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radiojamming · 4 years

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[WARNING: In-depth discussion of human remains along with relevant images, some of which may be disturbing.]

In the electric hustle of the mid-1980s, there weren’t many eyes turned toward the loneliest corners of the Canadian Arctic. It was a forward-momentum period, caught up the 20th century’s mach-speed technological progress and cultural change. In all of this movement, it took something quietly monumental to turn heads toward the past and look, quite literally, into its eyes. The world looked into three 140-year-old graves in permafrost, and found three sets of eyes wearily looking back.

Their names were John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine. In Victorian society, they would have faded into the backdrop of the social tapestry. One was a working-class petty officer, another a former shoemaker that had recently joined the Navy, and the third a private in the Royal Marines. In their world, they were perfectly ordinary—but it was their deaths that made them extraordinary. In time, they would be called the Beechey Island or Franklin Expedition mummies, and would become instrumental in helping to solve one of the greatest mysteries in exploration history.

In this first Mummy Monday, we’ll explore the lives and deaths of the Beechey Island trio, as well as their forensic results, cultural impact, and a further look into their unique process of mummification.

The Franklin Expedition

In international news, the Franklin Expedition has been something of a hot topic as of late. New artifacts, incredible discoveries, and potential vacation routes; not to mention a critically-acclaimed television series in 2018! Its impact is present in multiple facets, but it can be hard to gain a full scope of what it was and why it matters.

The quickest, dirtiest summary is this: in 1845, the British Admiralty sent two well-fitted bomb vessels—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—into the Arctic to ply the waters for the fabled Northwest Passage. It got very, very cold to the point that the land was inescapable and all 129 men aboard succumbed to any number of horrible fates—disease, starvation, exposure, and possibly even more violent ends. Say what you will about ominous-sounding names for these ships and risking fate, but the results were horrifying across the board. Scottish explorer John Rae even made discoveries of cannibalism among the wreckage of what was to be the most promising of Her Majesty’s exploration attempts, much to the public’s disgust, chagrin, and fascination.

There is, of course, so much more to the story than just a few quick notes about the horrors nature can inflict and the question of imperialistic hubris. One peek into the fae realm of Franklin-related academia is a little bit mind-boggling, and there have been plenty of glorious attempts to parse it all out. The sources range from contemporary to theoretical, and as much as people agree or disagree, the siren call of Frankliniana can be hard to resist.

So where the hell do you start?

For the sake of Mummy Monday, we’re starting where most of Franklin’s rescue attempts did:

Beechey Island.

Beechey Island

It’s a forbidding corner of the Canadian Arctic, even today. Nestled at the foot of Devon Island in the Wellington Channel of modern-day Nunavut, it can appear either unremarkable or dread-inspiring, depending on the day and the weather. Its nearest inhabited neighbor is the town of Resolute, although its name in Inuktitut gives a better sense of the landscape: Qausuittuq or ‘the place with no dawn’.

Most explorers tracing the steps of Franklin stop in Resolute to charter passage to Beechey Island. Although there are animals living near the area (different species of sea bird and the iconic polar bear), the tourism sector of Beechey Island is profoundly dedicated to the quiet contemplation of the remains of Franklin’s first winter camp. Scattered across the stones are broken pieces of wood and rusted rings of old Goldner’s cans. To this day, it’s possible to see the ongoing decay of history in the shadow of memorials left behind by past searchers.

And then there are the graves.

The original headboards are now stored at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife. Weather-resistant replacements still bear the same messages as the originals, each recalling the names, statuses, and death dates of three of Franklin’s men. Two graves, from Erebus, have ominous-sounding Bible verses tacked on to the epitaphs.

There is a fourth grave belonging to Thomas Morgan, an able-bodied seaman (AB) from the HMS North Star who died during a search for Franklin in 1854. Morgan is entombed alongside his Erebus and Terror predecessors, but he has not yet been exhumed.

And yeah, exhumations. That’s what we’re here for on Mummy Monday, after all!

In 1984, Dr. Owen Beattie of the University of Alberta led a crew of researchers and scientists to this lonely point in the Arctic Circle. At the time, he was entertaining the possibility of lead poisoning being a factor in the ultimate fate of the Expedition. Part of this consideration came from the bajillion cans littered across the extensive trail, each soldered shut with clumps of lead that Beattie believed leached into the food the men were eating. Beattie had good reason to pursue this theory! His belief was that the acidic nature of some of the canned food would have caused a breakdown in the lead solder, causing the food to become contaminated. Even without this theory, he wouldn’t have been off the mark at all. Later discoveries contemporary to the Expedition found other cans manufactured and sealed by Stephen Goldner to have gone completely rancid. That, outside of the lead-poisoning theory, certainly wouldn’t have helped matters. Another explanation pointed to the lead piping installed in the ships themselves. Would water passing through these pipes have poisoned the men in the process of drinking or breathing? What about lead-based paints, often needing to be applied throughout the year in new coats, and condensation to follow on steam-powered and heated ships? What about the nature of being a person in the Victorian era in the first place? You were probably about as leaden as a musket ball.

So Beattie made his trek north, intending to exhume John Torrington and crossing his fingers on the possibility of exhuming John Hartnell. People knew these men had died young, even by Victorian standards. Torrington was 20 years old, Hartnell 25, and William Braine 32. Torrington and Hartnell died within three days of one another at the beginning of January, 1846. Braine died only a few months later in April. If Beattie’s theory was correct, then lead may have played a part in why these men were dropping like flies after only a few months on the Expedition.

As detailed in his book, Frozen in Time, great pains were taken to get permits and carefully exhume John Torrington. It was far from easy. Beattie and his team had to dig, pick, and melt their way through around six feet of gravel and cement-hard permafrost. They had entertained the possibility that permafrost might have preserved the bodies; they had no idea how right they were.

After uncovering one black coffin, edged in decorative white tape and bearing brass handles (one was still in the ‘up’ position), they carefully melted through layers of ice until one researcher reached a piece of blue wool cloth. As gently as possible, he tugged aside the cloth and revealed the frozen face of John Torrington.

Petty Officer and Lead Stoker John Torrington seemed to wearily peer back at the researchers. And he was, in fact, peering. Torrington’s body had been almost perfectly preserved, including his eyes, other soft tissue, and cartilage. His striking appearance startled the researchers, understandably. They had been expecting some degree of preservation, but not this.

He was only 5′4″ (163 cm) and weighed just under 88 lbs (40 kg). Dressed simply in clothing that showed exactly how underweight he was at the time of his death, something about his appearance struck some emotional chord with the team. In Frozen in Time, Beattie quietly makes the comment that Torrington looked, “just unconscious” and “anything but grotesque”.

“The expression on his thin face, with its pouting mouth and half-closed eyes gazing through delicate, light-brown eyelashes, was peaceful. His nose and forehead, in contrast to the natural skin colour of the rest of his face, were darkened by contact with the blue-wool coffin covering. This shadowed the face, accentuating the softness of its appearance. The tragedy of Torrington’s young death was as apparent to the researchers as it must have been to his shipmates 138 years before.” (pp. 171-172)

His jaw was bound shut with a polka-dot kerchief (think Jacob Marley) and his limbs were tied together using cotton wrapping. Researchers made note of his hands, which showed some of the greatest degree of his preservation.

What was even more incredible was the full degree of flexibility his body retained. Beattie and a team member lifted Torrington from his coffin for his full autopsy, and as they did so, Torrington’s head rolled onto Beattie’s left shoulder. Beattie also noted how light and limp Torrington was more or less like lifting an unconscious child.

Samples were taken of Torrington’s hair, nails, organs, and brain. The fact that these samples could be taken at all was incredible, especially in their state of preservation. After this was done, Torrington was reburied with the utmost respect and the expectation that the grave itself would refreeze from encroaching water. Not only would Torrington be preserved physically, but his photos were about to preserve his memory in ways no one could really expect.

But, of course, he was just one of three.

John Hartnell and the ‘Face of Death’

Researchers literally brushed the surface of Hartnell’s grave in 1984 as time constraints prevented them from doing a full exhumation. They had enough time to do an initial dig and uncover part of him, which was enough to sate their curiosity for the moment. Undoubtedly, they still thought of Torrington’s repose and his more delicate features.

They weren’t really prepared for, uh...

Probably the most pissed-off mummy known to man. At least, that’s what he looked like. One researcher, Walt Kowal, might have summed it up best when he remarked, “This guy is spooky. The quintessential pirate. This guy is frightening.” (p. 184)

He wasn’t entirely wrong. Something about John Hartnell’s face seemed angry, and it didn’t help matters that his right eye was missing. As the water drained away, John Hartnell grimaced where Torrington had just seemed to passively observe. In time, the entire figure of AB John Hartnell emerged.

Dark-haired and hazel-eyed, Hartnell appeared to be something of Torrington’s opposite. Both men had the distinct features of mummification-in-ice, such as the receded and pursed lips from the water and the half-open eyes. That was where the similarities ended, however. Hartnell was bundled up in a blanket and shroud with his head resting on a pillow, where Torrington laid on a bed of sawdust (often mistaken in pictures as his hair). Pains had been taken to make Hartnell look presentable; his hair was combed and cut, his nails trimmed, and his body dressed in three shirts and a hat (no pants, though).

The question remained almost tangible: why were these men so different?

As the researchers reburied the remains and returned to Alberta to pore over lab results, so to am I going to take a step back and look at their lives in detail.

The Men Behind the Mummies

There’s not much I can say about Torrington that hasn’t been beautifully covered in magnificent detail by my Torrington research counterpart, @entwinedmoon. Her Torrington research series absolutely floored me with its depth and clear passion for the subject! Literally everything about his life, death, and afterlife is covered in there, so I can’t recommend it enough. And I absolutely agree with the sentiment that tracking Torrington down is like cryptid-hunting. Oof.

What I can say in a pale shadow of entwinedmoon’s work is that John Shaw Torrington was born around 1825 in the city of Manchester, making him around 19 or 20 at the time of his death. He hadn’t served in the Navy prior to being assigned as a petty officer on HMS Terror, but his lung tissue showed that he’d definitely been exposed to the amount of smoke expected of both a lead stoker and a Manchester resident (given its Victorian reputation as a pollution-belching beast of a city). Exact details of his life are hard to follow, making him something of a shadowy figure for being so front-facing after his death. Examination of his hands showed that at the time of his death, he probably hadn’t done much work between his illness and the fact the ships were frozen in and thus not really needing someone to work their locomotive engines.

And he’d been sick. Really sick.

In the end, it was a combination of tuberculosis and pneumonia that sent John Torrington to his premature grave. He’d been, as discussed, incredibly underweight, but had been well enough to pass a health check in Greenland when some of his comrades had been sent back to England for similar health issues. The when of his illness isn’t known, but it had lingered long enough to thoroughly emaciate him. Had he been sick prior to leaving England and just covered it up? Possibly. Had he been sick but had a flare-up at some point after the health check? Also completely possible.

In short, after his autopsy it became clear that everything about Torrington’s body was at active war against his life. He’d been small in build and had lungs so scarred with smoke and illness that lung tissue adhered to his chest wall. This wasn’t a man destined to live very long.

As opposed to his neighbor.

A personal aside, John Hartnell is my favorite. I’ve spent years researching his life, his family, and every detail I can hunt down about him, and it’s taking a lot not to just fly right into overshare mode. I can say that Hartnell’s mummy wears a lot of reminders of his life, along with the life of another one of the Expedition’s non-mummified members.

John Hartnell was born in 1820 in Gillingham, Kent. He was the oldest of five siblings and after the death of his father in 1832, immediately went to work as an apprentice shoemaker. Yeah, not a Navy man or a dockyard worker like his father. He signed his name on a form dedicating his time and effort under one Henry Sarge and went to work crafting footwear. A necrotic right wrist bone tells a story of repetitive movements and damage. Growth arrest lines in his ankle bones say that the 5′11″ (180 cm) Hartnell had actually had his growth stunted around the onset of puberty, possibly owing to malnutrition. However, letters from his mother Sarah and brother Charles paint the image of a close-knit family avid to support one another.

So close-knit, in fact, that John was one of two Hartnells on Erebus. His brother, Thomas, was two years younger than him and accompanied John as an AB. Their names appear beside one another in the muster books (possibly including a cousin, John Strickland) and John was buried in one of Thomas’ shirts, with the initials embroidered on a shirttail.

Although no known letters exist from John or Thomas Hartnell, the grave contents alone paint a remarkable picture of family ties in extraordinary conditions.

A new question arose, however. Torrington may have been marked by fate with his illness, but Hartnell had been healthy even past the health check in Greenland. What had happened to him?

For that, we need to go back to Beechey Island in the summer of 1986.

‘Son of a bitch! He’s been autopsied!’

Beattie and his team returned to Beechey Island in June, 1986 with a renewed sense of purpose and, of all things, an x-ray machine. It was set to be the first time such a machine would operate above the Arctic Circle and the team was both eager to try and dreading the worst case scenarios. Results from Torrington encouraged them, as the lab gave the news that Torrington’s hair had showed lead levels far above average, further pointing toward the lead-poisoning theory. Now the researchers were prepared to see if the same held true of John Hartnell and William Braine.

Unfortunately, very little is known of Royal Marine William Braine, aside from the fact that he was a private from Somerset. He’d been married prior to his departure, and seemed to come from a large, poor family. Economic reasons may have led him to join the Royal Marines, and he’d had no choice in where he was set to be assigned. Just as with the rest of the Marines in the Expedition, they were to serve in the Arctic regardless of their choices, and at a regular pay rate as opposed to the regular crew’s double pay. Aside from this, Braine’s life is well-obscured by history at the moment, so I won’t go into his results as much as Hartnell’s which can be correlated with his personal history.

