Cuttings: May 2019

Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories - article by Anna Merlan in The Guardian, based on her book Republic of Lies: Conspiracy Theorists and their Surprising Rise to Power. "In July 2016, Donald Trump fans had amassed to attend the Republican national convention.... Some of the attendees were from InfoWars, the mega-empire of suspicion – a radio show, website and vastly profitable store of lifestyle products – founded by Austin, Texas-based host Alex Jones... Jones and Donald Trump were longtime mutual fans. ... The conspiracy theorists ... recognised the future president as a 'truth-teller' in a style that spoke to them and many other Americans. They liked his thoughts about a rigged system and a government working against them, the way it spoke to what they had always believed, and the neat way he was able to peg the enemy with soundbites: the 'lying media', 'crooked Hillary', the bottomless abyss of the Washington 'swamp'. They were confident of his victory – if the globalists and the new world order didn’t get in the way, and they certainly would try.... The Trump era has merely focused our attention back on to something that has reappeared with reliable persistence: the conspiratorial thinking and dark suspicions that have never fully left us. ... The elements of suspicion were present long before the 2016 election, quietly shaping the way large numbers of people see the government, the media and the nature of what’s true and trustworthy."

Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian.  "We are told debate is the great engine of liberal democracy. In a free society, ideas should do battle in the public forum. Those who seek to lead us should debate with one another, and this will help us make the best possible informed judgments. ... People whose views we find abhorrent should not be ignored. We should debate with them, and so point out the flaws in the arguments. The more we debate, the happier and more civilised we will be.... That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, modern debate has a structural bias in favour of demagoguery and disinformation. It inherently favours liars. There is no cost to, and much potential advantage in, taking the low road and indulging in bullying and personal attack. ... Online, ... the call to 'debate' is increasingly a gendered demand, made by men as a way of attacking women with whose opinions they disagree. ... Spoken debate also favours liars, who know that even if their opponent attempts to rebut them, it will often be reported as 'balance'.... Since facts aren’t the real battleground, clever debaters will operate on a different level, for instance making dark insinuations that are designed to sow doubt in the audience’s mind. ... So the art of debating is one that rewards liars and bullies, is about beating the opponent rather than finding the truth, and is structurally biased in favour of conservative bromides rather than surprising new ideas. If that’s what debate is like, perhaps we shouldn’t aspire to be good at it."

What really matters now - summary of a Martin Wolf column in the Financial Times, by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Starting from the undeniable fact that faith in liberal democracy is declining and that charismatic politicians are enticing people into giving them support, he addresses the question: how should liberal politicians respond? He suggests ten principles that should underpin their response. (1) Leadership matters.... (2) Competence matters.... (3) Citizenship matters.... (4) Inclusion matters.... (5) Economic reform matters. ... (6) The 'local' matters.... (7) Public services matter... (8) Managed globalisation and global cooperation also matter... (9) Looking ahead matters... (10) Complexity matters."

It Must Be Heaven: Palestine's holy fool lives the dream - review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "The premise for this film that [the Palestinian film-maker Elia Suleiman] is playing himself: travelling abroad from Nazareth, coming first to Paris and then to New York, trying to speak to producers about getting his latest film made.... In Paris, a trio of cops swoop around on what look like Segways, infatuated with their own performance, like ice dancers. In the US, Suleiman wanders through a supermarket and discovers people are buying automatic weapons ... Suleiman has himself said that the comically heightened visions he creates 'show the world as if it were a microcosm of Palestine'. I don’t think that is exactly what is happening in It Must Be Heaven. It is more that he is satirising the oppression, security and policing that happen everywhere in the world, but that non-Palestinians in the prosperous west, who take their freedom of movement for granted, have the luxury of taking these 'policing' facts of life casually." His comedy is usually compared to Tati and Keaton – and again this isn’t quite accurate. Tati and Keaton’s deadpan setups would almost always lead to a specific visual gag. Suleiman’s hardly ever do: they just create a quirky, preposterous, amusing contrivance, generally without a punchline, as such... But this is not the point in Suleiman’s film-making; his comedy leads to something other than a punchline, it points you in the direction of a political situation."

Fan petitions - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, following fan petitions demanding remaking of the final season of Game of Thrones. "New ending for Beowulf. As fans, we deserve more. Beowulf should survive his battle with the dragon and go on to further adventures, maybe riding a wisecracking horse, or going into space. // Less whaling in Moby-Dick. As fans, we demand that descriptions of whaling are limited to two or three chapters. We have a long list of alternative subjects to fill out the rest of the book. // More action in Emma. As fans, we like olden-times people discussing marriage as much as anyone, but we also want seductive assassins, cursed treasure and an exploding vicarage."

Our glorious past is what we remember. The brutality behind it we’ve forgotten - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. "'The essential characteristic of a nation is that its individuals must have many things in common,' wrote the French philosopher Ernest Renan. 'And must have forgotten many things as well.' But they do not forget passively or at random. Things do not simply slip our mind. They are actively, wilfully, determinedly, selectively, purposefully buried. The issue is not one of time. When needs be, we can reach all the way back to 1066, the last time Britain was invaded, to make sense of who we are and what we do. But somehow the atrocities in the Kenyan detention camps in the 1950s, our complicity in the Bengal famine in 1943 or, even more recently, the Iraq war elude us. Our collective sense of responsibility for and engagement in these moments is similarly fickle. People say, 'We won the war', even if they didn’t fight, or 'We won the World Cup', even if they didn’t play. Indeed, one needn’t even have been born to identify with the triumph in question. The 'we' is implicitly understood as an embrace. It spans time, place and agency. But few will ever say, in a similar vein: 'We raped people' or 'We massacred people'. For then, 'we' is understood as an accusation. In these moments, individuality becomes the ultimate alibi. 'What has that got to do with me? I wasn’t even alive then.'”