military. Their core battle cry is: We are not Trump! This is ultimately a losing formula. It was adopted by Hillary Clinton, who is apparently weighing another run for the presidency after we thought we had thrust a stake through her political heart. It is the agenda of the well-heeled East Coast and West Coast elites who want to instill corporate fascism with a friendly face.

Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in “Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power” warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner’s sadistic leer. Janus-like, fascism seeks to present itself to a captive public as a force for good and moral renewal. It promises protection against enemies real and invented. But denounce its ideology, challenge its power, demand freedom from fascism’s iron grip, and you are mercilessly crushed. Gross knew that if the United States’ form of fascism, expressed through corporate tyranny, was able to effectively mask its true intentions behind its “friendly” face we would be stripped of power, shorn of our most cherished rights and impoverished. He has been proved correct.

“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America,” Gross wrote. “Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion.”

No totalitarian state has mastered propaganda better than the corporate state. Our press has replaced journalism with trivia, feel-good stories, jingoism and celebrity gossip. The banal and the absurd, delivered by cheery corporate courtiers, saturate the airwaves. Our emotions are skillfully manipulated around manufactured personalities and manufactured events. We are, at the same time, offered elaborate diversionary spectacles including sporting events, reality television and absurdist political campaigns. Trump is a master of this form of entertainment. Our emotional and intellectual energy is swallowed up by the modern equivalent of the Roman arena. Choreographed political vaudeville, which costs corporations billions of dollars, is called free elections. Cliché-ridden slogans, which assure us that the freedoms we cherish remain sacrosanct, dominate our national discourse as these freedoms are stripped from us by judicial and legislative fiat. It is a vast con game. (...)

We no longer live in a functioning democracy. Self-styled liberals and progressives, as they do in every election cycle, are urging us to vote for the Democrats, although the Democratic Party in Europe would be classified as a right-wing party, and tell us to begin to build progressive movements the day after the election. Only no one ever builds these movements. The Democratic Party knows there is no price to pay for selling us out and its abject service to corporations. It knows the left and liberals become supplicants in every election cycle. And this is why the Democratic Party drifts further and further to the right and we become more and more irrelevant. If you stand for something, you have to be willing to fight for it. But there is no fight in us.

The elites, Republican and Democrat, belong to the same club. We are not in it.

by Chris Hedges, Truthdig |  Read more:

Image: Mr. Fish/Truthdig
[ed. See also: Who’s the Real American Psycho? (NY Times)]

Good Luck Everyone

Blackadder Goes Forth

[ed. See also: Thumbs up from Putin as Trump rains on Armistice parade (Guardian).]

Victoria Semykina, Illustrations for Baku magazine (2015-2016)

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Marcel Mariën. Mermaid’s Incest (L'inceste de la Sirène). 1974.
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Winners Take All

Modern philanthropy means that giving some away is more important than how you got it

Anand Giridharadas was a former McKinsey consultant turned "thought leader," invited to the stages of the best "ideas festivals" and to TED (twice), the author of some very good and successful books, and as a kind of capstone to this career, he was named a fellow to the Aspen Institute, an elite corps of entrepreneurs who are given institutional support and advice as they formulate "win-win" solutions to the world's greatest problems, harnessing the power of markets to lift people out of poverty and oppression.

But the deeper Giridharadas got into this new role, the more uncomfortable he became with it. On the night he was to give a valedictory address to an audience of business leaders, finance leaders, and other members of the ruling class, he abandoned the "Aspen consensus" and instead give a scorching and excoriating talk about the structural failure of "win-win" as a way of thinking about the world's problems.

Giridharadas's point was that the business elites who were gathered to "give back" and "solve the big problems" were some of the most egregious contributors to those problems. They had looted the world's treasuries, shut down businesses and shipped jobs to low-wage, low-regulation free trade zones, gutted public services and replaced them with low-bidder private sector contractors, and had done so while formulating and promulgating the philosophy that business leaders' individual judgment about the provision of public services were always to be preferred to those policies set by democratically elected politicians.

The speech was -- obviously -- divisive. Giridharadas had expected to be pilloried for his views, and he was, to an extent. A hedge-fund millionaire sought him out later to call him an asshole, people glared at him from across the Institute's bar. But there were also people who applauded vigorously, billionaires who thanked him for finally articulating the doubt that had lurked in their hearts.

It was the start of a project that culminated in the publication of last summer's Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, a beautifully written "argument with Giridharadas's friends" about the problems with their worldview. As Giridharadas says, being inside the system gives you special insight when it comes to criticizing it, and Giridharadas is deep inside the system.

Winners Take All moves all the way up and down the stack of today's plutocratic philanthropy industry, talking to NGO managers, billionaire donors, critics, cheerleaders, superstars (Bill Clinton granted Giridharadas a wide-ranging interview about his extraordinary transition for a man who led the most powerful nation on Earth to someone committed to bypassing nations in favor of private philanthropy enacted by multinational corporations and hereditary billionaires), and, of course, critics.

