Pratap Bhanu Mehta It took a horrific video to get the Supreme Court to intervene, the Prime Minister to break his silence through a grudging and mendacious reaction full of whataboutery, and the nation to express its shame at the events in Manipur. But these reactions do not wash off the taint of vile moral callousness, the indifference… Read More Manipur and our self-serving morality
The Oppenheimer director, Christopher Nolan, has highlighted the difficulties of applying nuclear weapons-style regulation to artificial intelligence, as he warned that the United Nations had become a “very diminished” force. Nolan told the Guardian J Robert Oppenheimer’s call for international control of nuclear weapons had “sort of come true”, but there had nonetheless been extensive proliferation of… Read More Christopher Nolan: strong parallels between Oppenheimer and scientists worried about AI
Bharat Bhushan From Washington DC and Cairo to Paris and Abu Dhabi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the season’s flavour. However, the recurrent charge that his government is antithetical to India’s religious minorities hobbles his stride across the world stage. On the day he was guest of honour at France’s Bastille Day Parade, its premier… Read More Govt goes into pantomime mode to assuage foreign critics
*Originally published on November 12, 2020. This is Part 4 of the six-part 2020 Massey Lecture series Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. Find the rest of the series here. The internet was supposed to be our salvation. While historically power has remained in the tight grasp of a select few, the initial vision of the internet… Read More Digital authoritarianism: How technology was seized by autocrats
Jeff Sparrow the relationship between capital and technology has never been simple. The profit motive traditionally stifles as many mousetraps as it nurtures them, even when the economy offered something like a level playing field…. the dominance of ruthless monopolies in almost every industry means that innovations rarely get used to their full capability… not… Read More Enshittification, or social media today
George Monbiot According to Google’s news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop… Read More With our food systems on the verge of collapse, it’s the plutocrats v life on Earth
A recent collection, The Call of the Tribe, explains why the Peruvian writer rejected the left and embraced the thinking of Friedrich Hayek and his ilk. JACK HANSON In a 1949 paper published in the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, the liberal philosopher Sidney Hook described a certain species of mid-century intellectual who, having… Read More The Miseducation of Mario Vargas Llosa
A World After Liberalism, a fascinating new book by Yale scholar Matthew Rose, considers the thought and influence of five thinkers beyond the political and academic mainstream who have played a significant role in establishing the intellectual framework for the movement, which Rose refers to as the ‘Radical Right’. Justin Reynolds Russia’s invasion of Ukraine… Read More A World After Liberalism: the Radical Right and the dream of tradition
First posted August 14, 2017 NB: Outlook asked me to write an article on ‘the decline of idealism’, with a focus on the Left. Here is what I wrote – it has appeared under the title The Idea and its Mutant – DS Before discussing the idealism of the Left, it would be a good idea to think… Read More The decline of idealism
New writing by Czech Roma authors: different takes on the story-telling tradition; memories of growing up as a Roma after ’89; mainstreaming Roma writing and the decline of the Romani language. A2 devotes an issue to writing by Czech Roma authors, featuring samples from their works, reviews and interviews. Saša Uhlová provides a short history of… Read More New Roma writing
