nothing here but demon cat burglars – issue 262

issue 262 – 21st July, 2024

CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. Lots to share, so let’s get right to it.

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The Team

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) – Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. 

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Against Thermochauvinism – Andrew Dana Hudson

Thermochauvinism is the (often unconscious) assumption that it’s reasonable to live in cold places but unreasonable to live in hot ones. Thermochauvinism doesn’t blink at the massive infrastructure investments required to keep much of the Global North functioning through the coldest months of the year: gas heating, snow removal, salting of roads and sidewalks, winter clothes for every citizen, hand warmers, engine warmers, antifreeze, snow days, etc. etc. And yet similar investments in cooling somehow constitute a moral failing.

There is something Eurocentric, colonialist, even quasi-racist about thermochauvinism. Brown and Black people live in warmer places, and are then depicted as lazy or uncivilized for the ways they adapt to the heat. White people live in cooler place and are thought to be industrious for adapting to the cold.

A really interesting and well-reasoned piece from friend of the newsletter Andrew Dana Hudson that I think will only become more relevant as time goes on.

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DCH: What if absolutely everything is conscious? By Sigal Samuel at Vox

In a landmark 2006 paper, Strawson took this idea and ran with it, making a radical argument: Materialism, he said, actually entails panpsychism. We can break down the argument into six simple steps:

1. Consciousness is real. (We know that from our own experience.)

2. Everything is physical. (There’s no evidence that immaterial stuff exists.)

3. Therefore, consciousness is physical.

4. There’s no “radical emergence” in nature. (We don’t get something from nothing.)

5. Consciousness emerging from totally non-conscious stuff would be radical emergence.

6. Therefore, all stuff must have some consciousness baked into it.

A rundown of the history of panpsychism, how the Catholic Church, Enlightenment era philosophy and 19th and 20th century science have colluded to displace it with dogma, Cartesian dualism and materialism, and how 21st century scientists and philosophers are returning to a belief in it.

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• “Earlier this week, Google revealed that its emissions have increased by 48% in just five years, despite its previous promises to hit net-zero emissions by 2030. Much of that increase is driven by its push to accelerate AI deployment. The picture is much the same at Microsoft.” Generative AI is a climate disaster By Paris Marx (DCH: Data centres are energy vampires.)

• Dutch Network for Climate Obstruction Studies

Just the headlines:

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: A Week of Israel’s Horrific Massacres in Gaza – Seraj Assi at Jacobin

This morning, the Israeli army carried out one of the worst massacres in Gaza yet, killing more than one hundred Palestinians, including children, and wounding hundreds others. Israeli forces bombarded a densely populated area in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis, a tent region designated by Israel as “a humanitarian safe zone” for displaced Palestinians, where over eighty thousand people are taking shelter. Horrific scenes from al-Mawasi show dozens of bodies strewn on the ground in the wake of the massacre, many of them medical workers who were shot by Israeli soldiers as they rushed to help the wounded.

Testimonies and horrific footage obtained by Al Jazeera reveal that Israeli soldiers executed elderly civilians inside their homes. Many were burned alive as Israeli forces set fire to entire homes with families inside, leaving dozens of charred bodies in their wake.

Has the IDF ever designated a “safe zone” and then not bombed it once Palestinians had fled there? It really doesn’t seem like it.

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DCH: The Killing of Mohammad Bhar from Wikipedia

On 3 July 2024, the family said that a week after they had been trapped in a relative’s home, Israeli forces raided the place with a combat dog, which proceeded to maul Mohammad’s arm and chest. Mohammad, who had speech difficulties, started screaming at the dog: “Khalas ya habibi’ (enough, my dear),” according to them. The family described how Israeli forces then separated Mohammad from them to another room, where a military doctor arrived. They added that the Israeli forces later led them out of the house at gunpoint and prevented them from returning there until a week later, when they found Mohammad’s bloodied, decaying body on the floor with worms starting to eat his face.

Khalas ya habibi.

