White People Are Responsible, Really

Sacha

16 de agosto de 2017

(pode ler este artigo em português aqui)

The president of the United States of America can not manage to renounce, with a shred of conviction, white supremacy

Is it shocking to read a sentence like that? Yes, it is. But it’s nonetheless true. The president’s response to the extreme-right and neo-nazi’s marches in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, went just as such. First he denounced what had happened in uproar over “multiple bad sides”. Then, he backtracked, renouncing more fully the neo-nazi groups presents in the acts and the violence that occurred. But it didn’t last more than a couple of days, since he then backtracked again in an incoherent and bizarre press conference, where he had some Freudian slips of support for the “alt-right”. In sum, the president can not cover up his sympathies for the movements most bound to the ideas of white supremacy. We already knew about this from his electoral campaign.

It’s unacceptable to have a president of a democratic country who supports these ideas, much less in such a flagrant manner.

So that it’s not ambiguous for anyone: the march that was held in Charlottesville was in protest of the removal of a Confederate monument. The Confederate States of America were a vain attempt to maintain the system of slavery, in full rebellion against the Union and growing public opinion of the time, by way of the succession of declared slave states in the American South. Nothing less. Accordingly, white supremacist groups (and yes, neo-nazis themselves) have adopted the symbols of the Confederacy.

These same groups threatened for weeks to invade the city of Charlottesville in response to the removal of the Confederate statue. Last weekend, they invaded it, marching with all sorts of chants against non-white minorities. It wasn’t, alas, a march of two side, nor however many others, against each other. It was the reunion of extremist groups, united for the preservation of the white race. They invaded a city that dared to go against their beliefs.

Without the coexistence of minorities with the majority,

there is no democracy

The inconvenient truth of having a president that demonstrates any kind of level of sympathy with these ideas is that racial questions will be, during his entire term, a central issue of public debate. That is, even white people accustomed to ignoring racial problems can no longer ignore them. Not taking a stand against racism—truly structural, even from within the annals of power—is choosing to be passively on the side of the oppressor. It is vital and a unique responsibility for white people to renounce white supremacy. Not doing anything in the face of growing clamor of white supremacist groups is being complicit with their desires: to maintain the power of being indifferent to the condition of other races in the country. Minorities don’t have that luxury. That’s exactly what the extremists were marching for.

It’s time to demand that all sympathizers of intolerance leave the government. If the president was already embroiled in governability problems, now it will be all the more so. Without the coexistence of minorities with the majority, there is no democracy.

Image: fabrizio turco

Nós US

Marches for Common Sense

Sacha

26 de abril de 2017

(pode ler este artigo em português aqui)

It isn’t normal that scientists and aficionados take to the streets in defense of their work. But here we are.

This past Saturday, millions of people took to the streets across the world in defense of science. That is, science in general. The practice of doing empirical research to come to conclusions based on duplicable results. The base of all of the knowledge in the modern world. There were so many people just in the United States that, once again, they exceeded the attendance of the presidential inauguration.

The history of anti-intellectualism in the United States is nothing new

To understand all of this, it’s necessary to recognize the fundaments of the scientists’ appeal: science is under an existential attack to its resources and means with the arrival of a notoriously anti-intellectual executive. The political caste around the president also takes this position. Whether for corporate or religious interests, there is a notable current of anti-intellectualism in the US. The country factors among those which believe the least in evolution and climate change in the West, among other basic topics in science. Sectors of the country are so skeptical of science that they have developed movements against the very modern medicine that has given them the possibility of living longer, better quality lives. And so on.

The history of anti-intellectualism in the United States, however, is nothing new. It’s existed since the founding of the first colonies on North American soil, before there were even states, much less united ones. In the US, Great Britain did not succeed in exporting its class system, because the vast majority of those who settled the colonies came from the lowest rungs of Old World society. Ever since, education has suffered variously from perceptions of uselessness, elitism, unproductiveness, and much more. It is a constant for larger or smaller parts of society through even now.

