…it has been remarked upon that context is a bitch…for example…in the UK the tories would very much like everyone to know that they’ve slashed immigration by a third…& completely eliminated the backlog*

[* – if you accept that the backlog doesn’t include any cases begun in the last 18 months…or earlier if they’re “complicated”]

…while labour would like to remind everyone that 1/3 less than the biggest ever annual figures still lands you with the second highest figure ever…the overwhelming majority of which isn’t even illegal migration…but they’ve dragged nige out of the pub to game the shit out of that overton window by beating up on his chums about how those figures represent a betrayal of brexit…although it remains to be seen if his (not even his, formally, though aaron banks said if he joined up to lead it he’d raise 10 million to fund their campaign) speciously named “reform” party actually puts up candidates to potentially queer the electoral pitch red wall vs. blue wall wise…or old school millwall-wise if they don’t slow that roll…throw in the part where rishi gets to pick when to throw his popularity contest…& that alone is going to be an ongoing festival of bullshit that promises to very likely last out most if not all of the year…it…makes it hard to even pace yourself when you don’t know how long the race lasts…so…yeah…context can be a bitch…but it’s not all bad

As the year ends, civilians are dying at a staggering pace in Gaza and the genocide in Darfur may be resuming. A man charged with 91 felonies is leading in American presidential polls, and our carbon emissions risk cooking our planet.

But something else is also true: In some ways, 2023 may still have been the best year in the history of humanity.

…I have a friend who likes to make this case every so often…& it’s a sound point…not that we shouldn’t pay attention to the vast amount of awful that’s floating about…but…like for like…the profusion of ways that humanity has come a long way is easy to sleep on…at least on an aggregate basis…I’ll skip the infant mortality part because I’m not an anthropologist so it needs to at least be later in the day before I contemplate that sort of thing…but those numbers have never been better

Or consider extreme poverty. It too has reached a record low, affecting a bit more than 8 percent of humans worldwide, according to United Nations projections.

All these figures are rough, but it seems that about 100,000 people are now emerging from extreme poverty each day — so they are better able to access clean water, to feed and educate their children, to buy medicines.

…&…well…I’ll get on with it in a minute…but…I guess as we square up to start pushing ’24’s boulder up the damn hill it’s worth looking at the view from where we’ve got to & remembering a lot of it used to be uglier…speaking for myself…I find it helps?

None of this eases the pain of those who have lost their children in 2023, nor is it a balm for those caught in war or climate catastrophes. Yet at year-end, it’s worth acknowledging this backdrop of progress — not to distract anyone from all that is going wrong, but to offer a reminder that when we try hard enough, we can accomplish amazing things. Right now, looking at the anguish worldwide, I’d say we’re not trying hard enough.

I write a version of this column each year at around this time, and it upsets many readers. They believe it is offensive to hail progress when so many are dying unnecessarily from wars and disease, when the future seems so bleak to so many. I understand their point; my career has been dedicated to covering genocide, war and poverty. But one thing I learned long ago as a journalist is that when our coverage is unremittingly negative, people tune out and give up. If we want to tackle problems — from the war in Gaza to climate change — then it helps to know that progress is possible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/opinion/2023-humanity-poverty-growth.html

…I guess I think of it as the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down

I’ve been The Times’s foreign affairs columnist since 1995, and one of the most enduring lessons I’ve learned is that there are good seasons and bad seasons in this business, which are defined by the big choices made by the biggest players.

My first decade or so saw its share of bad choices — mainly around America’s response to Sept. 11 — but they were accompanied by a lot of more hopeful ones: the birth of democracy in Russia and Eastern Europe, thanks to the choices of Mikhail Gorbachev. The Oslo peace process, thanks to the choices of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat. China’s accelerating opening to the world, thanks to the choices of Deng Xiaoping. India’s embrace of globalization, thanks to choices initiated by Manmohan Singh. The expansion of the European Union, the election of America’s first Black president and the evolution of South Africa into a multiracial democracy focused on reconciliation rather than retribution — all the result of good choices from both leaders and led. There were even signs of a world finally beginning to take climate change seriously.

