Posted November 27, 2021

U.S. labelled a "Backsliding" democracy as global authoritarianism grows. A new report calls the rejection of the 2020 election results by many in the Republican Party as an "historic turning point" for the United States. The Global State of Democracy report, released by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), called former President Donald Trump's public questioning of the election results in November 2020 "a historic turning point" both for U.S. democracy and the world, pointing to a knock-on effect in several countries. "The declines in civil liberties and checks on government indicate that there are serious problems with the fundamentals of democracy." "The visible deterioration of democracy in the United States, as seen in the increasing tendency to contest credible election results, the efforts to suppress participation (in elections), and the runaway polarization... is one of the most concerning developments," International IDEA secretary general Kevin Casas-Zamora told The Guardian. The claims led hundreds of Trump supporters to violently storm the U.S. Capitol in January, and a national poll taken this month found that a third of Americans still believe Trump was the legitimate winner of the election.

Beyond the U.S., IDEA International pointed to evidence-free allegations of fraud in Myanmar that were used to justify a bloody coup in October. "The Global State of Democracy report is not a wakeup call, it's an alarm bell," said Jutta Urpilainen, European Commissioner for International Partnerships. "Authoritarianism advances in every corner of the earth. Universal values—the pillars of civilization that protect the most vulnerable—are under threat." Report co-author Alexander Hudson also noted the "decline in the quality of freedom of association and assembly during the summer of protests in 2020" in the U.S., with racial justice demonstrations marked by the use of force. According to the Global State of Democracy report, more than one in four people across the globe now live in backsliding democracies, which also include Brazil, India, and Hungary. "Seventy percent of the population in the world" live in authoritarian states, backsliding democracies, and "hybrid" states, which have "somewhat more open—but still insufficient—space for civil society and the media than authoritarian regimes," according to the report.

An excerpt from the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, published in The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman

Posted November 27, 2021

Beware.or the planet as we know it may morph into a Climate Dystopia! Silicon Valley makes billions by stealing your attention. No wonder it’s so hard to focus…At best, we’re on Earth for around 4,000 weeks – so why do we lose so much time to online distraction?

 When I first made that calculation, I felt queasy; but once I’d recovered, I started pestering my friends, asking them to guess – off the top of their heads, without doing any mental arithmetic – how many weeks they thought the average person could expect to live. One named a number in the six figures. Yet, as I felt obliged to inform her, a fairly modest six-figure number of weeks – 310,000 – is the approximate duration of all human civilisation since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia. On almost any meaningful timescale, as the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, “we will all be dead any minute”.

Social media is engineered to constantly adapt to our interests. No wonder the rest of reality seems unable to compete ... and so distraction truly matters – because your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. When you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. the crucial point isn’t that it’s wrong to choose to spend your time relaxing, whether at the beach or on BuzzFeed. It’s that the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart. All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online “attention economy”, of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations. Many of us are familiar with the basic contours of this situation. We know that the “free” social media platforms we use aren’t really free, because, as the saying goes, you’re not the customer but the product being sold. In other words, the technology companies’ profits come from seizing our attention,then selling it to advertisers.

We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly.  What’s far less widely appreciated, though, is how deep the distraction goes, and how radically it undermines our efforts to spend our finite time as we’d like. As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour. But you’d be wrong. Because the attention economy is designed to prioritise whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful – it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are – and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well.

From an article in The Guardian by Oliver Milman

Posted November 27, 2021

The number of people uprooted around the world will balloon further, to as many as 1.2 billion by 2050 by some estimates, and while most will move within their own countries, many millions are expected to seek refuge across borders. This mass upending of lives is set to cause internal and external conflicts that the Pentagon, among others, has warned will escalate into violence. The response to this trend on the right has led to what academics Joe Turner and Dan Bailey call “ecobordering”, where restrictions on immigration are seen as vital to protect the nativist stewardship of nature and where the ills of environmental destruction are laid upon those from developing countries, ignoring the far larger consumptive habits of wealthy nations. In an analysis of 22 far-right parties in Europe, the academics found this thinking is rife among rightwing parties and “portrays effects as causes and further normalizes racist border practices and colonial amnesia within Europe”. “The far-right in Europe has an anti-immigration platform, that’s their bread and butter, so you can see it as an electoral tactic to start talking about green politics,” Turner said, adding that migrants are being blamed in two ways – first, for moving to countries with higher emissions and then adding to those emissions, as rightwing figures in Arizona have claimed; and secondly for supposedly bringing destructive, polluting habits with them from their countries of origin. A mixture of this Malthusian and ethno-nationalist thinking is being distilled into political campaigning, as in a political pamphlet described in Turner and Bailey’s research paper from SVP, the largest party in Switzerland’s federal assembly, which shows a city crowded by people and cars belching out pollution, with a tagline that translates to “stop massive immigration” Adding new arrivals to high-emitting countries doesn’t radically ramp up these emissions at the same rate: a study by Utah State University found that immigrants are typically “using less energy, driving less, and generating less waste” than native-born Americans. Still, the idea of personal sacrifice is hard for many to swallow. While there is strengthening acceptance of climate science among the public, and a restlessness that governments have done so little to constrain global heating, support for climate policies plummets when it comes to measures that involve the taxing of gasoline or other impositions. According to a research paper co-authored by Fieschi, this has led to a situation where “detractors are taking up the language of freedom fighters”. “You see these quite obviously populist arguments in the US and Europe that a corrupt elite, the media and government have no idea what ordinary people’s lives are like as they impose these stringent climate policies,” said Fieschi, whose research has analyzed the climate conversation on the right taking place on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms. “There are these conspiratorial accusations that Covid is a dry run for restrictions that governments want to impose with the climate emergency, that we need to fight for our freedoms on wearing masks and on all these climate rules,” Fieschi said. “There is a yearning for a pre-Covid life and a feeling climate policies will just cause more suffering. “What’s worrying,” Fieschi continued, “is that more reasonable parts of the right, mainstream conservatives and Republicans, are being drawn to this.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/21/climate-denial-far-right-immigration?utm_term=619a49da5247fea0c4ce656301298dfa&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUS_email