The team re-exhumed John Hartnell after a good deal of difficulty, as shown in this incredible NOVA documentary aired in 1988. In the two years since the last exhumation, very little had changed in Hartnell’s appearance. The main difference was that his remaining eye appeared more sunken, but clearly the ice had done its job in preserving him.

This time, the team cut away his toque and revealed, of all things, a full head of hair.

Brian Spenceley, a physics professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, stood in as a photographer during this exhumation. What made his presence remarkable was the fact that he was John and Thomas Hartnell’s great-great nephew. It’s somewhat eerie to see him in the NOVA documentary, juxtaposed with images of Hartnell that are clear enough to show some family resemblances.

Like Torrington, Hartnell was removed from his coffin for a full autopsy. Unlike Torrington, Hartnell was subjected to x-rays which required removal of his clothing. And very much unlike Hartnell, removal of his clothing revealed another detail that, at risk of sounding clickbait-y, shocked the researchers.

He’d already been autopsied.

Hartnell bore the scars and stitches of an upside-down Y-incision that terminated at his hips rather than his shoulders. It correlated with some initial results of his x-ray which showed a scrambling of organ material, some in places where it shouldn’t have been (his liver in his shoulder, for instance).

According to Beattie, John Hartnell had been autopsied while still on Erebus, presumably under the hands of assistant surgeon and naturalist Harry D.S. Goodsir. The autopsy appeared hurried, with Hartnell’s chest plate being replaced upside-down as well. Beattie estimated that the entire procedure lasted no more than a half hour. However it had gone, someone had quickly cut out his organs, examined some (such as his heart) in detail at the point of a scalpel, and then shoved the organs back in without a care as to where they went. There are plenty of explanations for the time constraints, including the cold, the threat of disease, and the possible pressure of doing an autopsy under the scrutiny of superstitious sailors and a distraught younger brother. All in all, it gave the team a remarkable chance to observe a Victorian autopsy as they did their own.

As with Torrington, the team took samples of organ, bone, nail, and hair for later analysis. Hartnell’s appearance pointed yet another accusing finger at tuberculosis, but not with the lung damage as sustained in Torrington’s body. It was possible there was something else at work with Hartnell.

Also, a polar bear interfered, leading to one of the best forensic case notes I’ve ever seen.

Once autopsies and x-rays were concluded (the x-ray machine worked fine, provided it was being warmed by a fish tank water heater), Hartnell was wrapped in a linen shroud with his clothes placed in a bag to be buried with him. With Spenceley present at the reburial and the thought that Thomas Hartnell had been at the graveside 140 years prior, the whole situation carried an extra emotional weight. As Spenceley recalled, at the end he felt as though he was burying someone he knew.

Once the grave was replaced as accurately as possible following archaeological diagrams and photographs, the time came to exhume the third mummy, William Braine.

And he didn’t look quite right.

Whereas Torrington and Hartnell had retained something of a lively appearance (loosely, at least), Braine looked well and truly dead. He had clearly decomposed to some degree before the preservation qualities of the permafrost could take effect. His eyes were sunken into his head, his skin wax-like, skull prominent, and body slightly twisted in the coffin. One arm was tucked under his body to make him fit into what seemed to be an ill-fitting coffin that, unlike the other two, was not fitted to his measurements. Even the lid had been shoved down until it pressed against his nose and deformed it slightly. And even worse, the skin of one arm showed rat bites. Obviously, it had taken a good while for poor Braine to actually be buried. Like I said, he was 32 at the time of his death. His body sure doesn’t make him look 32.

His x-rays were far more conclusive in the cause of his death, but less so in the case of his burial. Braine’s spine had been literally twisted by tuberculosis.

It clearly had more time to wrack his body. He weighed about as much as Torrington had but stood at 6′0″ (181 cm). A theory arose that Braine had possibly died in a sledge group, causing his companions to haul his body back to shore. He had probably been kept in the hold for some time, in accordance with the bite marks and level of decomposition.

Sadly, as said, little is known of Braine’s life. He was illiterate, having made an X mark in the muster records. No letters have been found addressed to him or from any of his siblings. While one cursory biography was written by a possible descendant, not much research has been done to solve the mystery of his life (yet).

Braine was thereafter reburied, and this chapter of the Beechey Island’s saga was nearly done. And yet, the exhumations only provided more questions than answers.

Heavy Metal

Lead. Pb. Atomic number 82.

Zinc. Zn. Atomic number 30.

Neither are innocuous, and both bore some of the blame for what killed the men of the Franklin Expedition. The question is to what degree is the blame well-placed?

Dr. Owen Beattie set about to find out. Sample results from Hartnell and Braine came back from the lab with more bad news on the lead front. Both bodies showed high levels, furthermore damning the solder and piping. However, both Hartnell and Braine showed markedly less lead in their systems than Torrington.

Results left the cozy realm of academia and out into the great, wide international world. As will be discussed, the photographs of the mummies alone had caused something of a media frenzy, inspiring a new cultural Franklin-themed wave of music, art, and literature. But the lead-poisoning theory rang some discordant bell in the public’s imagination and became less of a theory and more of an accepted fact. Most decided that Franklin’s men had been killed by the lowest bidder of the Admiralty’s victualing department.

Those naughty, naughty Goldner’s tinned foods.

It would be some years before this theory was questioned. In fact, by all appearances, it was Hartnell who seemed to question it the most. After all, the lead content of his body had gone down after leaving England. And how did we know that?

His nails told us so. And that wasn’t the only information they decided to divulge. Because of these findings, scientists could figure out when his sickness began nearly down to the day. Not only that, but they also discovered that John Hartnell had a very severe zinc deficiency.

‘Hartnell’s time machine’ as it was nicknamed became an incredible source for vital clues to the mysteries posed by the Beechey Island trio. The spike at the end of the chart shows the point that Hartnell’s body began to break down and essentially devour itself for one last effort at keeping itself alive. What this revealed was that Hartnell’s illness was practically a flash in the pan; he’d only really been sick for about a month and a half before his death. How did such a dramatic downturn occur?

So far, it seems like a combination of bad genes and that little demon of a zinc deficiency. John Hartnell’s autopsy reports revealed a whole slew of issues from a sprained ankle to a compacted vertebral disc (which would have been painful). It was clear he had lived a hard and active life, with the wear and tear showing on his very bones. The zinc deficiency’s symptoms would have manifested as weight loss, fatigue, poor wound healing, night blindness, and an increased risk of infection. The last symptom in that last may point the most damning finger at what finally killed John Hartnell. If he had a zinc deficiency as severely as it appears, his immune system would have been compromised and he wouldn’t have been able to fight off infection as well as some of his comrades.

Not only that, but lining up historical hints adds another sinister factor to the list.

In 1853, an exhumation attempt was carried out on his grave under the auspices of Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield of the HMS Isobel and his physician, Dr. Peter Sutherland (the group that put the pickax through his arm). One letter refers to the body as:

“perfectly preserved by the intense cold, exhibited no trace of scurvy or other malignant disease, but was manifestly that of a person who had died of consumption, a malady to which it was further known that the deceased was prone.” (Sir Roderick Murchinson, Royal Geographic Society, 1853)

Again: “known that the deceased was prone.” Someone apparently knew or believed that John Hartnell had previously been consumptive. Not only that, but plying a Maidstone newspaper brought up another point:

John Hartnell’s father, also named Thomas, died from a ‘lingering illness’. While there are multiple possibilities as to what this illness was, it lines up nicely with both the historical record and the clues in Hartnell’s body. It’s possible he was ill with tuberculosis prior, had his immune system compromised by his zinc deficiency, and had his previous illness exacerbated by Arctic conditions.

And all this was learned from one mummy.

While this doesn’t solve the deaths of every member of the Franklin Expedition, the findings at Beechey Island provided incredible insight into their lives and deaths, and may have opened a door into further understanding.

‘God have mercy on the frozen man’

The forensic results of the exhumations were astounding in themselves, but the cultural impact can’t be understated. The world was taken by the images of Torrington, Hartnell, and Braine. Torrington in particular had his image splashed across magazines and newspapers, becoming the quintessential poster boy of the Expedition. He haunted no lack of dreams (mine included, circa age 7) with his gaunt face and hazy, half-lidded eyes. One might say something about a man straddling the precipice of life and death, as it isn’t often that the dead look at you.

As said, the trio inspired a small but noticeable culture wave, with just a few key and oft-cited examples provided below:

Iron Maiden’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’

James Taylor’s ‘Frozen Man’

Margaret Atwood’s short story ‘The Age of Lead’

Also, this particularly recognizable scene from AMC’s The Terror!

Paintings, sculptures, tattoos, poems, short stories, cosplay, dolls, and on and on! You could even argue that the discoveries on Beechey Island reignited new interest in the Franklin Expedition, creating a wave of discovery which eventually culminated in the discovery of the shipwrecks of Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016. Suddenly, the men of the Expedition were real, as tangible as you or me. People saw their faces, realized that these men were reaching across from the Victorian era into the 20th century. Sure, now they’re mostly condemned to Listverse-type categories of scariest mummies, but they’ve certainly drummed up emotional reactions in their time.

The Process

Now that we’ve covered the who, what, and when, it’s down to the how. How is a body preserved so well in ice and permafrost? The answer, my dear, is as simple as this picture.

It’s refrigeration on a natural level! Just as a refrigerator or freezer slows or completely stops bacteria from causing decay in food items (freeze your meats, my dudes!), permafrost and ice extends the same courtesy to anything buried in them. Of course, the conditions have to be specific! Other bodies found of the Expedition haven’t had even close to the same amount of preservation as the Beechey Island mummies. Wind, animals, and other natural processes have left a trail of skeletons rather than mummies. Clearly, something about depth of burial and level of protection is important as well.

Other ice mummies set to be covered include Ötzi the Iceman, and the Qilakitsoq mummies of Greenland. While there’s some variation as to their causes (glacial freezing and cold, dry air, respectively), the process is essentially the same. Cold stops naughty bacteria! The deep freeze kept the Beechey Island mummies from complete and utter decay, like freezing beef in an ice cube. Granted, if the mummies were ever exposed to warmer-than-freezing air for a pronounced length of time, they would eventually decay.

Conclusion

The Beechey Island mummies are an invaluable information source for questions about the final, mysterious fate of the men of the Franklin Expedition. Their bodies have provided incredible clues and beautiful insight into their lives as well as the lives of men like them. Not only that, but their cultural impact inspired a new wave of interest and the thought that the border between life and death is a surprisingly fragile one. While their initial appearance may be frightening or shocking to some, it’s important to remember that these were young men thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Their memory and impact is still felt to this day (which I hope makes them happy, wherever they are!).

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on this inaugural Mummy Monday, feel free to hit me up through my askbox or DMs! It’s a lot of fun for me and I’m totally open to any and all comments about how I’m doing! And the next Mummy Monday installment will be about the Qilakitsoq mummies!

Thanks for reading!

#mummy monday #tw death #tw mummies #mummies #mummification #franklin expedition #long post #this is very hartnell-centric and i can't find it in me to apologize #also it's still monday where i live so HAH take that DEADLINES

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xanyoules · 4 years

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"You Should Never Tell a Psychopath They Are a Psychopath. It Upsets Them": Villanelle, Joe Goldberg and Feeling Sorry for Psychopaths

What do you envision when you hear the word? I’d hazard a guess it’s your prototypical psychopath with a dead-eye stare and blood-stained knife in hand. Perhaps it’s your conspiracy theorist neighbour, or that — yes, that one — ex. We’ve seen Villanelle’s theatrical murders on ‘Killing Eve’ and we’ve rooted for Joe in ‘You’ despite his murder habit. We’ve read articles with clickbait titles on how to “spot” a psychopath and immediately diagnosed our sibling, colleague or ex-best friend. It’s a term we throw around carelessly, yet it also inspires fear. A real psychopath isn’t like us and they certainly aren’t worth any kind of sympathy. We’re good people and they’re crazy, violent, controlling, unemotional and self-obsessed. Right?

Sweet but a psycho

Popular culture has given us infamous psychopaths throughout the decades and a couple of our contemporary favourites must be Oskana Astankova — the Russian assassin “Villanelle” -from hit TV show ‘Killing Eve’ and Joe Goldberg from Netflix’s ‘You’. Despite their psychopathic tendencies, fans champion their victories.

Psychologist Robert Hare devised the ‘Psychopath Checklist’ back in 1980 and it is now routinely referred to as the PCL-R. Villanelle and Joe would score highly: both characters believe they are of great importance, routinely lie, act impulsively, struggle with control, take zero to little accountability for their actions, lack empathy, and have a history of criminality and behavioural problems.

Hare’s checklist is still doing the rounds in institutions worldwide, usually prisons, but it has come under plenty of criticism for what Willem Martens (2008) deems as being an unethical psychological practice. It’s difficult to diagnose the term “psychopath” but several diagnoses may suggest a fit, from Antisocial Behaviour Disorder to psychopathy and various other personality disorders.

Already, we see how complex a diagnosis it and encounter very different views from psychologists when it comes to the question of the psychopath. Yet, as we progress as a society, so does science. Science isn’t rigid, stuck in a time of Freud and every other straight, white, wealthy, old, neurotypical male philosopher and psychologist from the 20th century. It moves with society and it adapts as our knowledge deepens. Nowadays, some psychologists and mental health practitioners are rejecting the label “psychopath” completely due to the severely negative connotations and even calling psychopathy a mental health issue or disability.

Psychology says what?

Identity is an important factor when it comes to being human. Our identities are important to us, especially as we engage and present these identities online. Psychopaths are said to be so unlike the majority they are unable to make genuine connections with others but as with anyone deemed ‘different’, it is the group that collectively rejects the ‘different’ individual, perpetuating a cycle of low interpersonal integration and marginalisation.

