…nothing happens in a vacuum…well…maybe not in space…but down here

Warning bells went off in financial markets the instant the extent of the deadly Hamas attack on Israel became apparent – and it is easy to see why.

One of the rules of thumb of geopolitics is that recessions are sparked by a sharp jump in oil prices, and the cost of crude is sensitive to events in the Middle East.

Little wonder then that the war between Israel and Hamas has meant scenario planners have been working to answer the question being asked by finance ministers and central bank governors from around the world: how bad could it get?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/18/israel-hamas-war-oil-prices-global-economy

…& for every action

Last week, Exxon Mobil agreed to buy Pioneer Natural Resources for $59.5 billion, in a move widely expected to set off a wave of consolidation throughout the oil sector. Combined, Exxon and Pioneer would be the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the Permian Basin, the field that produces more than 40 percent of America’s oil. If the deal goes through, other companies like Chevron could soon follow suit, buying up smaller companies as they come under pressure from investors to match Exxon’s size.
[…]
The democratic argument against the proposed deal is simple. In politics, concentrated interests, like rich corporations, have powerful advantages over diffuse interests, like voters, that can distort outcomes and thwart progress. Take climate legislation. A majority of Americans want to see the environment protected, but big companies that pollute heavily have an interest in watering down legislation that might reduce their profits. As a result, progress on energy policy has been agonizingly slow.

Exxon has also taken steps to shape the way voters think about the environment by sowing public misinformation and funding conservative groups disguised as grass-roots organizations. For instance, in July 1977, Exxon’s own senior scientist James Black told senior management that fossil fuels were causing climate change. Publicly, however, Exxon painted a very different picture. Lee Raymond, Exxon’s chief executive from 1993 to 2005, reportedly announced at a shareholders’ meeting, “I’m not convinced that the earth is warming at all.” In 2006, Exxon finally publicly acknowledged climate change risk for the first time, but as recently as 2016, according to a Wall Street Journal article published last month, it was still supporting “research that questioned the findings of mainstream climate science.”
[…]
A second reason for concern is the yawning gap between what Exxon says to investors and what it actually does. The company said as recently as August that it continues to support the Paris climate agreement. But it also said that the world isn’t on track to reach the targets of the agreement. The Pioneer deal not only seems to be a huge bet to take advantage of that expected failure; it is also a commitment to contribute to the failure. By doubling down on its oil and gas strategy rather than investing in low-carbon technologies, Exxon is actively undermining the agreement that it claims to support.
[…]
Even with these clear democratic and economic concerns, the legal path to blocking the deal could be difficult. In recent decades, the courts have not taken kindly to antitrust cases rooted in environmental or democratic arguments. But there are, nonetheless, a number of avenues open to regulators.
[…]
The Federal Trade Commission should not be alone in this fight. The Securities and Exchange Commission should consider whether Exxon has misled its investors with regard to climate change. And Congress could also hold hearings on the proposed deal. If legislators want to build the political momentum required to enact the policies the United States needs to cut its emissions meaningfully, then it will be essential to expose the oil companies’ lack of credibility on this issue and to curtail their overwhelming political influence.

It didn’t have to be this way. If Exxon were serious about preventing climate change, it could use its record $56 billion in net income from last year to invest more seriously in renewable energy, carbon capture and storage or other technologies that are compatible with long-term environmental sustainability. The Federal Trade Commission would surely allow Exxon to acquire a major solar company, for instance.

Exxon Mobil’s Pioneer Acquisition Is a Direct Threat to Democracy [NYT]

…yadda yadda

‘Vaca Muerta was the future’: Argentina goes all in on fracking [Guardian]

More than a hundred species of wildlife found across every continent are contaminated with highly toxic flame retardants, and the pollution is probably responsible for population declines in some species, a new analysis of published research shows.

The dangerous chemicals have been detected in everything from sea urchins to bobcats to Arctic foxes, and at alarming levels in endangered species such as red pandas, chimpanzees and killer whales.

The analysis examined about 20 years of flame retardant research and includes an interactive map showing the location and type of animal found to be contaminated. It brings into sharp focus the breadth of flame retardant pollution and dangers it poses.

The paper’s lead author, Lydia Jahl, said she expected to find widespread contamination, but was “still blown away by the sheer number of studies finding harmful levels of all sorts of flame retardants everywhere”.