Juan Cole cites remarks in The Guardian by Dieter Gerten, professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research on three surprises of this weather system:

The massive storms in Germany, heat domes, and fires that produce their own weather suggest that models of linear progress may no longer be appropriate for storms of this magnitude and intensity. This shock of what scientists call "non-linearity," is dawning on many thinkers today. University of Chicago historian Dipesh Chakrabarty recognizes that important as his work was to globalization, nothing prepared him for "making sense of this planetary conjuncture within which humanity finds itself today." Likewise, in a recent essay, the Johns Hopkins Political Scientist William E. Connolly discusses what the ideas of the French philosopher Michel Serres (d. 2019) about time and nature can tell us about the urgent moment in which we live. Nature is in charge and is an active, unpredictable agent. As Connolly quotes Serres to this effect: "For whatever praise you may hear, whatever love you may profess for the sea and mountains, the desert or marshes, plants and animals, nature doesn't behave as a friend to humans or even their symbiont. By means of waves, fire, typhoons, poisoning, or devouring, it kills as calmly as bodies fall and eagles eat lambs." What that means culturally is as important as the flames and floods themselves. Events that challenge a culture-wide view of nature can evoke despair or anger and fuel extremist movements and quests for scapegoats. Connolly argues that Serres responds by teaching "us to master the will to mastery, first, because it cannot succeed and, second, because it fails to respond to the grandeur of that of which we ourselves are an intrinsic part. "Nonetheless angry denialism persists, which is to Serres "a sign," Connolly writes, "that they have not gotten over the profound disappointment that their favored images of time do not fit well rocky experiences they have themselves encountered." This image of nature and time sustains and is sustained by such narratives, doctrines, and ideologies, among others, as confidence in eternal salvation or the indefinite advance of capitalism. Challenges to conventional views of time and nature are hardly an attack on ethics itself. Connolly observes that "We are ethically enjoined to overcome [this disappointment] so that our thinking and responses to the world become more decent and in-formed. For existential disappointment, unless it is overcome, can morph into ressentiment, and the latter can morph into bellicose cultural dispositions to aggressive nihilism."

To respond to such disappointment, Connolly elaborates a critical theory of time. Clock time is linear, straight forward and helps us organize our days. But this is not all there is to time. Evental time, "involves the intersection of two or more previously separated temporalities, each on its own speed, capacities, and vector. Bumpy intersections between viruses, pangolins, and humans set on different temporalities illustrate evental time." That theory challenges the foundations of both mainstream environmentalism, with its confidence that nature will respond in predictable ways to such interventions as carbon taxes and deep ecology's faith that nature left to its own devices moves toward comfortable equilibrium. Both conventional theories and their several variants assume nature is for us in one way or another. In earlier work Connolly had labeled this shared posture ontological narcissism. The tendency to refuse to adjust extrapolations into the future in the face of new events provides one source of the recent turns to fundamentalism, denialism, and fascism across the world. Each refusal might involve a desperate desire to save an old faith, to preserve an old image of time, or to protect the assumption that the progress of capitalism on a linear track can proceed indefinitely. Or several of these, re-enforcing each other. Hence, the need to develop a philosophy of evental time. Break the hold of both views in order to curb the rage that follows event that expose even to us nature's cruelty. Mastery is nether possible nor desirable. As for teleogical views of unfettered nature as home and guidance for humans, if the arc of history did bend toward a preordained end that would mean we lived in a law governed world with no possibility of novelty and freedom, as Jairus Grove points out in his Savage Ecology. A messy unruly nature is the necessary precursor of freedom.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/27/living-newly-unrecognizable-planet?utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email