As covid-19 keeps spreading, Brazilian president Bolsonaro was tested positive for the virus. Bolsonaro, who earlier this year stated that the virus was "only a flu," and it would not cause bigger problems due to his "athletic history," became the second G20 leader — after Boris Johnson, prime-minister of the United Kingdom — to be infected with the virus.

In Japan, the Tokyo gubernatorial resulted in a landslide for the incumbent, Yuriko Koike, who pledged to keep the 2021 Olympics as planned. The opposition parties split the vote among the former Japan Bar Association president Kenji Utsunomiya, and the actor-turned-politician Taro Yamamoto.

Yamamoto's new party — Reiwa Shinsengumi, named as a reference to a secret police force created in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate — might become an important player in the upcoming Japanese Lower House elections, to be held at any point from now until October 2021, when the current legislature term expires.

As always, if you have any comments, replies, or reading suggestions for the next weeks, feel free to comment below or reach me on Twitter: @ferursine. Any feedback is really appreciated!

To read

Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook (Columbia Journalism Review)

This is a complement to last week's interview with Prof. Galloway on Fast Company. Here, Jacob Silverman writes about the relationship between Facebook and the press, highlighting some issues that journalists have when they try to report on issues related to the company that are most likely than not to become bad press. In this piece, he mentions that after the 2016 presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company started to close itself off, so as to avoid further scrutiny.

What Facebook has become is the press’s assignment editor, its distribution network, its great antagonist, devourer of its ad revenue, and, through corporate secrecy, a massive block to journalism’s core mission of democratic accountability. Whether journalists can survive these conditions to produce meaningful, critical work about Facebook depends as much on their own adaptability as it does on the backing of revenue-minded media owners who might not wish to antagonize one holder of the advertising duopoly during an unfolding economic calamity.

The Taming of the Elite: Putin’s Referendum and Putin’s Majority 3.0 (Carnegie Center Russia)

Vying for more powers under the presidential authority, Russian president Vladimir Putin proposed last March a set of constitutional reforms whose vote was held in the last weeks, from June 25 to July 1. As expected, Putin's reforms — which include a reset on presidential terms, allowing him to run a third reelection bid in 2024 — were approved with a majority of the popular vote. In the first piece, Tatiana Stanovaya writes about the reasoning Putin used to hold such vote now. By resetting the presidential term and receiving almost 78% of the popular vote in what the European Union considered a rigged referendum, Putin is sending the Russian oligarchy a message: this is not the time to think about his potential successors.

The president may consider the outcome of the vote as confirmation that the Russian public is providing him with a guarantee of support for more years to come. But the pragmatic elites will have a far more sober view of things. They know exactly how voting works in Russia, and that same 70 percent can easily be read as 25 percent real support, or even as a loss of trust entirely.

In the second piece, Andrei Kolesnikov makes a comparison between the majorities that Putin had throughout his terms as president. From the petrodollar-funded majority in the early 2000s, to what he calls a version 3.0 after last week's referendum (the piece was written before the vote), the construction of a 'majority' in Russia has been dependent on the mobilization of public sector workers, and is, according to the author, based on a need to convince "both himself and the public" that such majority is real.

The “Putin majority” was an ad hoc construction built less on ideology than political spin. […] To maintain this majority, it had to become militarized and fixated on myths about the country’s heroic history.

(In a side-note, I would strongly recommend Peter Pomerantsev's 2014 book Nothing is real and everything is possible to anyone interested in contemporary Russian politics. You can read the book reviews here and here.)

To listen

As summer is coming to the north of Japan, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to sleep without an electric fan, Spotify's summer rewind playlist reminds me of some songs I was listening in the past few summers.

The first one, Tasogare surround, from the Japanese group Rip Slyme, is one of the first songs I listened in Japanese after I started studying the language. This reminds me of the times I had to transfer music to a 32GB USB-stick mp3 player to have music on the go.

The other recommendation for today is the collaboration between the Japanese group Wednesday Campanella’s vocalist kom_i and the French fusion project Moodoid’s guitarrist Pablo Padovani. With the absurdity of this video clip, sang both in French and Japanese, the main message they try to convey is: “for music & love you have to go beyond words.”

That was me for this week! Again, if there are any comments, suggestions or questions, let me know in the comments or by reaching me on Twitter: @ferursine.

Thanks for reading, stay safe and have a great week!

This week, as the pandemic is still around and covid-19 cases are going up daily, numbers show that in Brazil, the amount of people whose lives were claimed by the coronavirus so far is the same as the casualties in the Paraguay War, 150 years ago. In a lighter note, in Japan, Zen Buddhist temples began offering Zoom zazen meetings online.

