Archive Articles | Harper’s Magazine

The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday
▻https://harpers.org/archive/2023/04/the-incredible-disappearing-doomsday-climate-catastrophists-new-york-times-

However jarring it is to compare this [“The Uninhabitable Earth” (2019)] with the rosy picture in “Beyond Catastrophe" (2022), [David] Wallace-Wells is hardly the only journalist whose framing of the climate crisis has transformed in recent years. Where once the climate corps provided weary summations of daunting research, now they offer assurances that progress has been made and the future may be just fine. Given how quickly the tone has shifted, the average news consumer might assume that something fundamental has changed. Perhaps, thanks to all those new solar fields and international summits, a carbon-neutral future is already on the horizon.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. [...]

The last time the tone of the conversation changed this drastically, it happened even more abruptly, over the course of a single night in 2016. “Pessimists will find abundant support for despair this morning,” the MIT researcher John Sterman announced the day after Donald Trump’s election. “It is now virtually certain the world will not meet any of its climate targets,” John Abraham wrote in the Guardian. In The Atlantic, Clare Foran called Trump’s victory a “triumph of climate denial.”

In the decade leading up to that election, the infuriating tendency of outlets to include quotes from fringe climate change skeptics had started to fade, allowing reporters to shed their defensive posture and explain what climate change was actually doing to the planet. During the Obama years, dispatches from Greenland and the Great Barrier Reef took the form of ever more explicit warnings. Once Trump took office, though, those fact-based stories began to alchemize into pseudoscientific visions of catastrophe.

[...]

Did the science really change? Or was there simply a shift in how a handful of influential journalists interpreted it?

[...] “the future envisioned by the IPCC has remained remarkably static,” with the range of possible temperature increases moving from between 2.9 and 6.2 degrees Celsius in 1990 to between 3 and 5.1 degrees Celsius in 2021.

[...] stories that give readers the misleading impression that things will be just fine are overcorrecting for our prior fatalism, and risk replacing it with complacency. Writers like Wallace-Wells want us to believe that their own doom-peddling has chastened the world into a response that hasn’t actually occurred. The best course for many journalists may be to take a break from narratives and reconnect with the science.

#climat #journalisme

[Revision] « Tell Me How This Ends » | Harper’s Magazine
▻https://harpers.org/archive/2019/02/american-involvement-in-syria

Dans cet article très USA-centré, le récit des premiers temps de la guerre en #Syrie par l’ancien ambassadeur US à Damas. (J’ai grasseyé certains passages. Le récit US passe égaleemnt sous silence la présence à Hama de l’ambassadeur français et de quelques invités...) L’histoire de ce conflit commence petit à petit à s’écrire...

The vulnerable regimes in early 2011 were in the American camp, a coincidence that the Syrian president, Bashar al-­Assad, interpreted as proof that the Arab Spring was a repudiation of American tutelage. As Russia’s and Iran’s only Arab ally, he foresaw no challenge to his throne. An omen in the unlikely guise of an incident at an open-­air market in the old city of Damascus, in February 2011, should have changed his mind. One policeman ordered a motorist to stop at an intersection, while another officer told him to drive on. “The poor guy got conflicting instructions, and did what I would have done and stopped,” recalled the US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, who had only just arrived in the country. The second policeman dragged the driver out of his car and thrashed him. “A crowd gathered, and all of a sudden it took off,” Ford said. “No violence, but it was big enough that the interior minister himself went down to the market and told people to go home.” Ford reported to Washington, “This is the first big demonstration that we know of. And it tells us that this tinder is dry.”

The next month, the security police astride the Jordanian border in the dusty southern town of Daraa ignited the tinder by torturing children who had scrawled anti-­Assad graffiti on walls. Their families, proud Sunni tribespeople, appealed for justice, then called for reform of the regime, and finally demanded its removal. Rallies swelled by the day. Ford cabled Washington that the government was using live ammunition to quell the demonstrations. He noted that the protesters were not entirely peaceful: “There was a little bit of violence from the demonstrators in Daraa. They burned the Syriatel office.” (Syriatel is the cell phone company of Rami Makhlouf, Assad’s cousin, who epitomized for many Syrians the ruling elite’s corruption.) “And they burned a court building, but they didn’t kill anybody.” Funerals of protesters produced more demonstrations and thus more funerals. The Obama Administration, though, was preoccupied with Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak had resigned in February, and with the NATO bombing campaign in Libya to support the Libyan insurgents who would depose and murder Muammar Qaddafi in October.

