The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The Cruelty Is the Point — Adam Serwer at the Atlantic: Trump’s only true skill is the con, his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
• Michael Lewis's new book 'The Fifth Risk' exposes the real decay under Trump — The Australian Financial Review publishes an excerpt: Trump's first budget eliminated ARPA-E altogether. It also eliminated the spectacularly successful $70 billion loan program. It cut funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of 6000 of their people. It eliminated all research on climate change. It halved the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster. "All the risks are science-based," said John MacWilliams when he saw the budget. "You can't gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country." But you can. Indeed, if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science. Trump's budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire – to remain ignorant. Donald Trump didn't invent this desire. He was just its ultimate expression.
• Uri Avnery, the Israeli optimist who played chess with Yasser Arafat, has died – he was one of my few Middle East heroes — Robert Fisk at the Independent: Uri Avnery suffered a massive heart attack at the weekend and died on Monday morning, but he was himself a Zionist, or at least a believer in a left-wing, courageous but humble “light among the nations” Israel; the kind many of us, in our heart of hearts, would like to believe in. He was the sort of Israeli that we bleeding heart liberals go and see when we arrive in Israel because they say what we want to hear.
• Last Survey — Bizarro by Dan Piraro:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading comics:

• The ‘prosperity doctrine’ and neoliberal Jesusing, Scott Morrison-style — Van Badham in the Guardian: He is a neoliberal and as treasurer he has governed neoliberally. Wage growth in Australia is stagnant, underemployment is rife. One of his earliest speeches was to condemn welfare recipients as the “taxed nots”, yet the policy he was most committed to pursue was the $65bn tax cuts for corporate Australia, including $17bn for the banks – the banks that are now recommended for criminal charges, from a banking royal commission Morrison described as a “populist whinge”. Who is such a person to lead this country? Well, if his own propaganda’s to be believed, a very holy man. Morrison spoke of his “personal faith in Jesus Christ” in his 2008 maiden speech, in which he also thanked pastors Brian Houston and Leigh Cameron of what has been described as a “money machine”, the Hillsong Church, for their “great assistance” to him. Citing Houston as “a mentor”, Morrison is a proud and public worshipper at the Horizon Church, which, like Hillsong, is Pentecostal, and similarly an “American-style mega-church ... where the gospel of prosperity is preached in an auditorium that can accommodate over 1,000 evangelicals” as described in a 2012 profile of Morrison in the Monthly.
• Voting Software — xkcd:
  
• The Non-University and the Manager — Binoy Kampmark at the Australian Independent Media Network: The university manager is a born and dedicated philistine, and is one of the most important reasons why such institutions are not only failing students but failing staff. It is managers who, untutored but entirely self-interested, feather their nests while stomping on the innovative and shutting out the novel. The world of ideas is a world of offense, dangerous and to be avoided. […] The fundamental goal of management is not merely to control, monitor and mediate performance on the part of the neutered academic, an insistence that thought is obscene. (Thought, by its very act, cannot be managed). The academic must be restrained before the all-seeing-eyes of the brand label police and authoritarians.
• Seder — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Life after death — Frances Coppola: Having seen my father die, I am more convinced than ever that we have only one life. Our job is to live it to the best, using our talents and abilities to the full, overcoming the constraints of our circumstances and our disabilities to the extent that we can. And because we are social creatures, living life to the full means helping others to make the best of their lives, too. Being truly human means giving the best that we have to offer without restraint, without counting the cost, and without any expectation of reward. Selfishness, that hoards what we do not need while those in need suffer, is inhuman. Those who deliberately seek to deprive others of the opportunity to make the best of their abilities and overcome their circumstances are evil beyond belief. Depriving another person of any hope of a better life is the most terrible thing you can do to them. When hope is gone, life is not worth living - and there is no other life that we know about. Ending someone's hope is tantamount to murder.
• The Cat Got Into Our Stash — Phil Are Go!:
  
