Weekly Grounding #68
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
This Weekly Grounding is longer than usual due to an abundance of noteworthy articles on the upcoming U.S. election, the livestreamed genocide in Palestine, and topics broadly related to the concept of “progress” and its discontents. I hope you find it useful.
“The Left is Losing Its Grip on Ethnic Minority Voters”
John Burn-Murdoch is, to my knowledge, the best data analyst working on the sociological trends behind contemporary political realignments. In this piece at The Financial Times, he argues that “On both sides of the Atlantic, one of the oldest patterns in electoral demographics has started to break down,” namely, the Democratic Party and Labour Party hold on non-white voters:
Burn-Murdoch notes that these realignments “are particularly notable in election campaigns in both countries. In the US, Kamala Harris’s tough stance on immigration at the southern border is not a betrayal of the Democrats’ diverse base; it brings her closer to the typical non-white American’s policy preferences.”
Burn-Murdoch concludes: “Next month’s US election will come down to very fine margins while old party allegiances in the British electorate are breaking down. It has never been more important to understand where public opinion really lies. Politicians of all stripes would be wise to start listening to what different ethnic minority voters actually want, instead of relying on increasingly erroneous stereotypes or painting highly heterogeneous groups with one broad brush.”
“Gender Gap Is Defining Feature of Deadlocked Trump-Harris Race”
If race has become a less reliable predictor of political ideology and voting behavior in recent years, gender has emerged as an increasingly salient one, as discussed in many previous Weekly Groundings. The Wall Street Journal reports: “While a divide between the sexes has become a fixture of modern elections, it appears to have broadened since 2020, cutting across many racial, educational and economic groups.”
The article continues: “Trump appeared at a town-hall event before an all-female audience on Fox News this week, and Harris on Monday rolled out an ‘opportunity agenda’ for Black men, including business loans, job training and health initiatives. She did a town hall Tuesday with radio host Charlamagne tha God, who is popular with young Black men. Harris also has gone on podcasts and the Howard Stern show and will be interviewed by Fox News. Polls show little evidence such overtures are working. In fact, with Black and Latino men moving toward Trump, the polls suggest that America is becoming a bit less divided politically by race and more divided by gender.”
“How Podcasts Are Transforming the Presidential Election”
Brady Brickner-Wood writes at The New Yorker that “conversation podcasts have come to rival traditional forms of media—a reality that both Presidential candidates seem to recognize. When a public figure sits across from a podcast host to embark on a purportedly shapeless, stream-of-consciousness chat suffused with crude jokes and senseless tangents, an odd alchemy occurs: the speakers begin to sound like pals bantering at a pre-game, with the listener as a silent confidant. Like social-media platforms, which promise users constant connection and inexhaustible entertainment, podcasts promote a world where you never have to be alone, where every silence can be filled by familiar and friendly voices. (As the editors of n+1 wrote, in 2019, ‘This is why we love podcasts: they are the internet for our ears. Now we can be on the internet all the time.’).”
Brickner-Wood continues: “By going on shows like ‘Call Her Daddy’ and ‘All the Smoke,’ Harris is able to appeal to some of the demographics that she needs to turn out for her in November: young adults, women, and Black Americans among them. Trump, meanwhile, has appeared on several seemingly apolitical yet right-wing-coded shows that have given him the opportunity to communicate directly to a young, terminally online, male audience. These shows include ‘Full Send,’ a program hosted by the Nelk Boys, a collection of pranksters and hard-seltzer salesmen; ‘Impaulsive,’ which is fronted by the YouTuber turned professional wrestler Logan Paul; ‘Flagrant,’ a multi-host podcast led by the comedian Andrew Schulz; and the live stream of the Gen Z Twitch star Adin Ross, which included Ross gifting Trump a Rolex and a Tesla Cybertruck.”
“Roadblocked”
New York Times reporters travel on two bus routes in the occupied West Bank—one for Israelis and one for Palestinians. This important report documents the operation of the Israeli apartheid regime through the lens of transport: “To differentiate who can drive where, cars have different-colored license plates. Those registered in Israel have yellow plates and can move much more freely. West Bank Palestinian cars have green plates, and except for rare vehicles with special permits, they are barred from certain roads and can’t enter Israel or almost any part of Jerusalem”:
Israelis and Palestinians use different roads to make the same trip: “[O]ne of the starkest examples of roads built to keep Israelis and Palestinians apart [is] the East Jerusalem Ring Road. Palestinian cars use one side; only Israeli-registered cars are allowed on the other. A high wall keeps them apart.” Israeli and Palestinian bus trips also differ drastically in speed and comfort.
The article continues: “Unable to enter the main road, [the Palestinian] bus twisted back onto more village roads, some of them wide enough for only one car to pass at a time. Children sat at the chokepoints, selling coffee and directing drivers in order to avoid head-on collisions. Finally, the bus emerged from the villages onto a wider road. Israeli soldiers in guard posts along it held their rifles pointed at the passing drivers.”
“Israel Is Turning Northern Gaza Into a Killing Cage”
Meanwhile in Gaza, “With the full support of the Biden administration, Israel is waging a merciless war of extermination against the 400,000 Palestinians remaining in the northern Gaza Strip,”
and report for . “As it orders residents to flee the north, Israel has intensified its attacks on Deir Al-Balah, a city in central Gaza that has not suffered the vast scale of destruction unleashed by Israel in other parts of the Strip. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled to the city in recent months. In the early morning hours of Monday, Israel bombed a crowded tent encampment for displaced people on the grounds of Al Aqsa hospital, engulfing civilians in a massive ring of fire. Video from the scene showed patients—some of whom appeared to be in beds attached to IV cords—being burned alive as others in the encampment tried desperately to extinguish the fires with small buckets of water.”Scahill and Kouddous continue: “The Israeli military characterized its incineration of civilians in tents at the hospital as a ‘precision’ strike against ‘terrorists who were working in a command and control complex that was established in an area previously known as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.’ The IDF, which vowed to continue such attacks, provided no evidence to support its claims about Hamas using the hospital. This pattern of justifying attacks on civilians and protected sites by claiming Hamas uses them as human shields or command centers has been a hallmark of Israel’s genocidal war, a lethal narrative that has been repeatedly bolstered by senior U.S. officials.”
“65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza”
In a guest piece for The New York Times, Feroze Sidhwa reports on his experience working at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza: “I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’ve volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I grew up in Flint, Mich. I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total. At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. ‘I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,’ I told him. To my surprise, he responded: ‘Yeah, me, too. Every single day.’”
The piece goes on to compile testimony from dozens of volunteer health workers in Gaza. Their on-the-ground reports establish beyond a reasonable doubt the fact that the Israeli Defense Forces consistently and deliberately target Palestinian children for murder as a part of the Jewish state’s genocidal war on Gaza. To excerpt one example from this deeply disturbing piece, an orthopedic surgeon from Dallas, Texas, who volunteered in Gaza, recounts his experience: “One day, while in the E.R., I saw a 3-year-old and 5-year-old, each with a single bullet hole to their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was backing out of Khan Younis. So they returned to see if anything was left of their house. There was, they said, a sniper waiting who shot both children.”
“Why We Got the Idea of Progress So Terribly Wrong?”
discusses the religious worship of technological progress at . She emphasizes the massive environmental costs of new AI technologies: “If you ask ChatGPT, the popular generative AI chatbot, to write one 100-word email, it will use about 519 millilitres of water, which is roughly one standard water bottle. If you ask it to do this once a week for an entire year, it will consume approximately 27 litres — equivalent to 1.43 water cooler jugs…But it’s obviously not just water that each chatbot query consumes. It’s also electricity. According to the same estimates, generating that 100-word email requires about 0.14 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, equal to powering 14 LED light bulbs for an hour. Previous research also finds that creating a single image with an AI image generator uses pretty much the same amount of energy as charging your smartphone.”Jgln continues: “[P]articularly in the West, we are often encouraged to simply enjoy the conveniences these new technologies offer and the enormous amounts of stuff we produce and be thankful that we’re not a poor peasant a few centuries ago whose life was, presumably, worse because they couldn’t ask a large language model if sour cream ever really expires or order bags of mass-produced goods for a $20 or less with just one click of a button. Meanwhile, the very real cost of all this resource extraction and consumption is treated as merely an afterthought in our economic systems, as an unpleasant externality that someone, at some point, will probably have to deal with.”
“The Sperm Donor Bros of Tech”
At The Financial Times, Elaine Moore reports on the techno-pronatalism espoused by many self-styled thought-leaders in tech: “This genetic largesse is presumably down to a mix of narcissism, altruism and dreams of immortality without the messy business of actually parenting a child. Some may also believe their genes are more valuable than most and that exceptionalism can (and must!) be passed down.”
Moore continues: “PitchBook reports that 2024 is expected to be a record year for fundraising in the so-called femtech sector, surpassing 2021’s high of $1.9bn. Well known tech names are investing. OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman has backed start-up Conception, for example, which is researching the possibility of same-sex parents having a biological child together.”
“The Price”
The New York Times reports on the “preparations America is making for a historic struggle with its nuclear rivals. With Russia at war, China escalating regional disputes and nations like North Korea and Iran expanding their nuclear programs, the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its own arsenal…The spending spree, which the government began planning in 2010, is underway in at least 23 states — nearly 50 if you include subcontractors. It follows a decades-long freeze on designing, building or testing new nuclear weapons. Along with the subs, the military is paying for a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles and thermonuclear warheads. Tally all that spending, and the bill comes to almost $57 billion a year, or $108,000 per minute for three decades.”
“On the factory floor, it is plain to see the dream of nuclear disarmament, once shared by Republican and Democratic presidents alike, is dead. Or, at the very least, on life support.” Children are being enlisted to put the nail in the coffin of this dream: “The U.S. Navy has put in an order for General Dynamics to produce 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 — a job that’s projected to cost $130 billion. The industry is struggling to find the tens of thousands of new workers it needs. For the past 18 months, the company has traveled to elementary schools across New England to educate children in the basics of submarine manufacturing and perhaps inspire a student or two to consider one day joining its shipyards.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Thanks for the pieces on child murder in Gaza and the politics of black voters in US/UK (though it should be said that the black vote in the UK is very small and could only affect a few constituencies in London.)
Thanks for the excellent post about 'progress" and the ones about what's going on in Gaza and the West Bank, policies now being extended into Lebanon, where the IDF has demanded that the population of 25% of the country move off and leave a free fire zone behind.