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A wintering;                          and everything we knowis hearsay: ravenspicking at a blood-knot in the snow, the villagelost,...

The problem is that democracy and capitalism don’t much like each other any more. Their underlying affinities have got lost in the miserable business of coexisting day to day. Businesspeople don’t want to be hectored by politicians who have never run a whelk stall. Politicians don’t want to be patronised by businesspeople who have never won a vote (‘Fuck business,’ as Boris Johnson neatly put it).

Archer Huntington called these objects ‘specimens’ and, for all its treasures, his collection was a product of late Victorian ethnography that painted the Spanish as an essentially ‘oriental’ race. Although he patronised artists such as Sorolla, Ignacio Zuloaga and Santiago Rusiñol, the works he chose are folkloric.

Philosophers of science had long accepted their role in justifying science, making the case that scientific knowledge is – take your pick – true, objective, rational, reliable, progressive, powerful. Thomas Kuhn seemed to be arguing that philosophers had been aiming their inquiries at the wrong targets.

the river was still widening as it went, as it carried me, thick mists risingoff it all day,was still widening, yes, for a while longer, holdingthe sky in its belly and back,me on my back in the...

For Bois, not only is form responsive to history, and historical situations inscribed in artistic transformations, but any such transformation is accountable to its present, and it is only thus that it is historically responsive in the first place. There is an ethics as well as a historicity in all artmaking, even the most abstract kinds.

The history of rebellion is always seductive. But the history of bone music suggests that state repression didn’t always loom as large in the lives of Soviet people as we might expect. What the stilyagi were resisting was the social not the political pressure to conform.

Jane Bowles’s characters are obsessed with sin and salvation, though they often confuse them. She was drawn towards things she found incomprehensible and, particularly, towards things she feared. What could be scarier for a godless person than submitting to a God she didn’t believe in?

For some, it’s a genuine community: a safe haven of soothers and tingle-seekers, a tool for anxiety relief and relaxation, amateur in style but extremely lucrative for independent self-described ASMRtists. For others, it’s a strange and unappealing fetish: a cynical form of ‘digital intimacy’. It’s the best, or the worst, the internet has to offer.

We can’t bear to come from nothing. We come from the dead, from our dead, in whatever mysterious ways we imagine that bond. Genealogy is a form of communion with those we take to be ancestors.

Which archival sources are used and whose voices are silenced? The Marcoses have – for now – claimed the archive and seized the narrative. They tell the story of a golden age followed by a fall and a quest for redemption. In the Philippines, a deeply Catholic country, the story has a satisfying narrative arc.

It isn’t just that the story of the Enlightenment needs amending to reflect its true complexity, it’s that conventional approaches to global history are in need of profound recalibration. The Malagasy weren’t just the backwater hosts of pirate kingdoms, imaginary or otherwise: they had busied themselves with their own political experiments.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 7 (Friday 17 March 2023)

A middle-aged man – Ha Sang-hyun, played by Song Kang-ho – looks tenderly at a baby and asks: ‘How could anyone throw him away?’ This has been interpreted as a sentimental moment in a sentimental movie, and Kang-ho won the Best Actor award at Cannes for that tender look and others like it. But ‘sentimental’ doesn’t seem quite the right designation, since the man himself steals and sells children.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 7 (Friday 17 March 2023)

Ships are abandoned when their owners take on too much debt, or when they deliberately let the ship’s condition and licences slip, or when they fail to pay the crew’s wages. If they leave the ship, crew members lose the right to claim their wages, and in some jurisdictions they may be threatened with arrest for negligence.

Corruption is ‘endemic in policing across the world’, the 2021 report into Daniel Morgan’s murder states. It takes root, efforts are made to tackle it, then attention moves elsewhere and it takes root again.

More self-serving outrage from the GOP Without getting overly wonky here, I’ve studied the Electronic Registration Information Centers (ERIC) efforts at voter roll maintenance for several years. Multiple red states in recent weeks have exited the ERIC network. The consortium of over two dozen states (it was over 30) share voter registration data in a coordinated effort to eliminate multi-state registrants, to identify registrants who have moved within and between states, to identify those who have died, and to identify people who vote in more than one state in an election. There seem to be quite a few of the last group in Florida, one of several red states that exited ERIC last week. Readers who remember Kansas’ Kris Kobach’s defunct Interstate Crosscheck system and its history of bad data matching, take note. Originally a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, ERIC is what Interstate Crosscheck purported to be and was not. Kobach’s real project was not election integrity but promoting the notion that voter fraud was widespread and photo IDs necessary to combating the phantom menace. Republicans loved it.

As the suffering increases so do the numbers who go private in desperation. I am sure that in doing so myself I contributed to what seems the unstoppable drift to a two-tier system. But there is a further distinction. Private medicine isn’t cheap if you don’t have health insurance. 

Something which has slipped past most people’s radar is that China recently acted as the intermediary for peace talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two countries have been at each other’s throats for decades, funding and running operations and proxies against each other. Elijah Manjier has a decent summary (part is behind a subscriber wall) from a pro-Iranian point of view.

It’s also interesting that in this conference no English was used!

Now it’s obvious why the US couldn’t be involved: it hates Iran and doesn’t intend to change that any time soon. But that China was reached out to indicates that it has good relationships with Iran and Saudi Arabia and that it’s considered powerful and prestigious enough to be involved a region far from its core.

A guide for ORG supporters and activists who want to take action to protect their digital rights from the Online Safety Bill Campaign Pack on the Online Safety Bill for ORG campaignersAuthor – James Baker – james.baker@openrightsgroup.orgMarch 2023 – V1CC BY-SA 3.0