On balance, these choices nudged world politics toward a more positive trajectory — a feeling of more people being connected and able to realize their full potential peacefully. It was exciting to wake up each day and think about which one of these trends to get behind as a columnist.

For the last few years, though, I’ve felt the opposite — that so much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players: Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.

To put it another way: If I think about the three pillars that have stabilized the world since I became a journalist in 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO, a steadily growing China always there to buoy the world economy, and mostly stable borders in Europe and the developing world — all three are being shaken by big choices by big players over the last decade. This is triggering a U.S.-China cold war, mass migrations from south to north and an America that has become more unreliable than indispensable.

…now…I don’t know but I rather suspect the impact of this or that on matters climate related might not be part of the context that part about big choices by big players is intended to have you thinking about…but…at a bare minimum you’d have to think it’s other shoe that’s dropped on the push/pull migratory tides…anyway…no prizes for guessing what the other one is

They are being fought on both physical battlefields and digital ones, with huge global reach and implications. Like farmers in Argentina who were stymied when they suddenly lost their fertilizer supplies from Ukraine and Russia. Like young TikTok users around the world observing, opining, protesting and boycotting global chains, such as Zara and McDonald’s, after being enraged by something they saw on a 15-second feed from Gaza. Like a pro-Israel hacker group claiming credit for shutting down some 70 percent of Iran’s gas stations the other day, presumably in retaliation for Iran’s support for Hamas. And so many more.

…all in all it’s hard to wrap your head around

I began thinking about this a few weeks ago, when I flew to Dubai to attend the United Nations climate summit. If you’ve never been there, the Dubai airport has some of the longest concourses in the world. And when my Emirates flight landed, we parked close to one end of the B concourse — so when I looked out the window I saw lined up in a perfectly symmetrical row some 15 Emirates long-haul passenger jets, stretching far into the distance. And the thought occurred to me: What is the essential ingredient that Dubai has and Gaza lacks? Because both began, in one sense, as the convergence of sand and seawater at crucial intersections of the world.

It’s not oil — oil plays only a small role in Dubai’s diversified economy today. And it’s not democracy. Dubai is not a democracy and does not aspire to be one. But people are now flocking to live here from all over the world — its population of more than 3.5 million has surged since the outbreak of Covid. Why? The short answer is visionary leadership.

…all things are relative…yadda yadda

Dubai has benefited from two generations of monarchs in the United Arab Emirates who had a powerful vision of how the U.A.E. in general and the emirate of Dubai in particular could choose to be Arab, modern, pluralistic, globalized and embracing of a moderate interpretation of Islam. Their formula incorporates a radical openness to the world, an emphasis on free markets and education, a ban on extremist political Islam, relatively little corruption, a strong rule of law promulgated from the top down and a relentless commitment to economic diversification, talent recruitment and development.

There are a million things one could criticize about Dubai, from labor rights for the many foreign workers who run the place to real estate booms and busts, overbuilding and the lack of a truly free press or freedom of assembly, to name but a few. But the fact that Arabs and others keep wanting to live, work, play and start businesses here indicates that the leadership has converted its intensely hot promontory on the Persian Gulf into one of the world’s most prosperous crossroads for trade, tourism, transport, innovation, shipping and golf — with a skyline of skyscrapers, one over 2,700 feet high, that would be the envy of Hong Kong or Manhattan.

And it has all been done in the shadow (and with the envy) of a dangerous Islamic Republic of Iran. When I first visited Dubai in 1980, there were still traditional wooden fishing dhows in the harbor. Today, DP World, the Emirati logistics company, manages cargo logistics and port terminals all over the world. Any of Dubai’s neighbors — Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Iran and Saudi Arabia — could have done the same with their similar coastlines, but it was the U.A.E. that pulled it off by making the choices it made.

…& dubai looks pretty good next to the usual suspects

These were fateful choices. Once Sharon pulled Israel out of Gaza, Palestinians were left, for the first time ever, with total control over a piece of land. Yes, it was an impoverished slice of sand and coastal seawater, with some agricultural areas. And it was not the ancestral home of most of its residents. But it was theirs to build anything they wanted.

