Weekly Grounding #6
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I found during the past week. I hope they help ground your thinking in the midst of media overload. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“US Reliance on China’s Capital Goods Rules Out Decoupling”
I touched on the US-China decoupling debate back in Weekly Grounding #4, and this is a useful follow-up. Economist David Goldman at Asia Times notes that “China is one of America’s largest suppliers of capital goods [goods used to make other goods], which include everything from industrial machinery to circuit boards.” Goldman concludes that “US reliance on China’s capital goods rules out decoupling. A cutoff of Chinese imports would thus create immediate and devastating supply shortages across a wide range of US industries.” The following pair of graphs demonstrate just how dependent the United States is on Chinese capital goods:
“The Imminent Extradition of Julian Assange and the Death of Journalism”
This column at
reminds us why the United States government will not stop its vicious pursuit of Julian Assange. Read the whole piece to see the US crimes Assange exposed. Hedges writes: “I am as stunned by this full frontal assault on journalism as I am by the lack of public outrage, especially by the media. The very belated call from The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País — all of whom published material provided by WikiLeaks — to drop the extradition charges is too little too late. All of the public protests I have attended in defense of Julian in the U.S. are sparsely attended. Our passivity makes us complicit in our own enslavement.”
“Ted Kaczynski, Technology and Trauma”
Binoy Kampmark discusses Ted Kaczynski’s life and thought in this article at Counterpunch. He concludes: “Far from being mad, the dystopia of Kaczynski’s industrial society has found solid roots. And the forces behind it, be they the myriad of social networks, data hungry platforms and the increasingly agitated discussion about Artificial Intelligence and its generative properties, implicates us all.”
“The Unexplained Rise of Cancer Among Millennials”
Speaking of industrial society, this disturbing article at The Financial Times chronicles the drastic increase in cancer among young people. While the exact cause(s) may be “unexplained,” the massive changes in food production, diet, work, lifestyle, and medicine ushered in by unbridled industrialism are clearly implicated: “The rise in cases in wealthy western countries now looks set to find a belated, but resounding, echo in poorer countries where these societal changes happened decades later than in the US or the UK. The FT’s research shows that between 1990 and 2019, cancer rates for 15- to 39-year-olds increased significantly faster in upper-middle income countries, such as Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa, compared to high-income countries: by 53 per cent compared to 19 per cent.” Here’s a graphic representation of these trends:
This is a provocative piece by
at . He writes: “The commercial dominance of plot irks me. It’s so Darwinian. We’re predisposed to want to see goodies struggle but ultimately win, the baddies get comeuppance, and then have it all wrap up at the end, with no extraneous scenes in there, with the story entirely driven by people’s actions rather than deus ex machina. Aristotle clocked all this shit in 400BC and every screenwriting guide recapitulates the same advice. Some modern writers propose theories from evolutionary psychology to explain our thirst for certain shaped plots. We should be ashamed at how easily these buttons are pushed by every soap opera, romance novel, and Marvel film. I want more. It’s not only that more original works press our buttons by accessing our narrative receptors via new pathways, by avoiding the most hackneyed formulae that we see in superhero films — some works also press new buttons.”
This essay by
at Palladium provides an incisive critique of modern schooling and offers some ideas to escape its trap: He writes: “The ever-longer march through school creates a bizarre barrier separating the student from reality. As a consequence, childhood consists of the age when one can intuit very well how the world works at the same time one is prevented from acting upon it meaningfully. Instead of making adolescence full of rites of passage where one attempts to master something and accept responsibility, we have made it full of waiting and fake work—for school is work. After a time, all children spot this fakeness, and all honest educators note it, saying that one of the most difficult parts of teaching is having to justify why what the children are learning will be relevant and useful.” The history of mass schooling is a major interest of mine, and I have written on this topic at Truthout.
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.