Our Weekly Discontents: August 31, 2020
Every day is the same and every day is bad!
Hi pals, it’s Gaby Del Valle from BORDER/LINES. A fun thing about covering immigration right now is that I literally have no clue what’s going on half the time, even though knowing what’s going on is like, at least half my job. I don’t know if it’s because news happens faster now, because every day feels the same, or some combination of both, but I often find myself sifting through Google alerts to remember what happened just a few days ago.
All of this is to say that last week, Felipe and I wrote about a bunch of stuff happening within the Department of Homeland Security, none of which is exactly new: every week, there’s a new horrible development in a thing we’ve known about for a long time. Like the DHS director who was illegally appointed and then hosted a televised naturalization ceremony that aired during the RNC, or the government’s new-ish policy of detaining migrant kids in hotels because they might have coronavirus and then testing them for coronavirus right before sending them back to their countries of origin, even though the whole point of “expelling” them is allegedly to keep them from giving Americans coronavirus. Nothing is new, it’s just constant and ongoing and shit.
Anyway! Let’s hear from the rest of the gang. Sorry for being such a downer :(
Wars of Future Past
The strangest part of covering military tech in 2020 is the sheer disconnect between the imagined futures of technologically sophisticated violence, and the tangible reality of violence at home, fought with shields and assault rifles and cars.
For the latest installment of Wars of Future Past, I look at some big stories in military Artificial Intelligence. First is the headline-grabbing DARPA dogfight, where in a flight simulator an AI outfights a real human pilot, in part by “not flying as though it had any squishy organs to protect,” and other tricks. I also talk a little about an AI that looks at rust, in what is either a cost-saving innovation for predictive maintenance or a way to involve the Google Cloud in ship repair.
Oh, and also there are cyborg locusts. Cool, calm, normal, military-funded cyborg locusts trained to sniff bombs.
A Lonely Impulse of Delight
Last week, I (Connor Wroe Southard) wrote about a bad TV show. This is unusual for me, because mostly I write about things I at least sorta like. I tried to like Lovecraft Country, and I did appreciate the first episode, which lovingly folds in what must have been considerable historical research about, for instance, block parties in 1950s Chicago. I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. The second episode was one of the more unfortunate messes I’ve seen, relative to the show’s budget and its status as a highly touted HBO product.
Lovecraft Country lost track of its tone, veering between the cues of low-stakes pulp adventure and sonorous melodrama without any clarity about where it wanted to end up. “Tone,” as applied to narrative art, is both a nebulous concept and a potentially trivial one. I use the term a lot, without having a rigorous theory about what it means. After writing about Lovecraft Country and reflecting further on how the show fails, I began to realize what I think I mean when I say “tone”: A story’s attempts to guide audience feeling to its desired destination. That means you have to know how you want your audience to feel, and you have to lead them there with as much grace as possible. This is both very simple and exceedingly hard. It’s something I’ve spent much of the last few years trying to learn to do in my own fiction. In the case of Lovecraft Country, I suspect the many talents involved in creating the show were simply not on the same page—not headed towards the same emotional destination.
Speaking of destinations and my own creative, my novel will be “done” soon. This means I’ll have even more time to slowly brainstorm plans for premium content once I finally go paid. I might even eventually create said content. In the meantime, sign up and help me figure it out.
Foreign Exchanges
Derek here. If you’ve read the story of Cain and Abel then you know that farmers and herders don’t always get along very well. They’re frequent rivals for scarce resources, but historically these two communities could not survive without one another and so they’ve been locked into a dynamic of mutual dependence and competition. At many times over the millennia and in many parts of the world that’s meant conflict, which until the rise of firearms generally went in the pastoralists’ favor but started to swing the other way when the tools of war began to favor settled peoples over nomads.
Tensions between herders and farmers have never entirely gone away, and they’re increasingly manifest today in parts of the world where climate change is forcing these communities to coexist amid increasingly scarce resources like water and arable land. One of the places where this conflict has really flared up has been across the Sahel, that transitional belt across Africa where the Sahara in the north meets the Savannah in the south. The Sahara keeps making its way further south, compressing the Sahel and pushing these competing peoples together in some very combustible ways.
Farmer-herder violence has become especially acute across central Mali and central Nigeria, but as we learned this week it’s happening in other countries as well, like Chad. In Mali herder-farmer violence is often conflated with that country’s jihadist problem, because the predominant pastoralist community in central Mali, the Fulani, also happens to be predominantly Muslim. Al-Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates have used the conflict between the Fulani and neighboring farming communities like the Dogon to bolster their recruitment efforts. That’s why it was interesting to learn this week that Mali’s primary al-Qaeda affiliate, Jamaʿat Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, has for the past month been brokering peace talks between Fulani and Dogon leaders in central Mali. It seems that with Mali’s already weak state apparatus falling apart, JNIM leaders have decided it’s time to promote their insurgency as an alternative governing body even at the possible cost of some new recruits. It’s too soon to say if the effort will be successful and the tide of history suggests it won’t be, but it is an interesting development both in this long-standing farmer-herder conflict and in Mali’s dire political crisis.
Thanks for reading and please check out Foreign Exchanges!
Welcome to Hell World
In the first of two free pieces this week I covered a lot of ground, from Biden attempting to outflank Trump on the right over the issue of funding police, to the interminable and unending ~David Foster Wallace~ discourse. Read that one here.
In the second I looked back at a historically consequential incident of police violence from over seventy years ago, and Orson Welles’ championing of the victim’s cause. Read it here.
"The blind soldier fought for me in this war. The least I can do now is fight for him. I have eyes. He hasn’t. I have a voice on the radio, he hasn’t. I was born a white man. And until a colored man is a full citizen, like me, I haven’t the leisure to enjoy the freedom that colored man risked his life to maintain for me. I don’t own what I have until he owns an equal share of it. Until somebody beats me and blinds me, I am in his debt. And so I come to this microphone not as a radio dramatist, though it pays better, not as a commentator, although it’s safer to be simply that, I come in that boy’s name, and in the name of all who in this land of ours have no voice of their own. I come with a call for action. This is a time for it. I call for action against the cause of riot. I know that to some ears, even the word “action” has a revolutionary twang, and it won’t surprise me if I’m accused in some quarters of inciting to riot. Well, I’m very interested in riots. I’m very interested in avoiding them. And so I call for action against the cause of riots."
The Insurgents
The Nation’s Ken Klippenstein somehow managed to evade his lifetime ban from the show to join us for a conversation on the NBA Wildcat Strike, conservatives in media & politics immediately rallying around a Blue Lives Matter militia cosplay teen after he murdered two protesters in Kenosha and how despite the wave of right wing terrorism that has claimed the lives of dozens of people over the last few years, the only “political violence” anyone ever seems to want to talk about involves smashed bank windows or burned up fast food restaurants.
Also, we send a special thank you message to the troops (fact-checkers) for making absolutely clear to everyone that Trump and the RNC’s claims about Joe Biden wanting to defund the police, give Americans health care or pursue a radical environmental agenda are unequivocally false.
Discourse Blog
This was a big week for Discourse Blog on the business end, thanks to two partnerships that we’ve been working on. The first is a discounted subscription drive between DB and TMI, David Sirota’s progressive journalism newsletter. We cross posted one of Sirota’s latest issues, about corporate Democrats stranglehold over the party (on brand for both of us). We also published our first collaboration with Enemy Magazine, which focuses on giving under reported local stories a national platform. The first piece, a feature on a group of striking garbage workers in New Orleans who were replaced by prison labor, is up now.
Elsewhere, Paul Blest had a great blog about the evolution of Ed Markey into the left’s favorite old dude in this post-Bernie Sanders world, Rafi Schwartz wrote about the surreal staying power of Trump’s base of support and how the constant churn of this administration has made time feel like nothing anymore. I closed out the week with an essay on the right’s acceptance and use of militia violence. We also had a ton of stuff behind the paywall, as usual, which you can get a teaser from here. As a last note: Discourse Blog is now offering half-price subscriptions to college students, so if you’ve got a .edu email address, there’s never been a better time to sign up. If you’re in high school and don’t have a .edu address, email us at discoursetheblog@gmail.com and we’ll get you set up.