Category: Politics

Listening to the Trash Future team describe CulturePulse.ai and the digital twin profile created for entire populations seems very very reminiscent of “The Red Men” by Matthew de Abaitua which didn’t get the attention it deserved but was quite prescient.

https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/waltz-with-the-sims/ (minute 23 and on)

Elements from the book such as the corporation known as “Monad” (!) and robotic public service utilities called “Dr. Easy” are looking back from our current hellscape period a bit too on the nose.

See Dr. Easy act in this short film: https://vimeo.com/68368877

Just some more German insanity from the anti-Deutsch group that I have to archive here for when it may come in handy later.

Fragment Ones and Tooze: Live from Berlin – Lindner

Given the current developments around the German debt brake, I think it’s good to refer to this bit about German financial politics and Adam Tooze’s initial prediction (FT, Zeit) that Christian Lindner as finance minister would not be good.

Fragment from around 45:00 clipped below:

“We got quite a lot of shit for doing that actually. Not entirely popular with my German colleagues. ‘Nicht zum Volkskörper zugehörig’ is a phrase that was used. ‘Wie trauen sie sich ein solches Urteil zu.’
Not belonging to the body politic of Germany. How dare you make a judgement like that.
We don’t have any reason to regret it. We were clearly right.

John Ganz on nationalism and reducing humans to insects.

A warm, comfortable death for you, and a violent, cold, and terrible death for the other guy. It choses being subsumed in a mass to avoid the terrible difficulty of remaining human that rises to the fore in tragic moments like this one. When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.

Above all, I refuse to become an insect or look on others as insects.

SOMETIME IN THE 2000S, a group of mostly Turkish women from an immigrant group called Neighborhood Mothers began meeting in the Neukölln district of Berlin to learn about the Holocaust. Their history lessons were part of a program facilitated by members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a Christian organization dedicated to German atonement for the Shoah. The Neighborhood Mothers were terrified by what they learned in these sessions. “How could a society turn so fanatical?” a group member named Nazmiye later recalled thinking. “We began to ask ourselves if they could do such a thing to us as well . . . whether we would find ourselves in the same position as the Jews.” But when they expressed this fear on a church visit organized by the program, their German hosts became apoplectic. “They told us to go back to our countries if this is how we think,” Nazmiye said. The session was abruptly ended and the women were asked to leave.

Bad Memory

This is a core fear of migrants in Germany and Europe and it’s not at all unjustified.

I can stop thinking about the Roman Empire, but this piece that draws an analogy between the Fall of the Romans and the End of Twitter is long overdue to be shared and still really good.

Over at twitter this dance was happening but with weirdo right wingers. They were always mad because no one likes them because they are hateful, stupid, and have absolutely no rizz. Because they only know other weirdo right wingers IRL, however, they were convinced that there was some sort of nefarious plot to dunk on them online and they wanted to know when Twitter would acknowledge them, the biggest victims known to man. At the head of this was, of course, your man there Elon who is mad that he isn’t funny. He became convinced that there was an army of bots or something making fun of him and he demanded to know why twitter was letting people be mean to him. “You say that you want weirdo right wingers to be on this site and yet! You allow people to be very mildly mean to them!!!!! Even when they are the richest man on the planet! So much for free speech, etc.” Anyway, he accidentally got forced to buy twitter for too much money because he is quite stupid, and now here we are.

On successor states and websites

In 2020 on the World Bank’s Human Capital Index — which measures countries’ education and health outcomes on a scale of 0 to 1 — India achieved a score of 0.49, below Nepal and Kenya, both poorer countries. China scored 0.65, putting it on par with Chile and Slovakia, which have higher GDP per capita. Most dramatically disadvantaged are India’s women. Since 1990, Indian women’s labour market participation has fallen from 32 per cent to about 25 per cent. And behind them come hundreds of millions of underskilled youngsters. In 2019 less than half of India’s 10-year-olds could read a simple story, compared with more than 80 per cent of Chinese children and 96 per cent of Americans. In the coming decade, 200mn of these poorly educated young people will reach working age. A large share of them will probably end up eking out a living in the informal sector and getting by on handouts. Unemployment amongst the under-25s already runs at more than 45 per cent.

Looking to the future, what sceptics of Modi’s boosterism ask is whether India might become the forerunner of a rather gloomy new model for populous, lower-income countries, managed, without a powerfully effective governmental apparatus, or globally competitive manufacturing sectors, by digitally enhanced populism, delivering cash payments to the cell phones of hundreds of millions of dependent people.

Chartbook brutal on India.