Cuttings: February 2025

The PKD [Philip K. Dick] Dystopia – article by Henry Farrell on Programmable Mutter website, referenced in John Naughton’s Observer column. “Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure.... In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s....In Dick’s books, the real and the unreal infect each other, so that it becomes increasingly impossible to tell the difference between them.... Factories pump out fake Americana in The Man in the High Castle (1962), mirroring the problem of living in a world that is not, in fact, the real one. Entrepreneurs build increasingly human-like androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, reasoning that if they do not, then their competitors will. Figuring out what is real and what is not is not easy. Scientific tools such as the famous Voight-Kampff test in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie based loosely on it) do not work very well, leaving us with little more than hope in some mystical force—the I Ching, God in a spray can, a Martian water-witch—to guide us back toward the real. We live in Dick’s world—but with little hope of divine intervention or invasion.”

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem – interview with Ted Chiang by Julien Crockett, referenced in John Naughton’s Observer column. “Q: Why is science fiction the best vehicle for you to explore ideas? A: The ideas that most interest me just lean in a science-fictional direction. I certainly think that contemporary mimetic fiction is capable of investigating philosophical questions, but the philosophical questions that I find myself drawn to require more speculative scenarios. In fact, when philosophers pose thought experiments, the scenarios they describe often have a science-fictional feel; they need a significant departure from reality to highlight the issue they’re getting at.... Q: What role does science play in your stories? Or, asked another way, what are the different roles played by science and magic in fiction? A: Some people think of science as a body of facts, and the facts that science has collected are important to our modern way of life. But you can also think about science as a process, as a way of understanding the universe. You can write fiction that is consistent with the specific body of facts we have, or you can write fiction that reflects the scientific worldview, even if it is not consistent with that body of facts. For example, take a story where there is faster-than-light travel. Faster-than-light travel is impossible, but the story can otherwise reflect the general worldview of science: the idea that the universe is an extremely complicated machine, and through careful observation, we can deduce the principles by which this machine works and then apply what we’ve learned to develop technology based on those principles.... By contrast, magic implies a different understanding of how the universe works. Magic is hard to define.... I would say that magic is evidence that the universe knows you’re a person. It’s not that magic cannot have rules; it’s that the rules are more like the patterns of human psychology or of interactions between people. Magic means that the universe is behaving not as a giant machine but as something that is aware of you as a person who is different from other people, and that people are different from things. At some level, the universe responds to your intentions in a way that the laws of physics as we understand them don’t. These are two very different ways of understanding how the universe works, and fiction can engage in either one. Science needs to adhere to the scientific worldview, but fiction is not an engineering project. The author can choose whichever one is better suited to their goals.”

The Prophet-Mystic – Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation by Mirabai Starr, extracted from her article ‘Inconsolable: The Path of the Prophet-Mystic’, ONEING 12, no. 2, The Path of the Prophet (2024): 49–50. “The key to living as a prophet-mystic [that is, a prophet and a mystic] is showing up for what is, no matter how heartbreaking or laborious, how fraught with seemingly intractable conflict and how tempting it might be to meditate or pray our way out of the pain. Contemplative practices train us to befriend reality, to become intimate with all things by offering them our complete attention. In this way, the prophet and the mystic occupy the same broken-open space. The nexus is grief. The mystic has tasted the grace of direct experience of the sacred and then seemingly lost the connection. She feels the pain of separation from the divine and longs for union. The prophet has perceived the brokenness of the world and is incapable of unseeing it. He feels the pain of injustice and cannot help but protest. But the mystic cannot jump to union without spending time in the emptiness of longing. The prophet must sit in helplessness before stepping up and speaking out.”

Television’s magic moments – article by Joe Moran in The Guardian, based on his book Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. “Those bits of television that are collectively recalled as landmark moments are often less significant than we think. The 1953 coronation did not transform us all into viewers in a single avalanche: it just gave the inevitable triumph of TV an obliging shove. Kenneth Tynan was not the first person to use the F-word on television: that was either Brendan Behan on Panorama in 1956 (although no one could understand him because he was drunk) or the man who painted the railings on Stranmillis Embankment alongside the river Lagan in Belfast, who in 1959 told Ulster TV's teatime magazine programme, Roundabout, that his job was ‘f****** boring’. The 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, far from being the highwater mark of television's golden age, was not even the highest‑rated show of the 1970s, being roundly beaten by less fondly recalled programmes such as Miss World 1970 and a 1971 edition of The Benny Hill Show. The key moments in the history of our television watching are often surprising, and some of them only seem momentous in retrospect. (1) Gilbert Harding on What's My Line?... (2) The launch of Telstar... (3) The rise of daytime TV... (4) The 1990 World Cup semi-final... (5) The final of Pop Idol.”