If you have any comments, reading suggestions for the next posts or replies, feel free to comment below or reach me on Twitter: @ferursine. Any feedback is really appreciated.

To read

Brazil’s Heart of Darkness (NewStatesman)

As a Brazilian, sometimes it is difficult to find English-written material to explain to other people how the current situation in the country is. Burns's piece helps filling this gap, presenting a well-written account of the federal government's approach to the pandemic, and the similarities to Trump's response in the US.

From a presidential system and the separation of powers, to a Trumpian pose against coronavirus — not to mention a law enforcement system that kills citizens at an alarming rate — Brazil seems to have imported a number of US political institutions and habits, only to encounter challenges in implementing them in a Brazilian context.

‘Mark Zuckerberg is the biggest oligarch in the history of mankind’ (Fast Company)

Next, an interesting interview with NYU professor Scott Galloway on the current state of social media, work-from-home and the oligopoly of the 'Big Tech,' especially the so-called Big Four (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google). Prof. Galloway's take on Mark Zuckerberg's approach to politics and power is worth the read.

These [social media companies] are some of the most damaging organizations we’ve seen on the planet. Mark Zuckerberg is the most dangerous person in the world. He has absolutely institutionalized sociopathy […]

Dear Reviewer 2: Go F’ Yourself (Social Science Quarterly)

Finally, a paper on the dreadful “Reviewer 2,” whose existence many academics I have met before despise. Here, the author evaluates the reviewer database for a Political Science journal and comes up with a surprising conclusion: in fact, Reviewer 2 is not the embodiment of the worst of humankind; Reviewer 3 is.

[…] the delay in accepting the review request is a signal of low compliance with professional expectations. The reviewer does not accept the request in a timely fashion and potentially waits until the editor sends an annoying reminder of the review request. Given this process, should anyone be surprised that the most negative and critical reviewer is the one who answers the request most slowly?

To listen

A lovely indie drum-and-bass track that was featured in my “Discovery Weekly” Spotify playlist. In case it is not available in your region, the Youtube link is here.

That was it for this week! Again, if there are any comments, suggestions or questions, let me know in the comments or by reaching me on Twitter: @ferursine.

Thanks for reading, stay safe and have a great week!

This is starting mostly as a way for me not to forget what I read online, and also as a means to recommend stuff to people without having to copy strings of links everyday. I was also inspired by a friend that is talking about her research interests by using social media as a learning tool.

I try to cover a lot of topics here, but most of them may be somehow related to politics. If you have any comments, suggestions or replies for the next posts, feel free to comment below or reach me on Twitter: @ferursine

To read

Why the rich are revolting — UnHerd

First, a text about the elitist nature of rebellion in the contemporary world. The radicalization of the middle-class, especially the upper middle-class, is the catalyst for most revolutions. As the author puts, “discontent and boredom among the rich and powerful can quickly descend into violence,” and perhaps we may be facing such violent times once again.

Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020?

In a related note, this 2012 Livescience post talks about the possibility of an upheaval in the U.S. in 2020, which seems to be happening now. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the pursuit of patterns in History — with a capital H — is becoming more than a “pseudoscience.”

Joe Biden, Emissary of Grief

The third one — in what I feel is becoming an increasingly U.S.-related list for this week— is about the former-VP and now-contender to the Presidency, Joe Biden, and the eulogies he has been doing throughout his career. I’m not going to lie that some parts of this text made me gasp as I tried to put myself in Mr. Biden’s position and imagined having to eulogize my own loved ones.

The neoliberal era is ending. What comes next?

Finally, Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia for Realists — a book I enjoyed reading last summer — writes a solid piece on how he foresees the post-pandemic world. Wealth taxes, universal basic income and a bigger role for the government? The future is unpredictable, but if those policies are to be implemented, it is definitely something to look forward.

To watch

A very interesting piece about the deployment of an U.S. anti-missile defense system in a South Korean village and the reactions of its dwellers. The way the struggle is developing reminds me of the reaction to the construction of new military bases in Okinawa.

To listen

Since 2011, the Korean internet behemoth Naver has been giving some space to indie artists with the On Stage video project. As a part of an On Stage collaboration with rising Korean stars covering songs from the 1980s, this is indie-rock band So Se Neon's version of "Cat" (고양이), a 1986-released folk track that you can also listen here.

What I am reading now

• Why Bother?: Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests, by S. Erdem Aytaç and Susan C. Stokes (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Professors Aytaç and Stokes present a new way to evaluate how important the participation in elections and protests can be in some groups. Using an extensive literature review, they discuss positive points and flaws in previous theories and show another way to analyse electoral participation and the reasons why people protest.

That was it for this week's list, hope you enjoyed (at least a bit) and see you next week!