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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“No Kings Protesters in Houston, TX Explain Why They're Marching”
interviews participants at the No Kings demonstration in Houston, Texas. He speaks with a range of protestors who are at the rally for different reasons. The video is well worth a watch. In his commentary at the end, Broze notes that “there’s Democratic politicians here giving speeches encouraging people to vote…I don’t support voting; I definitely don’t support voting for Democrats. But still I can come here and find common ground…This is just like during covid-1984 when I was in this same park marching against the covid lockdowns with Trump supporters, MAGA supporters, Blue Lives Matter flag-waving people, letting them know: ‘I don’t agree with you on a lot, but I’ll stand with you against the lockdowns.’ And that’s kind of how I see these movements.” “Protesters Against Overtourism Take to the Streets of Southern Europe”
At another set of protests across the Atlantic, Reuters reports on demonstrators confronting “overtourism” in Spain, Portugal, and Italy: “Thousands of people took to the streets of cities in southern Europe on Sunday to demonstrate against overtourism, firing water pistols at shop windows and setting off smoke in Barcelona, where the main protest took place. ‘Your holidays, my misery,’ protesters chanted in the streets of Barcelona while holding up banners emblazoned with slogans such as ‘mass tourism kills the city’ and ‘their greed brings us ruin.’”
“Under the umbrella of the SET alliance—Sud d'Europa contra la Turistització, or Catalan for ‘Southern Europe against Overtourism’—protesters joined forces with groups in Portugal and Italy, arguing that uncontrolled tourism was sending housing prices soaring and forcing people out of their neighbourhoods. ‘I'm very tired of being a nuisance in my own city. The solution is to propose a radical decrease in the number of tourists in Barcelona and bet on another economic model that brings prosperity to the city,’ Eva Vilaseca, 38, told Reuters at Sunday's demonstration in Barcelona, dismissing the common counterargument that tourism brings jobs and prosperity.”
“War Games”
At
, compares and contrasts modern and medieval warfare in relationship to the current propaganda campaign against Iran: “In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, war became something impossible for regular people to ignore. The bureaucratic machinery of the nation-state made it feasible to mobilize every last physical resource within a geographical territory, most importantly its population, and direct it toward war-fighting. Advances in military technology made it possible to slaughter civilian populations on a scale never before known to humanity. Now everyone had a stake in the battles carried out by their governments, and success or failure in war relied as never before on the active participation of the national population. It became necessary, then, for the state to persuade regular people to embrace the cause. Without their consent, one risked, at best, a lackluster war effort, and at worst, a social revolution.”“Now we’re seeing the start of a new propaganda effort, this time against Iran, and the case is so weak that it feels as if we’ve returned, full circle, to those medieval days when waging wars was the blood sport of an indifferent aristocracy, with no connection whatsoever to the stakes of our everyday lives. You open the paper and read about 60-day deadlines, uranium enrichment capabilities, and the ominous geo-strategic aspirations of a distant civilization few of us spend much time even thinking about. It’s all very abstract, technical, and intellectual. These are the concerns of princes in castles, not peasants on their plots. They’re hopelessly foreign. They’re vaguely reminiscent of the war games of dueling empires from an era we thought we had left behind.”
Woodhouse concludes: “It feels like they don’t even believe the bullshit they’re selling. It feels like 2003, when they whipped us up into a hysterical frenzy through the brute force of their vulgar and melodramatic war propaganda. It feels like the Dukes of This Place and That Place have a disagreement over the borders of their duchies and, to raise armies, need the rest of us to believe that it has anything to do with our lives. It feels like exactly the lie that it is.”
“Netanyahu Has Wanted War with Iran for Decades”
chronicles Benjamin Netanyahu’s lies about Iran’s nuclear program dating back to 1993. That year, Netanyahu stated that Iran would have a nuclear weapon by 1999. He continued to make these predictions over the course of the next 30 years culminating in the latest propaganda effort to justify Israel’s attacks on Iran and to rope the United States into another endless war in the Middle East. “Army Bringing in Big Tech Executives as Lieutenant Colonels”
Task & Purpose reports that “Four senior executives of tech giants like Meta and Palantir are being sworn into the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers at the unusually high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a new program to recruit private-sector experts to speed up tech adoption…The Reserve’s new lieutenant colonels are Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer for Palantir; [Andrew] Bosworth, chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, chief product officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer for OpenAI. Each of the four, who were set to be sworn in Friday, arrive with decades of experience in some of Silicon Valley’s largest and most innovative companies, and with levels of extraordinary personal wealth that careers in the industry often amass.”
“The tech executives will arrive as lieutenant colonels, a rank that most officers reach and hold when they are deep into the second decade of a military career. Lieutenant colonels typically command battalion-sized units, commonly with between 300 to 1,000 soldiers.” This recruitment effort is “aimed at bringing in part-time advisors from the private sector to help the service adopt and scale commercial technology like drones and robots into its formations.”
“The New Hydra”
At
, writes on the fallout from the feud between Steve Bannon and Elon Musk: “Bannon, naturally, slammed Musk for having betrayed the president and declared victory for the populists over the techies. But it’s not that simple, and Bannon, of all people, should know better. To be sure, this ordeal could very well end in a permanent split. Or the two could reconcile. Musk already apologized for some of his barbs, and Trump has reportedly been receptive to that act of contrition. He likes people who bend the knee. I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk and Trump mend fences in the end, if only to have another falling out later. But more importantly, I think that, regardless of how this specific relationship goes, the alleged triumph of MAGA populists has been greatly exaggerated.”He argues that the “technocratic threat is not limited to Musk, who is just one head on this hydra. Bannon is right about the threat posed by the tech elite. But he is outgunned by people who now have direct access to the president and his family. Indeed, as Bannon celebrated Musk’s self-inflicted blunder, Vance appeared on the podcast of Theo Von, where he defended his benefactor [Peter] Thiel’s plans to construct a technological Black Iron Prison, using his typical aw-shucks style to mask a sinister enterprise. According to comedian Tim Dillon, Thiel is playing the long game, courting your favorite ‘independent’ media personalities and podcasters in an effort to astroturf support for the new AI-military-industrial complex.”
Gonzalez concludes: “Short of jettisoning not only Musk but Vance and a whole host of tech bros, the new right is stuck with this problem and, as a result, cannot truly be independent. It can choose to make a symbolic sacrifice out of one man, pouring all its ire into him to soothe itself when the truth of that becomes too harsh to bear, but that does not change the fact that it has made a Faustian bargain and the ink has dried.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
"“Netanyahu Has Wanted War with Iran for Decades”"
All of Israeli's top political figures, of all parties, fully support the attack on Iran. Please, let's not make it all about Bibi.