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<title>13 December, 2023</title>
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<title>Daily-Dose</title><meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" name="viewport"/><link href="styles/simple.css" rel="stylesheet"/><link href="../styles/simple.css" rel="stylesheet"/><style>*{overflow-x:hidden;}</style><link href="https://unpkg.com/aos@2.3.1/dist/aos.css" rel="stylesheet"/><script src="https://unpkg.com/aos@2.3.1/dist/aos.js"></script></head>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-down" id="daily-dose">Daily-Dose</h1>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" data-aos-anchor-placement="top-bottom" id="contents">Contents</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="#from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-vox">From Vox</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</a></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Can Guatemalans Save Their Democracy?</strong> - Months after the election, President-elect Bernardo Arévalo’s path to taking office remains uncertain. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/can-guatemalans-save-their-democracy">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>How Hamas Used Sexual Violence on October 7th</strong> - Physicians for Human Rights Israel issued a report collecting evidence of sexual and gender-based violence. One of its authors lays out their findings. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-hamas-used-sexual-violence-on-october-7th">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Looking for a Greener Way to Fly</strong> - The Treasury Department is about to announce tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel, which raises the question: What fuels are actually “sustainable”? - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/looking-for-a-greener-way-to-fly">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Colorado Reconsiders Letting Trump on the Ballot</strong> - A Colorado Supreme Court case is one of several considering whether Trump should be disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment, but it has proceeded the furthest. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/colorado-reconsiders-letting-trump-on-the-ballot">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The War in Gaza Has Been Deadly for Journalists</strong> - The president of the Committee to Protect Journalists explains why Israel’s military campaign has led to an unprecedented number of deaths among members of the press in just two months. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-war-in-gaza-has-been-deadly-for-journalists">link</a></p></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-vox">From Vox</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><strong>Why we still underestimate what groups like Hamas are capable of</strong> -
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<figure>
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<img alt="Workers in yellow vests stand under a destroyed building." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Hpuacpm6_v29kLHIDCdHyQmYDMY=/184x0:3117x2200/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72958457/1724428590.0.jpg"/>
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<figcaption>
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Rescue workers at a police station that was destroyed after a battle between Israeli troops and Hamas militants on October 8, 2023, in Sderot, Israel. | Amir Levy/Getty Images
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</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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Two decades after 9/11, extremist groups continue to pull off surprise attacks. Why?
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Ge8Gfy">
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On August 6, 2001, George W. Bush was given what may be the most infamous daily intelligence brief ever received by a US president. <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/pdb8-6-2001.pdf">It was titled</a> “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” and it included details on the activities of al-Qaeda operatives in the US, including threats to hijack US aircraft. In response, Bush did virtually nothing. And then, a little over a month later, those predictions came stunningly true with the 9/11 attacks.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="chGOzG">
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Bush would not be the last leader to ignore such a warning. Decades into the “war on terror,” it’s clear that political leaders, as well as some of the world’s most powerful militaries and intelligence, still underestimate the ability and ambition of extremist militant groups to carry out large-scale attacks. There have now been three major instances of such failures in the past decade.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wjYD68">
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Multiple news outlets, including the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html">New York Times</a> and <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-27/ty-article/.premium/chilling-warnings-picked-up-by-israeli-intelligence-months-before-october-7-massacre/0000018c-1261-dd2e-a5ae-d36ba6240000?lts=1702055396430">Haaretz</a>, have now reported that Israeli intelligence agencies had provided officials with extraordinary details about the plans for what became the October 7 attack more than a year before it was carried out. Just a day before the attack, the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/13/politics/us-intelligence-warnings-potential-gaza-clash-days-before-attack/index.html">CIA reported unusual activity</a> by Hamas in Gaza, suggesting an imminent military operation. Hamas militants reportedly trained for the attack in all but plain sight less than a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/middleeast/hamas-training-site-gaza-israel-intl/index.html">mile from the Israeli border</a>.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hFk1KU">
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Yet Israeli officials appear to have dismissed these warnings, believing the group had scaled back its military ambitions to the occasional rocket barrage. Instead of reinforcing the border with Gaza, they chose to focus Israel’s military assets on other threats, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the increasingly restive <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18080034/west-bank-israel-palestinians">West Bank</a>. Ultimately, some 1,200 Israelis would pay for this miscalculation with their lives, as would thousands more Palestinian civilians in the war that has followed.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ioB6SY">
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But the October 7 attack was far from the first instance of this kind of strategic surprise from an extremist militant group in recent years. In 2014, the terrorist group then known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) began taking over towns in western Iraq. Even after the group had seized the city of Fallujah, the site of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq War, President Barack Obama felt comfortable using a flip sports metaphor to dismiss ISIS as an amateur imitation of al-Qaeda. “If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/27/going-the-distance-david-remnick?_sp=d4faf83a-8438-4261-a556-23c97c243c30.1702056777987">he told the New Yorker</a> that January.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FcILbO">
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Six months later, the “jayvees” had taken over Mosul, Iraq’s largest city, were <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/10/world/meast/isis-threat/index.html">threatening</a> Baghdad, and had proclaimed the establishment of a “caliphate” that, at its height, would control a territory the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/09/12/heres-how-the-islamic-state-compares-to-real-states/">size of Great Britain</a>. The US launched a military intervention to defeat the group in Iraq and eventually in Syria as well. US troops remain in both countries today — as does ISIS, which is <a href="https://apnews.com/article/islamic-state-fighters-syria-iraq-875d5ee8a0978f3b28aeec210b33cd5f">still active</a>, albeit much diminished.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="y5khIf">
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In August 2021, the world was stunned again as the Taliban marched into Kabul, meeting almost no resistance as an Afghan state <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2022">propped up with tens of billions of dollars in American funding</a> collapsed and US personnel — along with thousands of Afghans — scrambled to evacuate.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="D0mHCa">
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While an eventual Taliban victory was not shocking in itself — the group had been steadily gaining territory in the lead-up to a planned US troop withdrawal — few expected it to happen so rapidly. A month before the withdrawal, President Joe Biden <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/07/08/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-drawdown-of-u-s-forces-in-afghanistan/#:~:text=Once%20that%20agreement%20with%20the,would%20you%20have%20them%20stay%3F">told reporters </a>at the White House that he trusted “the capacity of the Afghan military” and said he believed that the Afghan leaders “clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.” He made these statements despite increasingly dire warnings from US intelligence agencies that the Afghan military <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/us/politics/afghanistan-biden-administration.html">was likely to collapse</a>. While senior administration officials later said these assessments were made with a low degree of confidence, the reality is that the evacuation of Kabul would descend into chaos, <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/hell-at-abbey-gate-chaos-confusion-and-death-in-the-final-days-of-the-war-in-afghanistan">including a bombing</a> that killed 13 US service members and more than 160 Afghans.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="n4GqPN">
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These are three very different examples involving very different countries and militant groups. But in all these cases, extremist militant groups demonstrated previously unseen ambition and destructive capabilities. And in all three cases, governments ignored or dismissed warning signs of an impending catastrophe until it was too late.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Rp6H9C">
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Analysts and former intelligence agents who spoke with Vox say that a combination of cognitive biases, cultural prejudices, and bureaucratic inertia cause such warnings to be ignored time and again. But just because these problems are well-known does not mean they are easy to address. And given the terrible toll from fighting terror over the past two decades — in lives, dollars, and lost civil liberties, especially for Muslims — the price of success may be just as high as the cost of failure.
