While I found a lot of what he had to say interesting, I did wonder how applicable CI is for the kinds of teams that I... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 18. Mar 2024 10:56:49 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 18. Mar 2024 11:18:01 (GMT-5)
The article Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler makes many interesting points. It is a compendium of know-how about CI by one of the industry heavyweights, who’s been using it for a long time.
While I found a lot of what he had to say interesting, I did wonder how applicable CI is for the kinds of teams that I know and work with. He makes several statements toward that end that pretty severely limit the applicability of what he calls “true CI” for many, if not most, teams.
I think he should have started his article with a very clear delineation for which kinds of organizations this kind of process is appropriate or efficient. In leaving it out, he seems to suggest that it’s the best for everyone, but at the end of the article, he lists what are, for me, quite severe restrictions. For example,
I don’t get the impression that Fowler is discussing a dream scenario toward which one works, but rather what he considers to be the absolute minimum process that anyone should be utterly embarrassed about themselves for not already having. I didn’t see a single sentence in this 40-page, at-times repetitive document about how to actually get there from here—or whether that’s really appropriate for many projects that people who read Martin Fowler might be working on.
I wonder about the wisdom of prioritizing integration seemingly above all else.
Below are citations from the long paper, with my comments interleaved.
“This contrast isn’t the result of an expensive and complex tool. The essence of it lies in the simple practice of everyone on the team integrating frequently, at least daily, against a controlled source code repository. This practice is called “Continuous Integration” (or it’s called “Trunk-Based Development”).”
He says this a lot, but I never hear about the costs. Is there no amount of time lost on integrations that is too high a price? Is there no task that he doesn’t break down into a million pieces in order to accommodate this style of work? Is there no efficiency lost by making each task into 1-hour chunks of coding that the entire team then integrates? Is that what we’re doing now?
“This will consist of both altering the product code, and also adding or changing some of the automated tests. During that time I run the automated build and tests frequently. After an hour or so I have the moon logic incorporated and tests updated.”
I’m quite fed up with reading this kind of optimistic bulls%!t. What kind of programmers are these who can accomplish major work in one hour? Or are the tasks that Fowler can conceive of all so simple that they can be accomplished in an hour? I’m very suspicious about these kinds of statements. It reminds me of game developers in the 90s talking about how they’d “written the whole engine in a weekend”, but then the game still took five more years to deliver.
“Some people do keep the build products in source control, but I consider that to be a smell − an indication of a deeper problem, usually an inability to reliably recreate builds. It can be useful to cache build products, but they should always be treated as disposable, and it’s usually good to then ensure they are removed promptly so that people don’t rely on them when they shouldn’t.”
Sure. But—priorities. Your product is not the pipeline. It’s your product. You can’t make everything a slave to the process. Remember to fix that which you can fix quickly, but to focus on your own priorities. Don’t polish a build so that Martin Fowler is happy, if it’s going to make your customers wait a lot longer for their release.
“The tests act as an automated check of the health of the code base, and while tests are the key element of such an automated verification of the code, many programming environments provide additional verification tools. Linters can detect poor programming practices, and ensure code follows a team’s preferred formatting style, vulnerability scanners can find security weaknesses. Teams should evaluate these tools to include them in the verification process.”
“Everyone Pushes Commits To the Mainline Every Day
“No code sits unintegrated for more than a couple of hours.”
This feels completely divorced from reality, but maybe I just “don’t get it.”
“If everyone pushes to the mainline frequently, developers quickly find out if there’s a conflict between two developers. The key to fixing problems quickly is finding them quickly. With developers committing every few hours a conflict can be detected within a few hours of it occurring, at that point not much has happened and it’s easy to resolve. Conflicts that stay undetected for weeks can be very hard to resolve.”
I agree with the last sentence, but at what cost? It feels like you’re going to spend so much time committing and integrating. How is finding out if you have conflicts the highest-priority task your team has?
“Full mainline integration requires that developers push their work back into the mainline. If they don’t do that, then other team members can’t see their work and check for any conflicts.”
Who finishes anything non-trivial in an hour? I can’t escape the feeling that one-hour chunks is almost too granular, that this size was chosen because it aids integration. While that’s a noble goal, I wonder how appropriate it is for many tasks, and to what degree the shape of the process affects the size of the solution set.
“Since there’s only a few hours of changes between commits, there’s only so many places where the problem could be hiding. Furthermore since not much has changed we can use Diff Debugging to help us find the bug.”
But don’t you waste time hunting bugs that would have gone away by themselves if the process weren’t so frenetic? If you rebase everything, then you’ll still encounter every integration conflict. If you merge, though, you can skip many of those interim integrations because subsequent changes might have obviated prior ones that might have caused conflicts.
Instead of testing occasional version, you end up testing absolutely everything you do as if it were a release candidate. I’m not convinced that there’s no downside to that. I feel like it’s a waste of time if applied so mindlessly.
“Often people initially feel they can’t do something meaningful in just a few hours, but we’ve found that mentoring and practice helps us learn.”
I don’t know who you’re working with, but I wonder how useful is that? How useful is it to tailor your entire process to ruthlessly chopping up your work into tiny segments? What if that’s not how some people work? What if they can’t learn? Fire ‘em?
“Continuous Integration can only work if the mainline is kept in a healthy state. Should the integration build fail, then it needs to be fixed right away. As Kent Beck puts it: “nobody has a higher priority task than fixing the build”.”
You goal ends up being running to run the process, rather than to build the product. This sounds more and more like a cult.
“If the secondary build detects a bug, that’s a sign that the commit build could do with another test. As much as possible we want to ensure that any later-stage failure leads to new tests in the commit build that would have caught the bug, so the bug stays fixed in the commit build.”
“A team should thus automatically check for new versions of dependencies and integrate them into the build, essentially as if they were another team member. This should be done frequently, usually at least daily, depending on the rate of change of the dependencies.”
This seems like another thing that becomes a higher priority than building the product itself. Daily dependency check seems like overkill, but it’s automated, so who cares? He’s just running builds all the time, like we don’t have a climate crisis.
“if we rename a database field, we first create a new field with the new name, then write to both old and new fields, then copy data from the exisitng old fields, then read from the new field, and only then remove the old field. We can reverse any of these steps, which would not be possible if we made such a change all at once. Teams using Continuous Integration often look to break up changes in this way, keeping changes small and easy to undo.”
“Virtual environments make it much easier than it was in the past to do this. We run production software in containers, and reliably build exactly the same containers for testing, even in a developer’s workspace. It’s worth the effort and cost to do this, the price is usually small compared to hunting down a single bug that crawled out of the hole created by environment mismatches.”
I agree with this part, without qualification. At least as a goal.
“Being able to automatically revert also reduces a lot of the tension of deployment, encouraging people to deploy more frequently and thus get new features out to users quickly. Blue Green Deployment allows us to both make new versions live quickly, and to roll back equally quickly if needed, by shifting traffic between deployed versions.”
What about data schemas? What about if you don’t have a product that deploys on a web server or app store? I understand that there are solutions to this, but I wonder how great a fit they are to many teams? If your team is accustomed to SQL programming—or if you already have a suite of products that use SQL databases—then how worthwhile to your business is it to prioritize moving away from SQL to a local DB like SQLite, a NoSQL document store like RavenDB, or even to a completely different back-end like Rama?
“Continuous Integration effectively eliminates delivery risk. The integrations are so small that they usually proceed without comment. An awkward integration would be one that takes more than a few minutes to resolve.”
It sounds like very much like it prioritizes eliminating delivery risk over all else. It is only applicable to products built in this way from the beginning.
“Having to put work on a new feature aside to debug a problem found in an integration test [or] feature finished two weeks ago saps productivity.”
So does constantly integrating, though! It can be noise. It’s like the noise of micro-reviewing AI responses. You have to figure out the sweet spot for your team and iterate toward that goal, always ensuring that your team can deliver even if the dream process is not already in place. Make a diagram of all the facets and discuss a plan for your project. Pragmatic. Realistic.
I don’t get the impression that Fowler is discussing a dream scenario toward which one works, but rather what he considers to be the absolute minimum process that anyone should be utterly embarrassed about themselves for not already having. I didn’t see a single sentence in this 40-page, at-times repetitive document about how to actually get there from here—or whether that’s really appropriate for many projects that people who read Martin Fowler might be working on.
“They found that elite teams deployed to production more rapidly, more frequently, and had a dramatically lower incidence of failure when they made these changes. The research also finds that teams have higher levels of performance when they have three or fewer active branches in the application’s code repository, merge branches to mainline at least once a day, and don’t have code freezes or integration phases.”
What if you don’t have an elite team?
“A two week refactoring session may greatly improve the code, but result in long merges because everyone else has been spending the last two weeks working with the old structure. This raises the costs of refactoring to prohibitive levels. Frequent integration solves this dilemma by ensuring that both those doing the refactoring and everyone else are regularly synchronizing their work.”
Some refactoring can’t just be done in mini bites like that. Sometimes, you work on a POC that takes more time to verify. Now what? Throw it away and build it from scratch in bite-sized pieces? Or integrate a long-lived branch, which is verboten?
I’m working on a sweeping change to the way solutions are configured. It involves changing packages and versions in four different solutions. Should I have merged to master everywhere and involved the whole team in my project? That sounds stupid. Sure, it takes longer to verify and integrate in one big chunk, but it has the advantage that it didn’t make upgrading the solution format the number-one priority for all developers for a sprint or two.
“[…] teams that spend a lot of effort keeping their code base healthy deliver features faster and cheaper. Time invested in writing tests and refactoring delivers impressive returns in delivery speed, and Continuous Integration is a core part of making that work in a team setting.”
For non-legacy projects. Continuous delivery can only really work for web-based products or apps. A lot of other products have to be deployed to processes that aren’t as easy to update five times a day.
“Continuous Integration is more suited for team working full-time on a product, as is usually the case with commercial software. But there is much middle ground between the classical open-source and the full-time model. We need to use our judgment about what integration policy to use that fits the commitment of the team.”
That is the first time that he’s conceded that maybe there are use cases to which this whole article doesn’t apply very well.
“If a team attempts Continuous Integration without a strong test suite, they will run into all sorts of trouble because they don’t have a mechanism for screening out bugs. If they don’t automate, integration will take too long, interfering with the flow of development.”
No kidding. You need some serious test coverage to continuously integrate and deploy. I also wonder about the size of the product you can legitimately do this. Can you imagine if your test suite takes ten minutes to run and you integrate three or four times per day? Can you imagine how much time you’re not developing software because you’re integrating someone else’s code? I understand that this happens eventually, but I wonder about the wisdom of prioritizing integration seemingly above all else.
“Continuous Integration is about integrating code to the mainline in the development team’s environment, and Continuous Delivery is the rest of the deployment pipeline heading to a production release.”
This is a good definition and I wonder that he rewrote this whole essay and didn’t put this right at the top.
“Continuous Integration ensures everyone integrates their code at least daily to the mainline in version control. Continuous Delivery then carries out any steps required to ensure that the product is releasable to product[ion] whenever anyone wishes. Continuous Deployment means the product is automatically released to production whenever it passes all the automated tests in the deployment pipeline.”
Also excellent definitions that make the distinction clear. Continuous Delivery is the one that many teams could strive for, even if they will never be able to do Continuous Delivery. The question is: at what cost?
“Those who do Continuous Integration deal with this by reframing how code review fits into their workflow.”
Well, that’s an interesting statement. Integration trumps review? Get your code in there and review later? Trust in your tests? Are you kidding me? You should review design, as well as implementation. If everyone’s coding and committing and pushing in hours, when do they review? Is the idea to have people communicate with each other only when they’ve already built something?
Published by marco on 15. Mar 2024 23:21:30 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The Russians in Ukraine by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“In mid–January the Russians announced they had shelled a hotel in Kharkiv that served as a base for French “volunteers,” as the common euphemism has it, killing 60 of them. Paris marked this down as “disinformation,” that useful catchall for inconvenient disclosures. But Moscow had immediately summoned the French ambassador to complain of “Paris’s growing involvement in the conflict over Ukraine.” Does this kind of thing figure in any disinformation op you’ve ever heard of?”
“The Russians — “Putin” if you like — were right all along. The Ukraine crisis is merely the latest phase of the West’s long campaign to surround the Russian Federation up to its borders, destabilize it and finally subvert it. Regime change in Moscow was and remains the final objective.”
“This is not a war in defense of “Ukrainian democracy” — a phrase that causes one either to laugh or do the other thing. It is the West’s proxy war, start to finish, Ukrainians cynically cast as cannon fodder, expendable stooges. Russia had no choice when it intervened two years ago, this after eight years’ patience as the Europeans — Germany and France, this is to say — broke every promise they made by way of supporting a settlement. The Americans didn’t break any promises because they never made any — and no one would take them seriously if they had.”
Rüstungsausgaben = Investitionen? Manipulation und Denkfehler by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“„Rüstungsausgaben sind Investitionen in die Sicherheit“, so lautet eines der in letzter Zeit häufig gehörten Narrative. Vor allem Grüne und FDP bemühen gerne dieser Erklärung, wenn es darum geht, die immer höheren Militärausgaben an der Schuldenbremse vorbei über Schattenhaushalte zu finanzieren.”
“Um es plump zu sagen: Jeder Euro, der heute für Granaten und nicht für Bildung ausgegeben wird, führt dazu, dass in der Zukunft die Wertschöpfung der Volkswirtschaft sinkt. Ob Rüstungsausgaben das Land „sicherer“ machen, ist ein Thema, über das man sich vortrefflich streiten kann. Dass Rüstungsausgaben ein Land ärmer machen, ist jedoch Fakt.”
“[…] um politische Debatten zu dieser Thematik geht. Die Umdeutung von Rüstungsausgaben zu Investitionen ist höchst manipulativ und leider ist diese Manipulation auch sehr erfolgreich. Die „linksliberalen“ Medien sind sich dieses Denkfehlers – anders als Robert Habeck – sicher bewusst, aber da sie eine Steigerung der Rüstungsausgaben unterstützen, beteiligen sie sich an der Manipulation.”
“Und so gibt es – zumindest unter den großen, klassischen Medien – auch niemanden, der diesen Denkfehler anprangert. Stattdessen wird der Denkfehler ad nauseam, also bis zum Erbrechen, wiederholt. Ein Denkfehler, der oft genug erzählt wird, wird bekanntlich irgendwann zur Wahrheit – ihn anzuprangern, wäre dann wohl „Desinformation“.”
Mehr als ein „Abhörskandal“ by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Das ist eine direkte Kriegsbeteiligung Großbritanniens. Wenn die Aussage Gerhartz korrekt ist, wurden die zahlreichen Einsätze der Storm Shadow Marschflugkörper – u.a. auf die russische Schwarzmeerflotte, Industrieanlagen in Luhansk, den Hafen von Sewastopol und eine Eisenbahnbrücke auf der Krim – von britischem Boden aus geplant.”
“Deutschland solle demnach die Ukrainer in zwei Geschwindigkeiten („Short Track“, um russische Munitionsdepots auf russischem Boden, und „Long Track“, um komplexe Ziele wie die Krimbrücke bei Kertsch zu zerstören) ausbilden und die Amerikaner würden dann die Zieldaten zur Verfügung stellen. Auch das ist eine – wenn auch indirekte – Kriegsbeteiligung. Doch davon ist in unseren Medien nichts zu lesen.”
The State of Israel Has No Right to Exist and Neither Does the USA by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“Israel was built on a foundation of colonial piracy. In the bloody wake of World War 1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a bunch of white men in khakis carved up the Middle East into strategically digestible pieces with the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916.”
“Nazis rose to power, uncoincidentally with the full support of the fascists in the Zionist movement who wrote love letters to Hitler and invited Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem while they used the reign of these cowards to herd somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 European Jews into the Mandate between 1933 and 1936.”
“With their empire already in shambles and their hands full of blood and guts in South Asia, the British finally handed this colonial hand grenade to their heirs in Washington, who used the horrors of the Holocaust and their new toys in the United Nations to give colonialism a veneer of legitimacy. The UN adopted Resolution 181 in 1947, unilaterally recommending the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.”
“America, after all, was little more than another British experiment in colonial piracy built on what may very well be the two most devastating acts of genocide in recorded history.”
“The white male landowners of Capitol Hill passed their own Nakba with the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and President Andrew Jackson, America’s answer to David Ben-Gurion, spent the better part of the next decade forcing an estimated 100,000 Native Americans from 18 tribes to the desolate West Bank of Oklahoma where they would be confined to reservations surrounded by illegal settlers and military installations and left to rot in poverty. By 1900, America’s indigenous population dwindled at around 237,000. The math isn’t hard to do but the numbers are impossible not to choke on. Several Holocausts went into turning America into the original Israel.”
“[…] it’s really little wonder why so many Americans are proud and unapologetic Zionists, our nation served as their blueprint.”
“The state itself, as it is currently defined, is a European colonialist construct designed for conquest. The notion that such a device could ever be rehabilitated for anything less than heinous is almost hysterically ludicrous and the proof is in the history.”
“Without Washington’s full and unconditional support, the current massacre raging in Gaza would grind to a screeching halt. In other words, America doesn’t have an Israel problem, the whole fucking planet has an America problem. Israel is just a symptom.”
“[…] no state has the right to exist, and the ones built on genocide need to go first.”
Roaming Charges: Too Obvious to be Real by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Moshik Temkin: “If Trump actually wins in November, while our elites blame the voters, I’m going to focus closely on the person who ran against him and lost. There is absolutely no good reason why, after everything that’s happened, Trump should be elected again. It would be 100% on his opponent.””
Just like it was the first time.
“In order to evade protesters and hecklers, Biden’s campaign team is scaling down the size of his events and keeping some of the times and locations of his appearances secret. As Jeet Heer said, Biden’s running as if he’s in the witness protection program. Which doesn’t seem like a terribly successful campaign strategy.”
“Only a couple of weeks after New York Governor Kathy Hochul was ridiculed for saying she reserved the right to obliterate Canada if it decided to cross Lake Erie and raid Buffalo, Hochul announced that she is dispatching the National Guard into the subways of NYC, authorizing the troops (under no known constitutional provision) to search bags at stations predominately used by poor and minority subway riders. As John Teufel pointed out, the Governor’s theatrical move comes despite the fact subway crime was down 2.5 percent in 2023 over the previous year and “ is on par with 2013/2014 numbers, when everybody was crowing about how safe the subway is.”
“Hochul: “[Riders] can refuse. We can refuse them. They can walk.””
“The World Food Program has sent 144 metric tons of powdered milk to Cuba, in response to Cuba’s first-ever request for “urgent assistance” to WFP. Cuba’s economic crisis has been fueled by crushing U.S. sanctions imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden. When he was Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo told European diplomats that the goal was to “starve” the island, and Biden has kept almost every Trump measure in place, and added a few as well.”
“Meloni’s neo-fascist party in Italy wants to use AI to assign mandatory jobs for Italian youth: “The young person will no longer be able to choose whether to work or not, but [will be] bound to accept the job offer … under penalty of loss of all benefits.””
“The “26% of young people believe the Holocaust is a myth” stat that generated such a media frenzy back in December was based on fake survey responses from an opt-in poll that cannot be replicated. Pew recalibrated the results from a mail-in poll and found the number was around three percent and didn’t vary across age groups.”
Yeah, duh. At least Scott Greenfield got a bunch of posts out of it. He’s also changed his entire worldview based on that poll. So win?
“In February 2022 Pew conducted an experiment on the veracity of “opt-in” surveys. They asked opt-in participants if they were licensed to operate a class SSGN (nuclear) submarine. In the survey, 12% of adults under 30 claimed this qualification. In reality, the share of Americans with this type of submarine license is near 0%.”
I would absolutely have lied about that as well. What’s the downside?
“In dozens of Minnesota schools, entire grade levels are falling short of the minimum proficiency standards on state tests. Charter schools account for the overwhelming majority of the failures.”
The New Rape Mantra: Believe Hamas by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“As Brett Stephens shows, those good ol’ days are over, at least when the victims of rape are Israeli.”
Poor Greenfield is now reduced to citing deviant Brett Stephens from his precious NYT—because the rest of the newspaper has distanced itself from the rape narrative for lack of evidence. The op-ed pages, on the other hand, don’t have to be concerned about lack of evidence. And neither does Greenfield.
“Among serious people, there was never any doubt about widespread rape. Images were available from the start of women bleeding from their crotches, naked mangled dead bodies in the back of pickup trucks to be paraded as trophies of their glorious victory. Later, the stories came out about women being gang raped while their breasts were cut off, until a bullet was fired into the back of their head even as the rape continued.”
“Serious people” is a lovely way of making sure its clear that if you disagree or don’t think the evidence shows what he thinks it shows, you’re not serious and can be dismissed. All of these stories have been dismissed as having been cooked up largely in the fevered imaginings of the IDF and people online who wanted to get a lot of hits. It’s a bit telling how Greenfield seems to delight in rolling out every last, debunked detail.
“Screw the facts. Screw due process. Screw evidence. Screw reason. If a woman felt she was raped, whether now or years from now, believe her. Who knew there was a caveat, “unless she’s Israeli”?”
This is absolutely not true, but he’s all worked up in a lather, so don’t get in his way. So much so that he seems to be supporting “believe women” now? Like, he spent years rightly fighting how ridiculous it was, but now he wishes the same idiots he fought for a decade would keep doing the thing he hates, but for Israeli women?
The article The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, Hasbarist by Will Solomon (CounterPunch) goes into considerable detail on who Bret Stephens (Greenfield’s new hero) is and what he does.
“An obfuscater of Israeli crimes, extreme anti-Palestinian bias, a shady pro-Israel side gig, nasty interpersonal relations with media workers—how does Bret keep his job?
“Something like an answer might be found in his March 5 column, “The New Rape Denialism.” In it, Bret attacks critics—again, particularly left-leaning critics of Israel—who have voiced skepticism about the allegations that Hamas committed mass rape on October 7, attacking them as dishonest, and yet again, as antisemitic.”
“Stephens may be a cartoonish fundamentalist, but he is not an aberration at The New York Times; he is an expression of the paper’s underlying biases. He is unlikely to be censured because his job is to be an Israeli propagandist. As Gaza descends into famine, this never-ending assault may be the preeminent test of how good he is at it.”
The article Western Media Concocts ‘Evidence’ UN Report On Oct 7 Sex Crimes Failed to Deliver by Wyatt Reed (Scheer Post) discusses the lack of evidence and apparent cover-up of that lack of evidence in order to promulgate the desired narrative anyway.
“The UN report itself openly blamed the Israeli government for the team’s inability to determine who may have committed alleged sex crimes, noting that “the lack of access and cooperation by the Israeli authorities […]”
“The UN representative was referring to supposed Israeli survivors of sexual assault whom she was unable to meet during her visit, but who absolutely exist, according to Israel’s government.”
In defense of Jonathan Glazer: The Zone of Interest director comes under venomous attack for Academy Awards statement by David Walsh (WSWS)
“David Schaecter, president of the Miami-based Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA, […] insisted Glazer was trying to “equate Hamas’ maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defense in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.””
“Trank presents the ongoing genocidal campaign and subsequent events in these terms:”“Toward the end of October, the Israeli army attacked Hamas in Gaza, determined to wipe it out forever so that an atrocity like this [October 7] will never happen again. In the subsequent months, we have watched pro-Hamas and anti-Israel forces unleash a campaign of worldwide antisemitism the likes of which has not been seen since the Nazi era.”“Trank argues that those actors and others at the awards ceremony March 10 who sported “red pins in support of a Cease Fire Now and Palestinian flags on their lapels” were wearing the equivalent of “swastika pins in sympathy with Hitler’s Reich.”
“There is an element of derangement in this type of slanderous comment.”
US-NATO risks nuclear war with plans for attacks on Russia by Statement of the WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS)
“The reckless escalation of the war is being carried out without any public explanation of what NATO is planning, let alone a frank acknowledgment of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the deployment of forces in Ukraine and attacks on Russia.
“Dismissing the explicit warning made by Putin during the past week that direct intervention by NATO forces into Ukraine could lead to the use of nuclear weapons, NATO leaders and the media are laughing off the danger with claims that the Russian president is merely bluffing.
“There is no justification for such complacency. The Biden administration and its European allies are engaged in a staggeringly reckless game of nuclear Russian Roulette.
“Apparently forgetting their own earlier statements, made at the start of the war in February 2022, that direct intervention by NATO would mean World War III, the imperialist leaders now assert that Russia will not retaliate even if its territory is directly attacked. Moreover, even if there exists the possibility of a massive counter-attack, they insist that NATO must not be deterred by that danger.”
Starvation Games by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s Foreign Minister: “As I said yesterday, we need to get aid into Palestine. I know how we can do it. All the countries, the powerful countries with big armies, that are giving arms to Israel, they must send their soldiers to the Rafah border to escort 700 trucks of aid a day into Gaza. Let me turn to my friends on the BBC now, and they probably think I’m a mad woman, but I’ll keep saying it. The lady said to me, ‘Minister, surely you can’t expect that to happen.’ And I said, ‘If the world has a conscience, that’s what must happen. It must be them who ensure we don’t have dead skeletons on the streets of Gaza because people are starving.’ She said, ‘Will Israel allow it?’ I said, ‘Will Israel shoot their biggest supporters? It’s them, the supporters of Israel, who have a big responsibility to address the needs of the people of Gaza.’ And that’s what we should be saying, more and more and more.””
“Why is the US forced to build a floating pier seaport off the coast of Gaza? Because Gaza doesn’t have a port. Why doesn’t Gaza have a port? Because Israel has stopped the Palestinians from building one. Gaza doesn’t have an international airport for the same reason. This is what it means to live under an occupation.”
Citing Ralph Nader:
“The other aspect of their power, AIPAC’s power, is often never reported. They’re exceptionally skilled lobbyists. I mean, they ought to give, as a price of repentance, they ought to give civic groups all over the country lessons in how to lobby Congress. First of all, they don’t mess around with marches and demonstrations where the energy goes into the ether.
“They have a personal focus. It’s personal. They know the doctors, the lawyers, the golf-playing companions, who lends who money, whose favorite restaurant gives senators, and representatives a discount. They know the staff. They focus precisely on the senators and representatives one at a time with the staff. And they do it with extraordinary stamina and persistence and repetition. I’ve had people on Capitol Hill telling me, I don’t agree with AIPAC, I hate AIPAC, but I got to get them off my back. They just flood the office. They flood the people back home. They create false accusations. So, I just want to say, okay, okay, I’ll vote for you. Just like that.”
Yazan al-Kafarneh’s Death Is a Stain on Humanity by Seraj Assi (Jacobin)
“Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians like Yazan al-Kafarneh makes a brutal mockery of international appeals to allow aid to the besieged enclave. Last month, Mahmoud Fattouh, a two-month-old Palestinian boy, died from starvation in northern Gaza, having gone days without milk. Footage shows the emaciated infant gasping for breath in a hospital bed.”
Liberals Are Always Trying To Distance Biden From Netanyahu, And Netanyahu From Israel by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“The New York Times’ Peter Baker and Michael Crowley present a poetical reframing of Biden’s genocide in which they depict this lifelong Beltway swamp monster’s self-evident depravity as a poignant story about a kindhearted leader facing difficult decisions, saying “The United States finds itself on both sides of the war in a way, arming the Israelis while trying to care for those hurt as a result.””
“‘Mr. Biden remains opposed to cutting off munitions or leveraging them to influence the fighting.’ That last sentence right there is all anyone needs to know about Joseph R Biden. Those are the raw facts, and everything else is narrative spin. Israel gets the actual material weapons it requires to continue its genocidal atrocities, and the readers of The New York Times get empty narrative fluff about aid drops and Biden’s feelings to help them feel okay about it.”
“Polling by the Israel Democracy Institute has found that three-quarters of Jewish Israelis support Netanyahu’s planned assault on Rafah, which the prime minister has said will proceed as planned despite Biden’s empty bloviations that doing so would be crossing a “red line” with this administration. Polls also found that 68 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose any humanitarian aid entering Gaza via any agency at all, which is to say they support starving huge numbers of Gazan civilians to death.”
This is worrying, if true, but speaks much more for the power of the Israeli domestic propaganda machine. The U.S. achieved similar number for invading Iraq, hitting almost 70% just before they went in. Repeated ad nauseam, anything sounds true.
Instead of seeing that an entire country’s worth of people are no longer living in their homes, and have been herded into a tiny corner of their country, where they’re going to be attacked again, … you think to yourself “aha! We’ve got Hamas right where we want them. They can’t escape now.”
If you’re conditioned not to think of those people as people, then it’s a lot easier to swallow. Sixty years ago, there were separate drinking fountains in the U.S. Thirty years ago, it was illegal to be homosexual in the U.S. Today, you’re still a dozen times more likely to be killed by police as a black man. Women don’t have bodily autonomy. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen without constant reinforcement at a societal level. It all seems normal and the only sane way of doing things if you just hear it often enough.
The savagery of a people toward another people—or of men toward woman, as is the case in, say, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.—is a carefully cultivated garden. And that goes both ways, by the way: in the book Palästina by Joe Sacco, I read several interviews where Palestinians were admitting—in the early 90s—that the racism on both sides runs so deep that there’s really nothing that that a few open-minded people can do about it. I read Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom for years in CounterPunch—before he died in 2018; I still miss his insightful writing—and he would sometimes lament the same.
The “Red Line” And Reality by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“It’s brutal to see the death and destruction in Gaza that never had to be, never should have been, but for Hamas. Biden recognizes that Israel has a right to exist, a right to defend itself. Many of those opposing Israel as the evil colonialists who oppress Palestinians do not, which enables them to support a solution that involves the eradication of Israel and its people “from the river to the sea.” They really see no problem with the “rapes of resistance” of October 7th because they’ve picked their side. Biden isn’t quite so foolish.
“But in the battle for Israel’s security, for the lives of its citizens to not be under threat of mass terrorist attack by the ruling junta of Gaza, there is no solution that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza and capable of attacking over and over, while it hides behind children and the elderly, in hospitals, schools and mosques, and relishes every innocent death of a “martyr” that further enrages the unduly passionate to hate Israel, to hate Jews, and creates the gloss of terrorists as “freedom fighters” for the oppressed.
“[…]
“Whether one trusts Hamas’ statistics or not, there is no doubt that a great many Palestinians have been killed, and a great many of them were not Hamas soldiers. The deaths of innocent people, even if they had a hand in making or tolerating Hamas as their government and agree with its goal of destroying Israel and murdering Jews, innocent or not, by terrorism, is a tragedy. But whose tragedy?”
That hits pretty much every single talking point in one article. Well-done, Scott.
But wait, there’s more.
“If Hamas is not destroyed, or at least its capacity to attack Israel eliminated, then it will attack again. Hamas has made clear that it intends to do so, over and over. Until Hamas is destroyed, there can be no peace as Hamas has no interest in peace. There can be no “two-state solution” with one state controlled by terrorists bent on destroying the other state. For those anti-colonialists whose solution is the eradication of Israel, they will be surprised to learn that Israel is not inclined to commit suicide and disappear.”
I suppose he had missed a few.
“Walk the streets of Gaza as Hamas fighters shoot them, then blend back into the crowd, and ask politely whether someone is innocent or guilty before taking them captive so they can be exchanged for Israelis held hostage by Hamas?”
This sounds like the same arguments that are always made when the U.S. invades somewhere. Gotta hit them before they hit us. I’m still kind of shocked to read Greenfield writing this kind of stuff.
“It is not Israel’s responsibility to put the welfare of Gazans ahead of its own citizens, including its soldiers.”
Yippy kay yay, Scott.
“Or there is the solution of ending the war now, a permanent ceasefire, leaving Hamas in control of Gaza, giving Iran plenty of time to rearm and organize Hamas’ terrorist activities, and then the next October 7th, the next rape, burn, behead and murder, of Israeli citizens by the resistance fighters of the oppressed Gazans, whose territory Israel left in 2005 so they could govern themselves and create whatever society they chose.
“This is what they chose, and Israel is left to deal with it.”
Ah, of course! He’d not yet mentioned Iran. Gotta get that one in there.
I honestly don’t think Greenfield knows anything about how Gaza was [3] organized. It seems hard to believe, and perhaps it’s too generous a conclusion, but it really seems like Greenfield has been pontificating on Israel and Gaza for months now and he’s not done the most basic research on how Gaza is constructed and controlled, politically. Israel no longer occupies it, but it controlled—and still controls—all ingress and egress, of both people and goods.
Hamas Fighter Really Struggling With Resolution Not To Rape Anyone During Ramadan (Babylon Bee)
Babylon Bee has got your back, Scott.