If given an official diagnosis with a working label of “psychopath”, combined with society’s current view of what it means to be a psychopath, a psychopath is quickly forced to the outskirts of society thus lowering their commitment to fulfilling social roles. A self-fulfilling prophecy becomes imminent: when someone is thought of and treated as if they are somehow broken, they often become it.

Noel Smith is the commissioning editor of magazine InsideTime and a former prisoner who has experienced his fair share of mental health difficulties. Writing for InsideTime, Smith says: “If people think you’re MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.”

Psychologists Peterson & Seligman (2004), tired of psychology’s tendency to focus on the deviant side of humanity, proposed we all have the ability to express ‘the six common virtues’: wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and spirituality or transcendence.

Here, Peterson & Seligman neatly demonstrated how language can create a narrative. The psychopath according to Hare’s checklist could be grandiose and controlling, but with a slightly different view, they’re confident and courageous leaders. We associate the term so often with negative traits that we ignore the possibility for positives.

Mental health matters — but not for you

“They [psychopaths] are the social snakes in the grass that slither and smile their way into your life and emotions. They feel no empathy, and only care about themselves” says Dr Xanthe Mallett, a forensic anthropologist and criminologist at Newcastle University.

Dr. Mallett’s words reinforce an age-old belief: the psychopath’s only identity is psychopath and they are incapable of being anything other than one-dimensional.

Author Nathan Filer expressed his initial dismay that once his diagnosis was televised by ‘Meet the Psychopaths’ programme on Channel 5, strangers expressed their fear and revulsion immediately. Filer states he “quickly got over” people’s negative opinions but received abuse on the streets with words such as “psycho” and “nutter” shouted at him on a regular basis, reinforcing the rejection by the collective.

Lucy Nichol, writer and mental health support activist, expressed her fears when joining a discussion panel at the Centre for Life Science’s speakeasy programme for adults in 2019. Nichol, rightfully, is anxious about the welfare of those living with psychosis and how they can be discriminated against due to fear. She worries that psychopaths can be “violent and frightening”, and any potential link between psychopaths and people living with psychosis can lead to danger for people with psychosis. Resistant to the movement of psychopathy being welcomed into the family of mental health, Nichol argues it should not be treated as a mental health concern. Her argument is that a classified psychopath lacks empathy and is unable to judge other people’s emotions and this makes the people around the psychopath vulnerable, not the psychopath.

Yet, other mental health conditions and disorders can lead to an individual not necessarily being able to empathise in the way a neurotypical person may empathise. Similarly, an individual with autism, a panic disorder or psychosis may have limited capacity to judge other people’s emotions on occasion. As a society, we tend to understand this and accommodate it.

In contrast to Nichol’s view, there are more and more calls for understanding psychopathy in broader, more compassionate terms.

Dr Luna Centifanti, Lecturer in Psychological Sciences at University of Liverpool classes psychopathy as a mental illness that means the individual experiences “disordered thinking, emotions and behaviour.” She added that psychopathy can lead to struggles with understanding emotions of others and therefore their responses to distress can be “inappropriate”.

Do better, be better

Joseph Newman is a psychologist at Wisconsin University who classifies psychopathy as a disability. Newman explains it as an ‘informational processing deficit’ where individuals have less ability to process cues immediately such as someone else’s fear or upset, inviting us to see the psychopath through a more sympathetic lens.

Campaigners, researchers, activists and those with lived experiences of mental health conditions and illnesses have made huge strides for inclusivity and understanding. As professionals such as Newman and Dr. Centifanti begin to deconstruct the pathological idea of psychopathy, it is being tentatively considered as a mental health issue.

Let’s go back to Villanelle. Her history is relatively secret, but the viewer knows she’s spent time in Russian prison and has no family, therefore little connection to others. Her violent, ‘psychopathic’ actions are a result of her occupation as an assassin as opposed to something she does simply for the joy of enacting violence.

A recent soundbite suggests the show’s writers are no longer calling Villanelle a “psychopath” after astute fans have criticised the way it reduces her to a label.

Be more psychopath

A merge of popular culture, sociology and psychology has begun to turn the connotations of ‘psychopath’ on its head somewhat. The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton (2012) looks to diagnosed psychopaths to teach us how to care less about other people’s emotions and our own, be fearless in our jobs and have an unwavering belief in ourselves. Western culture is a key culprit in promoting the idea that an impressive salary equals success or showing emotion at work is unprofessional, so, maybe it’s true — we could learn a lot about success from a psychopath.

On the flip side, while these traits have the potential to lead to fantastical financial and business success in aggressively capitalist societies, that doesn’t make them inherently good. Now more than ever seems to be a time where we need to cultivate harmony, compassion and vulnerability for all people regardless of individual status, label or identity.

“It isn’t hard to convince someone you love them if you know what they want to hear”

An eyebrow raising sentence from everyone’s favourite cute psychopath, You’s Joe Goldberg. It is wonderfully inclusive to change the narrative on psychopathy but surely there’s a reason for its fierce reputation. Maybe Dr. Mallet was right in that the psychopath is always a sneaky snake, ready to pounce and sink their psychopathic poison into our blood.

Manipulation is one of the terms we regularly hear associated with psychopathy. If psychopaths are prone to manipulating others, it can be argued that simple survival instincts mean non psychopathic individuals want to protect themselves and society from such behaviour. However, by perpetuating the hype of how dangerous psychopaths are, we just come back to an earlier point made in this article that the collective ostracises the psychopath and therefore impacts their ability to comply with social norms.

Hug your local psychopath

It seems that one of the prevailing mainstream perspectives on psychopathy is that a psychopath is someone evil: they were born evil; they are evil, and they’ll die evil. Hopefully you’ll now join me in disagreeing with that sentiment and see psychopathy as a complex mental health issue where everyone experiencing it is different and deserves to have the chance to be defined beyond a label.

No one is innately criminal or violent. While yes, there are links between criminality, violence and psychopathy, it’s worth remembering that we live in a time of mass media consumption that loves to sensationalise. The need to sell and to exaggerate often win over the need to be patient, analyse and truly understand complex parts of the human experience.

Psychology’s flirtations with neuroscience have revealed fascinating results: the brain, what a non-scientist would likely assume is a fixed and unchangeable organ, does and can change. Our brains are individual and through theories of neuroplasticity we can understand the vitality of our social environment on our brain and therefore behaviour. Psychopaths cannot be excluded from this.

Psychology and sociology are working to explore links between criminality and disadvantage or oppression. If criminality is linked to psychopathy, we must ask why, and be prepared to look at an individual’s history and their social environment.

Frankly, many of the accusations thrown at psychopaths do not work for neurodiverse people. Whether it’s an anxious person unable to understand why their habits, born from their anxiety, frustrate their travel buddy or a psychopath who — as Dr. Newman believes — can’t recognise their words or behaviour has upset someone until much later, the world can be a confusing puzzle for those of us who do not fit neatly into the expected norm.

In expanding compassion and understanding to others regardless of what condition or disorder they may have, we can be instruments of change. Once we look to others and try to understand them, we deconstruct labels that lead to marginalisation and instead, we can bring people together by saying: you are not alone.

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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In Russia in 1917, imperialism was a tangible force in everyday life. To be conscripted into the military and sent away, to have one’s grain requisitioned for the front, to find one’s work intensified for the demands of and discipline of war manufacture – these were the experiences of the Great War for those in the popular classes, and it was the political acumen of the Bolsheviks to articulate these experiences to the problem of imperialism. Indeed, the key political positions adopted by Lenin and the rest of the party throughout 1917 were based, to varying degrees, on their view of the imperialist character of the war and their consequent immovable opposition to it. It was for this reason that the Soviets, and not the Provisional Government and its participants, could continue to hold legitimacy in a situation of dual power. This accounted for the Bolshevik emphasis on organizing soldiers, which proved decisive time and time again – in the July Days, during the Kornilov Affair, and finally in October. And it was no coincidence that already in 1914 Lenin smelled crisis, no doubt understanding the link between the 1905 Russian Revolution and the Russo-Japanese War that preceded it.

Elsewhere in Europe, of course, the first World War had already revealed the limitations of a certain, literal, kind of inter-nationalism. Whereas communist revolution was understood by Marx and Engels to be a world phenomenon, and the proletariat a universal class, the proletariat was itself also carved up by nation, mirroring the histories that had produced national capitalist classes in Western Europe and situating their political strategies at the level of the nation state. The First and Second Internationals were ways of coördinating these various national proletarian parties, but the tension between a world political project and the self-consciously national character of its supposed subject would persist. This led, as José Aricó writes, to:

an ever deeper breach in the socialist movement between a formal internationalism and de facto everyday nationalism. Thus, the “universality” of the proletariat was always translated into seeing, whether consciously or not, particular “national” centres – wherever the working masses’ revolutionary energies were most concentrated – as the home of the class’s universal attributes: first in England, then in France, after that in Germany and finally in Russia. 1

Marx himself would increasingly question this way of thinking the relation between the national and the universal, which carried the remnants of a Hegelian philosophy of history, by drawing in particular on analyses of Ireland’s colonial relationship to England and the implications of this relationship for class struggle in both places. 2 Nevertheless, by 1914 the predominance of an uncritical practical nationalism in the Second International led to the extensive rationalizing of social-democratic support for imperialist violence, according to which individual capitalist states, owing to their supposed historical importance, were to be defended in the name of historically progressive class struggle: support for the war in Germany could be thought as a struggle against the reactionary force of Tsarism, France’s opposition to Germany as a “Defense of the Republic!” against the backward step of German feudalism, etc.

If Russia would eventually be thought as the individual case demonstrating the universal possibility of proletarian revolution, this was by no means so before or during 1917. Ironically, the fact that even Russian revolutionaries understood their country to be “backward” may have prevented them from the mistake of myopically seeing their potential revolutionary victory as the fulfillment of an epochal world-historical necessity that would by itself emancipate all humanity. On the contrary, a non-investment in nationality was the basis for Lenin’s ability to develop a strategic conception of imperialism in which the proletariat had no reason to take sides among competing powers. Lenin theorized imperialism as a conflict stemming from the concentration and centralization of capital in which states had become so beholden to their national monopoly capitalists that they would wage war directly as part of the struggle for new markets, resources, and sites for capital export. Thus, the Great War presented an opportunity: intracapitalist conflict would create the kinds of crises that would allow proletarian parties to turn “imperialist war into civil war.” In other words, imperialism had to be understood by its effects on the terrain of various national class struggles and the intensification of those struggles in all nations; the working classes would do better to cheer on the defeat of their own ruling classes than to support a war that could only be for capital, with workers and peasants as grist for the bloody mill. Indeed, even after the success of the February Revolution, and to the indispensable political benefit of the Bolsheviks, Lenin would hold this line, arguing that, “The slightest concession to revolutionary defencism is a betrayal of socialism, a complete renunciation of internationalism, no matter by what fine phrases and ‘practical’ considerations it may be justified.” 3

t was during the Great War, then, that two tendencies of internationalism, as distinct responses to the imperialist character of capitalism, would clarify themselves within the workers’ movement: first, the inter-nationalism whose nationalist underpinnings had paradoxically created complicity with the imperialist war, and second, what Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call an “antinationalist” internationalism, according to which

internationalism was the will of an active mass subject that recognized that the nation-states were key agents of capitalist exploitation and that the multitude was continually drafted to fight their senseless wars – in short, that the nation-state was a political form whose contradictions could not be subsumed and sublimated but only destroyed. International solidarity was really a project for the destruction of the nation-state and the construction of a new global community. 4

In this latter view, an internationalism opposed to imperialism should go beyond mirroring its form as a chain of nations; such was the view of Lenin, situated precisely at the latter’s weak link, where the contradictory phenomena of class struggle, political crisis, and international strife would condense into one of the 20th century’s first proletarian revolutionary ruptures. By recognizing imperialism as a phenomenon distinct but inseparable from capitalism tout court, the Bolsheviks could take into account its real effects on the relation of class forces in the conjuncture, and develop an anti-war political position that few others were willing to take.

The malleable relationship between these two conceptions of internationalism and the question of imperialism would come into play repeatedly throughout the rest of the century. But curiously, the effect of this intervening time that has given us our present has been to render the concepts of imperialism and internationalism opaque. This is not to say that imperialism itself is absent for the workers of the world; those facing drone strikes or military occupation daily, those crushed under the weight of their governments’ sovereign debts or foreign sanctions, the soldiers continually drawn into its wars, and those who risk life to cross or be detained at borders, among many others, all certainly live the existence of imperialism. But to actually re-conceptualize the specificity of this existence, and to furthermore pose a strategic and internationalist response, would mean to think together about what is at work in all of these experiences. If imperialism today is irreducible to any single phenomenon (even a massive phenomenon on the scale of a World War), then this is because it appears at once both ubiquitous and dispersed. How then to account today for the history that has amplified imperialism while making it all the more difficult to define?

(Continue Reading)

#politics #th #viewpoint magazine #economics #capitalism #socialism #globalization #imperialism #worker exploitation

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fowlerconnor1991 · 4 years

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Reiki Therapy Dallas Astounding Tricks

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Can Anyone Learn To Do Reiki

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Reiki Healing Tucson

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#Reiki Therapy Dallas Astounding Tricks #Reiki Healing Evidence

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metamodel · 5 years

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Death and Revival Revisited

The End is the Beginning is the End, as Billy Corgan suggests on the soundtrack to (what I feel is the unjustly maligned) Batman Forever. I had way too much “decline and rebirth” material to fit in the last issue, so I'll continue to follow that seam for a while. (You'll find that downturn and revival is a recurring, uh, theme here at Recurring Thing.)

After returning to design after a year away, I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed™. This is another one of my updates on restarting a creative practice (which I’m calling Studio Thing), plus a dose of cultural and design commentary.

