Weekly Picks

Weekly Picks – March 30, 2025

March 30, 2025 /

Credit (left to right): Noel Celis/ AFP via Getty Images; Maria Medem; Eid Suleiman

This week’s collection:

  1. “It Is Neither Death, Nor Suicide” | In These Times
  2. My Fifteen Minutes As a Palestinian | The Progressive
  3. The Prehistoric Psychopath | Works in Progress
  4. Why uncertainty can be a superpower | New Humanist
  5. Duterte’s bloody drug war was really a war on the poor | Salon

Find out how these lists are compiled at The Explainer.

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

1. “It Is Neither Death, Nor Suicide” | Jehad Abusalim

“It is impossible to see the Gaza Strip as anything but Israel’s creation, driven by a violent, organized campaign of geographic and demographic reengineering. This dynamic continues today: Israel as the colonizer, violently clashing with Palestinians as the colonized, forming the central drive and argument at the heart of this continuation of the 76-year-old Nakba.

At its core, the Palestinian struggle today is not only about defending the rights of the Palestinian people; it has a universal dimension and deep global implications, all of which are playing out in the Gaza Strip.

Palestine has become a crucial battleground in the confrontation against the marriage of traditional colonial visions — like those that shaped the history of the United States and allowed the Israeli settler-colonial model to metastasize in its most extreme form — and the 21st-century agenda of political exclusion that strips human and civil rights from large, disadvantaged groups.

. . .

Months before October 7, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called for wiping out the town of Huwara in the West Bank. A year later, he called for ​“total annihilation” of Gaza.

These statements are not marks of strength or confidence, as Smotrich and his ilk believe. They are the echoes of a failed project, the admissions of a state exhausted by its own futility — trapped in the endless cycle of trying, and failing, to erase a people who refuse to disappear. They reveal not power, but the desperation of a supremacist vision crumbling under its own weight.

The war of extermination that unfolded in Gaza over 16 months — that could reignite at any moment — was the culmination of the Zionist settler-colonial project and a concrete acknowledgement that it had hit a dead end.

This explosion, which we have lived through and continue to witness, was inevitable.”

2. My Fifteen Minutes As a Palestinian | Sam Stein

“For the past five years, I have engaged in an activist strategy known as “protective presence” in the West Bank. The premise is absurd, but simple: When more privileged people are around—particularly white, Jewish Israeli citizens—settler and military violence towards Palestinians is less likely to happen.

Whenever something does happen, we put our bodies in between Palestinians and violent actors while filming everything. All of our footage is then used for legal documentation and to raise awareness through NGOs, news publications, and social media.

A poll conducted by the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel shows that this activism works. Ecumenical Accompaniers (EAs) affiliated with the program offer a protective presence by witnessing the daily struggles of people living under occupation.

More than half of Palestinians surveyed at Israeli checkpoints said they benefited from the presence of EAs during inspections. Anecdotally, the stories of settler and military brutality that my Palestinian friends and colleagues have shared with me are much more extreme than what typically occurs in my presence. However, I recently briefly experienced a tiny taste of what it is like to be Palestinian in the eyes of Israel.”

3. The Prehistoric Psychopath | John Halstead & Phil Thomson

“We are naturally a highly violent species with a thin veneer of civilization that masks a brutal proclivity for violence – or so many people think. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that human life without government is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’. William Golding’s novel, The Lord of the Flies, which won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983 and many of us read in school, suggests that boys will rapidly descend into mob violence and brutal cruelty without oversight from authority. To know whether this is true, we need to understand the rates of violence among our ancestors.

There is longstanding disagreement on this issue among scholars: many hold the cultural assumption that humans are by nature bellicose, but there is also a ‘noble savage’ camp that believe the opposite. Stephen Pinker’s influential 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature tipped the scales by using a data-oriented approach to demonstrate that prehistoric people tended towards extremely high violent death rates, with average rates of violence higher than during the peak years of World War Two.

However, Pinker’s data also showed that prehistoric hunter gatherers seem to have been less violent than prehistoric agriculturalists. This is of critical importance in understanding human history because for 96 percent of our evolutionary history, we were hunter gatherers.

Comprehensive new research has emerged with much more archaeological data on violence in prehistory. Analysis indicates that prehistoric hunter gatherers were considerably less violent than the orthodoxy previously held. This finding also seems to be borne out by ethnographic data on modern hunter gatherers with lifestyles relatively similar to their prehistoric ancestors.

Hunter gatherers were not non-violent noble savages by any stretch of the imagination. They were relatively violent when compared with modern standards and even when compared with rates of violence experienced by other primates and mammals in general. However, we think this is primarily because human conflict is so lethal, not because it happens so often. On the contrary, hunter gatherers typically exhibit non-violent norms, with amoral and atypical sociopaths accounting for a disproportionate share of violence, just as in our own societies today.

Understanding this matters. Our extraordinary capacity to inflict lethal violence on each other is normally held in restraint by the natural aversion most people have to violence. If we fail to cooperate, we are vulnerable to falling into vicious cycles of violence that don’t benefit anyone. But we should be more optimistic about our capacity for peacemaking. Despite living in states of political anarchy, hunter gatherers were normally able to cooperate and exist peacefully together.“

4. Why uncertainty can be a superpower | Andrew Copson interviews Stephen Fry

“You implied earlier that intellectual uncertainty led, for you at least, to a certain type of tolerance. Would you say that was one of your moral values?

I think so. I suppose I would combine that with the things that have most compelled my attention and love all my life, and that is the arts: literature and poetry and music, and so on. They add another dimension, which is the ability to put yourself in the heart and mind and soul of another person.

That’s what imagination is. Imagination is not fantasy. It’s not, “Gosh, I pictured this planet in which the mountains are shaped like shoes, and there are 17 suns.” Fantasy can be very charming, but imagination is knowing what it is to be that person or the other person, to know what it is to be the rapist as well as the raped. And what it is to be the abuser and the abused, and to be the hopeful, to be the side-lined, and the ignored.

The best artists are able to become other people, and therefore allow us to understand humanity and the feelings of others more than we otherwise might. I think that, combined with uncertainty, is a very useful way of being in the world. You don’t judge people, necessarily. I mean, obviously, you make judgements. But it is [a case of] testing oneself. Not allowing oneself to get above other people.

In the current mess of the world, taking a position is sometimes regarded as the ultimate good – you must declare what side you’re on. In American politics, British politics, Brexit, the Middle East – all these terrible places where man is handing out misery to man, to misquote [Philip] Larkin.

It’s wonderful to tribalise yourself on to one side of that and to make an enemy that is clear. But experience and knowledge of humanity, and the empirical ability to look back at history, I think, shows us that that’s no way to be moral. The most moral thing you can be is effective. And I think one of the crimes of our age is that people would rather be right than effective.”

5. Duterte’s bloody drug war was really a war on the poor | Niko Vorobyov

“The Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands in Southeast Asia, had long been ruled by a succession of dynasties, out-of-touch with ordinary Filipinos, and their cronies while wealth inequality deepened. Along came Rodrigo Duterte, a swaggering ruffian from the southern island of Mindanao, whose 1998 psychological assessment concluded he had a “pervasive tendency to demean, humiliate others and violate their rights.”

. . .

As mayor of the crime-ridden Davao City, Duterte admitted to leading the Davao Death Squad composed of ex-cops and NPA defectors who executed hundreds of small-time drug users, peddlers, thieves and street kids, plus the occasional unlucky witness. The youngest was reportedly 12-years old. From 1998 until 2015, they’d racked up a body count of 1,424. The hitmen were paid monthly salaries plus bonuses for each job, and victims were often executed in a quarry — the women sometimes raped. Ex-killers turned whistleblowers claim Duterte got his hands dirty too, emptying two full Uzi clips into an investigator.

In 2016, embracing the popular rage against the elites and bolstered by an army of Facebook trolls, Duterte won the presidency. Fascist demagogues always need to rally against an opponent, and Duterte found his in drugs, which he claimed were drowning the country. He pledged to expand the Davao Death Squad model nationwide.

. . .

According to the Filipino police’s own data, in the first three years of the campaign they’d managed to interdict only an estimated 1% of the nationwide shabu supply and cash earned from its sales.

Meanwhile, only a tiny fraction of victims were powerful movers and shakers in the narco-economy: an estimated 2% were officials or politicians, and 1% were kingpins. The rest were largely working-class, in low-wage jobs or unemployed. In some instances, the families couldn’t even afford to bury their dead, only rent space in tightly-packed urban cemeteries.

. . .

And yet, despite all the terror and bloodshed, Duterte left office with an 81% approval rating — one of the most popular rulers of the Philippines. After his arrest, supporters held both protests and celebratory rallies in both Manila and The Hague.

So does a guy riding up and blasting you with a Glock because you took a hit from a meth pipe at least constitute an effective drug policy? According to the Dangerous Drugs Board, after three years of the drug war, the number of regular drug consumers fell by only 4.5%. By 2023, the total reduction from pre-Duterte levels was estimated at 17% — not unsubstantial, but it’s worth considering that drug deaths in America plunged by a similar level in just one year, from 2023 to 24, without any masked assassins in balaclavas dispensing state-sponsored street justice.”