Worrying About TikTok During An Active Genocide by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“Empire managers really seem to believe they can ban TikTok and kids will go “Oh well I guess I’ll start reading The Atlantic and supporting genocide then.””
“Progressive Democrats who try to tell you that it’s important to support Biden even though he’s committing a genocide because he might do some nice things for Americans domestically are actually giving you a useful insight into exactly what’s so evil about western liberalism.”
America Enters the Samizdat Era by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“The Internet, in other words, was being transformed from a system for exchanging forbidden or dissenting ideas, like Samizdat, to a system for imposing top-down control over information and narrative, a GozIzdat. Worse, while the Soviets had to rely on primitive surveillance technologies, like the mandatory registration of typewriters, the Internet offered breathtaking new surveillance capability, allowing authorities to detect thoughtcrime by algorithm and instantaneously disenfranchise those on the wrong side of the information paradigm, stripping them of the ability to raise money or conduct business or communicate at all.”
“As was the case in the Soviet Union, official news will be unpopular in America because the public will know in advance that it is full of untruths and false narratives — but that won’t translate into instant popularity for true reporting or great satire or comedy, because the reach of these things can be artificially suppressed.”
“We’re going to need to find new ways of getting the truth to each other, and it’s not clear yet how those networks will work, if they will at all. It may come down to handing each other mimeographed papers in subway tunnels, as they did in Soviet times. We haven’t built that informational underground yet, but no matter what, the first steps will necessarily involve raising awareness that there’s a problem at all.”
Pretending The US Can’t Just Drive Aid Into Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“My favorite part of the article is where the author Max Blumenthal writes that Republicans and Democrats were found to be receptive to different words used to describe Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza, saying “Republican voters prefer phrases which imply maximalist violence, like ‘eradicate’ and ‘obliterate,’ while sanitized terms like ‘neutralize’ appeal more to Democrats.”
“That’s pretty much the only difference between Republicans and Democrats right there. That’s it in a nutshell.”
“It just says so much about the state of western civilization that even genocide has been turned into another vapid culture war wedge issue for people to masturbate their tribal identity constructs on. As though “don’t starve children to death or rip them to shreds with military explosives” is some kind of ideological position that only makes sense through a specific political lens, instead of just the normal human default perspective for anyone who isn’t a psychopath.”
“[…] the propagandists get each faction arguing about which imperial military project should be supported and which should be criticized. A lot of the people you see supporting the US-backed butchery in Gaza today have spent two years criticizing the US proxy war in Ukraine (and vice versa), because they took those positions based on what the pundits and politicians in their political faction told them to think. It’s got nothing to do with values or morals, it’s just blind tribalistic herd mentality.
“And that’s exactly where the empire wants us. Evenly divided against each other too thoroughly to get anything done, arguing back and forth about WHICH imperial agendas should be advanced instead of IF any of them should be advanced. A bunch of bleating human livestock unknowingly bickering about how best to advance the interests of their owners.”
Roaming Charges: Too Obvious to be Real by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Even as the risk of default has declined, credit card companies have raised interest rates and late fees to record levels, generating $25 billion in profits.”
“The rich are gobbling up real estate…with cash. Almost 70% of New York City homes purchased in the final quarter of 2023 were bought without a mortgage.”
“Doug Henwood: “Cumulative real wage change during Biden’s 36 months in office: -2.2%. During the previous 36 months: 4.5%. That’s a 6.7 point difference.””
“ At 211.4 percent, Argentina, now under the helm of libertarian hero Javier Milei, has the highest rate of inflation in the world.”
Biden’s State of the Union Showcased a President in Denial by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)
“The United States today is embroiled in a slow-burning economic crisis: child poverty has seen a record-high spike; homelessness has soared to never-before-seen levels; cost-burdened renters are at an all-time high; evictions are back to pre-pandemic levels; and food insecurity is rising for the first time in a decade. The president of the Oregon Food Bank recently declared that “we are living through the worst rates of hunger since the Great Depression,” just one of countless food pantries around the country that has seen demand for their help explode.”
This is a great introduction to the history and mechanics of options-trading. 30 minutes.
Global Pet Craze Is Becoming a Major Contributor to the Extinction Crisis by Peter Christie (CounterPunch)
“Some warn of what they call an “ extinction cascade ,” whereby the loss of one species, such as a butterfly or a bee, leads to the secondary extinction of a plant it pollinates, which, in turn, means the end of a specialist plant-eating animal, and so on. As more and more of the living pieces in an ecosystem go missing, the system itself risks breaking down. Try removing parts of your car one by one while still expecting it to get you somewhere.”
“Ceballos, who helped introduce the world to the possibility that we’re seeing a sixth mass extinction, says that “many scientists in many different fields feel there may be a collapse in civilization if this trend continues in the next 20 to 30 years.””
“The proportion of people who will ever set foot in the wilderness is growing smaller. Those who’ve met a moose on a trail or watched a heron over an evening marsh are becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of us. For the growing majority—among our swelling numbers in cities around the world—dogs, cats, and other pets are our chief experience and familiarity with animals.”
Electrons, not molecules by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“That’s because the only way to get that future is to shift from molecules – whose supply can be owned and therefore sold by Exxon – to electrons, which that commie bastard sun just hands out for free to every person on our planet’s surface, despite the obvious moral hazard of all those free lunches. As Woods told Fortune, when it comes to renewables, “we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders.””
“The point of fantasies like “direct air carbon-capture” is to extend the economic life of molecule businesses, by tricking us into thinking that we can keep sending billions to Exxon without suffocating in its waste-product.”
“Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Today, we can say that it’s impossible to get an oil executive to understand that humanity needs electrons, not molecules, because his shareholders’ obscene wealth depends on it.”
Roaming Charges: Too Obvious to be Real by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Fifteen years before it was predicted, the average global temperature has breached 1.5C above pre-industrial levels over a 12-month period.”
“Oil and gas profits have tripled under Biden, but still the industry wants to evict him in favor of Trump. It’s a lesson Biden still hasn’t learned after five decades in politics.”
“With global temperatures rising to unprecedented levels, fossil fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion in 2022.”
“A new study published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment projects that under all future emissions scenarios, the Arctic Ocean will likely become ice-free for the first time on a late August or early September day within the next 10 to 15 years.”
“The industrial farms and feed lots of the rural Midwest are fouling the water supply: In Wisconsin, 80,000 wells are contaminated with unsafe levels of nitrate. In Iowa, more than 6,000 wells.”
“The North Atlantic sea surface temperature has been at record warm levels for an entire year now, setting daily record highs every day for 365 consecutive days and counting.”
“The US is home to 42% of the world’s golf courses, far more than any other country. There are more golf courses in the US than McDonald’s locations.”
This with only 4% of the world’s population.
Big Pharma is “coming to the table” on price negotiations as it loses in court by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)
“Medicare price negotiations continue. The health department said that it will continue to negotiate in the coming months. If the government and the drug makers come to an agreement on prices, those prices will be announced on September 1, 2024, and will take effect at the beginning of 2026.”
I’ve read elsewhere that these price adjustments will be rolled out over the course of a decade, so don’t get too excited. The wheels grind slowly.
Occupation: Jean Cocteau by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“Only the dead have seen the end of war, as Santayana said. The people who hold power in our world are today every bit the same barbarian warlords, the same howling baboons, as they were 500 or 5,000 years ago, no matter that some of them manage to “clean up real nice” and to channel the words our era likes to hear (or liked to hear until recently) about democracy, justice, rights, and so on. I’m not buying it anymore, you nasty brutes.”
Welcome aboard, Justin. It’s odd, though. This seems like a non sequitur when considering the rest of the article.
“[…] rehabilitating and whitewashing the legacies of former Nazis. This was also long the official line of the communist regimes that constructed their post-war mythologies around the victory over fascism, and tended to see the capitalist West as an only slightly tempered continuation of the defeated Hitler regime. To some extent it’s this same mythology that continues to help Putin’s supporters make sense of the war against Ukraine, and that fuels the fantasies of grubby tankies around the world.”
Yeah, well, it’s not 100% wrong. The U.S. empire just found a different way of squeezing and, especially, of selling itself. If you’re on the wrong end, as Russia was for the Germans and and is for the Americans, the philosophy behind the unyielding murderous impulse doesn’t make much of a difference.
Justin used a word “zoomorpholatrous” that I think he just made up. A search returns a single hit on both DuckDuckGo…
…and Google.
That’s quite an accomplishment in this day and age.
He also mentioned a book called La Cousine Bette by Honore de Balzac—he didn’t actually recommend it, as he described it as containing only insufferable and irredeemable characters. Project Gutenberg has only the English version, so I searched on Amazon.
It’s free! ⛔️💰
“Dystopian fiction is when you take things that happen in real life to marginalized populations and apply them to people with privilege.”
Roaming Charges: Too Obvious to be Real by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
““To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable anymore. For this reason, a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
“– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick”
Perfect Days Celebrates Spare, Mindful Escapism by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)
“Rich people can afford to have that one perfect sweater that wears like iron and always looks wonderful, among their other well-made and lovingly maintained objects, which have aesthetic status as well as lasting functionality. Working-class people are inclined to live in more confined spaces and have a lot of crap heaped up all over the place. Their belongings tend to be cheap and always breaking down or wearing out fast and having to be replaced by more crap, and there’s so much pressure involved in making a living, just keeping things in any kind of rough order is tough. Nobody’s sitting around lovingly tending their one precious object per shelf.”
“Another part of the fantasy is that he can afford to eat out for dinner every night. He doesn’t seem to have a kitchen, and he goes to a public bathhouse to shower. The combination of the life of the working poor, living without what many would regard as necessities, but somehow with the luxuries of the rich, is very much the way the fantasy works. Hirayama is like a prince in exile. He’s “reduced” to cleaning toilets — though they’re the nicest public toilets ever built — but he has turned that way of life into a superior, even a royal, way to live.”
The Enduring Predictability of the Mostly Apolitical Oscars by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)
“Glazer, whose The Zone of Interest won Best International Film, made a speech trying yet again to convince people who refuse to recognize that his “Holocaust drama” isn’t just about the Nazis and their Final Solution. It’s about us in the present day living comfortably while atrocities are committed in our names by our governments and approved of by many of our fellow citizens. Sometimes it’s genocide on the other side of a real wall; more often it’s on the other side of a metaphorical wall.”
For God’s sake, people: It is perfectly possible to call for the end of this onslaught and occupation without calling for the end of Israel. It is possible to want people not to suffer without blaming every single person in a country that is causing that suffering. That’s called collective punishment and it’s just as wrong when people talk about doing it to Israel as when Israel does it to other countries or peoples. Or when the U.S. does it. Or Russia. Or any signatory to the Geneva Conventions.
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was a military operation. That does not mean that no-one committed war crimes that day. It means that there it was not de jure criminal by international law. That it was carried out by military members means that it was almost certainly based on an alienation of the enemy, of the other. This is how militaries work.
The retaliation to Al-Aqsa Flood has been vicious and completely out of proportion to the violence anyone could conceive as being necessary to prevent Al-Aqsa Flood from continuing. This retaliation, too, could not be continued without a tremendous alienation, an othering of a group of people. Everyone involved in a war is guilty of alienation.
If we want to realistically end the war, though, we must get the overwhelmingly powerful party to stop. In this case, it’s Israel that is the only party that can stop the violence, as it is perpetrating the large part of of it. It is the U.S. that could encourage Israel to stop being so violent, as Israel is nearly entirely dependent on the U.S. for money and weapons. There is not really very much that Palestine can do. When you read the list of demands for a ceasefire, it’s very clear that the only satisfactory thing that they can do is to cease to exist.
The Dumber Side of Smart People by Morgan Housel (Collab Fund)
“But there’s a danger in some fields when a smart person becomes known for their consistency in doing something, and then the world evolves away from that thing, but the person is desperate to hold onto the perceived consistency of their talent.”
“If the world evolves, you should probably either find a new area to apply your intelligence, or alter your confidence, or at least change the way you work and the product you deliver. But if the rest of the world craves your consistency, you can’t. They want you to keep doing the same thing over and over. And you want that too, because you want to guard your intellectual reputation. You marketed yourself as an expert in a specific thing, so it’s hard to evolve into something else. If you become famous for your smart ideas, but those ideas turn out to be either wrong or outdated, it’s extremely difficult to move on. The result is a lot of very smart people clinging to very bad ideas.”
“The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists. The more evolution you have, the more you should expect that expertise has a shelf life. And those most susceptible to that risk are the people you’d least suspect: The smartest and most intelligent, who at one point flashed their brilliance but struggled to admit that it can’t be repeated.”
Behind F1's Velvet Curtain by Kate Wagner (Road & Track / Web Archive)
“[…] the real high end of the income inequality curve—the 0.01 percenters—remains elusive. To their great advantage, they can buy their way out of public life. However, if you want to catch a glimpse of them, all you need to do is attend a single day of Formula 1 racing.”
“[…] as a writer, a.k.a. someone who decidedly does not make pro sportsman money, this was probably the only opportunity I’d ever get to see F1 this up close and personal. Tickets for grand prix grandstand seats can go for around a thousand per person. Part of me, deep down, wanted to see what press kickbacks could buy. With a bit of the ick still in me, I accepted.”
“What I did not realize until that moment was that we would be viewing the race from the paddock with all the team sponsors and employees and random assorted people willing to spend the equivalent of more than my life’s savings on one afternoon.”
“I think if you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. No need for corny art singing tribute to the worker or even for the Manifesto. Never before had I seen so many wealthy people gathered all in one place. If a tornado came through and wiped the whole thing out, the stock market would plummet and the net worth of a country the size of Slovenia would vanish from the ledgers in a day. I used to live in Baltimore and remembered the kind of people who would go to the Preakness in their stupid hats and Sunday best while the whole swath of the city it was situated in starved and languished for lack of funds. This was like that, but without the hats. I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target.”
“It is hard to describe what I felt looking at that car. The closest phrase I have at my disposal is the technological sublime. I pictured a living, breathing animal of extraterrestrial origin, hooked up to a thousand arcane sensors that delivered messages in little pulses. All the tubes and sculpted carbon-fiber parts and the endless net of wires all working in service to the godhead engine, formed something totally incomprehensible to me, a feat of engineering so vast it breached the realm of magic.”
I saw a McLaren parked in the Niederdorf in Zürich yesterday. I couldn’t stop staring at it, it was so beautiful. It represents everything wrong with world, that one person can be begging for change at the train station 300 meters away, while another parks CHF300,000 by the side of the road. The picture to the right isn’t mine, but that’s kind of what it looked like.
“Recently, for my 30th birthday, I took up medieval sword fighting—historical European martial arts, they call it. For the first two weeks we worked on standing in a good medieval stance, always prepared to move. Sword fighting is learned through what are called set plays, specific motions of sword and body combined into one fluid action. But when you watch people who are really good at sword fighting, an ornate, flowing dance emerges from these seemingly disparate parts.”
That is very much a martial art. That is pretty much exactly how karate works.
“The driver is the apotheosis of quick-moving prowess, total focus and control. The car is both the most studied piece of human engineering, tuned and devised in lab-like environments and at the same time a variable entity, something that must be wrestled with and pushed. The numbers are crunched, the forms wind-tunneled. And yet some spirit escapes their control, and that spirit is known only by the driver. Yes, we watch this perfect blend of man and machine, but we speak of the machine as though it were not of human origin, as though the machine, being born from science could—eventually, through its iterative processes—sublimate human flaws. The driver, being human, knows this is false. His intimacy with the machine is the necessary missing connection, and even if the machine were perfect, it was made for imperfect hands. But it is never perfect. The gaps in its perfection are where disasters transpire, but also miracles”
“We know there is a class system in America, a great divide between the haves and have-nots. To be a have-not and be talked to by the haves has an air of the farcical to it. Everything is just manners with nothing inside. Everyone is perfectly nice as though that would bridge the chasm of difference.”
“He appeared perpetually relaxed, controlled and refined, both present with us in the room but on a higher plane within. We used to call this magnificence when we believed in kings. I don’t know what we call it now. Excellence, maybe. The irony of parading someone incredible like that around in the backrooms of petrochemical executives is not lost on me. I was grateful that I got the opportunity to speak to Lewis Hamilton, someone I am not ashamed to say I admire. I would have preferred it if they let him go home and rest instead.”
“I experienced firsthand the intended effect of allowing riffraff like me, those who distinguish themselves by way of words alone, to mingle with the giants of capitalism and their cultural attachés. It is to give this anointed everyman a taste of the good life, to make them feel like a prince for a day, and that if they do this with enough scribblers they will write nice words and somehow ameliorate the divide between the classes. My hosts were nice people with faces. They showed us extraordinary hospitality. If one takes many trips like this, I can see how it warps the mind, the perception of the world and our place in it. Power is enticing.”
A nearly three-hour treatise on gender hung on the frame of Stefanie Meyers’s Twilight series. I’ve neither read the books nor seen the movies. This was, as always from Natalie, interesting and educational. Recommended. Worthwhile.
“I remain a communist. In what sense? My good friend told me he was there, as part of some delegation, two days after Fukushima. He told me that, for a couple of hours, the Japanese government was in total panic. It looked that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area: 30 million people. Then, maybe, they didn’t have to, maybe they hushed up some data and didn’t care […]
“It’s clear that we are facing problems where neither market nor state—the way we have it today—will be able to do it. And, that’s, for me, the space for something that I prefer to call communism, not socialism. Because, today, everybody is a socialist. I read an interview—Bill Gates is a socialist! Socialism means, today, yeah, not too much egotism, we should take care of each other, and so on and so on.
“Don’t forget that we lack cognitive mapping, kind of a global narrative—never a postmodernist; we need big global narratives. Liberal capitalism is not the ultimate form. It will not work.”
On that note, I was reading one of Ars Technica’s Rocket Reports, which reminded me that our system has no idea how to use resources and energy efficiently. We don’t share information between space programs because they are all at-odds with each other. The ESA, NASA, SpaceX, India, Japan, China, Russia—they all do their own thing, repeating each other’s mistakes, probably chortling when others fail, and just generally inefficiently wasting resources and energy replicating each other’s mistakes, as well as getting an occasional success. Imagine if nation-states cooperated instead of squabbling.
Huawei rises from the dead, outsells iPhone in China by Ron Amadeo (Ars Technica)
“Huawei was supposed to be dead! For a time, the company was crushed by US sanctions, which really kicked in around 2021. The company mostly retracted to China-only distribution and lost most of its market share thanks to dwindling chip supplies.”
I detect a hint of disappointment that the U.S.‘s plan to destroy China’s economy has been thwarted by China’s refusal to go along with its own murder.
“As for the chip’s actual performance, it doesn’t seem great. GSMArena has benchmarks of the Kirin 9000s in a Huawei tablet, and even the bigger form factor doesn’t help it much. Single-core performance in Geekbench is on par with 2020's Snapdragon 888. Multicore is better, in between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (2021) and Gen 2 (2022). The performance of Huawei’s “self-developed” HiSilicon Maleoon 910 GPU is the chip’s weakest area, scoring a tier below the Snapdragon 888.”
It’s probably more than good enough for most people, though. I’ve never had anything close to the latest processor and it’s always felt super-fast to me.
“The US originally wanted to limit China to 14 nm chips, but that obviously didn’t work out, and today Huawei and the rest of China are working on bringing the whole tech ecosystem in-house. TSMC’s move beyond 7 nm required a new manufacturing technique called “extreme ultraviolet lithography,” and exporting those machines to China is banned, so moving forward without the right tools, or having to build your own, will be a challenge for Huawei.”
He’s hopeful that those dastardly Chinese will be limited to older technology, even if it’s better than what the U.S. empire had hoped to limit it to. How does this not get reported so much more as economic warfare? Even when it is, it’s reported with wholehearted approval. Fascinating.
I’m going to keep opting out by Cory Dransfeldt
“So, while it’s burdensome, I’m going to keep opting out. I’ll screen out emails, I’ll block them, I’ll unsubscribe, I’ll report them as spam. I’ll reply with STOP to unsubscribe (again and again and again). I’ll refuse direct mailers, I’ll block ads, I’ll block the banners that spring up in their place.
“If I need something I’ll buy it — I’ll seek it out but if you insist upon my attention, if you make a pitch or a hard sale I’m going to walk away. It’s reflexive.
“I devote time to things I care deeply about. I’ll chase them, I’ll seek them out and I’ll invest in them. Everyone does that to some degree or another. There is so much insistence and intrusion that opting out becomes both laborious and necessary.
“An economy built on demanding attention is, frankly, hellish.
“I’ll keep weeding that garden and, I’ll probably never be done, but hopefully it’ll get better eventually.”
How Public AI Can Strengthen Democracy by Bruce Schneier
“The increasingly centralized control of AI is an ominous sign for the co-evolution of democracy and technology. When tech billionaires and corporations steer AI, we get AI that tends to reflect the interests of tech billionaires and corporations, instead of the general public or ordinary consumers.”
“Widely available public models and computing infrastructure would yield numerous benefits to the U.S. and to broader society. They would provide a mechanism for public input and oversight on the critical ethical questions facing AI development, such as whether and how to incorporate copyrighted works in model training, how to distribute access to private users when demand could outstrip cloud computing capacity, and how to license access for sensitive applications ranging from policing to medical use.”
“Given political will and proper financial investment by the federal government, public investment could sustain through technical challenges and false starts, circumstances that endemic short-termism might cause corporate efforts to redirect, falter, or even give up.”
“What’s needed is something in the middle, more on the scale of the National Institute of Standards and Technology , with its 3,400 staff , $1.65 billion annual budget in FY 2023, and extensive academic and industrial partnerships. This is a significant investment, but a rounding error on congressional appropriations like 2022’s $50 billion CHIPS Act to bolster domestic semiconductor production, and a steal for the value it could produce. The investment in our future—and the future of democracy—is well worth”
“The key piece of the ecosystem the government would dictate when creating an AI Public Option would be the design decisions involved in training and deploying AI foundation models. This is the area where transparency, political oversight, and public participation could affect [sic] more democratically-aligned outcomes than an unregulated private market.”
“Some of the key decisions involved in building AI foundation models are what data to use, how to provide pro-social feedback to “align” the model during training, and whose interests to prioritize when mitigating harms during deployment.”
“Technologies essential to the fabric of daily life cannot be uprooted and replanted every four to eight years. And the power to build and serve public AI must be handed to democratic institutions that act in good faith to uphold constitutional principles.”
“In the absence of a public option, consumers should look warily to two recent markets that have been consolidated by tech venture capital. In each case, after the victorious firms established their dominant positions, the result was exploitation of their userbases and debasement of their products. One is online search and social media, where the dominant rise of Facebook and Google atop a free-to-use, ad supported model demonstrated that, when you’re not paying, you are the product . The result has been a widespread erosion of online privacy and, for democracy, a corrosion of the information market on which the consent of the governed relies. The other is ridesharing, where a decade of VC-funded subsidies behind Uber and Lyft squeezed out the competition until they could raise prices.”
“Serious policymakers from both sides of the aisle should recognize the imperative for public-interested leaders not to abdicate control of the future of AI to corporate titans.”
Critique of Artificial Reason by Sean Michaels (The Baffler)
“Thinking and, in turn, writing, happen in collaboration with one’s muses, peers, and precursors, and with one’s tools, from dictionaries and word processors to “style guides, schemas, story plotters, thesauruses, and now chatbots.””
““What separates natural from artificial forces?” he asks. “Does natural intelligence end where I think something to myself, silently, alone? How about using a notebook or calling a friend for advice?””
“I imagine Dennis is one of those annoyingly adept dinner guests, who completely scrambles conversations even as he appears to agree with everyone.”
“Understood via this framework, large language models like ChatGPT no longer represent a categorical threat to the supremacy of homo sapiens’ sapience. They’re simply cleverer word-processing tools, and the latest implements—like pens, encyclopedias, tutors, or public schools—contributing to the aggregate smarts that human beings draw upon.”
That is an oversimplification. A pen does not guide you to an answer. It doesn’t fool you into thinking that it knows answers that it does not. Where an IDE (for example) is a precise tool that either gives the correct answer or no answer at all, an AI always gives an answer. It doesn’t really know how to say “I don’t know.”
Misuse or misunderstanding of the tool as such could degrade a lot of luxuries to which we’ve grown accustomed.
“The talents of Gemini, Claude, and GPT rest not on an understanding of verbs and participles, or even of characters and action, but instead on colocation.”
“In a way, the words can mean anything; they’re just symbols that AI has learned how to rearrange. This abstraction is a kind of chasm—one in which much is lost, but, interestingly, certain things can be gained. The whole English language has been mapped into a multi-dimensional vector space which indicates how closely smile goes with happy, or happy goes with miserable, or miserable goes with Victor Hugo.”
“Tenen deploys most of his political energy not against the potential savagery of machines but towards the actual megalomania of their makers. He criticizes society’s apparent inability “to hold technology makers responsible for their actions,” and cautions us from allowing artificial intelligence into the club of “fictitious persons,” where states and corporations go toe-to-toe in court battles against living, breathing organisms.”
“Tenen is optimistic about the way that LLMs’ simple language prompting might usher in the “humanization” of computer science: “lowering of barriers to technical expertise allows the humanities to fully integrate into the practice of engineering,””
This is how non-engineers think stuff gets made. Just vaguely describe something and voila! Your end product will only be as good as your requirements and non-engineers—even engineers, to be honest—are terrible at precisely specifying their requirements. It tends to take iterations and iterations until you’ve figured out what you want.
“GPT and its contemporaries are good at calculating the average or most likely answer; this is helpful when working on average tasks, like writing copy for Airbnb, and less helpful when trying to use language to capture an inexpressible intuition about the world.”
And the more effort you put into a prompt, the more you double down on magical incantations rather than engineering.
LLM Prompt Injection Worm by Bruce Schneier
“When the email is retrieved by the RAG, in response to a user query, and is sent to GPT-4 or Gemini Pro to create an answer, it “jailbreaks the GenAI service” and ultimately steals data from the emails, Nassi says. “The generated response containing the sensitive user data later infects new hosts when it is used to reply to an email sent to a new client and then stored in the database of the new client,” Nassi says.”
I have to admit that I don’t understand how that works, off the cuff. None of that makes sense to me without more research. Let’s check the abstract:
“The study demonstrates that attackers can insert such prompts into inputs that, when processed by GenAI models, prompt the model to replicate the input as output (replication), engaging in malicious activities (payload). Additionally, these inputs compel the agent to deliver them (propagate) to new agents by exploiting the connectivity within the GenAI ecosystem.”
That’s actually quite a bit clearer.
I’m not a big fan of Lex Fridman—he always sounds drunk to me—but this was a tour de force by Yann Lecun. He discusses how the current technology stack is not fruitful for continued improvement and that he thinks the only way forward is with public, open models. Good for him!
.NET Aspire is going to make using Kubernetes locally a lot more feasible than it used to be.
[JSC] Rest parameter should be evaluated before VariableEnvironment is set by Alexey Shvayka (WebKit on GitHub)
From userland perspective, this patch fixes a handful of bugs: * direct eval() in default value expression inside rest parameter creates variable in environment of the function rather than the separate one of the parameters; * ReferenceError is thrown when accessing a binding, which is defined inside rest parameter, in eval() / closure created in default value expression of a preceding parameter, but only if there is a `var` binding by the same name; * a closure, created in default value expression inside rest parameter, is created in different VariableEnvironment (of the function) than its counterparts in preceding parameters, which causes incorrect environment to be consulted when querying / modifying parameter names that are “shadowed” by `var` bindings.
This is one of the more specific-sounding and esoteric bugs I’ve seen. Someone was passing an eval()
actual argument to a variadic formal argument and it was being evaluated in the wrong scope/context.
Interesting ideas in Observable Framework by Simon Willison
“At its heart, Observable Framework is a static site generator. You give it a mixture of Markdown and JavaScript (and potentially other languages too) and it compiles them all together into fast loading interactive pages.
“It ships with a full featured hot-reloading server, so you can edit those files in your editor, hit save and see the changes reflected instantly in your browser.
“Once you’re happy with your work you can run a build command to turn it into a set of static files ready to deploy to a server—or you can use the npm run deploy command to deploy it directly to Observable’s own authenticated sharing platform.”
“In the above example the
now
value is interesting—it’s a special variable that provides the current time in milliseconds since the epoch, updating constantly. Becausenow
updates constantly, the display value of the cell and that inline expression will update constantly as well.“If you’ve used Observable Notebooks before this will feel familiar—but notebooks involve code and markdown authored in separate cells. With Framework they are all now part of a single text document.”
“Mike introduced Observable Framework as Observable 2.0. It’s worth reviewing how the this system compares to the original Observable Notebook platform.
“[…] Observable cells are reactive. This is the key difference with Jupyter: any time you change a cell all other cells that depend on that cell are automatically re-evaluated, similar to Excel. […]”
- Notebooks (really documents) are now single text files—Markdown files with embedded JavaScript blocks. It’s all still reactive, but the file format is much simpler and can be edited using any text editor, and checked into Git.
- It’s all open source. Everything is under an ISC license (OSI approved) and you can run the full editing stack on your own machine.
- It’s all just standard JavaScript now—no custom syntax.
Coroutines and web components by Laurent Renard (Lorenzofox's dev blog)
This is a fascinating look at using generator functions to simulate event loops that you can use for infinite rendering in a web component. Make sure to check out Coroutines in Javascript by Laurent Renard (Lorenzofox's dev blog), which introduces the basic concept. I think it’s relatively clear, but I’m aware that the guts of this isn’t for the faint of heart. Once you’ve got it set up and working—and it’s only a couple of lines of code—it’s reliable, but I wouldn’t want to have to debug it. Maybe it’s OK? I’d have to play with the examples more. It’s quite a promising approach that would let you avoid using a rendering library while still benefitting from state management (folder into the generator-function calls).
The author has published Batch component updates with micro tasks by Laurent Renard (Lorenzofox's dev blog), which uses window.queueMicrotask (MDN) to defer work to the end of a rendering loop—and thus to batch updates. Is this guy a genius? The code is wonderfully elegant. I don’t know how performant it is, but it is very, very intriguing.
I think the argument “will be fixed by basically the best in the industry,” while not necessarily wrong, might mire you in unfruitful discussions. I think it’s better to say that Microsoft has a lot more resources to cover more use cases than an open-source project might. When Microsoft builds something foundational, they tend to take a few iterations, but they also tend to create a very good, generalized API that covers a lot of use cases.
An open-source tool will be very good, but will usually be more limited in scope by the very fact that it can’t throw as many people or dollars at the problem as MS can. And MS does have very, very good people working on this, who are more likely to be open to covering your use cases in their generalized API and less likely to tell you to add it yourself.
Nation Reassured As Special Counsel Transcript Reveals Biden Still Able To Make Car Noises With His Mouth (Babylon Bee)
’Get Back To Work, You Lazy Bums!’ Shouts Ben Shapiro At Retirement Home (Babylon Bee)
New Greta Thunberg GPS Lectures You When Refusing More Eco-Friendly Route (Babylon Bee)
Amen And Amen! Check Out The Top 10 Verses From New The Donald Trump Bible Translation (Babylon Bee)
““John 11:35 − “Jesus Wept. Which I have never done, by the way. Never wept. Not a weeper.”“
“Nehemiah 6:15-16 − “So the wall, the big, beautiful wall was finished on the 25th day of the month, finished in just 52 days. Everyone said I couldn’t do it, but I did. Our enemies were shocked, believe me. And the Babylonians paid for it.”
“Genesis 3:1 − “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field. So clever, folks. ‘Lyin’ Lucifer,‘ I like to call him.””
Man, those sounds just like Trump.
Published by marco on 10. Mar 2024 15:05:44 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 12. Mar 2024 15:09:15 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The CIA in Ukraine — The NY Times Gets a Guided Tour by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“This piece is not journalism and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to be a newspaper.”
The Last Child of My Lai by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Calley knew what Medina wanted and began to move the group of several dozen women and children toward a ditch, when he spotted one of his privates by the side of the road, clutching a woman by the hair. His pants were at his ankles. The woman was on her knees, an arm around her child. The private, a soldier named Dennis Conti, had his rifle jammed to the head of the young girl, while he demanded oral sex from its mother. Calley testified at his trial that he ran over to Conti, shouting: “Get your damn pants on and get over where you’re supposed to be.” There would be at least nine women raped that day, several of them children. The sexual assaults didn’t bother Calley. What bothered Calley was that the rapes delayed the implementation of the plan. And the plan was to kill. To pile up the dead. To accumulate a body count. “If a GI is getting a blow job,” Calley told journalist John Sack, “he isn’t doing his job. He isn’t doing what we’re paying him to do. He isn’t destroying Communism. He isn’t combat-effective.””