The result is a comprehensive and devastating critique of elite giving, and a sharp articulation of its core philosophy: that it doesn't matter how you made your money, provided that you do some good with it once it's in your anonymous, offshore, tax-free bank-account. Giridharadas's shows how this belief gives the rich cover to continue actions that are worsening the problems that they are nominally concerned with solving, and to still think of themselves (and be publicly recognized) as do-gooders rather than the source of our problems.

The private philanthropy model has both ideological and methodological blinkers. Practicioners of "marketworld" philanthropy approach every problem like a McKinsey consultant, bringing the management consultant's toolkit and specialized, jargony vocabulary with them. When "the protocol" of the management consultants are the only tool at your disposal, parts of problems that the protocol can't solve are downranked to oblivion, as are the methods that might tackle them.

I live on the periphery of the world Giridharadas describes: I, too, get invited to "ideas" festivals, and while I generally use my time there to decry corruption and to make explicit connections between bad policy and plutocratic wealth, I've also seen enough of the people Giridharadas is talking about to agree with him when he says that many of these people are kind, kind-hearted, and also secretly worried that the "market-world" approach to solving problems will never solve a problem that challenges market-world, or its beneficiaries (like them).

Giridharadas doesn't speculate about whether market-world's givers have their hearts in the right place because he wants to know whether they can be forgiven for their participation in the system -- but rather, whether they can be convinced to do something about it.

All through Giridharadas's book, he meets people high and low, rich and powerful or poor and scrappy, who understand that we're at a breaking point. Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that elite do-goodism was just cover for perpetuation of the system (nevermind that he also planned on perpetuating the system), and he resonated with people. Ever since late nineties, when Reagan-era deregulation had pervaded deeply into the system and wages started to stagnate, organized labor started to crumble, and policies like the WTO were consummated to the benefit of capital and the cost of the world, its climate and its people, there's been a mounting sense that we are on a collision course with disaster.

As inequality mounts, our weakened governments are unable to enact policies that upset plutocrats' apple carts. American health care, education, infrastructure, and (of course) its climate are unravelling so fast we can actually see it happen. People are turning to far-right movements and falling prey to charlatans as they seek a way out, or at least an explanation.

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: Winners Take All

Bassist Darryl Jones on Touring Life with the Rolling Stones and Playing with Miles Davis

It is 10:30 on a Tuesday morning, a morning which can best be described as a “proper” English morning. You must go to England to really experience a proper English morning, the sun shines brightly, but there is no oppressive heat. There’s a crisp breeze blowing, which is all the better because all the streets nearby are decked out in bunting, Union Jacks, and English flags. As far as the eye can see, there are decorations strung between building creating a sea of red, white and blue. Why all the flags? I’m here just a few days after the royal wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle. I’m not here for the wedding, however. I’m here for that other omnipresent British export, The Rolling Stones, and I’ve been granted an interview with their bassist, Darryl Jones.

It’s the night after the first of six Stones shows in the U.K, and specifically it’s the night after the first show in London, which can only be described as somewhat of a “homecoming” for the Stones. It’s been some years since they toured the U.K. and in some cases, it’s been decades since they’ve played some of the cities on this 2018 tour, known as the No Filter tour. There’s a buzz in the air, and the local denizens are eagerly anticipating their hometown boys. It’s not just the fans who view this as a homecoming, as Darryl tells me, “It felt a little bit like the hometown boys done good, you know what I mean?” He continues, “Last night there was definitely something in the air. At one point I turned to Keith and said ‘Welcome home’. I said that to the whole band, actually.”

The venue they played at last night isn’t a venue that they’ve ever played at. It’s the former 2012 Olympic stadium known now as “Queen Elizabeth Stadium”, a shiny and massive structure holding over 80,000 friends and family. When you’re a Stones fan, you’re either one or the other, sometimes both. It’s not atypical for super-fans to travel more than ten thousand miles for these gigs, and I’m no different.

After leaving my accommodations in the center of London, I hail one of the ubiquitous black London taxis as to make the journey — and the experience — as British as possible. The cab glides effortlessly between all the Ubers, bicyclists, and pedestrians as only a London cabbie can do, as we make our way to the venerable Savoy Hotel on the river Thames. This isn’t my first trip to The Savoy, however, as I was there the night before to pick up my tickets, which were held by the “ticket lady,” a position that has changed very few times over the decades, but is present whenever The Stones show up to play. I navigated the ermine and velvet hallways to find the VIP ticket office, which is in an unmarked room, past the various eateries and sitting areas.