(If someone’s forwarded this thing to you in the hope you’ll find it interesting, you can subscribe here to secure my everlasting love. And please, pass it on if you think it might be of interest to anyone.)

🔂🧟‍♀️ The eternal return of zombie-centred design

Some follow-up on that evergreen topic of what comes after human-centred design: at TEDxSydney I delightedly crossed paths with fellow innovation veteran Carli Leimbach, who’s been thinking about “earth-centred design” as a corrective to anthropocentrism. I’m intrigued. She’s run an initial workshop with some like-minded people, and I’ll keep tabs on her progress.

In other more-than-human news, Anne Galloway recently posted her talk at IndiaHCI 2018, “Designing with, and for, the more-than human”. I’ve been following Anne’s work for a long time, from when the Internet of Things was called “pervasive computing”, to her more recent work in Aotearoa about sheep. For Anne, more-than-human-centred design means:

“Acknowledging that human beings are not the be-all and end-all.”

“Accepting our vulnerability, acting with humility and valuing our interdependency.”

“Living with the world, not against it.”

Recommended. Also interesting is the “more-than-human design research roll-call” she recently initiated on Twitter. Follow this link if you want to get in touch with people who are active on the topic, at least in academic circles — some familiar names pop up.

🥪🤮 The alternative to curiosity is… hard to swallow

I’ve just wrapped up my NEIS coursework, and to celebrate I want to recount a story about my teacher Jason that also demonstrates why I’m so glad I decided to sign up for this microbusiness training and mentoring program.

A few years ago, Jason was the director of training at a large catering company which had a significant focus on healthcare facilities such as nursing homes. To get a feel for the training needs of his workforce, he decided to tour their workplaces, immersing himself in their day-to-day work. (His CEO was frankly a little surprised by this — as is the case with many sectors, it was uncommon for management to visit the frontlines. In fact, when he urged the Head of Care at one aged care facility to tour the frontlines of her own operation with him, the staff didn't recognise her, and assumed she was a visitor. Yikes.)

While working with kitchen staff in one nursing home, Jason noticed that one resident, a lone old woman, always ordered the same dish: a single salmon sandwich. Intrigued, he asked the staff about this, and they shrugged. “She must like it,” was the reply.

The next day, Jason decided to have lunch with her. After a pleasant meal together, he couldn't contain himself.

“Betty, I've noticed that you always order a salmon sandwich,” he said. (I love that he still remembers her name.) “I don't mean to pry, but, uh, why is that?”

She looked at him for a second.

“It's because I'm afraid,” Betty whispered.

It turned out that Betty had dysphagia — a problem with her pharynx or oesophagus that made swallowing difficult — and was terrified that if she admitted this, she would be placed on the puréed diet of an invalid. Over time, she'd gotten used to salmon sandwiches as the one meal she knew could swallow without issue. And because of her fears, that's all she ate.

“Betty, how long have you been eating salmon sandwiches as your only meal?” Jason asked.

“Two years.” So basically, a resident had been potentially malnourishing herself for years because the systems around providing and talking about choices under this regime of care were broken.

After setting her up with a more appropriate (and still chewable) set of diet choices, Jason decided to consult with dysphagia experts and patients like Betty to create a unit of training about these kinds of patient needs, aimed at preventing such system breakdowns. Everyone at their client nursing homes could attend. The aged-care nurses who came were flummoxed, telling their Head of Care, “Why are we only hearing about these kinds of problems and solutions from the catering guy? No offence, Jason, but seriously, WTF?”

In the midst of such regimented systems, where industrial efficiency often erases the possibility of supple action or even humane behaviour, I’m grateful that compassionate minds like Jason’s exist. When curiosity seems like it's at death’s door, people like him arrive to revive it.

The reveal: I was initially pretty skeptical about doing the course under Jason because before classes started, I'd gleaned that he’d spent most of his career managing McDonald’s restaurants. It turns out that my fears were misplaced, because I got a lot out of his teaching. While I really don't share his interest in large food systems, either in experiencing them as a customer nor in their general industrial impact on the world, I'm glad there are people like him enmeshed in such forbidding places, trying to make them more sensitive, responsive and just.

👹👽 First and Last Men

When’s the right time to write a requiem for the human species?

The other night I had the pleasure of experiencing the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s First and Last Men, a live symphonic and film adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s seminal 1930 sf novel of future history, narrated by that alien god who lives among us, Tilda Swinton.

(I only knew the Stapledon novel by reputation, and Jóhannsson from his film scores, but was recently prodded to see this production when I watched Philip Kaufmann’s excellent 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In a passing exchange that you’d easily miss, two characters chat about their reading habits, and Stapledon’s work is mentioned. More on this later. Intrigued, I pounced on the Jóhannsson version when it arrived in Sydney as part of the Vivid Festival.)

Jóhannsson only uses the last part of Stapledon’s immense story, which starts in the 20th Century and spans the next two billion years. This focus on the last of eighteen successive human species summons a particularly elegiac mood. Responding to the eventual extinction of life on Earth, humans have genetically re-engineered themselves for life on Neptune, and it is these highly advanced Neptunian humans, astonishing in their animalistic diversity, 20-year pregnancies and 2000-year childhoods, for whom Swinton speaks with such characteristically icy dignity. (My god: that voice.)

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As the camera slowly pans across a series of Yugoslavian Stalinist monuments (you probably know the ones — they recently came into vogue online in the last wave of ruin porn), we cycle through glassy sheets of what anticipatory mourning sounds like: slow arpeggios, and vocals that alternate between the wonderful anonymity of wind instruments and the mewling of cats. (I want to celebrate the two vocalists precisely because they didn’t call attention to themselves: they were exemplary orchestral players.)

The mood is well-earned: despite all the ingenuity and adaptability of these far-future humans, we discover that a cascade of supernovas has triggered our final extinction. Manned interstellar spaceflight — that mainstay of most sf — is revealed as madness, reducing humans at their technological, technological and ethical peak to nihilistic despair. And as the ever-warming climate of Neptune slowly wreaks havoc on their awesome civilisation, the only thing these “Last Men” can do is make telepathic contact with the past — the conceit that enables Tilda Swinton to narrate the tale for us — as they wait for the end.

It’s uncanny how much this story from 1930 resonates with our slowly unfolding climate change disaster. And now that the worst seems inevitable, the intense melancholy of Jóhannsson’s First and Last Men feels fitting — a necessary alternative to either denial or relentless panic. But beyond this, I’m impressed by the supreme ambivalence of Jóhannsson’s take. He makes the Last Men as dignified and magisterial as they are aloof, and their vaunted supremacy is a mixture of authentic maturity and our own sneaking suspicion that in their immortal, genetically-designed perfection, these final humans have lost the capacity to take unexpected action. It’s profoundly sympathetic.

This suggests to me that having a post-human-centred design orientation is very far from being misanthropic. Perhaps we just need to stop pretending that empathy is ever completely possible — who can truly pretend to empathise with a post-human species two billion years in the future, let alone our strange and often unknowable fellow lifeforms, be they vertebrate, invertebrate or botanical? — and instead extend a generalised (and non-paternalistic) sympathy to our neighbours and ourselves. Sympathy is okay. Yes, our situation can be pegged to a combination of pathetic ignorance, shortsighted greed and genuine moustache-twirling villainy. And we are not the centre of the universe. But like others, we are still a species that deserves a dignified mourning.

🦸🏼‍♂️☄️ Can only a God save us now?

Stapledon’s 1930s future-superhumans continue to haunt me.

When I was teaching art to six-year-olds last year, I did a unit on comics, tracing the emergence of costumed superheroes to the ’30s.

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“Why do you think superheroes appeared then?” I asked the class. “What was going on?”

“IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD WARS!” said one student. “MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WERE DYING!” called out another. “My great-grandmother met my great-grandfather in a Spanish flu hospital during World War I!” came another, very-relevant non-sequitur. (It’s easily forgotten that the 1918 influenza outbreak killed at least 50 million people. And yes, these kids are amazing, and publicly funded education is the fucking best.)

Out of the despair of modernity — mechanised mass slaughter and earth shattering pandemics enabled by the globalisation of capitalist industry — we cried out for salvation. Yes, there are many reactionary underpinnings to our superheroic imaginaries (the above image is just the most obvious), but their basis in real trauma behooves us to at least be sympathetic their emergence. We need to take fantasies of supermen seriously (and critically), rather than simply dismissing them as misguided or ridiculous because they’re rather obviously dodgy as fuck. And similarly, we need to take populism seriously.

Make no mistake: while I’m fascinated by downturn and revival narratives, they’re more often than not pretty terrifying: “Make America Great Again” is the clearest contemporary example. And when famed philosopher Martin Heidegger looked forward to “a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety,” he was talking about Adolf Hitler. Don’t look away. Stay and fight in the mud.

🚀🌎 Refuge

Besides talking to the past, the final act of desperation of the Last Men was to transmit proto-organic matter into space, designing it to reassemble on favourable ground in a direction towards intelligent life. (Listening to Tilda Swinton intone gravely about “the Great Dissemination” was just too deliciously weird.) Of course, this is the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the story that prompted me to explore First and Last Men in the first place: we are being invaded by relentless pod-people, growing out of seeds assembled from “living threads that float on the stellar winds.”

[caption align="alignnone" width="980"]

Not just taking our jobs — they're stealing Jeff Goldblum's life![/caption]

Too delicious.

Yours in ambivalence,

Ben

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scepticaladventure · 7 years

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9 Light - Some Important Background 18Aug17

Introduction

We observe the Universe, and physics within the Universe, and we try to make sense of it. There is often tension between our natural impression of the physical world and what our models and mathematical logic tell us.

Consider the most important of our senses – sight. Our eyes detect photons of light and our brain composes this information into a visualization of the world around us. That becomes our subjective perceived reality.

Nearly all the information we receive about the Universe arrives in the form of electromagnetic radiation (which I will loosely refer to as ‘light’).

However, light takes time to travel between its source and our eyes (or other detectors such as cameras). Hence all the information we are receiving is already old. We see things not as they are, but as they were when the light was emitted. Which can be a considerable time ago. Which means that we are seeing the objects when they were much younger than they are “now”. In other words, we are seeing back in time to what they looked like then.

Light from the sun takes nearly ten minutes to reach us. Light from the nearest star about 4 years. Light from the nearest spiral galaxy (Andromeda) is about 2 million years old (but Andromeda is becoming closer at about 110 km/sec). Light from distant galaxies and quasars can be billions of years old. In fact our telescopes can see light (microwaves actually) that is so old it originated at the time the early universe became transparent enough for light to travel at all.

Imagine we are at the centre of concentric shells, rather like an infinite onion. At any one moment, we are receiving light from all these shells, but the bigger the shell from which the light originated, the older the information. So what we are seeing is a complete sample of history stretching back over billions of years.

It would be mind boggling exercise to try to reimagine our mental model of what the universe is really like “now” everywhere. The only way I can think to tackle this would be some sort of computerized animation.

Even then there are a range of other distortions to contend with. All the colors we see are affected by the relative speeds between us and the sources of the light. And light is bent by gravity, so some of what we see is not where we think it is. There are other distortions as well, including relativistic distortions. So, in short, what we see is only approximately true. Believing what we see works well for most purposes on everyday earth but it works less well on cosmological time and distance scales.

Light is vital to our Perception of Nature

Electromagnetic radiation is by far the main medium through which we receive information about the rest of the universe. We also receive some information from comets, meteorites, sub-atomic particles, neutrinos and possibly even some gravitational waves, but these sources pale into insignificance compared to the information received from light in all its forms (gamma rays, x-rays, visible light, microwaves, radio waves).

Since we rely so heavily on this form of information it is a concern that the nature of light has perplexed mankind for centuries, and is still causing trouble today.

Hundreds of humanity’s greatest minds have grappled with the nature of light. (Newton, Huygens, Fresnel, Fizeau, Young, Michelson, Einstein, Dirac … the list goes on).

At the same time the topic is still taught and described quite badly, perpetuating endless confusion. Conceptual errors are perpetuated with abandon. For example, radio ways are shown as a set of rings radiating out from the antenna like water ripples in a pond. If this were true then they would lose energy and hence change frequency with increasing distance from source.

Another example: It is widely taught that Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect shows that light must exist as quantized packets of energy and that only certain energy levels are possible. I think the equation e = h x frequency (where h is Planck’s constant) does not say this at all. The frequency can be any integral number or any fraction in between. The confusion arises because photons are commonly created by electrons moving between quantized energy levels in atoms, and photons are commonly detected by physical systems which are also quantized. But if a photon arrives which does not have exactly one of these quantised levels of energy and is absorbed, the difference simply ends up in the kinetic energy of the detector. Or so it seems to me.

The Early Experimenters

Most of the progress in gathering evidence about light has been achieved since the middle of the 17th century. Galileo Galilei thought that light must have a finite speed of travel and tried to measure this speed. But he had no idea how enormously fast light travelled and did not have the means to cope with this.

Sir Isaac Newton was born in the year that Galileo died (1642 – which was also the year the English Civil War started and Abel Tasman discovered Tasmania). As well as co-inventing calculus, explaining gravity and the laws of motion, Newton conducted numerous experiments on light, taking advantages of progress in glass, lens and prism manufacturing techniques. I think Newton is still the greatest physicist ever.

In experiment #42 Newton separated white sunlight into a spectrum of colors. With the aid of a second prism he turned the spectrum back into white light. The precise paths of the beams in his experiments convinced him that light was “corpuscular” in nature. He argued that if light was a wave then it would tend to spread out more.

Other famous scientists of the day (e.g. Huygens) formed an opinion that light was more akin to a water wave. They based this opinion on many experiments with light that demonstrated various diffraction and refraction effects.