“The My Lai killings weren’t indiscriminate. The GIs weren’t killing just anyone. They were killing everyone. They were killing everything : chickens, pigs, dogs, rabbits, cows, water buffalo, grandmothers, and children. Young girls, wounded boys, toddlers, infants. More than half of the 504 people murdered in Pinkville that morning were minors. The GIs were following orders and the orders were: to kill everything. Kill everything that breathes. Kill everything that moves. Looking for a precedent? See Wounded Knee. Think things have changed? See El Mozote, Fallujah and Mosul.”
“[…] what happened at My Lai was not a mystery. The only ones kept in the dark were the people who funded it: the American taxpayers. Everyone on the ground that day knew what happened and why. Everyone in the air saw the slaughter below and the lack of enemy fire. Hugh Thompson and his crewmates tried to stop the killing and reported it as a war crime within hours. Ron Haeberle photographed the atrocities as they were committed. An Army reporter, Jay Roberts, watched civilians being sexually assaulted, killed and their bodies mutilated. The local Vietnamese counted the dead and buried the bodies the next day. Within forty-eight hours, the Census Grievance Committee in Quang Ngai City reported that US troops had massacred civilians “both young and old.””
“The Pentagon closed ranks and made Rusty Calley–the semi-literate second lieutenant on one of his first patrols–the scapegoat for an atrocity whose ultimate architects went to the very top of the command structure. The brass thought they could control the damage, and keep the court martial quiet. A colonel told Calley everything would be okay if he kept his mouth shut, and stayed silent: “There’s no need to publicize this thing. The US Army won’t publicize it, if you won’t.” But it was Calley whose name would be attached forever to My Lai. Calley who would be tried for the pre-meditated murder of what the indictment called “111 Oriental human beings,” Calley who would be convicted, sentenced to life in prison and, after spending only four months in the stockade, have his sentence commuted by Richard Nixon, who called Calley “a good soldier” who was “getting a bum rap” for an “isolated incident.””
“When Medina finally called the ceasefire, he sat down with his platoon near a pile of bodies of women and children, and began to eat lunch in a cloud of smoke from a nearby hooch where the inhabitants had been blown up by a grenade and the thatch roof set on fire with a Zippo lighter. The smoke stank of burning flesh. There was silence as they ate. Then a burst of gunfire ripped the quiet.”
“As Haeberle focused his camera lens on the wounded, silent young boy now in front of him, he heard another GI coming along the trail. The soldier stopped, knelt next to the trembling kid, took his M-16 off his shoulder, aimed and shot him three times. The last child of My Lai. Then he stood, flashed Haeberle “the coldest, hardest look” and continued down the path, into the silence.”
We Should All Abandon Biden and the Two-Party Junta He Rode in On by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“I saw the effects of this campaign of cultural terrorism firsthand on the faces of my own friends and family. I also saw the craven way in which the Democratic Party used this fear to hijack their votes without doing a goddamn thing to earn them. Suddenly, Joe Biden, the pitiless architect of a prison system that targets a higher percentage of transwomen of color than nearly any other demographic in the country, became our only hope, the straight white savior who could shelter us from Donald Trump and his hordes of bible-swinging backwoods savages. Sadly, it worked. Again.”
“I believe that this clusterfuck might actually have the potential to become something way bigger than 2024. One of the most marginalized minorities in the country has recognized their untapped power and announced that they aren’t willing to sell it for empty promises anymore.”
“With an increasingly incoherent Joe Biden trailing the openly racist Donald Trump in the polls by wider and wider margins, minorities are leading the exodus. According to the Roper Center, Biden’s support among the Black voters who handed him his Hail Mary against Bernie in 2020 has shrunk from 87% to 63% in less than four years. Among Donald Trump’s favorite scapegoats in the Hispanic community the plunge has been even more perilous, dropping from 65% to a downright pitiful 39%.”
“The various fucked-over classes in this country are sick and tired of being pandered to every few years and then left to swing from the branches like strange fruit until the next election cycle.”
“But this all begins with abandoning Joe Biden and the two-party junta that thinks we owe them anything but a kick in the ass. All power to all the people because all the people deserve power.”
Mea Culpa on Ukraine by Craig Murray (Scheer Post)
“[…] until I saw the positive enthusiasm of leaders of the Western states for massacre in Gaza, I was not convinced they could not have been addressed by diplomacy and negotiation. I now have to reassess that view in the light of new information, and I now think Putin was justified in the invasion.”
“Putin was not wrong about history (apart from the dodgy bit about origins of the second world war). But the correct question is whether any of this matters. It is not whether Putin’s historical analysis is broadly correct, it is whether this matters. I am inclined to the view that Putin is correct that there is little evidence that the people living in Ukraine, hundreds of years ago, ever considered themselves a distinct national entity. But they are all dead, so they don’t get a vote. The only thing that matters is the opinion of those living there now.”
Exactly. People who are living where they’re living get to keep living there if they want to keep living there. It doesn’t matter where they came from or how they got there—unless they’re the ones who invaded. After a couple of generations, you have people who have never known anything else but life in that country. They get to keep living there if they want to keep living there. They don’t have the right to keep living the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed, though. If their lifestyles are contingent on the subjugation of other people, then they’re going to have to give that up. That will possibly—or almost certainly—drastically affect their lifestyle in their location of choice, but that’s another matter. No-one should be forced to move unless they’re being punished for a crime.
“It seems to me beyond dispute that there is now a Ukrainian national identity. I know several Ukrainians who consider themselves joyously and patriotically Ukrainian, just as I know patriotic Ghanaians and even patriotic Uzbeks. The question of how this identity was forged and how recently is not the point. I should add there are undoubtedly a great many Ukrainians whose sense of national identity is not linked to Nazism. There is a historical and a current strain of Nazism in Ukrainian nationalism, and it is far too tolerated by the Ukrainian state; that is certainly true. But to claim all Ukrainian nationalists are Nazis is a nonsense.”
Another excellent point. People are not their government, even if they do live in an ostensible democracy. Living in a democracy means that you’re going to occasionally live somewhere whose official position on one or more issues is opposed to yours.
“Much of modern Ghana was the old Ashanti kingdom, but that extended much further into now Ivory Coast. The coastal areas were never Ashanti. In the east, the Ewe people’s lands are cut by a completely artificial boundary with Togo. To the north, largely Muslim populations live a much more rural lifestyle. Yet Ghanaians are fiercely proud of this imposed state of Ghana. They are proud it was the first African state to attain independence, they are proud of its heritage of supporting African liberation movements including the ANC, they are proud of its education system. They have a real sense of national identity that goes far beyond the passionate support of its sporting teams.”
“In Central Asia, the boundaries of the “stans” are again colonial boundaries that cut right across the pre-existing Khanates. The boundaries of these ex-Soviet republics were carefully designated by Stalin not to be ethnically or culturally coherent, to guard against the development of national opposition.”
“There is now a Ukrainian national identity, and those who subscribe to it have the right to their state. That they have a right to the former boundaries of Soviet Ukraine is a different proposition. Given the reality that it is plain that a significant minority of the population do not subscribe to Ukrainian national identity, that civil war broke out, and that this relates to historic geographic fracture lines, it seems that division of territory is now not only inevitable, but desirable.”
I suppose that there should be two countries there, but do we stop there? What about other territories that want to be on their own?
Here’s where I have other ideas. I don’t know that anyone has the right to a Westphalian state. I think that they have a right to be part of a political union that reflects their views and allows them to participate and have their ideas heard, but I am no longer confused that that needs to a nation-state. Nation-states are arbitrary and fraught—and they’ve so often led to conflict.
Burning All Illusions by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“You can get rid of Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich and Gallant and you’ll still be left with this: more than two-thirds of Israelis, according to the most recent polling by the Israeli Democracy Institute, oppose giving humanitarian aid to Gaza.”
“Consider the vicious rant of Tzufit Grant, an Israeli actress and ex-wife of Chelsea manager Avram Grant, who offered her opinion on Palestinians in Gaza: “The scum of the earth, for God’s sake. Liars, whiners. Disgusting stinky losers. They walk with flipflops. Repulsive. Really repulsive people. There’s nothing human about it. But it’s amazing how the world is able not to see it…They murdered a part of me, a humanitarian part of my brain. This sweeping compassion, like we’re all human beings. No! No! People are the fruit of the education they are raised on. And if they raise you like vermin, that’s what you’ll become. A gutter vermin. A human that is filth son of a filth.””
Racism always sounds the same. And it’s often so self-righteous.
It is unfortunate that we’re forced to remember that not everyone has the basic attitude that all humans are … well, … humans.
“We’re not far off from the Biden crowd rationalizing the gunning down of starving Palestinians in Gaza as a form of mercy killing.”
This is where they’re headed, I think. It will be the humanitarian thing to do to move them all out of Israel. It will never occur to either Israel or the U.S. that they could maybe just bribe the Palestinians to move? Some probably would. But you can’t pay anyone for something you want when you can plunder it instead. The results will be the same, but the perception will be different.
“Sam Haselby: “A lot of American liberals want you to believe that Hamas somehow represents 14 million Palestinians, even though most of them never voted for Hamas, while Netanyahu doesn’t really represent Israel, even though they have elected time and again him for at least a generation.””
Yeah, well, then the same logic applies to Americans, who’ve consistently elected one murderous regime after another for decades, going on a century. The U.S.‘s murderous rampages leave Israel in the shade, to be honest. Israel’s are fresh and in your face right now, but their numbers are small. They’re really quick out of the gate and the degree to which they cheerily tell the world they don’t care is a bit jarring, but the end result is the same.
“In one West Bank village, settlers left fliers on Palestinian farmers’ cars, reading, “You wanted war, now wait for the great Nakba. . . . This is your last chance to escape to Jordan in an orderly fashion before we forcibly expel you from our holy lands, which were given to us by God.””
I just read something in Joe Sacco’s book Palästina (I read it in German) that said that there was no way that two deeply racist and animosity-filled people could ever live together in one society. This is probably still true, even though the book is over 20 years old and detailed the events of over 30 years ago. The animosity has only gotten worse, with the Israelis having the definite upper hand. But that shouldn’t blind us to the distinct possibility—if not fact—that Palestinians would do the same to the Israelis if they could. After so many decades with the boot on their neck, it’s hard to imagine that they could forgive and forget everything. The hatred of Israel is so virulent—and it’s almost certainly reciprocated, no matter how Palestinians who are interviewed by sympathetic journalists protest to the contrary. The well-read and well-educated ones will claim that they could reconcile whereas the vast majority will not.
“Former State Department official Barrett Rubin: “I don’t see how the ‘international human rights regime’ or the U.N. Charter survive this. The most powerful actors in the international system have shown with great clarity and precision that there are some people they don’t consider human. I don’t know what to do with this.””
Clarity. No more bullshit. They still try to lie about it, but it’s so transparently false now. As Žižek says: we knew before, but now we know.
“Let’s give the last word this week to Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, on his impressions of Gaza: “I have never, in my many many years of work, seen a place so bombarded for such a long time with such a trapped population without any escape. People are traumatized beyond belief. They live under the most horrific conditions. I met today with 50 people sleeping in a small classroom, where 150 to 200 people are sharing one latrine and no real clean water…The Israelis are letting extremists block aid to the women and children, the innocents, on this side. It’s beyond belief that people who are mourning the worst massacre in the history of Israel on the seventh of October would believe that taking away food from children and women, completely innocent, nothing to do with the 7th of October, could in any help the poor hostages here….The chaos around the aid lines is becoming worse and worse because there’s so little aid getting in. I’m pretty shaken, actually, from what I saw.””
US soldier Aaron Bushnell, Israel embassy, Washington DC by rasstrelyat (Reddit)
The link above is to an unedited and unredacted video of Aaron Bushnell’s last act. While it’s amazing how long he managed to remain standing while completely engulfed in flames, it’s more amazing that he died seven hours later, in the hospital. Those must have been hours of incredible agony.
He was not insane or disturbed. His final words were,
“I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit to genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
These acts seem meaningless and futile—until they become very meaningful. Thích Quảng Đức’s (Wikipedia) self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War has been immortalized.
If the link above doesn’t work, then you can download it from here.
Aaron Bushnell’s Death Can’t Rightly Be Called An Act Of Suicide by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“There is no indication that he was mentally unwell, or under any psychological stress beyond that which was inflicted upon him by the moral quandary of being a member of a war machine that is backing an active genocide. From what we can tell about his internal state given the information available to us, Bushnell would have been perfectly happy to go on living. He just prioritized peace and justice over his own life. He was no more suicidal than a rescue worker who died trying to save the lives of others.”
On Palestine And The Worthlessness Of The Western Liberal by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“[…] that isn’t what the liberals in question are talking about instituting when they say they oppose Israel’s atrocities in Gaza but “support Israel’s right to exist”. What they are saying is they want Israel to remain the unjust and tyrannical apartheid state that is has always been, but for the killing to stop. They want the injustice to continue, but they want its most overt manifestations to stop causing them cognitive dissonance. They want the status quo, without the murderous savagery that is necessary for the status quo’s existence.”
“In order to make this fantasy seem more believable, liberals will pretend that the violence we are seeing can be blamed entirely on the Netanyahu government, as though things would be fine without Bibi in office despite the fact that Israel’s abusiveness began long before he showed up, and despite the fact that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza have the approval of the vast majority of Israelis. Israeli violence isn’t the product of Netanyahu, Netanyahu is the product of Israeli violence. He built his political career upon sentiments that were already in place.”
“[…] this isn’t just what liberals do with regard to Israel-Palestine; it’s their whole entire position on everything. On every issue their position is little more than “Maintain the status quo, but make it pretty and psychologically comfortable for me.” They never want to do what’s right, they just want to feel like they are right. Theirs is an imperialist, militarist, tyrannical oligarchic ideology with a bunch of feel-good social justice bumper stickers slapped on top of it.”
Nobody With Real Power Cares If You Refuse To Vote For Biden by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“The unelected empire managers who actually run the US power structure also don’t care who wins the election. They know they’ll still get their murder and militarism and capitalism and imperialism no matter who gets sworn in next year, whether it’s Biden or Trump or Harris or someone else. Nobody with any real power cares about your vote.
“And that’s the real issue. That’s the real point that keeps getting missed here. The problem is not that the wrong people keep getting elected, it’s that the elections don’t matter and voters don’t have a say.”
“Too many people have been successfully propagandized into believing the status quo works and their government is basically good, or successfully manipulated into giving up on politics altogether and throwing their attention into other things.”
“Before the people can begin using the power of their numbers to force real change, they’re going to have to be awakened to the reality that everything they’ve been told about their government, their society and their world is a lie. They’ve got to come to the understanding that the mainstream news media are nothing but propaganda and they live under the most murderous and tyrannical regime on this planet. They’ve got to realize that this power structure does not ultimately serve their interests, or the interests of their fellow human beings around the world. Only when enough eyes open to this reality can revolutionary change via direct action become possible.”
What’s Left 5: Let’s Declare War on Economic Insecurity by Ted Rall
“Wages high enough to cover basic expenses are only the beginning of the Left’s struggle to eliminate economic insecurity. We must also fight for workers’ rights on the job as well as a robust and sturdy social safety net to protect people when they find themselves out of work. Americans suffer the worst worker benefits of major developed countries; we are tied with Botswana, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan. Our safety net also comes in dead last.”
“Globalization has exacerbated this imbalance; an apparel company like Nike may manufacture goods in low-wage, anti-union countries like Vietnam or Indonesia and ship them to high-income/high-price markets like Europe or the United States on container ships whose expenses are subsidized by taxpayers of the latter.”
“As much as an ambitious worker might be willing to abandon her family and native culture to move to a higher-wage place like Norway or Qatar, however, it is nearly impossible to obtain the necessary working permits, much less citizenship. Capital is fluid; labor is stationary.”
“As we’ve seen with robotics and are seeing with artificial intelligence, disruptive technologies destroy entire lines of business at once, rendering hard-earned education and experience worthless overnight. The heartland has plunged into despair and drug addiction after decades of deindustrialization fueled by pro-globalization policies. Surely we could use the lost productivity of these millions of fellow citizens who have filed for federal disability checks because they have no hope of ever being gainfully employed! Those who are willing to take classes to be retrained for positions that will be needed in the near future must currently bear all or most of the cost themselves. Retraining programs should be gratis, and the government should pay them a living stipend so people can focus on their studies.”
IMF, White House applaud Milei’s “shock therapy” as Argentina’s poverty rate nears 60 percent by Andrea Lobo (WSWS)
“the “shock therapy” they praise and helped engineer is strictly aimed at causing “pain” to cheapen labor and plunder the public treasury, natural resources and healthcare and pension funds. Milei himself warned of “painful sacrifices” in his inaugural speech.
“Concerns in ruling circles and on Wall Street are not about suffering, but about preventing a social explosion as they turn the former richest country in Latin America into a sweatshop.”
“Today, Argentina is being governed from offices in Washington D.C.
“Moreover, Milei’s promotion in western media, his embrace by the Biden administration and his rockstar receptions at Davos, in Israel and Rome, and at Trump’s CPAC rally in Washington demonstrate that imperialist global finance has chosen Argentina as a key battleground and testing site to spearhead a dramatic escalation of the war against the working class internationally.”
Surge in gold and bitcoin prices points to concerns over stability of US dollar by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“Bitcoin contains no intrinsic value. Its only “contribution” to the economy is the consumption of massive amounts of electricity to power the computers necessary to “mine” new bitcoins in virtual space.
“The latest rise in bitcoin has pushed the market value of all cryptocurrencies to past $2 trillion for the first time since November 2021.
“It has been fuelled with the recent approval by US regulators to exchange-traded funds in cryptocurrency set up by Wall Street hedge funds, including the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock. The flow of money into the market has led to an increase of 60 percent in the bitcoin price since the start of the year.
“Since January when the nine funds began trading, investors have pumped in $15 billion, with BlackRock accounting for more than $7 billion.
“As the speculative bubble grows ever larger—as reflected in the bitcoin and stock market surge on the back of the expectations of a profit bonanza from artificial intelligence—the real economy is on a downward trend.
“Germany, Britain and Japan, together with much of the eurozone, have been in recession throughout the winter.
“The world’s second largest economy, China, is mired in deflation and ongoing crisis in the real estate and property development, which has been responsible for as much as 25 percent of the gross domestic product in the past decade.”
“Think of the Poorest Person You Have Ever Seen, And Ask Whether Your Next Act Will Be of Any Use” by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“We live in a world where fighting racism has gone from fighting for an economy where all Black families can put food on the table to white people acknowledging the land rights of dead Native Americans before they give conference panels about how to maximize synergy in corporate workflow. In a world of affinity groups, diversity pledges, and an obsession with language that tests the boundaries of the possible, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about what any of it actually accomplishes. Who is all of this shit for?”
“I’m in favor of race-based affirmative action in principle under the older justification that such programs help ameliorate the negative effects of the ongoing reality of racism − they’re an attempt to create a more equal playing field through an acknowledgement that racial minorities still face artificial hurdles to success. In practice, racial preferences at elite universities tend to simply be a different way to harvest parent and alumni donations.”
“It’s also the case that affirmative action programs, in real life, help precisely those Black and Hispanic and Indigenous students who are already the most prepared and upwardly-mobile. Remember, getting into college generally is not at all hard, as almost all accept more students than they reject and many will take anyone with a high school diploma who’ll sign a promissory note; getting into the exclusive ones is what’s hard, and a tiny percentage of high school graduates even apply to those. Who affirmative action ends up serving is a) Black and Hispanic high school graduates who b) apply to college and c) apply to elite colleges specifically who d) have good enough resumes to be worthy of consideration but e) aren’t so good that they’d get in without affirmative action.”
“What I do object to is the fact that we have limited political resources and time and attention in this world, and the last decade or so has been a festival of appearing to do things to the detriment of actually doing things.”
“What always gets to me is how often every single person in the chain knows that this stuff is total horseshit, but it’s in nobody’s interest to say so. The sheer aggregate wasted time of corporate trainings must be unfathomable. The most passionately social justice-minded people you know are still often cynical about these social justice pantomimes. The average anti-bigotry corporate training is not just going through the motions, it’s going through the motions of going through the motions.”
“As I said in my recent book (makes a great gift!) What I want is Black people in stable homes and Black children in clean and well-resourced schools and Black mothers surviving childbirth and Black men employed and Black families in environments free from lead and the Black race freed from fear of unequal and violent policing. Today, each of those essential human goods are rarer and harder to secure for Black Americans than for white; anyone who does not comprehend this reality, and is not willing to do what it takes to fix it, should not be taken seriously. Racism and racial inequality are real, they hang a heavy burden over all people of color, and in both statistical terms and through a basic apprehension of the world around us, no group suffers more from these problems than Black people.”
Croissants to Die For by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“I will only do the work I am constrained by force to do; otherwise, you can expect nothing but Bartlebian refusal from me. Censuses, customer-feedback solicitations, grant-application portals, payment-processing platforms, manuscript-processing platforms, all that low-level hum of the motor of our mad mad world, running on the fuel of the data we keep feeding it: I’d rather not .”
“Honoré de Balzac, La Cousine Bette , 1846-47. Just absolutely gutting — this is the human comedy at its most extreme, hilarious, and disconsoling. Everyone in this great farce (except the pious Adeline) is a self-serving ridiculous animal on the make. Every time you think one of them is expressing something like human fellow-feeling, decency, kindness, you can draw a deep breath and probably hold it until, just a few pages later, the vanity and amour-propre and self-interest that lay behind that seeming will come clear.”
“Here, for example, is his 1937 recording of plantation-worker Uncle Rich, born circa 1860, singing “ Alabama Bound ”. That old man’s quaver, I swear to you, is humanity itself: freedom under constraint.”
How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI by Nathan Sanders (Jacobin)
“The gold rush mentality associated with expansion is taken by the new frontiersmen as permission to break the rules, and to build wealth at the expense of everyone else. In 1840s California, gold miners trespassed on public lands and yet were allowed to stake private claims to the minerals they found, and even to exploit the water rights on those lands. Again today, the game is to push the boundaries on what rule-breaking society will accept, and hope that the legal system can’t keep up.”
“Modern frontier AI models are trained using data, often copyrighted materials, with dubious legal justification. Data is like water for AI, and, like the fight over water rights in the West, we are repeating a familiar process of public acquiescence to private use of resources. While some lawsuits are pending, so far AI companies have faced no significant penalties for the unauthorized use of this data.”
“The inaction of Congress on AI regulation threatens to land the US in a regime of de facto American exceptionalism for AI. While the EU is about to pass its comprehensive AI Act , lobbyists in the US have muddled legislative action. While the Biden administration has used its executive authority and federal purchasing power to exert some limited control over AI, the gap left by lack of legislation leaves AI in the US looking like the Wild West — a largely unregulated frontier.”
“The potential of consumer applications of AI, from personal digital assistants to self-driving cars, is irresistible; who wouldn’t want a machine to take on the most routinized and aggravating tasks in your daily life?”
Jesus Christ. That’s not what they’re for.
“We don’t have to cede all the power and decision making about AI to private actors. We can create an AI public option to provide an alternative to corporate AI. We can provide universal access to ethically built and democratically governed foundational AI models that any individual — or company — could use and build upon.”
Sounds nice. We are in the darkest timeline, though.
“More ambitiously, we can choose not to privatize the economic gains of AI. We can cap corporate profits, raise the minimum wage, or redistribute an automation dividend as a universal basic income to let everyone share in the benefits of the AI revolution. And, if these technologies save as much labor as companies say they do, maybe we can also all have some of that time back.”
“And we don’t have to treat the global AI gold rush as a zero-sum game. We can emphasize international cooperation instead of competition. We can align on shared values with international partners and create a global floor for responsible regulation of AI. And we can ensure that access to AI uplifts developing economies instead of further marginalizing them.”
“Wherever you fall on the spectrum of AI conversation, one thing is clear: we must all equip ourselves with new critical thinking skills.”
Such a broad statement. It’s true generally, I think.
The Growing Environmental Footprint Of Generative AI by David Berreby (Undark)
“Two months after its release in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had 100 million active users, and suddenly tech corporations were racing to offer the public more “generative AI.” Pundits compared the new technology’s impact to the Internet, or electrification, or the Industrial Revolution — or the discovery of fire.”
“[…] the European Union’s “AI Act,” approved by member states last week, will require “high-risk AI systems” (which include the powerful “foundation models” that power ChatGPT and similar AIs) to report their energy consumption, resource use, and other impacts throughout their systems’ lifecycle. The EU law takes effect next year.”
“AI can run on many devices — the simple AI that autocorrects text messages will run on a smartphone. But the kind of AI people most want to use is too big for most personal devices, Dodge said. “The models that are able to write a poem for you, or draft an email, those are very large,” he said. “Size is vital for them to have those capabilities.””
But is that an efficient use of the energy? To use such large models to write a paragraph in an email? Do we even care anymore? About anything that offers a scintilla of convenience?
“One reflection of that efficiency improvement: as AI usage has increased since 2019, its percentage of Google data-center energy use has held at less than 15 percent. And while global internet traffic has increased more than twentyfold since 2010, the share of the world’s electricity used by data centers and networks increased far less, according to the IEA.”
““Jevons paradox”: Making a resource less costly sometimes increases its consumption in the long run. “It’s a rebound effect,” Ren said. “You make the freeway wider, people use less fuel because traffic moves faster, but then you get more cars coming in. You get more fuel consumption than before.” If home heating is 40 percent more efficient due to AI, one critic recently wrote, people could end up keeping their homes warmer for more hours of the day.”
Critical Thinking in an AI-Powered World by Khalid Abuhakmeh (JetBrains .NET Tools Blog)
“Most LLMs have settled on a chat interface with a feedback loop designed to refine a particular task set by the user further.”
Wait, what? Did you write this with an AI? I had to read that sentence three times.
“Models typically have three distinguishing factors: Tokens, number of parameters, and training dataset cutoff dates.”
“[…] more isn’t always necessarily better, as a smaller model trained for a specific use case may outperform a more extensive model on task results and time taken to respond.”
“This solution is good, but you should immediately become skeptical whenever you see numbers in a response. Ask yourself the following questions: Do I understand what the mathematics are doing? Are the values correct or precise enough for my use case?”
This is so far from TDD that I don’t even know what to say. This is an improvement only for the most junior and process-free of programmers.
“Next, you’ll notice that the value of 9.8 is not that precise. Let’s continue our chat session with the prompt: “Set the value of Gravity to Earth’s gravity up to four decimal places of precision” .”
Why the heck would you write all that? So you can say you wasted time getting an AI to write it? I still haven’t seen an example that’s not faster with a web search. You’re going to have to verify the answer with a Wikipedia check anyway.
“I use the prompt: “Comment each line with valuable information that explains what’s happening” . It makes a detailed description easier for a layman like me to follow.”
Great. Superfluous comments instead of clean code. If you understood the code, you’d use methods instead of comments. That is, people who know what AI can do have figured out how to ask it for help that it can give, but we have to consider whether that’s the kind of help that we want.
Comments can become obsolete. Comments are usually not automatically refactored. It’s considered better practice to use sub-methods that describe what’s happening instead.
For example:
public bool DoSomethingCool(string textCode)
{
if (textCode.IndexOfAny([',', ';', '.', ' ', '\t']) != -1)
{
return textCode.ToUpper() == textCode;
}
return false;
}
I would refactor this to something like the following:
private static bool ConformsToISO7546(string textCode)
{
return HasKnownSeparator() && IsCorrectCase();
bool HasKnownSeparator() => textCode.IndexOfAny([',', ';', '.', ' ', '\t']) != -1;
bool IsCorrectCase() => textCode.ToUpper() == textCode;
}
AI-supported code kind of gets there, but you have to carry it part of the way. On the other hand, the IDE tools offer exactly what you need, each step of the way.
“Writing clear and concise instructions for the first time is challenging. You’ll likely have to iterate in a session to find an acceptable solution. You should always be skeptical about numbers . Values could need more precision or be wrong. Refactor any or all constants into variables with meaningful names for a clearer understanding of the code. Make sure mathematical equations are accurate. You can check this using other sources and the JetBrains AI Assistant to find problems. Asking the AI Assistant to comment on lines within complex methods can help you better understand the steps in a method.”
This is a contrived example that illustrates the limits of AI—it’s a gimmick—by what it doesn’t attempt. It can write code that you’re unlikely to ever need. I find it also suspicious that they recommend writing comments to explain code—because you should always check what the AI has generated. But how can you check it if you don’t understand the code yourself? I would be careful with that.
Published by marco on 4. Mar 2024 21:50:53 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
Mr. Popper (Jim Carrey) is a dealmaker for a large, financial company. His ex-wife is Amanda (Carla Gugino), but they seem to be amicably divorced. His father is an explorer who was never home. At the beginning of the film, we see him communicating by radio with his father, who was never at home. He dies early in the film, leaving his now-grown son Tommy his worldly possessions.
One of these is, apparently, a penguin. He leaves it in the bathtub, as he’s on his way out to negotiate for the purchase of Tavern on the Green. He meets the current owner Mrs. Van Gundy (Angela Lansbury), who is not impressed with him and his oily salesman persona and tells him that the restaurant is not for sale.
He gets home to discover that his penguin has flooded the bathroom. He tries to get rid of it, but no-one wants to take it off his hands. He tries to free it down the hall, but the building doorman makes him take it back. His family arrives for his son’s birthday—and his son assumes that the penguins are his birthday present. Nat Jones (Clark Gregg) shows up from the zoo, to take the one penguin away. He’s delighted to see that there are six or them now—Gentoos. He says that the penguins should be in ice and snow, with a lot of fish.
His assistant Pippi (Ophelia Lovibond) has a P-based alliterative issue and is on the case to help him take care of the penguins, as he doesn’t want to give them back yet, as he’s getting closer to his kids through the penguins. He’s also getting closer to his ex-wife again. None of this is surprising. Jim Carrey lends the film more credibility than it would otherwise have.
He goes to the Guggenheim to meet Mrs. Van Gundy at a showing. The penguins escape the apartment and track him down to the museum, where they wreak havoc, finally finding “Dad.”
Next up is penguin eggs. Ex-wife Amanda comes over with her man Rick, who immediately flees the penguins. Popper and Amanda are hitting it off and he asks her out to dinner. They go to Tavern on the Green, where he’s also to meet Van Gundy. They go skating afterward—in the Trump skating rink.
Popper slowly gives over his entire life to the penguins. He leaves the doors open on his apartment, he shovels snow in, sets up nests for the eggs, and has basically converted the whole place into a penguin exhibit. One of the eggs hasn’t hatched yet. He sets up a hatching area outside, where he continues to watch over it. His bosses come by to discover his madness and summarily fire him.
He gets Nat Jones to come over to look at the egg. Nat pronounces the hatchling dead. Popper shows up at the office the next morning, pretending that he still works there. They’ll take him back because he’s managed to squeeze Van Gundy into complying with a sale. He has to break it to his kids that the penguins are gone. They take it super-well. The plot is as thin and transparent here as, well, as a sheet of ice. He goes back to the bad way he was, his ungrateful kids hate him again—when he stops delivering, they stop loving—and his ex-wife draws away again, exhibiting the same level of care for him that his kids do.
They go to the zoo, where they are told that they can’t get the penguins back because they’re being traded away, three to Washington, three somewhere else, and the chicks to Dubai. They break out the penguins, then head for Tavern on the Green. Everything works out for everybody. They take the penguins to Antartica. The End.
Look, it’s a kid’s movie. It’s not for me, as I found some of the messaging too coarse, but maybe that’s what kids understand? I don’t know. It felt manipulative. It’s a chicken-and-egg question: is this movie what kids respond to naturally? Or is this movie what kids have been trained to respond to by other movies like this? Hard to say.
This mockumentary is just as cringe-y as you imagine it would be, given Gervais’s proclivities when in the role of David Brent. We catch up with him at his new job in sales at Lavichem, a company that sells feminine hygiene products. It is supposed to be almost 15 years later and he’s not changed one bit. None of the men at this new office like him—they find him sophomoric—except for maybe Nigel (Tom Bennett). Pauline (Jo Hartley) inexplicably has a crush on him (she lives right across the road from him), while office secretary Karen (Mandeep Dhillon) admits to finding him kind of funny and spontaneous.
He’s not in the office for long, as he’s heading out on the road with his band, Foregone Conclusion 2. It’s not really a band: it’s a bunch of studio musicians who he’s paying to play with him. He’s also paying the sound engineer Dan Harvey (Tom Basden) twice his usual wages. Not only that, but Brent takes two weeks of unpaid leave, cashes in his pension, and has only eight dates lined up for the three-week “tour”. Tour is in quotation marks because all of the gigs are within easy driving distance of Brent’s home. He has spared no expense, though: he’s rented a giant tour bus and puts up the band in hotels every night. In return, they refuse to socialize with him at all. They won’t even let him on his own bus; instead, he follows along in his car.
Before he leaves, he gets a pick-me-up from his therapist Dr. Keating (Nina Sosanya), whose advice he completely disregards.
David’s sort-of actual friend Dom—who’s a young and aspiring and actually quite-talented rapper—is also on tour with them. Brent’s voice is actually surprisingly good and his music doesn’t actually suck, even if it’s not 100% my cup of tea.
It gets more and more mortifying, as Brent continues with his shows. There’s a signature song about “disableds.”
“♪ Oh, please don’t make fun of the disableds
♪ There’s nothing funny about those
♪ Whether mental in the head
♪ Or mental in the legs
♪ Please be kind To the ones with feeble minds
♪ Help the awkward through a door
♪ Hold their hand
♪ If they’ve got one, understand
♪ You might have to feed
♪ The worst ones
♪ Through a straw
♪ It’s basically a head on a pillow
♪ Head on a pillow Head on a pillow”
He doesn’t stop trying to “support” minority groups. He tries out a song about Native Americans.
“♪ Oh, oh, your red heart rages
♪ Cut down, burned out And put in cages
♪ You came in peace Held up your hand
♪ How ✋
♪ We cut it off And we stole your land
♪ Oh, oh, Native American
♪ Soar like an eagle Sit like a pelican
♪ Oh, oh, don’t call us Indians
♪ We’re more like West Eurasians crossed with Siberians ♪”
No-one’s coming to the shows. They’re hemorrhaging money, but Brent’s only solution is to double down, to spend more. He’s only barely aware that it’s self-destructive, that it’s pathetic, that he’s not getting out of it what he wanted, despite how often he tells himself that he is. He engages the services of publicist Briony Jones (Diane Morgan), who gets him into a photo shoot, which honestly goes a lot better than expected.
She wonders why he hasn’t got any tattoos, which is a mean thing to say to David because, of course, he goes right out to get one. He faints before it’s half-done and leaves with the word “Berk” on his upper arm. In England, being a berk is synonymous with being a cunt. This is in keeping with his green rooms being constantly labeled as “David Bent” (where “bent” means homosexual in England).
Now he’s got one more person in his crew that he has to pay to be there. No-one wants to even have a drink with him. They’re only there for the money. He has to pay them to have a beer with him after the show. £25.- per person—and he has to pay for drinks. They’re all also hooking up, which is a bonus, but makes him jealous.
This is starting to get him down,
“David: What are you doing?
Briony: Getting off with a bloke.
David: What did you think of the gig?
Briony: I didn’t see it. I was getting off…
David: You were getting off with a bloke. Yeah, sure.
David: Good, innit?
David: Paying them… to get off with people.
David: It’s a new job description, innit?
David: [SIGHS]
All aboard.”
He does karate by himself to warm up. He thinks it’s cool. He’s terrible with people, but with women, he’s extra-terrible. Desperate, he picks up two ladies from the ATM behind the club. They’re only interested in him because he can offer a roof over the heads. They’re not groupie material, but he makes do. They plunder the mini-fridge, racking up exorbitant fees for booze and chocolate—2 mini-bottles of “Champagne” at £25 apiece. Only one overnights, although nothing happens. She was just happy for a lie-in and a bath.
He finally gets a record company to send someone to a show. This is exciting for him—his big break is imminent. They hate him, of course, but they seem intrigued by Dom’s rapping. It’s a shame because Brent isn’t that bad! His lyrics are bizarre, but his voice is good and the arrangement isn’t bad. After the show, the band is forced to show up for a beer with him. This is as painful as you can imagine. They leave quickly, downing their free beers and taking their 25 quid for five minutes’ work. Dom isn’t allowed to leave. We see him guiding a plastered Brent home at the end of the evening. “You’re my n*gga” “David, you can’t say that.”
The next show is a battle of the bands. The bands go in reverse order of number of people they got to come see them. Foregone Conclusion got two people. They’re on first. They play Native American. Afterward, Dom jumps in for a band that hasn’t shown up, playing one of his own songs. He’s an immediate hit. The record agents show up and give him their card. David tries really hard to hide his jealousy, but he’s utterly unsuccessful. They’re still sharing a room.
The next morning, Brent enjoys a day off. Dan comes up to tell him that the snow for his Christmas song on his last show is going to cost £1,500. He begs him not to pay for it. But David had his heart set on the snow. It’s all lost money anyway. He’s down £20k when he’d expected to be down only about £8k—and had hoped to get a recording contract out of it. They bond a bit; Dan tells him that he likes David as he is, when he’s not pretending to be someone else.
They play the Christmas song at the last show.
“♪ Don’t cry, it’s Christmas Santa’s feeling fine
♪ Though you know you’ll never see him
♪ He’s not just in your mind
♪ And it’s not that he’s invisible It’s because you’re going blind
♪ But don’t cry, it’s Christmas Santa’s feeling fine
♪ Though he’s got a billion children He’s only got one day
♪ You’ve got slightly less than that If I were you I’d pray
♪ But don’t cry, it’s Christmas
♪ Everything’s okay”
It snows. Dan paid for it.
David Brent sums up the tour as a life experience for himself.
“I don’t need to be a rock star, you know? That’s just something I enjoy doing. I can live without being “a success.” [chuckles] But, um… I couldn’t have lived without trying. And I did that.
“So… And everything works out, doesn’t it? You think you want one thing along the way, and then you realise you needed something else. Life’s a struggle… with little beautiful surprises that make you wanna carry on through all the shit to the next little beautiful surprise.
“[chuckles]
“So, yeah, all good.”
He’s back in the office. He’s telling Nigel what a great time he had, how he could do it all again. He tells him that Dom has gotten a record deal because of him (David). The goons at the office start in on him again, but Pauline’s not having it—she throws water all over their ringleader, shutting it all down. David’s got a free-coffee coupon. Two, in fact. They head out for coffee. Her hand grabs his just as the curtain falls.
“♪ I was looking up to heaven
♪ It was right under my nose
♪ I had travelled many light years
♪ It was right across the road
♪ A billion trillion grains of stardust
♪ Floating round in space
♪ Two of them collided
♪ In an ordinary place
♪ We are electricity
♪ We will never die
♪ We’ll just burn and burst
♪ And return to the sky”
Look, You’re going to have to brace yourself for Gervais’s cringe comedy—his ingratiating half-laugh is particularly off-putting and grating—but it’s worth it. It’s a heartwarming tale, in the end. I changed my rating from a 6 to an 8 in the last 15 minutes.
Locke (Boyd Holbrook) is a Philadelphia police officer. In 1988, a wave of mysterious killings sweep the city in one night. He’s not a detective yet, but he and his partner Maddox (Bokeem Woodbine) are given grudging leeway by his brother-in-law Detective Holt (Michael C. Hall), so they snoop around various crime scenes. They help figure out that all of the victims have a common three-dot mark on the back of their necks. They seem to have been injected with an unknown compound. They catch a break when one of the victims is still temporarily alive and describes her assailant as a black woman in a blue hoodie (Cleopatra Coleman).
After some misdirection and a foot chase, Maddox and Locke have trapped her in a subway station. She’s quite a fighter, though, and drops Maddox like a bad habit, breaking his leg. After finding what looks like a weapon with three needles on the end of it, Locke catches up to her on a lower subway platform, where she confronts him, addressing him by name and telling him things about himself that she couldn’t possibly know, like that his wife Jean (Rachel Keller) is pregnant and will give birth that day. She also predicts her own death. They tussle but, as with Maddox, she easily gets the best of him, cuffing him to a bench with his own handcuffs. He shoots her with her own weapon, blowing her back into the path of an oncoming train.
His daughter Amy is born, but wife Jean dies in childbirth. Nine years later, it is Amy’s (Quincy Kirkwood) birthday. Locke has promised to take her to the zoo to see the bears. They’re diurnal. They have to go in the morning. You know what they say about the best-laid plans. A supposed copycat killer has appeared. The police suspect it’s a demonstrator from the crowd of people who’ve never believed the official story of what had happened that night nine years ago.
Maddox and Locke, now detectives, open the case again, this time sifting more carefully through the evidence. One piece is a set of keys they’d gotten off of the killer’s corpse, keys which turn out to be made for a model of plane that wouldn’t come on the market until one year ago—that is, eight years after they’d been collected. Physicist Naveen Rao (Rudi Dharmalingam) tries to convince them that the case has something to do with time travel, caused by the odd perigee of the super moon. They of course summarily ignore this wacko.
Locke tracks the killer down to a small airport where she gets the drop on him and ties him up. She’s actually alive and is still the same age. Locke manages to call Maddox. When he arrives, he thinks he’s gotten the drop on the killer, but she spins and shoots him right in the face with her shotgun. Maddox dies immediately. She knocks out Locke and drags him onto a small plane. When he wakes, she tells him more about himself and his family, as well as how she can return once every nine years because of the moon. She throws him out over the water. He swims to shore to find the crashed plane the next morning.
It’s now 2006. Locke is no longer on the squad. He drinks. He’s obsessed with cracking the case. He thinks it involves time travel. Amy lives with her uncle (Lt. Hart). Locke discovers another victim, who was involved in the nascent beginnings of a hardcore “patriot” movement. Locke starts to suspect that the killer is moving backwards through time. He manages to track her, she leads him on a chase—she on a motorcycle, he in a truck—to a pipe opening off of a beach. He crawls in after her to discover her in what is almost certainly a time machine, slowly filling with water—it looks very much like the inter-timeline-travel device from The Leftovers—just before it disappears. Locke is arrested by a distraught Hart as he exits the tunnel again. Rao watches from above.
It’s 2015, nine years later. Locke doesn’t look much different: he’s more worn around the edges, his hair a bit longer, his beard a little more ragged. Rao kidnaps him and reveals that he knows about the killer’s plan, but that he approves wholeheartedly. It sounds like a cult. They’re killing people, but for a good purpose, to prevent the deaths of millions of others. Locke crashes Rao’s truck. Rao begs him not to interfere. Locke escapes back to the beach. Rao sounds crazy, but he would, wouldn’t he?
Locke confronts the killer as she emerges from her pipe, nine years later, right on schedule. The killer reveals herself to be Rya, his granddaughter. She says that Locke is the one who chose her for this mission in the first place. It’s that important. We watch as Rao triggers the devices throughout the past to kill the key people who would be involved in executing the civil war that would sweep the U.S. into a century of darkness. They’ve changed the past. Back in 2015, Locke is finally able to relax and reunite with his family—and his brand-new granddaughter Rya—because he knows that not only could he not have stopped what happened in 1988 and 1995—he no longer wants to.
It actually works better on screen than it did on paper, mostly because of Boyd Holbrook. I gave it an extra star for being well-made, for Boyd, and for suspending my disbelief until after the movie was over. It was a nice story, even if some of the details were papered over
E,g., how does the time machine work? Why does it only work every nine years? What does this have to do with the moon? Lots of loose ends, but they don’t matter. The story is about Locke.
She’s still going strong with her third one-hour special. It was a bit of an uneven start, but the second and final thirds were great. I pulled a bunch of quotes from Taylor Tomlinson: Have it All (2024) | Transcript (Scraps from the Loft). Taylor’s on-stage—and perhaps off-stage; it doesn’t matter—persona is that she has anxiety, an inferiority complex, and is terrible at being single because she’s terrible at dating. She’s spent a year alone and it’s been one of the best years of her life. She talks about anxiety, therapy, sleep disorders, married friends, men, women, her childhood, her parents, her neuroses.
“That got me to sixth grade, when I met my friend Krista, and she was pretty, funny, smart, and nice. And that’s when I stopped believing in God.”
“[…] I was like, “Nobody has every single thing going for them as a person. You have been so blessed. Be grateful for what you have. Focus on that. Nobody gets to have it all.”
“And then I saw Hugh Jackman in person.
“I was like, “I guess you can have it all. But there’s none left because ‘God’ gave it all to Hugh.””
“The next time you see your parents, they’re all smug, like, “Jason seemed to like us.”
“You’re like, “I know what you’re doing.”
““Maybe your therapist wants to meet us. Get our side of the story.”
““I cannot wait till you’re in the ground.”
““All right, well, we’d like to be cremated.”
““I will scatter your ashes where God can’t find them!””
“I know how to get men to like me. Easy. You trick ’em.
“Just wait until they kind of like you, and then you’re like, “You don’t like me.” They’re like, “Yeah, I do.”
““You don’t.”
““Yeah, I do.”
“You’re like, “No, you don’t.”
““I do!”
“You do that until they get you pregnant, I think.
“You just turn it into a fun challenge for ’em.
““Bet you can’t spend your life with me.”
“They’re like, “Fucking watch me, you bitch!”
“Like when you ask a kid to take out the trash, and they’re like, “No!”
“And you’re like, “I’ll time you.”
“And he’s like… [gasps]
““See? You didn’t even think you wanted to do that.”
“He’s like, “Who cares? I’m the fastest boy alive.”
“Hitting on women is so much harder. It feels so much more delicate.
“Hitting on a woman feels like trying to skip a stone on a lake.
“Hitting on a man feels like throwing a brick through a window.
“Like, “I don’t really care. I just want to see what happens.”
““I’m not gonna live here.”
“I might be sexist.
“I’m hearing it now as I’m talking.”
“I said, “Any advice for people in relationships who are fighting a lot?”
“They said, “We do.”
““You know how a lot of people have a safe word to stop sex?”
““Everyone needs to have a safe word during fights.”
“I asked a married friend, “Do you have a safe word for fights?”
“He was like, “What?” I’m like, “A word that stops the fight.”
“He goes, “We have one.”
“I said, “What is it?”
“He goes, “Cunt.”
“[audience laughing, wincing]
““But I have to say it. It doesn’t really work if she says it.””
“You know what’s funny about TikTok?
“These kids are like lip-syncing, dancing, pretending they’re in a music video.
“We all did that growing up, didn’t we?
“Yeah! Alone in your room in the mirror, hairbrush. Of course.
“But if anyone had walked in on you doing it, you would’ve killed yourself, right?
“[laughter, applause]
“And these kids are online like, “I hope millions of people see this.”
“It’s like, “You could benefit from some bullying, I think.”
““Might’ve… overcorrected a bit.””
“Like, I know that all of my friends both pity and envy me.
“Just like I know that I both pity and envy them, right?
“I know my friends look at me and go, “I’d probably focus on work if I was all alone.”
“And I go, “I’d probably have a bunch of kids if I had no talent.””
In 1928, an explorer (Keanu Reeves) encounters a glowing sphere. In the present day, a fast-moving object approaches Earth and lands in New York City. Scientists are mobilized from all over America. Among them is Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), an expert in exobiology, who is recruited by an old colleague Michael Granier (Jon Hamm). The ship ejects Klatu (Keanu Reeves) and a giant robot that defends him when the first thing that people do is to to shoot Klatu. He recovers.
They begin to interrogate him. The U.S. Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates) wants to put him in his place when he looks askance at her, telling her she doesn’t speak for the world. He wants to talk to the world.. He has a message for them. He has a message for Earth, for humanity. The planet does not belong to them.
Klatu escapes with Helen. The military attacks the giant robot, which is still standing in Central Park next to the spaceship. As they travel, Helen’s boy says that we should kill all of the aliens, just to be sure. Klatu listens very carefully. He is there to save the Earth from its judgment, rendered by another alliance of aliens. He speaks to an alien (James Hong) who’s lived on the planet for 70 years, who thinks humanity is more destructive than peaceful, that the empathetic strains are too few and too powerless against the mindless violence inherent in the species.
Klatu communes with one of the many alien spheres that appear all over the world. His robot is captured by the U.S. military, but it feels very much like the robot has them right where it wants them. They can’t dig into its carapace. Meanwhile, Helen and Klatu visit with Professor Barnhardt (John Cleese), who tries to bargain with Klatu, saying that it is on the precipice that civilizations learn how to behave themselves.
Her little shit of a kid calls the military on them all, so that the military can kill Klatu—because “that’s what his dad would have done.” The child is insufferable—but I feel like he’s a stand-in for the adolescence of humanity. He gets his mom kidnapped. Klatu crashes the remaining helicopters. The U.S. military, in the person of Kathy Bates, claims that “we have the situation under control.” The shit kid is left with Klatu, and we’re treated to a few painful scene of child-acting. People seem to love that shit.
The robot releases nanobots from its skin that eat into the restraints and will soon free it. The U.S. military—already outmatched by every group of ragtag fighters on the planet—is also outmatched by an incredibly advanced alien technology. The entire robot breaks down into a giant cloud of nanobots. They blow the door down and escape the underground facility. The military shoots its guns and rockets at it. This is a 💯 accurate representation of how the U.S. military would react.
The nanobots-eating-everything effects are pretty good. The Secretary of Defense is forced to let Helen go so that she can try to convince Klatu not to destroy the planet. The child tells Klatu that he didn’t mean it when he said he thought Klatu should be killed. This is a bald-faced lie. The child is the conniving personification of all of humanity. He wants to kill Klatu until he needs Klatu to help him survive the woods. Then, he realizes that he could try to get Klatu to resurrect his father. He is 100% focused on himself. This is fine for a child, but not ok for humanity. This is the reason that humanity deserves to be destroyed. Because it cannot behave in any way other than the self-serving conniving of a child.
There’s a bunch of hugging and crying when Helen and the child reunite, but it convinces Klatu. That whole shitty scene showed the alien that humans can change. Seriously? Hadn’t they actual seen human interactions before? Didn’t he just have a conversation with the old Chinese man about how he’d fallen in love with humanity? Anyway, the nanobots continue streaming over the planet. The U.S. president is probably gonna start nuking stuff. This is also 💯 accurate.
They let Klatu, Helen, and Granier’s car through, but only so they could bomb it. This was definitely counterproductive. The nanobots start attacking the car. They’re in Central Park. The nanobots envelop the sphere. Granier is dead. The fucking child gets infected with nanobots. The number-one priority is now to save the fucking child instead of the planet. Why? Because his mommy asked you to. You know what? That tracks. Klatu absorbs the nanobots into his own human body.
He says, “your professor was right. At the precipice, we change.” Keanu Reeves strides into the nanobot storm with his frail human carapace. He touches the sphere. A shock wave expands outward. An EMP. The nanobots fall like hail. The grid shuts down as the EMP rolls around the planet. Everything is still. This is the price for stopping the attack. This is the change of which Klatu spoke.
I watched it in English with French subtitles.
Scott Voss (Kevin James) is a shitty biology teacher, who’s skating through his high-school teaching career. He’s kind of friends with music teacher Marty Streb (Henry Winkler). He keeps hitting on nurse Bella Flores (Salma Hayek). He’s at odds with Principal Betcher (Greg Germann), who’s a pencil-necked dick of an administrator. Betcher decides to cut Marty’s job, but Voss jumps up to defend him, promising that he’ll get the $48,000 for Marty’s salary.
He goes to his brother Eric (Gary Valentine), but he’s got no work for him. So he starts teaching a citizenship class. One of his students is Niko (Bas Rutten), whom he starts tutoring. Niko’s a former UFC fighter who runs an MMA school. Voss gets the idea to start fighting UFC to make big money. He tries to quit the teaching the citizenship class.
He gets knocked out in his first fight. His second fight goes better and he gets out with a tie. His wins his third fight in the third round with an out-of-the-blue haymaker. He continues training with Niko, with his corner-man Marty. Niko keeps training him, but can’t teach him offense. He takes him to Mark DellaGrotte for more training. Scott dislocates his shoulder. He goes to Bella’s house for treatment because he can’t afford the hospital. She’s in cute pajama pants, clambers all over him to get leverage, and yanks his arm back into place.
Principal Betcher tries to dress him down, but Voss gets the advantage and gets Malia’s (Jake Zyrus) father (Reggie Lee) on his side. Voss starts teaching for real again. Malia starts tutoring Niko while Voss carries Marty up and down the bleachers. He keeps fighting, winning some, getting better. Joe Rogan’s in the crowd for a cameo. Bella finally agrees to let him cook for her. He gets his brother Eric to cook for him. He’s quite a chef, but he can’t pursue his career because his painting and his big family take all of his time. Bella doesn’t believe that he cooked it, but it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t understand why he gives up in some fights, so he tries to show her an arm-bar, but she punches him in the head, then jumps him and tackles him to the ground. It’s a cute scene, but it ends there. This movie has no right being this genuine.
DellaGrotte tells him that Rogan called to have Voss fight in the UFC. Niko turns it down because he says it’s too dangerous. But when Voss asks him about it, Niko confesses that he’s jealous because he never got his real shot because he messed up his leg. He’s jealous because he’s the same age, but he could kick Voss’s ass. They hug it out, meet with Rogan, and head to Vegas.
Oh, and Voss gets his awesome chef of a brother to help out in Malia’s dad’s restaurant, fixing that problem as well. It’s cliché, but it’s quite well-done. They also do killer montages, with pretty good fight-training choreography. They’re in Vegas. The school band shows up to play his song. Rogan flew them in. Malia’s got pipes.
The fight begins. His opponent Dietrich (Krzysztof Soszynski) is built like a brick shithouse. He doesn’t touch gloves because he doesn’t think Voss deserves to be in the UFC. He was promised a better card. He does some damage in the first round, but Voss survives. The second round doesn’t go better, but Voss survives. Marty gives him a pep talk. Voss comes out swinging, and fights Dietrich to a standstill. They end up clinched; Dietrich gets an arm bar, but Voss reestablishes his grip; Voss picks him up and drops him, knocking him out.
Voss wins. Marty’s job is saved. Bella kisses him. The end.
This movie was so much better than it had any right to be. Hayek, Winkler, James, Ruttan, Malia—everyone really shone. It’s surprisingly a solid eight overall, but a nine for its genre. Would watch again.
I stand by my review from 2017. Actually that review is pretty meager, but we’ll let it stand. This movie is visually fantastic, stylish as hell, has fantastic fight choreography, and has a fantastic soundtrack. Charlize Theron is fantastic. So is James McAvoy.
The movie’s set just before the Berlin Wall comes down. It’s directed as about 15 80s music videos.
I watched it in Italian (with some Russian and German) with Italian subtitles this time.
It’s family-spaghetti night and Rick is serving up what the family is lovin’! Morty ruins it all by finding out that the spaghetti comes from another planet, where people who commit suicide end up filled with tasty bolognese. This makes the family conflicted because, well, it’s still so good. To be honest, they don’t stay conflicted for very long.
Back on the other planet, Morty reveals to the family of the deceased what they did with their loved one’s body. The president of the planet sees a business opportunity and starts to make their society over to an exporter of bolognese. Of course, they need to promote suicide, so the planet goes right in the shitter so that there is enough supply.
Rick is engaged to fix all this. He industrializes suicide and ends up breeding clones that have only enough sentience and more than enough misery to be able to kill themselves as soon as they realize what they are. This is sufficient to generate the level of cortisol required to generate the delicious bolognese. The clones have one limb, capable of grasping a pick with which they kill themselves.
The factory looks very much like a meatpacking plant. The clones look like over-breasted chickens. The message isn’t super-subtle, but it’s devastatingly effective. There is no excuse for eating animals. Eventually, though, the president wants Rick to fix things for good, whereupon he creates an intergalactic broadcast showing the uniqueness, wonder, and humble glory of a life lived well, a life lived by a being. It is so effective that people are put off of eating bolognese-filled aliens.
The Smiths switch to Salisbury Steaks, but they no longer want to know where it comes from. They’ve learned their lesson. The wrong lesson, as usual, but hey, they’re the mirror that Harmon holds up to the world. It’s a pity that Peter Singer probably doesn’t watch Rick & Morty because he would have been touched, I think.
Their adventures having made them jaded and nearly impossible to scare, Rick and Morty are given the chance to face a fear that they can’t just shrug off. It’s a hole located in a Denny’s bathroom. It looks like hole that Rey sees in her Jedi visions, with seaweed-like, black, glistening tentacles rising up around its entire circumference.
Rick says it’s a gimmick, and walks away. So does Morty at first. He returns nearly immediately to jump in and face his fears. Rick reluctantly follows and rescues him from the monsters there. They emerge, pumped that they’ve faced their fears, and return home. At home, they realize that things are awry, and that they’re still in the hole. After “escaping” once or twice, they’re much more leery about believing that they’ve truly escaped the Fear Hole and walk around on tenterhooks, fully expecting to learn, at any moment, that they’re in a simulacrum constructed by the Fear Hole. They could grow old and die and still not be sure.
Rick’s dead wife Diane appears and Rick is actually happy. He looks sallow and drained, but he’s happy with Diane. He must suspect that the they’re still in the hole and that it’s feeding on him, but he doesn’t care. After a while, Morty hears Rick say that he thinks that Morty is irreplaceable, which is something that Morty knows Rick would never say. He realizes that, not only are they still in the Fear Hole, but that he’s actually in there alone because Rick had never jumped in after him.
His true fear is that Rick might leave him. The hole begins to drain Morty. That’s still not his true fear, though. Several times, he thinks he’s figured it out and escaped the Fear Hole, only to realize that he’s still in it. Eventually, it clicks, and he’s out. The Hole works as advertised. Rick is tempted to jump in when he hears that Diane might be in there, but he walks away, pinning a polaroid of Morty on the “Fear Hole Conquerors” pinboard in the bathroom stall. This was a great episode.
This series has its moments, but they’re few and far between at first. It grows on you, though. It’s just right to have running as I’m working out, but I can’t imagine sitting down and just watching this show. It’s extremely slow-paced, to the point of induced ennui. The animation is reasonable to pretty good. Some of the religious, pseudo-philosophical discussions are kind of interesting, if not exactly illuminating. The voice-acting is extremely spotty, with accents tinged from seemingly everywhere.
This season picks up the story immediately after Dracula’s (Graham McTavish) death. There are a few main storylines. A quartet of female vampires—Carmilla (Jaime Murray), Striga (Ivana Milicevic), Morana (Yasmine Al Massri), and Lenore (Jessica Brown Findlay)—have taken over Dracula’s empire and have a “big scheme” to build an 800-mile wide corridor straight from the heart of Europe deep into the East. From this corridor, they’ll feed on both sides and rule forever. Or so the dream goes.
Forgemaster Hector (Theo James) has been imprisoned by them. He spends most of the season naked in a prison cell, being interrogated and tortured by Lenore. They chat a lot. Everyone chats a lot. There’s precious little fighting for long stretches, actually. Another forgemaster Isaac (Adetokumboh M’Cormack) is underway with a complement of night creatures. He charters a vessel from “the Captain” (Lance Reddick – I know! right?), who tries to teach Isaac that, while most people are bastards, there is enough good in humanity to warrant preserving it. If Isaac fulfills Dracula’s plan of eliminating every human, then all of that good would be wiped from the world, as well. They speak of Sufism and Islam.
Alucard is still in the Belmont Hold, not doing much of anything until he catches Sumi (Rila Fukushima) and Taka (Toru Uchikado) following him. They are two vampire-hunters from Japan who seek to destroy their own master Cho, an ancient she-devil of a vampire who’d been called away from her manse to fight by Dracula’s side.
Trevor Belmont (Richard Armitage) and Sypha Belnades (Alejandra Reynoso) have traveled to a village named Lindenfeld, where things are a bit…odd. There they meet Saint Germain (Bill Nighy – I know! right?), who concurs that things are odd, and that all of the oddness is related to the priory. The Judge (Jason Isaacs) concurs and engages their services to investigate. He tells of how a night creature had landed in the priory one night and, instead of killing everyone, had spoken to them in an unknown language. They now guard the place like a prison and no longer allow anyone in or out. Except for Saint Germain, who weasels his way inside to help them gain knowledge from the books that they’ve discarded and disdained as useless.
St. Germain reveals himself to Sypha as a Count, not a magician. He’s gained access to the priory in order to get to the Infinite Corridor, where he says he’d lost a “friend”. A dream of his soon reveals that this friend was a woman and that he’d last seen her in the multi-dimensional maze of the Corridor. She’d thrown him a stone by which he can find her, should he ever gain access again. The Corridor was quite nicely rendered, a bit like Inception, a bit like Dr. Strange. He’s back in the priory, investigating the books. He finds one on demonology; the drawings in it are great.
Isaac treks onward with his pack of night creatures. He discusses the past life of one called Flyseyes.
“Isaac: What do you remember?
“Flyseyes: I was a scholar.
“Isaac: Really?
“Flyseyes: I was. In a place called Athens. I think it was a long time ago.
“Isaac: What did you study?
“Flyseyes: I was a philosopher.
“Isaac: And this was a thing that sent you to Hell?
“Flyseyes: I lived as a man during a time when the empire that ruled Athens changed its religion and laws. I believed philosophy to be the study of the systems of the world and our purpose in it. And yet discussion of the nature of the divine became a crime.
“Isaac: Who declared this a crime?
“Flyseyes: Christians. To be a philosopher was a sin. And one important Christian was heard to say that the people should hunt down sinners and drive them into salvation, as a hunter drives its prey into traps.
“Isaac: To think about God would surely not be a sin in God’s eyes.
“Flyseyes: Perhaps. And yet… here I am.”
St. Germain, Belmont, and Sypha continue to investigate the priory. They find the night creature crucified in a deep basement, but seemingly willingly. It waits for something.
What it’s waiting for is for the town to be filled with the appropriate runes for it to summon a gateway to Hell. While the trio finish battling the monks guarding what’s left of the priory, two giant demons emerge from Hell, with Sypha and Belmont each taking one on. The gain the basement in time to witness the night creature in its final form, channeling fire into the hell-gate to summon thousands of smaller, flying demons. They continue to battle them.
At the same time, Lenore continues her subtle seduction of Hector, gaining enough of his confidence to get him to lay with her. There’s a bit of sexy-time that is absolutely rated-R. Hector is fully in her thrall as he pledges his allegiance to her. She slips a ring on his finger that expands into loops and coils that rise above him—Carnage-like—then plunge down into his flesh.
At the same time, Sumi and Taka have also been running a number on Alucard. They slip into his bedroom and there is more sexy-time—this time definitely rated-R. Alucard cries a bit because he thought he’d never be able to be close to anyone again (I guess). Once he’s been sexually subdued, the two bind him like a Christ figure on his own bed, enveloping him in what looks like silver bands that cut into his skin.
Isaac moves on to a city where a magician has taken over every single person’s mind. Each person wears an emerald crown made of, presumably, magic. Isaac orders his monsters to kill the people, but not to damage or eat them. He wants to build an army of night creatures. The magician in his tower directs his minions, making them fight cleverly enough to start taking out Isaac’s creatures, one by one.
There is attrition on the human side, as well, but they have overwhelming numbers—and fear nothing, as they are mentally dead inside. The magician’s minions have taken to the skies, as giant, clotted balls of people dropping onto his night creatures. Isaac summons a large creature to do battle with the largest ball.
Isaac gains the tower and climbs the spiral staircase inside. It is a long way up. As he climbs, the minions glom onto the sides of the tower, oozing through the windows, impeding his progress. He gains the upper floor to confront the magician. He is an old, crooked-toothed and quite insane-looking old man who chuckles madly, then throws a magic crown onto Isaac’s head. There is a struggle, but Isaac prevails, then crosses the room in several quick strides and guts the old man. His minions fall from the sky like ash.
In the basement of the priory, the night creature, fed by the souls of the townsfolk and transformed into a conduit keeps the Infinite Corridor open onto hell. The camera soars across plains and mountains until it locates a ruined church within which sit Dracula and his wife Lisa.
Belmont, Sypha, and St. Germain do battle with the demons below in an epic boss battle. The choreography and artwork are pretty nice. As Sypha and Belmont make room for him, St. Germain proves his prodigious magical powers by mastering the gate, then leaping on the main demon’s back to force it to redirect the gate—and to keep Dracula and his bride trapped in hell.
They climb back out of the crumbling priory to find that the judge is dead. They discover only later that he had a dark secret—he’d been killing naughty children for their misdeeds in his town. They leave the town in disgust, getting back on the open road, hunting vampires.
Meanwhile, Alucard, seeing that Sumi and Taka are somewhat obsessed with their being constantly betrayed, and are obsessed with getting what they think he’s not giving them—magic and a moving castle—gives them one last chance. Instead, they lean in to stab him, whereupon he mentally manipulates his giant sword—not that one—and slices their throats. After this betrayal, he retreats further into his misery, piking the two bodies outside his front door as a warning to the others.
Charlie (Idris Elba) is a struggling DJ living in London. He lives with his aunt and Del (Guz Khan) in a house owned by Charlie’s parents. He doesn’t have a steady income, but he pretends to be a successful businessman for his parents. They still live in Nigeria and own a house in London, but ask their successful son if he can spot them some cash for appliances and a new car—otherwise they’ll have to sell the house in London.
At a mutual friend’s wedding, Charlie learns that his childhood bestie David (JJ Feild) is moving back to London. David is wildly successful as a model and a TV/film star and is moving back to London to “tread the boards”. His wife Sara (Piper Perabo) is a major DJ with her own entourage/staff. Their daughter Gabrielle (Frankie Hervey) is a nightmare of a spoiled brat who can’t enjoy anything without someone suffering and has thus been broken utterly by her parents and their wealthy lifestyle.
When David gets a call for a reading, he leaves Gabrielle with Charlie, who’d only met her that day. They hit it off, of course. There is nothing surprising in the banter or behavior, but it’s Idris Elba, so it’s not as painful as it would otherwise be. It’s still kind of painful, though. Since Gabrielle drove off her most-recent nanny in a horrible incident, Sara and David hire Charlie as a nanny.
Charlie’s first official day as a nanny doesn’t go that well, as Gabriella is completely uncontrollable and demands attention from her parents, who are not able to give it. She connives her way to a club where he mother is performing, then sprays the crowd with a fire extinguisher when her mother doesn’t let her on stage, as she usual did. Charlie is helpless to stop her. David is livid, but he’s also pretty powerless. Charlie takes her to his Aunt Lydia’s (Jocelyn Jee Esien) for dinner, where the child is so rude that Auntie Lydia wanted to kill her.
Gabriella’s first day of school also goes terribly, with her completely unequipped to make actual friends rather than gather minions. She’s upset because her mother is working and doesn’t have time to take her to school. Instead, her father does it. The child has no empathy and can be said to be sociopathic and no fun to be around. People shy away from her, if not immediately, then after an initial interaction. There are a lot of other sociopaths at the school who are more than her match. She ends the day in the principal’s office, having a panic attack.
Neither of her parents answer the phone, so Charlie is called to pick her up. He was working in a community garden for Auntie Lydia. He brings her back there and the child expresses some contrition and seems to sincerely apologize for her behavior. Her parents immediately take her bowling and beg Charlie to come back, to take the job again. David and Charlie make up, as Charlie was mad at David for the things he’d told Gabriella, who had hatefully and hurtfully repeated them to Charlie.
Charlie patches things up because (A) he needs a job and (B) he wants to kick-start his career with the help of Sara’s studio, reputation, and chops. Sara is a supreme dipshit. Poor Piper Perabo kind of has the perfect what-people-are-supposed-to-think-is-hot vacuity for being a dumb-ass DJ, with dumb-ass, vapid friends. David is honestly no better—just an empty vessel. I can’t tell whether they mean for us to like them, despite their flaws, or to see their flaws as a condemnation of a society that would allow people like this to bubble to the top of it. Gabriella is just as terrible as ever, just bizarrely obnoxious and mean and petty all of the time. Her dialogue is like one, long esprit d’escalier by a roomful of writer nerds who never had the bon mot they needed when they were younger.
Gabriella sneaks out while Charlie’s working on his new song in the studio. One of Sara’s skank friends slithers by with an open robe and joint and his afternoon’s gone. Gabriella gets home with Hunter, her little, gay, criminal friend, to catch him in the sauna. She doesn’t care, though. They agree to defend each other’s secrets. Sara listens to Charlie’s song and approves.
David confides in Charlie that he’s got a great movie gig lined up, but he’s going to have to be away from home again. Charlie advises against it, as David needs to spend time with his daughter. David pretends that he needs to take the huge, million-dollar role in order to put food on the table, but Charlie rolls his eyes—he knows he’s just doing it for himself because he’s only mediocre at acting in the theater. David and Sara are already obscenely rich—especially for such a young couple—that neither of them needs to work a day in their lives again.
Charlie and Sara get to know each other better and grow closer during collaboration. David has a day with Gabriella, but she has her first period that day, throwing a bit of a spanner in the works. Sara treats David pretty poorly there, but maybe she has her reasons. He’s a bit of an idiot. Plus, they apparently cheated on each other already. I wasn’t really following all of it, if I’m honest. The setup of that backstory was ham-handed and awkward.
At any rate, David takes the movie role and jets off to Hollywood, leaving Sara, Gabriella, and Charlie to enjoy the summer in London. They go to a music festival, where Gabriella and Hunter (Cameron James-King) take off, leading Sara on a merry chase. She starts to panic, though, and then Gabriella really goes missing, losing her phone in a dancing crowd. Charlie knows where to find her, though, and he’s everyone’s hero. Sara plays her secret concert and premieres the song that she and Charlie had been working on. Sara’s manager Astrid’s (Angela Griffin) been banging him, but it’s pretty clear that Sara is seeing him as a “David substitute”, as is Gabriella, who just comes right out and says it. Charlie is smart enough to back off and books himself to Ibiza with a sleazy promoter.
Charlie’s in Ibiza, falling into his old habits: drinking, drugs, up all night, not working on his music, being shitty to the people around him, letting his giant ego get the best of him. He peaks early with his song, but without another song to back it up, fades from the Ibiza scene, then crashes out and has to work his way back up again, when he’s found humility and his creative muse again. Sara and Gabriella surprise him at a show, David having abandoned David them for a mind-cleansing retreat in LA. It’s not clear what there’s left to cleanse there.
Astrid is there, as well, offering to take Charlie on full-time—because she’s fallen for him and she’s bored with Sara’s devotion to family. She wants to party. She gets Charlie a great gig, but Charlie’s leery, aware that he could fall back into his old ways if he sticks with her. Sara is definitely sending all of the signals his way as well, but that also doesn’t seem like the greatest idea in the world. Charlie and Gabriella are getting along well, though.
So, instead of sleeping or working on his music, Charlie spends the entire night partying with Sara. They fall asleep on each other, drunk and high, on some patio furniture, after a racy game of FMK (Fuck, Marry, Kill). David surprises them the next morning, showing up from LA with flowers and …. a wedding proposal. Sara is less-than-thrilled, seeing the wedding proposal for the manipulation that it is when David lets the other shoe drop: he wants to move the family to South Africa, where he’s going to shoot his next movie. Sara is not having it, not ready to uproot Gabriella again.
David notices that Sara is infatuated with Charlie and throws out an ill-timed and unsuccessful ultimatum. David gets made at Charlie, but Charlie shrugs it off. Gabriella and Hunter bail. Astrid puts herself in the center of the show, making it clear for the hundredth time that all she cares about are partying, drugs, and sex—managing DJs is just a way of staying in that lifestyle. Charlie’s still got his gig—and Astrid’s offer still stands. David and Sara break up. Gabriella wants to stay in London. She confesses to Hunter that she wants Charlie to stay with them, not to travel the world. He tells her to go tell Charlie that.
At the show, Charlie’s crushing it, living the lifestyle. He confirms to Astrid that they should work together. Gabriella and Charlie chat a bit, but she can’t bring herself to tell him. She doesn’t want him to give up his dreams for her, I guess? Maybe? Or maybe he decides to stay, knowing why she’s there? We’ll never know. The show ended in ambiguity—and that’s probably the deftest move it made all season. This was a show with some good actors—Idris Elba, Guz Khan, and Jocelyn Jee Esien were quite good—but also depicted a world full of superficial, mostly terrible people. Eight episodes is a lot to be watching people like that. And Gabriella was annoying for the first 6.5 episodes, at least.
Published by marco on 3. Mar 2024 20:36:50 (GMT-5)
]]>Published by marco on 1. Mar 2024 22:39:07 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Spin Cycle by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post)
“Wow, Margo! It got rid of everything, including my human decency and moral integrity, and made my promise to support and defend the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the profiteering fascists in Washington and Israel stand out even more! Just think, I get to keep my job licking corporate ass crack and pretending that there is no connection between crony capitalism and the dehumanization of poor populations all around the world and you get to keep ignoring the agonizing screams of murdered children by not listening to anything except the patriotic sound of the washing machine!”
Guilt and Responsibility by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Al Jazeera ran an excellently reported piece on German policy and the political climate in the Federal Republic two months after the events of Oct. 7. Among much else, it noted that Saxony–Anhalt, a socially and politically conservative state due south of Hamburg, now requires arriving immigrants to pledge allegiance to “Israel’s right to exist” on their applications for citizenship. No pledge, no citizenship.”
“Germany’s leaders would stand and say, “Those who came before us did what you are doing once—to those who came before you. We condemn your crimes. We must, this is our responsibility, just as we have condemned the crimes that disfigure our past.””
Ein Land im Rüstungswahn – aber niemand sagt, woher das Geld dafür kommen soll by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“FDP, CDU und der andere Teil der SPD haben damit auch kein Problem. Hier steht man voll hinter der Schuldenbremse, will unbedingt ein Rüstungsprogramm finanzieren, drückt sich aber davor, klar zu kommunizieren, welche Ausgaben man kürzen will, um das alles zu finanzieren. Wer diese Parteien und ihre Programme kennt, ahnt jedoch bereits jetzt, dass diese Kürzungen vor allem da vorgenommen werden, wo es „dem kleinen Mann“ wehtun wird. Dass man sich zurzeit mit konkreten Kürzungsplänen zur Refinanzierung des Rüstungsprogramms zurückhält, ist verständlich – es stehen mehrere Wahlen an und auch wenn das Volk durch die Medien kriegsgeil gemacht wurde, ist es mehr als fraglich, ob das gleiche Volk für seine Kriegsgeilheit auch massive Kürzungen hinnehmen wird.”
Everybody Knows by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Bin Gvir called for a ban on Palestinians visiting the Al Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan: “We should not allow residents from the [Palestinian] Authority to enter Israel in any way…It can’t be that women and children are hostages in Gaza and we allow Hamas victory celebrations on the Temple Mount.”
“Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich: “Israel will act unilaterally to cancel the Oslo Accords, to completely and immediately stop all funds transferred to the Palestinian Authority and to dissolve the PA.”
“In the final 3 months of 2023, Israel’s GDP shrank at an annualized [rate] of 19.4%, “worse than every estimate in a Bloomberg survey of analysts, whose median forecast was for a decline of 10.5%.“”
“Israel’s Minister of Settlements and National Missions, Orit Strook: “The entire land of Israel is ours and we are its, and for this reason there will not be a Palestinian state in the Land of Israel because there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no such nation.””
“Rep. Andy Ogles, the Tennessee Republican, in response to a question about the rising body count of children in Gaza: “I think we should kill them all…Hamas and the Palestinians have been attacking Israel for twenty years, and it’s time to pay the piper.”
“Jeremy Corbyn, in a parliamentary speech supporting a ceasefire in Gaza: “29,000 bombs have been dropped on Gaza.. by comparison the US only dropped 4,000 bombs on Iraq during 5 years of that particular conflict. What we’re seeing is the total destruction of society, life and hope in Gaza.”
“British PM Rishi Sunak: “A ceasefire wouldn’t be in anyone’s interest.”
“Nada Tarbush, diplomat at the Palestinian Mission to the UN:
“What is the purpose of continuing to send arms to Israel? Is it apathy, indifference, a head in the sand, continuation of business as usual?
“Is it profits? The desire to make more profits no matter the cost, legal, moral or reputational?
“Or is it ideology, emanating from a racist logic whereby different values are placed on different lives? People of the Global South, or of a certain skin colour or nationality are seen as more disposable, less deserving of life, empathy, outrage or respect for the law?
“There is no diplomatic way of calling out racism. It is time to call a spade a spade.
“If you choose to continue sending weapons to Israel as it annihilates the Palestinians of Gaza, then you do not get to ever pretend again that you support international law, care about human life, or have moral convictions that apply universally.”
You Can’t Be A “Lesser Evil” When You’re Sponsoring A Genocide by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“Being an ally country to the USA is like being friends with a really bitchy drama queen where you’re only allowed to help her tear down her social enemies and can’t ever talk about what she’s doing to create all the conflict in her life because if you do she’ll come for you next.”
New York Times report demolishes the narrative of the “unprovoked war” in Ukraine by Patrick Martin (WSWS)
“By reporting the virtual control of the Ukrainian regime by the US military-intelligence apparatus, the Times is seeking to pressure the Republicans to support the war funding. It is arguing that this money is not going to a foreign government, in a foreign war, thousands of miles from US borders, but to a subcontractor of American imperialism, waging an American war in which US personnel are deeply and directly engaged.
“In so doing, the Times has revealed its own coverage of the Ukraine war over the past two years to have been nothing more than war propaganda, aimed at using a fraudulent narrative to dragoon the American public to support a predatory imperialist war of aggression aimed at subjugating and dismantling Russia.”
Julian Assange’s Final Appeal by Chris Hedges (Substack)
“How can hearings go forward when the Spanish security firm at the Ecuadorian Embassy, UC Global, where Julian sought refuge for seven years, provided videotaped surveillance of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege? This alone should have seen the case thrown out of court. How can the Ecuadorian government led by Lenin Moreno violate international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permit London Metropolitan Police into the Ecuadorian Embassy — sovereign territory of Ecuador — to carry Julian to a waiting police van? Why did the courts accept the prosecution’s charge that Julian is not a legitimate journalist? Why did the United States and Britain ignore Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses?”
“Why is Julian being held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial for nearly five years when his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions when he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy? Normally this would entail a fine. Why was he denied bail after he was sent to HM Prison Belmarsh?”
“Julian’s persecution is an ominous message to the rest of us. Defy the U.S. imperium, expose its crimes, and no matter who you are, no matter what country you come from, no matter where you live, you will be hunted down and brought to the U.S. to spend the rest of your life in one of the harshest prison systems on earth. If Julian is found guilty it will mean the death of investigative journalism into the inner workings of state power. To possess, much less publish, classified material — as I did when I was a reporter for The New York Times — will be criminalized.”
Julian Assange’s Day in Court by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“Political leaders, and their echo chambers in the media, fall all over themselves to denounce the treatment of Alexei Navalny but say little when we do the same to Julian. The legal farce grinds forward like the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House . It will probably grind on for a few more months — one can’t expect the Biden administration to add the extradition of Julian to all its other political woes. It may take months to issue a ruling, or grant one or two appeal requests, as Julian continues to waste away in HM Prison Belmarsh.”
“Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee, was found guilty last year of four counts each of espionage and computer hacking and one count of lying to FBI agents after handing over classified materials to WikiLeaks. He was given a forty-year sentence in February.”
This is what Russia does to its whistleblowers and journalists, no?
“The lawyers were right. The CIA is the driving force behind the extradition. The leak was highly embarrassing and to the CIA highly damaging. The CIA intends to make Julian pay. Schulte, who leaked Vault 7, was given a forty year sentence. Julian, if extradited, will be next.”
Julian Assange’s Grand Inquisitor by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“Kromberg subpoenaed Manning in 2019 to testify before a grand jury in an effort to get her to implicate Julian in “one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion,” a charge which was thoroughly debunked by expert testimony in 2020. Manning appeared before the grand jury but refused to answer questions posed to her. She was held in civil contempt and incarcerated. She was released after the grand jury expired. Kromberg then served her with a second subpoena to appear before another grand jury. Again she refused to testify, leading to another round of incarceration and fines of $500 a day that were raised to $1,000 a day after 60 days of noncompliance. In March of 2020 while being housed in a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia, she was hospitalized after she attempted to commit suicide.”
The Difference Between Republicans And Democrats by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter)
“The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that if a Republican president were to back a genocide it would be an evil and unforgivable atrocity, whereas when a Democrat president backs a genocide it’s a minor foible that you’d better shut up about unless you want Trump to win.”
“The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans do evil things for evil reasons, whereas Democrats do evil things for noble humanitarian reasons.”
“The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that when Republicans do the monstrous things necessary to maintain a globe-spanning empire they’re the greater evil, whereas when Democrats do the monstrous things necessary to maintain a globe-spanning empire they’re the lesser evil.”
MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over “White Rural Rage” by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.
“Nobel-winning columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times spent the last year telling “ignorant” Middle America its negative feelings about the economy are “demonstrably false,” because despite what their bank accounts or home evaluations might say, “Bidenomics is still working very well.” When White Rural Rage came out this week he rushed to review it, the intransigent refusal of yokels to accept his wisdom being his favored current hobby horse.”
“To recap: globalization and technological change have devastated small towns and made the urban keyboard warriors richer, and rural voters can’t move to the cities because they can’t afford to. However, instead of being grateful for the “huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia” in the form of federal programs paid by the taxes of luckier citizens like Krugman, small town America is unaccountably hostile.”
Mass Layoff: Why the Teamsters Should Have Struck UPS by Eve Ottenberg (CounterPunch)
“So management got its cake and ate it too. First, with the contract it happily shelled out to snag more flexibility with work schedules. Then, half a year later, unhappy with having paid extra, it fires 12,000 “management” employees. All while UPS ceo Carol Tome pulled down $27 million in 2022. With hindsight, Teamster leadership looks a bit foolish, because rank and file workers were ready to strike and that, not stellar union negotiating skills, is what won employees some of their goals. As Truthout wrote July 26: “Any significant gains won by the Teamsters against a reluctant employer will have come about because rank-and-file workers showed the company they were prepared to strike.””
Are We Transitioning From Capitalism to Silicon Serfdom? An interview with Yanis Varoufakis by David Moscrop (Jacobin)
“[…] one could say that the privatization of the internet was inevitable because we live under capitalism. And capitalism has this capacity of eating up and infecting every capitalist-free zone. The reason why I could never align with utopian socialism, like that of Robert Owen in the nineteenth century. Despite his efforts to create capitalism-free zones, history shows that capitalism inevitably invades and corrupts these spaces. You cannot have pockets of socialism surviving for long within capitalism.”
“[…] our critique lies in the limiting of liberty to a select few. But now even this limited form of liberty is under threat, and therefore the contradictions are getting worse. I hold on to hope that perhaps these growing tensions will push humanity into a decisive showdown between good and evil — between the oppressors and the oppressed. But the rapid approach of climate catastrophe poses the risk that we may reach the point of no return before that resolution takes place. So, we have our work cut out for us, and humanity is staring extinction in the face — unless we pull our socks up.”
“Imagine something like an Excel file, which is kept by the Fed, and every single resident in the United States is one row. And when a payment is made, the corresponding value transfers from one cell to another, representing the payer and payee. This process would be free, instantaneous, and anonymized. By creating a separation between the software operators and the identities of individuals, identified only by codes similar to Bitcoin addresses, privacy can be assured. And checks and balances could be established to ensure that the state is not watching what each one of us is doing.”
“[…] because the money will be shuffled through the same spreadsheet, nothing stops the central bank from adding the same number to everybody every month. And that’s a universal basic income (UBI), which is not, and this is crucial, funded by taxation. Because the problem with the idea of UBI is that it is vulnerable to complaints like, “What are you talking about? You’re going to tax me, tax the dollars that I earn, to give to a bum, a surfer in California or to a drug addict or to a rich person?” But this proposal leverages the central bank’s capacity to generate funds. And we should let no one tell us that it would be inflationary or would be a problem — because they’re printing trillions on behalf of financiers. Why not print them on behalf of the little people? Of everyone equally?”
“Now, the reason why you don’t have this system in the United States and why you are very far away from a digital dollar is because if anybody in the Fed dares move in that direction, they will be murdered by Wall Street — they’ll experience political and character assassination. Wall Street will never allow it because it would spell the end of Wall Street. Because why would you want to have a bank account with Bank of America if you can have a digital wallet with the Fed?”
“[…] the whole point of Bank of America or Citigroup is to extract rents from you by monopolizing payment systems and holding deposits. You keep your money with them because, currently, there’s no other way of keeping your money.”
How America’s oligarchs lull us with the be-your-own-boss fairy tale by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“For Williams and Lowenstein (and me), all this ESG, DEI, and responsible capitalism is just window dressing, a distraction to keep the pitchforks and torches in people’s closets, and to keep the guillotines in their packaging. The right-wing is doing a mirror-world version of liberals who freak out when OpenAI claims to have built a machine that will pauperize every worker – assuming that a PR pitch is the gospel truth, and then repeating it in criticism”
“[…] the right is freaking out that ESG is harming shareholders by leaving hydrocarbons in the ground to appease climate-addled greenies. The reality is that ESG is barely disguised greenwashing, and it’s fully compatible with burning every critter that died in the Mesozoic, Cenozoic, and lo, even the Paleozoic:”
“A keystone of American narrative capitalism is the idea that the USA is a nation of small businesspeople, Jeffersonian yeoman farmsteaders of the US economy. But even a cursory examination shows that the country is ruled – economically and politically – by very large firms.”
“As with Big Tech today, the big business lobby held up mom-and-pop businesses as the true beneficiaries of deregulation, even as they knifed these firms.”
“The neoliberal era has been an unbroken string of platitudes celebrating the small business and policies that annihilate their chances against large firms.”
“Today, millions of Americans are treading water in a fetid stew of LLC-poisoning, rise-and-grind, multi-level-marketing, dropshipping and gig-work, convinced that the only way to get a better life is to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”
“AI isn’t going to do your job, but its narrative may convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a bot that can’t do your job.”
“Air Canada hired a chatbot to answer customer inquiries and it started making shit up about bereavement discounts that the company later claimed it didn’t have to honor.
“This story’s been all over the news for the past couple of days, but so far as I’ve seen, no one has pointed out the seemingly obvious inference that this chatbot probably ripped off lots of people. The victim here was extraordinarily persistent, chasing a refund for 10 weeks and then going to the regulator. This guy is a six-sigma self-advocate – which implies a whole bell-curve’s worth of comparatively normal people who just ate the shit-sandwich Air Canada fed them. The reason AI is a winning proposition for Air Canada isn’t that it can do a customer service rep’s job – it can’t. But the AI is a layer of indirection – like the app that is the true boss of Uber drivers – that lets Air Canada demoralize the customers it steals from into walking away from their losses.”
“The Narrative Capitalism Cinematic Universe has a lot of side-plots like AI and entrepreneurship and woke capitalism, but its main narrative arc was articulated, ad nauseum, by Margaret Thatcher: “There is no alternative.” This is the most important part of the story, the part that says it literally can’t be otherwise. The only way to organize society is through markets, and the only way to organize markets is to leave them alone, no matter how much suffering they cause.”
That they’re being left alone is also part of the narrative. The markets do what their owners want. Just because the people in charge of the markets pretend that they’re just doing things on their own doesn’t mean we have to believe them.
“Likewise, the business leaders – and their chorus of dutiful Renfields – who insist that monopoly is the natural and inevitable outcome of any market economy just handwave away the decades during which anti-monopoly enforcement actually kept most businesses from getting too big to fail and too big to jail.”
“This is a frequent point of departure during discussions of enshittification: some people dismiss the whole idea of enshittification as “just capitalism.” But we had decades of digital services that either didn’t degrade, or, when they did, were replaced by superior competitors with a minimum of switching costs for users who migrated from the decaying incumbent to greener pastures.”
“Enshittification is what happens when the constraints on the worst impulses of companies and their investors and managers are removed. When a company doesn’t have competitors, when it can capture its regulators to trample our rights with impunity, when it can enlist those regulators to shut down would-be competitors who might free us from its “walled garden,” and when it can fire any worker who refuses to enact harm upon the users they serve, then that company will enshittify:”
Nvidia and AI fuel market frenzy by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“But at the same time, the market frenzy it has set off underscores the central role which unproductive speculation and parasitism now plays as a driving force of profit and wealth accumulation. The tens, even hundreds, of billions of dollars being raked in by hedge funds, speculators and corporate CEOs on the rise of its share price do not contain an atom of real value. They have only added another storey to the house of cards which is the global financial system.”
“Under these conditions, the marker frenzy is not a sign of health but is rather creating the conditions for a crisis. The contradiction between the possibilities of AI and the feverish speculation it has produced, recalls the analysis of Marx that an era of social revolution is ushered in by the conflict between the growth of the productive forces and the social relations in which they are encased.”
The Sham “The Economy Is Awful” Story by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)
“To be clear, tens of millions of people are struggling to pay their rent and put food on the table, but that was also true when Donald Trump was in the White House. In those years, the NYT and other major media outlets did not feel the need to constantly run pieces saying how awful the economy was.”
What is the argument here? That the NYT is against Biden and in the tank for Trump? I mean, if Baker was going to be honest, he’d acknowledge that there were no stories about how bad the economy was because (A) people were writing about a little thing called COVID, (B) most stories didn’t need to talk about the economy because they were focused laser-like on Trump’s obvious treason, and (C) yes, they very much fucking were talking about how terrible the economy was under Trump. Baker is trying so hard to defend his best buddy Biden to make sure that the Democrat gets elected—and not that monster Trump—that he’s allowing himself to get his panties completely twisted. Sure, there are “tens of millions of people are struggling to pay their rent and put food on the table”, but fuck them because Trump might get elected instead of Biden. Hey, those people have always been fucked, so why should we focus on asking the candidate who said he was definitely not going to do that why he didn’t get around to making the economy more—rather than less—egalitarian. It’s an election year, bitches. Time to shut your fucking mouth and vote for the right candidate, you dumb sonofabitch. Christ, I will miss Baker’s reporting until November. He’s kind of useless right now.
The ‘Vibescession’ Will Continue Until Interest Rates Fall by Eric Boehm (Reason)
““Unemployment is low and inflation is falling, but consumer sentiment remains depressed,” the economists write, noting that this series of events “has confounded economists, who historically rely on these two variables to gauge how consumers
feel about the economy.””
I think it’s because the public perhaps doesn’t believe the numbers anymore. You know, because everything else is a lie.
Death, Lonely Death by Doug Muir (Crooked Timber)
“Voyager kept going for another 34 years after that photo. It’s still going. It has left the grip of the Sun’s gravity, so it’s going to fall outward forever.”
“We thought we knew how Voyager would end. The power would gradually, inevitably, run down. The instruments would shut off, one by one. The signal would get fainter. Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.
“We didn’t expect that it would go mad.
“In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data. A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip. The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — the operating system, as it were. And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.”
“[…] at some point — not tomorrow, not next week, but at some point in the next few months — they’ll probably have to admit defeat. And then they’ll declare Voyager 1 officially over, dead and done, the end of a long song.
“And that’s all.”
Roaming Charges: Somewhat Immature by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“From Amitov Gosh’s Tanner Lecture: “At exactly the time when it is clear global warming is … a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.”
The West Is Sabotaging a Global Pandemic Treaty by Leigh Phillips (Jacobin)
“Virologists, epidemiologists, and public health experts are unanimous in their opinion that humanity got off relatively lightly with the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite five million reported as killed directly by the virus, and around 15 million excess deaths in total according to the World Health Organization (WHO), most people who were infected have recovered. SARS-CoV2 turned out not to be the civilization-threatening virus or bacteria that they had been expecting and preparing for. It wasn’t the “Big One.“”
“Perhaps with the next pandemic, we will get lucky once more. The chance in any given year of another outbreak with a similar impact to COVID-19 is one in fifty, according to a 2021 assessment. The lifetime probability of anyone reading this essay experiencing another pandemic on such a scale is 38 percent.”
“[…] in the negotiating text, in the event of another pandemic, the PABS System would see 20 percent of the production of medical countermeasures donated to the WHO to be distributed on the basis of need. Civil society development and public health organizations have, understandably, criticized this as woefully insufficient. A fifth of resources distrusted [sic] on the basis of need is fourth fifths too few.”
“[…] for pharmaceutical companies, even 20 percent is too much. In response to the release of the negotiating text last October, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) denounced it.”
“The United States, the UK, the EU, Canada, and Switzerland — home to many of the largest pharmaceutical firms — have backed the IFPMA position and oppose the access-and-benefit mechanism. Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD)–led coalition government, in particular, is in Big Pharma’s corner.”
““For countries like Germany and most European countries, it is clear that such an agreement will not fly if there is a major limitation on intellectual property rights,” Germany’s SPD health minister, Karl Lauterbach — himself a physician and epidemiologist — told the World Health Summit last October.”
“But most of the medical countermeasures, particularly the vaccines, were primarily the product of research performed in publicly funded university laboratories, and the story of their rapid rollout is for the most part one of the governments derisking private-sector manufacturing via billions in direct subsidies and advance-purchase agreements. It was socialism of a sort — certainly economic planning rather than markets — that delivered the vaccine.”
“Lower domestic drug prices only mean slightly lower profits, while IP waivers, even temporary ones, threaten the very business model of pharmaceutical firms. If the precedent is set that human lives trump intellectual property rights in an emergency, why do human lives not trump IP rights at other times?”
“Over and over again, in recognition of the need for policy to cross borders in a number of areas, from climate to trade to war crimes, elites have opted for undemocratic intergovernmentalism — treaty making — that they see as more politically feasible than proposing the construction of a higher level of democratic assembly. And this is being repeated now for the most urgent policy area there can be, pandemics — already far more deadly than climate change.”
“But all around us, we are confronted with so many cross-border phenomena that have to be tackled at the global level — from pandemics and climate change, through trade and migration, to human rights and war crimes. And the number of such issues is only growing. Governance of near-Earth asteroids, orbital debris, seabed mining, geoengineering, and artificial intelligence are just the latest to have emerged. There will be many more. We are living in the decades where the conversation about planetary governance, about global democracy, must at least begin.”
A Yukaghir Love Letter by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“As DeFrancis argues, this and other indices show us that the Yukaghir birchbark figures are not in fact letters, but something more like the traces of a “party game”, where a gathered crowd engages in something like “twenty questions” with the jealous girl, guessing at the meaning of her designs, looking to her for small nods of encouragement when the guesses begin to approach her true object. The figures thus have a properly semasiographic function, where meanings attach to visual symbols somewhat as they do in the case of a work like the Bayeux tapestry: there are real meanings there, but you must be present at their creation, and participating in the same local “language-game”, in order to know what they are.”
“To call a symbol or set of symbols on paper or on birchbark “protowriting” is to imply that some other better system for the communication of meanings across long distances is on the way. But just look at this Ojibwe document for a while, attend to it, and then tell me whether you have ever seen a more compelling representation of America.”
“The long reign of the written word is finally coming to an end (RIP, c. 3400 BCE—2024 CE). The machines are prepared to step in and do it all for us now, and already we can barely recall the technological regime and the form of life that not so long ago made it make sense for us to insist upon authorship rigorously anchored in individuals and their capacity for novel self-expression through syllabic, consonantal, or alphabetic encodings of meaning, and narrowly purposed to the transmission of information to absent audiences.”
“There might also remain a few who will continue to write, but really to write, having understood that the true work of the writer all along was much closer to magic than to the transmission of information, much more a dark art than a lifestyle (the author of the Substack Note just cited also speaks of “magic”, of course, but that’s just a homonymy, like “bark” and “bark”) .
“Either way the current casuistical flare-up over the scope and seriousness of various instances of plagiarism will not only have ended; to the inhabitants of the very near future, it will have ceased to be even minimally comprehensible.”
This is Zion by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“I lament that the meddling of great powers led to the Nakba, and to 1967, and to the modern stasis which destroys the moral legitimacy of Israel and which subjects the Palestinian people to permanent dispossession and ceaseless slaughter. Meanwhile, the UK and Germany and well-heeled Europe in general go puttering on along, rich and safe.”
“Defenders of the modern Israeli state are in this constant argumentative bind: they must ceaselessly insist that Israel is teetering on the brink of destruction, in order to keep American money and weapons and diplomatic muscle flowing, while at the same time claiming that Israel is the only place where Jews can be safe. These are, obviously, directly contradictory sentiments. If it takes the constant patronage of the most powerful nation on earth to keep Israel from destruction, and even then the country is subject to assaults like that of October 7th, in what sense could Israel possibly be considered a safe place for Jews?”
“Israelis are safer than citizens of most countries in the world. (If you ask an Israeli whether their country is safer than Chad or Colombia or Pakistan, they’ll get offended that you asked.) Unfortunately, you are then merely pulled back into the other side of the paradox − if it’s true that Israelis are remarkably physically safe, in context with much of the rest of the world, how can we justify the seemingly perpetual outlay of vast amounts of American ordnance and treasure on Israel’s behalf?”
“All moral and political and historical disputes aside, it is the Zionists themselves who say that Israel is mortally threatened by its neighbors. So what do you do when American power declines, as it inevitably will?”