How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell – interview by Julien Crockett in the Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “AG: The political scientist Henry Farrell has argued that we’ve had artificial intelligences before in the form of markets and states. A market is just a big information-processing, decision-making device. So, in a funny way, anytime I see that something costs $4.99 and I pay it, I’m giving up a kind of autonomy to the force of the market, right? I’m not acting as I would if I had lived in a foraging culture, for example. We have these large-scale information-processing devices, and markets and states and bureaucracies are really good examples of this, where we give up individual decision-making. Legal systems are like that too. I’m not deciding whether I’m going to cross the street; the traffic light is telling me whether I should cross.… MM: This reminds me of Nick Bostrom’s paperclip apocalypse where a superintelligent AI system behaves in a psychopathic way: it’s given a goal and doesn’t care about the consequences of its actions as long as it is able to achieve that goal. Ted Chiang wrote a piece where he argued that we already have entities that act like that now: they’re called corporations and their goal is maximize shareholder value. I think that’s why Silicon Valley people often worry about what AI is going to do. Corporations maximizing shareholder value is the metaphor they’re using to think about AI systems.”

‘Dear, did you say pastry?’: meet the ‘AI granny’ driving scammers up the wall – article by Shane Hickey in The Guardian. “O2 rolled out ‘AI granny’ Daisy for a short period to show what could be done with artificial intelligence to counter the scourge of scammers who have become so ubiquitous.… In one call O2 released, a scammer tries to take control of her computer after telling her it is riddled with viruses. He is kept on the line while she looks for her glasses and bumbles about trying to turn the machine on and find the Internet Explorer icon.… When [another] scammer tries to get her to download the Google Play Store, she replies: ‘Dear, did you say pastry? I’m not really on the right page.’ She then complains that her screen has gone blank, saying it has ‘gone black like the night sky.’… [The AI system] has been trained on real scam calls, said Virgin Media O2’s marketing director, Simon Valcarcel. ‘It knows exactly the tactics to look out for, exactly the type of information to give to keep the scammers online and waste time,’ he said.… Over a few weeks, Daisy wasted each fraudster’s time for up to 40 minutes when they could otherwise have been scamming real people.”

‘He spent thousands’: how a bank team tries to rescue scam victims – article by Anna Tims in The Guardian. “A widowed pensioner is on the end of the phone and he’s flustered. He’s expecting his girlfriend to move in with him next month. He has never met her, but he has photos of a young blonde woman and weeks of texts pledging her devotion. On an industrial estate in Bootle on Merseyside, Clare is trying to deflate his dreams. She is a call handler on Santander’s Break the Spell team, which is part of the high street bank’s fraud prevention department. It is her job to convince the man that his girlfriend is actually a scammer who has defrauded him of his savings…. The 23 staff on the Break the Spell team deal with customers who have been so thoroughly taken in by a scam that they refuse to accept they are being defrauded. Most of them have been bamboozled into paying their savings into fake investment schemes or the pockets of criminal gangs who woo them online and promise romance. They are referred to Break the Spell by the bank’s fraud contact centre once ordinary interventions fail to persuade them that their transactions are suspect, and it is up to the team to win their trust and save them from themselves. It can take months.”

