#But this current wave of anti intellectualism obviously plays a part

[chemsexholmes]

one thing worth noting in the conversation about whether or not college students have "become stupid" is that the attitude of the general public toward academic study has largely shifted in the past few decades away from education as a moral betterment (and also, implicitly, a status symbol), toward totally embracing the idea that education is the Thing that gets you Jobs. which of course is pushed by policymakers and academic institutions, because how else do you sell academic funding in a capitalistic society? but has created an ethos about education as something you have to drag your feet through in order to get your degree, which makes students feel more inclined to use LLM like chatgpt to complete their work because they fundamentally aren't connecting with the material.

[alexsmitposts]

Events in the United States suggest perestroika in the USSR An unbridled mob threatens the very Foundation of the United States

Will it be possible to keep the pogroms and protests taking place in the United States under control, or will they lead to an uncontrolled disintegration of the country? These reflections are engaged in quite serious American analysts, and they find the reasons for their conclusions in numerous examples from American history. This scenario is particularly interesting in the context of the US presidential election.

American historians and sociologists are actively investigating the phenomenon of riots in the United States. Many of them believe that fighting with the police and looting stores is a classic of local political struggle. Simon Balto, a historian at the University of Iowa in an interview with Time magazine, recalls that, in fact, even the Boston tea party-the bifurcation point for American independence – was an ordinary "crime against private property" with elements of provocation.

On December 16, 1773, several dozen American " activists "in the port of Boston disguised themselves as" Indians", painted their faces, seized a ship with a cargo of tea on Board, and threw crates of tea overboard. By the way, their masquerade did not deceive anyone. The soldiers on the ship realized that they were white colonists and did not fire on them. Today, the technique of this provocation vividly resembles the modern practices of the" black bloc " antifa, covering their faces and provoking the crowd at protest events. With the Boston tea party, the war of independence in the United States began.

The topic of racial confrontations in the 1960s is also constantly being discussed by historians. Then a wave of rallies and clashes with the police swept across America. The scale of this racial conflict seems even more impressive than it is today.

They set fire to houses and cars, government buildings and police stations, and looted stores. Riots have engulfed entire neighborhoods and cities. The expense of the victims was in the tens of injured in the thousands. Up to three hundred thousand people took part in the March of colored activists on Washington in 1963 alone. In the city consisted of army units. The black neighborhoods of Detroit that rebelled in 1967 were subdued with tanks.

The fight against racial discrimination reached its climax in the spring of 1968, immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther king. There was unrest all over the country. Machine guns were positioned around the White house to fire back at the protesters. The fighting wing of black activists, the Black Panthers, played an active role in the riots.

As today, show business stars and advanced liberal intellectuals fueled and financed racial conflict. In the novel "Bonfires of ambition" by the classic American writer Tom Wolfe, it is funny to describe how a black radical in 1968 comes to a dinner party to a new York millionaire in order to make a speech and get financial support from local bigwigs. However, the evening is ruined by a drunk representative of the indigenous peoples of America.

As it is today, the leaders of the us democratic party were behind the 1968 riots, not particularly hiding. All the press under their command sang in unison of the protesters. John Lennon and Janis Joplin dedicated their performances to the Black Panthers. The leaders of the movement-don Cox, for example-were the best friends of new York celebrities and frequenters of the most glamorous parties in penthouses on Park Avenue.

However, paradoxically, this noisy election campaign ended in failure for the democratic party. The broad American masses were so afraid of the pogroms that they voted for the Republican candidate. Richard Nixon became President in 1969. He promptly dealt with the Black Panthers and stopped mass riots.

In the spring of 1992, again in the midst of presidential elections, history repeated itself. Los Angeles police beat black Rodney king with batons. In response, the city rebelled, thousands of buildings were burned, shops looted, and stones and Molotov cocktails were thrown at the police. The protests soon spread to San Francisco.

The press and television relentlessly littered this perfectly ordinary story for Los Angeles. Hundreds of thousands of Negroes turned out to protest rallies across the country. In the end, both the national guard and the army had to be brought into Los Angeles. But the democratic press presented the process of establishing order as an incredible cruelty. In all this hype, the democratic candidate bill Clinton received the votes of black voters and was elected President of the United States.

The racial conflicts of the past years strongly resemble the Black Lives Matter movement today. However, the differences between the agenda of the protesters of the 60s and the current one are also obvious. The ideological leader of the rebels, Martin Luther king, took Mahatma Gandhi as a model and called exclusively for non-violent resistance. In his sermons, he reminded Americans of the true American dream – equality of all races and Nations and individual freedom. Its one-on-one rhetoric is written off from the rhetoric of the founding fathers.

In essence, king was calling for Americans to return to their true values, rejecting segregation and racism. All this was very similar to how in the USSR of the 60s people were nostalgic for the early years of the revolution and dreamed of returning to "Leninist values".

But today's events in the United States remind us of the end of the national perestroika, when almost all the legacy of Soviet civilization was destroyed in the information field. The difference between the humane slogans of the 60s and today's speeches is striking. Rioters from Black Lives Matter are trying to destroy everything connected with white civilization in America-from Columbus to Teddy Roosevelt.

Today, in contrast to the 60s, they have almost all the mass media on their side. It is simply impossible to doubt the righteousness of the protesters.

Information control over public opinion has become absolutely totalitarian. People are "kicked out of the profession" and shamed in the eyes of the public even for an innocent objection like "All lives matter". This entire campaign is all too obviously dedicated to the goal of not allowing trump to be re-elected. His supporters are almost not allowed to speak publicly. A huge part of the electorate is terrorized, pre-branded "white racists" and does not have access to the information field at all. There was no such censorship of thought in the United States in the 1960s or 1990s.

All this leads to an unprecedented racial division of the country. The case is compounded by the fact that half a century ago in the United States justly fought the legacy of the slave system – humiliating segregation, real domestic racism. This was supported by almost all sane citizens. The majority of the country saw how justified the demands of the colored population were.

Today, there is almost no topic for fighting-African-Americans with their social benefits and quotas for University places and job vacancies have almost no real goals left. This is reflected in the complete lack of a coherent program for the BLM, whose only requirement – to disband the police and replace it with some "self-defense patrols" - is literally written off from the"Black Panther" program.

And the democratic party's incendiary election campaigns have never been held against the backdrop of such a large-scale economic crisis. If quarantine measures have become a trigger for the outburst of mass irritation, the true cause of it is a deep fear for their work, health, and life itself.

Forty million unemployed and about 400 million firearms in the hands of the population – in such a flammable environment, experiments to incite racial conflicts in the United States have not yet been conducted. Therefore, their outcome looks unpredictable. Pessimism reigns even among American analysts. It's hard to disagree with Washington-based journalist Elizabeth drew, writing for Project Syndicate: "...the American experiment-244 years since the establishment of the state next month-is in serious danger."

If the current series of pogroms and anti-police protests in the United States will take place, for example, according to the tracing of speeches in 1968 or in 1992, then in the fall, after the presidential election, it will go down. But if this is something new, then America is waiting for uncontrolled chaos.

[aion-rsa]

Tenet’s Release Date Forgets the Lessons of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar

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It seems fairly certain now that Tenet will be released in theaters at the end of the summer. Warner Bros. confirmed as much Monday when the studio announced Christopher Nolan’s latest epic is set to open in 70 countries, including the UK, on Aug. 26. It will then make the jump stateside to vaguely determined “select U.S. cities” on Sept. 2, just in time for Labor Day weekend. While plans can change—they have before—there is almost a weary resignation about this announcement. We’re opening this in theaters in 2020, come hell or high water.

Yet one of the many bitter ironies about this choice is that it ignores a central theme of another Christopher Nolan odyssey, the star-gazing Interstellar. Every bit as ambitious and grandiose as Nolan’s other IMAX spectacles post-The Dark Knight, Interstellar grappled with cerebral concepts, including Einstein’s theory of relativity, intergalactic wormhole space travel, and the existential threat of depleted resources on Earth. The movie also, much more bluntly, dramatized the danger of anti-intellectualism and a willful rejection of scientific facts, especially  the danger of beleaguered resignation.

The scene that most crystallizes this occurs during the climactic moments of the movie’s second act. Literally worlds away from where the movie’s hero Joseph “Coop” Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) struggles with the pitiful Dr. Mann (Matt Damon), Coop’s children back on Earth also face a reckoning. Now both adults who took radically different lessons from their father’s NASA legacy, Murph (Jessica Chastain) is a scientist who followed Dad into the space program, and Tom (Casey Affleck) is the estranged brother who’s happy to keep his eyes squarely focused on the ground. There is nothing wrong with farming, of course, but for Tom it’s as much a form of self-denial as it is a profession.

When the confrontation comes, Murph and friend Getty (Topher Grace) have come to the farmhouse where Murph and Tom grew up with their grandfather, and where Tom now lives with his own wife and son. In actuality Tom had two children, but one of them, Jesse, died of a lung disease caused by “blight;” a new type of dust and ecological menace that’s spread around the globe and is now coating every crop Tom owns. On this fateful day, Tom’s living wife and son are also showing symptoms of disease, and Murph wants Tom to make the tough choice: Face the reality of the situation and leave his family home.

One look at Affleck’s glower when his character enters the house announces this isn’t going to happen.

“Let me make something abundantly clear, you have a responsibility—” begins Getty before Tom punches him in the face. Murph then more succinctly cuts to the chase, “Dad didn’t raise you to be this dumb, Tom.”

And here in this moment, like many a story before it, Nolan’s Interstellar has distills  the age-old conflict between science and commerce, hard truths and comforting delusions. When boiled down to its fundamentals, the scene isn’t that different from Chief Brody trying to explain to the mayor of Amity Island they need to close the beaches in Jaws, or Cassandra warning the Trojan court of a doom to come.

And yet, what’s intriguing about the Interstellar variation is that it sympathizes with Tom and his position. Unlike Murph, he wasn’t Daddy’s favorite; the educational system likewise didn’t see much promise in him. In high school a single test prevented him from going to college. Instead he was left behind, conscripted to do what society viewed as a less financially important task while his little sister excelled at university. In a handful of minutes, the implication that Tom grew bitter about both his lot and their father’s absence is self-evident. As is their connection since Cooper disappeared trying to mitigate an existential threat which has come all the same in Tom’s adulthood.

But as that grown-up, what once seemed like an abstract idea is now tragically obvious. The danger of the blight is visible in the small Cooper family cemetery outback, and it’s there on his sister’s face as she stands in his kitchen, calling him dumb. But then it’s uncomfortable looking reality in the eye like this—or being asked to forsake the only thing Dad ever left him, which was this farm.

“Dad didn’t raise me. Grandpa did,” Tom snarls. “And he’s buried out back with Mom and Jesse.” Interstellar empathizes with Tom’s plight and desire to ultimately do nothing—just keep going on and pretending everything is normal—even though the movie knows it’s a deadly delusion. After all, the film crosscuts this scene with Coop calling Dr. Mann “a fucking coward.”