Had Hamas embraced Oslo and chosen to build its own Dubai, not only would the world have lined up to aid and invest in it; it would have been the most powerful springboard conceivable for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, in the heart of the Palestinian ancestral homeland. Palestinians would have proved to themselves, to Israelis and to the world what they could do when they had their own territory.

But Hamas decided instead to make Gaza a springboard for destroying Israel. To put it another way, Hamas had a choice: to replicate Dubai in 2023 or replicate Hanoi in 1968. It chose to replicate Hanoi, whose Củ Chi tunnel network served as the launchpad for the ’68 Tet offensive.

Hamas is not simply engaged in some pure-as-the-driven-snow anticolonial struggle against Israel. Only Hamas’s useful idiots on U.S. college campuses would believe that. Hamas is engaged in a raw power struggle with Fatah over who will control Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s engaged in a power struggle in the region — alongside other pro-Muslim Brotherhood parties and regimes (like Turkey and Qatar) — against pro-Western monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the U.A.E. and military-led regimes like Egypt’s.

…which bibi…himself a not-infrequent target of some courts he’d like to fashion more to his liking in a rather too direct parallel to believe the universe isn’t punking all of us with

In that struggle, Hamas wanted Gaza isolated and in conflict with Israel because that allowed Hamas to maintain its iron-fisted political and Islamist grip over the strip, foregoing elections and controlling all the smuggling routes in and out, which funded its tunnels and war machine and the lifestyle of its leaders and loyalists — every bit as much as Iran’s Islamic regime today needs its hostility with America to justify its iron grip over Iranian society and the Revolutionary Guard’s control of all of its smuggling. Every bit as much as Hezbollah needs its conflict with Israel to justify building its own army inside Lebanon, controlling its drug smuggling and not permitting any Lebanese government hostile to its interests to govern, no matter who is elected. And every bit as much as Vladimir Putin needs his conflict with NATO to justify his grip on power, the militarization of Russian society and his and his cronies’ looting of the state coffers.

This is now a common strategy for consolidating and holding power forever by a single political faction and disguising it with an ideology of resistance. It’s no wonder they all support one another.

…still…busy as that one is skipping from how it’s unfair to pretend “Israel alone was responsible for the isolation of Gaza”…which is true…to how fundamentally awful hamas is…also true…& the impact of netanyahu having a similar hard on for rendering the whole oslo thing hors de combat…to what they see as the crux of the thing

The only exit from this mutually assured destruction is to bring in some transformed version of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — or a whole new P.L.O.-appointed government of Palestinian technocrats — in partnership with moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But when I raise that with many Israelis right now, they tell me, “Tom, it’s not the time. No one wants to hear it.”

That makes me want to scream: No, it is exactly the time. Don’t they get it? Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement has been to persuade Israelis and the world that it’s never the right time to talk about the morally corrosive occupation and how to help build a credible Palestinian partner to take it off Israel’s hands.

He and the settlers wore everyone down. When I covered the State Department in the early 1990s, West Bank settlements were routinely described by U.S. officials as “obstacles to peace.” But that phrase was gradually dropped. The Trump administration even decided to stop calling the West Bank “occupied” territory.

The reason I insist on talking about these choices now is because Israel is being surrounded by what I call Iran’s landcraft carriers (as opposed to our aircraft carriers): Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Iran is squeezing Israel into a multifront war with its proxies. I truly worry for Israel.

But Israel will have neither the sympathy of the world that it needs nor the multiple allies it needs to confront this Iranian octopus, nor the Palestinian partners it needs to govern any post-Hamas Gaza, nor the lasting support of its best friend in the world, Joe Biden, unless it is ready to choose a long-term pathway for separating from the Palestinians with an improved, legitimate Palestinian partner.

…when we’re playing hurry up & wait…how soon is too soon if everyone already agrees it’s too late?

Netanyahu has been out to undermine the cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy for the last three decades — the Oslo framework of two states for two people that guarantees Palestinian statehood and Israeli security, which neither side ever gave its best shot. Destroying the Oslo framework is not in America’s interest.