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</p>
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<h3 id="edJpGL">
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The signal and the noise
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</h3>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tN7Il7">
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The problem of surprise isn’t a new one in intelligence-gathering, nor one unique to extremist groups. In 1962, RAND Corporation analyst Roberta Wohlstetter wrote a <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/pearl-harbor-warning-and-decision-roberta-wohlstetter/7499441?ean=9780804705981">classic account </a>of the intelligence failure leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. It concluded that, though the US military had collected abundant information suggesting an impending attack — including intercepts of decoded Japanese diplomatic cables that indicated preparations for a major rupture in US-Japan relations — they were hampered by diplomatic inertia and a failure to detect the relevant signals within all the noise.
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</p>
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<figure class="e-image">
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<img alt="A group of men walk across the pavement. Some are armed and wear camouflage. Some wear long tunics." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Hj4xK6I0KAnNX7v7ZElu79oz_Ao=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25158441/GettyImages_1235037294.jpg"/> <cite>Los Angeles Times via Getty Images</cite>
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<figcaption>
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Anas Haqqani, center right, gets a tour of the military vehicles captured by Taliban fighters after the militant group seized the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on August 31, 2021, in the wake of the American forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="RCuBAk">
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“If our intelligence systems and all our other channels of information failed to produce an accurate image of Japanese intentions and capabilities, it was not for want of the relevant materials,” Wohlstetter wrote. “Never before have we had so complete an intelligence picture of the enemy.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="x6nrAq">
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That scenario — too much information, not enough understanding of which bits are actually important — has occurred over and over again in the history of intelligence failures, from the outbreak of the Korean War to the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War to 9/11. Erik Dahl, a former naval intelligence officer and a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, said that the high-tech surveillance tools available to today’s spies have, in some ways, only made the problem worse. According to a <a href="https://hir.harvard.edu/too-much-information/">2019 estimate</a>, the National Security Agency intercepted and stored an average of 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, and other communications every day.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lqIyn0">
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“We have too much information and not enough understanding of what’s going on in the world,” Dahl told Vox. As an example, he pointed to the failed 2009 Christmas Day “underwear bombing” attack. A <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/07/terror.report.findings/index.html">White House review</a> later concluded that intelligence analysts had collected enough data to disrupt the plot, but did not act on it because the information was “fragmentary and embedded in a large volume of other data.” The plot only failed because the bomb failed to detonate.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JjTTyl">
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The problem is compounded when the information counteracts a government’s political preferences. Famously, the George W. Bush administration cherry-picked only the information that supported its preferred narrative when it was building the case for invading Iraq. That was a case of political leaders hearing what they want in order to hype up a nonexistent threat. But political preferences can also cause them to ignore a real one.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="i3mKk7">
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Obama had been elected in large part because of his pledge to take troops <em>out </em>of Iraq. Biden had vowed to bring America’s long and frustrating war in Afghanistan to a close. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government <a href="https://www.vox.com/23910085/netanyahu-israel-right-hamas-gaza-war-history">had argued</a> that the security threat from Hamas militants in Gaza was contained and the country could focus on other political priorities. Some Israeli officials <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html">even believed</a> there was an advantage to having a group like Hamas in power, as it reduced pressure on Israel to negotiate over the establishment of a Palestinian state. In each case, warnings of an impending attack were highly inconvenient for the government’s preferred course of action — and thus, tended to be downplayed.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="PuAd2c">
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“Human beings are really, really good at shaping the facts to support their own opinions,” said Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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</p>
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<h3 id="tcMplc">
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The militant challenge
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</h3>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="zkzxfX">
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Religiously motivated, underground, non-state militant groups also pose a particular challenge when state-run intelligence agencies try to analyze their intentions.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="iP1IY6">
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“It is difficult for modern Western intelligence services and national security organizations, which are created and established largely to track other entities that look like themselves, to get a handle on the problem of subnation states or non-state actors,” said Dahl.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="yL1OOs">
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Shiraz Maher, co-director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, pointed out that religiously motivated groups often act with a different set of cost-benefit concerns than secular ones. Hamas, for instance, was willing to carry out its attacks despite every indication that it would ultimately result in massive casualties for both its own fighters and Palestinian civilians. (Israel claims to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/05/middleeast/israel-hamas-military-civilian-ratio-killed-intl-hnk/index.html">have killed 5,000 of Hamas’s fighters</a>, while estimates are that more than twice as many Palestinian civilians have been killed. Even if the number of Hamas casualties has been exaggerated, it’s safe to say the group’s military losses have been substantial.)