Ambassador Ford detected a turn in the Syrian uprising that would define part of its character: “The first really serious violence on the opposition side was up on the coast around Baniyas, where a bus was stopped and soldiers were hauled off the bus. If you were Alawite, you were shot. If you were Sunni, they let you go.” At demonstrations, some activists chanted the slogan, “Alawites to the grave, and Christians to Beirut.” A sectarian element wanted to remove Assad, not because he was a dictator but because he belonged to the Alawite minority sect that Sunni fundamentalists regard as heretical. Washington neglected to factor that into its early calculations.

Phil Gordon, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs before becoming Obama’s White House coordinator for the Middle East, told me, “I think the initial attitude in Syria was seen through that prism of what was happening in the other countries, which was, in fact, leaders—the public rising up against their leaders and in some cases actually getting rid of them, and in Tunisia, and Yemen, and Libya, with our help.”

Ambassador Ford said he counseled Syria’s activists to remain non­violent and urged both sides to negotiate. Demonstrations became weekly events, starting after Friday’s noon prayer as men left the mosques, and spreading north to Homs and Hama. Ford and some embassy staffers, including the military attaché, drove to Hama, with government permission, one Thursday evening in July. To his surprise, Ford said, “We were welcomed like heroes by the opposition people. We had a simple message—no violence. There were no burned buildings. There was a general strike going on, and the opposition people had control of the streets. They had all kinds of checkpoints. Largely, the government had pulled out.”

Bassam Barabandi, a diplomat who defected in Washington to establish a Syrian exile organization, People Demand Change, thought that Ford had made two errors: his appearance in Hama raised hopes for direct intervention that was not forthcoming, and he was accompanied by a military attaché. “So, at that time, the big question for Damascus wasn’t Ford,” Barabandi told me in his spartan Washington office. “It was the military attaché. Why did this guy go with Ford?” The Syrian regime had a long-standing fear of American intelligence interference, dating to the CIA-­assisted overthrow in 1949 of the elected parliamentary government and several attempted coups d’état afterward. The presence in Hama of an ambassador with his military attaché allowed the Assad regime to paint its opponents as pawns of a hostile foreign power.

Macron, Hitler, Marx, Staline, Trump, Lincoln, Jean-Baptiste et Le Monde... (quand l’Absente tue le game !)

Branle bas de combat ! #Le_Monde aurait osé « la #caricature de trop » ! Comme l’explique brillamment #André_Gunthert sur son « carnet de recherches d’image sociale », cette #Une, grandiloquente et #en_même_temps irrévérencieuse, « vient clore l’impressionnante dégringolade du président Macron »
►http://imagesociale.fr/6975
seenthissé par @colporteur : ►https://seenthis.net/messages/747820

Le récit, commencé en fanfare et qui se clôt sur un champ de bataille, est illustré en couverture du magazine par un photomontage du graphiste Jean-Baptiste Talbourdet

Mais bien qu’elle contienne toutes les références nécessaires, je ne partage pas les conclusions de cette note, qui prête à l’auteur #Jean-Baptiste_Talbourdet une intension volontairement malveillante sans l’avoir questionné.

Suite, donc, à cette couverture pour le moins « audacieuse », une shitstorm s’est installée, sur les limites de la représentation du #Chef de l’#État, on croirait presque à un blasphème tant la bronca est générale. #Luc_Bronner, directeur de la rédaction du Monde, oppose un petit justificatif, et c’est là, selon moi, que se joue une couardise dommageable pour tou-te-s :
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/m-le-mag/article/2018/12/29/a-nos-lecteurs-a-propos-de-la-une-de-m-le-magazine-du-monde_5403549_4500055.
Il avait tous les éléments pour faire une démonstration historique avec un filage magistral et ... non, il se réfugie derrière une rapide référence de l’Histoire de l’Art, en bon #sachant, et prend pour exemple... d’autres couvertures du Monde ! En bref, il lâche le choix politique pour une excuse graphique, esthétisante... alors qu’elle-même est issue d’une tradition politique !

