Новости за 19.12.2016

What ants can teach humans about tyranny, co-operation, and the division of labour. “We know now that ants do not perform as specialised factory workers. Instead ants switch tasks. An ant’s role changes as it grows older and as changing conditions shift the colony’s needs. An ant that feeds the larvae one week might go out to get food the next. Yet in an ant colony, no one is in charge or tells another what to do. So what determines which ant does which task, and when ants switch roles?”

Liberalism was working fine; people just got bored with it, and forgot why they wanted its restraints and reassurances in the first place. “Various examples can be given of how people became bored with playing politics in safe mode. Hostility to globalisation is a particularly salient case of a general impatience with the self-binding rules that cooperation with others requires. If your government lacks the power even to change an EU rule about the shape of bananas, then what exactly is the point... Читать дальше...

The best way to sell a weapon is to place it in a Hollywood blockbuster, gun makers say. The clash of values between gun makers and Hollywood liberals leads to a “sometimes uneasy partnership”; but the two camps, ostensibly “mortal enemies”, still manage a “lucrative, symbiotic relationship”. For proof, look at the “scores of movie stars”, including “prominent gun-control advocates such as Matt Damon and Liam Neeson”, who have “made fortunes wielding guns onscreen”

How The Nation reported the most infamous lynching trial in post-war American history. “The Crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it. Citizens who drink from the Whites Only fountain in the courthouse breathe much easier now that the two fair-skinned half brothers, ages twenty-four and thirty-six, have been acquitted of the murder of a fourteen-year-old Negro boy”