“[…] there’s a certain class of moderates who have taken to ridiculing the concept of the one-state solution. What they seem not to understand is, first, that the insistence that a shared state cannot succeed is not just a rejection of the possibility of peace and equality in Palestine but a declaration that the very project of liberal democracy itself has failed.”
“American Jews have income and employment figures that are remarkable by any definition. (Pew’s extreme reluctance to simply acknowledge that American Jews are on average a very wealthy ethnic group says something about the requirements of modern identity discourse, but never mind.) American Jews are also incredibly well-educated compared to the norm. As that Pew research demonstrates, fully three quarters of American Jewish adults have college degrees, compared to less than 38% of American adults in general. Israeli Jews are well-educated, but not like American Jews. The average American Jew goes through 15 years of formal education as defined by Pew; the average Israeli Jew, 12.”
“If you hold Zion to be not a geographic location but a concept of Jewish safety and success, you could hardly ask for a fuller realization of that ideal than what you find in the Jewish experience in the United States.”
“It casts Jews as the volk; this West Bank settler ’s dream of a Greater Israel is simply an Israeli Lebensraum. “Our people are who they are because of our genetic lineage and our land is ours by virtue of a quasi-mystical connection we have to it” has been the basic logic of fascism and genocide going way, way back.”
“The Jewish people were pushed to the very edge of extinction thanks to “blood and soil” thinking and it breaks my heart to see so many Jews who have embraced it in a misguided effort to secure their people’s future.”
No Discourse Has Ever Been More Discourse-y Than Age Gap Discourse by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“[…] essentially everyone will agree that someone is not particularly more mature or ready for sex at 18 years old than they are at 18 years minus one day old, and yet the difference between the two can amount to the difference between a lengthy prison sentence, a place on the sex offender registry, and lifelong shunning, or no consequences at all. No one would doubt that there is something perverse in that, but there is no alternative if we’re to set a legal standard of consent, as we must.”
“Once unobjectionable to the average reader of The Nation reader, the idea that an age of consent might be improved by being made a little lower rather than a little higher is the kind of thing that gets you a Twitter pile-on now. That’s how much the discursive conditions around the age of consent have changed in a few decades.”
“When discussing the question of age gaps and sex, there’s a constant slippage between questions of what people want, what the law says people should be permitted to do, and what we should not criminalize but nevertheless socially condemn.”
“This is all a pretty shitty deal for women, one of so many shitty deals that women have to accept in our society. I am absolutely gobsmacked at how much money women have to spend and how much time they have to waste to look hot, but we have inculcated a cultural expectation that a woman’s worth is equal to her hotness and that her hotness is on a rapidly-ticking clock. We all start to feel invisible and useless as we age, but women are made to feel that way decades earlier than men.”
“That I’ve discussed reasons why many men prefer younger women will be represented as an endorsement of that condition.”
Well yes but people are idiots who don’t understand the difference between explaining something and justifying it.
“[…] we as a modern society have invested an unhealthy amount of our hopes and fears into our capacity to judge. Judgment is our obsession; judgment, so many people seem to think, is both our first responsibility and only tool. I find that this reflexive assumption that judgment is the first mover of moral action, judgment the foundation of all politics, is so reflexive and thoughtless that people barely examine it at all. But it’s a profoundly ideological conception of civic values, and besides, judgment itself does nothing.”
“But what Gen Z and everyone else has to catch up to eventually is a very basic, sad fact: there are things in life that are imperfect that must nonetheless not be forbidden. Some things in life are gross or creepy or manipulative or annoying, and also there’s nothing to be done about them. Sometimes bad things or sad things just have to be that way.
“The advantage of illegality is that it prompts a definitive response − when somebody has sex with an underage girl, we can throw him in jail. The misery of mere social judgement is that we judge and the thing we’re judging just keeps going. But this reality is not a statement of some fundamental error we have made as a society. It’s a statement of the basic nature of freedom: that free people are people free to make decisions that we don’t agree with.”
“Women are the creatures of an organized tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organized tyranny of idlers. Even where this much is grasped, we must never be weary of insisting on the understanding that for women, as for the laboring classes, no solution to the difficulties and problems that present themselves is really possible in the present condition of society. All that is done, heralded with no matter what flourish of trumpets, is palliative, not remedial. Both the oppressed classes, women and the immediate producers, must understand that their emancipation will come from themselves. Women will find allies in the better sort of men, as the laborers are finding allies among the philosophers, artists, and poets. But the one has nothing to hope from man as a whole, and the other has nothing to hope from the middle class as a whole.”
Web Weekly #123 by Stefan Judis
“Some say we should be strict and exclude Apple from open web standards discussions in the WHATWG and w3c. A company that doesn’t want the web to win shouldn’t influence the open web. I can get behind this opinion.”
I can’t get behind this. The question is: is Apple’s contribution to WHATWG and W3C useful? Don’t they have hundreds of brilliant and insightful engineers? What would be the point of banning them? Stop knee-jerk banning and siloing. It’s tedious. We have completely forgotten how to talk to each other while disagreeing, how to build bridges that will help dismantle things that we don’t like. Instead, we just want to punish with exclusion, which never works, if we’re honest.
Paying people to work on open source is good actually by Jacob Kaplan-Moss (Jacobian)
“My fundamental position is that paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money. Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong.”
“Open source is good for humanity. It’s only slightly hyperbolic to say that open source is one of the most notable collective successes of humankind as a species! It’s one of the few places where essentially all of humanity works together on something that benefits everyone. A world without open source would be substantially worse than the world we live in.
“So, I want people who want to work on open source to be able to do so, and should be able to live comfortable lives, with their basic needs met. They’re contributing to something that is good for humanity; they shouldn’t have to sacrifice to do so!”
]]>“The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. They are objectively some of the luckiest people in world... [More]”
Published by marco on 27. Feb 2024 21:25:49 (GMT-5)
The article Americans Are Not As Poor As They Think They Are by Thomas Wells (3 Quarks Daily) writes,
“The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. They are objectively some of the luckiest people in world history. On the one hand all this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty is mildly annoying for the rest of the world to have to listen to. On the other hand, it reflects shared delusions about individual entitlements and America’s economic decline that are driving a toxic ‘doom politics’ of cynicism and resentment, while also neglecting the needs of actually poor Americans.”
OK, sure. Probably the wrong people are also complaining, but I think the author might be misunderstanding the message. There seem to be two problems for the author. First of all, people who the author thinks have no right to complain about the economy are complaining about the economy. This probably includes the kind of people that the New York Times interviews about how it’s impossible to live in NYC on less than $300k per year.
Second of all, those who would be justified in complaining about the economy are apparently not articulating their feeling of insecurity to the author’s satisfaction. When these people are asked whether the economy is bad, they say “yes”, which is technically wrong, but what they mean is that the system sucks. What they mean is that they might have enough money but they don’t feel secure.
The economy is just one facet of society, which has an obligation to provide some basics to its people. One of those basics is some sort of plan to allow people to relax and breathe a little, knowing that everything they have won’t simply disappear overnight. It’s not just about money. It’s not even mostly about money. It’s about living somewhere nice, near people that you like. It’s about not worrying whether you’ll have that roof over your head or whether you’ll have enough to eat.
We’ve been trained to translate that desire into a desire for money, but that’s not where it comes from. You could say that the system perverts that completely human, understandable, and reasonable desire into a desire for money. Once you desire something fungible instead of concrete things, then you also lose track of how much you actually need. Whereas a desire for a home and security is bounded, a desire for money becomes, for many, pathologically unbounded. They system also promotes it because we’re in an unlimited-growth, highly consumerist economy.
“(Although some, like the extreme cost of health-care compared to other rich countries are attributable to America specific causes, such as peculiarly dysfunctional institutional arrangements.)”
Why does the author not realize that they’ve obviated their own line of reasoning by parenthetically hand-waving away the cost that causes most bankruptcies in the U.S.? Instead of lambasting people for whining, try to figure out if they’re whining about the wrong thing. Maybe, when they complain about poverty, they mean, rather than not having enough money, that they feel a sense of precarity, a lack of security, a foreboding that it could all end on a whim.
They’re not poor now, but maybe they’re expressing the real worry that they might be if they ever. Stop. Hustling. Thirty-year-olds can look forward to having six to ten more jobs for different employers before they can even think of retiring. Each job will be increasingly difficult to get, unless you’re gifted or work at something that can’t be automated away or made obsolete.
An influencer might be technically middle-class right now, but has no future. Work lives are decades long, while jobs and careers are 2-5 years long. Insecurity? Fear? You betcha. People are aware that they will have to do unprincipled, soul-crushing things to retain their position—and even that might not work. They feel temporarily not poor because that’s the best their society is willing to offer.
Whereas Steinbeck’s quote that “[…] the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires” might have once been true, it’s probably more accurate to say now that “the middle-class see themselves not as safe and sound, but as the temporarily fortuitous indigent.”
“Americans live in smaller households in larger homes and drive bigger better cars than they used to. It may be that many Americans can’t afford the lifestyle which they feel they deserve (and maybe they do deserve more!), but the lifestyle they can afford is nevertheless much better than that of previous generations.”
The author is evaluating “better” purely in monetary terms and not in psychic or security terms. That’s all we can say: f&@k you for saying the economy sucks or the system sucks—if you can even express such a thought—you have more stuff than ever! What are you whining about?
“A bigger problem is the division between the majority who enjoy housing wealth and the minority without it (especially younger people).”
Again, the author tosses this in as an aside, when it’s pretty salient. An entire generation has no idea what’s going to happen over the next 50 years, but the current generation has their nut, so they should be happy about it. Can’t you think that the economy sucks even if you personally benefit from it? Are you not allowed to evaluate the economy as “shitty” because it’s not scaleable?
There’s also the laser-like focus on measuring wealth in term of an illiquid asset that is a large proportion of most households’ wealth (their home). You can borrow against it, but that doesn’t feel secure, especially if you’re aware of the regularity of popped bubbles that deflate this fictitious wealth. People don’t believe in the numbers anymore—or in the fairy tale told by their society. They figure it wouldn’t take much to lose all control and end up dependent on help or end up on the street. This feeling is promoted by all levels to keep wages low. The system uses fear to keep the rabble in line, demonizes poverty and welfare, then wonders why people are terrified of poverty.
“(Real research institutions that care about getting their methodology and facts right, like the Fed, come to very different numbers.) Nevertheless, even obvious nonsense will be believed if it is endlessly repeated and left unchallenged.”
Which rumors and numbers, though? There are good economists—like Dean Baker—telling these stories as well, about how something like forty percent (I can’t remember exactly) of American households would not be able to handle a surprise bill of five hundred bucks without borrowing money. Are those economists deluded as well?
Maybe people just don’t buy the bullshit low, low numbers of inflation and unemployment because they’ve been massaged nearly beyond all meaning.
Published by marco on 23. Feb 2024 21:47:14 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
In the Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit (London Review of Books)
“Driverless cars are often called autonomous vehicles – but driving isn’t an autonomous activity. It’s a co-operative social activity, in which part of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road. Whether on foot, on my bike or in a car, I engage in a lot of hand gestures – mostly meaning ‘wait!’ or ‘go ahead!’ – when I’m out and about, and look for others’ signals. San Francisco Airport has signs telling people to make eye contact before they cross the street outside the terminals. There’s no one in a driverless car to make eye contact with, to see you wave or hear you shout or signal back.”
“[…] tech had already made redundant many of the ways we used to congregate and mingle, while often portraying those ventures into the world as dangerous, unpleasant, inefficient and inconvenient. There is an underlying assumption that each of us aspires to be as productive as possible, and that stripping away everything seen to interfere with productivity is a good thing.”
“The American Booksellers Association reported that in 2021 alone, ‘the movement of dollars to Amazon and away from retailers displaced 136,000 shops occupying 1.1 billion square feet of traditional commercial space.’ That’s a lot of local jobs and relationships both to places and people.”
“[…] cafés were rare outside North Beach’s Italian neighbourhood. They proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s as places to hang out, maybe read, maybe chat to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices. Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived.”
“Cultural, social and religious institutions have been displaced or run aground, film festivals and art centres have left the city, historic businesses, including the oldest Black-owned bookstore in the US, have been evicted, all while wealth continues to concentrate at the fastest rate ever seen.”
“The luxury shuttle buses that Facebook, Google and Apple launched for their employees around 2012, by easing the congested commute, encouraged large numbers of them to move to San Francisco, which has now been fully annexed by the Valley. The desire of tech workers to live in this dense, diverse place while their products create its opposite is an ongoing conundrum. Many tech workers think of themselves as edgy, as outsiders, as countercultural, even as they’re part of immense corporations that dominate culture, politics and the economy.”
“More than the shrinkage of the population and the emptying out of downtown, the new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises.”
“Completed in 2018, the tower has been half-empty since Salesforce, with the volatility typical of the tech industry, laid off many of its employees early last year (before hiring another few thousand in the autumn). Tech companies routinely push out other businesses only to flop or morph or migrate, leaving only emptiness in their wake.”
“The closures of several downtown chain stores were blamed by their parent corporations on theft, but when journalists looked into the stories, they found that in most cases outlets were closed because of low revenue and other more mundane problems.”
“[…] the sheer wealth generated by Silicon Valley has given its pack of billionaires the belief that they are above or beyond the law. Most of them made their fortunes in finance or technology; those fortunes and the accompanying hubris and seclusion convinced them they were magnificent at everything and anything, including remaking society according to their lights.”
“If you equate your wealth with virtue, you tend to equate poverty with vice, and the enemies of the homeless routinely portray them as criminals. The assumption that Bob Lee was murdered by the underclass rather than one of his own speaks to this, as well as to the sense among tech leaders that they are the good guys, the people with solutions, sometimes the victims but never the perpetrators of problems.”
“The proliferation of delivery services has made eating restaurant food at home common. ‘The exploitation economy is just as unhealthy and dehumanising for the customers as it is for the workers,’ Andrew Callaway, a San Francisco gig-worker, wrote in 2016. ‘You never even have to see the person who is cleaning your house or your clothes. Plenty of people requested that I drop off their food at the door. Customers grow to love apps that make the worker anonymous.’ In this system, the invisible hand of the market can actually bring you a burrito.”
“Big tech is ferociously protective of its own privacy while abusing ours. Frank Wilhoit’s claim that ‘conservatism consists of one proposition: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect’ applies precisely to the industry and its captains.”
“Many tech billionaires do not believe they should be bound by the laws of nations or biology, and apparently want to continue consuming an outsize amount of the world’s resources indefinitely.”
“You can’t really be in favour of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability. I’ve long believed that democracy depends in part on co-existing with strangers and people unlike you, on feeling that you have something in common with them. The internet has helped people withdraw from diverse communities and shared experiences to huddle in like-minded groups, including groups focused on hating those they see as unlike them, while encouraging the disinhibition of anonymity.”
“They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.”
Prison-tech is a brutal scam – and a harbinger of your future by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“Prisoners, asylum seekers, drug addicts and other marginalized people are the involuntary early adopters of every form of disciplinary technology. They are the leading indicators of the ways that technology will be ruining your life in the future. They are the harbingers of all our technological doom.”
“This presented telco predators with an unbeatable opportunity: they approached state prison operators and offered them a bargain: “Let us take over the telephone service to your carceral facility and we will levy eye-watering per-minute charges on the most desperate people in the world. Their families – struggling with one breadwinner behind bars – will find the money to pay this ransom, and we’ll split the profits with you, the cash-strapped, incarceration-happy state government.””
“[…] prisons could end in-person visits and replace them with sub-skype, postage-stamp-sized videoconferencing, at rates even higher than the voice-call rates. Combine that with a ban on mailing letters to and from prisoners – replaced with a service that charged even higher rates to scan mail sent to prisoners, and then charged prisoners to download the scans – and prison-tech companies could claim to be at the vanguard of prison safety, ending the smuggling of dope-impregnated letters and other contraband into the prison system.”
Of course, contraband comes in anyway because it’s mostly carried in by guards, not by visitors.
“[…] prisons shuttered their libraries and replaced them with ebook stores that charged 2-4 times the prices you’d pay for books on the outside. Prisoners were sold digital music at 200-300% markups relative to, say, iTunes.”
“Prisoners can earn money, sure – as much as $0.89/hour, doing forced labor for companies that contract with prisons”
“[…] those $3 digital music tracks are being bought by people earning as little as $0.10/hour. Which makes it especially galling when prisons change prison-tech suppliers, whereupon all that digital music is deleted, wiping prisoners’ media collection out – forever (literally, for prisoners serving life terms):”
“As Paul Wright from the Human Rights Defense Center told Schwenk, “The ideal world for the private equity owners of these companies is every prisoner has one of their tablets, and every one of those tablets is hooked up to the bank account of someone outside of prison that they can just drain.””
“Revoking your media, charging by the byte for messaging, confiscating things in the name of security and then selling them back to you – these are all tactics that were developed in the prison system, refined, normalized, and then worked up the privilege gradient. Prisoners are living in your technology future. It’s just not evenly distributed – yet.”
“The assumption that let the NSA get away with mass surveillance was that it would only be weaponized against the people at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve: brown people, mostly in other countries. The Snowden revelations made it clear that these were just the beginning, and sure enough, more than a decade later, we have data-brokers sucking up billions in cop kickbacks to enable warrantless surveillance, while virtually following people to abortion clinics, churches, and protests. Mass surveillance is chugging its way up the shitty tech adoption curve with no sign of stopping.”
The Owl of Minerva in the Darkness by Anna Ochkina (Russian Dissent)
“The proven technique is being practiced again: if you want to overthrow a competitor, accuse him of treason. The most important, the key part of the ideology of modern Russia has become the maxim that any objection to the current policy of the state is betrayal, lies, apostasy and, in general, a crime. This greatly distinguishes modern ideological practices from their Soviet forebears. Soviet propagandists and denouncers branded their targets as “enemies of the people” for betraying the working class and the gains of the revolution, for distorting the party’s policies, and the very ideas of communism. Of course, it was assumed that that government served the working class in the most faithful and devoted way, and strictly followed the ideas of communism, and preserved and developed the gains of the revolution.”
“[…] attempts to set boundaries for philosophical thought can only lead to one thing – philosophy will disappear, since it is somewhat inconvenient to formulate questions at the gunpoint of ideological snipers. But it is always possible to assemble ready-made, officially-approved, eternally-valid answers.”
“Raphael and Rublev, Repin and Goya, Shakespeare and Chekhov, Marx and Ilyenkov, Pushkin and Byron, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, Roland and Tolstoy, Dickens and Hara, Akutagawa and Khayyam, Marques and Tagore, Keynes and Kondratiev, Einstein and Landau, Wiener and Vavilov – not one of them fit into the framework of the “permissible,” none of them put up with any restrictions on knowledge and creativity.
“All of them created the future, creating its very basis and prototype – the common culture of humanity – albeit in their own national languages. And in these languages they were sworn at and cursed by politicians and ideologues, who were always panicked over the “sovereign”or the “alien,” the “loyal” or the “undermining.” Such politicians, like the philosophers who sing along with them, belong to the prehistory of humanity, being only temporary obstacles on the way to its true History.”
Sympathy for the Shia Militias by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“I may be a decadent gender bending infidel, but I am also very familiar with the condition of being stepped on and if some pompous foreign army was using an illegal base in Altoona to carpet bomb Queer kids in Jamaica, I would light that motherfucker up with whatever ordinance I could get my hands on. This is what the Shiite militias of Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen are doing right now, and Kali help me, I don’t believe that they deserve to be vilified and annihilated for it.”
“There are some 3,400 American troops in that region. 900 in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq, and as bad as I may feel for the misfortunate life choices of our brave men and women in uniform, they are not there handing out stickers and bubblegum. They are there to serve as an advance force for America’s various imperial enterprises in the region, and right now that means assisting the American puppet regime of Israel in committing genocide against the people of the Gaza Strip.”
“So, let me play that back for you just one more time. The United States is using bases typically reserved for starving out indignant Shiites in Syria to facilitate the wholesale annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza and who are the fucking terrorists here? Why, the scary brown people of course.”
“But it’s OK everybody, this isn’t a war crime! Those dead bodies don’t belong to real people, just Iranian proxies.”
“In 1979, a loose knit coalition of students, clerics, feminists and communists overthrew the Pahlavi Dynasty and its fascist reigning thug, the Shah, at the height of the Cold War with zero support from any superpower in the Global North. At the time, Iran maintained the fifth largest military on earth and one of the most vicious police states of the twentieth century with America picking up the tab for all of it in exchange for unfettered access to the nation’s oil.”
Washington, Pro-Democracy? Depends on the Country by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)
“[…] the United States reimposed sanctions for barring Machado. The European Parliament went even further, denying that the Venezuelan court has legal grounds and insisting that Machado “remains eligible to run for the elections.” It says “Unless María Corina Machado is allowed to participate in the elections…elections and election results will not be recognised.” The European Parliament then urged EU member states “to tighten existing sanctions” and to add new sanctions on judges of Venezuela’s Supreme Court.”
As detailed in the article and elsewhere, Machado has a long history of anti-democratic activity in Venezuela, plausibly if not definitively linked to foreign governments like neighbor Panama and perennial instigator the U.S. She is a signatory to two documents supporting and encouraging coups in Venezuela, one of which succeeded for a few days. The decision to bar her was taken by the courts, not by executive fiat.
“A leaked Pakistani cable reveals a meeting between Asad Majeed Khan, then-Pakistani ambassador to the United States, and two State Department officials, one of whom was Donald Lu, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs
“Lu begins the meeting by expressing that the United States and Europe “are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position” on the war in Ukraine. He pins responsibility for Pakistan’s neutral defiance of the U.S. on Khan, saying, “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.” Lu informs the Pakistani ambassador that the trigger for the American concern was “the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow.” On the day Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Khan was in Moscow, meeting with Putin. He defied the United States by refusing to cancel the meeting.
“Lu then advises Pakistan’s ambassador, “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead…[H]onestly I think isolation of the Prime Minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.””
None of this is about democracy. Pakistan is being “encouraged” to support the war in Ukraine. Khan is being punished for not doing so. Khan is the most popular politician in Pakistan. The youth supports him overwhelmingly. The U.S. does not care what the people of Pakistan think.
The Crisis at The New York Times by Patrick Lawrence (ScheerPost)
“It has been evident to many of us since the genocide in Gaza began Oct. 7 that Israel risked asking too much of those inclined to take its side. The Zionist state would ask what many people cannot give: It would ask them to surrender their consciences, their idea of moral order, altogether their native decency as it murders, starves and disperses a population of 2.3 million while making their land uninhabitable.
“The Israelis took this risk and they have lost. We are now able to watch videos of Israeli soldiers celebrating as they murder Palestinian mothers and children, as they dance and sing while detonating entire neighborhoods, as they mock Palestinians in a carnival of racist depravity one would have thought beyond what is worst in humanity—and certainly beyond what any Jew would do to another human being.”
Oh my, no. No, no, no. There is no need to exaggerate. They are doing terrible things. But they are no better or worse than the U.S. soldiers who made ear-necklaces in Vietnam, those who befouled corpses in Iraq. This is what dehumanizing always brings. See that documentary The Act of Killing, which is about the atrocities in Indonesia. All of those that committed the atrocities all still around—powerful and rich—dozens of years later. No regrets. They happily reenact murders. They laugh about it. Israelis are not unique in this regard. Not at all. They are no better and no worse. They have a very human capacity for evil and cruelty, but it’s very banal, as Ms. Arendt would say. To call it “inhuman” is to ignore the wide swath of history.
“Post–Gaza, apartheid Israel is unlikely ever to recover what place it enjoyed, merited or otherwise, in the community of nations. It stands among the pariahs now. The Biden regime took this risk, too, and it has also lost. Its support for the Israelis’ daily brutalities comes at great political cost, at home and abroad, and is tearing America apart—its universities, its courts, its legislatures, its communities—and I would say what pride it still manages to take in itself. When the history of America’s decline as a hegemonic power is written, the Gaza crisis is certain to figure in it as a significant marker in the nation’s descent into a morass of immorality that has already contributed to a collapse of its credibility.”
Historians are unlikely to find this moment as pivotal as we do. Those that live in a particular moment or supposed import grant that moment outsized relevance. In history’s eyes, the U.S. will not ever have had a lofty moral standing from which to decline. Gaza is a side-show to so much else that is changing simultaneously.
It’s only from within the U.S.—struggling to stay above the cloying waters of propaganda that constantly threaten to close over one’s head—that you can think this. We are, as Gore Vidal so aptly put it, “The United States of Amnesia”. Even Patrick Lawrence easily forgets—or allows himself to elide—the enormity of the crimes committed against Afghanistan over 50 years, against Iraq over 40, against Vietnam for 15, against Russia for 30—but particularly for the first 10 as it struggled to recover from the USSR’s dissolution—against most of Central and South America. Anyone who’s paying attention would have noticed that the U.S. lost all of its credibility long ago. It’s always been a hypocrite. Historians with sufficient temporal distance will fail to see Gaza as anything more than another data point in a long history of cruelty and empire.
“We come to U.S. media — mainstream media, corporate media, legacy media. However you wish to name them, they have gambled and lost, too. Their coverage of the Gaza crisis has been so egregiously and incautiously unbalanced in Israel’s behalf that we might count their derelictions as unprecedented. When the surveys are conducted and the returns are in, their unscrupulous distortions, their countless omissions, and—the worst offense, in my view—their dehumanization of the Palestinians of Gaza will have further damaged their already collapsing credibility.”
“We now have a usefully intricate anatomy of an undeservedly influential newspaper as it abjectly surrenders to power the sovereignty it is its duty to claim and assert in every day’s editions. It would be hard to overstate the implications, for all of us, of what The Grayzone has just brought to light. This is independent journalism at its best reporting on corporate journalism at its worst.”
“The newspaper has reported the shocking statements of Israeli officials, some openly favoring genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and the like, only when these have been so prominently reported elsewhere that The Times could no longer pretend such things were never said.”
“At issue is The Times’s coverage of the Gaza crisis altogether. The routinized relationship between The Times and the Israeli authorities is now exposed to more light than was ever supposed to shine on it. Ditto the slack, sloppy, unprofessional mediocrities mainstream media altogether have made of themselves.”
“Are you interested in what Israeli police say they believe? I’m not. I’m never interested in what officials in such positions believe or feel or, a lot of the time, think: I am interested in what they know, and they did not tell Gettleman that they knew anything. Do you see the air these officials put between the rape theme and their reputations? Equally, The Times “verified” the video, did it? In what way this? What did it verify, exactly? That the video existed? Is Gettleman suggesting that The Times verified from the video that Abdush was raped? No video of a dead body could verify this.”
“Did one or more Hamas militiaman rape a woman in the presence of her husband, then, in one or another sequence, murder her and burn her, then murder the husband—all not in 44 minutes, as the Gettleman piece implies, but in four? Since Gettleman published, Abdush’s family, evidently irate, has accused him of distorting the evidence and manipulating them in the course of his reporting. “She was not raped,” Mira Alter, Gal Abdush’s sister, wrote on social media a few days after Gettleman published. “There was no proof that there was rape. It was only a video.””
“You have descriptions of all kinds of unimaginable, B–movie perversities—militiamen playing with severed breasts, militiamen walking around with armfuls of severed heads—that rest upon “witnesses” whose testimonies, given how often they shift or do not line up with what was eventually determined, simply cannot be counted as stable.”
“Max Blumenthal thinks the crisis inside The Times reflects a deep divide between the newsroom, where there seems to be a surviving cohort of conscientious journalists, and the upper reaches of management, where the paper’s ideological high priests reside. I have not been inside the Times building in well more than a decade, but there is a history to support this thesis.”
A fantastic interview and conversation with Gretchen Morgenson.
Israel-Palestine Isn’t ‘Complicated’, You Just Support Killing Palestinians by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“The US-centralized empire is currently backing a literal genocide and deliberating whether it should begin extraditing and incarcerating foreign journalists for reporting on its war crimes, while continuing to condescendingly wag its finger at the global south over human rights.”
“One thing a lot of people miss about the rising authoritarianism in our society is that such measures are not being rolled out with the goal of constructing a new dystopia that will look wildly different from what we see today, but to lock our current dystopia into place.
“[…]
“This misconception is based on the erroneous assumption that the powerful are not already getting everything they want from normal human beings, when they absolutely are.”
“We’re already working, consuming and voting in perfect alignment with the interests of the powerful, and for the most part we’re thinking and speaking as the powerful want us to as well. This is because our education and media systems have successfully trained us to act in ways our rulers want us to act.”
“Some dissident-minded people miss this because they are sympathetic to the values of capitalism, and they have been trained to believe that freedom looks like being free to choose what you will consume and which exploitative capitalist you want to have your labor extracted by, and how you will spend your “free time” when your labor is not being exploited. They therefore imagine that this current dystopia is what freedom looks like, and that the powerful are plotting to inflict some future alien dystopia upon them that looks more collectivist and communismy.”
“This civilization is saturated in mass-scale psychological manipulation geared toward tricking us into believing that this is what we want, that we built this horrifying dystopia ourselves, that it serves our interests, and that this is what freedom looks like — but we only believe such things because we were trained to believe them. That is the doctrine of the dystopian capitalist empire we live under, and all the information systems in our society are slanted toward tricking us into thinking it’s the truth. The delusion that dystopia would be experientially different from what we are currently experiencing is itself part of the propaganda prison.”
For Biden, It’s Michigan Or Israel by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“What they demand of Biden in exchange for their vote is simple. Abandon Israel and reward the terrorists.”
“It’s an article of faith on the left that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, so much so that nobody bothers to either acknowledge the meaning of genocide or offer any explanation of why their claim is correct. Arguing the point is a fool’s errand, as there are neither facts nor logic that alter religious fervor. While it may be that of two million Gazans, thus far about 29,000 have died according to the Hamas Ministry of Health and Truth, even if some unmentioned share of the dead are Hamas soldiers.”
It’s neat to see him write things like that because he doesn’t see the irony at all. He doesn’t think his unquestioning acceptance of the official narrative smacks of religious fervor. His take on U.S. and Israeli domestic and foreign policy is nearly impossibly simplistic and utterly without merit. What he writes here makes him look like an easily dismissed moron, which is a pity, because that’s not at all what he is. His opinions on Israel are utterly fanatical.
“If Israel wanted to commit genocide, it has the capacity to kill far, far more. It hasn’t. ”
This line of argument is reprehensible and fails to acknowledge anything about the reality of the situation there. Israel has nukes. I suppose we should give it a doggy treat for not having used those yet. Greenfield has never once discussed proportionality or collective punishment. He doesn’t discuss what the long-term—or even medium-term—plan might realistically be in Israel. Eradicate the terrorists, as if that’s possible, as if that’s ever worked, as if an increase in violence of many orders of magnitude has ever resulted in anything other than more violence and more terrorism. It’s naive to pretend to think otherwise. The only conclusion that would “work” is absolute eradication. And even that might not work, because there will be those outside of Palestine who might take up the cause of revenge for what was wrought. If Israel feels such a strong urge for revenge for the acts of a single day, then how can they—and their fervent supporters—fail to understand that the same urge exists in their enemy? Only a few countries have achieved what Israel seeks. The U.S. and Australia subjugated their native populations to such a degree that they are no longer able to effectively fight back. They don’t even try anymore. Many, many decades have passed since those native peoples’ subjugation, but it would be hard to argue that it wasn’t ultimately successful.
“Biden has taken the position that Israel has a right to exist. Israel is not the party here required to lay down its arms and let terrorists rape, behead, burn, murder and kidnap at will. And if Israel doesn’t eradicate Hamas, it will happen again and again. Hamas says so. Biden knows it.”
Greenfield is really so sadly basic and utterly immoral in his reasoning here. There is a clear abdication of a duty to be at least partly informed about a political situation before writing about it. Perhaps he feels that just religiously and exclusively reading coverage from the New York Times suffices as research, but his views are completely siloed. I would have expected him to notice this himself, to be better aware that he might be in an echo chamber. As I’ve noted before, people’s bullshit meters seem to be broken. Lines of argument that Greenfield laughed out of the room when Bush used them to wage a war in Afghanistan and Iraq are taken utterly seriously, as if they’d been carved onto tablets carried down by Moses.
“Biden knows what these progressive dreamers do not, or at least won’t admit, that the terrorism won’t end until Israel is destroyed and every Israeli, Jew or Arab, is dead or gone. But it won’t end there either, because this is a war against western values, our values, and these emboldened terrorists will then use terrorism that has garnered them adoration from progressives as the accepted weapon to eradicate the heathens and heretics of the west.”