In sum, this war is so ugly, deadly and painful, it is no wonder that so many Palestinians and Israelis want to just focus on survival and not on any of the choices that got them here. The Haaretz writer Dahlia Scheindlin put it beautifully in a recent essay:

The situation today is so terrible that people run from reality as they run from rockets — and hide in the shelter of their blind spots. It’s pointless to wag fingers. The only thing left to do is try and change that reality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/29/opinion/israel-hamas-war.html

…certainly no shortage of people to try

A baby born this year will be 60 in the 2080s, when demographers at the U.N. expect the size of humanity to peak. The Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna places the peak in the 2070s. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington puts it in the 2060s. All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon.

…for a while, anyway

And then we shrink. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline.

Because most demographers look ahead only to 2100, there is no consensus on exactly how quickly populations will fall after that. Over the past 100 years, the global population quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion. As long as life continues as it has — with people choosing smaller family sizes, as is now common in most of the world — then in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.
[…]
Perhaps that loss doesn’t trouble you. It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment. But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. It will not replace the need for urgent action on climate, land use, biodiversity, pollution and other environmental challenges. If the population hits around 10 billion people in the 2080s and then begins to decline, it might still exceed today’s eight billion after 2100. Population decline would come quickly, measured in generations, and yet arrive far too slowly to be more than a sideshow in the effort to save the planet. Work to decarbonize our economies and reform our land use and food systems must accelerate in this decade and the next, not start in the next century.
[…]
If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control. Paying attention now would create an opportunity to lay out a path that would preserve freedom, share burdens, advance gender equity, value care work and avoid the disasters that happen when governments try to impose their will on reproduction.
[…]
Humanity is building a better, freer world with more opportunities for everyone, especially for women. That progress deserves everyone’s greatest celebration — and everyone’s continued efforts. That progress also means that, for many of us, the desire to build a family can clash with other important goals, including having a career, pursuing projects and maintaining relationships. No society has solved this yet. These tradeoffs bite deep for parents everywhere. For some parents, that means struggle. For others, that means smaller families than they hoped for. And for too many, it means both.

In a world of sustained low birthrates and declining populations, there may be threats of backsliding on reproductive freedom — by limiting abortion rights, for example. Some will inexcusably claim that restricting reproductive choice is a way to curb long-run population decline. Some already do.

No. Low birthrates are no reason to reverse progress toward a more free, diverse and equal world. Restricting reproductive rights — by denying access to critical health care and by denying the basic freedom to choose to parent or not to parent — would harm many people and for that reason would be wrong whether or not depopulation is coming. And it would not prevent the population from shrinking. We know that because fertility rates are below two both where abortion is freely available and where abortion is restricted. Any policymaker asking how to respond to global depopulation should start by asking what people want and how to help them achieve it rather than by asking what they might take away.
[…]
As with climate change, our individual decisions on family size add up to an outcome that we all share. No people are making mistakes when they choose not to have children or to have small families. (Although we might all be making a mistake, together, when instead of taking care of one another, we make it hard for people to choose larger families.) It’s in no one’s hands to change global population trajectories alone. Not yours, whatever you choose for your life, not one country’s, not one generation’s. Nor is it in your hands personally to end all carbon emissions even by ending your own emissions. And yet our personal choices add up to big implications for humanity as a whole.

It’s not too early to take depopulation seriously. The New York Times reported on the threat of climate change in 1956. A scientist testified about it before Congress in 1957. In 1965 the White House released a report calling carbon dioxide a pollutant, warning of a warming world with melting ice caps and rising sea levels. That was nearly six decades ago.

Six decades from now is when the U.N. projects the size of the world population will peak. There won’t be any quick fixes: Even if it’s too early today to know exactly how to build an abundant future that offers good lives to a stable, large and flourishing future population, we should already be working toward that goal. Waiting until the population peaks to ask how to respond to depopulation would be as imprudent as waiting until the world starts to run out of fossil fuels to begin responding to climate change.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/18/opinion/human-population-global-growth.html

…so…yeah

Doom dominates 2024 messaging as Trump and Biden trade dire warnings [WaPo]

Get real and read some history. The past was worse. [WaPo]

…past was worse…got it…& the tories are doing 1/3 better at immigration than they were but they still have the next-to-worst record & a trying to boast about it…so

In the face of such calamity, one would hope that the new year would bring better news. But as your humble harbinger of bad tidings, I have to apologize: There’s a lot that can go wrong in 2024, and many crises that will get worse.