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DCH: UN court orders Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian Territories by Haroon Siddique at The Guardian

“The sustained abuse by Israel of its position as an occupying power, through annexation and an assertion of permanent control over the occupied Palestinian territory and continued frustration of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, violates fundamental principles of international law and renders Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful.”

Furthermore all states and international organizations must end any aid to Israel used in the occupation and must take action to see that Israel ends the occupation as rapidly as possible. Time to put all that “rules-based order” rhetoric to the test. Put up or shut up.

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• The World War on Asylum – Malcolm Harris at The Intercept – CJW: A great summary of the Western war against asylum seekers and the legal basis for asylum itself. 

• Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential – Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, Salim Yusuf, The Lancet – CJW: A conservative estimate suggesting that the true death toll in Gaza could be as high as 186,000, or 7.9% of the population.

• “(…) a new report from Oxfam says that the Israeli government has reduced the amount of water available to Gaza’s population to 4.74 liters per day per person, or less than one-third of recommended minimum levels. This is not an unfortunate side effect of the violence but the result of deliberate decisions by Israeli authorities to cut off Gaza’s water supply and attack, repeatedly, its water, power, and sanitation infrastructure. Overall, conditions in Gaza have deteriorated to the point where the UN and the Israeli government have detected traces of poliovirus in sewage samples. Israeli authorities say they’re doing everything they can “to prevent the risk of disease in Israel.” They’re also doing everything they can to cause disease in Gaza, but I digress.” Derek Davison at Foreign Exchanges

• The modern world’s relationship to time is broken – and it’s fuelling the rise of the far right By Jesus Casquete at The Conversation

• Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country By Andy Kroll ProPublica

Just the headlines:

Science & Space

DCH: Elon Musk’s Plan to Put a Million Earthlings on Mars in 20 Years By Kirsten Grind The New York Times

Mr. Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX employees to drill into the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people with knowledge of the efforts and documents viewed by The New York Times. One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitats, including the materials that could be used to build them. Another is working on spacesuits to combat Mars’s hostile environment, while a medical team is researching whether humans can have children there. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony, two people familiar with his comments said.

Because of course he has.

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MJW: Cat burglars: scientists try to solve mystery of why felines ‘steal’ random objects by Ian Sample at The Guardian

Charlie, a rescue cat from Bristol, was dubbed the most prolific cat burglar in Britain after bringing home plastic toys, clothes pegs, a rubber duck, glasses and cutlery. His owner, Alice Bigge, once woke to a plastic diplodocus, one of many nabbed from a nearby nursery, next to her head on the pillow. It reminded her of the infamous scene in The Godfather. She puts the items on a wall outside for owners to reclaim. Another cat, Dusty from San Mateo in California, had more than 600 known thefts, once returning with 11 items on one night. His haul included Crocs, a baseball cap and a pair of swimming trunks. The bra found in the house was fortunately spotted on a video of Dusty coming in. In a feat of accidental social commentary, another cat, Cleo from Texas, came home with a computer mouse.

Some cute news to distract from The Horrors, scientists don’t know why some cats steal objects, but one wants to find out.

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• Living In A Lucid Dream – Claire L. Evans at Noema – CJW: A really interesting piece on lucid dreaming, dream research, and related questions of consciousness. Though I have to say the much-shared factoid (which I learned this week means something that isn’t true but which is presented as a fact) that you can’t die in a dream is incorrect. I know because I did die in a dream when I was a kid. My consciousness (such as it is in a dream) simply became a sort of disembodied narrator for the remainder of the dream.

Tech & Design

DCH: AI is not “democratizing creativity.” It’s doing the opposite By Brian Merchant 

>AI will not democratize creativity, it will let corporations squeeze creative labor, capitalize on the works that creatives have already made, and send any profits upstream, to Silicon Valley tech companies where power and influence will concentrate in an ever-smaller number of hands. The artists, of course, get 0 opportunities for meaningful consent or input into any of the above events. Please tell me with a straight face how this can be described as a democratic process.