• “Hothouse Earth” Co-Author: The Problem Is Neoliberal Economics — Kate Aronoff at the Intercept: Coverage of the paper tended to focus on one of its more alarming claims, albeit one that isn’t new to climate researchers: that a series of interlocking dynamics on Earth — from melting sea ice to deforestation — can feed upon one another to accelerate warming and climate impacts once we pass a certain threshold of warming, even after humans have stopped pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The best chance we have for staying below that catastrophic threshold is to cap warming at around 2 degrees Celsius, the target enshrined in the Paris Agreement. That’s all correct and plenty daunting. Yet embedded within the paper is a finding that’s just as stunning: that none of this is inevitable, and one of the main barriers between us and a stable planet — one that isn’t actively hostile to human civilization over the long term — is our economic system. Asked what could be done to prevent a hothouse earth scenario, co-author Will Steffen told The Intercept that the “obvious thing we have to do is to get greenhouse gas emissions down as fast as we can. That means that has to be the primary target of policy and economics. You have got to get away from the so-called neoliberal economics.” Instead, he suggests something “more like wartime footing” to roll out renewable energy and dramatically reimagine sectors like transportation and agriculture “at very fast rates.”
• An anonymous Op-Ed from the World War II French Resistance — Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the U.K. What Comes Next? — Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: Assange, his lawyers and his supporters always said that he would immediately board a plane to Stockholm if he were guaranteed that doing so would not be used to extradite him to the U.S., and for years offered to be questioned by Swedish investigators inside the embassy in London, something Swedish prosecutors only did years later. Citing those facts, a United Nations panel ruled in 2016 that the actions of the U.K. government constituted “arbitrary detention” and a violation of Assange’s fundamental human rights. But if, as seems quite likely, the Trump administration finally announces that it intends to prosecute Assange for publishing classified U.S. government documents, we will be faced with the bizarre spectacle of U.S. journalists — who have spent the last two years melodramatically expressing grave concern over press freedom due to insulting tweets from Trump about Wolf Blitzer and Chuck Todd, or his mean treatment of Jim Acosta — possibly cheering for a precedent that would be the gravest press freedom threat in decades.
• I traced missile casings in Syria back to their original sellers, so it’s time for the west to reveal who they sell arms to — Robert Fisk in the Independent: Readers, a small detective story. Note down this number: MFG BGM-71E-1B. And this number: STOCK NO 1410-01-300-0254. And this code: DAA A01 C-0292. I found all these numerals printed on the side of a spent missile casing lying in the basement of a bombed-out Islamist base in eastern Aleppo last year. At the top were the words “Hughes Aircraft Co”, founded in California back in the 1930s by the infamous Howard Hughes and sold in 1997 to Raytheon, the massive US defence contractor whose profits last year came to $23.35bn (£18bn). Shareholders include the Bank of America and Deutsche Bank. Raytheon’s Middle East offices can be found in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Kuwait. There were dozens of other used-up identical missile casings in the same underground room in the ruins of eastern Aleppo, with sequential codings; in other words, these anti-armour missiles – known in the trade as Tows, “Tube-launched, optically tracked and wire-guided missiles” – were not individual items smuggled into Syria through the old and much reported CIA smugglers’ trail from Libya. These were shipments, whole batches of weapons that left their point of origin on military aircraft pallets.
• Behind Greece’s Deadly Fires — Yanis Varoufakis for Project Syndicate: Over the course of a decade, we have lost many more people to the tragedy caused by the EU establishment than to any flood or forest fire. More than 20,000 people have committed suicide since 2011, while one in ten working-age Greeks have emigrated because of the economic depression the EU has imposed on Greece. I expect crocodile tears to be shed in Brussels over our fire victims, and similarly hypocritical posturing by the Greek government. But I do not expect any reversal of the organized misanthropy afflicting Greece just because nearly 100 died in a single day. Unless and until progressives across Europe get organized, accept local responsibility, and band together to apply pressure at the EU level, nothing will change, except a further strengthening of proudly misanthropic political forces like Greece’s Golden Dawn, Italy’s Lega, Germany’s Christian Social Union and Alternative für Deutschland, Sebastian Kurz’s Austrian government, and the Polish-Hungarian illiberal nexus. In this context, Greece’s forest fires are a tragic reminder of our collective responsibility as Europeans.