After 50 years, can’t we shut down this cult of Margaret Thatcher? Just look at the mess she made of Britain – article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. “This week marks the 50th anniversary of Thatcher’s election as leader of her party. I started counting but lost track of the myriad actors who have played her, some of the greatest of our time…. The problem is that good writers and good actors will produce a human drama of depth, subtlety and intelligence in a character, if flawed, an audience must feel for.… The inevitable result is that even astute and politically savvy writers such as James Graham end up whitewashing what Thatcher and her politics actually did to Britain. This 50-year marker comes at a melancholy time when her actions are rebounding on the country with a vengeance. Polls show the policies she was most famed for are those most voters now bitterly regret. Let’s look at her legacy. The one that most upends her claims to a grocer’s daughter’s thrift is her squandering of North Sea oil proceeds that came onstream just as she arrived in No 10…. She inherited a country moving markedly towards economic equality, but her 1980s policies caused top pay and wealth to soar, while the bottom deciles fell back. Inequality has stayed at that high level ever since…. Other parties envied her popular sale of council homes to tenants at knock-down prices as a stroke of political genius to propel her property-owning democracy. Now with 2m council homes sold, many owned by landlords charging astronomical rents, home ownership in England has fallen from 71% at its peak to 65%, moving further from reach of young renters, with the country trapped in a housing crisis.… Who now would celebrate her privatisations of water, energy, Britoil and a host of public goods at well below market price? A total of £5bn in water debts was written off, with natural monopolies never constrained by weak regulators. Railways were privatised by her successor, following her creed. All this failure on an epic scale has taken decades and serial bankruptcies to acknowledge.… The poll tax that brought her down was not an aberration, but sprang from a profound belief in flat taxes, as she cut top tax rates. That idea of equal taxes she had wisely kept in check until then. Most of these things inevitably slide away from plays and films. There’s a risk they will slip from national memory… Lest we forget, the things she did are doing us immeasurable harm right now. She is not history and certainly not entertainment. She is the unfortunate lived present.”

‘All people could do was hope the nerds would fix it’: the global panic over the millennium bug, 25 years on – article by Tom Faber in The Guardian. “Y2K went down in history as a millennial damp squib… To this day experts disagree over why nothing happened: did the world’s IT professionals unite to successfully avert an impending disaster? Or was it all a pointless panic and a colossal waste of money? And given that we live today in a society more reliant on complex technology than ever before, could something like this happen again?… Much of the messaging came from the government-­funded groups Taskforce 2000 and Action 2000. Robin Guenier, previously chief executive of the government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, led the former and was a prominent voice warning of the dangers. At the start, he says, it was tough to get people interested… The remediation work was not sexy. Guenier called the job of scouring raw code for dates that might be problematic an ‘exceptionally boring and unglamorous undertaking’ that involved repeated rounds of testing, because changing code could cause issues elsewhere in the system. It was an enormous job.… By late 1999, most UK organisations felt their systems were prepared. But the global media had other ideas and revelled in fantasies of apocalyptic doomsday scenarios. Articles in Time Magazine and Vanity Fair painted a picture of a Y2K midnight moment, when planes would fall out of the sky, people’s savings would be wiped out in the blink of a cursor, home appliances would explode and nuclear reactors would go into meltdown. It didn’t matter that few experts expected problems of this severity. In the words of Anthony Finkelstein, then a professor of software systems engineering at University College London, for many journalists at the time, the Y2K doomsday story was ‘simply too good to check’…. That’s not to say nothing went wrong…. There were many small failures around the world, mainly due to a lack of preventive action, but most were quickly remedied: police breathalysers in Hong Kong, traffic lights in Jamaica, slot machines in Delaware. Some issues were more serious: 10,000 HSBC card machines in the UK stopped working for three days. Bedfordshire social services were unable to find anyone in their care aged older than 100. The monitoring equipment in a Japanese nuclear power plant briefly shut down, though it caused no risk to the public. Some medical equipment failed, including a few dialysis machines in Egypt and equipment to measure bone marrow in South Korea. Most seriously, 154 women in South Yorkshire and the east Midlands were given incorrect test results regarding their risk level for giving birth to a child with Down’s syndrome, because the system had calculated their ages incorrectly. This directly resulted in two pregnancies being terminated, while four babies were born with Down’s to mothers who had been incorrectly told they were at low risk.… Though these were significant issues, there was no series of cascading faults leading to infrastructural collapse as the doomsayers had warned.… Almost overnight, the tenor of media coverage changed. The bug became a punchline…. The idea that Y2K was a hoax began to take hold in both the media and public memory. People wondered if they’d been wrong to trust the experts. Some historians believe this change of perspective was a reaction to the hyperbolic warnings in the press, which had painted a far more cataclysmic picture than experts actually anticipated, coupled with the fact that some opportunists did exploit Y2K fears to turn a quick buck.… ‘People assumed it was all a big scam’ [says Martyn Thomas, who ran Y2K remediation efforts internationally for Deloitte]. ‘If you insure your house against it burning down and it doesn’t burn down, you’ve wasted your money, haven’t you?’”

