Commonplacing
Autocracy is a political system, a way of structuring society, a means of organizing power. It is not a genetic trait. Particular cultures, languages, or religions do not necessarily produce it. No nation is condemned forever to autocracy, just as no nation is guaranteed democracy.
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday, 2024), chap. 1.
. . . It was their relationship with media, with televisions, radios, books, blogs, which helped them to re-imagine themselves over and over.
Peter Pomerantsev, This is Not Propaganda (2019), part 6
In This is Not Propaganda (end of part 2), Peter Pomerantsev writes of his Russian family, based in Kyiv, becoming stateless in the late 1970s. The KGB had accused his father, Igor, of “circulating defamatory fabrications, regular listening to hostile broadcasts and contacts with foreigners.” They recommended he emigrate.
In many ways Igor was lucky. He had the semblance of choice. The [KGB] major had made it clear that if he stayed, he would have the full seven years in prison and five exiled in the Soviet provinces to face. If he had been a Ukrainian-language poet, [Pomerantsev continues, Igor] would have been locked up immediately. Repression in Ukraine focused on exterminating any signs of independent Ukrainian culture outside the cultural crèche of state-sanctioned Soviet ‘Ukrainianness’. But Igor wrote in Russian, the language of the coloniser.
He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 3, last section.
“We believe Russia is a great empire that other powers want to tear away parts from. We need to restore our power, occupy our lost lands, grab Crimea from the Ukrainians,” the football supporters say, then in the same breath: “We want a Russia for Russians, all these darkies from the Caucasus and Central Asia need to go home.”
This has always been the paradox of the new Russian nationalism: on the one hand wanting to conquer all regions around, on the other wanting an ethnically pure great power. And all that comes out of this confusion is an ever-growing anger.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 3, section: “The Call of the Void”.
How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 2, section: “Another Russia”.
So that’s Perplexity’s real innovation here: shattering the foundations of trust that built the internet.
Elizabeth Lopatto, “Perplexity’s grand theft AI”, The Verge, June 27, 2024.
The Republican Party’s divorce from the rule of law is complete.
Aaron Blake, Washington Post
Any general machine can be misused by any malign actor with ill intent. The pursuit of failsafe guardrails in AI will prove futile, for it is impossible to predict every bad use that anyone could make of a machine that can be asked to do anything. That is to say, it is impossible to build foolproof guardrails against us, for there are too many fools among us.
Jeff Jarvis, “Demote the Doomsters”, Buzz Machine, May 21, 2024. via @[email protected]
Death Wish for Their Soldiers
I can’t shake these lines from Stasik’s “Lullaby for the Enemy” about Ukraine’s Donbas:
You wanted this land
Now mix with it
You are my land now
Sleep, sleep, sleep . . .
I’m guessing that “earth” would be another translation option.
We Are the Problem
We blame the virus for
the disastrous condition
of our schools
the catastrophic state
of our hospitals
the ruinous structure
of our workplaces
the collapsing authority
of our institutions
so we need not acknowledge
the virus is not cause
but revealer
of our society’s frailty.
—@PlaguePoems
The Self
I believe the self is, at least in part, a cleverly disguised deception that allows the social world in and allows us to be “overtaken” by the social world without our even noticing.
– Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
(Crown Publishers, 2013).
Leadership Failure
. . . As senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who—safely ensconced in the West Wing—was too busy watching fiery television images of the crisis that was unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their cries for help.
“Six Hours of Paralysis" (Washington Post)”
Statistics and Tears
“In fact, the more who die, sometimes the less we care,” [Paul] Slovic said in an interview. In greater numbers, death becomes impersonal, and people feel increasingly hopeless that their actions can have any effect.
“Statistics are human beings with tears dried off,” Slovic said. “And that’s dangerous because we need tears to motivate us.”
– William Wan and Brittany Shammas (Washington Post)
Leadership and Trust
Trust is fundamental, reciprocal and, ideally, pervasive. If it is present, anything is possible. If it is absent, nothing is possible. The best leaders trust their followers with the truth, and you know what happens as a result? Their followers trust them back. With that bond, they can do big, hard things together…
George P. Schultz (Washington Post)
Alpharetta, Georgia
[A] great American experiment got underway in a place promising “the luxury of the modern South” with none of the death.
Two Faces of America
To stand in Mann’s study today, with editions of Goethe and Schiller on the shelves, is to feel pride in the country that took him in and shame for the country that drove him out—not two Americas but one. In this room, the erstwhile “Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell prey to the clammy fear of the hunted. Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself? Would he be detained, interrogated, even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took a final walk through his house and made his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.
Alex Ross (The New Yorker)
Social Cognition
“Naomi [who denounces ‘climate alarmism’] said her political activism was sparked a few years ago when she began asking questions in school about Germany’s liberal immigration policies. She said the backlash from teachers and other students hardened her skepticism about mainstream German thinking.”
Desmond Butler and Juliet Eilperin (Washington Post)
Yes, our cognition is bound up in our social existence, as Ludwik Fleck noted in 1935.
American Psycho
Is insidious destruction of our democracy by a bureaucratic samurai with the soothing voice of a boys’ school headmaster even more dangerous than a self-destructive buffoon ripping up our values in plain sight?
– Maureen Dowd, “Who’s the Real American Psycho?," New York Times, November 10, 2018.