Newton’s view dominated due to his immense reputation, but as more and more refraction and diffraction experiments were conducted (e.g. by Fresnel, Brewster, Snell, Stokes, Hertz, Young, Rayleigh etc) light became to be thought of as an electromagnetic wave.

The Wave Model

The model that emerged was that light is a transverse sinusoidal electro-magnetic wave, with magnetic components orthogonal to the electric components. This accorded well with the electromagnetic field equations developed by James Clerk Maxwell.

Light demonstrates a full variety of polarization properties. A good way to model these properties is to imagine that light consists of two electromagnetic sine waves travelling together with a variable phase angle between them. If the phase angle is zero the light is plane polarized. If the phase angle is 90 degrees then the light exhibits circular polarization. And so on. The resultant wave is the vector sum of the two constituent waves.

Most people are familiar with the effect that if you place one linear polarizing filter at right angles to another, then no light passes through both sheets. But if you place a third sheet between the other two, angled at 45 degrees to both the other two filters, then quite a lot of light does get through. How can adding a third filter result in more light getting through?

The answer is that the light leaving the first filter has two components, each at 45 degrees to the first sheet’s plane of polarization. Hence a fair bit of light lines up reasonably well with the interspersed middle sheet. And the light leaving the middle sheet also has two components, each at 45 degrees to its plane of polarization. Hence a fair bit of the light leaving the interspersed sheet lines up reasonably well with the plane of polarization of the last sheet.

Interesting effects were discovered when light passes through crystals with different refractive indices in different planes (see birefringence). Also when light was reflected or refracted using materials with strong electric or magnetic fields across them (see Faraday effect and Kerr effect).

Young’s Double Slit Experiment

Experiments performed by Thomas Young around 1801 are of special interest. Light passing through one slit produces a diffraction pattern analogously to the pattern a water wave might produce. When passed through two parallel slits and then captured on a screen a classic interference pattern can be observed. This effect persists even if the light intensity is so low that it could be thought of as involving just one photon at a time. More on this later.

The Corpuscular Model Returns

At the start of the 20th century, Albert Einstein and others studied experiments that demonstrated that light could produce free electrons when it struck certain types of metal – the photoelectric effect. But only when the incident light was above a characteristic frequency. This experiment was consistent with light being a sort of particle. It helped to revive the corpuscular concept of light.

Arthur Compton showed that the scattering of light through a cloud of electrons was also consistent with light being corpuscular in nature. There were a lot of scattering experiments going on at the time because the atomic structure of atoms was being discovered largely through scattering experiments (refer e.g. Lord Rutherford).

The “light particle” was soon given a new name - the photon.

Wave Particle Duality

Quantum mechanics was being developed at the same time as the corpuscular theory of light re-emerged, and quantum theories and ideas were extended to light. The wave versus particle argument eventually turned into the view that light was both a wave and a particle, (see Complementarity Principle). What you observed depended on how you observed it.

Furthermore, you could never be exactly sure where a photon would turn up (see Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger Wave equation and Superposition of States).

The wave equation description works well but certain aspects of the model perplexed scientists of the day and have perplexed students of physics ever since. In particular there were many version of Young’s double slit experiments with fast acting shutters covering one or both slits. It turns out that if an experimenter can tell which slit the photons have passed through, the interference pattern vanishes. If it is impossible to determine which slit the photons have passed through, the interference pattern reappears.

It does not matter if the decision to open one slit or the other is made after the photons have left their source – the results are still the same. And if pairs of photons are involved and one of them is forced into adopting a certain state at the point of detection, then the other photons have the equal and opposite states, even though they might be a very long distance away from where their pairs are being detected.

This all led to a variety of convoluted explanations, including the view that the observations were in fact causal factors determining reality. An even more bizarre view is that the different outcomes occur in different universes.

At the same time as all this was going on, a different set of experiments was leading to a radical new approach to understanding the world of physics – Special Relativity. (See an earlier essay in this series.)

The Speed of Light

Waves (water waves, sound waves, waves on a string etc.) typically travel at well-defined speeds in the medium in which they occur. By analogy, it was postulated that light waves must be travelling in an invisible “lumiferous aether” and that this aether filled the whole galaxy (only one galaxy was known at the time) and that light travelled at a well defined speed relative to this aether.

Bradley, Eotvos, Roemer and others showed that telescopes had to lean a little bit one way and then a little bit the other way six months later in order to maintain a fixed image fixed of a distant star. This stellar aberration was interpreted as being caused by the earth moving through the lumiferous aether.

So this should produce a kind of “aether wind”. The speed of light should be faster when it travelling with the wind than if it travelling against the wind. The earth moves quite rapidly in its orbit around the sun. There is a 60 km/sec difference in the velocity of the earth with respect to the “fixed stars” over a six month period due to this movement alone. In addition the surface of the earth is moving quite quickly (about 10 km/sec) due to its own rotation.

In 1886 a famous experiment was carried out in Ohio by Michelson and Morley. They split a beam of light into two paths of equal length but at right angles to each other. The two beams were then recombined and the apparatus was set up to look for interference effects. Light travelling back and forth in a moving medium should take longer to travel if its path lines up with an aether wind than if its path goes across and back the aether wind. (See the swimmer-in-the-stream analogy in an earlier blog).

However, no matter which way the experiment was oriented, no interference effects could be detected. No aether wind or aether wind effects could be found. It became the most famous null experiment in history.

Fizeau measured the speed of light travelling in moving water around a more or less circular path. He sent beams in either direction and looked for small interference effects. He found a small difference in the time of travel (see Sagnac effect), but not nearly as much as if the speed of light was relative to an aether medium through which the earth was moving.

Other ingenious experiments were performed to measure the speed of light. Many of these involved bouncing light off rotating mirrors and suchlike and looking for interference effects. In essence the experimenters were investigating the speed of light over a two-way, back-and-forth path. Some other methods used astronomical approaches. But they all came up with the same answer – about 300 million meters/second (when in a vacuum.)

It did not matter if the source of light is stationary relative to the detection equipment, or whether the source of light is moving towards the detection equipment, or vice versa. The measured or inferred speed of light was always the same. This created an immediate problem – where were the predicted effects of the aether wind?

Some scientists speculated that the earth must drag the aether surrounding it along with it in its heavenly motions. But the evidence from the earlier stellar aberration experiments showed that this could not be the case either.

So the speed of light presented quite a problem.

It was not consistent with the usual behaviour of a wave. Waves ignore the speed of their source and travel at well defined speeds within their particular mediums. If the source is travelling towards the detector, all that happens is that the waves are compressed together. If the source is travelling away from the detector, all that happens is that the waves are stretched out (Doppler shifts).

But if the source is stationary in the medium and the detector is moving then the detected speed of the wave is simply the underlying speed in the medium plus the closing speed of the detector (or minus that speed if the detector is moving away).

The experimenters did not discover these effects for light. They always got the same answer.

Nor is the speed of light consistent with what happens when a particle is emitted. Consider a shell fired from a cannon on a warship. If the warship is approaching the detector, the warship’s speed adds to the speed of the shell. If the detector is approaching the warship then the detector’s speed adds to the measured impact speed of the shell. This sort of thing did not happen for light.

Lorentz, Poincaré and Fitzgerald were some of the famous scientists who struggled to explain the experimental results. Between 1892-1895 Hendrik Lorentz speculated that what was going on was that lengths contracted when the experimental equipment was pushed into an aether headwind. But this did not entirely account for the results. So he speculated that time must also slow down in such circumstances. He developed the notion of “local time”.

Quite clearly, the measurement of speed is intimately involved with the measurement of both distance and time duration. Lorentz imagined that when a measuring experiment was moving through the aether, lengths and times distorted in ways that conspired to always give the same result for the speed of light no matter what the orientation to the supposed aether wind.

Lorentz developed a set of equations (Lorentz transformations for 3 dimensional coordinates plus time, as corrected by Poincaré) so that a description of a physical system in one inertial reference frame could be translated to become a description of the same physical system in another inertial reference frame. The laws of physics and the outcome of experiments held true in both descriptions.

Einstein built on this work to develop his famous theory of Special Relativity. But he did not bother to question or explain why the speed of light seemed to be always the same – he just took it as a starting point assumption for his theory.

Many scientists clung to the aether theory. However, as it seemed that the aether was undetectable and Special Relativity became more and more successful and accepted, the aether theory was slowly and quietly abandoned.

Young’s Double Slit Experiment (again)

Reference Wikipedia:

“The modern double-slit experiment is a demonstration that light and matter can display characteristics of both classically defined waves and particles; moreover, it displays the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum mechanical phenomena.

A simpler form of the double-slit experiment was performed originally by Thomas Young in 1801 (well before quantum mechanics). He believed it demonstrated that the wave theory of light was correct. The experiment belongs to a general class of "double path" experiments, in which a wave is split into two separate waves that later combine into a single wave. Changes in the path lengths of both waves result in a phase shift, creating an interference pattern. Another version is the Mach–Zehnder interferometer, which splits the beam with a mirror.

In the basic version of this experiment, a coherent light source, such as a laser beam, shines on a plate pierced by two parallel slits, and the light passing through the slits is observed on a screen behind the plate. The wave nature of light causes the light waves passing through the two slits to interfere, producing bright and dark bands on the screen, as a result that would not be expected if light consisted of classical particles.

However, the light is always found to be absorbed at the screen at discrete points, as individual particles (not waves), the interference pattern appearing via the varying density of these particle hits on the screen.

Furthermore, versions of the experiment that include detectors at the slits find that each detected photon passes through one slit (as would a classical particle), and not through both slits (as a wave would). Such experiments demonstrate that particles do not form the interference pattern if one detects which slit they pass through. These results demonstrate the principle of wave–particle duality. “

In this author’s view, there is so much amiss with this conventional interpretation of Young’s Double Slit Experiment experiment that it hard to know where to begin. I think the paradox is presented in an unhelpful way and then explained in an unsatisfactory way. It is presented as a clash between a wave theory of light and a particle theory of light, and it concludes by saying that light therefore has wave-particle duality.

Deciding that a photon has “wave-particle duality” seems to satisfy most people, but actually it is just enshrining the problem. Just giving the problem a name and saying “that is just the way it is” doesn’t really resolve the issue, it just sweeps it under the carpet.

In this author’s view, what the experimental evidence is telling us is that light is not a wave and that it is not a particle. Neither is it both at the same time (being careful about what that actually means), or one or the other on a whimsy. It is what it is.

Here is just one of the just one of this author’s complaints about the conventional explanation of the double slit experiment. In my opinion, if you place a detector at one slit or the other and you detect a photon then you have destroyed that photon. Photons can only be detected once. To detect a photon is to destroy it.

A detector screen tells you nothing about the path taken by a photon that manages to arrive at the final screen, other than it has arrived. You have to deduce the path by other means.

Wikipedia again: “The double-slit experiment (and its variations) has become a classic thought experiment for its clarity in expressing the central puzzles of quantum mechanics. Because it demonstrates the fundamental limitation of the ability of an observer to predict experimental results, (the famous physicist and educator) Richard Feynman called it "a phenomenon which is impossible […] to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the mystery [of quantum mechanics].” Feynman was fond of saying that all of quantum mechanics can be gleaned from carefully thinking through the implications of this single experiment.”

There is a class of experiments, known as delayed choice experiments, in which the mode of detection is changed only after the photons have begun their journey. (See Wheeler Delayed Choice Experiments, circa 1980’s – some of these are thought experiments). The results change depending on the method of detection and seem to produce a paradox.

Reference the Wikipedia article on Young’s slit experiment, quoting John Archibald Wheeler from the 1980’s: “Actually, quantum phenomena are neither waves nor particles but are intrinsically undefined until the moment they are measured. In a sense, the British philosopher Bishop Berkeley was right when he asserted two centuries ago "to be is to be perceived."

Wheeler went on to suggest that there is no reality until it is perceived, and that the method of perception must determine the phenomena that gave rise to that perception.

They say that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. So, being eminently qualified, the author proposes to have a go at explaining Young’s Double Slit Experiment. But first he would like to suggest a model for photons based on the evidence of the experiments, Einstein’s Special Relativity and some fresh thinking.