English writer’s forgotten ‘masterpiece’ predicting rise of Nazis gets new lease of life – article by Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian. “Sally Carson was not an oracle or a prophet, just a young woman from Dorset, born in 1901. Yet she foresaw a dark and violent future for Europe and gave voice to those fears in a 1934 novel…. Carson’s book, Crooked Cross, predicted the scale of the Nazi threat and is to be republished for the first time this spring, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war. Controversial in its day, her novel had to tread a careful path to avoid the accusation that it was alarmist about the Führer’s aims. A stage adaptation was even censored, shorn of all its ’Heil Hitlers’. The novel tells the story of a German family struggling in an uncertain economy, but looking forward to the marriage of their daughter, Alexa, to a young doctor – that is, until his Jewish background jeopardises their engagement. Taking its title from the shape of the swastika, Crooked Cross was immediately recognised as essential reading and widely praised… Reading the manuscript last year, the contemporary author Rachel Joyce described it as an ‘electrifying masterpiece’.”

I saw illegality and complicity with war crimes. That’s why I quit the UK Foreign Office – article by Mark Smith in The Guardian. “I am a former diplomat and policy adviser at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)…. In August 2024, I resigned over the UK government’s refusal to halt arms sales to Israel amid the bombardment of Gaza.… My time at the FCDO exposed how ministers can manipulate legal frameworks to shield ‘friendly’ nations from accountability…. The UK’s legal framework is clear: arms sales must cease if there is a “clear risk” that weapons could be used to commit serious violations of international law. Civil servants are bound by a strict code of impartiality, requiring us to produce neutral, evidence-based advice. Any attempt to alter or manipulate this advice for political convenience is not just unethical – it is unlawful. However, during my tenure, I witnessed senior officials under intense pressure from ministers to skew the legal assessment. Reports were repeatedly returned to me with instructions to ’rebalance’ the findings – to downplay evidence of civilian harm and emphasise diplomatic efforts, regardless of the facts. I was often summoned for verbal instructions – a tactic deliberately employed to avoid creating a written record that could be subject to freedom of information requests or legal scrutiny. In one instance, a senior official bluntly told me, ‘This looks really bad,’ before urging me to ‘Make it look less stark.’ My protests were ignored. Significant edits were made to my reports, shifting the focus away from credible evidence of war crimes to paint a misleading picture of ‘progress’ by foreign governments. This was not an isolated case – it was part of a systemic effort to suppress inconvenient truths… Rather than confronting the illegality, officials resorted to delaying tactics – extending reporting deadlines and demanding additional information that was unnecessary. This ‘wait for more evidence’ approach created a loophole, allowing arms sales to continue while the government feigned compliance. I raised my concerns repeatedly, only to be overruled.… When I raised questions with the FCDO about the legal basis for our arms sales to Israel, I was met with hostility and stonewalling. Emails went unanswered. I was warned not to put my concerns in writing. Lawyers and senior officials besieged me with defensive instructions to ‘stick to the lines’ and delete correspondence. It became clear that no one was willing to address the fundamental question: how could continued arms sales to Israel possibly be legal?… The situation in Gaza could not be more acute. The UK’s closest ally now proposes the mass expulsion of 2.1 million people from Gaza and the demolition of one of the most densely populated civilian areas on Earth – this is ethnic cleansing. I call on my former colleagues – those who still believe in the values of integrity and justice – to refuse to be complicit. Do not rubber-stamp reports that whitewash crimes against humanity. This is not self-defence – it is collective punishment. It is genocide. The time for silence is over. Do not allow ministers to trade human lives for political expediency. The time for accountability is now.”

