Pretty Heady Stuff

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the editor of a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Palestine Studies. She’s also a policy member of Al-Shabaka and the Palestinian Policy Network. Seikaly and I talk about the question of Palestine and the ongoing catastrophe. When we spoke, the central focus was famine, which for a moment felt like a moral line in the sand for even Western liberals that hadn't taken a stand. Now, Western powers are trying to shift our gaze to peace, the need for peace and to begin the reconstruction of Gaza.... By whom? We don't know. We assume Jared Kushner, since we are clearly in the worst possible universe. The attempt, now, to normalize the murder of more than 30,000 children in Gaza, the self-congratulatory desire to move past it, ignores the fact that Gaza is still being starved and bombed. Israel is violating Trump's fake "peace plan" because it never planned to pull back; the occupation was always violence without end; it was built on what Abdaljawad Omar calls the "Zionist fantasy of total domination." October 7th drove this hypermilitarized nation to unleash genocidal fury on the people of Palestine. Since that date, its been flexing its state-of-the-art capacity for industrial slaughter. In a recent speech, Netenyahu said that his country needs to become a modern "Super Sparta" -- meaning, more militaristic and aggressive in its ambitions, and also more isolated and garrisoned-off from the rest of the world. Israel is an ultranationalist ethnostate with a nuclear arsenal that is threatening to respond to the collapse of what was left of its fragile public image by stockpiling more weapons and embracing their isolation. Some might say it's normal, or at least predictable, for a country that's always at war to invest so heavily in defense and to worry about fortifying its borders.... But that is not what Netenyahu meant by making Israel a "Super Sparta." Israel is building what my guest Sherene Seikaly calls a "paradigm" of imperial power, over and against much of the Arab world. And it is doing so to maintain a system of oppression and dispossession. Everything is out in the open now: the Israeli parliament just voted to annex all of the West Bank. Omar says that there are multiple futures that could proceed from October 7th. Will this moment of insurgency against an unhinged occupying power be "the first cracks in an imperial juggernaut and its outpost, the sign of the end of their imagined permanence"? Will it mean the end of the Palestinians? he asks. Their "bodies scattered, dispersed, maimed beyond recognition." Or can it be "something else: the endurance of the unbearable, the persistence of what was meant to be erased, the resurrection of a people who refuse to vanish"?

Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano (https://www.sarahsteinlubrano.com/) got her PhD from Oxford and Masters degree from the University of Cambridge. She works with the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab. She's also served as the head of content at The School of Life.Her new book, Don't Talk About Politics, has me reeling. (https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/dont-talk-about-politics-9781399413916/) The implications of her no-nonsense approach to what works in political communication are pretty radical. Lubrano, I think, is trying to outline a path to more flexible, accessible ways of communicating and organizing than the ones we have. She says that the act of building social relationships--not doing more prestigious things like making documentaries and writing books--is the single most important site of politics.So, how do we make political appeals to people while reckoning with the widespread social isolation they're feeling? Sarah says that “discourse, which is so highly valued in theory in our society, appears" to be quite "ineffective in practice.” With many of the political conversations we have, it feels like there's a wedge in place before we can even begin to engage. Lubrano says it's because we're forced to choose between the model of discourse as a battle or the idea that it's a "marketplace of ideas." These two polar opposite metaphors are the only ones we seem have for how conversation nourishes a democracy. At its core, her book is concerned with what it means for democracy to be reduced to either marketing or killing. The questions that Sarah is currently taking up in her work have obviously become more pressing with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the far-right social media influencer who was shot at a public event in Utah this September. This was a globally witnessed murder that sent shockwaves through state politics, the alt-right media sphere and into the far reaches of the internet. Lubrano recently wrote in The Guardian that there are "lots of reasons why debate (and indeed, information-giving and argumentation in general) tends to be ineffective at changing people’s political beliefs. Cognitive dissonance... is one. This is the often unconscious psychological discomfort we feel when faced with contradictions in our own beliefs or actions, and it has been well documented."I connected with Sarah again, after we recorded our initial conversation about her book, because Kirk's murder represents a crossroads for a lot of people, and a moment to reflect on the poisoning of public discourse. How did Kirk change people's minds? Was it through debate? Or did his organization Turning Point mainly use the spectacle of a debate as recruitment strategy? How and when do we change our minds? #debate #rightpopulism #farrightinfluencers #democracymaynotexistbutwellmissitwhenitsgone #charliekirk #leftpolitics #politicaltheory #solidarity