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FUrEtj">
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“These are rational groups,” Maher said. “But at the same time, they’re rational from a completely different epistemic, sociological, philosophical, ideological premise.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4LE2s5">
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Extremist militant groups, by definition underground organizations that emphasize secrecy and demand fierce adherence to their cause, are also notoriously difficult for intelligence services to infiltrate, compared with traditional national governments. They also tend to issue a lot of threats, making it difficult to know which plots they actually intend on, or are capable of, carrying out.
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</p>
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<figure class="e-image">
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<img alt="Stone and concrete&nbsp;buildings, some damaged, line a dusty street with rubble along the margins. At the end of the street, billowing smoke rises. " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/IANuw1iSv07RSjPdCFRF2TnBBYc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25158447/GettyImages_502540448.jpg"/> <cite>Getty Images</cite>
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<figcaption>
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Smoke rises as the Iraqi forces’ operation aiming to re-seize Ramadi from ISIS continues in the el-Hoz neighborhood of Ramadi, Iraq, on December 26, 2015.
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</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ALuFwr">
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Harding, who served at the CIA during the rise of ISIS, says that because extremist groups don’t look like traditional militaries, it’s easy to believe they lack the ability to carry out grandiose plans. “The intent is always there with these groups. Its capability is what you have to measure,” she said. “They look like a ragtag group of misfits. They don’t look like what we think of as a very capable fighting force.”
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</p>
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<h3 id="1h6fN4">
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Overestimating your allies
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</h3>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TUSXIx">
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In each of these cases, the failure was not only in predicting the actions of the terrorist group, but in the ability of the terrorists’ opponents to meet the threat once it materialized. In Iraq and in Afghanistan, the United States overestimated the ability of the militaries they had spent years and billions of dollars training and arming, and, perhaps even more important, the willingness of those militaries to fight back.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4T7AxX">
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“The psychology and motivation of a military force: That’s the most difficult thing to assess in intelligence,” said Robert Grenier, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. “Anybody who tries to make a prediction about that isn’t very likely to be successful.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IeyG2J">
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Conversely, in the runup to the <a href="https://www.vox.com/russia-invasion-ukraine">war in Ukraine</a>, US intelligence agencies <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/04/us/politics/russia-ukraine-biden.html">gathered and publicized</a> what turned out to be stunningly accurate information about Russian intentions and battle plans, but failed to predict the capability and resolve of Ukrainian forces in meeting that threat.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1pH8mW">
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The October 7 Hamas attacks were different, in part because Hamas is a very different group. In addition to being a militant organization, it’s a governing authority that administers services for more than half a million people and has relations with multiple other states. It’s also engaged in what it views as a nationalist resistance fight, unlike groups such as al-Qaeda or ISIS. Yet Israel was caught off guard by Hamas’s assault, in part because in the months before October 7, Israel relocated military forces away from Gaza, counting on electronic surveillance, autonomous systems, and relatively small groups of troops to deal with whatever threats might emanate from the strip. The Israelis clearly viewed Hamas as a manageable problem, rather than the impending catastrophe it has turned out to be.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IBg6Ch">
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“I think it shows there’s clearly a kind of arrogance on the part of the state,” said Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst now at American University.
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</p>
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<h3 id="aUyHV1">
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An inconvenient threat
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</h3>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FSdqLB">
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In an essay for Foreign Affairs written before the October 7 attacks — but published shortly after — National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/system/files/pdf/2023/FA_102_6_ND2023_Sullivan_print_edition_version.pdf">described the Middle East </a>as “quieter than it has been for decades.” It’s a line likely to <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/10/27/23933817/israel-palestine-biden-policy-jake-sullivan">age about as well</a> as Obama’s junior varsity team quip about ISIS.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="3VMnIf">
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Sullivan’s description might be wishful thinking, but the desire to focus on other priorities is hardly irrational. In recent years, leaders of both parties in the United States <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/10/donald-trump-middle-east-consequences/600610/">have</a> <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-hastens-slow-burn-shift-away-overreach-overseas-n1278332">argued</a> that, with the threat from groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS vastly diminished, the country should shift the focus of its national security policy to “great power competition” with countries like <a href="https://www.vox.com/russia">Russia</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/china">China</a>.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cEey53">
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But some terrorism analysts say the attack by Hamas, a group largely written off as a serious threat by both Israel and the United States, shows that we may have been premature in dismissing the ability of groups that have threatened major attacks to actually turn those plans into reality.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Ypahe0">
|
||
“I do a lot of work with the US government, including with the intelligence community,” said Colin Clarke, a terrorism analyst with the Soufan Group, a security consultancy. “We’ve talked a lot about ISIS, about al-Qaeda and its respective affiliates, about far-right groups, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/10/9/21504910/qanon-conspiracy-theory-facebook-ban-trump">QAnon</a>, you name it. I hadn’t heard anybody mention the name ‘Hamas’ in about 10 years. It wasn’t on anybody’s radar.”