Oligarchy != Democracy

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Just the headlines: 

Society & The Culture

CJW: A Buried Ancient Egyptian Port Reveals the Hidden Connections Between Distant Civilizations – Jo Marchant at Smithsonian Mag

Near the top of the stone’s rough, corroded surface are three lines of elegantly curved Sanskrit script. Strauch, wearing sunglasses and a Panama hat, traces the curling letters with his finger. “In the sixth year of King Philip,” he reads, “the kshatriya Vasula gave this image for the welfare and happiness of all beings.” Then he points to a single line, in Greek, written by the same person but in a cruder style, that says simply: “Vasula set this up.” If not for the Greek translation and the reference to a Roman emperor—Philip the Arab, who ruled in the third century A.D.—this dedication could be mistaken as coming from India, Strauch says. The words are Sanskrit, expertly written in Brahmi script. The message itself, with its reference to universal happiness, is undeniably Buddhist. And the author, Vasula, who arranged for the dedication, proudly describes himself as kshatriya, from the warrior caste.

The stele is just one of a series of remarkable finds that have specialists scrambling to reassess their understanding of Rome’s connections to the Eastern world. Others include a magnificent Buddha statue, carved from Mediterranean marble and mixing Indian and Roman-Egyptian features, the first ever found anywhere in the ancient Western world. A second stele features a carved Greco-Roman arch that frames a triad of early Indian gods. Nothing like these objects, with their unmistakable blend of Eastern and Western styles, has ever been seen in the Roman world. Nothing like these objects, with their unmistakable blend of Eastern and Western styles, has ever been seen in the Roman world. Peter Stewart, a historian of classical art at the University of Oxford, described himself as “flabbergasted” by them. Shailendra Bhandare, an expert in ancient India at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, said that when he heard about the Indic triad, “I fell off my chair.”

Fascinating read on an archeological dig in Egypt providing evidence of much earlier trade connections between the Mediterranean and India. Lots of interesting details, including that it’s the first ancient site to be found with a pet cemetery.

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DCH: The Demon Slayers By Sam Kestenbaum at Harper’s Magazine

Americans crave spectacle, in all matters, and exorcisms like this are today experiencing a season of growth. We Americans are drawn to those things that feel somehow both novel and ancient, old dreams and nightmares made new. Polling is fairly consistent, heathens be damned: roughly half of this country believes in the existence of demons and the ability of such spirits to possess humans.

Southern-fried right wing Evangelicals with Joss Whedon production values. 

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DCH: Birthing the Jersey Devil By Katherine Churchill daily.jstor.org

Like most Jersey children, I often heard this folktale as a kid, usually around campfires at Halloween. Today I understand it as what the film and media scholar Erin Harrington calls “gynaehorror.” Much like the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, it presents the vagina as “site of terror,” dramatizing and criticizing forced birth. Today, New Jersey has some of the most progressive abortion laws in the country. Across the nation, however, access to reproductive healthcare is rapidly eroding as states reinstate antique bans and punish women for miscarriages. With the ever-present possibility of a federal ban, the Jersey Devil is a haunting reminder that when reproductive rights disappear, horror ensues.

Emphasis mine. A great read on gyanehorror as social protest.

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CJW: Why planetary problems need a new approach to politics – Jonathan S Blake & Nils Gilman at Aeon

The realisation of our planetary condition may insult our narcissistic self-regard, but it also yields a positive possibility: that human flourishing is possible only in the context of multispecies flourishing on a habitable planet. The aim of habitability is meant to diverge from the now-dominant concept of sustainability. While the concept of sustainability treats nature both as distinct from humans and as existing for humans’ responsibly managed instrumental use, the concept of habitability understands humans as embedded in and reliant on the more-than-human natural world. Stripped of sustainability’s anthropocentrism, habitability focuses on fostering the conditions that allow complex life in general – including, but not only, humans – to live well. This vision of multispecies flourishing is at once generous and selfish. Expanding the circle of concern to include the multispecies menagerie is certainly more beneficent than current politics typically allows, but it is also absolutely about ensuring the survival of our species. What’s bad for them is, ultimately, bad for us. These goals – thriving ecosystems in a stable biosphere supporting human lives and nonhuman life – must be our new lodestar.