The Big Idea: how do our brains know what’s real? – article by Adam Zeman in The Guardian, based on his book The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination. “The idea, from psychology, that prediction is integral to perception, and by evidence from neuroscience that our experience depends absolutely on the work of our sugar- and oxygen-hungry brains[, suggests that] perception is far more dependent on prior knowledge – painstakingly created internal models of the world – than we usually take it to be. The contemporary expert Anil Seth puts it nicely: ‘We tend to think of perception as occurring outside-in, but it mostly occurs inside-out.’… If perception is a kind of true hallucination, a potential problem looms: how can we distinguish what we imagine from what we perceive?… Some rules of thumb are helpful – high levels of vividness and detail, effortlessness and consistency with context suggest that we’re looking at the real world – but not always. Daydreams can be effortless and vivid; hunting for a destination in thick fog can be effortful and the resulting experience indistinct. Somehow, though, the brain weighs up the odds, and generally gets the right answer. How does it achieve this? Research in AI provides some interesting clues. In ‘generative adversarial’ models, two elements combine to learn about some aspect of the world: the ‘generative’ bit aims to predict it as precisely as possible; the ‘adversary’ does its best to decide whether what it is looking at is the real world or the output of the generative model. The generative model constantly ups its game to masquerade as the real McCoy; the adversary keeps honing its connoisseurship to distinguish the authentic from the fake. Something similar happens in the brain. The ‘adversary’ in the human brain, charged with reality checking, keeps watch from our huge frontal lobes: Area 10, in particular, at the tip of the frontal cortex, becomes active in tasks requiring us to decide whether items were seen or imagined. It is smaller and less active in people with psychosis than in healthy people, especially so in people with psychosis who hallucinate.”

What Republicans really mean when they blame ‘DEI’ – article by Mehdi Hasan in The Guardian. “In 1981, Lee Atwater, the most influential Republican party strategist of the late 20th century, sat down for an off-the-record interview with the political scientist Alexander P Lamis.… In perhaps the most revealing, and most infamous, portion of the interview, [he] explained to Lamis how Republican politicians could mask their racism – and racist appeals to white voters – behind a series of euphemisms. ‘You start out in 1954 by saying, “[N-word, N-word, N-word]”. By 1968 you can’t say “[N-word]” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.’ … Got that? No need to utter the N-word out loud as there were plenty of other “abstract” ways to say it. Today, more than four decades later, DEI has become the new N-word; the new rightwing abstraction deployed by Republicans to conceal their anti-Black racism. DEI – short for diversity, equity and inclusion – is thrown around by high-profile conservatives, from the president of the United States downwards, for the express purpose of undermining Black people in public life. Don’t believe me? … When the Republican congressman Tim Burchett called Kamala Harris – the then sitting vice-president, former senator and former attorney general of the country’s most populous state; a woman who would have entered the Oval Office with a longer record in elected office than Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – a ‘DEI hire’ within 24 hours of her becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, what else could he have been referring to other than that she is a Black woman?… DEI is the new N-word.… In fact, the Black podcaster Van Lathan argues that DEI is now ‘worse than the N-word’ and has become ‘the worst slur in American history’. The term ‘DEI hire’, he explains, ‘is not just being used to undermine the qualifications, capability and readiness of Black people … DEI is placing the blame of all of society’s ills at the feet of these people.’ Plane crash? Blame DEI. Wildfires in LA? Blame DEI. Bridge collapse? Blame DEI. DEI is a racist dogwhistle. Blame Black people is the not so unsubtle message.”

Lights … camera … attraction! The 32 most romantic moments in cinema – article by staff writers in The Guardian. “The gazebo confession in The Sound of Music…. Bad timing in Casablanca…. The photograph at the end of Titanic…. Awkward listening in Before Sunrise…. A damp proposal in Pride and Prejudice…. The press conference in Roman Holiday…. A last-gasp declaration in A Matter of Life and Death…. The kiss of life in The Matrix…. The first meeting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…. The start of Up…. A healing touch in WALL-E… The poppyfield kiss in A Room with a View… Cycling in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…. Buns and lung disease in Brief Encounter.”