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MIqTQi">
|
||
The October 7 attack, Clarke said, was a “paradigm shift in how we think about the capabilities of these groups. He added: “We’ve kind of written these guys off, because the big names are gone,” referring to globally famous terrorist leaders like Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="n62GA2">
|
||
Extremist militant groups certainly didn’t disappear with the decimation of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and the destruction of ISIS’s caliphate. In many parts of the world, they are growing rapidly. West Africa, for instance, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/west-africa-sahel-terrorists-insecurity-mali-932b612a72bc368f9429736b27caf2ce">saw more than 1,800 terrorist attacks</a> resulting in nearly 4,600 deaths in just the first half of this year. But the prevailing assumption has been that these groups are mainly concerned with local conflicts rather than transnational attacks.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="u7Wl0z">
|
||
History has shown, however, that local threats don’t always stay local. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group’s Yemeni offshoot, was largely thought of as a local group until it <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/07/terror.report.findings/index.html">very nearly pulled off</a> the failed “underwear bomber” plot of 2009. ISIS, at its height, carried out numerous high-profile and deadly attacks in Europe.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="dJEn6b">
|
||
“We have batted zero in terms of correctly predicting when a group decides to shift from local to global,” said Katherine Zimmerman, a terrorism analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gffrcn">
|
||
Going forward, Israel has vowed that its massive military response to October 7 will wipe out Hamas as a military threat, but these groups can almost <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/10/20/23919946/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-ground-invasion-strategy">never be eliminated entirely</a>. And senior officials, including Gen. Charles Q. Brown, America’s new top military commander, <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-top-american-general-says-israeli-goal-of-toppling-hamas-a-pretty-large-order/">have expressed concerns</a> that the scale and brutality of the operation could end up creating more terrorists than it eliminates. Discussing the war in Gaza in a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/05/middleeast/israel-hamas-military-civilian-ratio-killed-intl-hnk/index.html">recent CNN interview</a>, Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton cited a study commissioned by retired US Gen. Stanley McChrystal which found that for every civilian killed, about 10 future fighters are recruited.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BEOYsr">
|
||
Whatever soul searching goes on in intelligence agencies in the wake of these failures, the answer is clearly not to go straight back to a September 12, 2001, mindset. Western governments, including the United States, have very good reasons for wanting to turn the page on the war on terror. Over the past two decades, the desire to eliminate terrorist threats has led the US into long, bloody, and frustrating wars and a troubling expansion of the surveillance state and discrimination against Muslim Americans. And it’s worth remembering that for every successful attack or military offensive by an extremist militant group, there are many more that never come to fruition. It’s simply neither possible nor desirable for a society to be on full alert at all times. No one wants to go back to the days of color-coded terror alerts.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qw6fEg">
|
||
But after three significant failures in the past decade to predict a major attack by an extremist militant group, it’s clearly a mistake to assume that these groups are no longer capable of surprising and outwitting the world’s most powerful and technologically advanced states, particularly when, as in the Israeli case, the preparations for that attack are happening in plain view of the state. And there’s no reason to assume it won’t happen again.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="XZDxXx">
|
||
“The curse of the intelligence officer is that we constantly get blamed for bringing the doom and gloom,” said Harding. “There’s a piece, I think, of human psychology, where you do not want to believe that something truly bad will happen.” That is one mistake that governments can’t afford to keep making.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cH1spm">
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nloEIw">
|
||
</p></li>
|
||
<li><strong>Tuberculosis kills more people than malaria or HIV. Why haven’t we found a vaccine?</strong> -
|
||
<figure>
|
||
<img alt="A doctor holds up a glowing X-ray sheet of a patient’s lungs in a darkened room of a TB clinic in Brooklyn, New York, on November 27, 2002." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/22VWeQgmH_P1w1rLECYNsVuPuuI=/0x0:2607x1955/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72958396/1667722.0.jpg"/>
|
||
<figcaption>
|
||
A doctor examines the X-rays of a tuberculosis patient. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
|
||
</figcaption>
|
||
</figure>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
||
Volunteers could speed up the race for a cure that works for adults as well as children.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="GrOfjd">
|
||
Few forces have killed off talented people before their time with quite the effectiveness of tuberculosis. There’s <a href="https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-death-of-anton-chekhov-told-in-proteins/">Chekhov</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/arts/chopin-heart-tuberculosis.html">Chopin</a>, <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/george-orwell-wrote-1984-while-dying-tuberculosis-180962608/">Orwell</a>, <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16463589">Kafka</a>, <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/38/7/991/322145">Keats</a>, <a href="https://concordlibrary.org/special-collections/essays-on-concord-history/a-gentle-death-tuberculosis-in-19th-century-concord">Thoreau</a>, <a href="https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/news/2022/december/reimagining-how-emily-bronte-died-new-research/">Emily Brontë</a> — all brought down by the bacterium before they reached the age of 50.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TLZSYy">
|
||
Their ranks are still growing. About <a href="https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/373828/9789240083851-eng.pdf?page=18">1.3 million people died of TB</a> in 2022, and while deaths were falling pre-pandemic, <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tuberculosis-deaths-who?tab=chart&time=2010..2022">the Covid-19 era saw progress stall</a>. At this point, its annual death toll exceeds that of <a href="https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/number-of-deaths-due-to-hiv-aids">HIV/AIDS</a> or <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria">malaria</a>. The <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/prevention/bcg.htm">one vaccine against it</a> was created in 1921 and <a href="https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2022/bcg-vaccine-prevents-tuberculosis-in-young-children-but-not-adults/">does not protect adults or adolescents</a>.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wLDRRB">
|
||
Yet the world has not mustered much in the way of resources against the disease. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/health/tuberculosis-tb-treatment-vaccine-diagnosis.html">The New York Times’s Stephanie Nolen</a> notes that $5.8 billion a year in treatment funds and $1 billion a year in research funds goes to fighting TB in low- and middle-income countries. By contrast, the equivalent figure for HIV/AIDS treatment is <a href="https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/2023-unaids-global-aids-update-summary_en.pdf">about $20 billion annually</a>. That’s a worthy cause, of course, but considering its enormous death toll, TB has drawn the short straw.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h3 id="EUsl4B">
|
||
Why is TB so neglected?
