This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Can Everyone Be Excellent? — Alfie Kohn: The inescapable implication […] is that the phrase “high standards” in the context of education reform means standards that all students will never be able to meet. Because if everyone did meet them, the standards would just be ratcheted up again — as high as necessary to ensure that some students failed. Its inspiring rhetoric notwithstanding, the standards-and-accountability movement is not about universal improvement or leaving no child behind. To the contrary, it is an elaborate sorting device, intended to separate wheat from chaff. The fact that students of color, students from low-income families, and students whose first language isn’t English are disproportionately defined as chaff makes the whole enterprise even more insidious. […] Success seems to matter only if it is attained by a few, and one way to ensure that outcome is to evaluate people (or schools, or companies, or countries) relative to each other. That way, even if everyone has done quite well, or improved over time, half will always fall below the median — and look like failures.
• How Robert Bork Fathered the New Gilded Age — Sandeep Vaheesan at the University of Chicago's (!) ProMarket Blog: Due to the extraordinary influence of Bork’s writings as a scholar and judge, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission today mostly leave Google, Walmart, and other powerful businesses across the economy alone and seek to suppress the collective action of workers in the service economy. Antitrust enforcers have targeted Uber drivers, home health workers, music teachers, and public defenders, among others. As I detail in a recent law review article, antitrust law again resembles its Gilded Age form—accommodating capital and policing labor—and has given us corporate monopoly and individual powerlessness. Creating an equitable society requires nothing short of wholesale reform of our antitrust law and policy and renouncing the ideology and prescriptions of Robert Bork.
• EFA Warns Chinese-Style Facial Recognition Is Already Happening In Australia — Lyndsey Jackson at Electronic Frontiers Australia: Queensland Police deployed facial recognition during the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, ostensibly to protect against terrorism, but it immediately started being used for general policing. Stadiums Queensland continues to use facial recognition at its venues. Perth council is pushing ahead with its own facial recognition trial despite opposition from local residents. And Australian federal authorities are actively seeking to build a system, disturbingly called The Capability, to use facial recognition across all of Australia. “We see the same language being used in Australia as used by the Chinese government”, [EFA Chair Lyndsey] Jackson said. “It’s justified as being about terrorism, but that’s just a word used to stop people thinking about what’s actually going on. It’s really about using state power to abuse vulnerable groups.”
• The ‘new right’ is not a reaction to neoliberalism, but its offspring — Lars Cornelissen in OpenDemocracy: […] what originally remained an intellectual attraction between neoliberals and conservatives has in recent decades morphed into something more closely resembling a synthesis. As neoliberal hegemony reached its climax in the 1990s, its intellectual custodians began focusing their attention on what they purported to be the failures of multiculturalism. Decrying ‘cultural relativism,’ neoliberal think tanks began publishing pamphlets that sang the praises of western culture, which their writers regarded as inherently superior to its non-liberal (read: non-western) counterparts. They proceeded to assert the need to protect national identity from its dilution by immigration and to advocate patriotism and nationalism as a means of consolidating such identity.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Perry Bible Fellowship — by Nicholas Gurewitch:
  
• The people of the Middle East should be reassured by one thing – their autocrats are no longer a global anomaly — Robert Fisk at the Independent: President Hassan Rouhani of Iran got it right on Tuesday. He said that the White House is “afflicted by mental retardation and doesn’t know what to do”. Donald Trump’s new sanctions may not be as “outrageous and idiotic” as Rouhani claims, but we’ve now reached a stage where the American president’s mental incapacity is plain for all to see. It is a sign of the times – our times, I’m afraid – that all the rantings and ravings of Iran’s leaders over the past 40 years at last sound clear cut, true, absolutely on the cue. Trump is crackers, barmy, off the wall, categorically lunatic. Rouhani is a sane man, but in the past we could listen to folk like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was crackers, and take a chuckle at Iran’s expense. Talk of the “Great Satan” could even get a bit boring after a while. But Trump, while possessing some of the characteristics of Colonel Gaddafi, now sounds like Ahmadinejad.
• Are Cryptocurrencies the First Crack in the Wall to Regulate Facebook? — Marshall Auerback on Zuckarus flying too close to the sun, in Naked Capitalism: How does Facebook potentially bypass central banks, bank regulators and existing currency systems when it is backed by these very same government-issued currencies? Even more anomalous, the company is provisionally partnering with entities firmly locked into the existing payments system, such as Visa or MasterCard. It has even suggested that banks are welcome to join the “Libra Association” if they wish to do so. What’s the point, and what advantages would these companies secure? Ultimately, this makes Libra look like just another link in a daisy chain of credit, the “moneyness” of its proposed cryptocurrency effectively established by its backing by other pre-existing monetary instruments. So why bother? Just because the label says Facebook (or Libra)? In case Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t noticed, Facebook isn’t quite the reputable brand it was a few years ago, and companies like PayPal already provide many of the types of services purportedly on offer from Libra (already operating under regulatory sanctions from the existing monetary authorities).