What Tom is doing is cowardly. But it’s also tragic, because he refuses to accept the scientific facts of a worldwide disaster, even as they come from his own sister. So Tom refuses to uproot his remaining family, to live with Murph and what’s left of the United States’ science community, waiting for a proverbial cure that hasn’t been invented yet. He’d rather just do what makes him happy until it kills him. And not only him. “You’re going to wait for your next kid to die,” Murph apprises of the situation.

The scene is obviously a work of fiction in which there is a fantastic agricultural blight so deadly it’ll kill off all organic life on Earth in several generations—and it exists in a world where the U.S. government is still even-headed enough to launch a program to save its citizens and species. With that said, the echoes of the conflict between data-minded experts versus the wishful thinking of those who just want to keep on keepin’ on, even if it kills them and everyone they love, obviously speaks to our moment. You can see Tom in each American, maybe some of whom have legitimate reason to feel “left behind,” now refusing to wear a mask during the coronavirus pandemic.

Hence the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases currently increasing in 30 out of the 50 states. As of the time of writing, more than 4.3 million cases have been confirmed in the U.S. alone, and the death toll is about to cross the morbid threshold of 150,000 Americans. There is no sign of things getting better in North America. In fact, things are expected to get much worse, particularly as the White House attempts to force public schools throughout the country to reopen at full capacity.

As WB pointed out in a press statement, more than 30 states currently have given movie theaters the go-ahead to reopen at reduced capacity. However, there is undoubted crossover among the states where indoor theaters can reopen and those with rising infection rates. Similarly, studios and theater owners are aware of a certain risk level of opening Tenet during a pandemic, even in areas where infection rates are down. According to a report in Variety, multiple studios are likely considering releasing movies in Europe this summer “in case more theaters in Spain shutter” due to a second wave of infection.

This is not to say Warner Bros. is making the choice to release Tenet out of cynicism. Indeed, we can only speculate as to what the private conversations are behind closed doors between studio executives, filmmakers, and exhibitors. But we know Nolan is desperate to protect his love for theatrical moviegoing, which he vocalized in The Washington Post in March by correctly saying cinema is a vital part of our collective social life. It’s about as democratic a form of art as can be imagined, with all economic classes able to afford and share an experience of going to the movies.

Read more

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Horrifyingly, movie theaters are facing an existential threat at the moment. The CEO of the National Association of Theatre Owners warned last week if Hollywood keeps delaying their movies until there is a vaccine “we won’t be there in a year.” So it appears likely Nolan is trying to turn Tenet into a kind of economic refuge, or at least respite, for movie theaters to weather a storm that is likely to last well into 2021.

But like Tom trying to will away the threat of blight to his family, or ignoring the protestations of his sister, Nolan and Warner Bros. are playing a risky game. Even in areas where infection rates are down, people who go see Tenet in September will be gathering in indoor theaters for hours at a time, with more than a few lowering their masks every so often to enjoy a snack or drink. On some level, I want to be one of them. I’ve savored every Christopher Nolan movie to date, and find a kind of sacrosanct comfort each time I go to a movie theater. But as with Tom and Murph’s childhood home, one needs to face the risks hidden in that comfort as the world changes.

A month ago, epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert Dr. Carlos Del Rio told CNBC, “I would honestly say I’m not comfortable going to the movies right now. I want to see the numbers come down, want to see the cases go down. Right now, the only place I am comfortable going to the movies is my living room.” In the same report, Dr. Ravina Kullar, a Los Angeles-based infectious disease specialist said, “What we are seeing now is that wave one is still going on… there has not been a decline or a plateau and that is a concern. I don’t see any change in a positive direction.”

Since then, the daily increase of new reported COVID cases has risen from around 30,000 new cases a day to between 50,000 and 73,000 cases a day. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, predicts we could likely soon see 100,000 new confirmed cases of coronavirus infection a day.For me, going to a movie theater is like going to church, or like working the same field as your father and grandfather is to Tom in Interstellar. It’s home. But until there is a solution to the problem, it is better to listen to the Murphs and Faucis of the world than wait around for another kid to die.

The post Tenet’s Release Date Forgets the Lessons of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[thewrosper]

Backstory: In Parallel With the COVID 19 Pandemic, We Now Have a Pandemic of Arrests