Flame retardant pollution threatens wildlife on all continents, research finds [Guardian]

…& speaking of conflagrations…despite a population that has been effectively kettled for two weeks in what was one of the most densely populated locations on the face of the earth…before half of it was induced to shift into the other half which surely must have put it top of that list…& treated like…well…not unlike the way they do buildings with hostages in in movies…no power…all taps turned off & all entrances & exits locked up just as tight…in a place with…let’s say “infrastructure that’s lacking”…where in fairly short order that means no water on account of either needing to pump groundwater from wells or through desalination plants or just from someplace else…nor food nor medical or other humanitarian supplies…for two weeks…which you’d think was all the kinds of not good you could think of…if it weren’t for the constant fear of it tipping over into a whole other order of globe-spanning conflagration…so…who knows what tomorrow brings…but hopefully one thing it might bring is some assistance to those in dire straits

Gaza waits for aid after Biden deal to allow convoy via Egypt [archive.ph/FT]

…&…if there must be puppet masters…that they bring their A-game…& not the kind of play that plays into the wrong hands

CIA admits 1953 Iranian coup it backed was undemocratic [Guardian]

…I mean…we were doing so well

‘Our world hangs by a thread’: Indigenous activist asks US agri giant to stop destroying Amazon rainforest [Guardian]

…we even made all sorts of rules

[…] modern warfare has found multiple ways of putting civilians in harm’s way. An almost medieval siege of the sort now being enforced on Gaza, depriving it of power and water, or the gunfire and shelling of the urban battle that may begin there at any time, can kill innocent civilians too. So, in particular, can a war from the skies. Precision bombing is a contradiction in terms, the more so in a densely populated place such as Gaza.

The need to cause as little harm as possible to civilians is one of the laws of war. These laws have evolved over centuries. They have roots in the Old Testament, the Mahabharata and pronouncements by seventh-century Islamic leaders. The laws took the form of military codes and then, later, of international legal conventions. They covered things such as appropriate resort to force, use of particularly lethal weaponry, protections for medical and humanitarian agencies, the treatment of prisoners, respect for civilians and the safety of women.

…I forget how long it took me to get that “an eye for an eye” isn’t meant to give you the baseline but the limit…but…like how long it took for me to clock the name of getafix the druid is a gag…I know it was a lot longer than it felt like it should have taken…sometimes what you see & what you look at just aren’t the same thing

Hamas’s attacks on Israel, like the horrific killings in Kfar Aza and elsewhere, could not have been more contemptuous of this culture. Those who ordered and carried them out were trashing ancient norms, many with deep religious roots. But that does not mean those who retaliate are entitled to act in the same way to civilians on the other side. Veruv clearly knows that. He is right. Israel has been atrociously wronged. But Israel and its allies remain bound to uphold their humane principles.

Rules like the laws of war are sometimes dismissed as naive and impractical. Some culture warriors will denigrate them as luxury beliefs. But tell that to those who have survived because of them. Ask those who live in fear in lawless lands what they would prefer. Laws of war are part of the world’s imperfect networks of rules, norms and values, which protects human beings from anarchy. They attempt to describe how the world should work, especially in dangerous and conflicted times. They sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. But they are better than no networks and no rules.

Some of the rules – such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948 – are rooted in the “never again” mood of the second world war’s aftermath. More than 70 years on, the world has moved on, and that determinedly reforming mood has inevitably slackened. This comes at a high price for our times. The rules are becoming less effective.

It’s not just the Middle East. Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine without embarrassment about any conventions it was brushing aside when it did so. Russia continues to target and attack civilian targets without shame. But the western democracies are not exempt from thinking that the rules do not apply to them. Twenty years ago, the US and the UK invaded Iraq without UN support and on doubtful legal grounds. If Donald Trump is elected next year, rules of every kind will be cast to the wind.

…&…consequences are the proverbial bitch

The respect for international rules has weakened in Britain too. That’s partly a result of Brexit. Compare the Strategic Defence and Security Review published by David Cameron’s government less than eight years ago. This contained no fewer than 30 references to Britain’s strong commitment to rules-based networks. “We sit at the heart of the rules-based international order,” the review stated proudly.