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad: a cathartic savaging of western hypocrisy over Gaza – review by Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. “Organised as a series of linked essays, One Day is powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. I devoured it in two quick sittings, and by the end my heart was drumming. The ugliness El Akkad describes is real and seems inescapable, too. Much of it is the unspeakable stuff nobody admits to but is clear to anyone who reads or observes: that once we’re safe, our empathy is often performative; that it’s more expedient to be against evil after it’s over; that western countries preach justice and democracy, but act to protect wealth and power. He balks at the morality of both the right, who with ‘deranged honesty’ sign missiles, and the left, whose ‘progressivism often ends at the lawn sign’. … As an Iranian who spent my first eight years dodging Saddam Hussein’s American bombs, then arrived in America to be treated like a savage, this book speaks to me. I’ve heard these arguments before, but never so articulately expressed. History always seems to start when westerners are harmed, ‘not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people.’ Like El Akkad, I despise Hamas and the authoritarian governments who use Islam to crush women, minorities and peaceful Muslims. But I can’t stomach the lie that the west is a civilised party here, after centuries of looting. El Akkad’s most compelling argument takes aim at ‘a fiction of moral convenience’, as he calls it: ‘While the terrible thing is happening –­ while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed – any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilisation.’ Later the children of the aggressors, with all that stolen wealth and privilege firmly in their hands, hungry now for cultural capital, can celebrate the old resistance and claim outrage and solidarity in hindsight.”

One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad: Gaza and the sound of silence – review by Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian. “Its title is a distillation of a tweet he posted in October 2023, three weeks into the bombardment of Gaza. It has since been viewed over 10m times: ‘One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.’… His first book was a novel; 2017’s American War is a dystopian imagining of a future civil war in the deep south waged against a backdrop of climate disaster. It was heralded by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shape our world. In this, his first nonfiction book, his narrative voice is measured and quietly engrossing in its articulation of what he sees as almost unspeakable, certainly ethically indefensible.… He is … acutely alert to the contradictions and compromises that modern journalism often entails, in particular the insistence that ‘the journalist cannot be an activist, but must remain allegiant to a self-erasing neutrality’. He points out that, on the contrary, ‘journalism at its core is one of the most activist endeavours there is. A journalist is supposed to agitate against power, against privilege … A journalist is supposed to agitate against silence.’ Which brings us to Gaza, the nexus of his moral argument. There, given Israel’s exclusion of western journalists, the task of ‘agitating against the silence’ has been redefined by Palestinian journalists – and ordinary citizens with smartphones – who have done just that at great risk. They, alongside the few foreign medics who have managed to gain entry to the killing zone, have described the deadly attacks on hospitals, schools, suburban neighbourhoods and flimsy tents housing terrified refugees displaced from their own land…. Gaza, he concludes, has killed something in us all: the victims, the perpetrators, the western leaders who have enabled the slaughter, the cheerleaders and the helpless onlookers. It has created what he calls ‘a severance’, not just between those who speak out and those who remain silent or collude in the carnage, but with the very idea that such an ideal as ‘western values’ actually exists. Or ever truly did.”

‘This moment is medieval’: Jackson Katz on misogyny, the manosphere, and why men must oppose Trumpism – interview by Ammar Kalia in The Guardian. “Katz has written a book, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue, which outlines the ways that men can and should involve themselves in the fight against gender-based violence. He believes it may be the first time a major commercial publisher has released a book about men’s violence against women that has been written by a man…. Attempting to change the culture from within became a tenet of Katz’s work with Real Men and, later, with his Mentors in Violence Prevention programme. Enlisting role models from professional sports and the military, Katz began running workshops and training programmes to encourage changes in behaviour from the top down in male-dominated organisations.… Gaining the ability and confidence to interrupt sexist behaviour from men is the main purpose of Katz’s book. Written in a conversational, largely jargon-free tone, it is intended as a practical toolkit for men to think about ways in which they can challenge difficult behaviour, with each chapter ending with a section on ‘how you can make a difference’ that outlines lines of argument and conversation…. One method that Katz has helped pioneer in his career is the bystander approach – initially employed as a tactic against school bullying, where peers are encouraged to step in and support the bullied child, rather than leaving the onus of responsibility solely on their shoulders. Katz began running workshop scenarios where men would think through their ethical obligations when faced with sexist or potentially abusive behaviour by one of their group. ‘Men would walk in with their arms folded, saying they didn’t need to be there because they weren’t abusers, so I would say: “You don’t abuse girls or women, but what are you doing to help others who are abusing them?”’ Katz says.”