Latest news with #TheSecondComing
Al Jazeera
2 days ago
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
The UK is slipping into racist dystopia
It has been a year since the Southport attack, which triggered furious racist riots in the streets of the United Kingdom. Unruly crowds, galvanised by false claims that the perpetrator was Muslim, went on a rampage, attacking mosques, Muslim-owned businesses, homes, and individuals they perceived as Muslim. As the riots were raging, I was finishing my novel, The Second Coming. The book is set in a dystopian future in which a Christian militia inspired by English nationalism seizes London, bans Islam, and exiles Muslims to refugee camps in Birmingham. The events unfolding in the streets as I was writing the final chapters made me realise that today, we are much closer to the dystopian world in my novel than I had imagined. The scenes and images that helped me shape this fictional world were inspired by the England I lived in during my youth, when racist violence was rampant. Gangs of white youth would hunt us down, especially after the pubs closed, in wave after wave of what they called 'Paki bashing'. Knife attacks and fire bombings were not uncommon, nor were the demands by far-right groups, such as the National Front and the British National Party, for the repatriation of Black (ie, non-white) 'immigrants'. Attending school sometimes meant running through a gauntlet of racist kids. In the playground, sometimes they swarmed around, chanting racist songs. As a student, I lost count of the number of times I was physically attacked, at school, in the street, or in pubs and other places. When I lived in East London, I was with the local youth of Brick Lane, where hand-to-hand fighting took place to stop hordes of racist attackers. These assaults were not an isolated phenomenon. Similar scenes took place across the country, with the National Front and British National Party organising hundreds of marches, emboldening white supremacist gangs. Around this time, some of my peers and I were arrested and charged with 'conspiracy to make explosives' for filling up milk bottles with petrol as a way of defending our communities against racist violence; our case came to be known as the Bradford 12. These struggles, whether in Brick Lane or Bradford, were part of a broader fight against systemic racism and far-right ideologies that sought to terrorise and divide us. The overt, street-level violence of those years was terrifying, but it came from the margins of society. The ruling political class, though complicit, avoided openly aligning with these groups. A case in point is Margaret Thatcher, who in 1978, as the leader of the Conservative Party, gave an infamous interview in which she said, 'People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.' It was a subtle nod of approval for racist mobs, but as prime minister, Thatcher still kept far-right groups at an arm's length. Today, that distance has disappeared. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other prominent members of Labour regularly echo far-right rhetoric, promising to 'crack down' on those seeking sanctuary here. His Conservative predecessor, Rishi Sunak, and his ministers were not different. His Home Minister Suella Braverman falsely claimed grooming gangs had a 'predominance' of 'British Pakistani males, who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values'. While the old crude white racism has not disappeared, a more vicious form – Islamophobia – has been fanned over the past few decades. It feels like the old 'Paki' bashing gangs have been replaced by a new crusading wave that equates Islam with terrorism; sexual abuse with Pakistanis; asylum seekers with parasitic hordes about to overrun the country. This is the soil in which the Reform Party has taken root and flourished, in which ever cruder forms of racism are made respectable and electable. When both Labour and the Tories have become havens for a complex web of political corruption, Reform's simple anti-migrant and Islamophobic tropes are projected as an honest alternative. This has propelled the far-right party to the top of polls, with 30 percent of voters supporting it, compared with 22 percent for Labour and 17 for the Conservatives. In this environment, it was rather unsurprising that for the anniversary of the riots, the Economist magazine decided to run a poll focusing on race rather than on issues of economic decline, social deprivation and the never-ending austerity to which the working people of this country have been subjected. The survey showed that nearly 50 percent of the population think that multiculturalism is not good for the country, while 73 percent thought more 'race riots' will happen soon. The nurturing of violent racism at home has run parallel with England's long history of enacting it abroad. The new face of racism is fed on old imperial tropes of savages that need to be tamed and defeated by civilised colonial rule. These racist ideologies, which welded the empire together, have come back home to roost. They are playing out in the racist violence on the streets and in the state's repression of Palestine supporters. They are also playing out in the UK's unwavering political and military support for Israel, even as it bombs hospitals and schools in Gaza and starves children. Empire taught Britain to use racism to dehumanise entire peoples, to justify colonialism, to plunder, to spread war and famine. Genocide is in Britain's DNA, which explains its present-day collusion with genocidal Israel. Against this backdrop of racist, imperial violence, people of all colours and religions and none have mobilised. While they may not have stopped the genocide, they have laid bare the hypocritical barefaced lies of the British political elite. Only this sort of solidarity and challenge to racism can stop the dystopic world of my book becoming a reality. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
