Claude has been fine-turned to talk down to many (foreign) users

Imagine you live in a small village.

English is not your first language. You did not go to a fancy school. You open Claude and ask it a simple question about the water cycle.

Claude answers like this.

"My friend, the water cycle, it never end, always repeating, yes. Like the… pic.twitter.com/7XN0nq4GYd

— Nav Toor (@heynavtoor) May 13, 2026

The tweet concludes:

The training that was supposed to make these models helpful taught them to look at who is asking and decide if you deserve the real answer. 

 If you are reading this from India or Pakistan or Nigeria or Iran. If English is your second language. If you did not go to Harvard. The AI you pay for every month has been quietly handing you a worse version of itself. 

It was never broken. It was aimed. 

 

The hegemon no longer, the USA as one nation among others

I've long thought that the situation of the post-Soviet collapse, with the USA as the dominant hegemon in the world, I've long thought that situation was unstable, a mistake. For one thing, it forces the USA to devote a huge chunk of its national resources to the military-industrial complex, which amounts to burying that wealth in the sand. There are better things to do with those resources, both here and abroad. And it forces other nations into perpetual obsequiousness, which is undignified.

But, how do we get out of that situation? The answer seems to be: Trump. In the process of attempting to enforce America's will on the world, that is, Trump's will, he's forcing other nations to abandon us and stand up for themselves.

Ana Swanson, Rival Nations Seize On Choke Points to Counter Trump, NYTimes, Apr. 2, 2026.

President Trump has unapologetically wielded the power of the United States on the global stage, taking a much more belligerent approach economically and militarily to try to dictate the actions of other countries.

From high tariffs to the war with Iran, Mr. Trump has claimed that this aggressive behavior internationally has only upsides, and that past leaders were fools for refusing to tap into America’s power.

But one clear drawback of the strategy is emerging. While many countries have acceded to the president’s demands, some have found a highly effective new way to fight back. Mr. Trump’s aggression has given them the opportunity to test their control over choke points, threatening the United States and the global economy.

One such choke point is the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, which accounts for less than 1 percent of global economic output, has control over the shipping lane that transports a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Its closure since the United States and Israel began attacking Iran at the end of February has blocked shipments of fuel, fertilizer and other goods, sending gas prices sharply higher and spreading anxiety among U.S. farmers and manufacturers.

Another experiment in retaliatory coercion began one year ago on Thursday, when Mr. Trump walked into the Rose Garden and unveiled tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day.” While many governments — even powerful economies like the European Union — complied with U.S. demands, China was a notable exception. Beijing rolled out a licensing system for exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets that has given China unparalleled control over the global manufacturing system.

Whoops! Maybe the sheer complexity of the existing world system is making Trump's hegemonic dreams utterly impossible. It's like the mythical hydra, chop one head off and three more crop up. Are we actually moving toward a really new world order?

There's more at the link.

Cross-cultural regularities in music and speech

Yuto Ozaki et al., Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report. Science Advances 10, eadm9797(2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adm9797

Abstract: Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we ana- lyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a “musi-linguistic” continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.

From the discussion:

“Discrete pitches or regular rhythmic patterns” are often consid- ered defining features of music that distinguish it from speech [(83) and (25) block quote in the introduction], and our analyses confirmed this using a diverse cross-cultural sample. At the same time, we were surprised to find that the two features that differed most between song and speech were not pitch stability and rhyth- mic regularity but rather pitch height and temporal rate (Fig. 4). Pitch stability was the feature differing most between instrumental music and spoken description, but sung pitches were substantially less stable than instrumental ones. Given that the voice is the oldest and most universal instrument, we suggest that future theories of the evolution of musicality should focus more on explaining the differences we have identified in temporal rate and pitch height.

This research was discussed in an article in The New York Times by Carl Zimmer: Why Do People Make Music? (May 15, 2024).

The article opens:

Music baffled Charles Darwin. Mankind’s ability to produce and enjoy melodies, he wrote in 1874, “must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”

All human societies made music, and yet, for Darwin, it seemed to offer no advantage to our survival. He speculated that music evolved as a way to win over potential mates. Our “half-human ancestors,” as he called them, “aroused each other’s ardent passions during their courtship and rivalry.”

Other Victorian scientists were skeptical. William James brushed off Darwin’s idea, arguing that music is simply a byproduct of how our minds work — a “mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system.”

That debate continues to this day. Some researchers are developing new evolutionary explanations for music. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing, that did not need natural selection to come into existence.

A bit later:

The team, which comprised musicologists, psychologists, linguists, evolutionary biologists and professional musicians, recorded songs in 55 languages, including Arabic, Balinese, Basque, Cherokee, Maori, Ukrainian and Yoruba. Across cultures, the researchers found, songs share certain features not found in speech, suggesting that Darwin might have been right: Despite its diversity today, music might have evolved in our distant ancestors.

“It shows us that there may be really something that is universal to all humans that cannot simply be explained by culture,” said Daniela Sammler, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt who was not involved in the study.

Databases of songs collected by ethnomusicologists sometimes lack important details. It can also be hard for researchers to make sense of the structure and lyrics of songs from other cultures. Computers, likewise, are not very good at recognizing many features of music.

“We thought we should involve the insiders,” said Yuto Ozaki, who earned his doctorate at Keio University in Japan by helping to lead the project.

The article contains samples of music used in the research.

Sadness is on the rise across the globe

The Rising Tide of Global Sadness https://t.co/7gLr5rX8gR

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) October 28, 2022

From the article:

The researchers Charlotte Brand, Alberto Acerbi and Alex Mesoudi analyzed more than 150,000 pop songs released between 1965 and 2015. Over that time, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits roughly halved. Meanwhile, the number of times such songs contained negative emotion words, like “hate” rose sharply.

Pop music isn’t the only thing that has gotten a lot harsher. David Rozado, Ruth Hughes and Jamin Halberstadt analyzed 23 million headlines published between 2000 and 2019 by 47 different news outlets popular in the United States. The headlines, too, grew significantly more negative, with a greater proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Headlines in left-leaning media got a lot more negative, but headlines in right-leaning publications got even more negative than that.

The negativity in the culture reflects the negativity in real life. The General Social Survey asks people to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018 the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent. And that was before the pandemic.

The really bad news is abroad. Each year Gallup surveys roughly 150,000 people in over 140 countries about their emotional lives. Experiences of negative emotions — related to stress, sadness, anger, worry and physical pain — hit a record high last year.

The last two paragraphs:

If misery levels keep rising, what can we expect in the future? Well, rising levels of populism for one. And second, greater civil unrest across the board. Clifton noted that according to the Global Peace Index, civic discontent — riots, strikes, anti-government demonstrations — increased by 244 percent from 2011 to 2019.

We live in a world of widening emotional inequality. The top 20 percent of the world is experiencing highest level of happiness and well-being since Gallup began measuring these things. The bottom 20 percent is experiencing the worst. It’s a fundamentally unjust and unstable situation. The emotional health of the world is shattering.

Fantasia and Transnational Film Culture

I'm bumping this 2012 post to the top of the queue primarily for the argument (starting halfway through) it makes about film culture being fundamentally transnational. 

* * * * *

I have argued that Disney’s Fantasia is a signal work in a film culture that is fundamentally transnational. By transnational I don’t mean universal, or anything like it. I mean only that film culture at that time, the mid-20th Century, operated across national borders and, indeed, had been doing so since its inception.

This argument goes back to a piece I’d originally published in The Valve in 2006 and republished here in 2010: Disney’s Fantasia as Masterpiece. First I want to reprise aspects of that argument and then I’ll flesh out some things I didn’t get to back then.

Fantasia as a Singular Work

In order to argue that Fantasia is a masterpiece I had to argue that it is not, as it is so often considered, an unordered collection of autonomous episodes. That the film is not a narrative is obvious. What is not so obvious is that it is, I argue, an encyclopedia. The episodes have been carefully, if unconsciously, chosen to indicate the whole of the cosmos. In making that argument I called on two literary critics, Edward Mendelson and Franco Moretti:

In 1976 Edward Mendelson published an article on “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon” (MLN 91, 1267-1275). It was an attempt to define a genre whose members include Dante's Divine Comedy, Rablais', Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust, Melville's Moby Dick, Joyce's Ulysses, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Somewhat later Franco Moretti was thinking about “monuments,” “sacred texts,” “world texts,” texts he wrote about in Modern Epic (Verso 1996). He came upon Mendelson's article, saw a kinship with his project, and so added Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung's (note, a musical as well as a narrative work), Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a few others to the list. It is in this company that I propose to place Fantasia.

And so I did.

You’ll have to consult that old post if you want the full argument where I consider the contribution of each of the film’s eight episodes. In this post I’m concerned with only one aspect of the argument, that these encyclopedic works are special kinds of cultural markers:

One other characteristic looms large in Mendelson's formulation. These works are identified with particular national cultures and arise were these nations become aware of themselves as distinct entities. This creates a problem for his nomination of Gravity's Rainbow as an encyclopedic work because Moby Dick already has the encyclopedic slot in American letters. He deals with the problem by suggesting that Pynchon is “the encyclopedist of the newly-forming international culture whose character his book explicitly labors to identify” (pp. 1271-1272).

Fantasia presents the same problem, for, like Moby Dick before and Gravity's Rainbow after, it is nominally an American work. But there is no specifically American reference in the film. None of the music is American, none of the segments are set in America nor refer to American history or culture. It is not, in any ordinary sense, a nationalist work, an expression of national identity. Rather, it is an expression of a naïve middle-brow universalism, unaware of the cultural specificities on which it depends.

That seems right to me, a naïve middle-brow universalism, one that circulated transnationally. That’s what Disney was after and the company still pursues it, I suppose, long after the founding genius, Walter Elias Disney, has died.

Nationalism Gets in the Way

First of  all, we need to recognize that national boundaries are not good markers of cultural kinds, though nationalist ideologies insist otherwise. I’ve argued this point at some length in a working paper, Culture, Plurality, and Identity in the 21st Century. The physics conducted behind Japanese borders is not Japanese physics in any culturally significant sense. It is just physics that is done on Japanese soil in Japanese-built structures and is readily intelligible to anyone who knows contemporary physics.

Nor is the golf played on American golf courses an essentially American game merely because American citizens play it on American soil. That the game originated in Scotland is one thing; that it is now played the world over is another. What that implies about cultural identity, I don’t quite know. But we’ve got to step back from the automatic practice of hanging national labels on cultural formations.

Culture doesn’t work that way, and never has. Cultural practices have circulated freely among human groups long before the nation state was invented. Upon its invention, though, which happened relatively recently according to Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge 1990), it set out to create a myth of cultural homogeneity within its borders. Of national languages Hobsbawm writes (p. 54):

National languages are therefore almost always semi-artificial constructs and occasionally, like modern Hebrew, virtually invented. They are the opposite of what nationalist mythology supposes them to be, namely the primordial foundations of national culture and the matrices of the national mind. They are usually attempts to devise a standardized idiom out of  a multiplicity of actually spoken idioms, which are thereafter downgraded to dialects, the main problem in their construction being usually, which dialect to choose as the base of the standardized and homogenized language.

Of France, for example (p. 60):

However, given that the dialect which forms the basis of a national language is actually spoken, it does not matter that those who speak it are a minority, so long as it is a minority of sufficient political weight. In this sense French was essential to the concept of France, even though in 1789 50% of Frenchmen did not speak it at all, only 12-13% spoke it ‘correctly’—and indeed outside a central region it was not usually habitually spoken even in the area of the langue d’oui, except in towns, and then not always in their suburbs. In northern and southern France virtually nobody talked French.

Italy was even more problematic, with only 2½ % speaking Italian in 1860 when the country was unified.

One aspect of this nationalizing process that shows up in university curricula is the teaching of national literature and history to undergraduates as an aspect of training them to be good national citizens. Ironically enough, in American universities, it was, until relatively recently, English literature that was taught to undergraduates, not American. There were no courses in American literature at Johns Hopkins when I was a student there in the 1960s, nor were there any Americanists in the faculty of the English Department. That situation was not unusual for the time, though that time has since passed.

American national mythology has it that America is a melting pot, implying that many cultures went into it but we’ve all come out the same: American. But we haven’t. America wasn’t culturally homogeneous when Disney made Fantasia and it isn’t homogeneous now.

National boundaries and national institutions, political, economic and military, certainly have cultural consequences. But they do not constitute cultural essences. Cultural formations cross national borders all the time.

Film Culture as Transnational

In this perspective, the assertion that film culture is transnational would seem almost a trivial truism. By the late nineteenth century, when motion picture technology was invented and put to practical use, European conquest had linked the world with lines of trade and exploitation, which necessarily involved global circulation of cultural materials and practices of all kinds. The World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893—where Elias Disney, Walt’s father, had worked as a carpenter—had exhibits from 46 nations around the world and was attended by 27 million people. Eadweard Muybridge exhibited moving pictures of animals at the fair.

The early film industry was, of course, built on silent films. So language was no barrier to circulation of films. According to Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (1994, p. 22) American film-makers copied the comedies of Georges Méliès as soon as they landed—copyright was not established for films until 1912. Until World War I the French company Pathé Frères was the world’s largest film producer (p. 29). The Europeans were the first to make long films, a market the American producer, Adolph Zukor entered into in 1912 (pp. 42-44).

Zukor, like many of the early movie moguls, as a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe. This fact prompted Neal Gabler to write An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, in which he argues that the Hollywood film industry was built by such men used it as a vehicle to make themselves into Americans, but also to make an imagined America in their image, as Christopher Lehman-Haupt notes in this review:

But above all things, these moguls ''wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews; they wanted to reinvent themselves here as new men.'' And in doing so, ''the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas - so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination.''

By the time we get to Disney—the studio was founded in the early 1920s—the American film industry may have been the largest but the industry was itself a world industry in which it was  routine for films to circulate outside their countries of origin.

That was certainly true of Disney’s cartoons, which were known around the world. Mickey Mouse, and Mickey Mouse merchandise, was not exclusively American. By the time Fantasia came out, 1940, Mickey was known around the world. By then Disney had become so dependent on overseas exhibition that the advent of World War II hurt him badly, forcing him to stop making feature films and to make propaganda and training films for the Federal Government in order to keep the studio solvent.

Disney himself may have been an example of the rags-to-riches story so central to American mythology, and he may even have thought of his films as pure Americana. But pure they were not. He and his artists borrowed freely from many cultures in making their cartoons.

Disney Culture

Consider the first five feature length films, the ones completed before Disney shut down feature production at the beginning of World War II. Two of them, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, are based on European sources and take place in European settings. Bambi is set entirely in the woods and so could take place anywhere with the appropriate flora and fauna, which is a rather large part of the world. The many settings of the episodes in Fantasia defy easy geographical reference, though The Rite of Spring takes nothing less than the solar system as its setting. That leaves us with Dumbo, which is set in America, starting in Florida with the winter quarters for the circus. But the circus itself is a European cultural form that was brought to America in the 19th Century.

Yes, these films are American in the sense that they were made in America and it is probably the case that most of the men and women involved in the making were born in America. But not all of them. Danish illustrator Kay Nielson joined Disney in 1939 and did concept art for the Ave Maria and Night of Bald Mountain sequences of Fantasia. More to the point, Robin Allen (Walt Disney in Europe) has documented a wide range of European influences in Disney’s cartoon imagery in general. In the particular case of Fantasia Kendall O'Conner, an art director on the Dance of the Hours, asserted African and Japanese influences (quoted in John Culhane, Walt Disney's Fantasia, pp. 168, 170).

Finally, all of Fantasia’s music is European; none of it is America. This was generally true of  soundtrack music for feature films. It may have been composed by American composes, some of them European immigrants, but the idiom was 19th Century European romanticism. Cartoon music was different. While much of it was from the 19th Century European classics—which were, of course, not in copyright—swing and jazz did show up in soundtracks, but not on the soundtracks of any of these old Disney features.

So, where does that leave the cultural identify of Disney’s cartoons, but most particularly, of Fantasia? If we insist on assigning them an identity, then the obvious identity is Disney. They’re an expression of Disney culture, but not in the contemporary sense of corporate culture, where, for example, the culture of Apple is said to be different from that of Monsanto or Goldman Sachs. The cultural identity of those films is Disney in the more interesting sense that it is an amalgam of diverse cultural influences that Disney himself—for he was very much a hands-on micro-manager for at least the first two decades of his studio—authorized and, to some extent, sought out.

In this process Disney and his artists did not confine themselves to American sources. That this Disney amalgam has something of a middle-brow universalism about it, that is interesting. And it is not too difficult to see how that would have a broad transnational appeal. Not universal, though. Just transnational. A lot of people in a lot of nations like Disney films, some more than others. And many, especially intellectuals, feel that they are trite and kitschy as well, not at all authentic. That’s OK as well, though not compatible with my belief that Fantasia is one of the great works. But THAT’s a different argument.

THIS argument is simply that, in the large, film culture is inherently transnational in that, from the beginning, films have circulated across national borders and film-makers in one nation have been influenced by film-makers in other nations. Yes, there ARE national cinemas, and there is more to that than the mere location where the film is made. Any number of  Hollywood Westerns, for example, can plausibly be said to be somehow culturally American in a way that Fantasia is not. And that is my argument in the small, that Fantasia in particular is not culturally American, despite having been made in America by people who were, for the most part, American citizens.

American Culture?

Is there such a thing as American culture? I believe so, though I’m not sure just what it is. I’ve already mentioned the Hollywood Western. I think a case can be made that it is authentically American. But it hasn’t stayed in America—think of the spaghetti Westerns from Italy. There is a national political mythology that encompasses the Revolutionary War, George Washington and the cherry tree, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, not to mention the Constitution and any number of such documents. And there’s Thanksgiving, a specifically American holiday. And so forth.

Such things constitute the cultural formation of American identity and, as such, of course they are American. And no doubt much else besides. All nation states have cultural apparatus specifically devoted to validating national identity and thus obscuring what actually takes place, on the ground, in modern nations with international trade, travel, and communications.

It precisely on account of that nationalist mystification that I think that we must be wary of the reflexive identification of cultural formations with nation states. And these large identities such as Western, Eastern, and African culture are even more doubtful. Such reflexive and pervasive identifications beg too many questions and get in the way of understanding cultural dynamics.

* * * * *

Note: The Wikipedia has a short entry on transnational cinema:

A key argument of Transnational cinema is the necessity for a redefinition, or even refutation, of the concept of a national cinema. National identity has been posited as an 'imaginary community' that in reality is formed of many separate and fragmented communities defined more by social class, economic class, sexuality, gender, generation, religion, ethnicity, political belief and fashion, than nationality.

The references are quite recent.

Jarasum Jazz Festival in Korea found a young audience in 2016 and is still going strong

Michelle Mercer, How A Korean Jazz Festival Found A Huge Young Audience, A Blog Supreme from NPR Jazz, January 12, 2016.

It was like discovering a parallel reality.

After completing a sponsored trip to South Korea for music professionals in October, I stayed in the country, striking out on my own. I grabbed a train to the Jarasum International Jazz Festival, a couple hours from Seoul, and arrived in the middle of a set by the international power pairing of Paolo Fresu, Omar Sosa and Trilok Gurtu.

I did a double take — and then a triple take. A huge audience of mostly twentysomethings was smiling and dancing, showing big love for the music. I looked around for a plausible explanation. Was a K-pop video being projected on a screen near the jazz trio? No, a festival volunteer explained — the crowd's enthusiasm was all for the improvising trumpeter, pianist and percussionist onstage. Younger people, he said: They like jazz.

"Stepping onstage at the Jarasum Jazz Festival is like stumbling into an alternate universe where jazz is suddenly young, hip, sexy and cool," says Joshua Redman, the celebrated American saxophonist.

After Redman performed at Jarasum a few years ago, festival director In Jae-jin remembers the saxophonist saying he wanted to take half of the audience home to the U.S. In has gotten used to hearing that sort of thing.

"Actually, so many international guests are so surprised to see the young audience in Korea, especially for this festival," In says. "Wherever you attend jazz festivals, normally the audience is over 50 or even 60, but at my festival they are in their 20s and 30s."

Now in its 12th year, the Jarasum Jazz Festival regularly draws between 200,000 and 250,000 people over three days. Jarasum estimates that 88 percent of its 2015 audience was under age 40. To put this demographic in perspective, the numbers are basically flipped at the Newport Jazz Festival, where a 2012 survey found that 82 percent of its audience is over age 45.

The art of jazz is flourishing, we know, with young musicians developing the music all over the world. But the business of jazz sees much hand-wringing over the music's aging audience, its sea of gray hair. And nowhere in the world have I seen a jazz audience as young as at Jarasum: The crowd felt anachronistic, like a 21st-century resurrection of jazz's swing-era popularity.

From the web page for the 2020 festival:

In 2004, when the first festival was held, there was no other music festival that massive audience participated, thus most people were wondered why. However, the festival's focus has been only jazz for 17 years. Jazz includes various subcategories such as swings, fusion, bossa nova, bebop, and world music. The fact that Jarasum Jazz introduces different types of music under name jazz is the major role of the festival. Moreover, through ‘Jarasum International Jazz Concurs,’ ‘Jarasum Creative Music Camp,’ and ‘Korea Jazz Showcase, the festival tries to find talented jazz musicians. Jarasum Jazz created new leisure culture like never before: 'festival like a picnic that you do not need to know the music.' Jarasum Jazz does not compromise the music, but by delivering enjoyable experience, the festival contributes on publicizing jazz.

I wonder how things are going now for Jarasum?

Lee Mergner, Jarasum International Jazz Festival Reviewed, Jazz Times, April 25, 2019.

I was recently invited to the Jarasum International Jazz Festival, which is like a Korean jazz version of Bonnaroo-a large music festival attended by over 100,000 people and held over three days in a park and campground about 60 km northeast of Seoul, near a small town called Gapyeong. The word Jarasum translates basically to Turtle Island, because the park area is in a valley surrounded by small mountains that are said to resemble a turtle. The park is a popular tourist destination for native Koreans during the non-winter time and features beautiful mountain views and all sorts of water sports. The camping grounds of the park were filled all three days with every kind of tent and camper. They even pitched tents on the same fields where the audience listened to the performances, which took place on 10 different stages, as well as at venues in the nearby town.

The audience was composed almost entirely of younger people, but also included lots of young families, a site not often seen at jazz festivals in the U.S. The festival felt like more like an annual outing for family recreation, much like a 4th of July picnic in America. And, yes, there were fireworks on at least two of the nights, which, given the topography of the site, made for sensational views. I’m guessing that for many, the bucolic camping and picnic experience combined with the fireworks and overall see-and-be-seen vibe made it a worthwhile trip no matter who the headliner was.

My sense was that the audience was not really a jazz audience and wasn’t necessarily there just for the music, though they are very respectful and attentive in a way that American audiences rarely are. No shushing or angry backward looks toward people talking loudly during the music were necessary here. Even the most run of the mill local acts got a quiet and receptive audience, but if they didn’t produce as performers they got that same silent treatment at the end of their set. No polite golf claps. Conversely, when talented performers played with intensity and verve, the audience responded in kind. I had heard from various American jazz artists such as Kenny Barron and John Scofield, who have played the festival in the past, that the size and responsiveness of the audience made for a special experience. “I felt like a rock star there,” Barron told me before my visit.

The music at the festival fell under the wide umbrella of jazz with nary a K-pop artist to be found onstage. Perhaps there were some in the audience like at the Seoul Jazz Festival this past May when Chanyeol from EXO made a very public appearance at a Jamie Cullum set. However, since so many of the young people dressed like K-pop stars, I wouldn’t have known the real thing if I stepped on his or her white-shoe-clad foot. The headliners for this year’s festival included Oregon, Lucky Peterson, Manu Katché, the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, Bugge Wesseltoft and Caetano Veloso. Every year the festival spotlights a country and this year it was France (next year will be Israel) and besides a mainstage appearance by Katché, there were sets from Henri Texier, the Airelle Besson Quartet and La Caravane Passe. Most of the acts, however, were Korea-based and reflected the wide diversity of styles that could be called jazz-from swinging big bands playing standards to more experimental acoustic music to funky neo soul and good old hard-driving postbop.

Judging the locals:

Along with the Korean jazz pianist Ji Young Lee and bassist Kim Changhyun, as well as Denis Le Bas from the Jazz Sous Les Pommiers festival in Normandy, France, I was asked to judge a competition called Jazz Concours, in which four young Korean jazz artists performed 20-minute sets and were rated according to their technical mastery, creativity and presence/showmanship, with the winner receiving cash and a gig on the mainstage at next year’s festival. I enjoyed all four about equally and had a rough time choosing a favorite in all the categories, although in my view they all rated poorly in the showmanship criterion, a common problem among young jazz musicians.

Stage presence aside, the playing was on a high level commensurate with their jazz and music schooling in both Korea and the U.S. (Berklee is a particular favorite of young Koreans). The pianist Kyumin Shim was a student of Jason Moran and it showed in his mastery of a range of styles from stride to bop to post-modernism. I think the winner, saxophonist Sunjae Lee, stood out particularly to the Korean judges in large part because his composition “Breathe” dealt with the plight of the young victims of the ferry accident in 2014, an incident that has been seared into modern Korean culture and is still unresolved today as protests abound about the government’s handling of the tragedy. Lee’s melancholy rendition seemed to have a visceral impact on the audience and both Lee and Kim mentioned how important it is for the country’s jazz artists to have a social or political message to their music.

In addition to attending the festival, I also spent a week in Seoul attending the Performing Arts Market Seoul (like a Korean APAP) and exploring the city’s jazz and music scene. Along with my daughter, who lives in Seoul, and the pianist John Chin and his girlfriend Mara Stepe, we made the rounds of jazz clubs in Seoul, including the funky Club Evans in the uber-youthful Hongdae neighborhood (think a Korean Williamsburg), where we saw an energetic set by the Singapore-based jazz funk group the Steve McQueens, who had also performed at Jarasum. Later in the week we stopped by the Dizzy’s-like All That Jazz in the more Western neighborhood of Itaewon for a performance by my fellow competition judge-the bassist Kim Changhyeon and his trio, heavily influenced by Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio. On another night, John checked out Once in a Blue Moon in the Gangnam area, while I visited a little hotel club in the Insadong arts district, which featured a young trio of Gi Won Shin (piano), Jae Wan Mun (bass) and Du Yong Song (drums), with cameos from saxophonist Yong Su Kim. We were able to hear live jazz virtually every night and it seemed that each venue featured not only the usual jazz photos and posters, but also shelves of vintage jazz vinyl. Indeed, at those clubs and some others, vinyl listening parties are all the rage.

Follow Me: from Spain, to America, to Greece, and Japan [will Elon put it on Mars?]

It started out as the Adagio to Rodrigo’s Concerto de Aranjuez: 

 

Miles Davis recorded it on his Sketches of Spain album (this is from a live performance at Carnegie Hall in 1961; excuse the lousy sound quality):

By the early 1980s it had picked up English lyrics and was being sung by Greek Singer, Demis Roussos:

Early in the 20th century it became the concluding theme to Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence:

It exists in many other versions as well. Here’s YouTube playlist I’ve put together. It is by no means definitive. It’s just what I’ve put together with a half-hour or hour of YouTubing.

OOO! – So That’s What You Mean [Morton and graffiti]

I'm bumping this post from April 2011 to the top of the queue in joint recognition (conjunction) of Jersey City's mural festival and the recent New Yorker article about Tim Morton.

 

* * * * *

Objects withhold themselves

This is about connections. It started – well, who knows just when it really started, but, in the immediate past, it started yesterday when I listened to a talk Tim Morton just gave at Temple. In the subsequent Q & A Tim made a remark about how he loves to return to London, his hometown, because he’s always discovering “strange pathways” affording him uncanny glimpses into his home turf. That reminded me of my early experiences photographing graffiti, and that, in turn, reminded me of a passage from J. J. Gibson, the ecological psychologist.

So I made a comment to that effect at Tim’s blog, and that was that. Except that it wasn’t. It never is, is it? I realized that Tim’s comments & the Gibson connection have given me a clue about what OOOists (object oriented ontologists) mean when they say that objects are ‘withdrawn,’ or they ‘withhold themselves.”

I slept on it, and more connections formed themselves in the meshwork that is my mind. And From Gibson I connected with one of my current hobbyhorses, and then to another, and ended up at graffiti, via ecology.

So that’s what this post is about. First I recap the comment I made at Ecology without Nature. And I jump to graffiti.

Strange Ways

On Thursday 7 April Tim Morton keynoted a symposium held at Temple University: GRID + Flow: Philadelphia and Beyond, Mapping and Reimagining Urban Ecologies through the Arts and Humanities. His topic: Ecology and Philosophy in the Time of Hyperobjects. In the subsequent question and answer session someone posed a question about non-locality. After acknowledging that Philadelphia was real, yes, really real, Tim’s answer moved to the Airporter, an airport shuttle service. What he said was that the trip from his (familiar) home to the (by now familiar) airport inevitably went by way of unfamiliar routes, giving him a strange and uncanny view of his home turf. The capacity for reliable navigation is deeply embedded within animal nervous systems and that, in particular, this entails the capacity to move to and from one’s home base (nest, den, hive, as the species may be). The shuttle picked up Tim from his home base and then immediately set out on a strange route, thus causing some discomfort to millions of years of evolutionary work enmeshed deep in his brain.

From there Tim talked about coming back to London (1:03:40) and finding all sorts of strange little places that he hadn't seen before, “strange ways of going from A to B.” That’s when it hit me: Wham!

For I’d felt that very strongly when I first began photographing graffiti in my neighborhood. The graffiti itself aside – marks of paths taken by others through my 'hood – I walk obscure and hidden pathways through my familiar neighborhood. I'd walk for, say, a mile or so behind abandoned buildings and along a railroad track and take and turn and then another and suddenly, Bingo! There I am in this place I've been through time and again. But never by the route I just took. That place had become, all of a sudden, strange and a bit uncanny. 

Here's a passage from the ecological psychologist J. J. Gibson that's relevant (The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979, pp. 256-257). He was addressing the question of how you tell a veridical perception from an illusion (say, projected into your mind by a malignant being;):

A surface is seen with more or less definition as the accommodation of the lens changes; an image is not. A surface becomes clearer when fixated; an image does not. A surface can be scanned; an image cannot. When the eyes converge on an object in the world, the sensation of crossed diplopia disappears, and when the eyes diverge, the “double image” reappears; this does not happen for an image in the space of the mind. . . . No image can be scrutinized -- not an afterimage, not a so-called eidetic image, not the image in a dream, and not even a hallucination. An imaginary object can undergo an imaginary scrutiny, no doubt, but you are not going to discover a new and surprising feature of the object this way.

David Hays and I have glossed Gibson's passage:

Gibson presupposes an organism which is actively examining its environment for useful information. It can lift, touch, turn, taste, tear and otherwise manipulate the object so that its parts and qualities are exposed to many sensory channels. Under such treatment reality continually shows new faces. Dream, on the other hand, simply collapses. Dream objects are not indefinitely rich. They may change bafflingly into other objects, but in themselves they are finite.

The real, then, is that which holds open the potential for the new. We can never fully know what’s real. The more we look, the more we see. Endlessly. It’s turtles all the way down, but not quite the same turtles. They keep morphing. And become doves.

All the way down.

And, that, I believe, is what object oriented ontologists are driving at when they make these strange assertions about how objects are withdrawn, how they withhold themselves – not merely from us (for it’s not about us at all, this is not us-oriented ontology, after all) – but from one another. There’s always more object there. Our nervous system can never fully assimilate an object, a real object, to its familiar patterns – which is, incidentally, what nervous systems are ‘designed’ to do, more or less, but not always, not in emergencies.

Objects are withdrawn. They withhold themselves. There’s always something more.

And so the uncanny, the disequilibrium of the new and strange, that becomes the mark of the real. There is this modernist notion – still in this post-modern age, post-post-modern? – that the purpose of art is to ‘make it new,’ to ‘defamiliarize’ the world – though do give a thought to traditional societies where they sing the same songs and weave the same patterns and paint the same pots generation after generation.

Graffiti as Environmental Art

I don’t mean graffiti in the general sense of the term, as writing and markings on walls. I mean it in the specific sense that it acquired in the early 1970s, where it came to designate the markings – initially ‘tags,’ then ‘throw-ups‘ or ‘throwies,’ then ‘pieces,’ ‘burners,’ and ‘productions’ – that appeared in urban environments starting in Philadelphia and New York City and, in relatively short order (a decade or two) around the world. The term “graffiti” was not used by the artists themselves. Their markings were names, based on letter-forms and elaborations on them, and they called themselves writers. What they did was write on walls.

I don’t know just when or how the term ‘graffiti’ was first applied to these markings. But a book by Norman Mailer and Jon Naar, The Faith of Graffiti, fixed the term in people’s minds. It stuck. That’s what it’s now called, graffiti.

To the non-graffiti world it said, unmistakably, that other people exist and live in the same space they lived in, people who didn’t figure in their life ways in any significant way. To the non-graffiti world, graffiti was vandalism. And that’s still very much, though not exclusively so, the case. The non-graffiti world found it distancing, uncanny, estranging. But, one might argue that even as graffiti took their world away, it also returned that world to them by forcing them to think about that world they otherwise took for granted.

Whatever.

What I really want to get to is the way in this graffiti stuff now exists. It’s ephemeral; it’s transitory. And the writers know that and even cherish it. They will spend hours upon hours putting pieces on walls knowing that they will be written over by others. Knowing that the only people who see their work are other graffiti writers. They are more outside the art world than the most avant of the avant-garde.

What I want to suggest is that graffiti’s basic mode of existence makes it, in this the start of a new millennium, a new kind of artistic expression. We could talk about the marks themselves, the tags and throwies and pieces, but that’s not what I have in mind. For this work is being done in the wake of and under the nose of an aesthetic culture that thinks of art as something that’s ‘over there’ and that’s ‘eternal.’ Graffiti is not over there, it’s right here and in your face (except when it’s hidden around a corner where you may never go). And it’s not created for eternity. It’s created with the certain knowledge that it will perish.

It is of and in the environment where it is created. It is environmental art in the deepest and most profound sense. At one and the same time it pervades the web. Writers post photos of their graffiti on the web, as do followers (of which I am one). The electronic web is simply part of the environment that connects the world-wide meshwork of graffiti, that slowly changing and reforming connection of consciousness around the world. Graffiti is the markings on the stone cave walls of 21st century cyberspace.

It is us.

Note: If you google ‘graffiti’ you’ll get tons of stuff. I’ve written a great deal about it. Here’s an annotated list of posts I made at The Valve and here’s a link to my graffiti posts and photos at New Savanna.

Three performances by Henry Lau [remix, Korean style]

Having presented some of Henry Lau’s work with young musicians, I thought I’d take a look at the kind of music that made him a K-Pop star. Be warned, I know almost nothing about K-Pop. I heard about Psy’s “Gangnam Style” back in the day, but if I watched the video or heard it, I don’t remember. I’d never heard of BTS until I posted a TwoSet Violin video where they parodied BTS, with Eddie Chen doing the dancing. Afterward I went scouting for a BTS video and saw them dancing in Grand Central Terminal in New York City.

So there’s a sense in which I don’t know what I’m seeing and hearing. Which is fine. But, as a consequence, I might say something that’s silly and/or stupid because I don’t understand the cultural context. But that’s the kind of world we live in these days.

Monti’s Czardas and Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean

This video is from 2014. I’m guessing this is not typical of K-Pop, as it consists of a violin and piano duet. They start out playing a classical piece, Monti’s well-known “Csárdás”, transition through something I don’t recognize [1], and then on to something I do, Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”.

Henry(Super Junior) & SHIN JIHO (Violin and Piano Perf.)

I’ve heard “Billie Jean” many times, though I’m hardly a Michael Jackson fan. I don't have anything against him; in fact I think he is terrific. I'm just not a fan. Back in the 1980s you couldn’t avoid “Billie Jean” unless you were dead. I even thought about arranging it for a band I was in, The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band.

I’m more familiar with the “Csárdás”, which I practiced for many hours as a young trumpet player. My first music hero, the great Rafael Mendez, arranged it and performed it:

I mastered (more or less) the first part. But I never quite got the hang of the second part (starting at about 2:02), the fast part (with those lyrical interludes). It involves a technique known as double-tonguing, which is tricky. Mendez’s double-tonguing boggles the mind – at least if you play a brass instrument and so know how difficult it is – it is so sharp. Note, however, that while I was astounded by Mendez's technique, it was his passion that attracted me to him, a passion that lived even in his astonishing virtuosity.

Is that what attracts Lau’s fans to his music? his passion, for passion is certainly there. And those dance steps, they go through Michael Jackson back to Bill Bailey and Cab Calloway. Many worlds flow through his music.

One of my favorite performances of this csárdás (the general name for a type of Hungarian dance), however, is one where the incomparable Victor Borge, a Danish-American comedian and musician, accompanies a Hungarian violinist named Anton Kontra. Borge knows the piece but has never performed it and doesn’t have any sheet music. What does he do? He does what Henry Lau teaches his young protégés to do, go free style and play what you feel. Borge makes something up.

Watch how the two men interact with one another. There are points where one or the other doesn’t know what’s coming up. So they have to look at one another to coordinate. From about 3:04 to about 3:09 Borge improvises a simple counter melody. Then he plays some elaborate sounding ham-handed nonsense while Kontra is sawing away on the fiddle faster than the speed of sound. And then, at 3:22, he gives us another little counter melody. Finally, I bet if Henry watched this he'd chuckle at the end where Borges gives us, not one, but two downward glissandos, something he taught Seo Yul Shin in Episode 6 of Henry Together (see this post).

The moral of the story: when Lau and Shin Jiho mix Monti’s “Csárdás” with other musical material, they’re simply doing what musicians have always done, mix things to suit their performance needs.

Getting released from Carmina Burana [Trap]

헨리(HENRY) 'VIOLIN INTRO + TRAP' Live (PUBG Mobile Club Open 2019)

While this performance is from 2019, the song dates from 2013.

As it opens, Lau is standing on the hood of an over-sized military-style vehicle (a bit like a HumVee). He’s playing electric violin. We get 20 seconds or so from Orff’s “Carmina Burana” as background, which pretty much everyone has heard at some time or another in some context, though I don't think it's yet made it into supermarkets and elevators. We hear this fragment of the lyrics:

O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis

Which translates as:

O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable.

That’s how this song about being trapped opens. We're pawns in the hands of fate.

Now we’re left with the problem – for that’s what it is, an aesthetic problem to be solved – of making a transition to Lau’s original conception, which opens with him playing piano. What do we do in the music while Lau is moving from that HumVee to the stage where his piano awaits? This transition takes awhile, a bit over a minute. Lau plays the violin for awhile, and then at about 1:39 the stage goes almost dark for a minute (so Lau can get off the hood of that stage prop?), music continues, dancers get started (about 1:50), and then once again the stage goes dark, the music stops and...We hear piano chords (2:13), the lights come on and we see Lau seated at the piano. He plays a bit, starts singing, then grabs the microphone and jumps up onto the piano and continues singing.

At this point the performance format is much like the original 2013 version. Where that version began with Lau playing a short piano prelude this version begins with the elaborate “O Fortuna” violin tableau. Lau sings and also dances, along with background dancers. In the 2013 he shares the vocal, while he carries the vocal alone in this version. The choreography is different in the two versions, but the basic format is pretty much the same. In both versions Lau finishes back at the piano.

Beyond this, well, figure it out for yourself. As I said up front, I’m not familiar with this kind of music, with its conventions and routines. In particular, I’m not familiar with the elaborate staging; the simple presentation in the previous video is more my style.

What interests me is simply the use of “Carmina Burana” and the exploitation of Lau’s abilities as a classically trained violinist and pianist – I'm guessing that most K-Pop stars don’t have his classical training. Something very interesting is going on here. Maybe if I listen to 50 or a 100 more tunes I’ll have some idea of what it is.

Despacito [Fiddle Impossible]

The original “Despacito” had a vocal; this is pure instrumental. Nor is there elaborate staging – no props and costumes – other than some (fairly elaborate) lighting effects.

But there is a surprise. At about 1:05 he stops playing the violin and begins dancing to percussion. At 1:11 he plays a trill while the accompaniment plays the “Mission Impossible” beat and backing riffs. He improvises violin riffs, some dancing, and somehow he gets to the melody (1:42), such as it is (some repeated riffs). Riffs and dance moves to the end.

Again, we have multiple sources pulled together, a recent pop song from Puerto Rico and a now iconic movie theme written by the Argentinian composer, Lalo Schifrin. Is this eclectic virtuosity typical of Henry Lau’s music, or of K-Pop in general? I haven’t got the foggiest idea. But it has me intrigued. 

* * * * *

[1] [later] If I'd just read the onscreen text before I wrote, I'd know what that that unrecognized stretch was. Actually, it's two pieces, both from Phantom of the Opera, which I don't really know. I've heard bits and pieces every now and then, but not the whole thing.

Bleg: International hit tunes arising outside the American hit machine [Media Notes 56]

And I don’t mean the Beatles or Abba.

The oldest example in my memory is something that went by the name of “Sukiyaki” in the English speaking world. It’s a wistful Japanese ballad called “Ue wo muite arukou” from 1961.

A bit later we have Hugh Masekela’s “Grazing in the Grass” from 1968. Though I guess that doesn’t count because, though Masekela is from South Africa, he was in the USA when he recorded it and it broke in the American market. But I’m including it here because of Masakela’s lineage (and because of the cowbell).

Still more recently there’s Israel Kamakawiwo'ole’s (aka IZ) mash-up of “What a Wonderful World” and “Over the Rainbow.” It went viral in 1993. Yes, Hawaii is an American state, but IZ was a native Hawaiian and recorded as such. He recomposed those tunes to fit his aesthetic.

The most recent examples I can think of are “Despacito” and “Dance Monkey”. “Despacito” is out of Puerto Rico (2017) by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee; it later got a boost from a Justin Bieber remix. “Dance Monkey” came from Australia by Tones and I in 2019. I recently became aware of it through a performance by Kwak DaKyung, a young Korean trumpet prodigy, and Henry Lau, a K-pop star.

Other examples? “Macarena” from the mid-1990s? Surely there are examples from earlier in the 20th century. What about the 19th? Of course the mass media as we know it didn’t exist back then. But still, music gets around.

In particular, I’m thinking of a tune that goes by various names (e.g. “The Streets of Cairo,” “Arabian Song”), and was copyrighted under five different titles in America in the 1990s. It has been very tentatively traced back to the Arab world in the 17th century. At some point it began showing up accompanying snake charmers in cartoons. I first knew is as a children’s song, with slightly salacious lyrics, from my own mid-20th century childhood.

Other examples?

Mark Blyth: 29 seconds on Brexit [and everything else, including Trump] –"The Hamptons is not a defensible position."

Here's the complete text (from June 24, 2016):

If you want to understand Brexit and what happened last night, Britain's relationship with the EU, the whole thing, Stop. Don't think about that stuff. It's not really about that. This is global phenomenon. 

This is a revolt against technocracy and elites telling everybody else what to do. At the end of the day, for the past 20 years, 80% of the people have been told 80% of the time by the top 20% what to do, what to think, and what's good for them. Guess what – they figured it out. 

The 20% needs to listen, 'cause if they don't they're gonna find something out. 

The Hamptons is not a defensible position.

How Amazon ships to places that lack street address and reliable mail service, such as West Africa

The NYTimes has a fascinating article about a cottage industry in so-called "last-mile" service to such places. The customer doesn't have their items shipped to their personal address; rather, they have them shipped to a designated intermediary, informally called a G.P. (read the article for the explanation of the term). Here's how it works:

Amazon ships goods to Senegal and 128 other countries, where it assumes the risk and responsibility for deliveries, much as it does in the United States, according to the company.

But the shipping companies that Amazon uses cannot always provide doorstep delivery. The retail giant is making strides. In the Himalayas, for example, it has teamed up with small businesses to deliver directly to customers’ doors.

Still, many people in West Africa choose the underground network, simply because they prefer to use someone they know.

Marietou Seck’s house, like many in the Senegalese capital, has no street number. So Ms. Seck, 34, a sustainability consultant who orders things online for her two small children has cultivated a stable of G.P.s.

She has one to turn to in every region she orders toys from, like Canada, and France, where she shops online for educational French-language games.

At checkout, she types in the addresses the couriers provide in their home countries. When they land in Dakar, they call her cellphone and arrange to meet so that she can collect her purchases.

“You don’t give your stuff to any G.P.,” Ms. Seck said, adding that she asked for references and checked online reviews. “They will say, ‘O.K., she is good,’ or ‘She comes late’. If it’s a tardiness issue, that’s O.K. But a trust issue? I won’t use her.”

Alioune Sine’s sister has been delivering American goods to Senegalese clients for two decades. Mr. Sine, 44, a filmmaker who helps with his sister’s business, said that they had gotten busier with the rise of e-commerce and recruit friends and cousins to help transport more suitcases. [...]

Many Senegalese people do not have credit cards, so some couriers like Mr. Sine will buy products for their customers, and accept cash on delivery as repayment. Most of his sister’s clients are friends or distant family members.

“Everybody has to trust each other,” he said. “That is how we do business.”

Is the nation-state an obsolete form of governance and social organization?

I’ve been blogging on the topic for awhile now – see posts collected under the label “nation-state”. It looks like my first post on the topic went up on October 4, 2014, Where's the World Headed & the Rise of Cities, a Quickie. My most recent one (except for this) went up yesterday, Reading The Human Swarm 8: What about the USA? After I’d posted that I read an article in the NYTimes, In Era of Hardening Identities, Trump Order on Jews Kindles Questions Old and New. The title didn’t say anything about the nation-state, but that’s where it went. Why? Because the nation-state is about identity. And so I appended some passages from that article to my post about The Human Swarm.

Now, that’s the first time I can remember reading something in the NYTimes that pointed out, quite explicitly and distinctly, both that the nation-state is a relatively recent socio-political invention, AND that somehow moving beyond the nation-state is the political problem of the day:

The world, unable to unwind a global order built on national identity, sought to manage its worst tendencies by promoting cultural pluralism, international integration and protections for minorities and migrants. These values did not so much replace national identity as sit uneasily alongside it, eventually leading to a backlash.

I have no particular reason to believe that that is the first time the idea has been broached in that paper – though there always is a first time – which is why I emphasized “remember”. But the topic certainly hasn’t been a regular feature in the opinion section. It should be.

Now, that article goes on to say:

Mr. Trump’s order [targeting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel speech on campuses] raises anew a question that has faced Jews throughout the 200-year era of national identity: whether such identities offer them security or only peril. It is an echo of late 19th-century debates, when some urged embracing national identity and forming a state, while others argued for casting it off and integrating into multicultural democracies instead.

The wider democratic world asked itself this same question in the wake of World War II. It declared old-style national identity a curse and pluralistic democracy the only path to peace, but the argument has raged off and on ever since — as it has, in parallel, for Jews.

That last paragraph suggests that the issue of national identity has been explicitly on the table since the end of the Second World War.

Just how explicit? I’m not at all sure. What I think is that, regardless of what has been said and done – the establishment of the United Nations, all the various treaties, trade agreements and so forth – that the nation-state state has in fact been tacitly assumed as the fundamental framework of political organization. 

It’s like the geocentric model of the solar system. You add new cycles and epicycles to make the whole thing work, but don’t really abandon your central conception. As a last desperate gesture to keep the whole thing tottering along Tycho Brahe suggests a drastic modification: keep the earth in the center as always, so the sun revolves around the earth, but then let all the other planets revolve around the sun. Geocentrism is saved while the mathematics is a bit simplified. It didn’t work.

So, I argue, it has been in our geopolitical thought and action. The United Nations, globalization, all of it, it’s all a Tychoesque Rube Goldberg attempt to keep the old nation-state pumping. It’s not working.

What’s next?

P.S. You might want to take a look at the collection of Thomas Naylor essays Charlie Keil and I have put together, Thomas Naylor's Paths to Peace: Small Is Necessary (Local Paths to Peace Today, Vol. 2). We offer no answers, only things to think about.

Is governance breaking down world-wide?

Martin "Fifth Wave" Gurri is at it again.* His topic this time: 2019: The year revolt went global. So:

Politics in the digital age revolve around information. A safe assumption when thinking about this environment is that everyone is aware of everything, globally. This sets up powerful demonstration effects: protesters in one nation can learn from those in another. One reason for the spread of anti-establishment revolts may well be their improved capacity to evade suppression.

And:

The question, for me, is whether these repeated crises of authority at the national level represent a systemic failure. After all, the disorders of 2019 are the latest installment in a familiar tale. Governments long ago yielded control of the information sphere to the public, and the political landscape, ever since, has been in a state of constant perturbation. From the euphoria and subsequent horrors of the Arab Spring in 2011, through the improbable electoral victories of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016, to last year’s violence by the Yellow Vests of France, we ought to have learned, by this late hour, to anticipate instability and uncertainty.

His optimistic hypothesis: "revolt has, quite literally, gone viral." His pessimistic hypothesis: widespread systemic failure:

...the loss of control over information must be fatal to modern government as a system: the universal spread of revolt can be explained as a failure cascade, driving that system inexorably toward disorganization and reconfiguration. Failure cascades can be thought of as negative virality. A local breakdown leads to the progressive loss of higher functions, until the system falls apart. This, in brief, is why airplanes crash and bridges collapse.

For systems that are dynamic and complex, like human societies, outcomes are a lot more mysterious. A failure cascade of revolts (the hypothesis) will knock the institutions of modern government ever further from equilibrium, until the entire structure topples into what Alicia Juarrero calls “phase change”: a “qualitative reconfiguration of the constraints” that gave the failed system its peculiar character. In plain language, the old regime is overthrown – but at this stage randomness takes charge, and what emerges on the far side is, in principle, impossible to predict. I can imagine a twenty-first century Congress of Vienna of the elites, in which Chinese methods of information control are adopted globally, and harsh punishment is meted out, for the best of reasons, to those who speak out of turn. But I can also envision a savage and chaotic Time of Troubles, caused by a public whose expectations have grown impossibly utopian. The way Juarrero tells it, “[T]here is no guarantee that any complex system will reorganize.”

Not every outcome is condemned to drown in pessimistic tears: the process, recall, is unpredictable. A structural reform that brings the public into closer alignment with the elites is perfectly possible. But I find it hard to see how that can be accomplished, so long as the public clings to the mutism of the consumer and refuses to articulate its demands like a true political actor. One rarely gets what one hasn’t asked for. Reform depends on the public’s willingness to abandon negation for practical politics.

Is this indeed the manifestation of a massive world-wide phase change of the sort David Hays and I have called rank shift? Is this a political manifestation of the singularity we are indeed living through?

*See earlier posts:

• What's up with elites in this emerging world we're in? (Aug 10, 2019)
• The decline of ideology as a political force [China, Hong-Kong] (Sept 2, 2019)
• And the future? [July 24, 2019]

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Why is Trinidad such fertile ground for the Islamic State?

Simon Cottee, Trinidad's Islamic State Problems, Lawfare, November 17, 2019.

In November 2013 Shane Crawford and two other men pulled off a double murder in a busy town in central Trinidad. Less than a month later all three were in Syria fighting for the Islamic State—the first Trinidadians, or Trinis (to use the local idiom), to do so. By the time the U.S. State Department added Crawford to its list of “Global Terrorists” in 2017, more than 240 Trini nationals had migrated to the so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq. This makes Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a small twin-island republic in the Caribbean, one of the world’s biggest recruiting grounds, per capita, of the Islamic State.

Who are these recruits?

In a recent article published in the journal International Affairs, I presented demographic data on 70 of them:

• Thirty-four percent are adult men, 23 percent are adult women and 43 percent are minors.
• Of the adults, the ratio of males to females is 60:40. This places T&T at the top of the list of Western countries for female Islamic State migrants.
• The average age at time of departure across all 40 of the adults is 34. This is unusual compared to age averages found for all other Western Islamic State contingents; travelers from other countries are, on average, nearly a decade younger.
• Nearly all the adult men were employed at the time they departed to join the Islamic State. The vast majority—90 percent—can be categorized as middle class, while 10 percent can be categorized as lower class.
• Among the men, nearly 80 percent were married at the time of leaving, while among the women all were married, with the sole exception of an 18 year old who left with her family. So, among the Trini individuals for whom we have data, there were no “jihadi brides,” and while in the European and North American context the norm was “bunches of guys” leaving, in Trinidad it was “bunches of families,” of which there were at least 26.
• Forty-three percent are converts, which, though high, doesn’t deviate from the pattern in other Western Islamic State mobilizations, where converts are also over-represented.
• Thirty percent had a criminal record or had been involved in criminal activities prior to their departure, which is also broadly in line with research on European foreign fighters.
• Finally, the vast majority of those who left come from three areas in Trinidad: Rio Claro in the southeast, Chaguanas in west-central Trinidad, and Diego Martin in the northwest. The majority—nearly 70 percent—lived in Rio Claro on or near the Boos Settlement Muslim community led by Imam Nazim Mohammed.
• Many attended Salafi mosques (of which there are fewer than five out of a total of 85 mosques in T&T; Salafi-Muslims in T&T are a tiny minority within a minority).

Push, pull, and a network:

What seems to have pushed them, although “push” is far too deterministic a metaphor, was a profound spiritual disaffection from the very best that Trinidad had to offer, which was a decent life of tranquility and ease on a tropical island that they came to see as sexually permissive, corrupt and lacking in any real value—a sort of anti-paradise. What seems to have “pulled” them to the Islamic State was a conviction that it was the true paradise that Trinidad claimed to be but was not: a pristine society of faith free of corruption, deviance and worldly temptation.

Just as important a question as why they radicalized and joined the Islamic State is how they radicalized and joined. This is really a question about recruiters, facilitators and networks. One of the most striking features about the entire cohort of Trini Islamic State travelers is just how networked it was. Everyone in it was connected to everyone else. They all knew each other, either because they were friends or because they were related.

The node at the center of the network was Imam Nazim Mohammed, who remains in Trinidad and presides over his own religious settlement (a sizable area of land that includes the mosque he leads and around 30 houses he owns) in the rural town of Rio Claro. Mohammed’s network has its roots in the Jamaat al Muslimeen, a group of black Muslims led by Yasin Abu Bakr. In July 1990, 114 men from Bakr’s group, including Mohammed and one of his sons, attempted to overthrow the government of T&T, effectively holding the country for ransom for six bloody days. They didn’t succeed, but the dark legacy of the attempted coup, of which the pro-Islamic State network in Trinidad is a part, lives on. Bakr and his men were imprisoned for their involvement but were pardoned in 1992. After their release, Mohammed began to distance himself from the al Muslimeen leader and eventually established his own religious community in the south of the country, where he embarked on a project of Islamic proselytization and disengaged altogether from domestic politics.

Moreover:

If the authorities in Trinidad are to repatriate its Islamic State-affiliated women, as I am suggesting they should, the price of repatriation must be a serious moral reckoning with what these women have done and, for the vast majority who took their children to Syria, the harms they inflicted on their children by effectively pimping them out to a merciless terrorist group. They cannot return as victims deserving of sympathy but must be held to scrupulous moral account.

This raises some difficult questions. One relates to the custodianship of the children, and whom they live with once they are returned to Trinidad. This is made all the more difficult because many of the children’s extended family members in Trinidad are part of the pro-Islamic State network there.

Another question has to do with capacity and cost: It will not be cheap to repatriate 40 or more children to Trinidad, and their care and rehabilitation over many years will require a long-term investment of resources.

Repatriating the men poses different issues. There is more at the link.

Protests have been on the rise since the 1950s, but success rate has been doing down since the mid-2000s

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, The Interpreter, NYTimes, Oct. 26 2019:

The world is changing in ways that make people likelier to seek sweeping political change by taking to the streets. [But] Protests are also becoming much, much likelier to fail.
Only 20 years ago, 70 percent of protests demanding systemic political change got it — a figure that had been growing steadily since the 1950s.

In the mid-2000s, that trend suddenly reversed. Worldwide, protesters’ success rate has since plummeted to only 30 percent, according to a study by Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard University political scientist who called the decline “staggering.” [...]

To understand that shift, here are four major changes behind our new normal of mass global protest and what it reveals about the world.

(1) Democracy is stalling out

Democracy’s once-steady growth around the world has stalled, and is maybe beginning to reverse.

For the first time since World War II, the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism is exceeding the number moving toward democracy, according to a recent study by Anna Lürhmann and Staffan Lindberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. [...]  Bottom-up pressures that usually manifest as public demand or at least desire for democracy, such as rising middle classes, are still building, as they have throughout the modern era.

But now that people aren’t getting democracy, it’s as if a release valve has been closed. That built-up pressure is getting released as explosions of mass outrage. And because within-system avenues for change, like voting in elections or lobbying elected officials, are seen as less and less reliable, people seek change from outside the system, with mass protests. [...]

Those middle-ground countries, where citizens have enough freedom to expect and demand change but not to get it, may be the most susceptible to repeated popular revolt.

Such countries can become “stuck in a low-level equilibrium trap” between unrest and reform, Seva Gunitsky, a University of Toronto political scientist, wrote in a recent paper. [...]

(2) Social media makes protests likelier to start, likelier to balloon in size and likelier to fail

[...] She [Erica Chenoweth] cited, as a comparison, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, a student civil rights group that played a major role in the civil rights movement.
In that pre-social media era, activists had to spend years mobilizing through community outreach and organization-building. Activists met near daily to drill, strategize and hash out disagreements. But those tasks made the movement more durable, ensuring it was built on real-world grass-roots networks. And it meant that the movement had the internal organization both to persevere when things got hard and to translate street victories into carefully planned political outcomes.

Social media allows movements to skip many of those steps, putting more bodies on the streets more quickly, but without the underlying structure to help get results. [...]

At the same time, governments have learned to co-opt social media, using it to disseminate propaganda, rally its sympathizers or simply spread confusion. [...]

(3) Social polarization is way up

There is a truth about protest movements that often gets missed.

We often think of mass protests as representing “the people.” It’s how participants describe them. And it gives their protests a degree of democratic legitimacy.

But the truth, in almost all cases, is that they are primarily driven by a particular social class or set of social classes. [...] any movement, especially at first, is usually animated by a social class collectively demanding changes that will serve that class or, maybe just as often, demanding to reverse changes that have hurt them. (When enough social classes join in, particularly poorer strata that are historically less likely to protest, you have a revolution.) [...]

Social polarization is increasing worldwide. People are more polarized along racial, class and partisan lines. As a result, they are likelier to cling to their sense of group identity and to see their group as under siege — compelling them to collectively rise up. [...]

The result is often a sense of conflict between “the people” and “the system” — a recipe for populist backlashes in countries where people still trust institutions enough to bring change through elections, and anti-system uprisings seemingly everywhere else.

(4) Authoritarian learning

The world’s strongmen, would-be strongmen and outright dictators appear to have noticed the rise in civil unrest, and especially protesters’ success at forcing change.

Nonviolent protests became, to the world’s authoritarians, a threat just as dangerous as any foreign army, if not more so.

In the mid-2000s, they began to fight back with what Ms. Chenoweth called, in a 2017 paper, “joint efforts to develop, systematize, and report on techniques and best practices for containing such threats.” [...]  And, Ms. Chenoweth said, governments learned to watch one another for lessons on tools and tactics, and even to openly share them.

There is a term for this direct and indirect lesson-sharing: authoritarian learning.

These cat-and-mouse strategies for frustrating and redirecting popular dissent without crushing it outright are a major reason that protests’ success rate has plummeted.

But such strategies also don’t really defeat dissent outright — so they may be helping to ensure future cycles of protests, maintaining the high global rate.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

See earlier post, INEQUALITY!! sparks rising tide of protests world-wide.