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.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Positive Views of Science Continue to Decline”
This report from Pew Research Center documents a steady decrease in Americans’ trust in science and scientists which has continued unabated after the pandemic. This suggests that the crisis of legitimacy for science is deeper than a dissatisfaction with covid policies alone. While this trend is most pronounced among Republicans, Democrats, too, have become less confident in the social benefits of science. The results of the most recent survey broken down by race were particularly revealing, demonstrating a close correlation between overall socioeconomic status and views about the impact of science on society:
“How AIDS Politicized Science”
In light of the Pew report, this is a timely column by David Moulton at Compact Magazine. He offers a clear and concise history of the debates surrounding HIV and AIDS and the uncanny parallels between the response to AIDS and covid. Moulton argues that “the AIDS crisis helped bring about a new relationship between science and politics. Science came to dictate intimate aspects of people’s lives and set public policy. At the same time, the appeal to science as the ultimate authority incentivized political organizations and leaders to present their agenda as scientifically correct and to pressure scientists to support it. The result was a double movement in which science became political and politics increasingly claimed to be scientific.” For more on the relationship between science and politics, see my recent appearance on the What’s Left? podcast.
“Inside an OnlyFans Empire: Sex, Influence and the New American Dream”
If the AIDS epidemic politicized science, it also reinforced the increasing politicization of sex and sexuality, a trend which has only become stronger since the 1980s. This reporting in The Washington Post documents how the more recent emergence of platforms like OnlyFans has contributed to another phenomenon: the attempt to subsume sexual intimacy entirely under the logic of pure commodity exchange: “America’s social media giants for years have held up online virality as the ultimate goal, doling out measurements of followers, reactions and hearts with an unspoken promise: that internet love can translate into sponsorships and endorsement deals. But OnlyFans represents the creator economy at its most blatantly transactional — a place where viewers pay upfront for creators’ labor, and intimacy is just another unit of content to monetize.” For the couple profiled in the article, “The money was just too good. And over time, they adopted a self-affirming ideology that framed everything as just business. Things that were tough to do but got easier with practice, like shooting a sex scene, they called, in gym terms, ‘reps.’ Things one may not want to do at first, but require some mental work to approach, became ‘self-limiting beliefs.’”
In light of Israel’s continued assault on Gaza, I recently watched this three-part PBS Frontline documentary series on the Taliban and the United States, released earlier this year. While many commentators have drawn parallels between the current conflict and the Iraq War, Afghanistan arguably provides an even more illuminating lens through which to help make sense of Israeli policies. The discussion of America’s failed counterinsurgency strategy during its two-decade war in Afghanistan (in Part Two of the series) is of particular relevance. It indicates that “destroying” or even “defeating” an organization like Hamas in Gaza is a much more difficult task than many believe.
“What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide”
In this guest opinion piece for The New York Times, Israeli-born scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, Omer Bartov, argues that top Israeli leaders and generals have clearly expressed “genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action” against the Palestinians. He writes that “the only way to put an end to these cycles of violence is to seek a political compromise with the Palestinians and end the occupation. It is time for leaders and senior scholars of institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust to publicly warn against the rage- and vengeance-filled rhetoric that dehumanizes the population of Gaza and calls for its extinction. It is time to speak out against the escalating violence on the West Bank, perpetrated by Israeli settlers and I.D.F. troops, which now appears to also be sliding toward ethnic cleansing under the cover of war in Gaza...”
“Understanding Israel’s Dehumanizing Palestinians by Rereading Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas”
One of my frustrations with most responses to the current conflict has been the generalized failure to engage directly and seriously with questions of ethics and theology. This is why I drew on the work of Jewish theologian, Michael Fishbane, in my recent piece, “The World Is Built by Gratuitous Kindness,” here on Handful of Earth. In it, I also mention philosopher Martin Buber in passing, so I was heartened to see Daniel Warner engage with Buber’s thought in a column at Counterpunch this week. Warner argues that “The Israeli Defense Minister’s description of the Hamas terrorists as ‘human animals’ and the disproportional Israeli reaction to October 7 are part of decades of an asymmetrical relationship between Israel and Palestinians. There can be no talk of a one-state solution, an eventual federation or even a two-state solution until there is an Israeli recognition of Palestinians as equals and worthy of being treated proportionally in a symmetrical, humane relationship based on mutual dignity. Until Palestinians become part of the I-Thou in Buber’s terms and are included in the Other in Levinas’ there will be no peace.”
“Nerd Culture Is Murdering Intellectuals”
- chronicles the rise of American nerds to positions of power and influence at . He contends that “Nerdom ascended because it was the nerds themselves who got rich. Really rich. Like Bill Gates rich. Because all the kids playing D&D in 1985 were doing dot com startups in 1995. The dot-com bubble burst, but a lot of them still got rich. These people, mostly men, had grown up mop-haired and spindly, the geek side of Freaks and Geeks. Then tech companies outperformed the S&P 500 for the last thirty years. We had the personal computing revolution, the internet and associated dot-com bubble, the crypto craze, and now the AI explosion.” Hoel goes on to lament that “some segment of nerds should be…metamorphosing from nerd into that more delicate but potent creature, the intellectual, but instead they are drawn to the easy honeypot of modern middlebrow culture because it is too nerdy, too attractive, too omnipresent, to ever leave.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Is the dehumanisation witnessed in Israel an isolated phenomenon or a manifestation of the broader approach that both Americans and Europeans, and the leaders they elect, employ in their global interactions? The utilisation of colonialist and settler methods, honed 'When the west was won' and elsewhere, is particularly intriguing in this 21st century context in Palestine and after this, who knows where. Doesn't this ongoing display serves as a live demonstration of well-established colonial tactics? Doesn't the voices of moderation from patriarchs in these societies seem to echo sentiments from the same historical playbook written with the blood of the past? Let's now sit back and enjoy the series called - how the West Bank is won.