• Absent — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Political Cartooning Was Murdered. Here’s the Autopsy. — Tedd Rall: Individual cartoonists are under fire around the world. Only in the United States, “land of the free,” has the art form as a whole been targeted for systematic destruction by ruling elites and cultural gatekeepers. After decades of relentless, sweeping and never-reversed cutbacks there are now far more political cartoonists in Iran than in the United States. After terrorists murdered 12 people at Charlie Hebdo, a single publication in France, hundreds of U.S. newspapers ran editorials celebrating the power of cartoons; 99% of these hypocritical blowhards didn’t employ a single cartoonist. American editorial cartooning didn’t just die. It was murdered. Here’s how it happened/it’s happening
• What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse — Jeremy Raff in the Atlantic: Sevier set up a makeshift clinic—stethoscope, thermometer, blood-pressure cuffs—in a room, lined with computer stations, that agents use for paperwork. Each of the agent stations had its own bottle of hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes. But when Sevier asked the 38 children she examined that day about sanitation, they all said they weren't allowed to wash their hands or brush their teeth. This was “tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease,” she later wrote in a medical declaration about the visit, the document that the lawyers filed in federal court and also shared with me. (Asked for comment on this story, a Customs and Border Protection official wrote in an email that the agency aims to “provide the best care possible to those in our custody, especially children.” The agency’s “short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations,” the official added, “and we urgently need additional humanitarian funding to manage this crisis.”) As agents brought in the children she requested, Sevier said, the smell of sweat and soiled clothing filled the room. They had not been allowed to bathe or change since crossing the Rio Grande and turning themselves over to officials. Sevier found that about two-thirds of the kids she examined had symptoms of respiratory infection. The guards wore surgical masks, but the detainees breathed the air unfiltered. As the children filed in, Sevier said she found evidence of sleep deprivation, dehydration, and malnutrition too.
• The System Doesn’t Forgive You. Why Would You Forgive It? — Ted Rall:
  
• The New Right: how a Frenchman born 150 years ago inspired the extreme nationalism behind Brexit and Donald Trump — Pablo de Orellana and Nicholas Michelsen in the Conversation: We spent the last two years analysing hundreds of documents written by New Right thinkers and their forebears to explain how and why these ideas take root. This ideological history is important if today’s nationalists are to be understood, and if there is to be any hope of overcoming the racism and sexism inherent to their ideas. What our research shows is that we are living through the latest battle in a 300-year long ideological war over the meaning of humanity itself. On one side is the belief in a universal idea of humanity, which produced notions of equal rights, humanism and liberalism. Opposing it is the belief that marks all forms of nationalism: that humanity is not a single entity but rather, one divided by nature into national identities.
• In which One become Two — Wondermark by David Malki !:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Apple locked me out of its walled garden. It was a nightmare — Luke Kurtis in Quartz: All in all, I was locked out of my account for roughly two months. Had I not taken advantage of my internal Apple contacts, I may not have gotten my account back. I spent a large part of those two months in a kind of grief, mourning not only the loss of a collection of media built up over a decade and a half, but also all the products I owned that no longer functioned as they were supposed to. The company I had given so much money to over the years could revoke my access to everything with just the press of a button. This whole ordeal made me wonder if I want to continue using Apple products. The more I consider it, the more I realize it’s not just a question of choosing one product over another. The truth is that Google or Microsoft (or Nintendo, or Samsung, or Sony, the list goes on) could just as easily cut off a customer for no stated purpose and without recourse.
• Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison — Ken White in the Atlantic: Jeffrey Epstein’s name and face are everywhere following his death. Even as an investigation reveals that the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he died, was terminally short-staffed and relied on untrained guards who failed to monitor him, conspiracy theories persist. Americans who believe in their justice system assert that it is obvious that he was murdered, and that jailers could not possibly be so incompetent, cruel, or indifferent as to let such a high-profile prisoner commit suicide. Here, to help you evaluate that claim, are 32 short stories about in-custody deaths or near-deaths in America. These stories don’t mention Jeffrey Epstein, but they are about him. Epstein was incarcerated in the United States of America, and this is how the United States of America, the mightiest and richest nation there is or ever has been, treats incarcerated people. When you say, “There is no way that guards could be so reckless, so indifferent, so malicious as to just let someone as important as Epstein die,” this is how 32 Americans respond. Many, many more could respond in kind.
• No, Productivity Does Not Explain Income — Blair Fix: Did you hear the joke about the economists who tested their theory by defining it to be true? Oh, I forgot. It’s not a joke. It’s standard practice among mainstream economists. They propose that productivity explains income. And then they ‘test’ this idea by defining productivity in terms of income. In this post, I’m going to show you this circular logic. Then I’ll show you what productivity differences look like when productivity is measure objectively. They’re far too small to explain income differences.