By 2021, by contrast, when the Johnson government published its post-Brexit “integrated review” of security, defence and foreign policy, those 30 references to the rules-based order had dwindled to … none at all. The updated version of the review published by Rishi Sunak in March rows back a little by saying that a rules-based system is “no longer sufficient” but that Britain is keen to uphold international law. But the commitment that marked 20th-century Britain is draining away.

This has wider causes than Brexit alone. A long tradition of state secrecy shows up once more in Britain’s new law ending Troubles-era legal cases in Northern Ireland. It shows again in the shutting down of investigations into allegations against UK special forces in Afghanistan. It shows in Britain’s eagerness to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda without properly examining their claims to refugee status. And it shows in the calls from the Conservative right for Britain to walk away from the European human rights process.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/13/universal-rules-of-war-1945-being-broken-not-just-middle-east

…because…practice makes perfect

‘The hope we had is gone’: how 20 months of stasis has paralysed Northern Ireland [Guardian]

…& people are always learning

“Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections,” Adam Przeworski, a political scientist at N.Y.U., wrote in 1991 — a definition that would prove prescient in the wake of the 2020 election.

“Outcomes of the democratic process are uncertain, indeterminate ex ante,” Przeworski continued. “There is competition, organized by rules. And there are periodic winners and losers.”

…one do rather seem to outnumber the other…&…I’d have thought you’d be aiming for those to be the other way around

In an essay published this October, “Vetocracy and the Decline of American Global Power: Minority Rule Is the Order in American Politics Today,” Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, argues that

America has become a vetocracy, or rule by veto. Its political system spreads power out very broadly, in ways that give many individual players the power to stop things. By contrast it provides few mechanisms to force collective decisions reflecting the will of the majority

Can an Unpopular Populist Still Damage Democracy? [NYT]

…but…they tell me…despair is not the answer

Beginning around the turn of the millennium, Case and Deaton showed, deaths from suicide, opioid overdose and alcohol-related liver disease among less educated, white, middle-aged people began to grow in a pattern that seemed to demonstrate how the country’s white working class was being — or at least feeling — left behind. Last month, the economists presented their updated data with a new paper showing a growing divergence in life expectancy between those with college degrees and those without.

But over the past few years, the “deaths of despair” story has come to seem thinner to many of those reading the literature most closely. And in response to the new findings, pointed critiques were published by Dylan Matthews in Vox and by Matthew Yglesias in Slow Boring, arguing that the deaths of despair narrative had been overhyped, creating a just-so story about postindustrial decline that had seemed too good to scrutinize.

Eight years on, the central claim from Case and Deaton holds up relatively well: Deaths by suicide, overdose and liver disease have been on the rise among the white working class and the middle class. But so have gun deaths across the country, deaths among the young and suicides, which puts the data on white middle-aged men and women in a different light. Among other questions about that data, it turns out that deaths of despair increased pretty uniformly across all demographic groups and that the rise in such deaths among white middle-aged people was, while real and concerning, not all that exceptional.
[…]
Unless they’re in the top 1 percent, Americans are dying at higher rates than their British counterparts, and if you’re part of the bottom half of income earners, simply being American can cut as much as five years off your life expectancy. At every age below 80, Americans are dying more often than people in their peer nations: Infant mortality is up to three times as high as it is in comparison countries; one in 25 kindergartners can’t expect to see 40, a rate nearly four times as high as in other countries; and Americans between 15 and 24 are twice as likely to die as those in France, Germany, Japan and other wealthy nations. For every ethnic group but Asian Americans, prepandemic mortality rates in the United States were higher than those of economic peer countries: In 2019, Black Americans were 3.8 times as likely to die as the residents of other wealthy countries, white Americans were 2.5 times as likely to die, and Hispanic Americans 1.8 times as likely to die. Americans with college degrees do substantially better than those without, but that second group represents almost two-thirds of the country. And while mortality rates show a clear geographic divergence, with life expectancy gaps as large as 20 years between the country’s richest and poorest places, just a fraction of American counties even reach the European Union average.
[…]
“The United States is failing at a fundamental mission — keeping people alive,” The Washington Post recently concluded, in a remarkable series on the country’s mortality crisis. “This erosion in life spans is deeper and broader than widely recognized, afflicting a far-reaching swath of the United States.” In a quarter of American counties, The Post found, death rates among working-age adults are not just failing to improve but are also higher than they were 40 years ago. “The trail of death is so prevalent that a person could go from Virginia to Louisiana, and then up to Kansas, by traveling entirely within counties where death rates are higher than they were when Jimmy Carter was president.” If death rates just among the country’s 55-to-69-year-olds improved to match the rates of peer countries, The Post calculated, 200,000 fewer of them would have died in 2019. That is more than the number of them who died of Covid in 2020.