|
||
</h3>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lZTDje">
|
||
To some degree, the relative neglect of TB (including by me — I <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/6/18/23762606/artesunate-malaria-drug-history-vietnam-war">write</a> much <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23933962/malaria-vaccine-challenge-trials-drugs-tropical-disease-africa-research">more</a> about <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/7/18126123/gene-drive-malaria-convention-biological-diversity">malaria</a>) has to do with the scale of the challenge it poses.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9jo41U">
|
||
TB is a hard disease to vaccinate against. While most vaccines target viruses, TB is a bacterium, and one with a strange lifecycle. In the vast majority of people it infects, it is “latent,” not causing symptoms or becoming contagious. The population of people carrying around latent TB infections is truly massive. A <a href="https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/54/3/1900655#sec-8">recent study compiling blood test estimates</a> found that about 24 percent of people on Earth have TB, with rates ranging from 12–14 percent in Europe and the Americas to over a third in Africa and Southeast Asia.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jv3HbP">
|
||
A small share of people with these latent infections (from <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764738/">5 to 15 percent</a>) develop symptomatic, contagious cases. Often these are treatable with antibiotics — but a <a href="https://www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/tb-reports/global-tuberculosis-report-2022/tb-disease-burden/2-3-drug-resistant-tb">significant share of cases are drug-resistant</a>, <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)00547-4/fulltext">access to antibiotics is uneven</a> in low-income countries, and <a href="https://www.who.int/teams/global-hiv-hepatitis-and-stis-programmes/hiv/treatment/tuberculosis-hiv">mortality is particularly high in people with both HIV and TB</a>.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6hmkPl">
|
||
These dynamics complicate the task for a vaccine. Ideally you would want it to both reduce the share of people with latent infections and reduce the odds that those infections become active. But we don’t have what’s called a “correlate of protection” for TB: a set of indicators of a person’s immune system that show they can resist initial infection, or can keep an infection from becoming active.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gOfi21">
|
||
That makes testing treatments and vaccines tricky — and expensive. Testing needs to be truly massive in scale, given the relatively small share of people who gain new latent infections, or see infections go active, in a given year. M72, the most promising vaccine candidate as of right now, is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/30/tuberculosis-vaccine-trial-funding-gates/">currently undergoing a phase III trial</a> with a staggering 26,000 participants. It cost donors $550 million to fund it — more than half the annual research budget for TB. And there’s still a chance it won’t work, or even that the trial won’t pick up enough cases to show anything either way.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="maAcPM">
|
||
If every promising TB vaccine costs more than half a billion dollars to test, we are not going to test very many. Even if M72 works, and I very much hope it does, it may still have limitations, as the existing vaccine for children does; and there may be other models that are cheaper to manufacture, or that prove more effective. We want to be testing those, too, and we won’t if testing them is prohibitively expensive.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h3 id="FH1mmU">
|
||
How to make vaccine testing cheap
|
||
</h3>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DUAqog">
|
||
In 2016, the <a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-vaccine-prevent-cholera-travelers">FDA approved a cholera vaccine</a> whose <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4872293/">phase III test only included 197 people</a>. That’s a tiny fraction of the 26,000 in the TB vaccine trial. This earlier trial was much, much cheaper but still resulted in a working, approved vaccine.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="z7FtjB">
|
||
What was the trick? The cholera vaccine was assessed using a “challenge” trial. 134 of the volunteers in the study actually ingested the cholera bacterium after receiving their vaccine or placebo. Those who got infected were, of course, given antibiotics, fluids, and other necessary treatments. No one got hurt. But their sacrifice enabled researchers to find an effective cholera vaccine for a fraction of the price of a field trial with thousands of people.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NaFV4Q">
|
||
<a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/4/9/21209593/coronavirus-vaccine-human-trials-explained">Human challenge trials</a> are a tested and reliable method, having been <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6402913/">used for decades with great success</a> to develop <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23933962/malaria-vaccine-challenge-trials-drugs-tropical-disease-africa-research">malaria</a> treatments and prophylactics. But <a href="https://www.1daysooner.org/tuberculosis">they have yet to be used on tuberculosis</a>. Developing a challenge approach takes time, and while that investment has been made for malaria and cholera, it hasn’t been for TB yet. That’s a shame, because they could provide a way around the huge numbers of people TB trials typically need to detect results. Instead of waiting months for a handful out of a group of thousands of participants to be exposed to TB, researchers could expose several dozen volunteers at once, see how much protection vaccines offer, and proceed from there.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LnTLr1">
|
||
This may sound dangerous at first glance, but the risks are small. As with other challenge trials, the researchers would use a weakened or “attenuated” version of the pathogen and would provide immediate and comprehensive treatment. <a href="https://philarchive.org/archive/ROHETEv2#page=12">One paper examining the idea</a> estimated that a challenge trial would pose a risk of death of about 1 in 1,600, at the high end. For context, that’s less than half the death risk associated with working as a trucker for five years, and about one-sixth the danger of working as a logger for five years. We let people do those things for money because we value lumber and quick shipping. There’s something to be said for letting people take more modest risks to save lives.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ReDFTv">
|
||
Luckily, several researchers are trying to develop models for tuberculosis challenges. <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/205/7/1035/787804">One would use the 1921 vaccine itself as a substitute</a> for the bacterium, because the vaccine is already in essence an attenuated form of TB. Given that the vaccine is already broadly accepted, it seems hard to argue with the acceptability of this approach. Another option involves an <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10680849/#:~:text=Notably%2C%20the%20strain%20that%20contained,for%20a%20human%20challenge%20model.">artificial strain of tuberculosis that has been modified to rely on certain compounds</a> that can be withdrawn at any time, effectively offering a “kill switch” for the bacteria and allowing study researchers to fully cure participants at the end of the trial. Both of these could provide a pathway to challenge trials with extremely minimal risks for participants.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DKmybf">
|
||
Helen McShane, Eric Rubin, Sarah Fortune, and the dozens of other researchers developing these models are, I think, doing some of the highest-impact work in global health right now. But they need help: regular funding, collaborative drug agencies, and a general public that’s supportive of letting volunteers contribute to the fight against tuberculosis this way.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mh77yO">
|
||
<em>A version of this newsletter originally appeared in the </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect"><em><strong>Future Perfect</strong></em></a><em> newsletter. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup"><em><strong>Sign up here!</strong></em></a>
|
||
</p></li>
|
||
<li><strong>The philosophy of anarchism, explained</strong> -
|
||
<figure>
|
||
<img alt="A protester, dressed in black and carrying a black bag, tags a gray wall with the anarchy sign — a capital A overlapping a circle — in blue paint." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TpgbpMLQO7-rxJLKpxcuM4Q11DQ=/278x0:4722x3333/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72958367/1249487716.0.jpg"/>