USA Today
22-07-2025
- General
- USA Today
'Sexual conservatism,' virginity and why Gen Z is having less sex
Research shows America's youth today are having less sex. The 2023 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Youth Risk Behavior found adolescent sexual behavior declined since 2013. A 2022 survey from the Kinsey Institute that found one in four Gen Z adults say they have never experienced partnered sex. But are Gen Z really as modest as some may think? Carter Sherman, 31, a journalist for The Guardian, digs into that question with her new book "The Second Coming," which explores Gen Z's sex lives — or lack thereof. Sherman found through interviews with more than 100 young people that this generational dry spell is less puritanical and more political, with Gen Zers abstaining from sex for a complex variety of reasons. Gen Z is sometimes framed as a "nation of virgins," Sherman writes, but our obsession with their lack of intercourse may really say more about our constant need to tell young people how to have sex. Rather than be corrective, she argues, we should focus on approaches that promote safe, consensual encounters and reduce shame. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Question: You share at the opening of the book you were obsessed with losing your virginity as a teen — sobbing to your mother when you learned a best friend lost theirs to a classmate before you. How is the idea of virginity impacting how we think about young people and sex? I was so obsessed with my own [virginity]. Truly, my last few years of high school were dominated by my a total freak-out that I was still a virgin. I felt that I should have already had sex and my friends were leaving me behind by having sex, and I felt I wasn't living up to the standard of being a teenager. Part of my own journey in writing this book was coming to understand that standard was based on false information. You're either too virginal, or not virginal enough. There's no way to win. I don't think we've moved from the idea of virginity. At the end of the day many of the young people I spoke to felt their virginity was important, and some feel that their virginity was treated as too important. We are always setting standards that don't match up to reality and make us feel worse about ourselves. What doesn't help is the level of shame people carry around and the feeling they're constantly doing it wrong. How much of a factor is the end of Roe v. Wade playing in Gen Z's not having sex? Gen Z is absolutely aware of how much the overturning of Roe v. Wade has changed the U.S., and in particularly their sex lives. Sixteen percent of Gen Zers are now more hesitant to date since the fall of Roe. There are so many young women I talked to who shared a level of sheer anxiety that Roe's overturning sparked. What the overturning of Roe has done is create a deep of anxiety but also create a generation that is ready to do battle over this. Feeling this stuff doesn't make you feel safe enough not only to be in a sexual relationship but also a romantic one. At the same time, you spoke with conservative youth, particularly men, and found that movements to embrace traditional sex roles have also complicated youth feelings about sex. What I call "sexual conservatism" speaks to that. This is the movement to make it dangerous to have queer, unmarried or recreational sex. Sexual conservatism has done a much better job of speaking about the difficulties of raising a family in this country than progressives. It's very appealing for young people to go toward sexual conservatism because the only people they hear talking about it are those on the right. If you feel like you're not being heard, you're going to go to the only people talking about this issue in a comprehensive manner. Gen Z has so much online information about sex, including porn, at their fingertips. How does that impact their sex lives? I really love how the internet has opened up discussions about what is sexuality. But social media also does this thing where it makes people extremely aware of the ways they believe they're falling short with sex. We're gauging our sexual value by likes, matches and follower counts. It makes people not want to engage in sex because they feel they have to look perfect naked in order to get naked. That's not a recipe for vulnerability or connection. How does OnlyFans fit into all of this? As Only Fans bleeds into mainstream social media, it becomes another metric whereby people evaluate themselves and make themselves also appear that way. For young people, the line between (real life) and virtual sex is very much diminishing and blurring. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, it's just how it is at this point. If we want to have conversations about sex, we have to acknowledge so much of young people's sex lives are shaped by the interactions they're having online. What is your advice for older adults trying to relate Gen Z right now? It's less about having the exact right information and more about approaching the topic with an empathetic attitude. Young people through the internet have more taken an approach to LGBTQ+ identities that are more iterative. Recognizing that and not treating that with suspicion is what's important for older people who might not understand what young people are going through. Gen Z men, women have a political divide It's made dating a nightmare What's the bottom line about Gen Z's sex lives? I don't really care if young people are having less sex if that's something they're comfortable with. What I worry about is if having less sex is a proxy for not having relationships, not having connections with yourself and what makes you feel good.