Lockdown – the word that best describes our present physical and mental state – has now acquired a vicious new meaning. As if in parallel to the COVID-19 pandemic, we now have a pandemic of arrests, with prison gates clanging shut on those marked by the state as anti-nationals. Consider, for a moment, this last fortnight. It began with Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde, prominent intellectuals and political activists, being jailed. Both marked their impending incarceration with letters that held up a mirror to their country. Navlakha pointed to how the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act has turned jurisprudence upside down: “No longer is it the axiom that ‘a person is innocent unless proven guilty’. In fact, under such Acts, ‘an accused is guilty unless proven innocent’” (‘‘My Hope Rests on a Speedy and Fair Trial’: Gautam Navlakha Before His Surrender’, April 14). Teltumbde begins with the observation that he is aware that what he writes may be drowned in the “motivated cacophony of the BJP and RSS combine and the subservient media”. Sure enough, large sections of the media blanked out all news of the arrest (‘Hindi Newspapers Look Away as Anand Teltumbde Is Arrested’, April 15). This deliberate deletion is part of the larger strategy to erase any evidence of state repression, as Teltumbde’s letter points out: “An individual like me obviously cannot counter the spirited propaganda of the government and its subservient media. The details of the case are strewn across the internet and are enough for any person to see that it is a clumsy and criminal fabrication.” A analytical piece in The Wire (‘Why Is Anand Teltumbde So Dangerous for the Narendra Modi Government?’, April 14) argues that it is his stance as a “progressive intellectual wall against the neoliberal Hindutva of the RSS-BJP”, that makes him such an important target. Similarly, there are excellent reasons why credible, argumentative journalists also invite the displeasure of the powerful. The Wire has had a taste of state repression. On April 10, one of the founder editors of the portal was visited by the UP Police (‘Attempts to Muzzle the Media’: More Than 200 Journalists Condemn FIRs Against The Wire’, April 12) for allegedly causing panic by reporting that the UP chief minister had attended a religious event on March 25. That, of course, is a matter of public record and a wrongly attributed quote in the report had been duly retracted along with a corrigendum. Yet none of this served to halt the UP police from driving all the way from Faizabad to Delhi amidst the lockdown, to serve a notice on Siddharth Varadarajan. This is by no means the first instance of police high-handedness. Over the last year, over a dozen cases have been filed against journalists by the UP police, according to a recent report filed by Kunal Majumder of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Hunting journalists down has now become part of active policing in these COVID-19 times. Over the course of a week, at least four mediapersons in Kashmir have had FIRs filed against them. Two of them were booked under UAPA, photojournalist Masrat Zahra (‘Kashmiri Photojournalist Charged Under UAPA for Unspecified Social Media Posts’, April 20) and author-commentator Gowhar Geelani, who in an interview to The Wire interpreted the move as a bid to criminalise journalism in Kashmir (‘The Assault Is on Journalism’: An Interview With Kashmiri Journalist Gowhar Geelani’, April 23). The case against Masrat Zahra has been registered under Section 13 of UAPA. Revisiting this Section is educative. The key reason why UAPA is so effective as a tool of state coercion is the broad manner in which the offence is framed and this Section lays down that not only are persons who take part in “unlawful activity” liable for punishment,  anyone who “advocates, abets, advises or incites the commission of, any unlawful activity” can be  imprisoned for a term which may extend to seven years under the law. We need to remember here that we are now seeing the results of the amendment to UAPA, passed in parliament in August 2019 shortly before the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5. Through that amendment, the government and its police assumed the power to take action not just against organisations deemed as terrorist, but against individuals, too. Union home minister Amit Shah not only piloted that amendment in parliament but justified it forcefully, arguing that acts of terror are done by individuals, not organisations. The logic inherent in that argument has now led to the scary outcomes that we are witnessing today, with the police drawing up elaborate conspiracy theories in a bid to make the charges stick. Journalists should be alert to the consequences this holds for others, because the same could wreak havoc on their own lives as well. Today it may be the Jamia students who had come out in protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (‘‘Terrorism’ Charge a Lesson for Jamia Students that Democratic Protest Carries Heavy Cost’) and are now being imprisoned under a draconian law which has no provision for anticipatory bail; tomorrow it could be their colleagues or themselves. It appears that while we wear our masks and stay at home under the lockdown, the Modi government and assorted state governments under BJP rule are displaying an uncommon appetite to place all those it has marked as “enemies of the state” – even if it is just a comment they put out in the public domain – under lock and key. They may not have an UAPA hammer smashing down on them, but they and their families have to contend with the terror of impending imprisonment. Over the last few days, we’ve had the Manipur government locking up Mohammed Chengiz Khan, who is doing his PhD at JNU, for critiquing the state’s government’s anti-Muslim policies. The Gujarat police booked Prashant Bhushan, well-known lawyer, for a tweet. A spirited, socially conscious former bureaucrat, Kannan Gopinath, and a news editor, Ashlin Mathew, have invited police action from the Gujarat state government  for their responses to a government order (‘FIR Against Prashant Bhushan, Kannan Gopinathan in Gujarat’, April 15). As if to indicate the pan-national nature of such aggravated police action, we now have the Coimbatore police march Andrew Sam Raja Pandian, founder of the news portal, ‘SimpliCity’, to jail for highlighting the looting of ration shops and lack of food for students (‘Coimbatore: Founder of News Portal Arrested for Reporting on Government’s Handling of COVID-19’, April 24). Please note that none of the above had Union ministers rushing to defend them, or the Supreme Court keeping aside urgent matters in order to provide them a patient hearing, as was the case with the editor-in-chief of Republic TV (‘SC Allows Hate Speech Probe Against Arnab Goswami to Proceed, Stays Multiple FIRs’, ‘SC’s Interim Protection to Arnab Goswami: What It Does and Doesn’t Say’, April 24). Is this just state paranoia that is playing out, or does this portend a new cycle of ever-deepening, ever-inexplicable state tyranny? COVID-19 is set to alter forever the