The crises that may get worse in 2024 [WaPo]

…I mean…I’m not a professional harbinger like their humble-ness, there

As death toll mounts in Gaza, veterans of past negotiations weigh in on possibilities for peace [NBC]

…&…this is why I wasn’t chuckling…well…not outside my head anyway…when it was empty greene

Maine secretary of state targeted with ‘swatting call’ after ruling Trump ineligible for ballot [NBC]

…I mean

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/01/congress-members-swatting-branndon-williams

…when it comes to methods of apportioning supreme executive power I’m seriously considering putting out a help-wanted ad requesting a watery bint prepared to lob scimitars at people

2024 is the year of the rematch — and not just for president [NBC]

North Korea’s Kim vows to launch 3 more spy satellites and produce more nuclear materials in 2024 [NBC]

Poland says Russian rocket entered its airspace, summons diplomat [NBC]

…or…at least pick a different hat to pull names out of

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/01/jeffrey-epstein-ghislaine-maxwell-associates-list

…because the numbers are making my head spin

New gun safety laws are taking effect in several states around the US on 1 January after the country ended 2023 with more mass shootings than days.

States including California, Illinois and Colorado are starting the year by implementing extreme risk protection orders, more commonly referred to as “red flag” laws, as a means to prevent further gun violence. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there were 655 mass shootings in the US in 2023.
[…]
Notably, these laws have overcome a slate of lawsuits from pro-gun groups across several states. Gun rights advocates have been challenging the legislation through the courts, relying on a supreme court decision in 2022 that expanded gun rights by striking down a New York gun law.
[…]
The US has grappled with rampant gun violence for decades. Guns were the leading cause of death for children and teens in the country in 2022, while the number of gun suicides reached an all-time high – 73 people died by gun suicide every day.
[…]
In 2023, the US marked more than 18,800 gun deaths, 36,200 gun injuries, and over 24,100 suicides, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/01/gun-safety-laws-us-2024

…so…swimming upstream might beat going with the flow

Again and again, the mainstream media have drawn a false equivalence between Donald Trump and Joe Biden – asserting that Biden’s political handicap is his age while Trump’s corresponding handicap is his criminal indictments.

But Trump is almost as old as Biden, and Trump’s public remarks and posts are becoming ever more unhinged – suggesting that advancing age may be a bigger problem for Trump than for Biden.
[…]
Similarly, every time the mainstream media reveal another move by the Republican Party toward authoritarianism, they point out some superfluous fault in the Democratic party in order to provide “balance”.
[…]
A recent Washington Post article was headlined: “In a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics.”

“How do Americans feel about politics?” the New York Times asked recently, answering:

“Disgust isn’t a strong enough word.”

But where is it reported that the mainstream media have contributed to making people tired and disgusted with politics?

And where is it acknowledged that this helps Trump and his Republican allies?
[…]
Much of the GOP no longer accepts the rule of law, the norms of liberal democracy, the legitimacy of the opposing party or the premise that governing requires negotiation and compromise.

Why isn’t this being reported?

Trump and his allies want Americans to feel so disgusted with politics they believe the nation has become ungovernable. The worse things seem, the stronger Trump’s case for an authoritarian like him to take over: “I’d get it done in one day.” “I am your voice.” “Leave it all to me.”

By focusing on Trump’s rantings and ignoring Biden’s steady hand, the mainstream media are playing directly into Trump’s neo-fascist hands.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/31/mainstream-media-is-playing-into-trumps-neo-fascist-hands-im-sticking-with-democracy-and-the-guardian

…small boats…small hands…same shit…different tailor

While We Watched is a documentary about the Indian broadcast journalist Ravish Kumar, and it slotted into a body of her work – in film-making and in activism – that defended anyone who makes it harder for the powerful to lie. She was the first person I knew who recognised the danger of Slapp lawsuits, and started trying to build a fund for the journalist Carole Cadwalladr and others like her, who would, inevitably, be chased through the courts by people much richer than themselves. That asymmetry of wealth continues to have a devastating effect on investigative journalism.