Ingrid Waldron is the founder and director of The ENRICH Project, the co-founder and co-director of the Canadian Coalition for Environmental and Climate Justice (CCECJ), and currently a consultant for Canada's Environmental Justice Strategy. Ingrid Waldron partners with equity demanding groups because their health depends on this thing called structural competency. There is a massive body of research on the impacts of racism and other forms of discrimination on the health of communities and plenty of political and legal force behind recognizing the ongoing lethal effects of environmental racism. Back in 2020, Waldron collaborated with Elliot Page to turn her book There’s Something in the Water, a study of environmental racism in Nova Scotia, into a feature-length documentary. Her new book, From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: Tracing the Impacts of Racial Trauma in Black Communities from the Colonial Era to the Present, is what we mostly focus on here. The book traces the history of Black racial trauma in Canada, Britain, and the US, but it's also a kind of manifesto, demanding for a politics of structural transformation in biomedicine as a way of moving past the discipline’s resistance to advocating for changes at the root, structural level. Waldron is saying that because racism places obvious restrictions on the ability of human beings to thrive in their social worlds, it also places an insurmountable burden on the equal distribution of health. I think there are moments in this discussion where it feels like Dr. Waldron might even be satisfied, or maybe just reassured, with the medical community if it could just recognize and respond to racism as a factor that has a huge impact on a person's health. Demanding an anti-racist politics in academia and medical practice, she says that we need to make it standard practice to care about radical structural change, and especially where the politics of race and psychiatry collide.

This episode comes out at a time when the movement for Palestinian liberation is relentlessly holding groups accountable for supporting and whitewashing the state of Israel's annihilationist violence against Gaza's people. The shaming of companies, states and cities for their complicity and quietism on Gaza has reached a fever pitch. Here in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Tennis Canada was set to play Team Israel in the Davis Cup, but the event was closed to spectators as a result of public pressure (although the reasons cited were related to "security," a refrain that Jones says should be identified as anti-Palestinian racism). Can we see professional sports are inherently political? And how do we understand the sort of political maneuvering pariah states are doing to launder their reputations through "sportswashing"? Professional sport is a symbolic activity that is clearly important for defining who we are and where our moral limits lie, but it is also, as Liew stresses, an escapist experience that's meant to inspire awe and joy at seeing the feats that people are capable of when in competition with each other. But we need to start from the position that sportswashing is an attempt to sideline the legitimate political demands of millions of people globally: demands, in this case, that Palestine be free from this tyranny. In Liew's words, "The primary objective of Israeli sporting diplomacy is that when you hear the country’s name, you won’t think of any of this. You won’t think about military checkpoints or the bombing of Gaza or the Palestinian occupation, or really Palestinians at all. Instead you’ll think about golden beaches, rooftop cocktails, Lionel Messi and Chris Froome bathed in a glorious sunset."Tennis Canada could have stood on the side of justice. The International Tennis Federation could also have aligned with countless legal experts globally in identifying what Israel is doing as abhorrent and unacceptable, worthy of boycott and having athletes barred from international events. A genocide is unfolding before our eyes.Jones ultimately comes back to this question: how, given that this is happening in a way that is visible, visceral and almost too horrific to articulate, do professional communicators, journalists, political leaders and others convince themselves to keep lying by pretending this is normal?

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, content producer and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University, where he served as founding director of Rice’s Center for Environmental Studies. Some of his recent books are Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene and Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human. The book we’re talking about here, though, No More Fossils, is a short, stunning analysis of the function of fossils during this era of human-propelled environmental destruction and development. And No More Fossils is easily one of the best books I’ve read on the history of energy. Dominic says his goal was to make a book that was teachable, and I would say that, given its length, it’s also super portable and modal in its usefulness.  In this conversation, Boyer says a few times that the goal is to bring about a decisive move away from the indulgent, excessive use of energy that is currently so normalized. And I totally agree, the overwhelming accelerationist use of energy is catapulting us into an incredibly turbulent future on this planet. But how do we bring that about? Dominic’s book offers some extremely moving promises of a point after the petrostate and words of encouragement for people that are organizing to end fossil capitalism. One of the things that most resonated with me  is the idea that, one day, everyone will grasp the obviousness of the need to phase out fossil fuels. It will be self-evident that it was necessary. Even if, right now, the fossil gerontocracy, as Boyer calls it, is doing everything it can to preserve a failed way of life based on bottomless plastics and gasoline. Can we fight the future and preserve joy? Can we propel the energy transition while forging a future that addresses the colonial crimes of the past? If we are now living in epic times, can we collectively rise to the planetary challenges that we face?