political and social landscape of the country at multiple levels (‘What Will Politics Look Like in the Post-Pandemic World?’, April 13; ‘The Economy Needs a Survival Strategy – and Not Just Stimulus – to Recover From COVID-19’; ‘Children Will Be More Vulnerable to Trafficking After COVID-19’, April 13), but how alert are we to the permanent damage this phase will wrought on our rights and liberties? How alert is the Indian media to this? Incidentally, India’s free fall in terms of the World Press Freedom Index – it currently stands at 142 in a tally of 180 countries – is a story in itself. Even Bolsanaro’s Brazil is streets ahead. As the writer of the piece, ‘If We’re at ‘War’ With the New Coronavirus, We’re Doing It Wrong’ (April 15), observes, the way we use language to define COVID-19 needs attention.The war metaphor is not useful: “In this conception, the virus becomes an agile enemy, the national leader’s actions are shows of strength, the suspension of civilian rights becomes a matter of necessity, and every citizen is seen as a soldier with well-defined orders and a quasi-duty to self-censor.” Gulshan Ewing:  the most glamorous was also the kindest When news that elderly patients in UK’s care homes were succumbing at an alarming rate to COVID 19, I didn’t imagine for a moment that the disease would also take away 92-year-old Gulshan Ewing, editor of two Mumbai staples, Eve’s Weekly and Star and Style. A resident of a care home in London’s Richmond area, she succumbed to the disease on April 21, a few days before her daughter, Anjali, had tweeted: “My mother is NOT receiving the same level of care in her care home as Boris did in hospital. We are all equal and all in this together. Aren’t we? @BorisJohnson @10DowningStreet @DominicRaab @MattHancock @tnewtondunn @bbclaurak @BBCHughPym @GuidoFawkes” Gulshan’s era was certainly kinder to those who helmed media institutions than is the case today, but what must have helped her longevity as an editor was the kindness and teamship she brought to her long innings. Glamorous she may have been, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Cary Grant and Raj Kapoor, Alfred Hitchcock and Nargis Dutt, partying with beauty queens and supping with the crème-de-la-crème of Bombay society, but within the office she remained cool, unflappable in her brightly patterned chiffons and chunky rings – even when her celebrity columnist, Devyani Chaubal (clad at all times in embroidered white organzas), threw a tantrum and would need to be coaxed to write up her next column. By the 1980s, second wave feminism had made an emphatic entry and the new generation of women journalists who landed up at Gulshan’s desk disdained much of what she took great pleasure in. They loathed the beauty contests that sometimes brought instant international fame – Reita Faria, India’s first Miss India, was Gulshan’s catch, make no mistake – and they even found the very name ‘Eve’s Weekly’, an affront to their senses. But they realised that the matrix of the women’s magazine was a great trojan horse to smuggle in feminist ideas. Along with recipe spreads and knitting patterns, many radical notions would make their way into unsuspecting households. Household hint: squeeze out a little Colgate to clean the family silver and, while you are at it, remember that you, yourself, are not a beautiful object to be displayed at home. Use a little foundation under the eye to cover up those dark circles, but also remember being beaten by the “lord and master” is a criminal, unacceptable act. Gulshan was too intelligent a woman not to recognise the changes that were taking place, and somewhere she made the decision that while she would continue with her social whirl and beauty contests, she would allow her junior colleagues to mould parts of the magazine to their liking. In fact, she also knew how she could make feminism work for her. Among the questions she asked as she interviewed me – a Times of India sub-editor – for a job as chief sub, was what my plans of being a mother were about. When I shrugged away the intrusive query, she smiled, “Yes, you are a modern woman and don’t believe in rushing to have children I am sure!” This live-and-let-live approach helped her to negotiate an unbroken run as editor from 1966 to 1989, possibly making her India’s longest serving woman editor. Lockdown and I In the last column, readers had written in about their experiences of lockdown. This time Khubrooh Siddiqui had this to say: “These are my circumstances during this abrupt and insane  lockdown. I am stranded in Ghaziabad, which has been my home city for the last 15 years. My husband is stuck in Kolkata. His father is in his late 70s and is mentally unstable, making life impossible for my husband, continuously shouting and throwing things around. At one point, he almost threw down my husband’s laptop, which is crucial for his work. I feel helpless because I cannot reach out to him at this time, knowing that he himself is often seized by extreme anxiety, and his doctor has recently modified his medicine dosage knowing that I am not there to help him. I dread to think what may happen over the next days. I don’t know if I am in a better position than others who may not have food to eat, but I can say, for sure, that I am absolutely desperate to reach Kolkata. I can only urge the authorities to let stranded people like us go to our respective destinations.” Attack on press freedom A letter from Satish Mahaldar, chairman, Reconciliation, Return & Rehabilitation of Migrants, New Delhi: “In these difficult times of a pandemic, when people associated with essential services like the Media, Health workers and the Police are doing everything they can to save people, certain vested interests are trying to cause harm.  The responsibility to disseminate news in an atmosphere where rumour mongering and fake news is the order of the day, there have been attacks on media personnel. I wish to draw attention to acts of intimidation by certain elements against the reputed news service, Indo-Asian News Service (IANS).  Its subscribers and journalists are being threatened for its reportage on the issue of Tablighi Jamaat and its role in the spread of the corona virus. As these threats were persisting, IANS has been forced to file three criminal intimidation cases against individuals who claim to be the members of  the Jamaat. The attempts to muzzle IANS and other media organisations are not only criminal but an attack on the freedom of the media. Such acts should not only be condemned but the perpetrators must be held accountable for their anti-democratic activities. We urge stern governmental action against such miscreants.” Songs for the Migrant Kaushik Raj, who described himself as a poet and activist, wrote and recorded this poem on the “plight of migrant workers who had to walk hundreds of kilometres after lockdown in their bid to reach home”. He sent across the IGTV and Facebook links of the two-minute poem: The same topic inspired Poojan Sahil, to compose and perform this three-minute song. He asks why we as a society has always neglected this section of the population: Read the full article

