Weekly Picks – January 21, 2024
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece. Click on this post’s title or “read more” to ensure anchor links below redirect to the appropriate hyperlinked article.
This week’s collection:
- On policing and state violence:
- On smuggling sand plus its creation:
- On the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict:
- Other pieces:
“CompStat, with its aestheticized infographics and quantification of urban social metrics, has shaped police forces over the past thirty years in a significant way. As an abstracted representation mediating between the police and the people, it relies on a deep reductionism, quantifying crime and communities as numerical problems to be solved. With CompStat, the usual promise of the emancipatory power of data is turned on its head: supposedly intended to make our lives safer, its crime data is instead weaponized as a tool of the police, used to justify policing’s very existence through statistics and efficiency measures.
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Just as white-collar workplaces have come to employ now-ubiquitous visualization practices through the use of software like Microsoft Excel and Tableau, the police station has been subject to the same trend via the adoption of CompStat. And yet to describe CompStat as a separate and novel police analogue of corporate-style data interfaces would be to miss the explicit overlap between white-collar enterprise software and policing interfaces. As just one example, the NYPD’s current CompStat-adjacent Force Dashboard has been implemented using PowerBI, Microsoft’s interactive data visualization software for business intelligence. As described by Ingid Burrington, “the technical foundation of CompStat also emerged from retrofitting private sector tools,” dating back to MapInfo 94, Informix’s SmartWare, and Microsoft’s Visual FoxPro.9 That these interfaces evoke corporate dashboards is a direct consequence of the fact that they are often derived from the same enterprise products, with crimes graphically rendered the same way as click-through rates or revenue.
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I find there is something particularly unsettling about seeing violent crimes—forcible rape, criminal homicide, hate crimes—abstracted to the point of resembling securities or commodities. There is a jarring conflict between the sleek aesthetics of the charts and the gravity of what is represented by them.”
2. Panama Hits Activists With Terrorism Charges Over Successful Anti-Mining Protests
“The protests kicked off on October 23, three days after Panama’s congress approved a new mining contract with the Canadian firm First Quantum Minerals. President Laurentino Cortizo signed it into law only hours later. The government praised the new contract, saying it would create windfall profits for the state. Cortizo vowed to use the funds to shore up the social security system and improve pension benefits.
“The contract ensures a payment to the state of $395 million for 2022 and a minimum payment of $375 million a year, for the next 20 years,” Commerce Minister Federico Alfaro told a local news outlet at the time. “If you can compare this with what the state was receiving before, which was $35 million a year, it’s a substantial improvement to the past.”
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But Panamanians did not care. They said the contract was a handout to a foreign company and an attack on Panamanian sovereignty. That’s a big issue in Panama, which fought for most of the 20th century to remove the United States from its control over Panama’s Canal Zone region. Panamanians also said they feared for the mine’s impact on the country’s environment and water reserves, amid increasing drought.
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Protesters in Damaris Sanchez’s area of Tierra Altas, Chiriquí, held strong. They refused to allow all but ambulances and emergency services through their highway roadblock for more than a month.
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Members of Panama’s business sector said the roadblocks cost the country $1.7 billion, in just the first four weeks of protests. Local restaurants, hotels and businesses have been hit hard.
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The Chamber of Commerce of Tierras Altas, Chiriquí, is the entity that has lodged the criminal complaint against Damaris Sanchez and the other 20 individuals in the state of Chiriquí.
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They accuse the activists of crimes against economic assets, damages, crimes against collective security, terrorism and unlawful association.”
3. Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand
“Despite all his research into illegal sand mines, he was unprepared for the scene below. Half a dozen dump trucks scattered across a deeply pitted moonscape were filled high with brown sand. Just beyond lay the light blue sea. Abderrahmane was stunned by the “major disfiguration” of the dunes, he told me later on a video call. “It was a shock.”
Part of his shock came from the sight of desecrated nature, but part came from seeing the brazenness of trucks hauling sand in full daylight. “You cannot illegally mine sand in daylight if you don’t have people helping you,” he says—people in high places. “Big companies are being protected, perhaps by ministers or deputy ministers or whoever. It’s a whole system.” Everyone in the sand-trafficking market “benefits from it, from top to bottom.”
For the past 15 years the slender, bespectacled Abderrahmane has studied environmental trade and crime for the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), an African research and policy advisory organization based in South Africa. ISS papers showed how environmental degradation can fuel tensions among people and compromise security. But until a few years ago Abderrahmane had never heard of sand trafficking. He had been in Mali doing fieldwork on the drug trade when a source noted that most cannabis in Mali came from Morocco and that sand trafficking was also a major market in that country, with drug traffickers involved. “I think that when you talk about sand trafficking, most people would not believe it,” Abderrahmane says. “Me included. Now I do.”
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The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons).
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Companies large and small dredge up sand from waterways and the ocean floor and transport it to wholesalers, construction firms and retailers. Even the legal sand trade is hard to track. Two experts estimate the global market at about $100 billion a year, yet the U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries indicates the value could be as high as $785 billion. Sand in riverbeds, lake beds and shorelines is the best for construction, but scarcity opens the market to less suitable sand from beaches and dunes, much of it scraped illegally and cheaply.”
