The Reason Review—April 2018
The last few weeks raised many questions about what politicians are expected to know. Is it necessary that they understand the meaning of data scraping or should they draw the line at the functionality of Facebook? Should they be aware of immigration targets or is it best to simply remain ignorant? Is it okay to bomb a country without a complete picture of what’s happening on the ground? In April, none of these questions seemed to have clear answers.
Tech Titan Gives Testimony
“As Mark Zuckerberg left Congress on Tuesday after testifying to the Senate, he may have felt relieved. The four-hour Q&A session had been largely dominated by mundane questions of fact about how Facebook works, requests for apologies and updates he had already given and was happy to repeat…Less than 24 hours later, however, a very different pattern of questioning…suggested a much more worrying outcome for Facebook”
In what appears to be a watershed moment in the increasingly heated parleys between tech titans and governments, Mark Zuckerberg was hauled before Congress and the House of Representatives this month to give testimony in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The two hearings — which took place 24 hours apart on Tuesday 10th and Wednesday 11th April — made for a stark contrast.
The first seemed rather rote; Zuckerberg was at ease answering all-too-simple questions about Facebook’s functionality, which arguably demonstrated a worrying lack of knowledge on behalf of his inquisitors. The second session, however, proved slightly more uncomfortable; Zuckerberg’s panel of interrogators asked more pointed questions about shadow profiles, user tracking and data scraping, at times leaving the CEO at a loss for words. This Guardian article by Alex Hern explores this contrast in more detail.
The Grass Isn’t Always Greener
“With Brexit under a year away, a new report shows that our environment won’t fare well under the current deals on the table. Waterways are at very high risk from ‘zombification’, birds and natural habitats could fare especially badly, and the government’s recent 25-year plan won’t be enough.”
Michael Gove, the current Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has been notably vocal about his vision of a “Green Brexit”. In an article for Politico, the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath wrote “If Brexit is our chance to take back control of our laws and our money, Green Brexit is our chance to give the environment a voice in this time of national renewal.”
If, however, Gove reads this recent report — commissioned by Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland — his optimism might be tempered. Titled UK Environmental Policy Post-Brexit: A Risk Analysis, the 40-page document is a joint effort between Professors from Universities in Sheffield, East Anglia and Belfast, and raises serious questions about the security of the natural environment in the UK after Brexit. “We were promised that Brexit wouldn’t harm our environment,” writes Friends of the Earth campaigner Kierra Box, “but this analysis shows that under all scenarios currently on the table, this promise will be broken.”
When Two Tribes Go to Proxy War
“A new reality is taking shape as one war gives way to new one.”
The Syrian civil war seems to be lurching, unchecked in a dangerous new direction, becoming a proxy war fought between fierce rivals, Israel and Iran. Israel states that Iranian military entrenchment in Syria is a red line they will not countenance being crossed, while Iran repeatedly asserts that Israel must be eliminated. This is cause for concern.
Recent Israeli estimates put Iranian expenditure in Syria and Hezbollah at $30 billion since the start of the Syrian Civil War, meaning that they are currently the single biggest investor in Syria, fuelling Israeli fears that they are alone in standing against Iranian expansion.
What’s facilitating this expansion though? A combination of factors are at play here. The capabilities of ISIS have been severely diminished, Bashar al-Assad’s rule has been reestablished across much of the country, and there has been a seeming lack of American interest in Syria except after chemical weapons attacks.
Unless there is a change in international policy towards Syria, specifically from the US, the could be about to take a dangerous new turn.
The Day After Tomorrow
“Such a collapse would see western Europe suffer far more extreme winters, sea levels rise fast on the eastern seaboard of the US and would disrupt vital tropical rains.”
The Gulf Stream is at its weakest level in 1,600 years, some 15% weaker than it was in around 400 AD recent studies have shown and may be less stable than originally thought. Theses recent studies have also indicated that human led global warming is contributing to this weakening.
Any fan of 2004’s disaster movie ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ will know that this should set alarm bells ringing as the Gulf Stream is an integral part of The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc). This serves a crucial role in regulating world weather patterns because of how it works. The Amoc carries warm water northwards towards the North Pole where it cools down. In doing so it becomes denser and sinks, and then flows back southwards. Global warming hinders this cooling process by melting Arctic ice which floods the area with freshwater which is lighter than seawater. This in turn serves to weaken the Amoc current, which in turn weakens the Gulf Stream.
Whilst not on the same exaggerated scale as ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, worryingly it does seems that fiction is in danger of becoming fact.
Faking It is Making It
“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it…”
So wrote Jonathan Swift back in 1710. Social media and the rise of fake news and data seem to have super accelerated this truth. The largest study ever undertaken to study this shows that falsehood and rumour outperform truth and fact in every single metric on social media.
Analysis of Twitter’s data by Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT and Deb Roy, a media scientist at MIT has revealed that on average, a false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker than one that is true.