[newsnigeria]

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New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/russia-shutters-georgian-democracy/

Russia Shutters Georgian Democracy

Democracy is in danger once again. The treacherous Putin regime is pressuring Georgia with sanctions, prohibiting flights between the countries and putting it under duress. Naturally, the Russian bear showed its totalitarian face by answering with pressure, a democratic protest of civic society.

The pretext for the protests, which have rocked Georgia since June 21st was a visit by a member of the Russian Parliament and president of the assembly of MPs from Orthodox Christian countries – Sergei Gavrilov. As the head of the assembly, he addressed its session in the Georgian Parliament from the speaker’s seat as proposed by the receiving party.

Opposition politicians doused Gavrilov with water before he was escorted out of the building to protest the “occupier” whom, Georgian politicians stated, was acting as if Georgia was a Russian satellite state.

The United National Movement opposition party and its supporters condemned the occupation of the sacral stool by the Russian citizen. Street riots immediately broke out near the Parliament building. Protestors waved flags of Georgia, the European Union, the US and Ukraine, clashed with police, and stormed the Parliament. Obviously, they did not forget to chant anti-Russian slogans and demand that Putin, the Kremlin and “Russian occupiers” get out of their country. A Russian TV crew was also attacked because of its non-democratic coverage.

To provide some context to the “Russian occupiers” narrative, it’s important to know what the Georgians mean by “occupation”. They describe as occupied two de-facto independent states South Ossetia and Abkhazia. These states declared their independence in the early 1990s after a direct aggression from the Nazi regime of Zviad Gamsakhurdia. During the conflict in these republics, Georgian nationalists practiced mass repressions and cleansing of non-Georgian population. Since then, and until 2008, Russia had not recognized them as independent states. The situation changed in 2008 after war crimes were committed by the Georgian military in South Ossetia. Forces of the Saakashvili regime carried out massive artillery strikes on the city of Tskhinvali. Vehicles carrying refugees were shelled by Georgian troops and foreign mercenaries. Russian peacekeepers which had previously been deployed to South Ossetia were attacked. In the ensuing 5-day peace-compelling operation, Russian Armed Forces delivered a devastating blow to the Saakashvili regime by defeating its forces. The Russian Army reached Tbilisi, but did not enter the city. No territory was annexed and Russian troops returned to their permanent deployment sites. As a result of the conflict, Russia recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states.

In the following years, both republics repeatedly asked Russia to accept them into the federation. Moscow rejected these requests and worked with Abkhazia and South Ossetia as with allied, but independent states. In this light, the Georgian government uses the term “Russian occupation” to describe the Ossetians and Abkhazians who survived the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s and the war of 2008. However, there is a historical case that may explain Georgia’s attitude.

In 1918-1919, forces of the Georgian nationalists, assisted by foreign instructors, attempted to seize control of the city of Sochi and the nearby coastal strip of the Black Sea. They lost this conflict. Forces of Georgian radicals also carried out multiple war crimes in Abkhazia and Ossetia in the period from 1918 to 1920. If Tbilisi believes that any place where Georgian nationalists were once present is rightfully Georgian territory, that could explain which “Georgian territories” were occupied by Russia.

Despite the mentioned facts, it would be fair to note that most of these destructive events were instigated by a small radical part of the Georgian population, indoctrinated by radicalism and nationalism, and supported by Western funds. Most Georgians are friendly to Russians and the Russia state.

Democratic media outlets and civic society activists from Georgia, Russia and around the world united in their efforts to condemn Russian provocations and to praise the democratic actions of the Georgian population.  Some hotels and restaurants increased prices for ethnic Russians. Russia is the number one source of travelers visiting Georgia. Cinemas banned movies in Russian.

A host on pro-opposition TV channel Rustavi-2 came on air and continued to insult Russian President Vladimir Putin in an expletive-ridden statement.

On the evening of July 7th, George Gabunia began the program with obscene swearing at Putin. Gabunia addressed the Russian President in Russian and called him “the grubby occupant,” and also said that Putin and “his slaves” have no place on Georgia’s “beautiful land.”

A Georgian branch of the Soros Foundation “Open Society” accused official Tbilisi of “violating the law” because the authorities invited “Russian deputies who do not recognize the territorial integrity of Georgia” to the country. The NGO called for a response to the “anti-state actions” of the Russian Federation.

In 2019 alone, the Soros Foundation sent millions of dollars to projects in Georgia, including programs to combat “Russian disinformation” and the formation of a “right” perception of the Soviet past among the country’s residents.

Former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, who had his citizenship revoked, after he was convicted of abuse of office has openly supported the protests, saying that the government would fall against the pressure. He, too, blamed Russia and, more than likely, hopes to be allowed back in the country again, since he handled the situation in 2008 so well.

Initially, Georgian Prime Minister, Mamuka Bakhtadze called the United National Movement, founded in 2001 by Mikhail Saakashvili, and its backers “destructive political forces”, and said that they attempted to use the protest to seize power. But later, both the government and opposition decided that it’s better to blame Moscow for organizing the protests against itself because, you know, the only side interested in instigating anti-Russian protests in Tbilisi is Russia itself.

This brilliant explanation of the erupted political crisis did not stop conspiracy theorists from claiming that the June 21 event was a pre-planned provocation in interests of some Georgian elites affiliated with the Washington establishment. The groundless theory is that the goal of the provocation was to exploit anti-Russian hysteria in the internal political struggle. In the long-term perspective, this would strengthen the influence of the Washington establishment in the country.

The democratic action of the Georgian people finds no understanding within the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree prohibiting all flights from and to Georgia and urged tour operators to not organize visits to the country. Moscow enacted travel restrictions due to the potential of danger to Russian tourists.

Additionally, Russia reduced the amount of wine imports from the country saying it would increase investment and shift focus towards domestically produced wines. Although Georgia was not mentioned, Russia is the biggest purchaser of Tbilisi wine.

Lawmakers in Russia’s parliament unanimously backed a resolution on July 9th calling for sanctions to be imposed on Georgia.  The “evil mastermind” President Vladimir Putin, however, rejected the call saying that repairing strained relations with Russia’s neighbor was more important than reacting to the provocations of some scum. Putin  brazenly claimed he was against imposing sanctions on Georgia, “out of respect for the Georgian people.”

But, Georgia is already suffering from the travel ban. According to the head of the Georgian Hotel and Restaurant Federation 80% of the hotel bookings made by Russians had been cancelled. The potential loss to the country’s economy from reduced Russian tourism stands at about $710 million.

Declining export and tourism revenues will also cause Georgia’s current account deficit, which is already large at about 8% of GDP, to widen further.

The June 21 situation and the crisis could be explained in a wide range of ways.

If one takes into account the facts and their consequences, he could conclude that they played into Russia’s hands. The Georgian nationalists and radicals demonstrated that their position is weak and that they lack intellectual assets, international diplomatic and even media support. The Kremlin can state, with reason, that there is a Nazi threat in the Caucasus and react in its own way to contain this threat. The anti-Russian hysteria and threats against Russian citizens in Georgia allow Moscow to justify protectionist economic policies.

Another explanation is that these developments are part of the wider campaign to create tensions and destabilize the situation along Russia’s borders. By instigating tensions in the Caucasus, Russia’s geopolitical rivals are creating a basis for a possible military aggression against Russia and its allies on several fronts simultaneously. This aggression could be carried out by nationalist regimes which receive financial, technical and limited military support from the West. This is the worst case scenario for the entire region.

Most likely, the June 20 crisis was a pre-planned provocation by the Saakashvili faction and Ukrainian nationalists with the intended purpose of being used in the internal political struggle. In this event, they achieved their goal, the mobilization of nationalist and extremist elements of society. As to the situation on the international scene, a kind of detente in Russian-Georgian relations may start in the relatively near future.

The recent crisis demonstrated that, at any moment, even a minor pre-planned effort may be enough to instigate nationalist and radical sentiments of Georgian society. The Caucasus will remain one of the regions of constant geopolitical struggle and inter-ethnic hostility. It is difficult to imagine active development of the Georgian economy and stabilization of its political system under such conditions.

[felinevomitus]

Interview: Joe Banks + Disinformation

Joe Banks is a sound artist, author and researcher, originally specialising in radio phenomena and electromagnetic noise. For over twenty years Joe has been performing, releasing albums and exhibiting under the guise of Disinformation. This Disinformation brand name allows for a critique of corporate identities and modern communication, and uses a sonic palette sourced from errant radio waves, natural earth signals, and interference from the sun and from the National Grid, etc. In 2012, Joe published “Rorschach Audio – Art and Illusion for Sound” on Strange Attractor press, a book that explored the subject of EVP (ghost voice) research in contemporary sound art practice. Joe’s work currently focusses on language and evolutionary neuroscience. Joe lives in London, 40 metres from the spot where physicist Leo Szilard conceived the theory of the thermonuclear chain reaction.

For more information, please visit https://rorschachaudio.com/about/ All images courtesy of the artist. 

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Ilia Rogatchevski: Disinformation began in the mid-1990s. What was the conceptual reasoning behind branding your creative output, rather than just making works under your given name? Has the conceptual framework behind the Disinformation handle changed or shifted in the last twenty years?

Joe Banks: To clarify when it was that all this activity started, the first Disinformation solo releases were published by the record company Ash International – an imprint of Touch Records – in 1996. The first collaborative recording, where I contributed Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio noise, to a track by Andrew Lagowski’s SETI project, appeared on a compilation CD called “Mesmer Variations” in 1995, and that contribution is credited to Disinformation in the printed CD sleeve-notes.

The name Disinformation works well for performing concerts and publishing LP and CD tracks, but was intended as much as a brand name. At the time I was interested in exploring ideas around corporate communications, logo design, corporate identities and branding. The name Disinformation also suggests parallels with philosophical concepts like the Liar Paradox and so-called Strange Loop. The name is also useful in collaborating with other artists. Creating collaborative artworks and publishing under the authorship of “Joe Banks” could arguably be misleading for audiences and disrespectful to collaborating artists.

If I’m writing research, obviously I have to publish using my own name. However, I’m also careful to not just acknowledge, but to actively advertise all the inspirations and sources that I make use of, in terms of the artists who’ve inspired my artworks, and the authors of material used in research work like the “Rorschach Audio” project.

As for the name itself, with all this talk of “post truth” politics, “fake news”, and Michael Fallon’s recent statement about “weaponising misinformation”, if anything, the idea of encouraging scepticism is more prescient now than it has been at any point in the last twenty years.

IR: What attracted you to using sound as a medium? I’m particularly interested in finding out what your gateway to experimenting with radio waves (VLF, ELF, Noise from the sun and and the National Grid) was. What creative potential do you see in radio?

JB: Part of the appeal of making sonic art using VLF radio noise was that on the one hand the imagery associated with VLF is just extraordinary – electric and magnetic storms, radio science, electricity, space physics, communications science, defence electronics, etc. On the other hand the techniques required to record these phenomena are technically straightforward and cheap to realise. It was really about research, about ideas, and a creative thought-process, rather than being about technology as such.

IR: In the past you’ve described your work as being akin to natural wildlife recording. Do you find that recording storms or interference places you in a similar realm of debate as soundscape studies and acoustic ecology? Do you see interference, i.e. your source material, to be a pollutant on our (sonic) landscape?

JB: The idea of presenting recordings of electromagnetic interference as a form of wildlife recording is important, but only really applies to a few Disinformation tracks – unprocessed, un-remixed field recordings like “Theophany” (meaning “The Voice of God”), “Stargate” [both from the “Stargate” LP, 1996] and “Ghost Shells” [12”, 1996] for instance, and, later on the “London Underground” and “Bexleyheath to Dartford” tracks [from “Sense Data & Perception”, 2005], but the idea’s still relevant.