|
||
<figcaption>
|
||
A protester in Marseille, France, tags a wall with the anarchy sign during a demonstration against pension reform. | Gerard Bottino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
|
||
</figcaption>
|
||
</figure>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
||
Why it isn’t the same as chaos.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tYg9l1">
|
||
When you think of anarchism, what comes to mind?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="vPSXXw">
|
||
Maybe you have some vague image of a punk rocker with the Circle-A symbol scratched into her jeans. Or some comic-book supervillain out to destroy the world that spurned him. Those are fun caricatures, but anarchism is actually a rich tradition of thought going back centuries, and it was at the center of utopian leftism until Marxism came along.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0nIxcH">
|
||
Today, though, Marxism and other lefty ideologies don’t have nearly the purchase they once did, and it’s not entirely clear what, if anything, has filled that void. That lack is all the more interesting given our current moment, when so many conventional ways of doing and thinking about politics are being challenged.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IQ4qwe">
|
||
So, in that spirit, I invited Sophie Scott-Brown onto <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area"><em>The Gray Area</em></a> to talk about the history of anarchism and its relevance today. She’s a research fellow at the University of St. Andrews and the director of Gresham College in London. She’s also the author of a new book, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Colin-Ward-and-the-Art-of-Everyday-Anarchy/Scott-Brown/p/book/9780367569303"><em>Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy</em></a>, which is a fascinating look at the potential of anarchist ideas through the work of the well-known British writer.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="oi8iIm">
|
||
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area"><em>The Gray Area</em></a> on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/id1081584611">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/search/vox%20conversations">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations">Stitcher</a>, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<div id="eeJhgc">
|
||
|
||
</div>
|
||
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="6BN4Us"/>
|
||
<h4 id="OflXU1">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wnYFex">
|
||
We’re all familiar with the stereotypes, but as someone who thinks seriously about anarchism, what does the term mean to you?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="SKMKzq">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ieBB5t">
|
||
Yeah, I completely accept the stereotypes. Before you can get to any sort of serious anarchist philosophy, you have to do quite a lot of work deconstructing that for people. So here’s a working definition that might help. Anarchism, if you just take the very word itself, all it entails is a commitment to a lack of permanent authority.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="dnnQK9">
|
||
Now, what you then want to do imaginatively after that is wide open. Dare I say there’s a lot of propaganda out there suggesting there has to be chaos and disorder and violence and crime. But the concept itself simply says no permanent authority, and that’s about the one thing you can say that really connects up a lot of people who might use that term to describe their beliefs.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="fdEWPX">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xySgBk">
|
||
I heard someone say once that anarchism is “democracy taken seriously.” I’m not sure how accurate that is, but I like it.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="fu6XOA">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="sIFXBi">
|
||
I think that’s precisely right. There’s a spectrum of anarchisms, so I’ll stress that before I get lots of complaints. However, I would actually argue, philosophically speaking, if you’re going to take that first notion that we started with — that anarchism is a commitment to an absence of permanent authority — that does refine your options a little bit more.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="GDdpMK">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="VLyP8R">
|
||
Is there a particular species of anarchism that you identify with?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="YThGcL">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NyX9YF">
|
||
I mean, for me, if you want the philosophical roots of it, it comes very much from the Italian rhetorical tradition. So figures like Cicero going through to Vico, people who actually believed that the nuts and bolts of living together means communication, means dispute, means arguing, essentially, but arguing in such a way where the results are not catastrophic. So conflict, I think, is a feature of life. The challenge for us is to not make that conflict catastrophic.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="CauYrV">
|
||
So if you accept that conflict’s going to be a ubiquitous feature of life, you say to yourself, “Okay, well, how do I deal with conflict so that it’s not only not catastrophic, but actually creative?” We want to be ambitious with it. We want to know how to live in a world where our conflicts, our differences, our collisions, can be very creative. And that, to me, is the essence of what a full and most radical democratic culture would look like.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="Clevno">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="GGvAok">
|
||
Do you think it’s better to think of anarchism as a practice rather than an ideology?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="Jit7Xt">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="seJTfC">
|
||
I certainly do. I think in some ways the big challenge anarchism gives to us these days, and why it’s so removed from where we’re at now but also why it’s going to be essential for the world that we’re going into, is that it comes away from this whole notion that politics always has to have an end game. It’s going to be a utopia. It’s going to be the ideal society. There was always an element of utopianism in anarchism, let’s not lie about that, but for me, I feel like we’re reaching times now where people have very little patience with utopian notions.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WaZj3n">
|
||
I mean, sure, wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world without constant warfare? That kind of utopian thinking has a life and a place, but anything more specific, I think we’ve perhaps grown out of that. And therefore this idea of anarchy as a habit of mind or an attitude or a way of thinking and being in the world is useful for thinking about a politics of constant change. You’ve got to think about a politics which accepts that you’re never going to have the truth or the facts or the safe ground under your feet to know you’re right. So how do you live with an ability to adapt? How do you live with contingency? How do you live with the fact that you’re going to be involved in lots of different kinds of problems, probably simultaneously?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="MdYgb2">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Hm2znw">
|
||
What would you say is the most promising anarchist idea that seems relevant to this political moment?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="CxHjiM">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="pMkAGF">
|
||
Decentralization, or the idea that permanent authority is the real bugbear. This is a bit provocative, but even things like codes of law and rights and things like that, they have their purpose and their reason, or they certainly did have their purpose and reason, but increasingly we’re looking at a world where we simply have to get better at taking more responsibility.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hTPbNI">
|
||
Anything like government or systems of law, what are they? They’re actually heuristics. They’re shortcuts for an awful lot of moral and political discussion and reasoning, and people forget that they’ve compressed those discussions into a series of rules of thumb. And we are increasingly not teaching ourselves or troubling ourselves to have those complex conversations between ourselves, and so the tail is sort of wagging the dog now. We’re becoming very subject to all these systems and structures, which emerged at times that were so unbelievably different from how we’re living now and they’re not fit for purpose anymore, and so it’s no surprise that they’re cracking up around us.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="wTHd2v">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1A7WcY">