• Outer Turmoil — George Monbiot: In politics almost everywhere we see what looks like the externalisation of psychic wounds or deficits. Sigmund Freud claimed that “groups take on the personality of the leader”. I think it would be more accurate to say that the private tragedies of powerful people become the public tragedies of those they dominate. For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering than to process their own trauma and pain. What we appear to see in national politics around the world is a playing out in public of deep private distress. This could be a particularly potent force in British politics. The psychotherapist Nick Duffell has written of “wounded leaders”, who were separated from their families in early childhood when they were sent to boarding school. They develop a “survival personality”, learning to cut off their feelings and project a false self, characterised by a public display of competence and self-reliance. Beneath this persona is a profound insecurity, that might generate an insatiable need for power, prestige and attention. The result is a system which “consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are.”
• The brain-eating zombie party — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Fake News Is an Oracle — Cory Doctorow in Locus: Fake news is an instrument for measuring trauma, and the epistemological incoherence that trauma creates – the justifiable mistrust of the establishment that has nearly murdered our planet and that insists that making the richest among us much, much richer will benefit everyone, eventually. The contagion model for fighting fake news – replacing untrue statements with true ones – is like firefighting. It’s necessary, but it is responsive, even reactionary. The trauma model of fake news says that the fires will continue until we clear away the brush that makes them so easy to spark: until we address the underlying corruption that is rotting our society, fires will continue to rage. Simply put: if you want to make conspiracy theo­ries less plausible, you should start by stamping out conspiracies.
• Sydney Ember’s Secret Sources: NYT reporter hides corporate ties of Sanders critics she highlights — Katie Halper at FAIR: New York Times reporter Sydney Ember has a problem with Bernie Sanders—which may be why the paper has her cover him. Ember is supposed to write reported articles, not op-eds, but she consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders’ temperament, history, policies and/or political prospects in the over two dozen pieces she’s done on him. This makes sense, given the New York Times’ documented anti-Sanders bias, which can be found among both editors and reporters alike. The paper was caught making significant changes, without acknowledging them, to a 2016 article on Sanders hours after it went up: It changed the headline (from “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years via Legislative Side Doors,” to “Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories”); deleted a positive quote from a campaign advisor; and added two negative paragraphs. Even after the paper’s public editor chastised the Times for the practice known as stealth editing, the editors defended the changes because they “thought [the article] should say more about his realistic chances.” In its original form, the article didn’t cast enough doubt on Sanders’ viability and ability to govern, in other words.
• Today's Deep Learning Is Like Magic - In All The Wrong Ways — Kalev Leetaru in Forbes: Much like the world of magic, deep learning today is largely defined by practitioners churning out a steady stream of limited one-trick algorithms that are then chained together into complex sequences by developers to solve problems. Under perfect circumstances and fed ideal input data that closely matches its original training data, the resulting solutions are nothing short of magic, allowing their users to suspend disbelief and imagine for a moment that an intelligent silicon being is behind their results. Yet the slightest change of even a single pixel can throw it all into chaos, resulting in absolute gibberish or even life-threatening outcomes.
• The psychological reasons behind why Trump behaves the way he does — and how the American public can break free — M Jane in the Independent, on a personality type that I have personally come to know rather too well: There is a distinct and remarkable pain in the delusions of grandeur that Trump continues to press into society and, in turn, onto himself. His very specific need for attention, in any form, is reminiscent of a child of trauma. There is no safety — and no self — that is accepted and loved regardless of productivity or appearance. There is a threat at every turn — so, rather than build healthy relationships of accountability and mutual respect, there is a desire to subvert every social nicety and moral ethos because there is always the chance the carpet will be immediately pulled out from underneath his feet. His ongoing and persistent belief [in] winning by any means necessary is the rhetoric of someone who cannot survive a perceived loss. How fragile the form that insists it never feels the pain of loss. This fragility is, of course, mirrored in equal parts to the ego. The larger and more ominous the ego appears, the deeper and weaker is the core self. The smallest of blows is then taken deeply and personally, and the speed and ferocity in which he must lash out in order to recover is imperative to preserve the tenuous mirage of strength and power.
• What the Measles Epidemic Really Says About America — Peter Beinart: Our amnesia about vaccines is part of a broader forgetting. Prior generations of Americans understood the danger of zero-sum economic nationalism, for instance, because its results remained visible in their lifetimes. When Al Gore debated Ross Perot about NAFTA in 1993, he reminded the Texan businessman of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs on 20,000 foreign products—prompting other countries to retaliate, deepening the Great Depression, and helping to elect Adolf Hitler. But fewer and fewer people remember the last global trade war. Similarly, as memories of Nazism fade across Europe and the United States, anti-Semitism is rising. Technology may improve; science may advance. But the fading of lessons that once seemed obvious should give pause to those who believe history naturally bends toward progress.