The degradation of Indian politics, as told through the Kumar bio-doc, is chilling and chastening. Mainstream Indian current affairs TV has become a blunt and violent discourse in which coiffed young anchors yell at people for being “anti-nationalist”, and reduce all questions down to the simplest yet least enlightening: do you love the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and if so, do you love him enough? It’s chilling to watch such a quick, confident descent, out of reason into blunt assertion, and it’s chastening because, if you squint, you could be watching GB News or certain members of the Conservative party, with “pseudo liberal elite” in place of “metropolitan”, and “secularati” in place of “wokerati”.

Against that onslaught, Kumar insisted on carrying on with regular journalism – going places, finding things out – with the result that between 2019 and 2021 (the period covered in the film) he was subjected to endless death threats, and his channel, NDTV, was assailed by government action against its founders and impoverished by dwindling ad sales.

It’s not a feelgood film, and it doesn’t have a feelgood codicil: after it was made, the channel’s founders resigned, and Kumar with them. He now has a YouTube channel with nearly 8 million subscribers, so perhaps that tells a hopeful story about the democratisation of the media, although you’d need some pretty selective analysis if looking to YouTube for optimism about that.

Anyway, that’s not what made me hopeful: rather, it was a moment in one of Kumar’s last shows on NDTV, when he turned to the camera and said, “as long as there is one viewer like you, facts will find a way to survive”.

In a dark world, a light is held by those who make it harder for the powerful to lie [Guardian]

…so…I’d get the temptation to kinda just give up on it all

In the ordinary way of things, when people say that they are giving up, they are usually referring to something like smoking, or alcohol, or chocolate, or any of the other anaesthetic pleasures of everyday life; they are not, on the whole, talking about suicide (though people do tend to want to give up only their supposedly self-harming habits). Giving up certain things may be good for us, and yet the idea of someone just giving up is never appealing. Like alcoholics who need everybody to drink, there tends to be a determined cultural consensus that life is, and has to be, worth living (if not, of course, actually sacred).

There are, to put it as simply as possible, what turn out to be good and bad sacrifices (and sacrifice creates the illusion – or reassures us – that we can choose our losses). There is the giving up that we can admire and aspire to, and the giving up that profoundly unsettles us. What, for example, does real hope or real despair require us to relinquish? What exactly do we imagine we are doing when we give something up? There is an essential and far-reaching ambiguity to this simple idea. We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.

All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, is about sacrifice, about what we should give up to get the lives we should want. For our health, for our planet, for our emotional and moral wellbeing – and, indeed, for the profits of the rich – we are asked to give up a great deal now. But alongside this orgy of improving self-sacrifices – or perhaps underlying it – there is a despair and terror of just wanting to give up. A need to keep at bay the sense that life may not be worth the struggle, the struggle that religions and therapies and education, and entertainment, and commodities, and the arts in general are there to help us with. For more and more people now it seems that it is their hatred and their prejudice and their scapegoating that actually keeps them going. As though we are tempted more than ever by what Nietzsche once called “a will to nothingness, a counter-willan aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life”.

The abiding disillusionment with politics and personal relationships, the demand for and the fear of free speech, the dread and the longing for consensus and the coerced consensus of the various fundamentalisms has created a cultural climate of intimidation and righteous indignation. It is as if our ambivalence about our aliveness – about the feeling alive that, however fleeting, sustains us – has become an unbearable tension and needs to be resolved. So even though we cannot, as yet, imagine or describe our lives without the idea of sacrifice, and its secret sharer, compromise, the whole notion of what we want and can get through sacrifice is less clear; both what we think we want and what we are as yet unaware of wanting. The formulating of personal and political ideals has become either too assured or too precarious. And the whole notion of sacrifice depends upon our knowing what we want.