|
||
It does seem like a lot of this comes down to whether or not one views human conflict as ultimately creative or ultimately destructive, whether it’s the beginning of cooperation or the end of conversation.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="fOg96l">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="W1a3ZT">
|
||
Well, you have the famous quote, it’s usually attributed to Bakunin, “To destroy and to build again.” There is a vein running through anarchism, which has often been part of the reason why it’s been associated with violence and violent insurrection and chaos and disorder and that sort of thing. But to destroy and to build again can be taken perfectly metaphorically. It’s this idea that actually destruction and creation are simultaneous things. Any act of creativity is simultaneously destroying some possibilities in favor of others.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="Shgr8A">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="O2aQIl">
|
||
Every political philosophy, either implicitly or explicitly, is built on a theory of human nature, and I guess I’m wondering what the anarchist view of human nature is. Or maybe I should ask what your view of human nature is because I’m sure there are many different views of human nature within the anarchist community.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="jkNVI4">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Pp1Iu6">
|
||
Well, those pesky anarchists, as you’re saying, have pretty much adopted all of the familiar views of human nature and managed to turn anarchism to their advantage in every single possible definition. So you do have those like Peter Kropotkin, the 19th-century Russian anarchist, who are very optimistic about human nature. They think we’re basically social beings and we’re being inhibited or prevented from doing that by these coercive, life-denying, authoritarian structures. Therefore, if we get rid of those, it’ll be an easy win. People will find it remarkably easy to be cooperative.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="due3Yk">
|
||
But then you have people like Alex Comfort, for example, who is a 20th-century British anarchist who wrote around the 1940s and 1950s, and he took what he called a much more realistic view. He argued that humans aren’t going to be like that at all. They’re going to collide with each other constantly, so the game in town is how do you manage that conflict? If it’s inevitable, if you can’t be too optimistic about everyone’s social capacity, how can you distribute your society, distribute your decision-making power, distribute your economic power, so nobody ever gets enough to have a critical mass that can overtake everybody else?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="V1fWeC">
|
||
My view is a total copout, Sean. I think human nature is incredibly malleable. I think it can be many, many, many things. I think we’re like the ultimate actor in neutral, waiting for the next role.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="CrgnBn">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="GQmeJi">
|
||
Can you be an anarchist and still believe that there are fundamentally evil human beings?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="Bq3hxF">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7wIehj">
|
||
Well, I personally don’t, which is sometimes really difficult to maintain. I don’t believe in evil. What I would say is people certainly have the capacity for it, a shocking capacity for it. And I’m not a full environmentalist in the sense that I don’t think that if only these people had a nice progressive education and lots of drama classes when they were young, everything would’ve been fine. It might’ve been. In many cases, it probably could have been, but actually we don’t quite know what that tipping point is. I would be happier calling it a capacity rather than anything more profound.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="0C1sci">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ZY6mb2">
|
||
I do think that human beings are pretty plastic and often we are as good or bad as the world allows us to be. I also believe that evil, for lack of a better word, is a real thing. And I say that as a secular person, not a religious person. And even if we constructed the most practical utopia ever, I think we would still need police and armies. Now, an anarchist might say that people can be wicked, but it’s power that makes them that way. I think there’s some truth there, but it also seems importantly incomplete. Some people are just wicked whether they have power or not. Would you disagree with that?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="pSLry1">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mr7mH9">
|
||
Well, it’s a big gamble to take, isn’t it? I have to ask myself, on balance, is the damage [done by] having things like a permanent police force or a judiciary system skewed in a particular historical social context? Does the damage outweigh the reality that these institutions can actually be the source of so many problems?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="L1ubHh">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="f2fzH3">
|
||
These aren’t easy questions, I get that. I would say that I agree with you that the vast majority of people are not “cruel and disordered” when they’re not governed. I guess I just think that some people are, and the problem is that it doesn’t take many cruel and disordered people to make life impossible for everyone else. And that to me is the crucial political problem, how to deal with that. And I’m not sure anarchy can or does, but I could be wrong.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="YSeiMY">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MpAagL">
|
||
Let’s flip this upside down. We’re talking about that rare individual who is beyond all reasonable measure, but what we could talk about is all those other people. And I actually think they are really interesting, those other people. Who are they? We don’t quite know.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LXmc3M">
|
||
But if we take the situation we have now where we have minorities on either end. We have a relative minority of people who are unbelievably kind, you’d call them saintly if you were religious, and then you have the tiny minority of people who we’ll call evil for want of any other word. And then you have this sort of spectrum of people in between the two.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TOLR0N">
|
||
These are always the really interesting people. They’re the people who are very unpredictable, and that’s wonderful in a way because you never know where they’ll go with a particular issue on a particular day. But they’ll be very responsive to a situational logic rather than some sort of deep ideological commitment to anything. And I think there’s enormous potential there, which is largely ignored or squandered.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NrW523">
|
||
People really dismiss everyday sorts of intelligence and reasoning and logic, and because it’s dismissed, because we’re constantly trying to come up with these official measures of what we should be and who we should be, we actually miss that, half the time, we’re perfectly functional anarchists already.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="2rrXpk">
|
||
Sean Illing
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qjkQgJ">
|
||
There’s so much in anarchism that appeals to me, but I’m not sure it could ever work at scale. And yet you could pose that question about any political order. I fear that one of the lessons of the 20th and 21st centuries might be that humans are not especially equipped to live in large symbolic communities without material connections and shared ways of living. So maybe anarchism could work, but only in smaller, more localized ways?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<h4 id="p2mc3u">
|
||
Sophie Scott-Brown
|
||
</h4>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FqoQyj">
|
||
I think that’s broadly right. This idea that you have to have anarchist nations or even anarchist unions, if you like, well, yes you could, but maybe let them take care of themselves. If they happen, they happen. But what might be more interesting is this notion of being intensely local while being simultaneously global. I’m trying not to use that old but very useful cliche, “Think global, act local,” but it’s got traction here.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ZALriL">
|
||
Let’s say, for example, that we accept that there are idealistic and ethical and practical reasons why it would be great to see more worker control of industrial democracy in our workplaces. Why is it that we have to retain these fairly doddery, very hierarchical structures of decision-making, which as we know even now are still not particularly diverse?