The taxi pulls up to the gilded port-cochere of the hotel, where I am met by a lovely chap outfitted in top hat and tails, in grey of course. Posh is how you would best describe it. A short walk from the drop-off to the front desk, where I inform the concierge I’m there to meet with Darryl Jones. I’m asked to have a seat and after a few minutes, I’m approached and told “Mr. Jones will see you now, Sir. Take the lift up to the eighth floor.” And with that I am on my way.

If you haven’t been up front at a Stones show, you don’t fully grasp just how incredibly loud the group is, nor do you necessarily pick up on all the interplay between the band members. “We’re an incredibly loud band,” says Darryl. “Dave is our front of the house guy and at times I’ll tell my tech man to get on the walkie talkie and tell Dave to turn the bass down, he really does push the bass in the mix, he tells me all the time that if you can’t feel the drums and bass, it ain’t rock and roll.”

If you’ve been lucky enough to be front of house for a more intimate gig, as I was at the tiny Fonda Theater in Los Angeles in 2015, you fully know what I’m talking about. Darryl knew exactly what I was talking about as he stated, “Being in the front for that Fonda show must have really blown your hair back, we’re really loud in small places like that!” The loudness of the band must be felt to be truly appreciated. When I was present in 2015 at the band’s rehearsal space, it felt like I was standing inside the room with them cranked to 11. As Darryl explains, “I guess it just depends on the room too, because I don’t remember that being particularly loud. It’s just one of those things you know? Rock and Roll.”

One of the things that has always endeared the band to its fans is the occasional mistake or misstep. “Last night we were having issues with the wireless mics and guitars,” Darryl explains. “It’s gonna happen with any modern technology if you want to walk around the stage without a cable. They always check all this stuff before we go on, but sometimes there’s radio interference and things cut out, for some reason, something was interfering a little bit last night. I’ve been working with these guys for a while and I don’t remember the last time that happened, I don’t think I ever remember that happening with Keith’s guitar. The fans don’t seem to mind, and the band is acutely aware of that.”

He continues, “It’s really interesting, I get the feeling that the real fans want to see that, they want to see something real and they love the mistakes. If there’s a faux-pas, they seem to really dig it. There’s definitely an element of chaos to what the band does, I always thought that when I first started playing with them,” says Darryl. “I’d be at a wedding for a musician, and the band playing is really a great band, but when they start playing a Rolling Stones song, I would think to myself, “Something’s not right,” and then I’d realize that there’s a little bit of irreverence to what the Stones do. We don’t mind if our “slip” is showing a bit, and the fans seem to really appreciate it. We’re going to let that be a part of our music, I think I learned that from Miles Davis.

by Ivor Levine, Rock Cellar |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Solongo Mellecker - Hidden Treasure
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Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer

The futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.

He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete.

He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.

He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”

But lately, Mr. Harari is anxious about something much more personal. If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley C.E.O.s love him so?

“One possibility is that my message is not threatening to them, and so they embrace it?” a puzzled Mr. Harari said one afternoon in October. “For me, that’s more worrying. Maybe I’m missing something?”

When Mr. Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive research division, invited Mr. Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating writer”) in The New York Times.

“I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are — it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to secede or shatter, or for the creation of corporate nation-states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Mr. Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Mr. Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.”

Mr. Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.”

Mr. Harari, who has a Ph.D. from Oxford, is a 42-year-old Israeli philosopher and a history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise — that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident — seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Mr. Harari tied together existing knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over. Translated into English in 2014, the book went on to sell more than eight million copies and made Mr. Harari a celebrity intellectual.

He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Mr. Harari’s future is one in which big data is worshiped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities.

Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting — and how your data could power it.”

His prophecies might have made him a Cassandra in Silicon Valley, or at the very least an unwelcome presence. Instead, he has had to reconcile himself to the locals’ strange delight. “If you make people start thinking far more deeply and seriously about these issues,” he told me, sounding weary, “some of the things they will think about might not be what you want them to think about.”

‘Brave New World’ as Aspirational Reading

Mr. Harari agreed to let me tag along for a few days on his travels through the Valley, and one afternoon in September, I waited for him outside X’s offices, in Mountain View, while he spoke to the Alphabet employees inside. After a while, he emerged: a shy, thin, bespectacled man with a dusting of dark hair. Mr. Harari has a sort of owlish demeanor, in that he looks wise and also does not move his body very much, even while glancing to the side. His face is not particularly expressive, with the exception of one rogue eyebrow. When you catch his eye, there is a wary look — like he wants to know if you, too, understand exactly how bad the world is about to get.

At the Alphabet talk, Mr. Harari had been accompanied by his publisher. They said that the younger employees had expressed concern about whether their work was contributing to a less free society, while the executives generally thought their impact was positive.

Some workers had tried to predict how well humans would adapt to large technological change based on how they have responded to small shifts, like a new version of Gmail. Mr. Harari told them to think more starkly: If there isn’t a major policy intervention, most humans probably will not adapt at all.

