Patrick Stewart–A Fighter Against Domestic Violence:
When Patrick Stewart was growing up in the 1940s, he witnessed how, after his father beat his mother, home doctors and ambulance workers would tell her: “You must have done something to provoke him.”
Stewart knew the violence was never warranted, a conviction that became the spark for a lasting commitment to campaigning for greater understanding of domestic abuse.
As news emerged of his death, aged 86, domestic abuse campaigners praised his legacy and said his contributions had helped raise awareness of domestic abuse and its impact on children.
Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, said that although Stewart, as Capt Jean-Luc Picard in the sci-fi TV series Star Trek, was “best known for playing heroes on screen … one of his bravest acts was telling the truth about his own childhood”.
“For many years, he stood with Amnesty. He spoke openly about the violence his mother suffered at home to support our campaign to stop violence against women. His honesty gave courage to survivors around the world,” she said.
Stewart shared his story for the first time in 2004 as part of Amnesty International’s global campaign to cut violence against women.
At the time, he recalled: “I saw the self-loathing of my father, due to his inability to control his violent outbursts. I saw society, police, doctors and neighbours conspire to hide the abuse with comments like: ‘She must have provoked him’, and: ‘It takes two to make an argument’.”
He was moved to speak out about his childhood in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, after his 79-year-old brother said that “what happened had blighted his life”, and was spurred by a conviction that “violence must be controlled. If you fail to raise your hand in protest, you are part of the problem.”
The ‘Flattening Of Culture’. You may not notice it, but it’s there:
On a recent afternoon, Lauren Leek stood on a typical London shopping street, in front of a Victorian-era pub and a predictable array of corporate-owned food, drink and retail outlets: Pret a Manger, Starbucks, Joe & the Juice, Subway.
“What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic,” said Leek, a Dutch Australian data scientist who is an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere,” she said. “It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.”
Leek recently posted a Substack article, with the headline “Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same,” that analyzed the “flattening” effect that predictive algorithms have had on music, movies, hospitality and almost every aspect of today’s consumer culture.
Taking 640 shopping streets in London as a test case, Leek used advanced data-analysis tools to examine how predictive algorithms have helped create what she calls a homogeneous “monoculture” in which, she writes in her Substack post, “we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.”
A recent excursion with Leek in southwest London to experience her analysis in action began in the Prince of Wales pub. The bar is owned by one of Britain’s biggest brewers and hospitality retailers, which runs 2,600 sites across the country. This British company is in turn owned by a Hong Kong-listed property development and investment conglomerate.
It was just after noon, and the old-fashioned wall décor and wooden furniture lent the pub a traditional feel. Multiple TV screens were showing the buildup to a Premiere League soccer match. Generic mood music played in the background.
“Often these pub chains have playlists that artificial intelligence automatically adjusts according to the sound level,” Leek said. “If the pub isn’t very full, it will play chilled background music,” she explained. “When it gets louder, the music gets louder.”
Leek studied the pub’s menu. It included staples such as chicken wings, burgers, and fish and chips, all of which could be ordered via a QR code. “Pub chains get the data from people who have previously ordered. They typically aggregate ordering data across their sites to optimize their menus. Everything has been analyzed,” Leek said. “Local differences have been taken away. Quirkiness is taken out.”
For Leek, the key to the flattening of consumer culture lies in the mathematics of algorithms and their methodology of next-token prediction. Language models like ChatGPT write one small chunk of text, called a “token,” at a time and predict and select the most likely next token at each step. The models have a “temperature” setting, a set of parameters that control how adventurous that pick is. At “temperature zero,” the model always chooses the most likely next token and gives the same answer every time.
“It’s predictable and safe,” Leek said. “When the model is uncertain, it still has to make a prediction, so it always falls back on the most expected answer.” That means there is no randomness, no surprises. Leek argues that algorithms are pushing culture toward a blandly predictable, mathematically determined temperature zero.
Speaking for myself (but I suspect for a lot of you), this is something that had worked its way into my sub-conscious. Now, I’m conscious of it. Question now is, what do I do about it?
‘Women Spreading The Gospel Of MAGA’:
Why do a majority of white Christian women enthusiastically support the MAGA project? These women harbor a drive for female empowerment but insist that the way to achieve it is to submit body and soul to the man of the house. They celebrate purity but in many cases leave no cosmetics jar or surgical enhancement off the table in their quest to turn themselves into sex objects. They preach a religion of universal love but practice a politics of division, exclusion, and hate. They are relentless in their performance of positivity yet see themselves as besieged in a world of evildoers. They have aligned themselves with a uniquely corrupt administration and a movement that now brands empathy as toxic. Amid the wreckage of America’s democratic institutions in recent years, a substantial number of MAGA women have risen to positions of prominence, including Erika Kirk, Allie Beth Stuckey, Paula White, and Karoline Leavitt.
The rise of a class of female enablers of an authoritarian patriarchy, Du Mez shows, is neither a novel development nor an accident. In a deep, narratively engaging history, she traces the roots of our present predicament to a nineteenth-century movement called New Thought. The formula for a twenty-first-century phenomenon like Erika Kirk, she argues, was already present in the work of Hannah Whitall Smith—an almost unknown figure for most people today but a major Christian celebrity in her time.
In The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, which was published in 1875 and went on to sell over three million copies, Smith lays out the recipe for the new American evangelical woman. The book exudes the relentless positivity that now freeze-frames the smiles on women like Erika Kirk and compels evangelical women to insist that the sun shines all day in an unending parade of occasions to praise the Lord. Even when Smith’s own life became unspeakably miserable—several children died, her husband cheated and abandoned her, a surviving daughter married, of all people, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell—Smith doubled down on the conviction that “every snub and mortification” was an opportunity for spiritual growth and that she could will her way to happiness.
The critical ingredient here is the assumption, echoed by the American philosopher William James, that the mind controls reality. Think the correct thoughts, and all good things will come to you. The Lord will reward you with material security, a loving husband, godly approval—everything one could possibly desire. The Prosperity Gospel, as Du Mez makes clear, comes in early and strong.
At the core of the doctrine that stretches from Smith to the self-help pioneers of the early twentieth century, to the God-and-country nationalists of the mid-twentieth century, and to the social media influencers of the twenty-first century, in Du Mez’s telling, is a firm commitment to the salvific potential of submission. Obedience—unconditional, unstinting, utterly abasing—will set you free. The lesson applies to all believers, but it has special meaning for women in a deeply unequal society. Being happy means being happy that you are a woman. And that means obeying your (male) pastor and your husband. In everything.
Highly-recommended. Read the whole thing. Yes, AMWAY and other Ponzi schemes are covered.
Don’t think that the algorithm explains CMAT. I flat-out loved this Tiny Desk concert by the ‘cheeky’ outfit. Betcha you will too:
