A Short History of Stupidity by Stuart Jeffries: comfortably dumb? – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage... First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense.... You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity... As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it. But then there’s the second problem: definitions. Is stupidity the same thing as ignorance? As foolishness? As the unwillingness to learn (AKA obtuseness, or what the Greeks called amathia)? As the inability to draw the right conclusions from what you have learned? Is it a quality of person or a quality of action? On and off, in ordinary usage, it’s all of these. It’s a know-it-when-you-see-it (except in yourself) thing. Perhaps inescapably, therefore, Jeffries makes a number of nice philosophical distinctions about the meaning of the term – and then goes back to using it in the know-it-when-you-see-it sense, so his discussion wanders through whole fields of its meanings without ever quite erecting a boundary fence. In a way, you could see this book not as a history of stupidity but as a slant history of its various opposites. It’s an amiable and rambling tour through the history of philosophy, looking at the idea of rationality and its limitations. If it’s stupid not to seek the truth, is it not even more stupid to suppose there’s a truth to be sought? The western ancients were in the first camp; and their special distinction – thank you, Socrates – was to see reason and virtue as being directly connected. It’s only with the Enlightenment that stupidity started to be seen as a cognitive rather than a moral failing.... It’s not all straight philosophy. Jeffries gives us affectionate readings of Don Quixote and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, dips into Shakespeare’s fools and the rich menu of stupidities available in King Lear, as well as making the odd excursus into cognitive science.... This is a learned and often exhilarating book, and it’s a bit all over the place – but, given the subject matter, it’d be stupid to expect otherwise."
‘The one thing it doesn’t have is actual sex’: the new Mary Whitehouse play that would have infuriated Mary Whitehouse – review by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. “'Mary Whitehouse wasn’t material I would naturally have been drawn to – being leftwing and gay, two things of which she didn’t approve,' admits [playwright Caroline Bird]. Her previous biographical drama for Nottingham Playhouse, Red Ellen (2022), was much closer to her own politics and feminism in its depiction of the pioneering Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson. The idea of writing about Whitehouse came from [actor Maxine Peake, who plays her] and the play’s director, Sarah Frankcom. Bird admitted her doubts but 'they told me to go away, do a bit of research and see if there was something I could get my teeth into.' ... Although, as a gay feminist, Bird’s engagement with Whitehouse was antagonistic, she knew instinctively that, for dramatic effectiveness, the play could not be purely a rebuke or refutation: 'Like in a court case, you have to give each side equal time to speak, regardless of your personal views. But in a play you also have to empathise with either side.' She feels that, on both X and the stage, 'it has become quite controversial to empathise with someone who you vehemently disagree with personally. "How could you humanise this person? How could you empathise with this person?" But to write a play or a character you have to imagine how they feel.' Her motto while she was writing it was a quote from the film director Jean Renoir: 'The real hell of life is everyone has [their] reasons.'... The writer rejects the idea that Whitehouse was simply of her time (born before the first world war) and tribe (Christian): 'This is not the homophobia of my grandmother, who was Christian and called all my partners "flatmates". This was a woman with a huge platform and agenda for 25 years.'... 'She fell in love with a married man at a time when her parents’ marriage broke down – something she never wrote about. At the same time she joined what many have seen as a cult and was at least cult-adjacent: The Oxford Group, which later became the Moral Re-Armament movement.'... Whitehouse was instrumental in passing the Protection of Children Act 1978, making child abuse images illegal... Because those concerns seem prescient – and overlap with feminist and liberal thought – they have led to a revisionist view that Whitehouse has been proved 'right' about important matters. Bird understands this argument but demurs: 'I have a slightly different take on it. We tend to think that, if we align with someone’s fears, we agree with them. But that’s only half the story; you have to look at what their solutions are. Of course we can align with her fears about the effects of unregulated content on young people. But her solution to that was sex education that only teaches chastity before marriage and fidelity within it. She was anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-divorce, anti-feminist. She wanted a very traditional Christian state. So before we say "she was right", we have to look at the whole picture.'"
Inter Alia: Rosamund Pike rules in searing legal drama from Prima Facie team – review by Emma John in The Guardian. "Three years ago, playwright Suzie Miller gave Jodie Comer a career-defining role with her West End debut in Prima Facie. ... This is an almost deliberate counterpoint to Prima Facie, in which a defence lawyer, expert at playing the system to demolish rape charges against her clients, is undone by her own experience of sexual assault. Miller wanted to highlight how poorly the law serves victims, and Inter Alia presents the same issue from the flipside with a female judge, determined to make the system more just, whose world is upended by an accusation close to home.... Jessica Parks (Pike) is the kind of multi-skilled woman you just know the legal system needs more of. She brings humanity and compassion to her courtroom, employing her soft skills to protect vulnerable witnesses while cutting down cocky male counsel with a tone that can 'cut through tendons and bone'. But she’s not just a crown court judge, she’s also an expert juggler, in the way that high-achieving women so often need to be. Her career exists 'inter alia' – as Miller puts it, in the cracks of everyone else’s lives.... Jessica remains the moral and emotional centre: her tragedy unfolds like that of an Ibsen protagonist failed by those around them. As a mother she has done the best she can, both to shield her child from bullies and to raise him true to her feminist beliefs (there’s a very funny scene where they have the porn talk). But she can’t protect him from social media, or peer pressure or, in the end, himself."
Suzie Miller on her Prima Facie follow-up Inter Alia: ‘Boys are looking for male mentors. Instead they get the internet and porn – interview by Elissa Blake in The Guardian. "Inter Alia sold out before Pike started rehearsals, and received glowing reviews, with the Guardian calling it 'a searing commentary on the justice system and a purposefully uncomfortable insight into contemporary parenting'. There has been speculation about a West End remount but, in the meantime, a filmed version is on screens in the UK... As part of her writing process Miller interviewed female judges and lawyers – many, like Miller, mothers of sons – about a potentially ruinous conundrum: what if the system I uphold one day ensnares my child? 'Every woman I know says they live in fear of their son being accused of something and ending up in prison,' Miller explains. 'Not because they want to excuse bad behaviour, but because they know the system is brutal and binary. Some women want perpetrators jailed. Others want acknowledgment, apology, repair. But the law rarely allows for anything between acquittal and a custodial sentence.' Inter Alia has been compared to the Netflix hit Adolescence: both ask audiences to consider how boys are inducted into masculinity and what happens when parents, particularly mothers, are shut out of that conversation. 'You raise these gorgeous, rambunctious boys,' Miller says, 'and then as teenagers, mothers become less relevant. They’re looking for male mentors, and I don’t think they’re finding them. Instead they get the internet, porn, locker-room banter. We don’t equip them with tools to navigate that space. And we hand over their education in sex and relationships to the internet.'... In Inter Alia, Pike’s character is both judge and mother; the play shifts between the high rhetoric of the courtroom and the chaotic multitasking of family life. 'When she’s in court she can control the narrative,' Miller explains. 'At home she can’t. That’s what women recognised in the play, the endless invisible labour, the way crises always default to mum, the humour of juggling it all. I’ve spoken to a lot of women who said, "I didn’t realise I did this every day until I saw it on stage."'"
