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… read about Chile writing a constitution for social democracy.

If a constitution is a living document, should it not be written by the living? Chile’s writing of a new constitution has attracted the attention of Critical State before, when in May I wrote that “the everyday professions and low average age of delegates (just 44.5) ensures that the people writing this new document are creating something they intend to live with.” Now that the first draft has been presented to Chile’s president Gabriel Boric, the Washington Post has decried it a “Woke Constitution.” Writing for The Nation [[link removed]], Natacha López highlights how the specific work of activists, like human rights lawyer Manuela Royo, led to direct change and new rights. In the Pinochet-delivered 1980 constitution, water was private property. Under the new constitution, should it be adopted, access to clean water is a human right, with priority given to “human consumption, then the ecosystem, then rural agricultural families, and lastly, commercial industries like forestry, factories, and mining.” The constitution enshrines rights, and it also restructures government, allowing for more active legislation with fewer veto points. The constitution could be adopted in a referendum in September, but to get there supporters need to overcome a hostile campaign from the right.

Bad Trip

If the climate emergency is gripping the White House, it certainly isn’t visible from President Biden’s upcoming travel schedule. He’s headed to Saudi Arabia, where he will meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. As markets turn to renewables, but not fully, Biden’s trip is at best an artifact of past oil diplomacy, a face-to-face meeting where both parties declare everything is fine.

While security concerns ostensibly drive the visit, its genesis can more easily be found in high gas prices, with Biden hoping a diplomatic thaw is enough to overcome the fixed economics of an oil economy metering out its vast but finite reserves.

“A move to sacrifice Biden's principled stand against Saudi human-rights abuses in hopes of maybe slightly increasing fossil-fuel production does not serve any real US interest,” write Abdullah Alaoudh and Sam Ratner [[link removed]] in Business Insider. (Full disclosure: Sam Ratner used to write Critical State.)

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Coup Coup Coup

The first rule of condemning an attempted coup is to focus on the act, not the amateurism of the coup-makers. John Bolton, perpetual late-stage Republican appointee and inveterate mustache wearer, told Jake Tapper that coup-planning “takes a lot of work.”

The admission came as Bolton was trying to dismiss Tapper’s assertion that “One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.”

“Bolton’s self-serving denials of a Trump coup belong in the same trash heap as his denials of the 2019 coup in Venezuela,” writes Jonathan Katz [[link removed]]. “Bolton’s reasons for denying those plain facts are clear: because the 2021 coup attempt — shambolic as it was — could not have been carried out by one deranged man, but by factions of a whole political and para-political apparatus [[link removed]], of which Bolton remains a part.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Ladder theory: Part II

On March 3rd, I joined millions of strangers watching a video feed streamed from Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. The power plant was under assault as part of the just over a week-old Russian invasion, and the video showed flashes of light from explosions and gunfire. It was the stuff of war, transmitted over the internet, to an international audience worried about what might happen next.

The biggest risk to the reactors was disruption of maintenance and operation, followed by the explosives used in the fight. But there was also another ominous threat, carried in the same medium as the camera streaming the attack. What if the internet itself was used as a vector for an attack, disrupting or sabotaging controls and causing harm?

“Cyberattacks” is a big category, and one that doesn’t easily map onto a vocabulary of explosives and ramparts, flanks and missiles. But they’re real all the same, and can cause tangible, physical harm, like the Stuxnet worm did when it increased the spin rates of Iranian centrifuges to cause them to break.

In “ Hitting Back or Holding Back in Cyberspace: Experimental Evidence Regarding Americans’ Responses to Cyberattacks [[link removed]],” authors Marcelo Leal and Paul Musgrave demonstrate that the American public supports a range of responses to cyberattacks. This range depends a great deal on the harm from the attack and the nature of who launched it.

While the public won’t actually be making the decisions about how to respond to a cyber attack, political leaders will be responding with that public sentiment in mind, so Leal and Musgrave set out to discover what that sentiment actually is.

“Our findings demonstrate that the effects of an attack matter for the public’s evaluation of its severity and how to respond” write Leal and Musgrave. “This relationship, however, is not linear.”

Harsher retaliations were selected when the scale of harm increased, with deaths and lots of deaths eliciting the most drastic calls for retaliation, while surprisingly billions of dollars of economic damage was also seen as warranting the same retaliation as several deaths. Notably, the reason given for an attack and the entity targeted, like a business or a hospital or the military, mattered less for retaliation than the fact of the attack itself.

“Support for more severe retaliatory options rises in a curve as evaluations of attack severity increase,” the authors write. “There is no bright line between a severe and a less-severe attack; rather, both evaluations of attack severity and preferences over retribution are usefully conceived of as continua.”

This range of response matters a great deal, because the public will have some expectations of how the government should respond, but won’t have the same elaborate theorizing around it as people in the room.

“Policymakers should be aware that the public prefers cyber retaliation but supports escalation only conditionally,” write the authors. “In general, the public prefers to respond to cyberattacks with cyberattacks, but there is some pressure for harsher responses as the severity of an attack increases, especially if the aggressor is a US citizen.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Alan Ruiz Terol visited [[link removed]] with Ukrainian refugees living on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. When the invasion began, and the refugees first fled, it was winter, and the many hotels designed to accommodate travelers sat empty and unused, the pandemic compounding the usually light season. Refugees settled in, for a time, but as tourists return for the summer those refugees have again been displaced, often to less-desirable hotels. “It would be the most unbelievable and great thing that the war finishes and we can all safely go home, but for now, we have what we have,” Iryna Levyk told Ruiz Terol.

Durrie Bouscaren reported [[link removed]] on the booming market for solar power in Lebanon, where the state, and especially state capacity, has largely failed to provide for people. “Just two years ago, Lebanon produced a mere 70 megawatts of electricity from solar, Karam said. But in the past two years, that number has almost quadrupled to 250 megawatts — largely driven by small residential projects,” writes Bouscaren. Those projects are often off-grid, powering homes and batteries instead of sending supply back into the system. Promising as the power is, not everyone can afford it, and installation is done on weekends, when police are off duty and thus cannot enforce a law against solar panel installation.

Ramona Wadi revisited [[link removed]] the revolutionary music of Cuba and Chile, whose respective Nueva Trova Cubana and Nueva Cancion Chilena musical styles were joined at the First International Meeting of the Protest Song 55 year ago. The traditions diverge in origin, with Trova Cubana state-sponsored after revolutionary triumph, while Cancion Chilena has its origin first as protest music, then as electoral support for the Allende candidacy, and finally as protest in- and out of exile to the Pinochet regime. “It is clearly time for a renovated revolution for the new millennium, as the country faces the laborious work of untangling and dismantling the impacts of decades of US neoliberal policies and the ghosts of dictatorship,” writes Wadi.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Hanging gardens by a thread [[link removed]].

What’s cooler than cool? Ice-age [[link removed]].

What if we built the entire universe out of the lampshade [[link removed]]?

A wild pack of family dogs [[link removed]] said if you see something, say something.

If you take a nap at the exact right moment you can skip straight from tragedy to farce [[link removed]].

Immortals technique [[link removed]].

Oh, you’re experiencing a structural problem [[link removed]]? We hear you, we see you, we cannot fix it [[link removed]], but here’s the story we had to file on deadline.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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