So many people marched in the street because of this skepticism. Not because it exists, but because it just took control of the highest powers of the country. The tonic of belief in self-reliance and the idea that only ambiguous effort is necessary for success is no longer just the elixir of the Average Joe. Nowadays, one of the main parties has taken its own hearty dose. Scientists found themselves forced onto the streets to march for the common sense that understands the benefits of their work. It remains to be seen whether the result is duplicable.

Image: Thomas Jaggi

Nós US

3 Things the United Scandal Teaches Us About Our Culture

Sacha

12 de abril de 2017

(pode ler este artigo em português aqui)

It’s inevitable that we talk about what happened to that passenger on that United flight if we’re talking about the United States right now. The thing is, it shows us something about where we’ve come as a culture that definitely won’t sit easy.

1. We can’t control our outrage

We’re at a point where it’s practically possible to track the sequence of events each time this kind of news emerges. The United case wasn’t any different. Our world is one where video cameras are available on any portable device, with new rules allowing them to be used even in the air. Of course the images of the middle-aged man being dragged off the plane didn’t take their time to appear. Nor did the collective outrage toward United over what happened.

What happened was horrible and the company’s reaction only made it worse, unquestionably. But the tragic sequence has already become predictable—every attack on humanity, on our dignity, follows the same line. It’s become a formula for sensationalism, without being the Onion. We get outraged over headlines and short videos and lose both context and a more complete understanding of what happens in these situations. It’s not difficult to understand why this doesn’t help solve the underlying problem.

2. Companies have already learned to commercialize our outrage—but aren’t free from it, not even United

After what happened in Chicago, United lost around 900 million dollars. It’s an impressive sum, but it’s not a one-off. Just before them, Pepsi launched an ad campaign commercializing the images of popular struggle and was excoriated across social media for it. Companies already see our outrage as a source of profit and apply it in their campaigns to varying degrees of success. Except that, sometimes, the huge profits they hope for end up being just the opposite. The power of outrage isn’t controlled by companies, much as they try to.

3. We have a police brutality problem

At the root of it all, the real problem wasn’t what United did so much as the police unit that handled the removal of the passenger who refused to leave the plane. Once United was forced to call the police to handle the belligerent passenger, the responsibility for what happened passed to the police. In the tradition of the Chicago police, it wasn’t all calm and polite, as we saw from the many videos. That’s the problem.

Since the death in 2014 of the black teen Michael Brown at the hands of a cop who would be later exonerated, police brutality and injustice have surged in American politics. There are innumerable cases, and each week we have some other, yet another example of this disservice to our population. And in these three years since, little or nothing have been done to confront police aggression, police militarization, or clearly-documented injustices committed by the police. We have a police brutality problem that is aggravated by advances in technology and increases in police budgets. Without confronting this problem, there will be more United-style controversies.

Image: Juha Martikainen

Nós US

No, Trump wasn’t Brexit

Sacha

22 de fevereiro de 2017

(pode ler este artigo em português aqui)

There is a whole sea of comparisons between Brexit and Trump. They’re considered sister phenomenons, a wave spreading throughout the West. Except, despite appearances, they’re not quite as similar as they seem.

Similarities

It’s true that Western populism, in the current state of things, has taken on a conservative tendency. It’s also true that xenophobia is running high just as much in the United States as in Europe. It’s a fact that the demographics of Europe and the US are shifting toward ever less white, Christian pastures. It appears to be the case, for now, that the Conservative Party of the UK and the Republican Party of the US don’t have as well-defined of plans for what should come after their electoral victories as they made it seem. The media helped to construct and participate in a spectacle, abusing false premises and falsified facts to induce a more lucrative, dramatic result. Up to here, everything appears basically the same.

Where the paths split

The splitting point between Brexit and Trump resides, in part, in the fundamental difference in their respective political scenarios. The convocation of a referendum to determine the continuation within the European Union by a British government with a wide majority in Parliament does not, in fact, correspond with the regular occurrence of elections for the leader of another country. Cameron called the referendum looking for political consolidation at home and legitimation in Brussels, where he saw his bargaining position reduced because of strategic political errors in dealing with Europe.

