TRENDS IN BRIEF
Apologies to my paying customers for the brevity of this week’s dispatch. I am on a very tight deadline for an hour-long documentary called “NATO: Then, Now, Now What?” for BBC Radio 4 — in the studio on Friday with much yet to do. But there were two very distinct groups of events this past seven days and I wanted to note these trends and will, no doubt, come back to them.
The first is the bedding down of elective authoritarianism in the US and in several of its allies.
In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, jailed Ekrem Imamoglu, the Mayor of Istanbul and likely candidate of Turkey’s main opposition party the CHP. Imamoglu was arrested on Wednesday the 19th on charges of corruption and has no been orderedd to jail pending trial.
Istanbul is a city of 15 million plus. The cultural and business capital of the country has an outsized impact in Turkish politics. Erdoğan himself used the mayoralty of the giant city as a springboard to power.
Imamoglu was first elected in 2019 and has won two subsequent elections. He is widely seen as having a decent chance of defeating Erdoğan at the next election which isn’t scheduled until 2028. Talk about a pre-emptive strike!
Erdoğan, who has been in power as either Prime Minister or President for 20 years enjoys a good relationship with Donald Trump
The New York Times notes in an article on the situation that the pair recently had a long phone call. After Imamoglu’s jailing on Saturday, Trump’s personal envoy to the Middle East and Russia Steven Witkoff told Tucker Carlson on X (yeah, it’s creepy to write that, but this is the world we live in):
“There is just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now as a result of that conversation.”
Meanwhile in Israel the past week, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu fired Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service. The Israeli Supreme Court froze the order.
The reason for firing Bar now may be two-fold: to deflect the Israeli public from Netanyahu’s breaking the cease-fire in Gaza and further jeopardizing the lives of the 50 or so remaining hostages, or it may have to do with this, as reported by the BBC
“Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara late last month ordered the police and the Shin Bet to investigate officials within Netanyahu's office over alleged financial ties to Qatar. A gag order has since been issued on all information relating to the investigation. Netanyahu's Likud Party denies all allegations.
Baharav-Miara - a vocal critic of Netanyahu who is herself facing dismissal proceedings - argued that Bar could not be fired until the legality of the move had been assessed.
The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, an NGO, said it had launched an appeal against the "illegal decision [...] posing a real risk to national security".
In any case, thousands turned out in the rain in Tel Aviv to protest:
In the US, Donald Trump is trying to imitate Erdoğan and Netanyahu in riding roughshod over constitutional norms and customs. The courts are in his way. The Turkish President has managed to co-opt the judicial process. Trump and Bibi are trying to catch up. The paradox of course is that all three were democratically elected, and none of them are acting in a democratic manner.
So far in the US people are not taking to the streets as in Turkey and Israel, they are attending campaign style rallies. One wonders how long that will continue.
The other trend of the week relates to AI. The Atlantic published a search function that allows authors to see if LibGen, a site that has pirated millions of books and articles into a data-base, had used their material. Why do we writers care? Because Meta (Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg had given his execs permission to download the LibGen data base to train Meta’s Llama3 AI system. As creators of this material writers expect payment of a royalty or at least to be asked our permission to use our work (with credit).
I of course checked to see if my work was included. Not my books as it turned out but a number of articles about anti-Semitism and the problems of minorities assimilating into society, two of the themes of my book Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance.
Intellectual property law is no simple thing, especially as new platforms for distribution are constantly being dreamed up.
I ran into the problem twice this week. First, the LibGen situation and then last night I got this note from Spotify, one of the many platforms where you can download the FRDH podcast.
The music was an Ella Fitzgerald rendition of a Gershwin tune in a program about the close relationship of Blacks and Jews in the US in creating the American songbook and a sting of Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony for a program that originally aired on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
The notice will have been generated by an artificial intelligence program. Spotify has literally millions of hours sound available to stream and I don’t flatter myself that a human being was listening to my podcast to see if I was in compliance. A machine that was programmed to look for a digital musical footprint found my work and generated this notice.
In any case, the music was used legally under existing fair use for non-commercial purposes laws. I filled out a form for Spotify explaining this and hopefully that will resolve the issue. But a very serious conversation needs to be had about fair use for generative AI model creation and for quotation in audio content.
Although not as serious and urgent a conversation as needs to be had about autocrats who use democratic means to subvert — pervert — democracy.
The Ella Fitzgerald song appears in the closest thing to a masterpiece I have ever created for radio — It’s called Jews and Blues and since I can only visit with you briefly this week here is a link to it. Really it is worth 47 minutes of your time.
Or simply make a one-off donation: