News from Everywhere – Page 6 – First they came for …

Mussolini

Watched ‘M’ the other night – a brilliant piece of TV film about the rise of Mussolini, and the emergence of modern fascism. So good I got hold of Antonio Scurati’s book, “M: Son of the Century” on which it is based. Also a good read, although literary in form rather than documentary.

We forget, and of course cannot feel, the appalling degradation that the First World War brought to those countries that ‘lost’ … except that Italy’s loss was not military defeat, because of course they were among the Allies, but the betrayal of promises made in the Treaty of London. It was a very complicated situation – after all Italy decided not to fight with the German/Austrian alliance of which they were a part because Italy saw an opportunity to regain territories it had lost in previous wars! And by the end of the 1st World War Europe as a whole was burning with the passionate possibility of a widespread socialist revolution stimulated by the the Bolshevik revolution.

Scurati and the film emphasise the depths of despair that the Italian survivors of that war had fallen into. All the promises of victory wiped away and to make the humiliation of the conscripts worse the promises of a fulsome welcome on their return from the battlefields were replacd with ostracism.

Mussolini had been a Marxist until he rejected the threat of the seizure of power by the socialist Movement following the Bolshevik successes. He (supposedly) never rejected the working class foundations but sought an active overthrow of all party political government. An ‘anti-party’

Thus fascism in Italy arises from the depression of defeat and national humiliation in spite of sharing the victory in a turbulent war..

None of this directly explains the rise of fascism today (for that is what is happening) although many of the markers are there. A particular idea early in the book catches eye: the fear that many of us feel as the madness of our increasingly psychotic democracies stretches its tentacles and encircles us. Some say, there is little you can do but look at the things you can control – and these aren’t many – but a least you might hang on to your sanity and avoid the dark wind of except that fear blows away confidence in the future.

This is all very well, and is a comforting idea – whatever it is that you can do will at least maintain your soul. But isn’t this exactly what Martin Niemöller was writing about … “First they came for …”?

Scurati writes about the fear that stalked Italian cities as division and often brutal strife caused people to lock their doors and shutter their windows and the political mobs paraded and or rampaged in the the streets:

“Faced with that future, they walled themselves up in the prison of the present.”

Destruction by Constitution

Astonishing … a low-IQ gangster cosplaying a ‘President’ enables a drug addict and baby-farmer to gain control of a foundational governmental system that controls who eats, who lives, who thrives, who dies … What has America done to itself?

https://newrepublic.com/article/191014/trump-elon-musk-treasury-purge

Futurist Femme

Too much information

Until fairly recently, say 19th Century, the survival of ‘content’ from the past has been as much as matter of chance as of design. The invention of printing, of course, arriving in the 1450s, made a huge difference to the survival of documents of all kinds including from the previous ages of scribal production. But, as is evident from Roland Allen’s research in “The Notebook” the development and spread of paper as a medium not only made printing feasible but also the general use of paper as a means of recording all kinds of information. Yet by its nature paper is also a vulnerable medium and even if printing ensured the survival of a great deal much has been lost. For the everyday use of paper as a personal as well as an official medium of record, survivals have been rare when considered against the huge scale of creation over the centuries since the 1400s.

Today, digital methods of production and storage of text, images and sound, have the result that very much less is lost.* In fact, we may be entering an age when we experience a new kind of cultural problem, the overabundance of ‘content’.

Is this a new kind of problem?**

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* I use the word ‘less’ deliberately for much of the world’s population remains unaffected by the presence of digital media. and probably cares even less! Yet, it has to be true that over the next few decades the digital archive provides a deeper pool of content that represents in greater variety and detail the ‘output’ of human beings.

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** In fact, reading Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science, and Allen (see below) this is not really a new problem. During the period leading up to the of the creation of the Royal Society and then beyond into the 17-18 Centuries we find much anxiety about how to manage the flood of content and information that printing made available

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Posted to Bluesky

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Takeaways: paper enabled print but also the spread of paper notebooks. Most now lost (tens of thousands?). Many books too but notebook loss is greater.

Contrast with the scale (~100%?) and longevity (200+ yrs?) of digital storage. This near-perfect archive may be our cultural nemesis (e.g. LLMs!).

(2)

#books

For those interested in the history/evolution of pre-digital media see ‘The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper‘. Some useful insights into our media precursors.

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Capone, Chicago … Trump

Just re-read ‘Scarface and the Untouchable: Eliot Ness and the Battle for Chicago‘* by Max Collins and Brad Schwartz. * An excellent book based on a load of research. Also if you, like me, you cannot abide the superficiality of American culture, its overweaning self-importance, its breeding of corruption and racist colonialism it provides some useful background.

Of course my home, the UK, is not completely innocent of these traits (e.g. smugness and a creepy shift to the right side of politic aka the wrong side!) but America has for some time been a sad nation in search of style and humanity.

In a casual moment a while back I watched the movie ‘The Untouchables’ with San Connery and Kevin Costner and realised it is a load of baloney. I went back to the book that I read a few years ago and the authors confirm that the movie is BS. The story they tell is much more interesting and bears little relation to Hollywood’s ideas about prohibition crime as depicted in that movie (though some of the pre-war noir movies are well worth watching and more accurate).

Takeaway:

What is striking is the character of Capone. A murderer yes, famous for killing three of his gang byt swinging his own baseball bat and then having his cronies shoot them until they were not quite dead but what stands out, and it quite chilling, is how closely Trump’s attitudes and beliefs so like Capone … him but without his intelligence or style! Trump is a black void, preferring corruption over honesty, confusing sycophancy for proof of self-worth and a less than hidden disdain for the law.

At least, the very least, Capone had brains.

Mind you, The US legal system and its enforcers were significantly to blame as well – the stories about Chicago’s mayoral elections of the time are eerie because of their similarity to contemporary US politics (e.g. Mayor Thompson). Lies and graft, lies and graft. I am not sure that much has changed in the years since.

The overall conclusion of the book is pessimistic: the effort to fight gangster crime, to stymie its flourishing, is fruitless:

“There are a thousand Dillingers … and a thousand Capones who know better than to write checks. The Bureau of Investigation is designed to prune the criminal tree but the tree goes on flourishing.”

Posted to Twitter and BSky:

Just re-read ‘Scarface and the Untouchable’. Relevance? What stands out is that Trump is so like Capone but without his intelligence or style!!

Capone’s moral compass was bent but at least he he had one! Trump is a zombie. Never honest, never kind, always greedy.

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Posted to BSky

The new vanguard of crooks, liars and traitors swindling their way into the political mainstream is depressing. A good case study is to be found in ‘Scarface and the Untouchable’.

Paradoxically, fighting gangster crime is like pruning a plant to make it stronger.

Confirmation bias is structural

See: The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine

“… misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine.”

“This dynamic plays into a natural tendency that humans have to be evidence foragers, to seek information that supports one’s beliefs or undermines the arguments against them. Finding such information (or large groups of people who eagerly propagate it) has not always been so easy. Evidence foraging might historically have meant digging into a subject, testing arguments, or relying on genuine expertise. That was the foundation on which most of our politics, culture, and arguing was built.”

“The current internet—a mature ecosystem with widespread access and ease of self-publishing—undoes that.”

Black Mirror, Series 2, Episode 3.

Broadcast i Black Mirror, Series 2, Episode 3. Available on Amazon Prime.

Broadcast in 2013 this film has a prescient quality about it. An example of how an LLM, which in 2024 are now commonplace. It also posits the idea that well, they could be used to mimic the personality of an individual. This episode of Black Mirror illustrates the limitations of that idea. Something like an LLM cannot replicate a human life; and creating an automata built to to mimic the physical person in every physical detail (adjustable in real-time!) may just make their limitations worse.

A young couple, Martha and Ash, off to a new home, somewhere rural. He is always engrossed in his online chatter. She, a graphic designer, is good humoured about it, if at times a little impatient with his distraction.

After they unload their stuff he goes off the return th hire van. He does not make it. He dies in a crash. She is, of course, traumatised; grieving.

At the wake. A friend, also bereaved, tells her she can sign up to ‘something’ (an online system, just software, that uses all the information it has about someone, that you can have conversations with). She says it will help her grief, as it did for her. Martha is upset, denounces the whole idea, screaming – “It’s sick …”.

Later, while also discovering that she she is pregnant, she gets a message from the same friend ‘I’ve signed you up’ and in the same list of new messages there is also one from Ash!

She finds the conversations both weird but also comforting and she spends a lot of time talking ot online-Ash. It sounds like Ash, and Ash seems to know he is ‘not there’, and online-Ash does seem to have ‘gaps’ i his knowledge about himself, and about Martha – but these are quickly repaired after he performs some sort of lookup!

Later, her friend writes to her to tell her about a new beta project by the same company, This turns out to be an automaton that looks like Ash, sounds like Ash, but is also ‘gappy’ about things he should know especially physical behaviour and real-time interactions.

The sex, however, is terrific! But he does not sleep, which Martha finds disturbing and is oddly dispassionate about everything. He cannot leave the house, for he is programmed to stay within a fixed distance of his point of origin (the bathroom in this case where he was activated after delivery!) …

Eventually she becomes so disturbed, angered, by the entire situation that she walks him to the nearby cliff, overlooking the sea shore where they live, and tells him to jump. He says “OK” but, again, Martha is so disturbed by his dispassionate compliance she screams at him that she cannot take it any more. He then enacts, mimics, how a person might passionately and fearfully to such a demand, to kill himself …

Final scene some years later: Martha has a daughter and it’s her birthday. They come home and the daughter asks to take a piece of birthday take to Ash, who now ‘lives’ in the loft. We see him standing there immobile, with some basic furniture – a bed!, a lamp! – none of which he needs. He speaks kindly and softly to his daughter, “Happy Birthday”; she replies, handing him the cake, “I know you can’t really eat it but let’s pretend …”.

Last shot: Martha climbs the loft ladder to join them.

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Posted to BlueSky:

A ‘case study’ of the limitations of LLM-type models of mind mimicry: Black Mirror, Series 2, Episode 3 (on Amazon Prime).

Produced 10yr ago) in 2013 it is an insightful depiction of the absurdity of believing that mind-mimicry built from data archives is a ‘real’ mind.

It is also a warning.n 2013 this film has a prescient quality about it. An example of how an LLM, which in 2024 are now commonplace. It also posits the idea that well, they could be used to mimic the personality of an individual. This episode of Black Mirror illustrates the limitations of that idea. Something like an LLM cannot replicate a human life; and creating an automata built to to mimic the physical person in every physical detail (adjustable in real-time!) may just make their limitations worse.

After they unload their stuff he goes off the return th hire van. He does not make it. He dies in a crash. She is, of course, traumatised; grieving.

Later, while also discovering that she she is pregnant, she gets a message from the same friend ‘I’ve signed you up’ and in the same list of new messages there is also one from Ash!

Last shot: Martha climbs the loft ladder to join them.

===============

Posted to BlueSky:

A ‘case study’ of the limitations of LLM-type models of mind mimicry: Black Mirror, Series 2, Episode 3 (on Amazon Prime).

Produced 10yr ago in 2013 it is an insightful depiction, and a warning about the absurdity of believing that mind-mimicry built from data archives is a ‘real’ mind.

It is also a warning.

Creative Destruction

Our beginning and our end …

Photo of the first image of a black hole with a dark centre surrounded by a glowing, uneven ring of orange, yellow and red.

The new image of the black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy. L. Medeiros (Institute for Advanced Study), D. Psaltis (Georgia Tech), T. Lauer (NSF’s NOIRLab), and F. Ozel (Georgia Tech).
Source

What the image shows is the ‘photon ring’ that surrounds the gravitational mass of the black hole. The photon ring is a boundary layer, the last gasp of light as it is dragged into the black hole (yes, that’s the void in the middle of the ring that we cannot actually see).

Interesting detail: the photon ring is brighter towards the bottom of the image because the ring is spinning mind-bogglingly fast and where the ring is brighter is the result of the Doppler effect – the brighter part of the ring is spinning towards us (…well, that’s the hypothesis anyway!)

Even more beautiful is the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy: Sagittarius A*

Cromwell: A Biography

Have just read Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Thomas Cromwell: A Life’ (after watching the Mirror and the Light on telly.

It’s a very long book, not for the faint-hearted, very detailed. and an astonishing amount of research mostly based on original archive material (as far as I can tell).

Having read Mantel, and watched the TV adaptations as well as several programmes ‘investigating’ the Tudor period, there is much in this book to balance some of the more simplified representations of his life and character. He was a hard man for sure and used his power and influence for ends that in today’s world we cannot sanction. But his rise from relative ordinariness to become a of pivot of Tudor power as well a driver of religious Reformation is extraordinary.

Takeaways:

His father was not the brute he is made out to be in Mantel. That is a Victorian story and his family were, in today’s terms, successful middle-class people. He was, nevertheless, something of a wild kid!

He created several political and governmental practices we use today – the ‘division’ (handy, if you think about it, for identifying those who oppose a government line); the by-election to replace defunct of unwilling parliamentary participants); and he developed the role of printing as a tool for disseminating government policies and statutes, until then much more dependent on scribed documents. He was a Nicodemite (i.e. a covert Protestant; this likely played a significant role in his downfall along with the political mess created by the Cleves marriage), and was responsible for printing and the compulsory distribution of the first English language bible (known as the Matthew bible because it was published under the false name of ‘Thomas Matthew’ whereas it was in fact a reprint of Tyndale’s bible!).

Perhaps one of his more interesting concerns (aside from the transformation-by-closure-and-requisition of the English church system) was to do with the state of rivers and the damage done by the uncontrolled use of weirs for a variety of purposes. For example, the River Itchen once provided navigable access from Winchester to the sea of Southampton but had become impassable and degraded as a result of the many weirs and mill ponds established along its course leading to silting, loss of flow. and navigation. Cromwell spent a lot of time removing many weirs and improving the quality of rivers.

See the section in the book on the ‘Commissions of sewers’. “In many ways, the work of these commissions over several centuries from 1532 created the modern geography of rural England: less spectacularly or rapidly than the Industrial Revolution, but cumulatively just as important in effect.”

The idea that Cromwell was a ‘rewilder’ is suggsted here https://www.inkcapjournal.co.uk/was-thomas-cromwell-the-first-rewilder/ and refers to Mantel’s story in the Mirror and the Light that he looked upon beavers as a necessary and useful animal for the maintenance of river health. This biography implies there was much more to than that. A useful study indeed for historians of environmentalism!

There is much more in the book that offers many, many hours of follow up though the sources that are cited are mostly original documents, so follow-up would be quite challenging. It’s a long read, lots of names, hard work if you want the details!

During 1530 to 1540 as the pace of reformation increased, the removal and destruction of shrines, tombs and religious artefacts grew more wanton. For example, by about 1537 scavengers were digging up wayside crosses in search of (non-existent) treasure that popular belief said lay buried beneath them! Cromwell’s ow cellars At Austin Friars were, apparently, stuffed with all kinds of seized holy objects (most eventually burned or otherwise destroyed).