#Speed of Light #Wave-Particle duality #Young's Double Slit Experiment #Photons #Experiments on light #WaveParticleDuality #Young'sDoubleSlitExperiment #ExperimentsonLight

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dillydedalus · 5 years

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what i read in february

check to find out if i defeated my nemesis thomas mann by reading the magic mountain or surrendered to his absolute rule over my unread books shelf

milkman, anna burns this is deeply divisive on the bookish internet apparently with fights over a) whether it’s brilliant or garbage, b) whether it’s difficult, c) whether literary difficulty is a moral issue (with both renouncers-of-milkman and defenders-of-milkman variously taking either side). here’s my lukewarm take: a) it’s good, b) it’s not that difficult but can be frustrating to read, c) it’s not a moral issue, like, obvi. anyway, y’all probably know what this is about (girl in belfast during the troubles finds herself stalked by dangerous paramilitary, gossip & violence abound). i found the decision not to use proper names, either for the characters (narrator is middle sister, other characters are ‘maybe-boyfriend’, ‘wee sisters’, ‘third brother-in-law’, etc) or the setting really interesting - it added both to the conversational feel, the paranoia in the community and the universality of themes like civil violence, paranoia, mistrust, sexual harrassment, pressure to conform etc. 4/5

paradise, a.l. kennedy (uni) idk man this is well-written and especially the writing about drunkenness & the depth of hannah’s addiction & misery (and joy, which kennedy does not avoid) is vivid, but i’m still p meh on it, and it was definitely too long for what it was doing. i’ll add more after the class where we’ll discuss it (update: the class was unfortunately a mess so I’m still ehhh about it) 2.5/5

die verängstigten, dima wannous (tr. from arabic) an english translation, the frightened ones, is coming out some time this year i think. this story is told thru two narratives, one by sulaima, a syrian woman with anxiety living in damascus, whose brother has been disappeared by the regime and whose lover nassim has fled the country, and one thru chapters of the unfinished novel nassim leaves behind for sulaima, narrated by a girl called salma, whose life story mirrors sulaima’s own. this is a very interesting set-up, and i think both the narrative structure and the combination of anxiety as a psychological illness and anxiety/paranoia as a social state caused by political repression & violence were really interesting, but sometimes the book felt a bit muddled and confusing to me. 3/5

der schlaf der gerechten, wolfgang hilbig (the sleep of the righteous) this is a collection of connected short stories set in a mining town in east germany - the first 4 stories follow the narrator figure (who’s not necessarily the same, but very similar throughout all stories) as a child and young adult, growing up in a town almost without men after world war 2, whereas the last 3 describe the narrator’s return to this town as an adult after reunification, struggling with his own and east germany’s past. i ADORED the first stories - they are insanely good, dark, atmospheric, beautifully written and so evocative of the materiality of this town, the ash, the coal, moulding fruit, gritty, grimy, ash coating everything (the blurb on the back says that your hands will come away from the pages stained with soot, and i feel that). the second set is good too, but it moves away from that sensual evocation which i loved so much. 4/5

the golden fool (tawny man #2), robin hobb y’all i really tried to read this one slowly, and it worked for four days but then i decided that i might as well read read the entire second half in one day so. anyway this is hard to talk about w/o spoiling a lot but robin hobb truly is the queen of character writing. loved the elliania plot, loved the coterie forming, loved the bingtown delegation, loved fitz and the fool having Feelings Drama (made me Big Sad tho - also fitz is my son & all but good god he can be a dumbass). i feel like this one’s mostly setting everything up for fool’s fate but it’s good. 4/5

the sixth extinction: an unnatural history, elizabeth kolbert engaging & accessible nonfiction book about extinction, including both past extinction events, the history of science about extinction and focusing on the current extinction event (with several example species, from frogs to rhinos) mostly caused by humans fucking everything up. 3/5

the course of the heart, m john harrison tbh i just didn’t get it.... maybe i’m not versed enough in gnosticism & weird esoteric shit. anyway, this is about three friends haunted by some spiritual ritual (lol) they held while at uni with a sinister guy called yaxley. you never find out what they actually did, but they construct a whole mythology about it that i uh. didn’t get. tbh i pretty much checked out halfway thru. 1.5/5

barracoon: the story of the last “black cargo”, zora neale hurston (audio) interesting & sad & really touching account of cudjo lewis, one of the last africans to be shipped to america as slaves, mainly made up of his own narrative, collected & put together by hurston. some interesting background info about how the book came to be as well. 3/5

how to survive a plague, david france in-depth account of the aids epidemic in the us, especially in new york, combining personal stories, insight into aids activism, scientific progress (and for most of the book, lack thereof) and staggering political neglect and failure. well-written, informative and well-explained but (obviously) very emotionally draining. 4/5

fool’s fate (the tawny man #3), robin hobb lmao i love emotionally dying about robin hobb books. anyway A LOT happens in this one & i was very emotional about most of it but most emotional about fitzchivalry farseer (idiot, son boy, changer) and the fool (beloved!) and my man burrich (lol say the words ‘heart of the pack’ & i’m already overwhelmed). anyway this was a very epic & hardcore emotional conclusion to this series & robin hobb may make me cry any time she wishes. 4/5, series rating 4.5/5

what it means when a man falls from the sky, lesley nneka arimah collection of short stories mostly set in nigeria and in the us. some of the stories are magical realist-y, some are more realist, but almost all are concerned with familial bonds and bondage, the complicated relationships between parents and children. the stories are well-executed and precisely told, but while i liked quite a few of the stories (esp. the title story) i just didn’t feel particularly strongly about most of them. 3/5

heimsuchung, jenny erpenbeck (visitation) another interesting take on 20th century german history from erpenbeck - this one is centred around a house by a lake in brandenburg & told thru the various people connected to the house over the years & decades, owners, visitors, neighbours, etc. it’s an interesting concept & well-executed & clever & erpenbeck can write but it kinda paled for me in comparison to her aller tage abend, which does a similar thing in very different way. 3/5

currently reading: look okay i have Not finished the magic mountain but i am still reading it so i still have a chance of defeating mann in single combat. i’m actually kinda liking it but it’s A Lot, so i’m taking it slow. also call me zebra which i am v v...... unsure about??

#the books i read #i have three (3!) gigantic thomas mann books on unread shelf & they've been there for years #i need a victory here #march is gonna be crazy busy (i also have to. actually write a paper lol.)

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drapeau-rouge · 7 years

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Democratic Socialism

From the Communist Party of Canada’s 38th Central Convention Main Political Report

‘Democratic socialism’ is a dead-end in the working class movement: it is not class-based, anti-capitalist or revolutionary, and its main content is anti-communism. Its most important feature is that it seeks to create an identity that rejects scientific socialism and the reality of socialism in the 20th century.

Like most other social democratic parties, the NDP has been gradually repositioning itself toward the centre of the bourgeois political spectrum, jettisoning traditional social democratic policies and any hint of support for anti-war positions or opposition to NATO. It has distanced itself from the labour movement and instead appealed to the ‘middle class’ of professionals and small business people (i.e., the petty bourgeoisie), while accommodating the interests of monopoly capital.

In the disastrous 2014 Ontario provincial election campaign, the NDP was out-maneuvered and out-flanked by the Liberals. Similarly, the NDP lost when it campaigned from the right in the 2013 provincial elections in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

The story was somewhat different in the May 2015 election in Alberta, where the right-wing was divided between the Conservatives and the Wild Rose party. NDP leader Rachel Notley was elected on a platform including increases to the minimum wage, higher oil royalties and corporate taxes, more social spending, and other relatively progressive promises to offset the impact of falling oil prices. Some had hoped that the federal NDP might adopt a similar platform.

But instead, the Mulcair leadership kept to its strategy of attempting to marginalize the Liberals by moving further to the right. The conclusion the NDP leadership drew from the 2011 campaign and recent provincial elections was to press their case harder with Bay Street, focusing on balanced budgets and other austerity measures to prove their credentials as a reliable partner for Big Business and an electoral alternative to the Liberals and Tories.

Their aim was to replace the Liberals, who had been decimated in 2011, as the liberal bower of state monopoly capitalism in Canada. The adoption of New Labour policies under Alexa McDonough’s leadership, on top of Broadbent’s efforts to jettison socialism from the NDP’s program and more recently its constitution, had already set the stage for the recreation of the NDP as a party of Big Business with a human face.

Now, the NDP faces an internal crisis. While the media campaign for a change of leader, prominent NDPers like Ontario MPP Cheri DiNovo, a left social democrat, are demanding a sharp change in direction. In a December 1, 2015 interview with the Toronto Star DiNovo said the party should reverse course, abandon austerity and embrace ‘democratic socialism’ a la US Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. “We have to remember who the hell we are,” she said, “And honestly, Canada’s waiting.”

But unlike the US or Britain, Canada has a strong Liberal Party which also has ties to the labour movement, and chameleon-like abilities to campaign from the left and govern from the right. The Liberals emerged in the federal election like a phoenix, recast as the agent of progressive change, the defender of democracy, civil and social rights, the provider of jobs and social security, and the party to pull Canada back from the carnage of war. This was the NDP’s promise in years past; the roles appeared to reverse in a political sleight of hand, leading many voters to opt for the Liberals.

DiNovo’s call for a return to ‘democratic socialism’ is the same demand that fuelled the birth of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, the progressive social democratic trend in the US Democratic Party, and the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party. This reaction to the rightward shift of traditional social democratic parties reflects a desire to turn back the clock, to the “good old” days when social democracy was supposedly rooted in the labour movement and claimed to champion the workers’ struggles against the employers, for peace and disarmament, and for some form of socialism.

What the supporters of this trend do not acknowledge is that the history of social democracy in Canada, especially since 1945, is intertwined with vicious anti-communism and class collaboration, leading slowly but surely to the right-hand side of capital, with aspirations to govern on their behalf. That is the fatal flaw of social democracy, and it cannot be rectified by new incarnations of social reformism.

The proof, of course, is in the practice, and the best example is the tragedy of Greece, where Syriza sold out the working class and the country to the European banks and the European Union. After promising to stand up to the Atroika” in the July 2015 referendum, Syriza immediately surrendered, imposing even worse austerity measures.

The consequences were immediate and catastrophic: new cuts to wages, pensions and living standards, privatization of public services and assets, a new tax load on the working class and unemployed. The grip of the EU and the German banks was strengthened, along with the hand of reaction and the fascist Golden Dawn party. Attacks intensified on the Communist Party of Greece, and on the labour and people’s movements. In fact, Syriza has been an important vehicle for the European Union and the European banks to impose austerity and control over the Greek people.

In Canada, the first response of the ‘democratic left’ was to defend Syriza, and to call on the left forces to withhold all criticism of their actions. The main reason for this disgraceful position was that the ‘democratic left’ had advocated Syriza as a model of a ‘democratic socialist party’ to socialist minded Canadians who were fed up with the NDP. When the terrible truth of Syriza’s actions were splashed across the media, the >democratic’ socialists had little to say.

Podemos – capitalizing on the genuine rage of the Spanish people against national inequalities and the implementation of EU austerity ‘diktats’ became the third-largest party after the 2015 elections. But like Greece’s Syriza, post-election Podemos is neither against NATO nor the EU. In fact, since Spain’s continued membership in the EU is a key element of the corporate attack against the Spanish peoples, Podemos aids monopoly capital by channelling opposition against the established order into a strategy that does not challenge the ruling class.

‘Democratic socialism’ has always been the alternative to scientific socialism, not the alternative to capitalism. It is a response to the exposure of traditional social democratic parties as agents of capitalism, austerity and war. It’s also a response to widespread disenchantment with the traditional bourgeois parties which increasingly deliver the same right-wing policies once elected.

It also reinforces illusions about ‘fixing’ or ‘humanizing’ capitalism. Keynesian policies of economic stimulus can provide some temporary relief to the worst effects of capitalism, but cannot challenge capitalist control of the main levers of the economy. The notion that somehow, the prosperity of past capitalist economic booms can be recaptured for workers in the future, is wishful and dangerous thinking that will disarm the working class. In the period ahead, the struggle will be sharper and the stakes higher.

A new illusion that accompanies ‘democratic socialism’ is the notion that ‘people’s democracy’ and ‘power from below’ can overcome state monopoly control of the economy, and the private ownership of the means of production, without fundamentally challenging capitalism. This is a pipe dream, not reality. Working people face an enormous struggle, which cannot succeed without winning the fight for public and social ownership of the main levers of the economy, and for working class power.

This is why ‘democratic socialism’ is a dead-end in the working class movement: it is not class-based, anti-capitalist or revolutionary, and its main content is anti-communism. Its most important feature is that it seeks to create an identity that rejects scientific socialism and the reality of socialism in the 20th century. For this reason it is supported or at least tolerated by capitalist interests in Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not to say, however, that ‘democratic socialism’ will quickly disappear as a trend in social democratic ideology.

In Canada, as in other capitalist countries, anti-communism has been ingrained in the working class and youth for generations. While economic crises have shaken public faith in the immortality of capitalism, the system has stepped up its anti-communist offensive since 1990 — an ideological inoculation against scientific socialism and revolutionary transformation. Part of this inoculation is the creation of a Ademocratic socialism” that can coexist with capitalism. Such a strategic concept is useless to the working class, but it is very useful to capitalism as a diversion for working people in search of real and fundamental change.

The Communist Party of Greece wrote about this some years ago, comparing social democracy and ‘democratic socialism’ as an ideological spider-web, from which workers can be extricated only by the patient political work of Communists.

This is certainly the case in Canada today where anti-communism is the biggest single obstacle to winning workers to the ranks of the Communist Party, and to building unity of the left and progressive forces. This points to the need for a lot more work on the ideological front, with respect to the role and history of the CPC, the need for fundamental and revolutionary change, the struggle for class oriented change and for socialism, and the fight for unity of the left and progressive forces in Canada.

The “Leap Manifesto,” launched as a strategy to tackle the climate change crisis, has been portrayed by some of its supporters as a new, radical version of “democratic socialism.” On the positive side, this manifesto advocates military spending cuts, indigenous sovereignty, higher wages, a shorter workweek, replacing tar sands extraction by a renewable energy program, massive investment in housing, and an end to “corporate trade deals.” However, it does not condemn imperialist wars, and says little about labour rights or police state repression. Instead of advocating state/public ownership of energy and natural resources, it proposes “collective community control of new energy systems.”

Reflecting the anti-communist views of some of its authors, the manifesto does not offer a socialist alternative. Instead, it suggests that capitalism can somehow be pushed back by community control of projects and resources. While we welcome the debate over many important issues raised in the Leap Manifesto, this document is deeply flawed by its refusal to call for an economy democratically owned, controlled and planned by the working class, a change which requires a revolutionary break with capitalism.

At the same time, we work with all those who are willing to fight for the interests of working people, for the cause of peace and against aggression, reaction and war; for democracy, equality, sovereignty. Many of our allies in these daily struggles do not understand or interpret the world in the same way that we do, which is not surprising in a country where working people are surrounded by capitalist media and subject to a bourgeois explanation of the world. But this does not, and should not alter our scientific analysis of the class and social forces at work here and globally, and of our responsibility to weld that analysis onto the working class movement (as Lenin put it a century ago), while working to unite the movements for reform into a powerful common struggle for fundamental and revolutionary transformation.