It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”

He was slouching a little. Socializing exhausts him.

As we boarded the black gull-wing Tesla Mr. Harari had rented for his visit, he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel “Brave New World,” which depicts a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Mr. Harari said, often think it sounds great. “Everything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you’re really hard-pressed to explain what’s wrong with it,” he said. “And you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.”

An Alphabet media relations manager later reached out to Mr. Harari’s team to tell him to tell me that the visit to X was not allowed to be part of this story. The request confused and then amused Mr. Harari. It is interesting, he said, that unlike politicians, tech companies do not need a free press, since they already control the means of message distribution.

He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. “I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people,” he said. “They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.”

Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. “Some may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing,” Mr. Harari said.

Still, their enthusiastic embrace of his work makes him uncomfortable. “It’s just a rule of thumb in history that if you are so much coddled by the elites it must mean that you don’t want to frighten them,” Mr. Harari said. “They can absorb you. You can become the intellectual entertainment.”

by Nellie Bowles, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Emily Berl

Seymour Chwast - 1979
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Why We Need Difficult Books

"The fascination of what’s difficult,” wrote WB Yeats, “has dried the sap out of my veins ... ” In the press coverage of this year’s Man Booker prize winner, Anna Burns’s Milkman, we’ve read a good many commentators presenting with sapless veins – but a dismaying lack of any sense that what’s difficult might be fascinating.

“Odd”, “impenetrable”, “hard work”, “challenging” and “brain-kneading” have been some of the epithets chosen. They have not been meant, I think, as compliments. The chair of the judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, perhaps unhelpfully, humblebragged that: “I spend my time reading articles in the Journal of Philosophy, so by my standards this is not too hard.” But he added that Milkman is “challenging […] the way a walk up Snowdon is challenging. It is definitely worth it because the view is terrific when you get to the top.”

That’s at least a useful starting point. Appiah defends the idea – which, nearly a century after modernism really kicked off, probably shouldn’t need defending – that ease of consumption isn’t the main criterion by which literary value should be assessed. We like to see sportsmen and women doing difficult things. We tend to recognise in music, film, television and the plastic arts that good stuff often asks for a bit of work from its audience. And we’re all on board with “difficult” material as long as it’s a literary classic – we read The Waste Land for our A-levels and we scratched our heads as we puzzled it out, and now we recognise that it is like it is because it has to be that way. So why is “difficult” a problem when it comes to new fiction?

Attacking a literary prize for rewarding a book that doesn’t accord with a critic’s ideas about “readability” is simply philistinism. The question is not where the book sits on some notional sliding scale between “challenging” and “page-turner”: it’s how successfully it answers whatever challenge it sets itself. The question isn’t how difficult a book is, but why it’s difficult. What is it doing with its difficulty? What is it asking of the reader? Does that difficulty reward the reader’s investment of time? You’re entitled, as James Marriott did in the Times, to conclude that in this case the view from the top of Snowdon wasn’t worth the hike. But complaining about the hike per se is to give up on the idea that there might be any case for art that rewards an investment of energy and attention from its consumer. (...)

Easy good books will, with a bit of luck, find their audiences; easy bad books will do so too, because they are often fun in spite of or because of their badness. Difficult bad books will tend to die in a ditch; and difficult good books, without a helping hand, are likely to do so too. Think of prizes like the Folio, Man Booker and next week’s Goldsmiths as that helping hand. Having a panel of serious and thoughtful critics giving a lot of time to noticing something that might otherwise not be widely noticed can’t, surely, be a bad thing. These prizes are set up to reward the best literary fiction. Here, though, something of a definitional abyss opens. What the hell is “literary fiction”?

I’ve heard it said, and it’s an attractive position, that “literary fiction needs to recognise that it’s just another genre and get over itself”. Fair enough. Let’s explore that. I think it’s a pious cop-out to declare, as some do: “There aren’t literary books and popular books: there are just good books and bad books.” If we’re going wilfully to retreat from analysis, we may as well fold our tents as critics. There are indeed good and bad books but books also succeed and fail – and are responded to by readers – in relation to the genres they fit into or escape from.

Like it or not, literary fiction is a category that we use. And if it is just another genre and needs to get over itself, fine. Let’s work with that. We can identify features of other genres. Aliens and nanobots? SF, more often than not. Guns and hats and dead bodies? Crime. Dossiers and dead drops? Spy novels. So we ought to be able to make some, if necessarily vague, stabs at identifying what the features of “literary fiction” are. Let’s leave aside cultural value judgments about “importance” or “seriousness”. Literary fiction can, like most fiction, be unimportant. It can also be unserious: some of the best of it is. I’d call Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller literary fiction, but it doesn’t strike me as either important or serious. 