Compared to the acoustic ecology movement, part of the artistic strategy was to poke fun at some of these over-romanticised conventions about what’s considered “natural”. The idea that any electrical activity, and, even more so, any human activity, is or can be part of nature goes against the more sentimental notions that some people project onto what they see as being nature.

In contrast, it’s about stressing how electricity is an aspect of the natural world, as opposed to being exclusively and purely a product of technology, and about stressing how human activity is part of nature – stressing these facts as a positive, as an expression of idealism, to question traditional ideas about how we’re seen as distinct from other species and from the rest of the natural world.

IR: Reading through some of the materials you sent me, I’ve noticed that you place great emphasis on copyrighting your work, images, sounds and ideas. While this is not uncommon, I’m interested to find out what your relationship is to appropriation, synchronicity and originality in art? In the example of Tacita Dean’s ‘Sound Mirrors’, is it possible that there was overlap in interests, rather than outright theft of intellectual property? Have there been other examples where your work has been subjected to misuse or appropriation without your consent?

JB: It seems pretty obvious that from time to time artists do independently re-discover aspects of each others’ ideas, in good faith, so-to-speak. It seems equally obvious that problems with genuine rip-offs have as much to do with issues of professional and personal courtesy and common sense as they have to do with actual copyright law, but, to be honest, I don’t think there is any more emphasis on copyright in my work than you’d find in any mainstream cultural product.

It’s more a question of not being naive about the fact that today’s avant-garde cultural experiments become tomorrow’s mainstream and trying to protect yourself from exploitation in that context. Copyright is far too complex a subject to do justice to here, but I notice that in your own material you talk about being influenced by the Situationist writer Guy Debord, who is perceived as a famous, almost legendary, opponent of copyright.

What is less well-known is that Guy Debord, his partner Alice Becker-Ho and Debord’s friend, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, all asserted and defended their own copyrights when they felt their ideas were being misused (and this is well documented on a pro-Situ website called “Not Bored“).

As a case in point, from 1999 to 2006 my research project “Rorschach Audio” generated between £0 and £150 per year, mostly in lecture fees. Then, after successfully fending-off a number of fairly blatant copyists, from 2007 to 2012 the project attracted £234,000 in AHRC funding. Suffice to say that I only got to see a small portion of that funding in terms of personal salary, but this does show how much ideas can go on to become worth, even, in some cases, after years of being marginalised and ignored.

IR: I’ve been reading “Rorschach Audio” with great interest and while I consider the subject of EVP to be a bit of a red herring, I wonder if you’ve come to a consensus regarding the reason why artists are attracted to and get sucked into working with EVP? Is there anything beyond the grief/loss factor or the lo-fi aesthetic?

JB: The Electronic Voice Phenomena – ghost voice – belief system is just so blatantly false that when I first got involved with sonic art my attitude to EVP was outright hostile. I didn’t become interested in EVP until it became apparent that the psychological processes which enable people to mishear poor-quality voice recordings as ghosts, are, in themselves, more interesting than the recordings themselves. But it never ceases to amaze me how many people in electronic music, alternative and mainstream art, even academia, seem sympathetic to the idea that EVP recordings are actual ghosts.

One reason, perhaps, that a few people get attracted to EVP, is, frankly but honestly, because they flunked science at school, so they don’t seem to understand why it is that using a bit of made-up technical jargon and messing around with electronic recording technology isn’t enough to make EVP experiments “scientific”.

From time to time, and particularly among some artists, you also come up against a kind of postmodernism-by-numbers, which is so anti-rational that some people don’t seem to understand what science is, why science is important, or how science works; who have little concept of the distinction between science and technology, and no concept of science being a methodology first and foremost.

Obviously bereavement can be a genuine motive, but in some cases artists choose to work with EVP because it seems to challenge conventional thinking, albeit on a very superficial level. And because EVP recordings are just really easy to make.

IR: How has your research developed since the publication of “Rorschach Audio” in 2012? I get a sense that you’re moving into a more language-focused direction. Is the technology that’s responsible for most electronic music now playing a smaller part in your practice?

JB: I should stress that I’m actively continuing to exhibit and to develop all the existing work; also, since 2012, a great deal of new material has been published on the “Rorschach Audio” website. “Rorschach Audio” features have been published in places as diverse as the lifestyle magazine of the Soho House hotel chain and “The Psychologist” – the magazine of the British Psychological Society.

Having said that, you’re absolutely spot-on – whereas in the early days “Rorschach Audio” focussed on illusions of sound, as the project progressed, the focus shifted towards illusions of language, then to language more generally. Technology itself has never really been the prime focus – as the “Rorschach Audio” book says, “the earliest form of sound recording technology was not a machine but was written language”.

Even when I was producing sound art almost exclusively with VLF radios, even that work was really about radio as a sensory extension. It was about psychology of perception, and this is something that makes this work qualitatively different from most work by artists who’ve used electromagnetic noise. It’s what Geoffrey Grigson called “the electricity of the mind”… it’s about excitement… it’s about ideas.

In light of what you say, if I may I’d also encourage your readers to check out an article I wrote about evolutionary neuroscience, with the subtitle “visual reality is in itself a carefully constructed optical illusion”, for the website of the AXNS [Art X Neuroscience] Collective (see below). That is one I’m particularly proud of, not least because it’s almost exclusively about visual perception, and, in fact, because it says almost nothing about sound at all.

AXNS Article Part 1 | AXNS Article Part 2

Ilia Rogatchevski Originally conducted for Resonance 104.4fm in November 2016 Published by Ear Room, 4 March 2017