#Communist Party of Canada

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newslegion-blog1 · 5 years

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U.B.I. WILL MEAN RIGHT-WING AUTHORITARIAN RULE FOREVER

WHAT IS UBI?

Universal Basic Income isn't a new idea but it's getting a lot of airtime lately and winning supporters, especially as the economics are shown to align with what seems like a clear and present social benefit. In short U.B.I. means everyone in the country receives a minimum baseline income, from the government, to take care of the necessities of life. It's usually presented as no-strings attached i.e. available for all, regardless of wealth or employment status and it's separate to provisions like welfare, social security, disability allowance. The economics square because it's fundamentally an injection into the circular flow, stimulating and stabilising local business, rents, high street spending, etc. Traditionally UBI has been advocated by the left wing as an egalitarian measure liberating the working class from poverty and resisted by the right as a handout encouraging the poor to refuse necessary menial jobs, contrary to the principles of austerity.

Now, democracy can be a way to elect fair representative government and to an extent this is what it has brought about in most of the industrialised world. For this dynamic to continue working, however, against pressure from mature crony capitalism, the population must remain politically ‘woke’ to their best interests. Anything less than an educated - and vigilant - population results in vast swathes of the voter public susceptible to propaganda. This tends to be controlled by authority and corporate money, dangerous if left unchecked.

DEMOCRACY UNDER SIEGE

Authoritarian vested interests will always be on the look out for ways to consolidate power. Corporations are immortal (in a sense) so work their profit agenda with patient manipulation, fixing on populism as an effective tool to condition the most naive sections of society via its worst instincts, to vote as best suits the agenda of vested interests. This can include voting away everyone's rights, your freedom included.

The potential for a dictatorship of the voting majority is a systemic vulnerability and it's inherent to universal suffrage. Individual freedom comes with risk, including the potential to be suckered into a mobthink that enables authoritarians to make evil laws through apparently benign democratic institutions. This is currently playing out in the Brexit supporting working classes in the UK who're enabling a national erosion of free movement and human rights. Ironically they'll be first to suffer the worst of the long-term consequences just as having been duped by the Conservatives in 2010 ended up being a vote for austerity and the corrosion of public services on which they most relied for quality of day to day life.

Frustrating dupes indeed yet unlikely to understand let alone thank anyone trying to point this out. To date the entrenched interests have been content to imperfectly but effectively exploit the credibility and docility of the electorate, admitting of periods of push back (i.e. left wing governments). This, flattered by the advance of technology, has amounted to a general progress for the middle class and, until the 2008 crash, the impression of a decade on decade improvement for the working classes too. The unbroken uptrend ended in the post-2008 recession.

The terrible twins austerity and populism have been the risky but audacious response of an establishment whose priority is continued shielding of their institutions and individuals from the consequences of the 2008 economic crisis. At some point there will be a voter backlash that brings a genuinely left wing anti-establishment government into power. UBI will be on the agenda, an obvious antidote to austerity, and it'll be a temptation for any benign government trying to protect and compensate those voters responsible for putting them in power. UBI will be an easy sell, no doubt. It'll have enough popular support to win through even in a climate of artificial fear and habitual xenophobia. Sadly, Universal Basic Income will also be the most dangerous risk for the long term future of free society since the Second World War.

EDUCATION EDUCATION EDUCATION

Education is the key to a genuinely robust democracy but few countries have educated their citizens top to bottom. Recent governments on both sides of the Atlantic testify the truth of this vulnerability.

A "woke" voter public isn’t achieved through taught dogma nor necessarily by dint of education to some middle class paradigm. Rather the electorate needs to be given a certain level of independent self-awareness. Lessons in pragmatic cynicism would be a good start - e.g. when facing any public narrative, focus on following the stakes, the money and the power - in short, the voter needs a toolset for cutting through rhetoric and propaganda and snake-oil salesmen that hoodwinks then into voting on their worst instincts. Without it, democracy is as likely to throw up authoritarian abuses of power as a non-democratic politburo; and with greater durability when it happens. The state powers-that-be know this, of course.

Many countries approach broad qualitative education as a basic provision, seeing it as a safeguard against extremism and short term fads that work against the national interest. In the US and the UK, on the other hand, it’s been government policy to resist the creation of an awakened electorate at all cost. This mandate has been a consistent feature since the expansion of universal suffrage.

The anti-fact groupthink polarising British and American society today is an inevitable consequence of many decades’ anti-education legislation. It's also playing out a corollary: gradual economic degradation relative to the rest of the world. This loss of ground had been mostly offset in the 20th century by ugly but utilitarian global economic imperialism - making the most of historical advantages - but can't be kept from the people forever.

Bad education means an increasingly unproductive unemployable population. This is a bad long-term outlook that's been evident for decades. It's one of the trends that'll compound the need for Universal Basic Income as calls grow for a solution to the increasing pressure on social security. Automation, likewise, continues to advance, making more and more useless the narrow vocational training most receive in British and American state schools (i.e. one that keeps the proletariat busy but needs no progressive higher education).

Education nowadays needs to equip abstract lateral thinkers and adaptable problem solvers but this isn’t going to happen as it’s considered dangerous by governments with a history of doubling down on preventing any kind of political awakening slipping in by the back door.

LEFT AND RIGHT

The Left have no history of express opposition to Universal Basic Income and will probably bring it into their manifesto as a necessary vote winner against the winning formula of populism and fear stoked used by conservative opponents. At first, the Right will resist the "handout" mentality; certainly while they remain in power.

At some point in the ebb and flow of winner-takes-all electoral systems the Left will get into power. UBI, pitched as an antidote to austerity, will also be seen as a practical quickfix to the degraded welfare system. It’ll be demonstrated as economically manageable (even beneficial) while also simpatico with the extant capitalist paradigm. No boats need be unnecessarily rocked by bringing UBI into the mix.

The stability insured by introducing UBI will be a key point as it flips from being a thorny question of public spending to one where citizen rights, expediency, manifesto promise and state security align. It's not hard to see how UBI, as a type of government subsidy, will quickly gain support from entrenched business interests. Consider the plight of low rent landlords and high street retailers. Support will quickly spread through the media to accelerate UBI being sold to the population, establishing itself as a new civil expectation.

THE OPIATE CANNULA

The Right will have seen the wood for the trees by this point. They’ll consult their backroom think-tanks and progress to publicly wanting UBI as a way to bring society closer to a stable paradigm. This is stability is the key, however. For the Right this means helping to ringfence the hegemony of the 1%: the top stays at the top, the rest stay at the bottom. UBI can handle needs like food and shelter and life’s necessities and it won’t be hard for a government of either stripe to condition the electorate into voting the right way long-term.

UBI will become a gateway drug to perpetual populism, a democratic totalitarianism where the 1% rule forever and the 51%+ always vote ‘the right way’. Take out ambition by conditioning an appropriately limiting school system and life for the lower classes becomes a reality show. The Left will have been suckered into supporting perpetual UBI because it seems like a liberation for the people, a solution to any burden on society to provide its citizens home, food and - on paper - freedom from oppression.

It may well be a kind of solution for these universal human needs but then so would be a hospital bed and a never-ending opiate cannula. If the government were to propose the latter, one would correctly suspect it might abuse its status as the ‘dealer’. It shouldn’t be a big leap of the imagination to perceive how a society addicted to the no strings Universal Basic Income could see the creation of millions of docile proletariat voters easily manipulated ‘from above’ into acquiescent conformity. This subversion of mass voting includes underwriting an authoritarian government with all the firm foundations of modern democracy.

SAVE OUR SOULS

How will anyone persuade an uneducated self-centred electorate to vote against such appealing short-term security as no strings attached Universal Basic Income? Telling them they’ll be voting away some abstract future freedoms will seem a flimsy tautology, more likely to trigger a knee-jerk reaction against than encourage people to reject UBI. Indeed, what if the lumpen proletariat prefer comfortable subjugation in the safe embrace of perpetual familiar totalitarianism? Comfort might matter more than freedom, in the end. And if the majority choose to vote away freedoms they don't care about, in return for the safety of Universal Basic Income without ambition or opportunity or pressure to aspire for self-improvement, what can (or should) the democratically powerless intellectual minority do to prevent it?

#ubi universalbasicincome government politics politics welfare left right

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humofun-blog · 7 years

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The 'underground astronaut' in search of ancient bones

Four years ago, Dr Elen Feuerriegel was trawling the internet when she saw an ad.

The ad was unusual — it asked for three or four people for a short-term project, but they had to be skinny, preferably small and could not be claustrophobic.

They also needed to be fit, have some caving experience, a good attitude and be a team player.

And they had to be willing to work in cramped quarters.

Elen was intrigued.

The ad described her to a tee.

"I sat on it for an hour or two, thinking 'well if I fit the bill I should really apply' but I didn't think I'd have a chance in heck that I'd even be considered," she says.

"And then I thought 'I would be a fool if I let this opportunity go by without trying.' It cost me nothing, so why not?"

So the 24-year-old Australian PhD student sent her resume — and her measurements — to a man she'd never met in South Africa.

An extraordinary discovery

Just days before posting the ad in early October 2013, Lee Berger had sent cavers down an unexplored site he'd spotted on Google Earth.

The cavers returned with extraordinary photos.

"I was looking at pictures of a fossil that looked to me like a skeleton just sitting there in the dirt on the floor of a cave 40 metres down, 170 metres into a system," Professor Berger says.

No-one in history has seen something like that on the continent of Africa."

The Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site is one of the richest fossil sites in the world

(Flickr: Martin Heigan)

The photos were taken in the Rising Star Cave system near the Cradle of Humankind, just 50 kilometres north-west of Johannesburg.

The World Heritage site is dotted with rich fossil sites and ancient caves, many of which were mined for lime for use in the gold industry.

The Rising Star Cave is 800 metres away from the famous Swartkrans Cave, where remains of human ancestors up to 2 million years old have been found along with stone tools and evidence of fire use.

Although paleoanthropologists have been excavating in the region since the early 20th century, many rocky outcrops and caves have not been explored.

Professor Berger, a US-born palaeoanthropologist based at the University of Witwatersrand, has been mapping the area using Google Earth for a decade.

He made his first big find in 2008 — a 2.5 million year old ancient human called Australopithecus sediba.

But since then he'd found nothing — until that day in 2013 when he sent the cavers down into the Rising Star Cave system.

A big job ahead

As Professor Berger soon discovered, reaching the Dinaledi chamber — one of two chambers where fossils have been found — is a dark and dangerous journey.

Illustration of the Dineledi cave

(ABC: Rachel Ang)

To get to the bone chamber you have to squeeze through Superman's crawl, so-called because you have to wiggle through with one arm extended.

If you get stuck someone grabs your arm and they drag you through to avoid breaking your ribs," he says.

Then you have to climb 20 metres up a jagged spine of rock called the Dragon's Back.

"If you fall off either side you die, quite literally," Professor Berger says.

Then, in front of you is a plunging 12 metre-deep, 18-centimetre-wide vertical fissure called The Chute.

Frustrated that he was too big to make it down this last descent, Professor Berger asked his 15-year-old son to descend The Chute. When Matthew returned with images of a jaw bone, Professor Berger knew he needed to put a team together. Fast.

"So I put a Facebook ad, it said basically I need skinny scientists and I'm not going to tell you what you are going to do, but you need to drop everything, I'm not going to pay you, but come to South Africa," he recalls.

"Remarkably I found six extraordinary scientists out of over 60 applicants that just happened to be women."

The Underground Astronauts: (L-R) Becca Peixotto, Alia Gurtov, Elen Feuerriegel, Marina Elliott, Lindsay (Eaves) Hunter, Hannah Morris

(Supplied: University of Witswatersrand)

'A wonderful scientist'

Elen had heard of Professor Berger's work on Australopithecus sediba.

At the time, she was in her first year of a PhD studying human anatomy under Professor Colin Groves, a world re-knowned paleoanthropologist at the Australian National University.

She'd worked on Neanderthal dig sites in Spain, and had explored the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains.

Elen Fuerriegel in bone room at Witswatersrand University

(Supplied: Elen Fuerriegel)

The moment Professor Berger met Elen via Skype he knew she was right for the job.

"Elen is a wonderful scientist," he says.

"She is this eccentric, but brilliant mind.

"She was doing her PhD in Australia, she had the right measure of risk taking versus safety, knowledge, and she had a great understanding of hominin morphology."

And, at only 160 centimetres tall, she was also the right size to squeeze through the tightest of the cracks in the cave.

Basically all I did was to reassure Lee that I could fit through an 18-centimetre pinch," Elen says.

Expedition leaders Professor Lee Berger and Professor John Hawkes in front of the command centre tent.

(Getty Images: Herman Verwey/Foto24/Gallo Images)

Three weeks later, Elen arrived at the Rising Star excavation site — a bustling little city of green tents. One of these tents housed technology that would monitor the team's progress through the cave system, and beam their journey to the world via social media.

The women — nicknamed the 'underground astronauts' — began work.

Elen watched her colleagues, Marina Elliott, Becca Peixotto and Hannah Morris, decked out in hard hats and blue ovals, take the first descent.

"I remember watching on the CCTV we'd set up in the system up in the headquarters of the expedition ... and how I wished I was there with them experiencing it for the first time," she says.

The dangerous descent

Elen didn't have to wait long. The next day, she was in the second team.

"When you first descend into any cave, in particular the Cradle of Humankind, the first sensory experience you have is of the dark but the second is the dust," she says.

"The dust gets everywhere, it gets kicked up very easily when you move through the system so you tend to breathe it in and you can taste the dirt on your tongue."

Each day the teams spent three to five hours squeezed between rock faces with just the light from their headlamps to see where they were going. The muffled sounds of bats flying past in the humid air filled their ears.

"The feeling of claustrophobia is a little bit more intense when you can't see where you're going," she says.