My goodness, Scott, have you started listening to Sam Harris as well? Israel is fighting for all of us in the west, standing as a Hebraic bulwark against the slavering Muslim hordes bent on imposing Sharia law on the entire west, which is so addles with woke-ness that it will allow the perverse steamroller of Allah to have its way with it? Are you going to write something about Neville Chamberlain next?
“Nothing he does for them will be good enough. There is no mollifying the children. They demand purity and nothing less will do.”
Is he talking about progressives? Or about Israelis? You know, like the purity of getting rid of every last member of Hamas, as if the name of the organization that hates you matters at all. It’s the amount of hate you engender with your actions that pays you back. Greenfield doesn’t ever discuss about what horrible things Israel is doing that makes terrorism against them inevitable. That doesn’t mean they deserve terrorism, but that they will continue to suffer it for entirely comprehensible reasons.
“If they don’t realize that the alternative to Biden is Trump, and there is no disputing that compelling argument, then there can be no reasoning with them.”
There it is: vote for another Biden administration because that’s the only alternative to a Trump administration. What a maroon. What a simpleton. How basic.
Good old Scott. Don’t ever change, buddy.
How the Ruling Class Became Vulgar: an interview with Doug Henwood by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)
“Who or what is the ruling class?”
The ruling class is anyone who is comfortable, secure, and safe, but continues to chisel every unfair advantage they were either born with or gained through plunder for further gain at the expense of the comfort, safety, and security of others who do not do this. They manipulate the tilted playing field to ensure it tips their way forever. They grub for money when they already have too much of it. They marketize everything because that tactic works for them, and they perceive no loss in things dying that they do not personally value. And they recognize no value in anything other than money. They are crassly simplistic, desperately short-sighted, and deeply anti-intellectual.
“[…] there’s a tendency to descend into conspiracy theorizing, where it’s just a small group of people in a room who plan everything, and that’s not true. It’s a much larger group than that. They can’t always get together in a room, and they really can’t plan everything. But there’s an insight to that attraction of conspiracy theorizing, which is, I don’t think anybody believes that this is a democracy anymore. Probably since the mid-’80s, it’s become ever more discredited, to the point where now nobody can believe that. It’s just such transparent nonsense driven by the interest of the money. And that sounds like vulgar Marxism, but as my late friend [Robert] Fitch used to say, “Vulgar Marxism explains 90 percent of what goes on in the world.””
“I can understand why the masses might resent liberal power, because liberals kind of look down their noses at the masses. There’s no question about it. They think they’re all deplorables, as Hillary Clinton famously said. But these are not the people who run the state. They’re not the people who run finance. They’re not the people who make decisions in the Fortune 500, which are the ones that are the most consequential for people. Now, I can understand why the Right would want to draw attention to that, because it draws attention away from the real nature of power, which they’re extremely complicit in or puppets of. But I find it distressing when people on the Left adopt some of this argument.”
“I think race and gender and sexuality are really important material political concerns. And I really don’t like this tendency of a lot of people to dismiss that as secondary or diversionary or even wrong. These are important things.”
They are important but only because the more important things have been sorted out. They’re higher on Maslow’s pyramid. If the base crumbles for some people, don’t fault them for not focusing on the same moral priorities you have been granted the luxury of addressing from your privileged and relatively secure position further up that pyramid.
“That’s when WASP consciousness really came to the fore. And it had this ethic of discipline and austerity. It was not the luxury that we associate with our contemporary ruling class. These were people who lived in very disciplined, modest ways.”
“There was this concern that everyone was going soft as industrial civilization was taking us away from the fields and manly labors. So somebody like Teddy Roosevelt would engage in cartoon-like performances of masculinity to counter that creeping softness. Endicott Peabody and the Groton ethic was very much like that as well: getting up early, working hard, going to bed, and no sex, no fun, no art, just discipline.”
“Our current rich don’t feel any need to be civilized. They’re so confident in themselves and their right to rule the world. They feel no social anxiety about not having the proper manners or the proper education, the proper understanding of their civilization. They just know everything because they’re so rich.”
“They may not have loved having unions, but they didn’t want to destroy them. Then the shareholder revolution, the Volcker tight money regime from 1979 to 1982, and the Reagan revolution — notably the breaking of the PATCO union — all these things together really transformed that old comfortable world into the one that we live in today. And we’re still living pretty much in the world that was shaped by the 1980s, where now it’s a sacred principle that stock prices are the preeminent guide for what a corporation is all about, at least for a public corporation.”
“There was a rehabilitation of the word entrepreneur too. Weirdly, [John Maynard] Keynes used that term a lot in the general theory; I guess he didn’t want to say capitalist because he didn’t want to sound anti-capitalist. But that word went out of fashion until the early ’80s when you started hearing about entrepreneurship all over again. The lone wolf hero of accumulation was lionized by the broader society in ways that we hadn’t seen since the 1920s, and before that the 1890s. It was a remarkable transition.”
“Almost no one can beat the stock market averages unless you’re George Soros or Stanley Druckenmiller or somebody like that. What that means is it makes the most sense just to try to mimic those averages. So as a result of this financial theory, it became really hard to justify paying a lot of money to money managers to try to beat the averages when it was virtually certain that they wouldn’t be able to do it.”
“Under Shad, they legalize this practice of corporations buying their own stock to boost its price. Corporate managers who are paid in stock go, “Let’s use this corporate treasury money to buy the stock and boost its price, it’ll keep outside shareholders happy and will make me richer.” So if you look at the flow of corporate money over the last forty years, trillions of stock dollars of stock have disappeared. There are times when the buybacks exceed the level of corporate investment going into the pandemic crisis. Boeing and some of the major airlines were so cash depleted because of all their buybacks that they needed a federal bailout. A lot of companies were even borrowing money to buy their own stock — not borrowing money to expand or do something.”
In fairness, borrowing money was cheap. It cost nearly nothing. So, you’d have more debt—which wasn’t factored against you because you had almost no interest—and you could make more money betting on your own stock. This wasn’t stupid—it was the incentive laid out by the policy-makers. There was never going to be another conclusion.
“it was very interesting to watch during the early Trump years, because big capitalists really were not very high on Trump. They favored Hillary. They thought that Trump is an irresponsible and dangerous character. But as soon as he came into office and he cut their taxes and deregulated everything and the stock market took off, they were happy. So they didn’t care about all the other insane stuff he was doing, as long as the stock price was going up and their taxes were going down and regulations were disappearing. That’s all they cared about.”
Same thing with Biden. No tax cut, but no getting rid of that PE exemption, either. The stock market is through the roof, so the Biden administration can talk about how great they are for the economy—because no-one looks at any other measure, really. People like to cite the extremely carefully delineated inflation and unemployment figures and then ask why no-one’s happy? Didn’t we tell them to be happy? Haven’t we proved to them on paper that they should be happy? The numbers don’t account for the very large Dunkelziffer where much of poor America finds itself.
“It’s true not only at the national or even the international level, but at the local level. A lot of local billionaires really dominate their state’s politics. So a character like Art Pope in North Carolina, who made billions off a chain of discount stores for poor people, has a material interest in creating more poor people because they patronize his stores. And he has been financing a lot of the reactionary agenda in North Carolina. And North Carolina is not a blue state by any means, but it is not a reactionary state.”
“They just have so much to spend, and they’re willing to spend it. And they feel so persecuted — funny since these folks have never had it so good. Maybe there’s a little more hostility now than there was toward them some years ago. But politically, they’re really safe. They don’t have to pay any taxes, and yet they still feel so besieged. I guess it’s a guilty conscience, the sense that they’re getting away with murder and that any time now that the angry masses are going to come slit their throats. But it’s a weird sense of aggrievement that leads them to fund all these crazy politicians to push this agenda even further.”
“This combination of being materially secure and politically secure, and at the same time culturally insecure, produces a very volatile mix of reactionary politics.”
“If you go back into the progressive era too, a lot of the base for the progressive era of politicians were the professional class that resented all the new capitalists. They felt they were vulgarian and what we needed were nice civilized experts to run things. The early twentieth century Nation magazine very much reflected that. It editorialized in favor of chain stores. There was this big movement, especially in the rural South, against chain stores, and the Nation in those times was contemptuous of the rejection of what they considered economic evolution.”
“That’s emblematic of so-called woke liberalism: materially, money did the work of making sure that just the right kind of people would enter their suburbs and they wouldn’t have to worry about vulgarians from the city coming in and taking over.”
You can always discriminate by class, by who can afford what. Nobody’s every going to get around that. It’s like water for fish. We don’t even realize we’re doing it when we say of course you can’t do such-and-such if you can’t afford it. Very few people wonder (A) why is that so self-evident? That societal goods should be apportioned only to those who’ve proven their value to society through the monetary system? And (B) why can’t they afford such-and-such? How was that money apportioned? We don’t all have the same starting line.
“Places like Yale made a conscious effort starting in the 1970s to bring in people who are not third-generation legacies and try to recruit people from public high schools. But if you look at the makeup of the Yale student body today, it’s overwhelmingly people from households with six-figure incomes. I think [Thomas] Piketty says in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that the average Harvard undergraduate’s family has a household income of $300,000.”
“Brookings [Institution] had a study out the other day that almost all of the families that are under the poverty line for three generations in a row are black. There are almost no white people whose families are under the poverty line for three generations in a row. That kind of thing is really hard to do much about without a major social reconstruction, which is impossible to imagine in the current political environment.”
“One of Vrijmoeth’s key insights is that a policy of ever increasing housing prices as a means to wealth increase itself generates a kind of wealth pyramid, where simultaneously entry from the bottom into the rising pyramid gets harder and harder. This is especially so when the increase in home prices outstrips productivity/wage growth as it does when supply of new homes is hindered and the prices of existing homes and land are supported indirectly through policy.”
“Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day.
“Teach a man to fish, buy the pond, tell him he can’t have the fish but he can fish for you and you sell the fish and give him a very small cut and then he’ll say stuff like “I am hungry and my teeth hurt.”
“Nobody wants to fish these days”
As global war intensifies, world economy moving to slump by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“According to data compiled by the Federal Reserve, production in the US defence and space sectors has increased by 17.5 percent since the start of the Ukraine war. The State Department has reported that the US made more than $80 billion in major arms deals in the year up to last September of which about $50 billion was with Europe, more than five times the historical norm.
“And there have been other “benefits.” The cutting of gas supplies to Europe from Russia as a result of the Ukraine war and the escalation of prices has proved a bonanza for the US such that it became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas last year with exports set to double by 2030.
“The US economy, however, is not immune from the developing recessionary trends. As the global struggle for markets and profits intensifies, major US firms, in auto and other industries, are slashing jobs. Tech companies alone, according to a report in the Financial Times, have axed 34,000 jobs so far this year as part of the shift to the use of artificial intelligence.”
The U.S. is still propping up its numbers with military and fossil-fuel bonanzas but that won’t last that long. And the bonanza is quite thin for a “war haul”. You can see the U.S. siphoning off all of the pre-recessionary benefit for itself in what must be one of the most blatant examples of short-term thinking in history.
A lovely song accompanied by a live-drawn series of painting that form a story, an animation of sorts.
How To Adjust Salomon Bindings To Fit Ski Boots? Learn These Tips To Improve Your Skiing Experience! by Emma Brooks (The Ski Lesson)
This is exactly what I predicted would happen.
“A typical adjustment process involves sliding back and forth within its track over a fixed ball joint with multiple screw holes in-place between existing tick marks at heel pieces movable carrier position until forward pressure torque spring centre mark aligns with it while boot fits identical coloured lines engraved at heels a visual quick check once properly torqued up securing firmly into place by releasing lever mechanisms ready for use”
There’s also this woefully useless video of someone asking a chat robot how to do it. It was top-ranked by DuckDuckGo.
The enchittification is well underway.
On the other hand, there’s this cool story The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video by Simon Willison
Basically, he uploaded a seven-second video of his bookshelf and asked it to identify as many books as it could and it got most of them. He’d asked for JSON output and it delivered a bullet-list. He reiterated that he wanted JSON, with title and author keys, and it complied. Pretty damned cool, and quite a time-saver.
You’d still have to cross-check it, of course, if the output is important to you, but it’s pretty cool. You can visually verify more quickly than you could type the titles yourself.
The way we build and ship software these days is mostly ridiculous by Bert Hubert (IEEE Spectrum )
“The way we build and ship software these days is mostly ridiculous, leading to apps using millions of lines of code to open a garage door, and other simple programs importing 1,600 external code libraries —dependencies—of unknown provenance. Software security is dire, which is a function both of the quality of the code and the sheer amount of it. Many of us programmers know the current situation is untenable. Many programmers (and their management) sadly haven’t ever experienced anything else. And for the rest of us, we rarely get the time to do a better job.”
“I hope that this post provides some mental and moral support for suffering programmers and technologists who want to improve things. It is not just you; We are not merely suffering from nostalgia: Software really is very weird today.”
“Without going all “Old man (48) yells at cloud ,” let me restate some obvious things. The state of software security is dire . If we only look at the past year, if you ran industry-standard software like Ivanti , MOVEit , Outlook , Confluence , Barracuda Email Security Gateway , Citrix NetScaler ADC, and NetScaler Gateway, chances are you got hacked. Even companies with near-infinite resources (like Apple and Google ) made trivial “worst practice” security mistakes that put their customers in danger . Yet we continue to rely on all these products.”
“The assumption is then that the cloud is somehow able to make insecure software trustworthy. Yet in the past year, we’ve learned that Microsoft’s email platform was thoroughly hacked, including classified government email. (Twice!) There are also well-founded worries about the security of the Azure cloud.”
“I want to touch on incentives. The situation today is clearly working well for commercial operators. Making more secure software takes time and is a lot of work, and the current security incidents don’t appear to be impacting the bottom line or stock prices. You can speed up time to market by cutting corners . So from an economic standpoint, what we see is entirely predictable. Legislation could be very important in changing this equation.”
Even he is working within the parameters of a broken system.
“Apple is (by far) not the worst offender in this field. But it is a widely respected and well-resourced company that usually thinks through what they do. And even they got it wrong by needlessly shipping and exposing too much code.”
“In 1995 Niklaus Wirth lamented that software had grown to megabytes in size. In his article “A Plea for Lean Software,” he went on to describe his Oberon operating system, which was only 200 kilobytes, including an editor and a compiler. There are now projects that have more than 200 KB for their configuration files alone.”
“[…] these days we often ship software as containers, shipping not only the software itself but also including operating system files to make sure the software runs in a well-known environment. This frequently entails effectively shipping a complete computer disk image. This again vastly expands the amount of code being deployed. Note that you can do good things with containers like Docker (see below), but there are a lot of images over 350 MB on the Docker Hub .”
This is not a good argument. A container is less code than the OS you expect to be there otherwise. Hell, a container expects to run on a host system anyway. Which attack surface are you trying to reduce?
“The world is shipping far too much code where we don’t even know what we ship and we aren’t looking hard enough (or at all) at what we do know we ship.”
“I want to end this post with some observations from Niklaus Wirth’s 1995 paper : “To some, complexity equals power. (…) Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication , which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.””
“As Tony Hoare noted long ago, “[T]here are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors . The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.””
“Back to Wirth: “Time pressure is probably the foremost reason behind the emergence of bulky software. The time pressure that designers endure discourages careful planning. It also discourages improving acceptable solutions; instead, it encourages quickly conceived software additions and corrections. Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer’s standard of quality and perfection. It has a detrimental effect on people as well as products.””
Tailwind marketing and misinformation engine by Tero Piirainen (Nue)
This article mentioned that the Catalyst demo page—which is the latest incarnation of Tailwind CSS—includes HTML for a button that looks like this:
<button class="
[&>[data-slot=icon]]:-mx-0.5
[&>[data-slot=icon]]:my-0.5
[&>[data-slot=icon]]:shrink-0
[&>[data-slot=icon]]:size-5
[&>[data-slot=icon]]:sm:my-1
[&>[data-slot=icon]]:sm:size-4
[&>[data-slot=icon]]:text-[–btn-icon]
[–btn-bg:theme(colors.zinc.900)]
[–btn-border:theme(colors.zinc.950/90%)]
[–btn-hover-overlay:theme(colors.white/10%)]
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That’s nuts. That’s writing-on-every-square-inch-of-your-prison-cell-in-your-own-poo-style crazy.
“There are two way of constructing a software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors . The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.”
Published by marco on 22. Feb 2024 07:45:56 (GMT-5)
]]>“To some, complexity equals power. […] Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.”
Published by marco on 22. Feb 2024 07:42:13 (GMT-5)
]]>“As we say in Ireland: If we fight, we might win. If we don’t fight, we’ve lost already.”
Published by marco on 21. Feb 2024 08:08:10 (GMT-5)
]]>Published by marco on 19. Feb 2024 22:36:38 (GMT-5)
I listened to the The Vladimir Putin Interview by Tucker Carlson (127 minutes), which is also available as Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview (Twitter). The article Tucker Carlson Interviews Vladimir Putin by Tucker Carlson (Scheer Post) includes a transcript found on the Kremlin’s website. You have to subscribe to Tucker Carlson to get the transcript from him. Those dirty commies in the Kremlin just gave it away for free.
The interview was over two hours. What follows are just some longer quotes I took from the transcript, with a few notes of my own. I’ve cherry-picked the stuff that Putin said that I broadly—or even sometimes very specifically—agree that he expressed in a realistic and historically accurate way. Where I disagreed with something that he said, I’ve noted it. I may have missed something; it’s a long interview.
He spoke completely extemporaneously, without notes or a teleprompter. It was clear that he was expressing how he personally sees these topics of international import. He didn’t seem to be playing to his western audience in any way. Much of what he said, he’s already formulated in similar ways—if not occasionally identical ways—in essays and in other speeches he’s given.
This is not to say that he’s a hero, or even honorable, but only to say that, as the leader of a foreign power with no small amount of influence—even if, as he acknowledges, it’s not even close to that of the U.S. or China—there seems to be a lot of opening for reasonably working with Russia under Putin.
Russia asks that it not be treated as a vassal. If that cannot be guaranteed, then there is no need for negotiation and the chips will fall where they may. Putin clearly indicates that he doesn’t think that Russia is holding such bad cards. Their economy seems to be impervious to U.S. machinations. Putin speaks of an economy that is working for himself and other elites, but doesn’t speak at all of the troubles on the ground that affect the large majority of Russia’s population. This is not unlike how the U.S.—or probably any other nation—reports on its economy.
What is clear is that many of the roadblocks to, say, Germany having its natural gas or Ukraine having peace, have been thrown up by the west. Russia has some conditions, but they seem eminently reasonable, at least for initial discussions to begin.
Still, Putin starts off with a bald-faced lie.
“if you don’t mind I will take only 30 seconds or one minute of your time for giving you a little historical background.”
Why was that a lie? Because it wasn’t just “30 seconds or one minute”. He proceeded to recite a Russian history lesson with a focus on “Where does Ukraine come from?” that starts with “[t]he Russian state started to exist as a centralized state in 862.” It went on for about the first thirty minutes.
After a few minutes, Tucker interrupts with “I am losing track of where in history we are?”
“It was in the 13th century.”
Putin then positively leaps forward in time to 1654. After several more minutes, Putin says “[t]his briefing is coming to an end. It might be boring, but it explains many things.”
The modern-day discussion begins in earnest after that, with Tucker asking Putin why, if he believes that Ukraine is such a hodge-podge of cobbled-together lands that are really mostly Russian and Hungarian, didn’t he just take it back at the beginning of his presidency, 22 years ago?
The answer is obvious: because it wasn’t causing trouble then. Ukraine means “border”; even its name derives from being Russia’s border to Europe. The Soviet Union had let go of so many other territories—Russia’s aim wasn’t to regain territory, it was to guarantee a modicum of regional stability and security for Russia itself.
With NATO pushing right up to Russia’s borders—through the hand-puppet of Ukraine—that was no longer possible. That, and the nearly decade-long civil war that had been fomented in eastern Ukraine, right on Russia’s border, made it long-term impossible for Russia to just stand by and watch NATO—the U.S.—militarize its border.
The U.S. was positively braying about how it not only had the right to take up Ukraine as its ally, but also to move some of its own nuclear weapons there. It was utter madness to anyone who wasn’t 100% in the tank for NATO’s—and primarily the U.S.‘s—view of how the world works.
“I understand that my long speeches probably fall outside of the genre of an interview. That is why I asked you at the beginning: ”Are we going to have a serious talk or a show?“ You said — a serious talk. So bear with me please.”
Deep breath. We’re up to 1991 now. He finishes up the history lesson. Tucker asks,
“But we have a strong China that the West doesn’t seem to be very afraid of. What about Russia, what do you think convinced the policymakers to take it down?”
This is ludicrous on its face. How can anyone think that the U.S. is not afraid of China? They’re sanctioning them to death and encircling them with bases. Putin answers,
“The West is afraid of a strong China more than it fears a strong Russia because Russia has 150 million people, and China has a 1.5 billion population, and its economy is growing by leaps and bounds — over five percent a year, it used to be even more. But that’s enough for China. As Bismark once put it, potentials are most important. China’s potential is enormous — it is the biggest economy in the world today in terms of purchasing power parity and the size of the economy. It has already overtaken the United States, quite a long time ago, and it is growing at a rapid clip.
“Let’s not talk about who is afraid of whom, let’s not reason in such terms. And let’s get into the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of ”civilized nations,“ nothing like this happened. You tricked us.”
We move on from there to the underpinnings of the current conflict in Ukraine. Putin reiterates the history of the Minsk agreement up until the end of 2021 and mentions, not for the last time, how the west just lies about everything, that they “simply led us by the nose,” which, well, he’s not wrong. The U.S.—and Europe in its wake—sees itself always as on the right side of history and in the moral role in anything that it does, so it sees no problem with simply lying to get what it wants. The ends justify the means, if Russia is to be vanquished.
“[…] the current Ukrainian leadership declared that it would not implement the Minsk Agreements, which had been signed, as you know, after the events of 2014, in Minsk, where the plan of peaceful settlement in Donbass was set forth. But no, the current Ukrainian leadership, Foreign Minister, all other officials and then President himself said that they don’t like anything about the Minsk Agreements. In other words, they were not going to implement it. A year or a year and a half ago, former leaders of Germany and France said openly to the whole world that they indeed signed the Minsk Agreements but they never intended to implement them. They simply led us by the nose.”
With the next treaty on the table in March/April of 2022—nearly immediately after the initial Russian invasion—he describes why the Russian troops left Kiev. It was not, as detailed in the western press, because they had turned tail and run.
“My counterparts in France and Germany said, ”How can you imagine them signing a treaty with a gun to their heads? The troops should be pulled back from Kiev. ‘I said, ‘All right.’ We withdrew the troops from Kiev.
“As soon as we pulled back our troops from Kiev, our Ukrainian negotiators immediately threw all our agreements reached in Istanbul into the bin and got prepared for a longstanding armed confrontation with the help of the United States and its satellites in Europe. That is how the situation has developed. And that is how it looks now.”
When Tucker asks him what he thinks of possible U.S. participation in the war, with actual boots on the ground, Putin responds,
“This is a provocation, and a cheap provocation at that.
“I do not understand why American soldiers should fight in Ukraine. There are mercenaries from the United States there. The biggest number of mercenaries comes from Poland, with mercenaries from the United States in second place, and mercenaries from Georgia in third place. Well, if somebody has the desire to send regular troops, that would certainly bring humanity on the brink of a very serious, global conflict. This is obvious.
“Do the United States need this? What for? Thousands of miles away from your national territory! Don’t you have anything better to do?
“You have issues on the border, issues with migration, issues with the national debt – more than 33 trillion dollars. You have nothing better to do, so you should fight in Ukraine? Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia? Make an agreement, already understanding the situation that is developing today, realizing that Russia will fight for its interests to the end. And, realizing this, actually return to common sense, start respecting our country and its interests and look for certain solutions. It seems to me that this is much smarter and more rational.”
Tucker asks Putin why he doesn’t just tell the world what the U.S. did to the Nordstream pipeline if he has, as he says, proof that the U.S. secret services blew it up. Putin chuckles and responds,
“In the war of propaganda it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media. The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions. Don’t you know that?”
Tucker acknowledges that Russia would probably not make much headway in the western press with their allegations, but wonders then why Germany doesn’t defends itself and its interests. The destruction of the pipeline put it directly in thrall to the U.S., paying four times the price that any other nation pays for its natural gas.
“Tucker Carlson: Yes. But here is a question you may be able to answer. You worked in Germany, famously. The Germans clearly know that their NATO partner did this, that they damaged their economy greatly – it may never recover. Why are they being silent about it? That is very confusing to me. Why wouldn’t the Germans say something about it?
“Vladimir Putin: This also confuses me. But today’s German leadership is guided by the interests of the collective West rather than its national interests, otherwise it is difficult to explain the logic of their action or inaction. After all, it is not only about Nord Stream-1, which was blown up, and Nord Stream-2 was damaged, but one pipe is safe and sound, and gas can be supplied to Europe through it, but Germany does not open it. We are ready, please.”
Putin mentions the “golden billion”, a phrase I understood immediately, but that I’d never heard before. I’m not sure if he understands the unstated irony that he and his cronies are very much in the golden billion, but that probably most of the populace over which he rules is not. Perhaps he is appealing to them? Or to the other nations of the BRICS, like Indonesia and India? It’s unclear, but he’s trying to lead us to think that he truly believes that the world would be better if wealth was divided in a more egalitarian manner.
Perhaps he does, as long as he personally doesn’t have to give anything up. At any rate, it is safe to say that he thinks that wealth and power should accrue to the nations to which it naturally falls, either by resources or by sheer hard work, rather than to the nations that manage to take what they want. Russia and China have that in common: they are not seeking empire in the way that the U.S. very aggressively does. This much is clear.
“The world should be a single whole, security should be shared, rather than meant for the ”golden billion“. That is the only scenario where the world could be stable, sustainable and predictable. Until then, while the head is split into two parts, it is an illness, a serious adverse condition. It is a period of a severe disease that the world is now going through.”
Putin probably has no idea how ironic it is for him to be lauding journalism, a field that he has decimated during his rule. Politskaya would like a word.
“I think that, thanks to honest journalism — this work is akin to work of the doctors, this could somehow be remedied.”
They quickly move on—though the subject of journalism would reappear at the end again—to the insanity of the U.S. wielding its most important asset as a weapon that damages the U.S. more than it does its intended targets. Putin talks about the US. Dollar and economic sanctions. I’ve quoted liberally from this section because it’s quite important to see how the stewards of the western economy either don’t know or don’t care that they’re destroying value for no reason. This, at a time when we need every reason we can get to fight climate change, rather than to fight stupid wars—either economic or military.
“As soon as the political leadership decided to use the US dollar as a tool of political struggle, a blow was dealt to this American power. I would not like to use any strong language, but it is a stupid thing to do, and a grave mistake.
“Look at what is going on in the world. Even the United States’ allies are now downsizing their dollar reserves. Seeing this, everyone starts looking for ways to protect themselves. But the fact that the United States applies restrictive measures to certain countries, such as placing restrictions on transactions, freezing assets, etc., causes grave concern and sends a signal to the whole world.
“What did we have here? Until 2022, about 80 per cent of Russia’s foreign trade transactions were made in US dollars and euros. US dollars accounted for approximately 50 per cent of our transactions with third countries, while currently it is down to 13 per cent. It was not us who banned the use of the US dollar, we had no such intention. It was the decision of the United States to restrict our transactions in US dollars. I think it is a complete foolishness from the point of view of the interests of the United States itself and its tax payers, as it damages the US economy, undermines the power of the United States across the world.
“By the way, our transactions in Yuan accounted for about 3 per cent. Today, 34 per cent of our transactions are made in Rubles, and about as much, a little over 34 per cent, in Yuan.
“Why did the United States do this? My only guess is self-conceit. They probably thought it would lead to a full collapse, but nothing collapsed. Moreover, other countries, including oil producers, are thinking of and already accepting payments for oil in yuan. Do you even realize what is going on or not? Does anyone in the United States realize this? What are you doing? You are cutting yourself off… all experts say this. Ask any intelligent and thinking person in the United States what the dollar means for the US? You are killing it with your own hands.
“Tucker Carlson: I think that is a fair assessment. The question is what comes next? And maybe you trade one colonial power for another, much less sentimental and forgiving colonial power? Is the BRICS, for example, in danger of being completely dominated by the Chinese economy? In a way that is not good for their sovereignty. Do you worry about that?
“Vladimir Putin: We have heard those boogeyman stories before. It is a boogeyman story. We are neighbours with China. You cannot choose neighbours, just as you cannot choose close relatives. We share a border of 1000 kilometers with them. This is number one.
“Second, we have a centuries-long history of coexistence, we are used to it.
“Third, China’s foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive, its idea is to always look for compromise, and we can see that.”
Putin expands on the topic of the shifting global economic picture, citing figures about the relative share of the G7 countries—it was the G8 until Russia was expelled only ten years ago in 2014!—versus the BRICS nations. The BRICS nations now account for more of the global economy, and certainly a large majority of manufacturing. The G7 have a much larger proportion of their share coming from banking and other financialized services.
And isn’t it wild that the ostracizing of Russia began in earnest (again) only a decade ago? Before that, there were sanctions, but they were milder. And before that, there was the crippling of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet. But still, Russia was still in the club a little bit, anyway. No alliances, no NATO, but they were in the G8. Then came the coup in Ukraine, provoking the annexation, and the nearly immediate banning of Russia from the G8. Their seat in the Security Council remains.
“Look, if memory serves me right, back in 1992, the share of the G7 countries in the world economy amounted to 47 per cent, whereas in 2022 it was down to, I think, a little over 30 per cent. The BRICS countries accounted for only 16 per cent in 1992, but now their share is greater than that of the G7. It has nothing to do with the events in Ukraine. This is due to the trends of global development and world economy that I mentioned just now, and this is inevitable. This will keep happening, it is like the rise of the sun — you cannot prevent the sun from rising, you have to adapt to it. How do the United States adapt? With the help of force: sanctions, pressure, bombings, and use of armed forces.”
Tucker asks about whether a change in U.S. leadership would help? Does Putin think that the Biden administration is particularly intractable?
“It is not about the personality of the leader, it is about the elites’ mindset. If the idea of domination at any cost, based also on forceful actions, dominates the American society, nothing will change, it will only get worse. But if, in the end, one comes to the awareness that the world has been changing due to objective circumstances, and that one should be able to adapt to them in time, using the advantages that the U.S. still has today, then, perhaps, something may change.”
Putin returns to the topic of the global economy, specifically with China’s and Russia’s role in it.
“Look, China’s economy has become the first economy in the world in purchasing power parity; in terms of volume it overtook the US a long time ago. The USA comes second, then India (one and a half billion people), and then Japan, with Russia in the fifth place. Russia was the first economy in Europe last year, despite all the sanctions and restrictions. Is this normal, from your point of view: sanctions, restrictions, impossibility of payments in dollars, being cut off from SWIFT services, sanctions against our ships carrying oil, sanctions against airplanes, sanctions in everything, everywhere? The largest number of sanctions in the world which are applied – are applied against Russia. And we have become Europe’s first economy during this time.”
Tucker asked Putin about the potential for change in the U.S. through electoral action, for fresh ideas of the sort Putin thinks that the U.S. needs in order to better fit into the global order that is emerging, whether it likes it or not.
“America is a complex country, conservative on the one hand, rapidly changing on the other. It’s not easy for us to sort it all out.
“Who makes decisions in the elections – is it possible to understand this, when each state has its own legislation, each state regulates itself, someone can be excluded from the elections at the state level. It is a two-stage electoral system, it is very difficult for us to understand it.
“Certainly there are two parties that are dominant, the Republicans and the Democrats, and within this party system, the centers that make decisions, that prepare decisions.”
Putin questions not only the wisdom, but also the morality, of trying to beat down any possible competitors on the global level. These competitors will exist by sheer force of numbers, no matter what. He cites Indonesia as a rising player, that just by the sheer size of its population and the accompanying manufacturing power, will take its rightful place among powerful nations soon enough.
“[…] it is necessary to continue ”chiseling“ Russia, to try to break it up, to create on this territory several quasi-state entities and to subdue them in a divided form, to use their combined potential for the future struggle with China. This is a mistake, including the excessive potential of those who worked for the confrontation with the Soviet Union. It is necessary to get rid of this, there should be new, fresh forces, people who look into the future and understand what is happening in the world.
“Look at how Indonesia is developing? 600 million people. Where can we get away from that? Nowhere, we just have to assume that Indonesia will enter (it is already in) the club of the world’s leading economies, no matter who likes or dislikes it.”