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="076dpo">
|
||
We’re under so much pressure to keep educating people for longer and longer because now we’re told it’s a lifelong process of learning to keep abreast of everything in order to stay employed. Well, if you’re going to keep this highly educated population, are you honestly going to be surprised when they start getting very resentful about being treated like rube mechanicals in their workplaces? I don’t think we need to worry about anarchist nations or anything like that. A much more healthy approach is to start local by giving more workers more control over their lives and their democracy.
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Fc4p6s">
|
||
<em>To hear the rest of the conversation, </em><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/taking-anarchism-seriously/id1081584611?i=1000638168277"><em>click here</em></a><em>, and be sure to follow </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/thegrayarea">The Gray Area</a><em> on </em><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/id1081584611"><em>Apple Podcasts</em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://podcasts.google.com/search/vox%20conversations"><em>Google Podcasts</em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP"><em>Spotify</em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations"><em>Stitcher</em></a><em>, or wherever you listen to podcasts.</em>
|
||
</p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</h1>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Indian team has responsibility to take women’s cricket ahead: Harmanpreet Kaur</strong> - After a gap of nearly nine years, India will be playing a Test at home when they take on England in a one-off match here at the DY Patil Stadium</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Didn’t know how to come back after World Cup final loss but now motivated for ultimate prize: Rohit</strong> - “It wasn’t easy to digest but life moves on and it wasn’t easy to move on,” said Rohit, opening up for the first time since India lost to Australia</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Test series against India | It was a fair decision, says Chris Woakes on being left out</strong> -</p></li>
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<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Gaza support | Cricket Australia expects Usman Khawaja to abide by rules</strong> - Khawaja sported messages on his boots conveying the sentiments “Freedom is a fundamental human right” and “All lives possess equal value,” both written in the hues of the Palestinian flag.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Champions League | Man United loses 1-0 to Bayern Munich; crashes out</strong> - Kingsley Coman scored in the 70th minute to knock Erik ten Hag’s Manchester United out of the Champions League</p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</h1>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Do justice to winter session in North Karnataka by taking up irrigation projects worth ₹5,700 crore in the region, Vijayendra tells government</strong> - The newly-appointed BJP State chief also requested incentives for sugarcane and grape growers, while criticising the Siddaramaiah government for increasing cattle feed prices.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Telangana | Congress Govt. to know burden of promises now: KTR</strong> - He observed that the party came to power by fooling people with impossible promises</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Parliament security breach: ‘My son’s act is condemnable’, says Manoranjan’s father in Mysuru</strong> - Mr. Devraj said they had voted for BJP MP from Mysuru Pratap Simha</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>U.S. has made great progress in further bolstering defence relations with India: Pentagon</strong> -</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Telangana ranked among the top in own tax revenue collections at 84.2% of overall tax collected</strong> - RBI’s report on state finances says general increase in own tax revenues will reduce dependence on Central devolutions</p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</h1>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Ukraine war: Dozens wounded in Russian missile strikes on Kyiv</strong> - A total of 53 people have been hurt in the attacks, including six children, the mayor of Kyiv says.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Aid stalemate leaves Zelensky with little to show from US trip</strong> - The Ukrainian president failed to secure a breakthrough on more US aid during his third visit to Washington.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Russia’s new Black Sea naval base alarms Georgia</strong> - The Kremlin’s plans raise fears that EU-hopeful Georgia could be dragged into the war in Ukraine.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Aleksandar Vucic dominates Serbian election as vote nears</strong> - Critics say President Aleksandar Vucic is an autocrat, as his party seeks another election win.</p></li>
|
||
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Manchester United 0-1 Bayern Munich: Red Devils out of Europe with defeat by German champions</strong> - Manchester United fall to defeat by Bayern Munich at Old Trafford to exit the Champions League at the group stage.</p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</h1>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Blue Origin sure seems confident it will launch New Glenn in 2024</strong> - Does Jeff Bezos’s heavy-lift rocket really have a shot at launching next year? - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1990649">link</a></p></li>
|
||
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>E3 memory lane: Ars’ favorite moments from the show’s over-the-top past</strong> - The people, scenery, and oddities that made E3 part trade show, part theme park. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1990329">link</a></p></li>
|
||
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Every homeopathic eye drop should be pulled off the market, FDA says</strong> - Eye drops are uniquely risky because the eye is an immune-privileged site. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1990624">link</a></p></li>
|
||
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The future of Arrakis is at stake in latest trailer for Dune: Part Two</strong> - “This is a form of power that our world has not yet seen.” - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1990472">link</a></p></li>
|
||
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Broadcom ends VMware perpetual license sales, testing customers and partners</strong> - Already-purchased licenses can still be used but will eventually lose support. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1990440">link</a></p></li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</h1>
|
||
|
||
|
||
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