Weekly Grounding #101
News, links, writing
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.
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“Profiting From Genocide”
summarizes the recent United Nations report, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” at : “The latest report submitted by Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as Blackrock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.”The report notes that “‘Israeli military operations rely heavily on equipment from leading global manufacturers to “unground” Palestinians from their land, demolishing homes, public buildings, farmland, roads and other vital infrastructure. Since October 2023, this machinery has been integral to damaging and destroying 70 per cent of structures and 81 per cent of cropland in Gaza.’ Caterpillar Inc. has for decades provided the Israeli military with equipment used to demolish Palestinian homes, mosques, hospitals as well as ‘burying alive wounded Palestinians,’ and killed activists, such as Rachel Corrie.”
“The report criticizes universities that partner with Israeli universities and institutions. It notes that labs at MIT ‘conduct weapons and surveillance research funded by the Israeli Ministry of Defense.’ These projects include ‘drone swarm control—a distinct feature of the Israeli assault on Gaza since October 2023—pursuit algorithms, and underwater surveillance.’”
“The Young College Grads Who Propelled Mamdani to Victory in New York”
The Wall Street Journal reports on Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in the New York City mayoral Democratic primary. While it is quite significant that Mamdani managed to win the primary despite a concerted Zionist smear campaign against him, it is far from clear that his victory represents the working class uprising that many on the left have proclaimed. Instead, it appears to follow a familiar pattern: a culturally elite millennial leftist candidate whose core support base can be found among (justifiably) disgruntled young petite bourgeoisie transplants.
The article notes that Mamdani “was propelled to the Democratic primary in a stunning upset by a group of economic rebels just as unlikely: young, educated New Yorkers, many of them white…Most electoral districts where at least a quarter of residents had bachelors degrees broke mostly for Mamdani over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Wall Street Journal analysis of preliminary election results and census data found. Mamdani also performed better in areas where non-Hispanic whites made up an above-average share of the population, as well as areas with above-average populations of Asians and Hispanics, the Journal found.”
Cuomo’s coalition of finance capitalists and working class voters was not enough to defeat Mamdani’s mobilization of New York’s middle strata: “Mamdani’s win shocked some on Wall Street, where top financiers had backed Cuomo. The former governor won much of New York’s tony Upper East Side, but also working-class neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens.”
Mamdani’s primary victory demonstrates the broad appeal of economic populism and increasing disregard for Zionist propaganda in New York City. However, it does not seem to indicate a dissolution of the deep divide between working class voters and the downwardly mobile petite bourgeoisie, which persists in the city and beyond.
“China to Hold First World Humanoid Robot Games”
At Asia Times, Jeff Pao reports on the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, which will be held in Beijing in August: “Following the world’s first humanoid robots’ marathon in April and kickboxing match in May, both held in China, the first World Humanoid Robot Games (WHRG) will be held in Beijing from August 15 to 17. More than 100 international teams will join the sports events. Beijing will also host the 2025 World Robot Conference (WRC) from August 8 to 12.”
Pao writes that “In sports competitions, humanoid robots will compete in seven track-and-field events, including 100 meters, 400 meters, 1500 meters, 4×100 meters relay, 100 meters obstacle race, standing long jump and standing high jump—as well as free gymnastics and 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3and 5 vs 5 football matches. There will be two dancing competitions for singles and multiple robots.”
For more on technophilia in China, see “The Left’s Problem with Technology.”
“What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?”
Hua Hsu reflects on the radical impacts of generative AI on college students for The New Yorker: “On a blustery spring Thursday, just after midterms, I went out for noodles with Alex and Eugene, two undergraduates at New York University, to talk about how they use artificial intelligence in their schoolwork. When I first met Alex, last year, he was interested in a career in the arts, and he devoted a lot of his free time to photo shoots with his friends. But he had recently decided on a more practical path: he wanted to become a C.P.A. His Thursdays were busy, and he had forty-five minutes until a study session for an accounting class. He stowed his skateboard under a bench in the restaurant and shook his laptop out of his bag, connecting to the internet before we sat down.
“Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, ‘so we can both lock in our skin care.’ Weeks earlier, when I’d messaged Alex, he had said that everyone he knew used ChatGPT in some fashion, but that he used it only for organizing his notes. In person, he admitted that this wasn’t remotely accurate. ‘Any type of writing in life, I use A.I.,’ he said. He relied on Claude for research, DeepSeek for reasoning and explanation, and Gemini for image generation. ChatGPT served more general needs. ‘I need A.I. to text girls,’ he joked, imagining an A.I.-enhanced version of Hinge. I asked if he had used A.I. when setting up our meeting. He laughed, and then replied, ‘Honestly, yeah. I’m not tryin’ to type all that. Could you tell?’”
Hsu reports that “many students claim to be unbothered by A.I.’s mistakes. They appear nonchalant about the question of achievement, and even dissociated from their work, since it is only notionally theirs. Joseph, a Division I athlete at a Big Ten school, told me that he saw no issue with using ChatGPT for his classes, but he did make one exception: he wanted to experience his African-literature course ‘authentically,’ because it involved his heritage. Alex, the N.Y.U. student, said that if one of his A.I. papers received a subpar grade his disappointment would be focused on the fact that he’d spent twenty dollars on his subscription. August, a sophomore at Columbia studying computer science, told me about a class where she was required to compose a short lecture on a topic of her choosing. ‘It was a class where everyone was guaranteed an A, so I just put it in and I maybe edited like two words and submitted it,’ she said. Her professor identified her essay as exemplary work, and she was asked to read from it to a class of two hundred students. ‘I was a little nervous,’ she said. But then she realized, ‘If they don’t like it, it wasn’t me who wrote it, you know?’”
“The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism”
At Compact,
writes that “There’s a genre of right-wing social media posting that’s dedicated to retro-Americana aesthetics: Norman Rockwell paintings, pictures of cute New England towns, preppy clothing, 1950s family scenes, Beach Boys-era Southern California, and similar things. The Trump administration has even gotten into the game, with the Department of Homeland Security posting a Thomas Kincade paining of an idealized small-town scene. But to the extent that any such aesthetics or lifestyles are actually practiced today, it’s usually by liberals, not conservatives.”Renn argues that this “helps explain some of the disconnect between the conservative elite and the Republican base. A lot of the conservative leadership class shares a significant part of the cultural outlook of progressives. They are culturally blue in an important way. That’s why much of the conservative intelligentsia lives in New York, Washington, or coastal California where they can live that lifestyle. They may have to be in these cultural centers to do their job, but they quite like it there…Right wing influencers post those images because it’s what they like. But this isn’t actually what the Republican voting base is choosing.”
“Hippies, Hubris and Evangelism—The Legacy of the Psychedelic ’60s”
Mia Levitin reviews two recent books on the 1960s counterculture for The Financial Times: The Last Great Dream by Dennis McNally and The Acid Queen by Susannah Cahalan. The Acid Queen tells the story of Timothy Leary’s fourth wife, Rosemary Woodruff: “A high-school dropout, Woodruff arrived in New York from the Midwest in 1953. Twice divorced by 21, once from a jazz accordionist, she worked as a model and stewardess (an industry ‘harder to get into than Harvard,’ writes Cahalan), until she aged out of the skies at 30. Fleeing an abusive relationship, she met Leary, 15 years her senior, at his psychedelic commune upstate in 1965.”
“It’s a colourful story, involving love triangles, drug busts and the dramatic jailbreak of Leary, who was serving a 20-year sentence for marijuana possession. The couple fled to Algeria, became wards of the Black Panthers and were then sheltered by an arms dealer in Switzerland. Woodruff’s life underground—once Leary was caught in Afghanistan and returned to the US in 1973—had her hiding in Italy, Colombia and the Caribbean before living under an assumed name in Cape Cod, unable to afford the ‘mouthful of fillings’ she had needed since their escape…Leary was disavowed by the psychedelic community for co-operating with the Feds to reduce his sentence, after which he lived a life of debauched semi-celebrity until his death, aged 75, in 1996, with his ashes blasted into space. Woodruff, meanwhile, remained undercover for more than 20 years, until a judge threw out the charges against her in 1994.”
For some of my thoughts on the counterculture, see “Ted Kaczynski and the Paradox of the Postwar Predicament” and “Everybody Is a Star” here at Handful of Earth.
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.