There are a few things that Americans do as well or better than other countries (cancer treatment, where outcomes have been steadily improving now for decades, and keeping old people alive), so chances that a 75-year-old makes it to 90 or 100 are about the same as in other wealthy countries — though that stat is somewhat distorted by the fact that many fewer Americans make it to 60 in the first place, with those who do likelier in better health.

But by almost every other measure the United States is lagging its peers, often catastrophically. The rate of homicides involving a firearm are 22 times higher in the United States as in the European Union, for instance, a worsening trend that has given rise to research suggesting that the country’s mortality crisis is primarily about gun violence. Another set of researchers emphasize exceptional mortality rates among the young, with rates of death among American children growing more than 15 percent between just 2019 and 2021, with little of that increase attributable to Covid. Americans also die much more often in car crashes, workplace accidents and fires. Our maternal mortality rate is more than three times as high as that of other wealthy countries, and our newborns have the highest infant mortality rate in the rich world. We are almost twice as likely to suffer from obesity as are our counterparts in countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the downstream consequences — from hypertension to heart disease and stroke — mean that obesity could explain more than 40 percent of the U.S. life expectancy shortfall for women, and over 60 percent for men. The life expectancy among America’s poorest men may be 20 years shorter than that of their counterparts in the Netherlands and Sweden. Overall, among 18 high-income countries, America’s life expectancy ranks dead last.

Beyond ‘Deaths of Despair’ [NYT]

…but it’s not as easy as it should be

Knowing you are going to lose a campaign never quite prepares you for experiencing it, and this wasn’t just a campaign. This was a request from the original inhabitants of the continent to restructure conversations between Indigenous people and government – a request grounded in the history of dispossession and silencing.

The rebuff felt savage. This was a big opportunity to lose. Tears flowed. The mourning was visceral and deep. But later in the night, when some of the group kicked on after the North Sydney wake, resilience had returned to the fore. The mourning was laced with defiance.

The voice was dead. Time to regroup. Time to consider what next.

…even that is easier said than done when you’re unfamiliar with the course that led to the point you’re starting from

This analysis is logical, but the counter-factual was also obvious: how could the government go to the voters proposing a voice that the original architects of the voice were fully prepared to disavow? That position is untenable for a prime minister who had promised to listen to Indigenous people.

This strange tango – Dutton demanding detail, Albanese pointing to the wealth of detail in previous parliamentary and other reports about the voice, Liberal moderates hoping there was a universe where very obviously irreconcilable differences of policy and strategy could somehow be resolved – continued until just after the Liberals lost the Aston byelection in April.
[…]
It was clear in real time, and it’s crystal clear in hindsight, that the yes campaign began flat footed. It lost the critical opening messaging war. Dutton’s questions about the voice over the summer became definitional in the minds of many voters. One insider says: “That’s where it was lost. We were too slow”.

The yes campaign spent months trying to reframe the conversation, but reaching people was laborious and commanding voter attention was difficult. The growing conflict in the referendum conversation was a turnoff for a lot of voters. The divisive algorithms of social media were working their dark magic, saturating voters in ad hominem and negativity.
[…]
The process Sheahan described was like kicking an open door. The no campaign was able to “shape the conversation” because “very few people” knew what the voice was. Sheahan said the anti-voice group settled on its central argument – that the referendum would cause division – because that theme had been popular in focus groups. He said Advance’s strategy was to win three states to deny the yes campaign its required double majority of a national majority plus four of six states.

It wasn’t just Coalition voters who sunk the voice. There was a drop off in support from Labor voters too, but the trajectory was nowhere near as steep. In the end, every Australian state voted no.
[…]
Not all no voters were a hard no. Campaign research suggests around half the no cohort were reluctant about it.
[…]
Archer describes this group as “middle Australia” no. “For the most part, they recognise the disadvantage faced by Indigenous people, they just disagree on the solution,” Archer says. “They feel a little bit uncomfortable about voting no, because they want to do something, they just didn’t want to do the voice for whatever reason.” She says this group were not going to “stand on a booth wearing a T-shirt that says ‘say no to division’ because they didn’t feel that way about it necessarily, they just felt unsure that the voice was the solution.”
[…]
The campaign had reached the uncomfortable realisation, backed by research – that many no voters weren’t driven by racism, but more an “apathy”. Noel Pearson said in the closing week of the campaign the “overwhelming attitude” he’d picked up wasn’t racism but “a complete lack of empathy.”