It’s sometimes fuzzily said that literary fiction gives you more on rereading, or that it stays with you, or that it’s “more profound”. That may be true, some of the time – but these things are more likely to be symptoms than necessary features. I’d suggest that the main identifying feature – and in this respect literary writing can and does compass and mingle with any number of other genres – is to do with complexity and depth of attention. That can be moral or psychological complexity – crudely, the goodies and baddies are less clearly delineated – but it can also be, and tends to be in the best work, allied to a greater attention to the form and to the sentence-by-sentence language itself. And where I say that it mingles with other genres, the point I mean to make is that (just like hats, or nanobots) its features can be found in any genre. You could make the case that Iain M Banks’s Culture novels are literary SF, that Sarah Waters has written literary historical thrillers, that Joseph Kanon or John le Carré write literary spy novels, that the metafictional quality of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a literary quality, and so on. The examples are numberless.

A publishing acquaintance suggests an analogy with music: jazz is more complex than blues. It’s harder to play and harder to appreciate. That doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of good blues and lots of bad jazz. It doesn’t mean that jazz is an innately superior artform. It simply describes a formal difference between the two. Likewise, when we talk about a “literary novel” we usually mean something that demands and rewards close attention – though, as ever, there will be exceptions. The quality of that attention isn’t uniform from novel to novel. You don’t, for instance, read the torrential riffings of a Thomas Pynchon or even a Karl Ove Knausgaard the same way as you do the crystalline exactness of Nabokov. And those qualities will, for reasons that should be obvious, sometimes but not always issue in “difficulty”.  (...)

So let’s not assume that challenging work is like some sort of joyless high-fibre diet. Many if not most of the great modernists and postmodernists weren’t just formally challenging: they were outright funny. Samuel Beckett, laureate as he was of existential despair, is wildly funny. So is James Joyce. So, in his pinstriped way, is TS Eliot. More recently, David Foster Wallace is almost dementedly prankish, as is Pynchon. AL Kennedy’s Costa-winning Day, about bomber pilots in the second world war, is a book of high seriousness and some narrative complexity, but is full of jokes. Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island contains, for my money, the funniest gag on that year’s Booker shortlist. And it’s notable that many of those who have enjoyed Milkman commend it not for being solemn or profound but for being funny.

All this is not to say that some difficult novels are not truly ghastly. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, you could say that pretentiousness is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius. I remember a colleague on a judging panel surveying the gathered novels and saying, with a certain roll of the eyes: “There’s a lot of ... fine writing in here.” By this he meant overwrought bad writing. The idea of literary fiction – in particular the idea that it is intrinsically high-status or, worse, “important” – is the rock on which many ambitious second-rate writers bark their shins. It’s what gives us plotless novels choked with portentous metaphors and pseudo-profound ruminations, novels that mistake difficulty for accomplishment or, worse, solemnity for seriousness. It’s what gives us, in parody, the “octuple time scheme and sixteen unreliable narrators” of Richard Tull’s unreadable seventh novel in Martin Amis’s The Information. Just because literary fiction doesn’t necessarily tell a story (though it usually at some level does), and frequently spars with its own form, and tends to pay attention to its language, it doesn’t mean that by turning all those things up to 11 you’ve created a worthwhile work of art. And it’s for just that reason that, year by year, we should be grateful rather than indignant that panels of judges on literary prizes labour to bring to our attention those difficult books that really are worth our time.

by Lara Feigel, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Franck Allais

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s War on Gerrymandering

Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing to travel to the future of the gerrymandering war.

Tuesday brought wins for independent redistricting commissions that Schwarzenegger backed in three of the four states where they were on the ballot—Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado, with Utah still counting, but also trending toward yes. Now the former California governor has begun planning a summit for advocates, donors, and the people behind some of the successful campaigns to brainstorm and build to more wins.

It will be held at the Schwarzenegger Institute at the University of Southern California. Plans are being made to bring the group together within the next few months.

With Tuesday’s ballot questions, now nearly one-third of House districts will be drawn through independent redistricting according to a new report by the Schwarzenegger Institute, by commission or other methods. Schwarzenegger’s goal is to get that number to half by the end of 2020, and he already has his eyes on Virginia, among other states.

“My biggest complaint is always when people say, ‘This is [what’s] wrong with politics.’ Now I say, ‘What do you do about it?’” Schwarzenegger said in an interview on Thursday. He compared the effort to some of his other passions. “We’re going to make a plan, and this is going to be a new family. It’s like the environmental family or the fitness family.”

Schwarzenegger became obsessed with redistricting reform after successfully pushing a ballot initiative in California, which passed narrowly in 2008 for statehouse races followed by another in 2010 for House seats, with opposition from both Republicans and Democrats. The measure took the power to draw the lines of House and state legislative districts away from politicians and gave it to a nonpartisan commission.

At the time, California was one of only a handful of states that did this, and the results changed the makeup of who voters ended up sending to Sacramento and Washington.