4. Beaches Are Blankets of Fish Poop
“Charles Darwin wasn’t too far behind the Hawaiians in understanding the development of reefs. He intuited that coral atolls, ring-shaped reefs, were the remnants of volcanoes. Corals settle and grow along the shallow basaltic rock of a new volcanic island or seamount. As the island ages, the volcanic rock erodes, and the seamount disappears. Life takes over—a ring of reefs and sand built by corals, sponges, parrotfish, and seabirds. In many places, these atolls are all that remain of long-forgotten volcanic islands.
Alfred Russell Wallace described coral reefs as marine-animal forests in 1869. Each polyp, each individual coral, is like an upside-down jellyfish cupped in a limestone skeleton of its own creation. The corals build the seascape themselves. They provide shelter and deliver carbon dioxide to their symbiotic algae, and in return, the zooxanthellae synthesize energy-rich carbohydrates for their hosts.
But corals can’t do it alone.
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Corals thrive where there are lots of fish,” Hixon said. “The fish feces and urine fertilize the corals, which have single-celled plants living in them. A healthy reef has all these interconnections,” Hixon added. “Thank goodness for uhu.” These fish have another talent that makes them crucial engineers in these ecosystems: They build the beaches that protect the islands, by pooping sand.
If you’re reading this on a tropical beach, consider yourself lucky. Plunge your hand into the rough beach sand, with its colors of oatmeal, cream, sandstone, and slate, that brought you there. You really can see the biosphere in a grain of sand—from the flying fish to the frigate bird, the coconut palm to the elkhorn coral and the parrotfish—on an island beach. Most people don’t realize that when they stretch out by the sea in Hawaii, they’re lying on a bed of animal waste.
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A single green humphead parrotfish, native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans and measuring more than four feet long, can poop almost 10,000 pounds of sand annually. Hire that fish! Three of them can deliver a concrete mixer’s worth of sand to the beach each year.”
5. “They Don’t Show Gaza”: Gideon Levy on How Israel’s Press Is Failing to Cover the War’s True Toll
An interview with Gideon Levy concerning Israeli coverage of the Gaza conflict.
“Bear witness. This, an admonition often repeated through these killing weeks. Bear witness, a cry against the fierce, orchestrated attempts to deny the devastation wrought in Gaza and the West Bank. Bear witness, we tell ourselves as helplessness threatens to engulf us on our far end of the telescope. Bear witness, we say, yet three months into a livestreamed genocide, we must ask—what does all this looking do?
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And so, mere meters from strike sites, their hands still shaking from terror, these survivor-creators have broadcast the unmaking of their world. Their dispatches are an act of resistance, transmitting truths systematically excised from legacy media. From the start, Israel has forbidden all outside journalists from entering Gaza, save for the few reporters they escort on orchestrated tours. These journalists are prohibited from speaking to Palestinians while on the ground, and are required to submit their reports to the Israeli military for approval before publishing.
Chillingly, many of the young, now-famous faces of this living archive—people we presume to call by their first names, Bisan, Plestia, Motaz—have focused on creating content in English. In this, they have made clear that these images are not simply intended to capture their intimate experience, but to move the unseen audiences of the West.”
7. For Israel, the Cruelty Is the Point
“This, of course, appears to be part of a broader Israeli objective—not just to dismantle Hamas’s military capabilities but to further degrade and destroy Gaza’s imperiled aquifers (already polluted with sewage that’s leaked from dilapidated pipes). Israeli officials have openly admitted their goal is to ensure that Gaza will be an unlivable place once they end their merciless military campaign.
“We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said shortly after the Hamas attack of October 7. “We will eliminate everything—they will regret it.”
And Israel is now keeping its promise.
As if its indiscriminate bombing, which has already damaged or destroyed up to 70 percent of all homes in Gaza, weren’t enough, filling those tunnels with polluted water will ensure that some of the remaining residential buildings will suffer structural problems, too. And if the ground is weak and insecure, Palestinians will have trouble rebuilding.”
8. The Making of a Youtube Radical
“Over years of reporting on internet culture, I’ve heard countless versions of Mr. Cain’s story: an aimless young man — usually white, frequently interested in video games — visits YouTube looking for direction or distraction and is seduced by a community of far-right creators.
Some young men discover far-right videos by accident, while others seek them out. Some travel all the way to neo-Nazism, while others stop at milder forms of bigotry.
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The radicalization of young men is driven by a complex stew of emotional, economic and political elements, many having nothing to do with social media. But critics and independent researchers say YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things: a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens.
“There’s a spectrum on YouTube between the calm section — the Walter Cronkite, Carl Sagan part — and Crazytown, where the extreme stuff is,” said Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, YouTube’s parent company. “If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.””
“A panel discussion exploring the landscape of anti-war advocacy within U.S. universities at the outset of the occupation, the consequences of exile or execution on the framework and prospects of Iraqi academia, and the present-day role of public intellectuals in Iraq.”