When I Grow Up by Moya Sarner – review by Salley Vickers in The Guardian. "'What’s going to happen to the children, when there aren’t any more grownups?' sang Noël Coward, satirising the self-indulgent hedonism of the 1920s. But Coward’s ironic lyrics seem even more relevant today when the traditional values of adulthood, self-control, self-sufficiency and the willingness to take responsibility have become sources of angst rather than a desirable, if difficult, end. So what then, if anything, has been lost? In her book, journalist and psychotherapist Moya Sarner attempts to find answers to this question.... Sarner’s effort to tease out the many strands of this conundrum is a noble if not wholly successful enterprise. The most convincing parts come from the journalist in her. She has a way with people, which I imagine serves her well in her therapeutic work. She is adept at drawing out her subjects and getting an authentic inside track on their emotional vicissitudes.... The nature and the desirability of adulthood is not a straightforward matter in an age in which it is quite possible to spin out childhood to the end of one’s days. Is this good for society? Is it good for the individual? These are non-trivial questions and the answer has to be, as in so many matters: it depends. I feel Sarner is right to believe that there is such a being as a mature adult with a well-preserved and nourishing inner child, rare as this ideal may be. But her book suggests that as a society we are bad at producing these – and that there are too many stranded unhappily in the outreaches of childhood, unable to find any new and sustaining ground."
‘You want to talk about a world of lies?’ Teaching philosophy in prison – article by Jay Miller in The Guardian, republished from Aeon.co. "We are several weeks into the semester-long course, innocuously titled Introduction to Philosophy. The class, held each Friday morning for three hours at a women’s correctional facility near the college [in North Carolina], is part of the US national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. There are 20 students on the course. Half are “Outside” students – that is, mostly 19- to 20-year-old residential students at the small liberal arts college where I teach. The other half are “Inside” students with a much broader range of age, background and life experience. Today, 17 are in attendance. We get the sad-but-happy news that Shauna has been released early. Debbie can’t make it because her cell is being searched for contraband. Michael has flu.... Last week, we began discussing Plato’s Republic – though the students didn’t realise it at the time. In fact, this time last week, many had never even heard of Plato, let alone the Allegory of the Cave.... As a matter of principle, before any text, lecture or assignment enters the picture, we start doing philosophy. We always start with discussion, and discussion always begins with a simple question. Last week, the question was: 'What if everything you ever knew was a lie?' Without any mention of any scary-sounding words such as 'metaphysics' or 'epistemology', the students were doing philosophy. The Outsiders complained that the media, especially social media, twists everything, makes everything seem not real. Some of the Insiders were intrigued and perplexed, having heard of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok but never used them. Several students expanded on this thinking, arguing that other things twisted the truth too, whether it was history, or capitalism, or other subjects they’d recently learned about in various college classes. 'Ohhhh-ho-ho, you want to talk about a world of lies? Let me tell you about lies,' Jess jumps in. 'Try getting stuck with a felony charge against a cop.' It goes on like this for more than an hour, each student sharing their own version of what the hell is happening in the cave.... This week, we’ve read Book 7 of Plato’s Republic and are ready for discussion. In the past few weeks, I’ve observed how the Inside students have raised the bar for class preparation. They show up each week with the printed texts I left with them the week before, they take good notes, and they always have their writing assignments out and ready to discuss... The writing prompt I’ve given them for today’s class is a spin on the topic of last week’s discussion: what if you knew it was all a lie? What would you do differently?"
‘Binary thinking’: Why Zohran Mamdani’s African identity doesn’t fit US racial boxes – article by Aina J Khan in The Guardian. "In the Ugandan capital, ... people of Indian descent have lived for more than 125 years. Many people here boast a multi-hyphenated 'African Indian' identity – as indeed does Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 33-year-old running for mayor of New York City. Mamdani – who made shock waves this summer when he defeated Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic primary, setting himself up for a likely victory in the mayoral race this November – was born in Uganda, and moved to New York when he was a young boy. In July Mamdani even returned here for his marriage ceremony, a sprawling three-day affair in Kampala. The same month, the New York Times reported that an anonymous source – alleged to be Jordan Lasker, a well-known eugenicist and neo-Nazi – had hacked internal data showing that on an application to Columbia University in 2009, Mamdani had identified his race as both 'Asian' and 'Black or African American'. The story sparked outrage from some critics who alleged Mamdani was weaponising identity politics in order to gain preferential access to the prestigious university. (He was not accepted.) Mamdani said he had ticked what he described as 'constrained”' boxes to capture the 'fullness of my background', and that he did not see himself as African American or Black, but as 'an American who was born in Africa'. In Kampala, however, it is clear that Ugandans of Indian descent are unquestioningly considered African – both by Black indigenous Ugandans and by themselves.... Many people here consider Mamdani absolutely African.... Identity in the US can be complex, however, and not everyone agrees that Mamdani has the right to claim an 'African' identity. 'African American' is often used to specify the people of Black African descent who were violently amputated from their history and their ancestry through the transatlantic slave trade."
The Guardian view on connective labour: feelings are part of the job description – editorial in The Guardian. "In a new book, the Last Human Job, the sociologist Allison Pugh writes of the consequences of a world that is accelerating away from, among other things, the time when 'grocers knew their clients intimately; clerks kept close track of shoppers’ desires, their habits, and their families, soliciting views and peddling influence'. The emphasis on speed, efficiency and profit has hollowed out work as a site of everyday, local human-to-human relationships. ... She argues that current trends, which are most pronounced in the US, will be bad for society, not least because advanced nations are moving from being 'thinking economies' to 'feeling economies', where an increasing number of jobs – from therapists and carers to teachers and consultants – are relational in nature. The academic describes as 'connective labour' the jobs that rely on emotional understanding for their success. Underlying this work is 'second-person neuroscience' that looks not at the knowledge inside individuals but at what exists between them.... For her book, the sociologist immersed herself in the world of professional feelers – therapists, doctors, chaplains, hairdressers – with years of practice in seeing the other... interviewing 100 subjects in depth,... The thinning out of connective labour by scripting, by increasing precarity and by automation needs reversing. Covid laid bare the frailty of the social contract and for a moment, the common sense was that radical reforms were needed to create a society that would work for all. Prof Pugh goes one step further by calling for a 'collective system dedicated to protecting the social well-being of a population … We need to fight for and enable what we might call our social health.' It’s hard to disagree."
Racism or celebration? What England’s flag-hoisters are saying, and what others are hearing – article by Daniel Boffey in The Guardian. "If it started anywhere it was among the suburban streets off a large roundabout in Weoley Castle, [in] south-west Birmingham... The national colours of England and the United Kingdom, and Scotland and Wales to a lesser extent, have been on show across the country in recent weeks. Explanations abound as to the genesis of the flag-hoisting and street furniture painting. Some associate the outbreak with its most extreme cheerleaders, of whom Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, may be the best-known.... Others, wearily, or indeed angrily, reject claims that there is anything fundamentally 'far-right' or racist about what is going on around the country, regarding condemnation of the flag phenomenon as confirmation that the 'uniparty' that has run Britain for decades in cahoots with 'the mainstream media' cannot be trusted. But there is at least one thing on which there is agreement: it was in Weoley Castle (pronounced Wee-lee), a neighbourhood of largely postwar council stock homes, where the first organised flag display got going... 'A group of proud English men with a common goal to show Birmingham and the rest of the country of how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements,' [the] self-styled Weoley Warriors wrote on their crowdfunding page. 'Giving hope to local communities that all isn’t lost and they are not alone.' ... Between filling ... sandwiches, Nicole Moy and Shazza McCormack collect donations for the flags and pass on quietly offered suggestions by local people, anxious about possible illegality, as to where the flaggers should visit next with their ladders and cherrypickers. Spending time with Moy and McCormack, along with those hoisting the colours elsewhere around the country, and speaking to those who despair at the emergence of the flags and those who celebrate them, is a journey of discovery – about what is being said and what is being heard.... 'A lady come today with a Scottish flag and a donation, it’s not just the English,' said Moy.... 'We had an old lady come in with £2 worth of 5ps.' ... 'They are not doing it for racism' interjected McCormack. 'No, but I think we are making a bit of a stand,' said Moy. A stand over what? The suffocating cost of living ('You go to Asda, it’s an extra 40, 50 quid'), the scale of immigration in recent years and the people on the small boats arriving on the south coast and 'getting everything for free'. Then there is the right of the people here to speak their mind. 'I think people saying that we can’t fly our flag, I think it’s made us a little bit more determined,' said Moy. It started four months ago. Flags were put up on nearby Bristol Road in response to the proliferation of Palestine flags in other parts of Birmingham in support of those suffering in Gaza, they said. People liked what they saw, and asked for more. Now the warriors were buying pallets of 2,000 flags at £4,500 a time, said Moy. 'They say it is racist … You’ve got other people putting up their flags, and we’ve got to accept it,' said one of the cafe’s younger customers popping in for her lunch... As to Robinson? 'I do like certain things he says, but then other things … he is making out all Muslims are bad. They are not, they are not,' Moy said."
‘I have to do it’: Why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China – article by Chang Che in The Guardian. "Today, at 56, [Song-Chun] Zhu is one of the world’s leading authorities in artificial intelligence. In 1992, he left China for the US to pursue a PhD in computer science at Harvard. Later, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he led one of the most prolific AI research centres in the world, won numerous major awards, and attracted prestigious research grants from the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation. He was celebrated for his pioneering research into how machines can spot patterns in data, which helped lay the groundwork for modern AI systems such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. He and his wife, and their two US-born daughters, lived in a hilltop home on Los Angeles’s Mulholland Drive. He thought he would never leave. But in August 2020, after 28 years in the US, Zhu astonished his colleagues and friends by suddenly moving back to China, where he took up professorships at two top Beijing universities and a directorship in a state-sponsored AI institute.... For almost a century, the world’s brightest scientific minds were drawn to the US as the place where they could best advance their research. The work of these new arrivals had helped secure US dominance in technologies such as nuclear weapons, semiconductors and AI. Today, that era seems to be coming to a close. Donald Trump is dismantling the very aspects of US society that once made it so appealing for international talents. He has shut off research funding and attempted to bully top universities, which his administration views as hostile institutions. As US-China tensions have grown, Chinese-born students and professors in the US have faced additional pressures. In a callback to the 'red scare' of the 1950s, Chinese students and professors have been detained and deported, and had their visas revoked.... [Zhu's] philosophy is strikingly different from the prevailing paradigm in the US. American companies such as OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic have collectively invested billions of dollars on the premise that, equipped with enough data and computing power, models built from neural networks – mathematical systems loosely based on neurons in the brain – could lead humanity to the holy grail of artificial general intelligence (AGI).... Zhu insists that these ideas are built on sand. A sign of true intelligence, he argues, is the ability to reason towards a goal with minimal inputs – what he calls a 'small data, big task' approach, compared with the 'big data, small task' approach employed by large language models like ChatGPT. AGI, Zhu’s team has recently said, is characterised by qualities such as resourcefulness in novel situations, social and physical intuition, and an understanding of cause and effect. Large language models, Zhu believes, will never achieve this.... It is hard, in the current AI race, to separate out purely intellectual inquiry from questions of geopolitics.... Yet for some scientists, the thrill of intellectual inquiry – as well as the prospect of personal glory – may remain more compelling than the pursuit of national advantage.... 'I asked him: "Are you sure you want to do this?"' [his fellow Harvard classmate Mark Nitzberg] told me.... In Nitzberg’s recollection, Zhu replied: 'They are giving me resources that I could never get in the United States. If I want to make this system that I have in my mind, then this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I have to do it.'"
‘Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like’: The rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof gang – article by Jason Burke in The Guardian. "In the summer of 1970, a group of aspirant revolutionaries arrived in Jordan from West Germany. They sought military training though they had barely handled weapons before. They sought a guerrilla war in the streets of Europe, but had never done anything more than light a fire in a deserted department store. They sought the spurious glamour that spending time with a Palestinian armed group could confer. Above all, they sought a safe place where they could hide and plan. Some of the group had flown to Beirut on a direct flight from communist-run East Berlin. The better known members – Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent leftwing journalist, and two convicted arsonists called Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader – had faced a more complicated journey.... They were not the first such visitors. Among the broad coalition of activists and protest groups known as the New Left, commitment to the Palestinian cause had become a test of one’s ideological credentials. Israel was no longer seen as a beleaguered outpost of progressive values surrounded by despotic regimes dedicated to its destruction. After its victory in the 1967 war and subsequent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel was now frequently described by leftists as a bellicose outpost of imperialism, capitalism and colonialism. At the same time, many intellectuals on the left had come to believe that the radical transformation they longed for would never begin in Europe, where the proletariat appeared more interested in foreign holidays and saving up for fridges or cars than manning the barricades.... Almost immediately there was a series of fierce disagreements between the Germans and the middle-aged Algerian who ran the camp, a veteran of the independence struggle against the French. The first of these was about Ensslin and Baader’s insistence that they be allowed to sleep together, which was unheard of in the conservative environment of Fatah’s training camps. The visitors complained about the diet. Then the women insisted on sunbathing either nude or topless, which provoked further outrage.... Almost none of the visitors spoke Arabic and very few had travelled in the Middle East, or even overseas, before. For all their sympathy for the Palestinians’ grievances and enthusiasm for their cause, the European volunteers were profoundly ignorant of the society, history and culture of their hosts.... Launching an armed struggle in Germany proved more difficult than Ensslin, Baader and Meinhof anticipated. The name they had chosen for their group [Red Army Faction (RAF)] reflected their belief that theirs was merely one of many efforts worldwide that would collectively bring about the downfall of capitalist, imperialist states such as the US and West Germany. But ...by the late spring of 1971, the group had been back in Germany for eight months, and yet had little to show for its efforts beyond a dozen or so bank robberies.... In April 1972, the RAF’s leaders decided that the moment had come to launch the blow that would, by provoking massive repression and revealing the 'fascist' nature of the German state, definitively rupture the 'false consciousness' of the working classes and so create the conditions for revolution. As ever, quite how to do this was unclear. When it was reported in the news that the US air force, engaged for several weeks in a massive bombing campaign in North Vietnam, had dropped mines to block the country’s principal port, Ensslin suggested bombing the numerous US military installations in West Germany in response. Baader’s response was typically unconsidered: 'Let’s go then.'”
Breaking the Code: tribute to Alan Turing given a fascinating update – review by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "When premiered in 1986, giving Derek Jacobi a key career role, Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code was instrumental in spreading knowledge of the precocious brilliance of mathematician Alan Turing, whose brutal treatment by a homophobic and ungrateful state contributed to his suicide in 1954 aged 41....But Turing is now officially pardoned and features on a British banknote in a world that owes much to him for the evolutions in digital technology and now AI (in which Turing saw both the gains and dangers). So Jesse Jones’ smart revival offers a more redemptive portrait of a true genius who lived in an age that proved fatal to him. Starting in a Northampton theatre 23 miles from Bletchley Park, where Turing saved British shipping by cracking German naval codes, this touring production will end in Manchester, where he died. It adds a new epilogue by Neil Bartlett, set in the present day at Sherborne School, Turing’s alma mater. ... Most important to this Turing 2.0, though, is a superb performance by Mark Edel-Hunt. It is tempting to play Turing as if he always knew he was in a tragedy but, shown extracts out of context, an audience might think this were a comedy. Edel-Hunt also delivers long speeches of mathematical and computing exposition with immaculate clarity, exuberantly suggesting the humour and sensuality that Turing found in numbers and nature, his body and tongue tangibly loosening when his great brain engages.... This is not just a revival but a fascinating reboot."
Trump has dragged the US to the abyss and Nigel Farage would do the same to Britain. Here’s how to stop him – opinion piece by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "The polls are telling a very stark story. Absent a dramatic shift, a party of nationalist populism is on course to beat both Labour and the Conservatives at the next election, and very probably form the next government. Nigel Farage may be no fan of Tommy Robinson, but he is Trump’s loudest UK cheerleader; he does not condemn the current US gallop towards authoritarianism but rather stands alongside those responsible for it. If we want to prevent Farage doing to Britain what Trump is doing to the US, we need to halt the advance of Reform. The first move in that effort is to puncture Farage’s core claim: that he somehow speaks for the British people, that his views reflect the 'commonsense' views of the silent majority. It’s not true. On issue after issue, including those that define him, Farage is an outlier, articulating the positions of a noisy but often small minority. He was the chief advocate of Brexit, a decision so calamitous that only 31% now say it was the right move. Indeed, a healthy majority, 56%, favour its reversal and want to rejoin the EU. Farage is on the wrong side of that number. He has long banged the drum for leaving the European convention on human rights. If you read the rightwing papers, you would assume that is now a majority view. Wrong. Support for staying in the ECHR is close to 60% and has actually increased as the subject has been debated. Farage is out of step with the British people. But surely on the issue he has made his own, immigration, he is in tune with the public? After all, Labour seems to have built its entire political strategy on that assumption. And yet, the numbers tell a different story. While 81% of Reform voters believe migrants have undermined Britain’s culture, only 31% of Britons in general believe that. Ask about the effect of migrants on the economy and you get a similar picture. It’s Reform that is badly out of touch."
On Antisemitism by Mark Mazower: parsing prejudice – review by Rafael Behr in The Guardian. "Adolf Hitler’s defeat didn’t end prejudice against Jews in Germany or any other country. But the Third Reich did, in Mark Mazower’s judgment, 'discredit antisemitism as a positive programme for decades to come'.... The operative word, dissonant in the context of mass murder, is 'positive'. People didn’t stop hating Jews after 1945, but they found there was an electoral penalty for boasting about it. The loud, proud style of antisemitism was banished from the mainstream. Mazower’s book contains many such distinctions – subtle twists of the lens that bring different shades of personal and ideological animus into focus.... The story begins with the coinage of the word in late 19th-century Germany. The concept is embossed with intellectual and political fixations of that place and time – the emergence of nationalism as an organising principle for European states and the accompanying pseudoscience of racial difference and hierarchy. For Mazower it is important to distinguish this relatively recent coalescence of anti-Jewish feeling as a driver of political activism from previous generations of animosity. He is especially critical of the tendency to treat antisemitism as a phenomenon as old as Judaism itself – the plotting of 20th-century atrocities on a continuum of hatred that reaches back to biblical narratives of exile, and further still to slavery under the pharaohs. His point is not to deny the long list of regimes and societies that have mistreated Jewish populations, but to resist the fatalism that conflates modern political phenomena with scriptural and liturgical tales of suffering and persecution. This becomes especially important, and inevitably controversial, when Mazower’s timeline reaches the creation of modern Israel. Differentiating between modes of hostility to Jews before 1948 was a challenge. It becomes spectacularly difficult once the scene shifts to the Middle East. In 1920, the place most Jews called home was somewhere in Europe. By 1950, it was the US. Now it is Israel, where a radical nationalist government presents itself as the embodiment and only legitimate political expression of Jewish interests worldwide. That is an extreme reconfiguration of the original Zionist project. It is not a view shared by many diaspora Jews, nor indeed by liberal Israelis."