Clinton’s big error was underestimating the importance of the electoral map

Cameron’s big error was to underestimate the apathy and friction to the EU that older Englishmen have. These are the same people who tend to vote in greater numbers and who lived through the complete trajectory of the difficult fit of the UK in the EU. Compare that to the loss of nearly 3 million votes that Trump had against Hillary Clinton, which has left doubts about the legitimacy of his presidential mandate, if not about the electoral system that allowed for him to win despite that discrepancy. Clinton’s big error was underestimating the importance of the electoral map.

The friction between the UK and the EU has always been well known, and led the EU to concede many special statuses for the country with regard to its contribution to the EU budget, belonging to the single currency, and more. Trump represents the culmination of years of extreme rhetoric normalized by factions of the Republican Party and the conservative media in the US, especially in their game of obstinance against everything that had anything to do with president Obama.

The main motive for voting to leave the EU was a nostalgia for times of greater individual relevance on the global stage for the ex-Empire, settled by a wide margin. The main motive for voting for Trump was a belief in his aggrandized rhetoric of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and nationalism as an easy solution to local problems that have little to do with it—an elixir that worked by the slightest of margins in just the right places.

The similarities between the two cases are many, but it’s best that we avoid treating them as if they were exactly the same phenomenon.

Image: Michal Zacharzewski

Nós US

We’ve Debuted the Decadence

Sacha

8 de fevereiro de 2017

(pode ler este artigo em português a qui)

We’ve already said goodbye to 2016 and arrived at the dawn of the inauguration of our unloved circus peanut as President of the United States of America. If there were an original joke to write about this appearing to be a scene out of a movie, I would write one, but there isn’t. We already know who the next “leader of the free world” (for as much controversy as that phrase involves) is and what he stands for.

Setting the scene of the beginning of 2017 is the triumph of the rejection of “technocracy” in favor of simplistic and nationalistic responses to the changes that the progression of globalization has brought to the fore. It no longer matters what experts say with regard to the worldwide consequences of this phenomenon, since they are the easiest scapegoat for all of the problems in our economies and their inability to reallocate and reinvent workers faced against forces that know no national boundaries. This is the point from which we arrived at Trump and Brexit. The pre-existing order of the West has been profoundly altered.

The most accurate word for this phenomenon would be decadence.

Not just in the sense of decline, but also the confrontation with the failures of the system. How are we going to tell the factory worker—whether from Lincolnshire or Michigan—that their life’s work not only is never coming back, but that it was in fact substituted entirely by gains in productivity thanks to new technology and machines? By appealing to vainglory, ignoring the facts and complications of real life, because that’s what they want to hear. Decadence resides in their reaction to the false promises and the snake oil they’ve bought.

But why, then, decadence? Let’s call it that for the decline of public service, which is the point of any political position. The current discourse, arising as much in Trump as in Europe’s simmering populism, is, at heart, an appeal to a simplistic image of government functioning. Governing is not a simple task. Appealing to a fantasy of a government-turned-machine in the service of enriching those of the majority left behind is simple. Governance is not capable of pleasing everyone at once. Populism’s purpose is to say the words that it hopes will please everyone in that majority. It’s decadent because it defrauds the proper principles of politics and governance.

A lot is said about “us” in populist discourse, in appeals to patrimonial vainglory of the nation, in nostalgia for times that never existed. This “us” is most convenient when the attraction to dividing the public is strongest. We are good people, versus those who don’t have morals. We are honest workers, versus those who already have everything and wouldn’t know a proper day’s work if it slapped them in the face. We have common sense, we understand the world around us like it is, versus those who spend all day in a laboratory researching things. We are civilized, versus those buffoons on the other side. There’s a whole universe of generic examples of this “us” that simultaneously represents everyone and no one. This “us” is simplistic by default. The real us is complex, includes even the least estimable parts of our society, has defects, and always needs corrections in its system.

We’ve debuted the decadence.

Now we’re debuting Us.