It’s not bots doing this, it’s human nature and our underlying pathologies. But why? False information online has two key attributes that seem to appeal to us; it’s often really novel and frequently negative. According to Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth Professor ‘these are two features of information that generally grab our attention as human beings and that cause us to want to share that information with others.’
This relates to fake news as it seems to be more ‘novel’ than real news and it evokes considerably more emotion than the average tweet. It seems that fake tweets elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust.
In short, social media systematically amplifies falsehood at the expense of the truth. Most concerning of all though is that no one knows what to do or how to solve this — dangerous times for any system premised on a common public reality.
Small Win for Windrush
“It is with great regret that I am resigning as Home Secretary. I feel it is necessary to do so because I inadvertently misled the Home Affairs Select Committee… I have reviewed the advice I was given on this issue and become aware of information provided to my office which makes mention of targets. I should have been aware of this, and I take full responsibility for the fact that I was not.”
The resignation of the UK Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, on Sunday April 29 marked the culmination of a two-week torrent of stories relating to the Home Office’s immigration policy and the so-called ‘hostile environment’ it created towards immigrant communities. Specifically they related to the Windrush generation of migrants from the Caribbean invited to help rebuild the UK after the Second World War.
The stories were broken by Guardian reporter Amelia Gentleman, whose “low-key” investigation developed into a scandal after six months of investigation revealed that Home Office brutality had seen tax-paying Windrush citizens denied benefits and NHS treatments as well as being detained and deported — one man was told he’d have to pay £54,000 for cancer treatments to which he was legally entitled for free. Their statelessness and inability to prove citizenship had only occurred due to the Home Office’s destruction of their original landing cards.
While the Prime Minister played politics when the issue was raised at PMQ’s, attempting to blame the landing card debacle on the previous Labour government, Rudd was later grilled by the home affairs select committee about her department’s involvement in the scandal. It was here that she “inadvertently misled” them about her knowledge of enforced quotas for migrant deportation.
Although this story outlines the government’s hostility towards immigrant communities, the outrage inspired in the general public suggests the population isn’t quite so hungry for closed borders as the sentiments surrounding Brexit might suggest. Whether the appointment of Rudd’s successor Sajid Javid will ring in a more immigrant-friendly Home Office will reveal itself over the coming months.
EU Hears Bees Pleas
“Today’s decision by the EU Member States to restrict the use of certain neonicotinoids to applications in permanent greenhouses is a bad deal for the European agricultural sector and the environment, and one that will not improve the lot of bees or other pollinators.”
A rare bit of good news for Europe’s bees this month as the EU member states voted to extend a partial ban on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides to a comprehensive ban on the outdoor use of three major products; imidacloprid developed by Bayer CropScience, clothianidin developed by Takeda Chemical Industries and Bayer CropScience, and thiamethoxam developed by Syngenta.
The ruling was made under the weight of significant scientific evidence that linked the substances to colony collapse disorder in bees and the disappearance of 75% of flying insects in Germany. The ban will come into effect in December 2018.
The quote above comes from agrochemical giant Bayer CropScience, who are unsurprisingly distraught that their products will cease to have a market in six months’ time. But Professor Dave Goulson from the University of Sussex warns that the ban may not go far enough: “If these neonicotinoids are simply replaced by other similar compounds, then we will simply be going round in circles. What is needed is a move towards truly sustainable farming.” Nevertheless, a small win for our little winged friends.
See Something
“Food and farming is in crisis. In just over a decade we’ve lost more than 33,000 farms from our countryside, and alongside this, bad diet is now causing more health problems than smoking! The fundamental link between people, food and the very land we stand on is being broken. Yet it need not be this way.”
Check out In Our Hands, a new film from The Landworker’s Alliance, and find out what they’re doing to support sustainable agriculture in the UK. The film has been produced as a free resource for education, and if you’re so inclined you can organise a screening, workshop, discussion, or debate for a community near you.
Read Something
“We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of the sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artifacts of previous societies are fine if you’re only interested in timescales of a few thousands of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated.”
Adam Frank’s thought experiment in The Atlantic wonders whether we’d know if intelligent industrial life had already existed on this planet. Get a cushion ready; your jaw will likely hit the floor.
Do Something
“We need your continued help to fight this battle against fracking in Lancashire. Please donate as much or as little as you can afford to send the frackers packing.”
Last week we spent some time with the anti-fracking communities up in Lancashire, who have been opposing Cuadrilla’s drilling in the area for over a year. They’re doing great work, but their funds and numbers are limited, so if you’re able to donate some spare change, pick up some merch or, best of all, visit for the day to increase their numbers, they’d definitely appreciate it.
The Reason Review aims to go beyond the headlines and find the stories and angles the newspapers have missed. We give you the extra context behind the bigger stories, explain to you why some seemingly smaller events matter and offer you something more interesting and informative than the simple facts.