After the four ballot questions Tuesday and the federal judge who on Wednesday threw out the Maryland congressional map on the grounds that it violated the Constitution through excessive partisanship, Schwarzenegger said he sees “a wave” of its own, albeit one that most election coverage has missed.

“The only thing I can come up with is that people are so dissatisfied with how things are going that they think this is the next best thing, that they can get power and change,” he said, explaining what drove the wins.

Last month, Schwarzenegger hosted a raffle that raised $50,000 on Crowdpac for redistricting reform. The winners, a physical therapist and a nurse who had never made a political donation before, got to visit him on the set of the latest Terminator movie in Budapest. He also spent a day in mid-November campaigning at rallies and fundraisers in Michigan and Colorado for the ballot amendments there. Ahead of the Ohio ballot question that passed in the spring, he allowed signatures to be gathered at the Arnold Classic bodybuilding competition in Columbus, and did a series of videos promoting it.

Schwarzenegger said he’s ready to do more of that.

by Edward-Isaac Dovere, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

World Chess Championship: Magnus Carlsen Vs. Fabiano Caruana

Fabiano Caruana, the US challenger, escaped from the verge of defeat against world champion Magnus Carlsen on Friday evening as their error-strewn seven-hour marathon in game one (of 12) in their world title series at Holborn, London ended in a 115-move draw.

Caruana played too passively early on against Carlsen’s surprise Sicilian Defence, and the Norwegian gained a clear edge which should have been decisive when the American became acutely short of time. But on move 40, with a full point beckoning, Carlsen made an impatient pawn swap which gave away almost all his advantage and the game then drifted into a drawn rook endgame.

Caruana appeared nervous and was clearly more affected by the occasion. Computer assessments gave Carlsen a clear edge around move 20, and although Caruana recovered somewhat, he then blundered badly at move 33 when acutely short of time, allowing the champion’s queen and rook to penetrate his defences.

Game one of a world title match can be difficult for a challenger. The most famous example was at Reykjavik 1972, when Bobby Fischer, in a level endgame, captured Boris Spassky’s poisoned pawn and was defeated. (...)

At the end, coping with defeat will be hard for whoever loses. Caruana has already suffered at the end of the 2016 candidates when Sergey Karjakin beat him in the decisive game to become the challenger, so this would be his second failure, raising the spectre of becoming an eternal deuxième like Paul Keres or Viktor Korchnoi.

Asked the loser question in a recent interview, Carlsen replied: “I will be very sad. I can’t think too much about it.” His sister Ellen went further, suggesting that he might simply retire. Years ago Carlsen already said that he planned to give up before his 40s, and he could easily afford to do so. So far Bobby Fischer is the only one of the 16 world champions to have retired in youth while still at the top.

Caruana is the first US challenger since Fischer famously took the crown from Boris Spassky at Reykjavik 1972, so who would win if the Caruana of 2018 played the Fischer of 1972?

Caruana’s current rating of 2832 beats Fischer’s highest live rating of 2790, which reflects major advances in opening theory and all-round strength, stimulated by easily available 3400 strength computer programs. If Fischer had a year or two to get up to date, it could be a different story.

When Caruana was very young, his parents sought advice from Garry Kasparov, who warned that devoting a life to chess was too risky. They were determined, and still went ahead. His father gave up his work in data processing and used property income to manage his son and finance a move to Europe in search of high-class coaching and for travel to tournaments.

Both Fischer and Caruana were raised in Brooklyn so had easy access to New York’s active chess life. Bobby lived with his single mother and his sister, and had no top-class coach. He was an avid reader, and was one of the first in the US to acquire Schachmatny Bulletin, which published high-class material including secret training games by the top Soviet GMs. He absorbed, analysed and retained everything, and became a human database in his favoured systems like the Najdorf and Bc4 Sicilians or the King’s Indian.

So who would win between Caruana and an updated Fischer? It would be close, for sure.

by Leonard Barden, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty

[ed. See also: The Queen's Gambit]

Queen

When Queen Took ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to Live Aid (NY Times)

[ed. I wasn't much of a Queen or Freddie Mercury fan but this performance is pretty amazing. See also: Queen Guitarist Brian May On Writing Anthems And Studying Astrophysics (NPR).]

Why Do White Women Support Republicans? Because They Are Republicans.

Immediately after the midterms ended and the media started reporting that a majority of white women voted for Republicans Ted Cruz in Texas (59 percent), Ron DeSantis in Florida (51 percent), and Brian Kemp in Georgia (76 percent), the calls for white women's heads started rolling in on social media. White women didn't vote for those candidates in higher numbers than white men, but instead of calling out men, progressive white women started self-flagellating and promising to make other white women, collectively, "do better." Others were less conciliatory, like the actor Heather Mattarazzo, who tweeted that white women should “choke to death on the white supremacist patriarchal cock.”