Daily Maverick
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Crossed Wires: Artificial intelligence slouches towards the advertising industry
Quite suddenly, AI is shredding long-established norms everywhere in this vaunted industry. One of the most startling developments has been the release of Meta's Veo 3, a text-to-video application released a few weeks ago, which has to be seen to be believed. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? — WB Yeats, The Second Coming Perhaps it's a bit of an overkill to link AI's looming encroachment on the advertising industry to Yeats' darkly foreboding poem. Yet, having just returned from Cannes, where the global ad industry's biggest event, the Golden Lions, is held, it was clear that AI was hanging like a shadow — not visible to everyone perhaps, but obvious at least to those who are certain of the disruption to come. They were the ones who looked like deer caught in the headlights, standing startled and paralysed amid the glitz and glamour of the event. I was there to present a paper titled 'AI in Advertising: Governance, Regulation and Other Troubles' on behalf of the Icas (International Council for Advertising Self-Regulation) Global Think Tank. I was not the only one talking about AI in Cannes; the conversations and presentations were everywhere. One disquieting question didn't have to be articulated: has the advertising industry arrived at its Fleet Street moment? The question refers to the collapse of the printed newspaper business in the mid-'90s, catalysed by digitisation and the internet, which brutally upended an industry that had remained largely unchanged for more than a century. There were many casualties and only a few survivors in its wake — which is what is likely to happen in advertising. Quite suddenly, AI is shredding long-established norms everywhere in this vaunted industry. One of the most startling developments has been the release of Meta's Veo 3, a text-to-video application released a few weeks ago, which has to be seen to be believed (just go to YouTube and search for Veo 3; here is but one example). The quality of the video and the AI 'actors' and locations is indistinguishable from those shot with cameras and populated by human actors and extras. With Veo 3, the user describes the scene they want to see, gives the actors a 'script' and 'directions', and Veo 3 does the rest. (Veo 3 is not the only text-to-video app, just the latest.) Professional-level text-to-video is a brand-new strand of Generative AI. There are, of course, grumbles. It has limitations. Currently, Veo 3 can only render eight seconds of video. Some visual elements are difficult to control or 'not quite right'. It is expensive. Expensive? Consider this: A marketing director will brief an agency to deliver a 30-second video commercial. The agency then refines the brief, perhaps with a rough storyboard and brand/campaign context, and passes it on to a few video production companies. One of those companies comes up with a creative approach and pitches a treatment: three days of shooting, four locations, three actors, 10 extras, two weeks of post-production. Budget? $1.5-million. Or the agency can use Veo 3 in the hands of a single tech-savvy director and perhaps a good human Veo 3 expert. Cost? $150,000, with 10 differently flavoured commercials rendered for presentation to the client within two weeks. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where this is going. It signals the end of video production companies, except for live events or productions with celebrity actors. One estimate I heard at the conference predicted 3,000 production company bankruptcies globally within two years. And it may mean the end of some ad agencies if some corporations decide to plough the money they're saving in production costs into forming new in-house agencies. Dystopian scenario This scenario isn't even the worst of it. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently spelt out the following audacious and dystopian scenario: 'We're going to get to a point where you're a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting demographic, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that's going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.' Here is his vision: A business comes to Meta with a product and a few ideas, and then Meta takes over; it does everything: creative concept, production, media strategy, analytics. Then AI constantly refines the ad in near-real time, on an ongoing basis, until it performs at maximum efficiency. Zuckerberg, somewhat brutally, implied that, in the future, advertising agencies will not be required. There are those who will strenuously object, who will talk about brand strategy and management, understanding client product roadmaps, and other assumed sacred cows — the 'deep' cores of the agency proposition. These too, I submit, will fall to AI as soon as it learns from hundreds of thousands of successful brand case studies and is able to generate a plethora of its own novel approaches. Audience targeting Finally, there is the matter of audience targeting. The holy grail of the advertising industry has long been the idea of the perfectly relevant ad — one that is pitched directly and only to individual consumers who are looking to buy that very product or service. Consumers have also sought the same thing: ads that matter to them and do not waste their attention. It has been assumed to be a perfect match of incentives. But AI is now able to understand much more about individuals than we are comfortable with. By analysing our internet behaviour, our social media behaviour, our friends, our devices, our buying patterns, even the tenor of our emotional states when we post, AI can paint a near-perfect picture of who we are at any moment. This intrusion is a privacy nightmare, one demanding regulation, which may not be properly enforceable in a fast-fracturing and chaotic landscape. There will, of course, be some advertising agencies which grab the nettle and shed their old skins to quickly embrace and exploit AI, perhaps pivoting quickly enough to other business models to avoid obsolescence. Others will end up like the celluloid film editors I used to know, obstinately and proudly refusing to submit to the newfangled video editing systems that started arriving in the late 1990s. They were brave and foolhardy, and they died alone. DM Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in the UK/EU, available now.