Even though the team's moves were captured on CCTV, they had limited ability to communicate with those working above ground. So they had to rely on each other.

"You don't ever want to leave anyone behind because sound doesn't travel all that well, so you need to be very aware of who is in your team and what they're doing at any given time," Elen says.

"We were pretty conscientious about checking with one another to make sure everyone was doing well getting through the system, particularly the most challenging parts."

The most challenging part was The Chute. The fissure was so narrow that Elen and her colleagues could not even wear safety harnesses.

When you first go through the opening to the fissure you have to drop in feet first and there's not enough room that you can see where you're going," Elen says.

"You feel blindly around with your feet for any possible foothold you could before slowly wriggling your way very carefully down without looking at your feet."

The sides of the chute was filled with interlocking spurs of stone.

"They were handy sometimes but at other times they could catch your clothing, catch your jumpsuit and choke you," she says.

A chamber full of bones

But at the bottom of this chute was the most stunning thing Elen had ever seen.

"One of the most treasured experiences I have is walking into that chamber for the first time," she says.

"The ground was covered in white stuff," she says, pausing. "White stuff!"

"And it took me a second or two to realise that all the white stuff I was seeing on the ground was bone material. And it was everywhere."

The team recovered around 1,500 fragments from at least 15 individuals.

Over the next three weeks Elen and her colleagues ferried thousands of fragments of bone to the surface.

The precious cargo was carefully covered in bubblewrap and packed in Tupperware containers.

Then, just like a pass-the-parcel, it was wrapped in more plastic and placed in a dive bag.

"In some cases where we had very fragile elements, like the skull for instance, we sort of daisy chained it out of the system. We had people set up at strategic points through the system," she says.

Once they were above ground, the pieces were taken to the science tent, where they were unwrapped, photographed, cleaned and catalogued.

All up, the team recovered around 1,500 fragments from at least 15 ancient humans of all ages, including the almost complete skeleton of one individual.

Curiously, though, there were no signs of animal bones or tools with the human remains.

Introducing a star to the world

Homo naledi had a small skull and a brain the size of an orange.

(National Geographic: Mark Thiessen)

Two years later, Professor Berger held a press conference to announce to the world that the team had discovered a new species of ancient human in the caves — Homo naledi.

Naledi, which means 'star' in the Sotho language, was a bizarre combination of ancient and almost modern features.

This new member of our family tree had a brain the size of an orange and a small flat face — much like the famous Lucy skeleton from East Africa. It had the shoulders of an ape, the spine of a Neanderthal, and long arms and legs that led to hands and feet that resemble our own species, Homo sapiens.

Homo naledi's feet were very similar to ours

(Supplied: National Geographic/Peter Schmid)

At the time of the announcement the bones had yet to be dated, but features suggested the ancient human was around 2 million years.

The discovery opened a new chapter of human evolution — and a fiery debate about how science should be conducted in the age of mass media.

Some palaeoanthropologists felt the team, which was funded by National Geographic, had rushed the results and speculated on the findings.

Listen to the podcast

Download 'The Bone Wars' on Science Friction to hear more about Elen's journey and the controversy surrounding the discovery of Homo naledi.

For a start, the team was widely criticised for publishing the discovery before knowing the age of the bones.

Dating of the bones, released 18 months after the discovery was announced, showed the bones between 236,000 and 335,000 years old, which was much younger than thought.

The expedition, was also criticised for using junior scientists who were all women.

According to the younger generation of paleoanthropologists like Elen, the field is dominated by men with big personalities and big opinions. And, with more scientists than bones, it's highly competitive.

"We see these powerful personalities who limit research access to key fossils so they can ... keep control of the story that is being told about those finds," Elen says.

I've had my experiences of sexism in this field, particularly getting critique for only getting a job because I'm a woman scientist.

But the field is becoming more egalitarian, she says.

"It's through these people who value the work of early career scientists, of giving opportunities to people who aren't typically chosen for these kinds of projects, that we're beginning to see a bit of a change," she says.

"In that sense I think we're making progress. It's still slow."

Return to Rising Star

Elen's connection to Homo naledi continues.

After finishing up the initial dig, she returned to Australia and completed her PhD, which included her research on Homo naledi.

Elen now works at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she teaches and studies the ancient human's upper limb remains.

But the thrill of finding bones no-one has ever touched is still in her blood.

Over the past four years she's been back to Rising Star for a couple of short digs.

Next month, she's returning to the caves again.

Dineledi cave entry.

(Herman Verwey/Foto24/Gallo Images/Getty Images)

The plan is to excavate the base of The Chute to the Dinaledi chamber to work out if this was the route the Naledi took to get into the chamber.

She'll also revisit a second chamber known as Lesedi, where the team found 131 fragments including the almost complete skull of an adult Homo naledi man — known as Neo.

"In this profession you deal with fossil material, but typically its fossil material that 100 people have handled before you," she says.

"It's kind of nice to know whose hands have held a fossil but it doesn't really compare to being able to unearth something yourself and think 'this is something completely new to science, this is something that hasn't been looked at before possibly in millions of years'.

Your eyes are the first to fall on it, in such a long, long time and it's an incredible privilege to be able to do that.

August 30, 2017 at 11:38AM http://ift.tt/2vG4roc

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thecouchdiaries · 7 years

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The Lamentable Focus On Immigration

While the globe is warming up due to human activity, its many economies still staggering along at limping pace, wars and conflicts waging across continents and the medical world hurling towards antibiotic resistance — the issue in the spotlight is, of course, immigration.

That immigration causes friction between incumbent and incoming cultures is no novel phenomenon. If anything, people have displayed a persistent tendency to distrust other groups known by another name. Indeed, in its broad strokes, history can look like repeating cycles between tolerance and fear.

In comparison to other items on the global agenda, immigration enjoys a disproportionate influence as a catalyst for political change.

In a vote largely taken to be an implicit referendum on immigration, Britain shocked the world when it decided to leave the European Union. Prime Minister Theresa May has since stood by the oft-repeated promise of cutting immigration down to the ‘tens of thousands’ from around 160,000 now.

Then, still more shocking was the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. elections. Mr. Trump, whose election campaign was drenched with vitriolic and xenophobic rhetoric, has spent considerable effort since taking office to enact some of his most cynical ideas — this March, Mr. Trump signed into effect an executive order so quaintly titled as the order “Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States” — a slightly attenuated version of an earlier executive order barring citizens from 7 Muslim-majority countries from entering the US (the new order bars 6 of the 7 countries, and exempts current visa holders).

Now, in this midst of rising anti-immigration rhetoric looms a series of European elections which will set the tone of foreign policy for years to come — the current mood of this election cycle exemplified by the disconcerting success of Marie Le Pen, of the French party National Front, who has campaigned vigorously on an anti-immigrant platform (specifically, against those of Islamic faith), and is expected to receive 26-27% of the votes in the upcoming French elections. Neither does it look a whole lot brighter in the rest of Europe — according to Pew Research Centre, a non-partisan think tank, anti-Muslim sentiment is prevalent across Europe, particularly in Eastern and Southern nations such as Hungary, Poland and Greece.

If stripped of the many connotations bestowed upon it by the fervent and ongoing political discussions, immigration is simply the movement of people from one place to another. Yet, it has become one of the biggest and most controversial talking points in the political mainstream, bringing with it a wave of populism that is at times hostile and at others, outright malicious.

But a sober study of the most commonly cited reasons against immigration reveals a word of distorted information and exaggerated fears.

The most dominant concerns can roughly be segregated into security, economics and culture.

People worry that increasing arrivals of foreign nationals may raise the risks of terrorism. And while terrorist attacks do occur, the likelihood of their occurrence has little to do with immigration.

In late 2016 the UN released a report stating that “while there is no evidence that migration leads to increased terrorist activity, migration policies that are restrictive or that violate human rights may in fact create conditions conducive to terrorism”. While this year the U.S. Department of Homeland Security compiled an internal report concluding that “the country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity”.

The more prominent concern has to do with the economic effects: pressure on state institutions and the welfare system, disruptions to the labour market and housing shortages.

While immigrants can and do place pressure on state institutions, and they do use welfare services, they also often turn out to be net contributors to the economy and the state. For instance it is estimated that migrants have produced a net economic benefit of approximately USD$50 billion since 1990. Or, consider a a University College London study of migration effects on the UK, which found that for the period of 2000-2011, immigrants arriving after 1999 were 45% less likely to receive benefits than persons born in the UK. The study also found that immigrants from the European Economic Area (EEA) contributed 34% more taxes than they receive in benefits.

More so, immigrants increase aggregate demand and contribute to GDP growth through increasing spending and tax receipts, which would allow for more jobs to be created. And in countries with ageing populations, young migrants help reduce the burden of dependents. Highly skilled migrants are also of particular benefit to innovation industries.

Some may complain that foreigners bring with them differences which dilute or change the native culture, or that some refuse to assimilate — this is absurd. We live in a world where you can choose to have dinner between a kebab store, a burger house or a pasta joint all along the same street, wearing shoes made in China and watching American shows on a Japanese television. Modern society is a globalised affair, to deny that would be ignoring a reality where cultures are already interconnected and changing with mutual influence.

The point being, certain arguments illustrating difficulties in managing immigration may hold merit, but the conclusions often drawn are far from sound. Shutting out migrants will neither curb terrorism nor cure economic ills. It would, however, undermine the progress consolidated in the latter half of the 20th Century to promote peace, cohesion and shared prosperity (or, at least the attempt at it).

Whether it be labelled dangerous, a symbol of social progress, a burden or blessing — the opinions encircling immigration, and the people who do migrate, are many and varied.

But to start talking about immigration without first acknowledging a shared humanity is to begin the debate with an imperfect premise. By limiting a class of people to being only ‘immigrants’ and nothing else, it frames the discussion as a zero sum, us-and-them adversarial system, where some party must come out either winning or losing. But immigration is not a competition, it’s people with real lives like any other — though a bit (or a lot) down on their luck — being displaced from their homeland for fear of their lives or moving in search of new opportunities.

Immigration has become the dominant battleground for the future of Western democracies. And make no mistake, liberal democracies are at a crossroads — in determination of whether to persevere in defence of the progressive, egalitarian values championed by post-war Europe, or succumb to fear and cynicism in retreat to a world of toxic suspicion.

#immigration

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metamodel · 5 years

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Death and Revival Revisited

🔂🧟‍♀️ The eternal return of zombie-centred design

“Acknowledging that human beings are not the be-all and end-all.”

“Accepting our vulnerability, acting with humility and valuing our interdependency.”

“Living with the world, not against it.”

🥪🤮 The alternative to curiosity is… hard to swallow

The next day, Jason decided to have lunch with her. After a pleasant meal together, he couldn't contain himself.

“Betty, I've noticed that you always order a salmon sandwich,” he said. (I love that he still remembers her name.) “I don't mean to pry, but, uh, why is that?”

She looked at him for a second.

“It's because I'm afraid,” Betty whispered.

“Betty, how long have you been eating salmon sandwiches as your only meal?” Jason asked.

“Two years.” So basically, a resident had been potentially malnourishing herself for years because the systems around providing and talking about choices under this regime of care were broken.

👹👽 First and Last Men

When’s the right time to write a requiem for the human species?

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🦸🏼‍♂️☄️ Can only a God save us now?

Stapledon’s 1930s future-superhumans continue to haunt me.

When I was teaching art to six-year-olds last year, I did a unit on comics, tracing the emergence of costumed superheroes to the ’30s.

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“Why do you think superheroes appeared then?” I asked the class. “What was going on?”

🚀🌎 Refuge

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Not just taking our jobs — they're stealing Jeff Goldblum's life![/caption]

Too delicious.

Yours in ambivalence,

Ben

0 notes

metamodel · 5 years

Text

Death and Revival Revisited

🔂🧟‍♀️ The eternal return of zombie-centred design

In other more-than-human news, Anne Galloway recently posted her talk at IndiaHCI 2018, “Designing with, and for, the more-than human”. I’ve been following Anne’s work for a long time, from when the Internet of Things was called pervasive computing, to her more recent work in Aotearoa about sheep. For Anne, more-than-human-centred design means:

“Acknowledging that human beings are not the be-all and end-all.”

“Accepting our vulnerability, acting with humility and valuing our interdependency.”

“Living with the world, not against it.”

🥪🤮 The alternative to curiosity is… hard to swallow

The next day, Jason decided to have lunch with her. After a pleasant meal together, he couldn't contain himself.

“Betty, I've noticed that you always order a salmon sandwich,” he said. (I love that he still remembers her name.) “I don't mean to pry, but, uh, why is that?”

She looked at him for a second.

“It's because I'm afraid,” Betty whispered.

“Betty, how long have you been eating salmon sandwiches as your only meal?” Jason asked.

“Two years.” So basically, a resident had been potentially malnourishing herself for years because the systems around providing and talking about choices in this system of care were broken.

After setting her up with a more appropriate (and still chewable) set of diet choices, Jason decided to consult with dysphagia experts and patients like Betty to create a unit of training about these kinds of patient needs, and aimed at preventing such system breakdowns. Everyone at the their client nursing homes could attend. The aged-care nurses who came were flummoxed, telling their Head of Care, “Why are we only hearing about these kinds of problems and solutions from the catering guy? No offence, Jason, but seriously, WTF?”

The reveal: I was initially pretty skeptical about doing the course under Jason because before classes started, I'd gleaned that he’d spent most of his career managing McDonald’s restaurants. It turns out that my fears were misplaced, because I got a lot out of his teaching. While I really don't share his interest in large food systems, either in their experience as a customer nor in their general industrial impact on the world, I'm glad there are people like him enmeshed in such forbidding places, trying to make them more sensitive, responsive and just.

👹👽 First and Last Men

When’s the right time to write a requiem for the human species?

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