None of the people issuing either mea culpas or threats seem to have actually voted for Cruz or DeSantis or Kemp or Trump, but apparently they think they can sway those who did by using some combination of shame and bullying, including the Women's March, which tweeted:

This tweet was not well received, at least if the 4,800 replies—the vast majority of which are some variation of “fuck off”—are any indication. As one woman replied, "I’m going to just take a stab in the dark here, but I’m not sure if condescendingly telling an entire demographic of women that they have a lot to learn and need growth is a good strategy."

While I understand the impulse to blame anonymous populations for our problems and defeats, it's not hard to see why people bristle at this kind of message. Blaming white women for not electing Democrats is based on the false presumption that white women are a homogenous population, that we are all supposed to be allies for the great feminist cause. When the right does this—treating, for instance, all Arabs (and Indians, Pakistanis, and Sikhs) as criminals when a Muslim extremist commits an act of violence—those of us on the left tend to object, and for good reason: Punishing the collective for the actions of the few is how we get things like the Muslim ban, the border wall, racial profiling, and vague demands that all Muslims get together and condemn ISIS attacks in unison. It’s ridiculous thinking: People are individuals, and we should treat them like it—and that even includes white women.

White women are not a monolith. We don't all know each other. We don't all go to the same church or yoga class. Some of us, in fact, don't go to church or yoga at all. White women, like all populations, are a large, unwieldy group made up of individuals with an array of concerns and values, and less than half (48 percent) of white women lean Democratic. The fact that conservative women voted for Republican candidates should be no more surprising than the fact that liberal women voted for Dems, regardless of their race.

There are reasons not to blindly shout about "white women" when you’re pissed about the outcome of the election. For one, why the hell aren't you shouting at white men? They vote for Republicans at even higher rates than white women. This women-blaming rhetoric reeks of misogyny, which may be ironic considering it comes primarily from progressive women. Regardless, it won’t fix anything. The way to win races is to actually appeal to voters (or to suppress them), and the only way to appeal to voters is to either try and change their opinion (and good luck with that) or to meet them where they already stand.

by Katie Herzog, The Stranger |  Read more:
Image: Twitter

What You Have to Fear From Artificial Intelligence

These days, advancements in artificial intelligence are not only making rich people billions of dollars, but inspiring wild-eyed fear-mongering about the end of civilization. Those concerned include Elon Musk, who has said that the technology could eventually produce an “immortal dictator,” and the late Stephen Hawking, who warned that the sudden explosion of artificial intelligence could be “the worst event in the history of our civilization.” Generally, the fear is that we will produce machines so intelligent that they are capable of becoming smarter and smarter until we no longer have control over them. They will become a new form of life that will rule over us the way we do the rest of the animal kingdom.

As a professional in the AI industry, I can tell you that given the state of the technology, most of these predictions take us so far into the future that they’re closer to science fiction than reasoned analysis. Before we get to the point where computers have an unstoppable “superintelligence,” there are much more pressing developments to worry about. The technology that already exists, or is about to exist, is dangerous enough on its own.

Let me focus on some real-world developments that are terrifyingly immediate. Of the many different kinds of artificial neural networks, algorithms modeled after a rough approximation of how groups of neurons in your brain operate (which make up what is commonly called AI) I will focus on two: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs).

GANs are good at making counterfeit images, and thus videos as well. A GAN is made up of two neural networks that have each been “trained” on what a certain thing looks like, like a bathroom or an animal or a person of a certain identity. When the training is complete, one network is told to start generating new images of the thing on its own. The other network is presented with a stream of these counterfeit images with real images interspersed and tries to guess which are fakes. Human input tells each network its successes and failures. Each then adjusts itself to try to do better and they push each other to greater and greater heights of success. RNNs work with data that exists as an ordered sequence, such as a record of daily high temperatures in a city, or the words in a paragraph. Processing and generating written and spoken communication are two of the tasks RNNs are most commonly used for.

A computer program that can generate convincing images, or another that can understand human speech and generate it, might not seem world-shaking. But as these “counterfeiters” steadily improve, the implications are immense. GANs can produce photorealistic images and videos of nonexistent people. Magazines and advertisers can simply replace real people with generated pictures, saving money on photo shoots which require lighting, sets, technicians, photographers, and models. Stock photos will no longer be of people pretending to be students, professionals, workmen, etc. They will be computers pretending to be people. Many of the images you see on the internet will be of people who literally do not exist. If that sounds implausible, realize that it’s just another small step in the kind of fakery that occurs already through Photoshop and CGI. It just means that instead of starting with a photo, you can start by asking the computer to generate one. (...)

