Brasília National Park, 16 September 2024. Photo © Eraldo Peres / AP / Alamy
Following a prolonged drought, smoke from wildfires in the Amazon basin is choking people over an enormous swath of territory in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia. The fires pose a direct threat to the social reproduction of Brazil’s 1.7 million Indigenous people, 75 per cent of whom live in the north and north-east, with the states of Amazonas and Bahia accounting for 42.5 per cent of the total. Only 21 per cent of Brazil’s Indigenous people still live in Indigenous territory, which illustrates the extent of their dispossession, including language loss.
In the north, according to one Ka’apor leader in the Alto Turiaçu Reserve in Maranhão, fire has surpassed illegal mining, logging, ranching and poaching as a threat to his people’s survival. In 2013, the Ka’apor expelled the Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas (the federal agency that is supposed to protect them) and appointed a new generation of leaders, represented by Sarapó Ka’apor, who died two years ago: the Ka’apor say he was killed by poison.
The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury died yesterday at the age of 76. When his early book The Little Mountain (1977) was translated into English in 1988, Edward Said – contrasting him with Naguib Mahfouz – described Khoury in the LRB as a ‘politically committed, and, in his own highly mobile modes, brilliant figure’. A journalist, publisher and ‘highly perceptive critic’ as well as a novelist, Khoury ‘forged (in the Joycean sense) a national and novel, unconventional, postmodern literary career’. He had also been ‘a political militant from his early days, having grown up as a 1960s schoolboy in the turbulent world of Lebanese and Palestinian street politics.’
The question of what computers can’t do was posed in 1972 by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus’s answer – think creatively – was soon considered an error, but the problem remained. It is difficult to distinguish human from machine intelligence because we use the same underlying philosophical and psychological understandings of the mind to discuss both. We think of human beings as essentially rational, problem-solving, goal-oriented animals – an idea that long antedates neoliberalism. At the same time, we think of the computer as a problem-solving calculator, though one with access to far more data than an individual person. The main alternative to this paradigm – psychoanalysis – has long been discredited. Nonetheless, I want to propose a psychoanalytic answer to the problem Dreyfus posed. What computers can’t do is free associate.
The events of this summer, Bibi Rabbiyah Khan said, are a wake up call for the community: to overcome divisions and fear, and draw on the support of interfaith groups, local authorities and anti-racism groups. ‘That's what saved London – people stood up.’
On 28 August, Israel launched a ground and air attack on the northern West Bank, ‘the biggest of its kind since 2002’. With the military onslaught came images of medical staff rounded up, hospitals besieged, ambulances and paramedics stopped, cities and refugee camps sealed off, roads destroyed, water, fuel and electricity supplies cut. Israeli occupation forces were reported to have killed twenty Palestinians in Jenin in two days. They took over people’s homes and positioned snipers on the roofs of buildings. Mass arrests and abuse of detainees were filmed by residents. The human rights organisation al-Haq has shown footage of the destruction of the eastern part of the city by Israeli bulldozers.
It isn’t only on the economy that Labour is aping the Conservative Party. In May this year, the High Court ruled that the protest regulations enacted by Suella Braverman when she was home secretary were unlawful.
The dining table at the Spanish embassy in Belgrave Square is 13.5 metres long and seats fifty people. It’s said to be the largest table (without leaves) in London. No. 24 Belgrave Square, once Downshire House, was acquired by the Spanish government in 1928. The table came with the house. The previous owner was William Pirrie, the 1st Viscount Pirrie, chairman of the shipbuilders Harland & Wolff and a one-time mayor of Belfast. It was in the dining-room of Downshire House in 1907 that Pirrie and Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, conceived their idea for three vast new ocean liners, the Olympic, the Britannic and the Titanic.