…but…& not least because I may have lost my sense for what qualifies as “the ordinary run of events”

We calculate, in so far as we can, the effect of our sacrifice, the future we want from it (it is never clear, for example, whether a sacrifice is a plea or a coercion or both, a manipulation or a forlorn surrender or both). As though at certain points in our lives we are asking what we have to do to get through to certain people, or to get through to ourselves: to get through to the life we want. We are asking what we are going to have to lose to gain what we think we want. These are sometimes the moves, of course, of an omniscient animal who claims he can know what he wants, and for whom knowing his wants, and having good ideas about how he may gratify them, is the only thing he can imagine doing. Sacrifice, giving up, is a form of prediction.
[…]
People can be found wanting, but they don’t tend to be found not wanting. To be found wanting is to be found lacking in something; and in a by now traditional story we are assumed to want whatever it is assumed we are lacking. Our frustration is the key to our desire; to want something or someone is to feel their absence; so to register or recognise a lack would seem to be the precondition for any kind of pleasure or satisfaction. Indeed, in this account, frustration, a sense of lack, is the necessary precondition for any kind of satisfaction.

“Lack always involves,” Lacan writes, “something that is missing from its usual place.” And if it has a usual place, then whatever is lacking is, in a certain sense, something that can be taken for granted – something that has, or should have, a usual – a familiar, a reliable – place; as a mother might have in a child’s life, as meals might have in an ordinary day. As though a sense of lack is reactive to a sense of entitlement; as though I only feel the lack of what I take to be rightfully and legitimately mine; as though there is a real sense in which I always already know what I want, even if I am unable or unwilling to let myself know.

I want to suggest that there is a part of oneself that needs to know what it is doing, and a part of oneself that needs not to. And by the same token, as it were, there is a part of oneself that needs to know what one wants and a part of oneself that needs not to. There are freedoms attached to both, and both these aspects of oneself are interanimating – our wanting depends on our knowing and our not knowing what we want. There is a sense in which our wanting and our not wanting go together, but as a paradox rather than a contradiction or a conflict.

In the ordinary language of appetite there is a sliding scale of urgency, from need to desire to want; we can often do without what we want, but we can’t do without what we need; and we are never quite sure whether we can do without what we desire. Desire, we might say, is where need and want become blurred. If we cannot survive without what we need, what is it we cannot do without what we want? What is perhaps notable are the distinctions we need to make, as though appetite – whatever appetite is described as being – requires scrutiny, discrimination and regulation. And it tends to be something about which there needs to be consensus – coerced or otherwise – because the wanting we call appetite seems to be at once imperious and essential. Like Henry James’s definition of the real – “that which it is impossible not to know” – wanting is something that it impossible not to know about. And not something we can supposedly afford to be too uncertain about. If God was once, as it were, the expert on appetite – on what it is and what it should be – in secular materialist cultures appetite has replaced God, or has become a so-called god term in that it seems to organise and run things. When Darwin claimed survival and then reproduction (and natural selection) as the driving forces of evolution, he was, by definition, making appetite the heart of the matter, the real driving force.
[…]
It was to be one of the contributions of Freud’s psychoanalysis in modern times – which would eventually include stories about child development, and stories about the place and function of language in development – to enquire into the nature of wanting, from a secular, materialist scientific point of view; the appetite radically redescribed by Darwin, and his theories of evolution; the psychobiological wanting of hunger and sexuality, and the acculturated wanting that is now, for us, consumer capitalism. Indeed, acculturation, we can see, has now become the really quite quick proliferation of wants; for us, from the breast to the supermarket, from the mother and father to the infinite array of apparently satisfying objects (it is a crucial moment in the child’s development, the critic Leo Bersani has remarked, when he begins to notice that there are pleasures outside the family); acculturation as the organising and transformation of appetite. Parenting and education teaching us what to want, and what to not want. It has, of course, been the role of the so-called great religions and political ideologies to tell us what we should and shouldn’t want, and how we should do our wanting. Theories of human nature, after all, can only be stories about what people are deemed to need and want. The child-rearing manuals that have been such a feature of modern life have followed in their wake.
[…]
What Freud and psychoanalysts after him have been very good at showing us is how and why we are so prone to get our pictures of wanting so wrong, and so disturbing. Or if not wrong, at least unduly frustrating. Or, in James’s language, simply mistaken. Wanting may always be to varying extents frustrating, but so may the ways we have of talking about it; or the ways we have of talking about it may promote frustration, or promote the frustration they describe.