Lately, I have been mostly reading:

• Here's what I saw at the border — Elizabeth Warren, Daily Kos: An ICE official brought in a group of nine detained mothers who had volunteered to speak to us. I don't believe that ICE cherry-picked these women for the meeting, because everything they told me was horrifying. Each mother told us her own story about crossing the border, being taken to a processing center, and the point that they were separated from their child or children. In every case, the government had lied to them about where their children were being taken. In every case, save one, no mother had spoken to her child in the days since the separation. And in every case, no mother knew where her child was.
• Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good — An essay by David Graeber from 2007: Imagine, for a moment, that the United States as it exists today were the creation of some ingenious social engineer. What assumptions about human nature could we say this engineer must have been working with? Certainly nothing like rational choice theory. For clearly our social engineer understands that the only way to convince human beings to enter into the world of work and the marketplace (that is: of mind-numbing labor and cut-throat competition) is to dangle the prospect of thereby being able to lavish money on one’s children, buy drinks for one’s friends, and, if one hits the jackpot, to be able to spend the rest of one’s life endowing museums and providing AIDS medications to impoverished countries in Africa. Where our theorists are constantly trying to strip away the veil of appearances and show how all such apparently selfless gesture really mask some kind of self-interested strategy, in reality, American society is better conceived as a battle over access to the right to behave altruistically. Selflessness – or at least, the right to engage in high-minded activity – is not the strategy. It is the prize.
• Is Michael Cohen ready for the John Dean role: A hero who saves America from Donald Trump? — Heather Digby Parton in Salon panders to my worst scandalphilic tendencies: In the interview, Stephanopoulos asked Cohen whether he could say that Trump told him to pay off Stormy Daniels and whether Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians in June 2016. Cohen said he could not answer on the advice of his attorney, which certainly implies that the answer to both questions is yes. Of course, Trump would know the answer was yes. If the president is inclined to issue a pardon, Cohen is saying he'd better do it soon. But keep in mind that this is TrumpWorld we're talking about, and among those people, you really don't exist unless you're on TV. All this may have more to do with Michael Cohen trying to figure out how he can parlay this situation into a new career in media once this mess is over. There's only one clear way for him to do that: Take the John Dean route and become the man who saved America from Donald Trump. Dean lost his law license and did four months in jail, but he is now considered a hero and a national icon. It's not a bad model.
• The fallacy of obviousness — Teppo Felin in Aeon: In fact, the current focus on human blindness and bias – across psychology, economics and the cognitive sciences – has contributed to the present orthodoxy that sees computers and AI as superior to human judgment. As Kahneman argued in a presentation last year: ‘It’s very difficult to imagine that with sufficient data there will remain things that only humans can do.’ He even offered a prescription that we ‘should replace humans by algorithms whenever possible’. Because humans are blind and biased, and can’t separate the noise from the signal, human decision-making should increasingly be left to computers and decision algorithms. This ethos has helped to fuel great excitement about AI and its attendant tools such as neural networks or deep learning. Proponents even claim that big data and associated computational methods will change the nature of science. For example, in 2008 Chris Anderson, then editor of Wired, boldly proclaimed ‘the end of theory’, as the ‘data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete’. Naturally, what we assume about human nature will determine the type of science we do, as well as shaping the types of questions we ask of it.
• Employer groups in Australia lied about the impacts of penalty rate cuts — Bill Mitchell: Given we received the latest employment by industry data in the last fortnight, we can undertake some detailed analysis to see whether there is any evidence to support the employers’ claims that the cuts would benefit jobs and hours of work in the impacted sectors (Retail Trade and Accommodation and Food Services). You will not be surprised to read that the opposite seems to be the case, although the generally poor results for the industries that are sensitive to the penalty rate cuts cannot be attributed directly to those cuts. But the evidence is very strong – the cuts to penalty rates have hurt low paid workers and driven then towards or over the poverty line with no positive effects being evident in terms of employment or working hour gains.