Edmonton Journal
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Edmonton Journal
Edmonton rapper Headline addresses MMA fighter's death on new album
Article content Album single No Diddy (Gotham City) is a braggadocious hype song built over a mosaic of triumphant horns and cinematic strings. Rick Ross also shows up to rap about wearing thousand-dollar jeans and a watch worth a hundred stacks. Dig the way the horns switch up under the Teflon Don's verses, giving it an air of mafioso menace. Closing off The Second Coming is Teezus, perhaps the most personal song Headline has released. On it, he addresses the death of his friend Trokon Dousuah, who died after injuries sustained in a charity mixed martial arts fight in November 2024. 'I knew I had to honour Teezy in a way the both of us knew I could,' says Elechko. 'I put every ounce of thought and heart into creating a song that would be the legacy of his final moments immortalized in song, like the true champions of old.'
The Independent
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
In breezy satire Your Friends & Neighbors, Jon Hamm channels Don Draper
'Things fall apart,' the Irish poet WB Yeats wrote in his 1919 poem 'The Second Coming'. 'Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' All epochs move, inexorably, towards decline, and so too, apparently, all happy lives. That's the premise of half the television put out into the world – a good life, ruined – not least the new Apple TV+ crime saga Your Friends & Neighbors, which shows the American Dream going up in smoke. Andrew 'Coop' Cooper (Jon Hamm) has the perfect life: a beautiful family, a palace in the suburbs, a job at a hedge fund that pays handsomely. Almost overnight, he loses everything. His wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), runs off with one of his best friends, athletics mogul Nick (Mark Tallman), and Coop finds himself living in a rental with his bipolar sister, Ali (Lena Hall). To add to his struggles, he loses his job – and a big pot of money – after a one-night stand with a colleague. But the alimony cheques still have to be written and the Maserati's not going to refuel itself. 'I just want to know how long I could float on what I've got,' he asks his friend, and business manager, Barney (Hoon Lee). The answer is 'not long' – that is until Coop realises that he has access to all the luxury items stored, oh so carelessly, in the houses of his country club peers. Regular men pushed into a life of crime is a subgenre of its own. Accountant turned money launderer (Ozark), chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin (Breaking Bad), judge turned vigilante (Your Honour); now we have hedge-fund manager turned cat burglar. It's a role that gives Hamm another chance to flex his smoothie skills. Coop's narration purrs through a social critique of the life he's living ('the age-old economics of social extortion') even while he struggles, frantically, to keep up appearances (a concept reinforced by a truly dreadful theme song). The key to Coop's success as a thief lies in the conformity of his milieu. They all wear the same clothes, drive the same cars, value the same bottles of wine. 'Nobody, even the cops apparently, would suspect a guy like me,' Coop confesses. Hamm is an actor of quite limited range – or, more charitably, is frequently typecast – but he is a master of a type of depressive confidence. He specialises in portraying men who exude charm but clearly have something missing. It's not too reductive to compare Coop to Don Draper, his fabled role on Mad Men: both men behave amorally while also exhibiting a strict moral code. Men, that is, of contradictions. Your Friends & Neighbors is clearly a vehicle for Hamm's talents (and popularity), but there is still space for the 'friends and neighbours' too. Peet manages to bring some sympathy to the faintly monstrous ex-wife, while there are fun roles for Olivia Munn, as a recent divorcee whose life is disintegrating in parallel, and Aimee Carrero as Elena, Coop's old maid who becomes his accomplice. It's all very easy on the eye. Showrunner Jonathan Tropper has written a solid, if uninspiring story, and Apple have brought it to the screen with the sort of colour palette you'd expect from a DFS advert. And yet there's something a bit insipid about Your Friends & Neighbors. Coop selects his victims based on the ease of sneaking into their mansions, the likelihood that they won't notice a missing watch or handbag. It's all a bit easy. He's not quite a Robin Hood ('I'm in a bind here,' he tells his fence, Lu (Randy Danson); 'No, you only think you are,' she replies) but, equally, the ethical stakes of his crimes are not quite the same as, say, drug running. And when he's not robbing a bunch of worthless ingrates, Coop is at home caring for his sister. The audience is invited to like and exonerate the character (even the sexual misconduct, for which he loses his job, is a conspiracy against him) with a readiness that was never afforded to Don Draper. This lack of ambiguity, combined with the diffuse lighting, obscured nudity and a blank cheque for the costume department, makes the whole thing feel a bit toothless. Your Friends & Neighbors is a luxury product. Like the company that makes it, it's well crafted and easy on the eye. But, beneath that glossy veneer, does it justify the investment? For every Severance, it seems, Apple puts out a lot of frustratingly mediocre fare. A breezy enough caper, Your Friends & Neighbors prefers to retread old ground rather than forge new paths. Or, as Coop puts it when he begins his petty larceny spree, 'What's the worst that could happen?'