…it’s those damned common denominators, ain’t it?

The referendum campaign unleashed and emboldened forces of division and polarisation in our polity. Once unleashed, these forces can be hard to subdue. While yes built a social movement, the no campaign has also succeeded in uniting previously disparate forces in a coherent structure for the permanent campaign. If a constitutionally enshrined advisory body for Indigenous Australians can be weaponised successfully in a national culture war, so can many other things.

At the same time as the yes campaign was holding its wake in North Sydney, the no campaign was dwelling on its triumph at the Hyatt Regency in Brisbane. When many journalists left the gathering to observe a post-result press conference from Dutton on Saturday night, the richest person on the Australian Financial Review’s Rich List this year, Gina Rinehart, drifted through the lobby of the Hyatt Regency and made her way to a private no campaign event upstairs.

The nature of Rinehart’s association with this cause is unclear. But the discrete ascension of the reclusive mining magnate seemed an appropriately sardonic coda to a destructive campaign which had sought to cleave a country into tribes – the so-called “elites” and the rest.

Inside the voice campaigns: how muddled messages and voter confusion led to a crushing defeat [Guardian]

…voices…everybody’s got one…but who gives voice to what is surely as fraught as it is freighted

A coalition of more than 30 student groups posted an open letter on the night of the Hamas attack, saying that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence that ended up leaving more than 1,400 dead, most of them civilians.

The letter, posted on social media before the extent of the killings was known, did not include the names of individual students.

But within days, students affiliated with those groups were being doxxed, their personal information posted online. Siblings back home were threatened. Wall Street executives demanded a list of student names to ban their hiring. And a truck with a digital billboard — paid for by a conservative group — circled Harvard Square, flashing student photos and names, under the headline, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”

Campuses have long wrestled with free speech. What is acceptable to say and what crosses into hate speech? But the war between Israel and Hamas has heightened emotions, threatening to tear apart already fragile campus cultures.

Complicating it all: outside groups, influential alumni and big-money donors, who are putting maximum pressure on students and administrators.
[…]
This is not the first time that Harvard students have taken up an unpopular view. But those involved with the letter had not anticipated that their statement would go viral and unleash such repercussions.

The students had to contend with “people’s lives being ruined, people’s careers being ruined, people’s fellowships being ruined,” said one student whose organization signed the letter, in an interview.

Many critics have little forbearance for these complaints, saying that the letter itself showed a lack of empathy. But other students and free-speech activists say that the outside pressure has created its own kind of heckler’s veto, dictating what can be said on campus and how institutions must respond.

“You kind of feel like you’re responsible” for the harassment, said one of the Harvard students, whose family’s personal information was released. “That’s how silencing works, right?”

…they got into harvard & all…so maybe it ought not to be surprising…but the kid would appear to have a point, there

The groups that signed the letter often worked together in a kind of informal support network, the students said. When one championed an issue, the others might sign on in a show of collegiality.

They had agreed to be interviewed but insisted on anonymity, saying that they feared for their safety. They asked that even the smallest details of their personal lives — freshman? senior? — not be published.

They have been avoiding publicity since posting their letter on Facebook and Instagram on the night of Oct. 7, hours after the attack.

As the world increasingly focused on Hamas’s trail of terror in Israel, their letter opened with the line: “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

After the letter went viral, and anger against it erupted, some of the groups distanced themselves from the message.

Attention has now shifted to Israel’s ongoing retaliation and the toll on civilians in Gaza, and these students are sticking with their stance, though they said it has been wearing.

…bonus points for the understatement…that whole not-a-vacuum deal cuts pretty sharp both ways

One of the women found out from a friend about the billboard truck. It was parked just outside the university gates, plastered with a giant image of her smiling face. Customers sitting at a pastry shop, students looking out of their dormitory windows and commuters rushing to and from the train station could see her, along with a carousel of other students, being branded as antisemitic.

“I threw up in Harvard Yard,” she said.

The truck is operated by Accuracy in Media, a conservative group that has also deployed such trucks at other campuses, like Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.

“It’s ironic that students on the campus where Facebook was invented are shocked that their names are publicly available,” Adam Guillette, president of Accuracy in Media, said. “We’re merely amplifying their message.”

The group is not done. It has purchased domain names for Harvard students associated with the letter and is setting up individual websites for them. Each site will call for the university to punish the students.

…what can one person do about it? …I dunno…but…to take one example I wouldn’t be in a hurry to treat as a role model

Students’ names were also exposed last week through a website featuring a “College Terror List, a Helpful Guide for Employers” compiled by Maxwell Meyer, a 2022 Stanford graduate.

Mr. Meyer, 23, said in an interview that his information had come from public sources and tips sent to an email address. He said he had no affiliation with Accuracy in Media.

His website was removed by Google and Notion, the note-taking app where it was displayed, Mr. Meyer said. (The students said alumni had helped remove it.) But other sites have picked up the list and passed it around.

Mr. Meyer said that as a former editor of the conservative Stanford Review, he was a defender of free speech. “At one point, I defended critics of Israel against what I called right-wing cancel culture,” he said.

But “if you’re a member of an organization that advocates terrorism in your name, you aren’t just a sitting duck, you’re a person with agency,” he said. “You can say, ‘I disavow this.’ These are Harvard students we’re talking about. They need to be held to a higher standard.”

…always easier to hold someone other than yourself to a higher standard…& these assholes do seem to love them some taking it easy on themselves

Bill Ackman, the hedge fund billionaire and Harvard alumnus, wrote on social media that the names of students should be circulated, to avoid “inadvertently” hiring them. His more than 800,000 followers boosted Mr. Meyer’s website, and led dozens of chief executives to ask for the list, Mr. Meyer said.

In another social media post, Mr. Ackman said he was “100% in support of free speech.” But, he added, “one should be prepared to stand up and be personally accountable for his or her views.”

The doxxing, however, has extended to family members.

“Every single member of my family has been contacted, including my younger siblings,” said the student whose smiling face was on the truck.

…&…”both sides” & all

Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar and the dean of U.C. Berkeley’s law school, said he objected to the doxxing and believed that displaying a truck billboard of student photos was “despicable.”

But he did not believe the actions had prevented either side from expressing their views. Mr. Ackman and Mr. Meyer may have heightened the tension, he said, but “you can’t express your views and then say, ‘Those who criticize me are chilling my speech.’”

…but…in raw terms of triangulation…if the sides pick themselves…pretty sure I know which one I don’t want to wind up on

To other free-speech advocates, however, doxxing and shaming have become a standard part of the cancel culture arsenal, and run the risk of suppressing opinion.

Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the students’ statement “deplorable” but said that was beside the point.

Collecting names sounded like a throwback to McCarthy-era blacklists, she said. The latest lists could muzzle not only these students, but also those who might share “more thoughtful and less categorical pronouncements.”
[…]
“The concept of proportionality, elusive as it is, is very woven into the fabric of not only American law, but international human rights law,” said Ms. Strossen, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
[…]
There is little the university can do, however, about the truck, which has been careful to stay on public streets. And the lists of names were compiled from publicly available sources.
[…]
Students associated with the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee have distributed a guide for doxxed students, which they compiled after a meeting with “upper-level administrators,” according to student emails.

The guide said that Harvard’s career center would reach out to employers to vouch for students. And it provided contact information for a lawyer willing to help undocumented students. It also recommended avoiding the news media: “Demand anonymity — use language about ‘extreme threat to security.”

How Harvard Students Became the Center of a Free Speech Fight [NYT]

…the chances of that “extreme threat to security” hitting the all-alarms fire status of the ones being faced by kids who never even dreamed of going to harvard may not be high…but…even in relative terms…we’re talking about a threat that extends to relatives…& taken to extremes some have a vocal appetite for…can be a life & death kind of a deal…& if team #bruteforceandignorance

The children’s book publisher Scholastic said it will separate titles in its elementary school book fairs by race, gender and sexuality, allowing school districts to include or exclude the list.

The decision is a response to dozens of state laws restricting how the topics are discussed in schools, which Scholastic has opposed. Districts can now opt out of the new list, called the Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice catalog, or choose specific titles from it.