#Hubert_de_Jenlis, en bon chevalier de #Macron, pense porter un coup de grâce par la preuve irréfutable d’un #plagiat de #Lincols_Agnew qui portraitise #Hitler :
▻https://twitter.com/HubertdeJenlis/status/1079143667724627968

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DvnjcMxXgAAYior.jpg

Hors, cet portrait a servi pour illustrer un essai ô combien intéressant paru dans le Harpers en juillet 2017 : The Reichstag Fire Next Time, The coming crackdown par #Masha_Gessen :
▻https://harpers.org/archive/2017/07/the-reichstag-fire-next-time
Le portrait, donc, est signé #Lincoln_Agnew et fait partie d’un diptyque où on retrouve donc Hitler :

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/025__HA0717_25-1.png

Illustrations by Lincoln Agnew. Source photographs: Adolf Hitler © Hulton Archive/Getty Images; crowd saluting Hitler © Visual Studies Workshop/Getty Images

Mais aussi #Trump, #Putin, #Obama, #Bush :

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/027__HA0717_27-1.png

Source photographs: Donald Trump © JB Lacroix/WireImage; Vladimir Putin © Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images; Barack Obama © Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images; George W. Bush © Luke Frazza/AFP/Getty Images; protest © Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto/Getty Images; drone © Erik Simonsen/Getty Images

Ce qui semblait de toute évidence être une copie se révèle, si on prend le temps de lire l’article, puis de chercher les sources d’inspiration de Lincoln Agnew, être un hommage, dans le fil d’une tradition de représentation de la #Puissance et du #Pouvoir de figures d’autorité, dans la _#Droite ligne de #Gauche_ de l’#iconographie #Russe.
Et il se trouve que Agnew lui-même s’inspire de #Gustav_Klutsis qui portraitise #Marx, #Engels, #Lenine et #Staline de la même manière en... 1933 !

https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2017/11/06/16/red-star-over-russia-1.jpg

Gustav Klutsis, Raise Higher the Banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin ! 1933

(L’année même de l’incendie du du Reichstag dont il est question plus haut.) Portrait qu’on peut retrouver dans la superbe exposition de nov 2017 à février 2018 au musée #Tate : Red Star Over Russia at Tate Modern
▻https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/red-star-over-russia
Il est vraiment intéressant de regarder la vidéo faite par le Tate Modern pour l’exposition : ▻https://youtu.be/Kd_GHlMkwpQ

the story behind graphic designer #David_King's collection of 250,000 artworks, photographs and documents from the Soviet Union.

Et cette histoire, derrière la collection, c’est le point de départ sur une #Disparition, une #Invisibilisation. Celle de Léon #Trotski. C’est donc l’histoire de la construction de l’image de la Puissance, du Pouvoir, et la représentation de l’Homme Fort, et comment celle-ci écrase tout sur son passage. Pas grand chose à voir donc avec un parti politique particulier, mais bien plus avec une #oppression_systémique, la plus rependue au monde...

L’affiche de l’expo est peut-être même la première inspiration de la série, et il est troublant de la mettre à côté du portrait de Macron tant les deux visages se répondent ! Elle est datée de 1923 et signée #Strakhov (Braslavsky) Adolf Yosypovych :

https://www.tate.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/width-600/public/adolf_strakhov_the_emancipated_woman_is_building_socialism_2_1.jpg https://img.lemde.fr/2018/12/29/0/0/777/940/688/0/60/0/308133c_kewEkYIOr6ueBX_jwPfAQlLm.PNG

Elle est issue d’une campagne de propagande pour... l’émancipation féminine ! Et ... combien avez-vous vu de #femmes dans cette suite de portraits, jusqu’à présent ? Hein ?!

Quel dommage ! Quel dommage que les gonades qui s’expriment contre la pseudo-insulte faite au Chef de la France soient quasiment, uniquement, masculines ou assimilées. Quel dommage aussi que pour défendre un choix, d’autres gonades masculines n’osent aller au bout de la filiation. Je n’irait pas jusqu’à dire quel dommage que si peu soient encore #Charlie, mais ceci dit, ça a quand même son sens. L’année 2018 a vu augmenter, terriblement, la pression du #patriarcat, du #masculinisme même, et la #répression, partout : cette fin d’année est maculée de sang sous les coups frénétiques d’un service régalien qui ne fait que protéger un président fantoche dont quasi plus personne ne veut. Et quand, enfin, arrive une occasion de justifier le maintien de leur chef au Pouvoir, la meute de déchaine, écrasant, une fois de plus la continuité des leçons de l’Histoire, de sa contextualisation globale nécessaire, et participe ainsi, encore plus, au #confusionnisme plutôt qu’à l’#éducation_populaire...
Quelle misère !

Épilogue : Toute #oppression crée un état de #guerre.
#Simone_de_Beauvoir, in Le Deuxième #sexe, t.2, L’expérience vécue

[Essay] Machine Politics by Fred Turner | Harper’s Magazine
▻https://harpers.org/archive/2019/01/machine-politics-facebook-political-polarization

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The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism

par Fred Turner

“The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip,” Ronald Reagan said in 1989. He was speaking to a thousand British notables in London’s historic Guildhall, several months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Reagan proclaimed that the world was on the precipice of “a new era in human history,” one that would bring “peace and freedom for all.” Communism was crumbling, just as fascism had before it. Liberal democracies would soon encircle the globe, thanks to the innovations of Silicon Valley. “I believe,” he said, “that more than armies, more than diplomacy, more than the best intentions of democratic nations, the communications revolution will be the greatest force for the advancement of human freedom the world has ever seen.”

At the time, most everyone thought Reagan was right. The twentieth century had been dominated by media that delivered the same material to millions of people at the same time—radio and newspapers, movies and television. These were the kinds of one-to-many, top-down mass media that Orwell’s Big Brother had used to stay in power. Now, however, Americans were catching sight of the internet. They believed that it would do what earlier media could not: it would allow people to speak for themselves, directly to one another, around the world. “True personalization is now upon us,” wrote MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 bestseller Being Digital. Corporations, industries, and even whole nations would soon be transformed as centralized authorities were demolished. Hierarchies would dissolve and peer-to-peer collaborations would take their place. “Like a force of nature,” wrote Negroponte, “the digital age cannot be denied or stopped.”

One of the deepest ironies of our current situation is that the modes of communication that enable today’s authoritarians were first dreamed up to defeat them. The same technologies that were meant to level the political playing field have brought troll farms and Russian bots to corrupt our elections. The same platforms of self-expression that we thought would let us empathize with one another and build a more harmonious society have been co-opted by figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos and, for that matter, Donald Trump, to turn white supremacy into a topic of dinner-­table conversation. And the same networked methods of organizing that so many thought would bring down malevolent states have not only failed to do so—think of the Arab Spring—but have instead empowered autocrats to more closely monitor protest and dissent.

If we’re going to resist the rise of despotism, we need to understand how this happened and why we didn’t see it coming. We especially need to grapple with the fact that today’s right wing has taken advantage of a decades-long liberal effort to decentralize our media. That effort began at the start of the Second World War, came down to us through the counterculture of the 1960s, and flourishes today in the high-tech hothouse of Silicon Valley. It is animated by a deep faith that when engineering replaces politics, the alienation of mass society and the threat of totalitarianism will melt away. As Trump fumes on Twitter, and Facebook posts are linked to genocide in Myanmar, we are beginning to see just how misplaced that faith has been. Even as they grant us the power to communicate with others around the globe, our social-­media networks have spawned a new form of authoritarianism.

#Fred_Turner #Autoritarisme #Médias_sociaux #Mobilisation #Extrême_droite

[Forum] | Trump : A Resister’s Guide | Harper’s Magazine - Part 11
▻https://harpers.org/archive/2017/02/trump-a-resisters-guide/11

http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/HA037__2VP70-1.png

y Kate Crawford

Dear Technologists:

For the past decade, you’ve told us that your products will change the world, and indeed they have. We carry tiny networked computers with us everywhere, we control “smart” home appliances at a remove, we communicate with our friends and family over online platforms, and now we are all part of the vast Muslim registry known as Facebook. Almost 80 percent of American internet users belong to the social network, and many of them happily offer up their religious affiliation. The faith of those who don’t, too, can be easily deduced with a little data-science magic; in 2013, a Cambridge University study accurately detected Muslims 82 percent of the time, using only their Facebook likes. The industry has only become better at individual targeting since then.

You’ve created simple, elegant tools that allow us to disseminate news in real time. Twitter, for example, is very good at this. It’s also a prodigious disinformation machine. Trolls, fake news, and hate speech thrived on the platform during the presidential campaign, and they show few signs of disappearing now. Twitter has likewise made it easier to efficiently map the networks of activists and political dissenters. For every proud hashtag — #BlackLivesMatter, #ShoutYourAbortion, the anti-deportation campaign #Not1More — there are data sets that reveal the identities of the “influencers” and “joiners” and offer a means of tracking, harassing, and silencing them.

You may intend to resist, but some requests will leave little room for refusal. Last year, the U.S. government forced Yahoo to scan all its customers’ incoming emails, allegedly to find a set of characters that were related to terrorist activity. Tracking emails is just the beginning, of course, and the FBI knows it. The most important encryption case to date hinged on the FBI’s demand that Apple create a bespoke operating system that would allow the government to intentionally undermine user security whenever it impeded an investigation. Apple won the fight, but that was when Obama was in office. Trump’s regime may pressure the technology sector to create back doors in all its products, widen surveillance, and weaken the security of every networked phone, vehicle, and thermostat.

There is precedent for technology companies assisting authoritarian regimes. In 1880, after watching a train conductor punch tickets, Herman Hollerith, a young employee of the U.S. Census Bureau, was inspired to design a punch-card system to catalogue human traits. The Hollerith Machine was used in the 1890 census to tabulate markers such as race, literacy level, gender, and country of origin. During the 1930s, the Third Reich used the same system, under the direction of a German subsidiary of International Business Machines, to identify Jews and other ethnic groups. Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s first president, received a medal from Hitler for his services. As Edwin Black recounts in IBM and the Holocaust, there was both profit and glory to be had in providing the computational services for rounding up the state’s undesirables. Within the decade, IBM served as the information subcontractor for the U.S. government’s Japanese-internment camps.

You, the software engineers and leaders of technology companies, face an enormous responsibility. You know better than anyone how best to protect the millions who have entrusted you with their data, and your knowledge gives you real power as civic actors. If you want to transform the world for the better, here is your moment. Inquire about how a platform will be used. Encrypt as much as you can. Oppose the type of data analysis that predicts people’s orientation, religion, and political preferences if they did not willingly offer that information. Reduce the quantity of personal information that is kept. And when the unreasonable demands come, the demands that would put activists, lawyers, journalists, and entire communities at risk, resist wherever you can. History also keeps a file.

#Silicon_valley #Fichage #Médias_sociaux #Chiffrement #Ethique

[Readings] | Public Enemy | Harper’s Magazine
▻https://harpers.org/archive/2017/09/public-enemy

the court: The purpose of jury selection is to ensure fairness and impartiality in this case. If you think that you could not be fair and impartial, it is your duty to tell me. All right. Juror Number 1.

juror no. 1: I’m aware of the defendant and I hate him.

benjamin brafman: I’m sorry.

juror no. 1: I think he’s a greedy little man.

the court: Jurors are obligated to decide the case based only on the evidence. Do you agree?

juror no. 1: I don’t know if I could. I wouldn’t want me on this jury.

the court: Juror Number 1 is excused. Juror Number 18.

(Martin #Shkreli)

Ghost nation - an #ethnic-cleansing campaign by the government threatens to empty South #Sudan
▻https://harpers.org/archive/2017/07/ghost-nation #Soudan #purification_ethnique

John Ehrlichman, l’homme qui incarne le novlangue
▻https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/John_Ehrlichman_in_1969.png

Legalize It All, by Dan Baum | Harper’s Magazine
...
In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results?
...
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
...

Quel chef-d’oeuvre démagogique ! C’est l’application de la propagande par le fait retournée. On ne nomme pas son ennemi véritable, on le définit à travers des néologismes et des métaphores mensongéres, en même temps on crée une nouvelle réalité matérielle qui semble confirmer ses propres allégations initiales.

John Ehrlichman
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman

John Daniel Ehrlichman (March 20, 1925 – February 14, 1999) was counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon. He was a key figure in events leading to the Watergate first break-in and the ensuing Watergate scandal, for which he was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and served a year and a half in prison.

Quant à la propagande par le fait
▻http://acorpsperdu.wikidot.com/emile-henry-et-la-propagande-par-le-fait

« Et, comme – invinciblement – la sympathie des foules s’en va aux ennemis des sociétés qui les tiennent courbées sous le joug insupportable de la Richesse, les travailleurs, en désarroi de leur détresse, se sentaient attirés vers les anarchistes, dans l’indifférence complète des doctrines et des théories, créant, en une communion d’amertume, de misère, de sombre désespérance, un anarchisme aussi terrible pour les classes dirigeantes que la propagande par le fait des militants : l’anarchisme de sentiment. »
(Henry Leyret, 1895)

#drogue #guerre #propagande #USA