There may indeed be a significant irony in the fact that the ways we have found for talking about and describing appetite set up or stage appetite as a certain kind of threat or persecution. Wanting, for example, might be redescribed as experimenting with attraction; or testing preferences. If the very thing that sustains us seems to be also the very thing that undoes us – if our medium of contact with ourselves and others is the source of our formative alienations – we may wonder, as Freud did, what we are wanting appetite to do for us. And we may notice, as Freud did not, how adept we have been at finding pictures and descriptions of appetite that sabotage it.

What we talk about when we talk about giving up [Guardian]

…so…let’s keep an eye on that sabotage motif, maybe?

Kate Starbird, co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, added that she feared that the entirely false story of rigged elections has now “sunk in” for many Americans on the right. “The idea that they’re already going to the polls with the belief that they’re being cheated means they’ll misinterpret everything they see through that lens,” she said.
[…]
Starbird, a misinformation researcher, herself became the subject of an ongoing misinformation campaign – but said she would not let that deter her from her research. Her team wasn’t the only target of the conservative campaign against misinformation research, she noted: researchers across the country have received subpoenas, letters and criticism, all attempting to frame misinformation research as partisan and as censorship.

Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, served as the ringleader of this effort in Congress, using his power to investigate groups and researchers that work to counter misinformation, particularly as it related to elections and Covid-19. One practice that especially upset Jordan and his colleagues was when researchers would flag misleading information to social media companies, who would sometimes respond by amending factchecks or taking down false posts entirely.

Nor is it just Congress attacking anti-misinformation work. A federal lawsuit from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that the Biden administration violated the first amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech. A new lawsuit from the state of Texas and two rightwing media companies takes aim at the Global Engagement Center, a state department agency that focuses on how foreign powers spread information.

The pressure campaign has chilled misinformation research just ahead of the pivotal 2024 presidential election, as some academics switch what they focus on and others figure out ways to better explain their work to a mixed audience. One thing they will probably no longer do is flag posts to social media companies, as the practice remains an issue in several ongoing court cases.
[…]
Jordan’s committee released reports with outlandish claims about how the government, researchers and tech companies “colluded” to “censor Americans”. Starbird served on an external advisory committee for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; when a Republican congressional report claimed the committee tried to censor people, when in reality it solely advised the security agency, Starbird fired back, calling the Republican report a “manipulated narrative”.

“It was really weird to watch how they so effectively created this false narrative. It was frustrating,” she said. “And then at some point, you step back and you’re like, ‘You gotta appreciate their craft – good at what they did.’”
[…]
The reason that research into election misinformation is labelled as biased was because it’s largely the right that spreads election lies these days, she said. Widespread misinformation shared by rightwing politicians and activists since the 2020 election culminated in the January 6 insurrection, which was motivated by false claims of electoral fraud, almost all of which have been thrown out of court.

“The influencers, political elites on the right, have embraced those lies, which is one of the reasons that they spread further,” she said. “So this is an asymmetric phenomenon.

“Now, they may argue and say that they’re not false, and it’s really hard to have a conversation if you don’t have a shared view of reality.”
[…]
With misinformation research under fire and social media platforms less willing to factcheck viral posts, 2024 could see a flood of voter fraud lies, making for an even more contentious election than in 2020. Even if social media platforms, which are optimized to spread the most attention-getting posts, did more work to address misinformation, they would still be accused of bias and censorship, Starbird said.

She fears that the election fraud narrative has now “sunk in” so deeply for so many Americans on the right that it could end up creating worse laws and procedures – and actually increase the possibility of a successful foreign interference campaign in US elections.

“Right now, we’ve got a space where we may be in a ‘Boy who cried wolf’ situation, where there’s so much misinformation about election integrity that if we have a true threat, we may miss it,” Starbird said.

‘Stakes are really high’: misinformation researcher changes tack for 2024 US election [Guardian]

…right…so…up & at ’em, then…err…actually, now you mention it…it looks like a filthy day…can I not just fuck off back to bed & be done with it?

…I’m being told that’s not how any of that works…but I have a new plan so that’s not a problem…I’m signing up for this dog’s life business I’ve been hearing a lot about…if anyone needs me I’ll probably be taking a nap