The new catalog of 64 titles includes biographies of the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and the civil rights icon John Lewis; the memoir I Am Ruby Bridges, on the experience of desegregating schools; the picture book Change Sings by the poet Amanda Gorman; The Storyteller, a middle grade novel about a Cherokee boy; and the disability-positive titles You Are Enough and You Are Loved.

In a statement last week, Scholastic said it created the separate catalog to continue offering diverse books in a hostile legislative environment that could threaten school districts, teachers or librarians. “There is now enacted or pending legislation in more than 30 US states prohibiting certain kinds of books from being in schools – mostly LGBTQIA+ titles and books that engage with the presence of racism in our country,” it said. “Because Scholastic Book Fairs are invited into schools, where books can be purchased by kids on their own, these laws create an almost impossible dilemma: back away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued or prosecuted.

“We cannot make a decision for our school partners around what risks they are willing to take, based on the state and local laws that apply to their district,” the statement added, “so these topics and this collection have been part of many planning calls that happen in advance of shipping a fair.

“We don’t pretend this solution is perfect – but the other option would be to not offer these books at all – which is not something we’d consider.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/18/scholastic-book-fairs-race-gender-sexuality-school-bans

…gets onside with the mechanical turk?

Artificial intelligence could be harnessed by terrorists or hostile states seeking to build bombs, spread propaganda or disrupt elections, according to the heads of MI5 and the FBI.

Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, and Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, said their organisations were monitoring developments and needed to cooperate with experts in the private sector to tackle emerging threats.

The MI5 chief said that while AI developers put in safeguards to prevent people using software to ask to how to build a bomb, there was a risk that it was possible to “jailbreak” those controls.

“If you are experienced in security, you would be unwise to rely on these controls remaining impregnable,” McCallum said. “So there is clear risk that some of these systems can be used, put to uses that their makers do not intend.”
[…]
It was not the only example that hostile actors had sought to use artificial intelligence, Wray added. “We’ve seen AI used to essentially amplify the distribution or dissemination of terrorist propaganda,” he said, using translation tools to make it “more coherent and more credible to potential supporters”.
[…]
“It’s one of those issues where no one has a monopoly of wisdom and trying to have a different form of public private partnership and crucially, international partnerships,” the MI5 chief added.

Both agency chiefs said they were monitoring for sophisticated, AI-generated efforts at political interference by hostile states such as Russia in the run-up to forthcoming elections in the US and UK respectively.

“The use of AI in a way that if it’s sophisticated enough to create potential deep fakes is something that adds a level of threat to that we haven’t previously encountered,” Wray said. It was a threat “we’re on the lookout for”, he added, given “an existing strategy by hostile nations could become more dangerous”.
[…]
This month, faked audio purporting to be the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, bullying his staff was posted online as the party’s conference in Liverpool began. Though false, it was widely circulated, and experts said it may have been generated by AI software based on audio of his speeches.

McCallum said monitoring disinformation was not MI5’s main job, but it was alert to hostile states trying to manipulate British opinion, and indicated that analysts were maintaining a watching brief.

“So I wouldn’t want to make some sort of strong prediction that that will feature in the forthcoming election, but we would be not doing our jobs properly if we didn’t really think through the possibility,” the head of MI5 said.

The event in California earlier heard warnings that terror threats could rise as a result of the war in Israel and Gaza, and warnings about the scale of Chinese industrial espionage.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/18/terrorists-exploit-artificial-intelligence-ai-mi5-fbi-chiefs-warn

…well…some booksmart types might not go amiss…provided the mob gives them a miss

Last week the literary association Litprom canceled a celebration for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s book “Minor Detail” at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the publishing world’s biggest international book fairs. The novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, was to be honored for having won the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, a German literary prize awarded annually to a woman from the developing world. A panel that Shibli, who splits her time between Jerusalem and Berlin, was to be on with her German translator, Günther Orth, was likewise canceled.
[…]
Some readers, like the festival organizers, may also side entirely with Israel, which was brutally attacked by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. Others may side with Hamas or with the Palestinian people, now under fire by Israeli forces. Still others may have more complicated positions, condemning the actions of Hamas while supporting the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state or supporting Israel while disapproving of the tactics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or its military.