The central question of our time is: how can we achieve this?

A really interesting thought experiment. I can’t see nation states choosing to give up any tiny sliver of sovereignty for the sake of the planet and all its inhabitants, but if they did, this offers a good outline for an alternate system to what we have today.

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CJW: Young People Are Now So Unhappy That They’ve Changed A Fundamental Pattern Of Life – Dr. Katie Spalding at IFL Science (apologies for sharing something from a website called IFL Science)

None of the easy answers seem to fit. The change is “not caused by COVID,” Blanchflower stressed; “COVID simply extends trends that had started in 2011.” It’s probably not the labor market either, since wellbeing in the young seems to start decreasing right around the time the job market picked up. 

“What you need here is something that starts around 2014 or so, is global and disproportionately impacts the young – especially young women,” Blanchflower told Scientific American. “Anybody that comes up with an explanation has got to have something that fits that.” 

“Other than cell phones, I don’t have anything.”

You don’t think young people might be recognising that climate change is going to utterly alter society and make life in general unpredictable, more difficult, and more tenuous? Or maybe that rampant (hopefully) late-stage capitalism has made things that much harder for young people without generational wealth? Or that the rise of far-right politics and the resurgence of fascism is going to undermine decades of social, cultural, and political progress, and put countless people directly in harm’s way? 2014 is about when these things all started to become far more apparent.

The latter in particular would affect young women (as we see with abortion bans and other Christofascist policies emerging in the US), who are showing greater levels of unhappiness in the studies mentioned.

These are all terrible things young people can see on the horizon (or here already), which the older generations in charge are seemingly unwilling or incapable of addressing. No wonder they’re unhappy.

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Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: ‘We’re Living in a Nightmare:’ Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town By Andrew R Chow at Time Magazine

>Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s 5-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a “red beam behind her eardrums.”

>It didn’t occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. A mother said her 8-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit.

Hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks all thanks to the aural din of a bitcoin mining hub.

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Labour & Economics

Just the headlines:

Art

CJW: Robert Strati’s Delicate Scenes in Ink Burst from Shattered Porcelain Plates – Colossal

We often associate objects with memories—a stuffed bear reminds us of childhood playtime or a family heirloom of a beloved ancestor—but for Robert Strati, certain items also contain narratives of their own accord. The artist draws elaborate scenes that appear to burst from shattered porcelain plates as part of his Fragmented series. Perfectly matching ink to the design on the dinnerware, Strati expands the story within the vessel to the paper below, rendering large-scale, monochromatic scenes that seem to emanate from the original composition.

Can’t remember if I shared some other broken plate art here recently, or if I just sent it to Marlee, but apparently art created from beautiful broken things speaks to me. Huh. I wonder what that could mean…

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CJW: Through Surreal Paintings, Diego De La Rosa Imagines an Uncertain But Resilient Future for Venezuela – Colossal

The Toronto-based artist draws on the compounding political crises in his native Venezuela, retracing the tragic shortages of food and medicine, years-long recession, and violent protests that have characterized life for more than a decade. In his first solo in the U.S., De La Rosa re-interprets these tragedies through allegorical works replete with monsters and uncanny happenings.

The Night You Love Me features 14 paintings that reflect Venezuelans’ struggles and deferred dreams.

These paintings are fantastic – definitely click through to see them all. 

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MJW: Jo Waite Slept Here

This is a really cool multimedia piece from the ABC about art and gentrification. It’s about the Inner North of Melbourne, a place close to my heart, as I’ve lived here for ten years. I always held Sydney’s Inner West in a special place in my heart because I lived there for so long, but I’d never allowed myself to feel the same way about the Inner North of Melbourne, even though I’ve lived here longer. Until now. I love the simple line drawings and splashes of ink.

The Memes