The origins of today’s conflict between American Jews over Israel – article by Mark Mazower in The Guardian, adapted from his On Antisemitism: A Word in History. "Zionism in the modern sense was largely a product of the mass migration from the Russian Empire, and even in the interwar years pro-Zionist movements in America were still outranked socially by the officially 'non-Zionist' American Jewish Committee (AJC), which represented the leadership of the most assimilated section of the Jewish population whose arrival predated the 'Russians'.... Into the 1930s, the AJC opposed the setting up of an international quasi-parliamentary Jewish organisation lest it imply that Jews owed an allegiance to one another that ranked above their allegiance to the political institutions of their own homeland.... The abandonment of this position and the wholesale American Jewish shift in the direction of Zionism only really took place during and after the second world war. In 1942, against the opposition of both the wartime American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist voice, and the American Jewish Committee, several groups convened to demand the postwar establishment of a 'Jewish commonwealth' in Palestine.... With the establishment of Israel in 1948, hailed across the board by American Jews as an epochal event anti-Zionism as a political position was weakened, and the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism shrank to virtual irrelevance.... The AJC ... was far from assuming the cheerleading role of recent times. It is worth bearing in mind that in 1950 there were four times as many Jews in the United States as in Israel, and almost twice as many in New York City alone. A tussle for power between the community notables of American Jewry, on the one hand, and the Jewish state and its leaders, on the other, was all but preordained.... It was the six-day war in 1967 that was perhaps the real turning point, immeasurably boosting Israel’s image in the United States and thereby transforming the relationship between Israel and American Jewry. After it, the last of the sharp ideological conflicts and disagreements that had been evident through the second world war gave way to a mutual embrace, emotional as much as political. Zionism – in a new and attenuated sense of being generally supportive of Israel and feeling some special kinship with it – increasingly unified the American Jewish mainstream. In the words of the Israeli historian Evyatar Friesel, 'not only was Zionism "Americanised", American Jewry became "Zionised"'. It is hard now to recapture the radical nature of this shift, not least because it was something of a paradox. As the commentator Henry Feingold noted: 'The American Jewish identity, which Zionists predicted was destined to fade … was actually strengthened by the establishment of the Jewish state.'"
Heirs and Graces by Eleanor Doughty: what are aristocrats really like? – review by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "A large number of paragraphs, maybe every paragraph, of Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces starts like this: 'Bert was the son of Charles “Sunny” Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough.' Why do aristocrats insist on broadcasting their domestic nicknames to the wider world and to history, as though these are the passwords to polite society?... Like any jargon, it’s a system designed to dominate and exclude, dressed up in the language – not really language, more like mouth-noises – of the nursery, but reader, you do not have time to get irritated by this, because you will need all your resources of patience to get to the end of the sentence, without thinking: who cares whether he’s the 9th Duke of Marlborough? Who knows which century the 6th Duke was in? I bet the Spencer-Churchills don’t even know! In the end, the problem with any history of modern British aristocracy like Eleanor Doughty’s is not the implicit contempt of a class that believes in its own superiority to the extent that it considers the nicknames of its great-grandmother’s lurchers worthy of your time, yet will look you in the eye and tell you that hard work and merit are all that count – or to put that another way, piss on your shoes and tell you it’s raining.... No, the real problem, from a narrative perspective, is that every sentence is loaded with so much extraneous information ... that no amount of punctuation in the world can even rescue its syntax, still less hold your interest.... All that said, Doughty’s expertise jumps off the page. She started her career as a journalist on the Telegraph, and wrote their Great Estates column from 2017 (who even knew they had one of those? It’s like the Guardian and tofu, except their obsession connotes a value system that destroys its own young, whereas ours is just a tasty, proteinous ingredient)."
Inside the everyday Facebook networks where far-right ideas grow – research report in The Guardian. "Using a large language model via OpenAI’s API, we analysed 51,000 posts made in three of the largest groups prior to, during and after the 2024 summer riots. We did this to get a sense of what the individuals charged during the riots – and the people defending them – engage with online. The analysis below explores how these conversations overlap with broader far-right ideology.... (1) Distrust of mainstream institutions... (2) The scapegoating of immigrants... (3) 'White British people are fed up'... (4) 'I'm not far-right... I'm just right'... (5) 'Entry points' for deeper conspiracies."
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