But taking a side in a war does not require taking positions on a work of fiction — no matter the subject matter or the author’s nationality — and that is the effect of the fair organizers’ decision. Canceling a celebration of an author may not be the same thing as banning a book, but the organizers’ decision amounts to demonizing a fiction writer and stifling her viewpoint.

The move sends an unfortunate message to both authors and readers, advancing the false notion that there is a wrong time for certain authors or novels and that now is not the time for Palestinian literature. As if novelists were somehow responsible to or for global conflicts and must be judged in accordance with whatever political events take place at the time of publication.

Even if one chooses a side in this war, literature and the views of fiction writers shouldn’t become collateral damage. It is no more wrong to read the latest novel by the Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad at this moment than it is to read the comic short stories of the Israeli author Etgar Keret. Now may, indeed, be the very moment when it makes sense to consider a creative work that comes from the other side.

Shibli told me she doesn’t fear the effects of Litprom’s and the book fair’s actions so much as she fears what they reflect in terms of political shifts. “It’s alarming to witness this populism attempting to take its hold on literature,” she wrote me in an email. “But literature cannot be in the grip of one group, not when it forges an intimate link with every reader.”

Shibli has not been canceled. Her works are still available in translation from the Arabic. But a chill has been cast. The idea has been thrust out there by the organizers of one of the world’s most prominent annual literary events that her fiction and, by extension, the work of other Palestinian writers are somehow not OK for our moment. And that the work of literary institutions is to reinforce borders rather than enable literature to transcend them.

“Minor Detail” undoubtedly offers sympathies to the Palestinian cause — a perspective that surely won’t be embraced by all readers. It includes the story of a Bedouin girl who was gang raped and murdered by an Israeli Army unit in 1949, an atrocity that has been well documented. One German judge of the prize, Ulrich Noller, resigned from the jury that determined the award last summer, saying the novel serves “anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives” and claiming it not only allowed such readings but also opened up space for them.
[…]
Let’s be clear: Wars cause harm. Novels do not. Literature may raise uncomfortable questions or explore unpopular viewpoints or establish reasons to empathize with a character a reader might otherwise find repugnant. A novel’s story, characters, politics and theme may not appeal to a particular reader. That reader does not have to like those books or read them to begin with. One need not like or agree with the author, either, to appreciate the person’s work.

But novels need not appeal to or appease a political constituency. Those works of fiction written purely as political dogma in disguise tend to suffer the consequences with critics and readers. That said, even overtly political fiction and the novelists who write them should not subjected to the passions incited by global conflicts.

These are just two examples, but the effects ripple out, generating tension and fear in the wider literary world. Already, there is fallout from the decision in Frankfurt. The Indonesian Publishers Association, the Arab Publishers’ Association, the Emirates Publishers Association and the United Arab Emirates Sharjah Book Authority have pulled out of the festival, which opened on Wednesday.
[…]
More than 600 publishers, editors, translators, writers and others in the industry, including Ian McEwan, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright and the Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, have signed an open letter on the ArabLit website.

“The Frankfurt Book Fair has a responsibility,” the letter explains, “to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down.”

In the statement Boos emphasized “peaceful and democratic discourse.” He and the fair’s organizers should then reflect on this: When you shut people out (be it through censorship, bans, social media campaigns, a canceled book celebration or the machinations of an autocratic regime), when people feel judged by or deprived of a voice that expresses their — and our common — humanity, we wall off our minds.

The moment people line up on opposing sides, when their eyes and hearts shut tight accordingly, is precisely when we need literature that challenges our presumed allegiances most.

“‘Adab’ in Arabic means ‘literature’ but also ‘ethics,’” Shibli told me. “Literature as ethics would perhaps open up more possibilities in our imagination on how we could live our lives together, in relation to each other.”

A Chill Has Been Cast Over the Book World [NYT]

…some people…like to ask themselves…what would jesus do? …I dunno the answer to that question for most situations I can think of in the wider sense…& I’ve read that book…more than once, even…in several translations…& some bits that some people say got cut & other people say aren’t meant to be in it…but…if the way to beat that one riddle where you don’t know who’s lying is to ask the one guy what the other one would say to do…& then do the other thing? …then maybe I should start asking myself “what would the people who burned the library at alexandria do?”…& then do the other thing…I mean…what’s the quantum of it all

…& speaking of doing the other thing