These people do not actually exist

If you think “fake news” is a problem now, just wait. When an image can be generated of literally anyone doing literally anything with perfect realism, truth is going to get a whole lot slipperier. The videos will soon catch up to the images, too. Already, it’s possible to make a moderately convincing clip that puts words in Barack Obama’s mouth. Fake security camera footage, fake police body camera footage, fake confessions: we are getting close. Marco Rubio has worried that “a foreign intelligence agency could use the technology to produce a fake video of an American politician using a racial epithet or taking a bribe” or a “fake video of a U.S. soldier massacring civilians overseas.” More worrying is what the U.S. military and police forces could do with it themselves. It didn’t take much deception to manipulate the country into supporting the invasion of Iraq. Fake intelligence is going to become a whole lot more difficult to disprove.

AI-generated images and videos are not just going to cast doubt on reporting, but will pose a major challenge for the legal system. Photographic evidence in trials will always be in doubt once generated images can’t be distinguished from real ones by human experts or other AIs. They can also be used as alibis, with claims that the real images are the counterfeit ones. In this dizzying world of forgery and illusion, how is anyone going to know what to believe? So-called “deepfake” videos will make Donald Trump’s claims of “fake news” that much more plausible and difficult to counter.

Mimicking ordinary human speech is coming to be a cinch. Google recently unveiled a new AI assistant that can talk like a person. It even puts “ums” and “uhs” where they need to go. Called Duplex, it can run on a cell phone, and not only sounds like a human but can interact like one. Duplex’s demo used it to call a hair salon and make an appointment. The woman on the line had no idea she wasn’t talking to a person. Google says it is building Duplex “to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable.”

Imagine how tomorrow’s technology could have worked in 2016. Two days before the election, a video appears, showing Hillary Clinton muttering “I can’t believe Wisconsin voters are so stupid,” supposedly caught on a “hot mike” at a rally in Eau Claire. It circulates on Facebook through the usual rightwing channels. Clinton says she never said it, and she didn’t. It doesn’t matter. It’s impossible to tell it’s fake. The fact-checkers look into it, and find that there never was an event in Eau Claire, and that Clinton had never even been to Wisconsin. It doesn’t matter. By that time, the video is at 10 million shares. The “Wisconsin can’t believe you’re so stupid” shirts are already being printed. Clinton loses, Trump becomes president. Catastrophe. (...)

By far the most serious and most frightening AI development is in military technology: armed, fully autonomous attack drones that can be deployed in swarms and might ultimately use their own judgment to decide when and whom to kill. Think that’s an exaggeration? The Department of Defense literally writes on its websites about new plans to improve the “autonomy” of its armed “drone swarms.” Here’s FOX News, which seems excited about the new developments:

No enemy would want to face a swarm of drones on the attack. But enemies of the United States will have to face the overwhelming force of American drone teams that can think for themselves, communicate with each other and work together in hundreds to execute combat missions…. Say you have a bomb maker responsible for killing a busload of children, our military will release 50 robots – a mix of ground robots and flying drones…Their objective? They must isolate the target within 2 square city blocks within 15 to 30 minutes max… It may sound farfetched – but drone swarm tech for combat already exists and has already been proven more than possible.

The focus here is on small quadcopter drones, designed to be deployed en masse to kill urban civilians, rather than the large Predator drones used to murder entire rural wedding parties in Muslim countries. DARPA’s repulsive Twitter account openly boasts about the plan: “Our OFFSET prgm envisions future small-unit infantry forces using unmanned aircraft systems and/or unmanned ground systems in swarms of >250 robots for missions in urban environment.” The Department of Defense is spending heavily in pursuit of this goal—their 2018 budgetary request contained $457 million for R&D in the technology. Combined with our new $275 million drone base in Niger, the United States is going to have a formidable new capacity to inflict deadly harm using killer robots.

Perhaps more telling, the Department of Defense is also spending heavily on counter-drone systems. They know from experience that other entities will acquire this technology, and that they’ll need to fight back. But while the offensive murder technology is likely to be incredibly effective, the defensive efforts aren’t going to work. Why? Because a swarm of cheap drones controlled by AI are almost unstoppable. Indeed, the DoD counter-drone efforts are pathetic and comically macabre: “The Air Force has purchased shotgun shells filled with nets and the Army has snatched up the Dronebuster, a device used to jam the communications of consumer drones…the Army and Navy are developing lasers to take down drones.” Lord help me, shotgun shells with nets! And if a drone is autonomous, communications jamming doesn’t do anything. If you were facing a swarm of drones, communications jamming would disrupt their coordination, making them less effective, but there would still be hundreds of drones trying to kill you.

It’s ironic, given all the fear that powerful members of the tech industry and government have about killer AI taking over the world, that they are silent as we literally build killer robots.

by Ryan Metz, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. For proof, look no further than today's news: White House Releases Doctored Video To Back Up Attack on CNN Reporter (With video - TPM).]

Handmade Bamboo Furniture

Li Zikai
[ed. Soothing video despite the laborious effort involved.]

via:

Rolling Stones