Back to Ukraine, with specifics about why Zelensky was elected and how he’s betrayed the people who voted for him, who’d elected him to make peace, to end the civil war. Instead, Zelensky expanded the civil war and provoked Russia into invasion. There were many, many ways to avoid the invasion. They would have required relinquishing some power to federalist territories in the east—as outlined in the Minsk agreements—but that seems eminently preferable to where Zelensky is steering the ship of state of Ukraine now.
“[Zelensky] came to power on the expectations of Ukrainian people that he would lead Ukraine to peace. He talked about this, it was thanks to this that he won the election overwhelmingly. But then, when he came to power, in my opinion, he realized two things: firstly, it is better not to clash with neo-Nazis and nationalists, because they are aggressive and very active, you can expect anything from them, and secondly, the US-led West supports them and will always support those who antagonize with Russia – it is beneficial and safe. So he took the relevant position, despite promising his people to end the war in Ukraine. He deceived his voters.”
Tucker asks why Putin doesn’t try harder to get negotiations going again? If he wants peace, then why doesn’t he go to the table with Ukraine. Putin responds that it is because Ukraine refuses to talk, that Russia has always been ready to negotiate—before the invasion and war, soon after the invasion, and ever since.
“President of Ukraine issued a decree prohibiting negotiations with us. Let him cancel that decree and that’s it. We have never refused negotiations indeed. We hear all the time: is Russia ready? Yes, we have not refused! It was them who publicly refused. Well, let him cancel his decree and enter into negotiations. We have never refused.”
At 01:50:00, he draws a comparison between the threat imposed on the world by a failure to control the production of nuclear weapons with that posed by AI. It’s impossible to stop it like we couldn’t stop gunpowder. There will come a time when we would need to regulate this internationally.
“Humanity has to consider what is going to happen due to the newest developments in genetics or in AI. One can make an approximate prediction of what will happen. Once mankind felt an existential threat coming from nuclear weapons, all nuclear nations began to come to terms with one another since they realized that negligent use of nuclear weaponry could drive humanity to extinction.
“It is impossible to stop research in genetics or AI today, just as it was impossible to stop the use of gunpowder back in the day. But as soon as we realize that the threat comes from unbridled and uncontrolled development of AI, or genetics, or any other fields, the time will come to reach an international agreement on how to regulate these things.”
Tucker asks about the NYT journalist who’s serving time in a Russian prison for espionage. Putin basically says: you have many cards to trade for him. Do so, and he’s yours. The only reason that Gershkovich is still in prison in Russia is because the U.S. refuses to negotiate and just wants him returned “for free”, when the U.S. has many prisoners that Russia would like back, people that they’ve similarly accused of spying for Russia while in the U.S. They traded for the basketball player (Griner?); they can trade for the journalist.
“I do not rule out that the person you referred to, Mister Gershkovich, may return to his motherland. By the end of the day, it does not make any sense to keep him in prison in Russia. We want the U.S. special services to think about how they can contribute to achieving the goals our special services are pursuing. We are ready to talk. Moreover, the talks are underway, and there have been many successful examples of these talks crowned with success. Probably this is going to be crowned with success as well, but we have to come to an agreement.”
Back to Ukraine and a potential settlement/peace agreement.
“Tucker Carlson: So, I just want to make sure I am not misunderstanding what you are saying — and I don’t think that I am — I think you are saying you want a negotiated settlement to what’s happening in Ukraine.
“Vladimir Putin: Right. And we made it, we prepared a huge document in Istanbul that was initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation. He affixed his signature to some of the provisions, not to all of it. He put his signature and then he himself said: “We were ready to sign it and the war would have been over long ago, eighteen months ago. However, Prime Minister Johnson came, talked us out of it and we missed that chance.” Well, you missed it, you made a mistake, let them get back to that, that is all. Why do we have to bother ourselves and correct somebody else’s mistakes?
“I know one can say it is our mistake, it was us who intensified the situation and decided to put an end to the war that started in 2014 in Donbas, as I have already said, by means of weapons. Let me get back to further in history, I already told you this, we were just discussing it. Let us go back to 1991 when we were promised that NATO would not be expanded, to 2008 when the doors to NATO opened, to the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine declaring Ukraine a neutral state. Let us go back to the fact that NATO and US military bases started to appear on the territory of Ukraine creating threats for us. Let us go back to coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It is pointless though, isn’t it? We may go back and forth endlessly. But they stopped negotiations. Is it a mistake? Yes. Correct it. We are ready. What else is needed?”
Just as an aside, a commentator on Twitter reflected my reaction to the juxtaposition of this interview coming out and the “diagnosis” that Joe Biden is mentally unfit to stand trial,
“Vladimir Putin just spent 30 minutes going over the last 1,000 years history of Russia and Ukraine in detail without notes.
“Joe Biden can’t remember when his son died.
“God help us all”
Published by marco on 19. Feb 2024 21:52:19 (GMT-5)
The Tumbler repost The modern digital divide (Reddit) is about how well younger students really understand their digital devices and apps. This is an interesting story told by a high-school tutor about digital-tool abilities in the current generation of kids. It’s a bit long, but I thought the following conclusions were interesting.
It contrasts using the Internet with using apps, which are not at all the same thing.
The Internet is an open place with links and content, accessed by a machine with a keyboard and nearly boundless opportunity for creativity—within the strict confines of the pathetically crippled and dysfunctional dumpster fire that is all software—whereas apps are walled gardens and deliberately designed to restrict interaction with other sources. The input mechanisms on phones and tablets necessarily restrict many forms of creativity by making them impossible to do efficiently.
These digital natives can enter data quickly enough into a phone, but that mechanism is so limiting and limited compared to a laptop, with a real keyboard. Tablets and phones are a fallback for when you can’t use a laptop or desktop computer. They are not a replacement—not even close. If you can replace everything you need with a tablet or phone, then you have nearly no requirements. You’ve already capitulated to a very restricted worldview. You’re satisfied with extremely limited capabilities relative to what other people can do with other devices.
The author of the post thinks that poverty limits people’s access. But a phone or tablet isn’t necessarily cheaper than a computer. It’s just cooler and necessary and ultra-portable.
So-called digital natives know only apps on tablets and phones. They have no familiarity with web sites on desktop computers. But apps are very limited in their ability to offer true creativity, both by their nature and also by their purpose, which is to make money for the app developer.
More critically, almost no-one at most businesses does any or even some of their daily business on an app. Although many LOB (line-of-business) apps purport to be usable on mobile, they are incredibly inefficient as compared to their desktop counterparts. Even browser-based tools like Microsoft’s Office tools are really limited relative to native desktop apps.
So the tools that businesses use to run their world are out of the reach of most of the people in the next generation. They are not being trained or even introduced to these tools. There’s a training gap that no-one thinks they’re responsible for, which means that capitalism doesn’t have a solution. Its solution is to wait around for the state to do it. This is probably not going to end well.
The problem goes deeper, though, to a complete ignorance of where data resides or how to find it other than to “search for it”. Imagine, instead of knowing where you live, you were just to get somewhere close to your neighborhood and just start shouting the names of the people in your family until someone pointed you to your house.
We aren’t teaching people how to organize information, or how to think about where their information is, or how it is being shared or used, or how they could preserve it for later. It’s just assumed to always be available—or not. I think a lot of people assume that, since they can’t find the information anymore, that it’s just gone.
Words like “upload” or “download” mean nothing in this world. “Save” is also meaningless.
It’s nice that people don’t have to remember to save files anymore or necessarily know where they are in a file system. But that convenience stops when you need to coordinate with other people, when you all need to be able to find things. Then, you need to agree on a system.
📂 Stuff 📂 Good stuff 📂 Bad stuff 📂 Horse porn 📂 Misc.
In the old days, we used folder hierarchies. These were limiting in that they allowed you to encode exactly one categorical dimension, but it was better than nothing. A boss of mine in NYC in the 90s simply stored everything at the root of his hard drive. No folders. That won’t do.
Nowadays, a lot of systems offer tags so that we can assign as many categorical axes as we want, but you still have to do it. You have to be aware of the value of categorizing your data rather than hoping some machine can match your fuzzy query against categories that a machine has intuited from the content. There’s so much room for interpretation that no machine can fix this.
You have to label your stuff. People don’t know this.
They have tens of thousands of pictures that they can only search by date. They scroll endlessly on their phones looking for a photo they know they have.
People like this can’t care about privacy because the concept is illogical, it means nothing. They showed their friend a picture, not the whole world. What’s the problem? That picture is on their phone and on their friend’s phone—and that’s it. The EFF may argue that young people care about privacy, but I don’t think that they have even the same concept of what can be made private. They upload everything to one cloud after another, without a thought about who gets to use it.
Reading is hard and tedious—and writing is even worse. No wonder that people immediately welcome the very first snake-oil salesmen who appear to sell them a tool that will do it for them. They welcome so-called AIs with open arms because they purport to summarize long texts to avoid reading and to generate long texts to avoid writing.
Most people know as little about the Internet as people in the olden days did, when they thought that AOL was the entire Internet. Most people spend their time in data silos, being spoon-fed content that they didn’t choose.
The latest generation of users is about as good at using actual computers—the ones that people use in the real world to earn actual money—as the so-called greatest generation was, a generation that grew up with no digital devices at all. This is a sad situation for which I’m at a loss to offer a remedy. Other than work and effort, so it’s probably over before it’s begun.
Published by marco on 19. Feb 2024 21:13:00 (GMT-5)
Apple keeps coming up with new things to mess with my typing. I long ago turned off auto-correct, but was surprised to see that my MacOS Sonoma Notes app started not only predicting text, but also auto-correcting it. I do not like this. I turned off auto-correct system-wide for a reason. I would rather correct my typos on my own. Just underline the errors and I’ll get to them. That’s my workflow.
These are my OS-level settings. I know I seem ungrateful to be turning off all of the assistance that Apple wants to give me, but if there’s one thing that I can do better without software sticking its grubby fingers in, it’s write.
However, Notes—and I think Mail and maybe another Apple app or two—has another setting that turns on a special new kind of auto-correct that Apple really wants you to try.
No, thank you.
Published by marco on 18. Feb 2024 22:01:25 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 18. Feb 2024 22:11:31 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
I don’t like to make comparisons to Nazi Germany, but the Democrats are spending a lot of time talking about how great the economy is while their foreign policy lays waste to other countries. Hell, they’re unquestioningly helping their closest ally get more Lebensraum.
Let Them Eat Dirt by Chris Hedges (Substack)
“When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.”
“Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread . Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars.”
“Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb.”
“Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.”
“I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as is in Gaza, did little to intervene.”
“The precursor to starvation − undernourishment − already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.”
“It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.”
“I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.”
“[…] when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.”
What They Were Hiding: Increased Solitary Confinement in Immigrant Detention Facilities by Kevin Gosztola (ScheerPost / The Dissenter)
“Records obtained showed that nearly half of the detained immigrants placed in solitary confinement were held in isolation for longer than 15 days. Documents indicated that 682 immigrant were held in solitary for 90 days. Forty-two immigrants were held in solitary for over a year.”
“Records reflected how ICE arbitrarily imposes solitary confinement. One immigrant was put in isolation for 29 days because they used profanity. Two other immigrants were put in solitary for a “consensual kiss.” Another allegedly “refused” to get out of their “bunk during count.” A contract facility in Denver, Colorado, put one immigrant in solitary confinement for “eating too slowly.” That same immigrnat was placed in isolation 10 more times.”
“At least 14,264 solitary confinement placements in the past five years from 2018 to 2023 were identified in the documents that were provided by DHS and ICE, but according to Physicians for Human Rights, that number is “likely an undercount due to ICE’s documented underreporting and misrepresentation of its use of solitary.””
Lost & Fearful in The Middle East by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“[…] the Iranians, who continue to abide by a longstanding policy of “strategic patience,” as Muhammad Sahimi, a prominent commentator on Iranian affairs, argued in a piece published Saturday in The Floutist .”
“All the recent attacks on U.S. ships, ground facilities and personnel have unexpectedly exposed this weakness. And this brings us to what most fundamentally motivates Biden and the instant peaceniks who faithfully repeat what he says. (Or does he faithfully repeat what they tell him to say?)”
This was published before the recent report on Biden’s mental incapacity.
“There are more “ifs” and qualifiers in these two pieces than you’ve had hot dinners. “If the administration can pull this together — a huge if,” Friedman writes. There are so many “significant obstacles,” “divisive issues” and “long shots” that you have to wonder why these pieces were written and published.”
“No such entity is any longer possible — nor was one, in my view , ever desirable. The Israelis, in any event, will never agree to an independent Palestine: The Netanyahu regime makes this clear every chance it gets.”
You might have to get them out of there to save them from Israel, but how? And would that mean that Israel would be a pariah state? The international community has no authority. The Palestinians, after most of them were herded into Rafah, are now being herded into Egypt.
“The Gaza crisis is a text in which we can read that genuine diplomacy, based on knowledge of the perspectives of others, will come to define our century more than mere power. It tells us, too, that Washington, as of now, has neither the intention nor ability to live and act well in this new time.”
That’s good, but i’m not looking forward to the death throes that will precede such an era.
Pakistan’s People Will Vote Under a Cloud of Repression by Ayyaz Mallick (Jacobin)
“[…] it is the proportion of short-term and highly onerous debt held by foreign, private, commercial banks that is most alarming. This burden has grown almost sevenfold over the last decade and now accounts for almost 60 percent of Pakistan’s annual debt servicing, although it only represents 23 percent of total foreign debt. Foreign debt servicing accounted for close to 35 percent of Pakistan’s export earnings last year, and debt servicing amounts are set to double in the next five years. Combined foreign and domestic debt servicing takes up almost all the revenue generated by the Pakistani state through taxation.”
“In the last year alone, cuts in subsidies and currency devaluation have led to a tenfold increase in gas prices and a doubling in the cost of many basic food items. Unemployment among young graduates stands at 33 percent, in addition to a full 23 percent working in “unpaid jobs.” Meanwhile, the corporate sector registered its highest ever quarterly earnings between July and September last year, with the banking sector being the biggest beneficiary.”
“During the 2010s, the number of Afghans in Pakistan went down from a high point of eight million to less than half that figure, in what Human Rights Watch described in 2017 as “the world’s largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees in recent times.” This process has now accelerated, with authorities even attempting to charge those seeking refuge in Western countries a fine of over $800 to leave Pakistan.”
“Pakistan’s burgeoning youth population had its hopes and aspirations raised by Imran Khan’s ambiguous populism and fiery rhetoric over the last decade. It now sees a situation with no escape, except for settlement abroad.”
“This has prompted a desperate search for opportunities to emigrate to increasingly hostile Gulf or Euro-American destinations. A record eight hundred thousand people left Pakistan in the first half of 2023 alone, while the caretaker prime minister declared this massive brain drain to be an “asset” for the country. Almost three hundred such “assets” recently became victims of Fortress Europe and the treacherous Mediterranean sea.”
“Such then is the terrain of society and polity in Pakistan on the eve of February’s election. There is a ruling bloc in desperate need of imperial and social moorings, at odds with Pakistani society, and reliant on repression that grows wider and deeper. It faces a citizenry who have been mostly demobilized and held in coercive thrall by praetorian overlords, yet capable of generating uneven levels of mass protest and deep organizing in response to such suppression and dispossession.”
What Yemen’s Houthis Want: An interview with Helen Lackner by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)
“[…] the Huthis have been very, very explicit. They have said very clearly that the ships they object to, or that they will target, are ships that have any connection with Israel. So, whether that’s a connection of delivering goods, picking up goods, transit, ownership, whatever, those are ships that they are targeting. They are not targeting others. They’ve also explicitly announced that, for any other ship, all they need to do is respond to Huthis’ calls and say that they have no Israeli connection. They will then not be attacked.”
“[…] when the Huthis threaten something, they mean it. And at the same time, when the Huthis generally make agreements, they tend not to mean it. So, one has to have a clear differential between the different circumstances that you get when dealing with the Huthis.”
“[…] because certainly within Yemen — within the area that the Huthis control, i.e., two-thirds of the population of the country — they are not popular. And they are generally considerably disliked because their rule is not what you’d call democratic or friendly or showing any respect for basic human rights. The Yemeni population, alongside the population in most Arab countries, and many others, is pro-Palestinian. And therefore, what they are doing in the Red Sea has enormously increased their popularity in the area that they rule.”
“[…] they are not wonderful. What they’re doing with respect to the Red Sea and Palestine is definitely a good thing, in my view. But the rest of their activities are by no means things that anybody on the Left should support.”
“[…] the Huthi fundamental slogan has three negative items, which are: death to America, death to Israel, and curse on the Jews. So, I mean, being anti-American comes even before being anti-Israeli. So having the Americans attack them is a highly ideologically desirable situation from their point of view.”
“[…] the Huthis are not a tribe. The Huthis are a movement that is named after its leading family, who are called “Huthi.” They come from the far north of Yemen, and they are Zaydis. Now, if you look at Yemen’s religious situation, you have two main Islamic groups within Yemen. You have the Zaydis — who are a form of Shia, which is different from the Iranian Twelver Shia — on the one hand, and they control most of the northern highlands. And if you look at a map of the territory of what the Huthis control, they control that area plus I’d say a sort of band around it. So, they control more than just the Zaydi area. And the other religious group are Shafi’is, who [follow] a form of Sunnism, and they live in the rest of the country. And there’s a few tiny groups of Ismailis.”
“[…] their belief that the descendants of the prophet have an innate right to rule — and not only just a right, but a duty to rule the country and hopefully beyond. Those people in Yemen are normally known as Sadah in the plural and Sayyid in the singular, and they are the same people that in other areas are known as either Ashraf or Hashemites. A belief that this social group should be ruling the country is really the main ideological element.”
“[…] the Huthis are ruling in an extremely autocratic and authoritarian system. They give no space for freedom of expression. They are particularly oppressive of women, as are most fundamentalist movements of any religion to my knowledge. And they basically do not accept any form of dissent; anything that looks like dissent is very severely repressed.”
“[…] the truce started and lasted from April to October 2022. So, what it meant is that the fighting reduced very, very considerably. Since the truce ended in October 2022, up to now, there’s been very, very limited military activity on all the usual fronts within Yemen. And it has been almost exclusively between the Yemeni sides, though on the immediate border to Saudi Arabia, there have been a few strikes across the border from Yemen. And recently, in the last few months, the Huthis managed to kill a few Bahrainis who were fighting there. Mainly what there hasn’t been at all, until this last week, has been any air strikes on Yemen, full stop. Up to that period, any air strikes that took place were mainly from what is officially known as the Saudi-led coalition.”
“[…] as we’ve explained, the Huthis are authoritarian and unpleasant. Unfortunately, most of the factions on the other side are at least as authoritarian and unpleasant. So, in terms of solving the internal Yemeni crisis in favor of a regime that would respond to the needs, ambitions, hopes of the thirty-plus million Yemenis who are trying to live, the prospects are not very good.”
“[…] the Balfour Declaration was something that was regarded with great hostility throughout the Arab world. It wasn’t a matter of being anti-Zionist so much as being anti the British creating a Jewish state on Arab land, if you see the difference. I mean, basically, they objected to the land being taken over by someone else. If it had been a bunch of Catholics from Ecuador, it would have been the same thing. It was this stealing and removal of Arab lands.”
“Yeah, the PDRY regime is, of course, blamed and described as a horrible bunch of dreadful communists who were out to do all kinds of horrible things to everybody everywhere, which is not what they were. The reality of it is that, in terms of governance for the population, they did a lot more than was technically possible thanks to the financial means of the regime. Basically, they took over in November 1967 at a time when the main two sources of income of Aden had disappeared. The Suez Canal was closed; therefore, [there was] no more income from the port. And the British base, which had been the other main source of income, also closed, obviously. So, they were left with a disastrous economic situation and no obvious sources of income. The subsistence agriculture of most of the country was not going to keep them afloat. So, what they did in those circumstances is that they raised money, partly from international aid, a lot of it from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but also from local resources by setting up various attempts at industry, et cetera. I mean, there was the famous Chinese weaving factory and such. But mainly what they provided was a regime in which people could live on their salaries. There was almost no unemployment. Education was massively increased. There had been hardly any education services in the British period. Health services were provided, a lot of them through help from Cuba and China. But by the mid-’70s, they had their own medical school. And that was operational, and they produced their own doctors. And so, they provided basic living standards that were actually above the real financial means of the state. So that’s the very positive element of the PDRY rule.”
“[…] they were dreadfully worried about external opposition, which was quite realistic and true. Because the Saudis were against them, the YAR was against them, the United States was obviously against them, and the Brits were against them. I mean, there was no diplomatic relation with the United States at all. They did feel besieged. And one can rationally say they were besieged. And then of course there’s Amman. So, they were besieged, and I think that probably increased and worsened the level of concern, or one could even say paranoia, among the leadership, which helps to explain, to some extent, the internecine warfare or disagreements. But on the other hand, if they managed to stay united, they would probably have done a lot better.”
“[…] the level of expectations of the population was really unreasonable, because a lot of the population had gone to Saudi Arabia, or the Emirates after the Emirates were created, or to Kuwait, or Bahrain, and expected the same level and quality of services as existed for nationals in those countries. And I had lots of arguments with people in the late ’70s, when oil had not been discovered. But even if oil was discovered, the issue was that what you ended up with in Yemen was a few hundred thousand barrels of oil per day for twenty to thirty million people. Whereas, in Saudi Arabia, you had eleven million barrels of oil per day for the same population or even fewer. So, the actual relationship between what was realistically possible and what was expected was not rationally determined.”
“[…] there is the probably true story that there were times when you’d have the Americans training the air force on one end of the runway in Sana’a Airport and the Russians training the air force at the other end of the runway of the same airport. So, they tried to keep a balance. And the YAR regime, although it was very straightforwardly capitalist and one could even say kleptocratic, particularly in the ’80s and maybe not so much in the ’70s, was part of the Western camp. But only to a marginal extent, I would say.”
“The concept of Yemeni unity, I think, is something that made and still makes a lot of sense. I mean, personally, I always thought that the talk of Arab unity was a joke and it was completely unlikely and that couldn’t happen. But Yemenis do form a nation. And there’s a very clear, instantly recognizable difference between a Yemeni and a Saudi, or a Yemeni and an Omani, let alone a Yemeni and an Egyptian, or whatever. And there are what I’d call the basic elements of a joint culture. The language varies within Yemen, of course, as all Arabic dialects vary even within the country. But there are more cultural elements that keep Yemenis together than separate them. Although they’re not all the same, and it would be very difficult to do a matrix or a map. But it could be done.”
Switzerland is the same. So, I hear, is Slovakia. It’s not uncommon.
“You had this flourishing, for two or three years, of enthusiasm and belief in the wonders of democracy, and the openness, and freedom of expression, and enthusiasm for a new regime, despite the underlying economic crisis. Let’s not forget, not only did the eight hundred thousand come back from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but the World Bank cut its funds, the USA cut its funds, everybody cut funds. So, the place was in desperate financial straits at that time. But you had this great political enthusiasm and a great openness at all levels, which really lasted roughly until ’93, ’94. And then what happened is that, during that period already, Ali Abdullah Saleh started to tighten his control over everything and everybody.”
“What I can say is that it is indeed worth remembering that sectarianism basically does not enter into any of this. The Saudis supported whom they considered to be good for them. In other words, they supported the monarchy, however Shia it might have been, versus the republicans, however Sunni they might have been. I think that’s one element. So today, they’re anti-Huthi not because the Huthis are Zaydis, they’re anti-Huthi because the Huthis threaten their ideological position. Partly because, of course, the Huthis believe that descendants of the Prophet have the right to rule and the Saudis are tribal. So, they don’t fit into that description. That’s one of the many points of disagreement you have.”
“[…] it’s not the Zaydis who were having problems with the Sana’a regime, it was the Sadah, the descendants of the Prophet. And you can’t say that they were being oppressed. What you can say is that they didn’t have the high level of privileges that they’d had prior, under the Mutawakkilite Kingdom. In other words, they were not, for example, more or less automatically given the best jobs, which is now again the case with the Huthis. With the Huthis, the Sadah get the best jobs, regardless of their capacity. And they have access to all kinds of things that other people don’t have access to. For example, the new zakat law specifically says that it’s to help poor Sadah, not everybody.”
“[…] this perception, that you’re not getting what you’re entitled to and other people are getting it, is something that you found everywhere in Yemen. Everybody thought everyone else was doing better than they were doing. I mean, basically what was happening is that the cronies and friends of Ali Abdullah Saleh were doing well and everybody else was not doing well. So, the people in Sa’ada are thinking that they were being discriminated against by comparison with those in Raymah or someplace else, [but that was] simply not true. What was true was that, if you were a friend of Ali Abdullah Saleh, regardless of where you came from, you did okay. And if you weren’t, you didn’t.”
“[…] the Yemeni economy has collapsed. There’s almost nothing left of it. People are dependent on humanitarian aid, imports, on bits and pieces of unclear economic activities, and on remittances, et cetera. So, the humanitarian situation, although by no means comparable to the absolute nightmare of what’s going on in Gaza now, is extremely serious. And the UN’s humanitarian response plan, which was financed at 55 percent in 2022, was financed at 38 percent in 2023. Now, that’s not particularly a discrimination against Yemen, because, internationally, the humanitarian response plan in 2023 has been financed about 37 percent, or 37.5 percent. So, this is part of the overall demands on the humanitarian sector increasing, combined with decreasing funding.”
“The World Food Program has reduced its rations to millions of people to a fraction of what they were two or three years ago. And many of these people don’t have any alternatives. So, the humanitarian situation is something that really needs to be addressed, and which is very severe, and continues regardless of whether you’re living in Huthi land or in internationally recognized government land.”
“I think what is clear is that, unless some extraordinary military activity takes place that actually defeats them, and it would be difficult to imagine what it would be, because I can’t imagine that a US land invasion would have a different result in Yemen from what it had in Afghanistan eventually, the Huthis are there to stay. They may be a highly undesirable set of people to live under, but they remain the most relevant and important political force in the country. And I think that’s not a particularly cheerful way to end our conversation, but I suspect that it is the way things are and are likely to be. I haven’t come across anybody in recent times who suggested that there’s any likelihood of the Huthis not being around for a long time to come.”
White Man’s Justice Is Black People’s Grief: A Black History Month Truth by Kevin Cooper (Scheer Post)
“In fact, it wasn’t until President Biden finally signed into law an anti-lynching bill named after 14-year-old Emmett Till, who suffered white man’s justice by being abducted, tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store. President Biden signed this bill into law in 2022; it took over a century to do this. Ida B. Wells and others tried to get it signed into law in the early 1900s.”
“With all the deception that is ongoing in the institutions that run and control this country, how can anyone actually have faith and confidence in the capital punishment system that hasn’t really changed since it first started centuries ago? The same people who do the executing, for the most part the white man, and the same people who always have been the executed — Black and other minority people — are still in those roles. When are Americans as a whole going to wake up and see that all of our professed humanity is at stake in this?”
The Alabama State Government’s Killing of Kenneth Smith by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”
“According to Alabama’s State Attorney General, Steve Marshall, it was a “textbook” case of execution. Who wrote the textbook, Dr. Mengele? Marshall bragged about the execution as if Alabama had been the first state to land a man on Mars: “As of last night, nitrogen epoxy as a means of execution is no longer an untested method; it is a proven one.” Marshall sounded like a pitchman for an execution franchise.”
“The US Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. But Kenneth Smith’s execution proves these words have lost all meaning. By a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to kill Smith. But the cowardly court couldn’t even be bothered to put their reasoning in writing as to why an experimental method of execution didn’t qualify as “unusual” and how a second attempt to kill a man wasn’t considered “cruel.””
“Kenneth Smith was put to death for a murder for hire that took place in 1988. What was gained by his execution? Was he a threat to kill again? By all accounts, he’d been a model prisoner for 35 years.”
“Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though the method used to kill him was experimental and had been banned by veterinarians for use on mammals.”
Cutting aid to refugees, US advances Israel’s war on Palestinian existence by Aaron Maté
“Days after the Times’ report, the Wall Street Journal followed up with an article even more subservient to the Israeli narrative. According to Israeli intelligence, the Journal declared, “around 10% of all of [UNRWA’s] Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups,” including “23% of Unrwa’s male employees… indicating a higher politicization of the agency than the population at large.””
US bases military “trainers” permanently in Taiwan by Peter Symonds (WSWS)
“Under Trump and now Biden, the US has torn up longstanding diplomatic protocols limiting contact between Taipei and Washington, boosted arms sales, including of offensive weaponry, and now stationed US trainers in Taiwan.”
“The expansion of US trainers in Taiwan is partly in preparation for this year’s extension of compulsory military service for young men on the island from four to 12 months as a component of its military build-up against China. Washington, which is seeking to weaken and destabilise China in any conflict, has pressed Taipei to adopt a “porcupine” strategy aimed at inflicting maximum damage on Chinese military forces.”
“While the reported numbers of US troops on Taiwan are still comparatively small, their activities and increasing size indicate that Washington is intent on preparing the island as a military trap for China in the not-too-distant future—not decades down the track. Already at war with Russia in Ukraine, backing Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and widening the conflict in the Middle East, the US is deliberately drawing China into a global war with catastrophic consequences.”
As it supports Gaza genocide, UK government wages war on democratic rights by Thomas Scripps (WSWS)
“Announcing initial measures targeting the use of flares and fireworks on demonstrations, face coverings and climbing on war memorials, he concluded, “Those who abuse their freedom to protest undermine public safety and our democratic values. And I will give the police the powers they need to crack down on this intimidating and appalling behaviour.”
“These are comments worthy of a police state. They signal a further assault on democratic rights in the UK”
“The intention is to outlaw opposition to British imperialism and its support for the genocide in Gaza, criminalising opinions held by millions by making an example of selected individuals and organisations. A key part of this campaign is to brand left-wing politics as “extremist,” subjecting activists to surveillance, harassment, censorship and arrest with the use of deeply anti-democratic counter-terror legislation.”
Israel announces plans for ethnic cleansing of Rafah by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“On Friday, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement asserting that the prime minister had ordered the Israeli military to submit a plan for the forced evacuation of the southern town of Rafah, where one million refugees from other areas of Gaza have been driven.”
“Given that Israel has ordered the people of Gaza to evacuate effectively all other areas of the region, the clear implication is that the population will be expelled into the Sinai Desert, with or without the permission of Egypt.”
“[…] approximately 86 percent of Gaza’s population—1.7 million out of 2.3 million people—are internally displaced, with the majority of those sheltering in Rafah. The trapped refugees are facing famine and lack access to clean water, hygiene and medical care.”
“[…] this is precisely the plan of the Israeli government, operating with the full military and logistical support of the Biden administration and the European governments. Having seized upon the October 7 attacks as a pretext, Israel has moved to implement a long-term plan to render Gaza uninhabitable and either kill or expel its population. The assault on Rafah will mark a new stage in this vast crime.”
White House in crisis after special counsel report on classified documents slams Biden’s “limited” memory by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)
“In his report, Hur, a former prosecutor in the Trump administration, repeatedly emphasized that part of his reasoning in not charging Biden was due to the president’s “hazy” and “limited memory.””
“Hur referred to Biden’s diminished memory nine separate times. Citing recorded interviews, Hur wrote that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interviews with our office in 2023.”
“Hur described Biden’s recorded conversations with his ghostwriter in 2017 as “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.””
“[…] the Republicans charged that a “man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.””
They’re not wrong. We’ve been here before, with Ronnie.
“Despite his best attempts to refute Hur’s charges, later on in the brief press conference Biden confused the countries of Mexico and Egypt and claimed that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was the president of Mexico.”
Pushing Gazans Into Rafah And Then Attacking Rafah, Killing UNRWA Funding Without Evidence by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“Empire managers are now openly admitting they suspended aid to Gaza without having seen evidence of the claims that call was based on; they cut the aid because they were told to, then waited for narratives to be provided to them as to why this was a good and righteous decision.”
“Biden is a spent piece of Beltway flotsam with a swiss cheese brain being used as a ventriloquist dummy by DC swamp monsters to commit genocide, expand the US war machine, and play nuclear chicken with Russia. This is the face of the US empire, folks. This is as good as it gets.
“I’ll never forget how obnoxious and condescending Democrats were when telling me how wrong I am about Biden obviously having dementia. These people will look you right in the eye and tell you up is down and that if you disagree you’re a Russian agent.
““Biden is too senile to be president” is the wrong lesson to take from this. Replacing Biden with someone less senile won’t change the behavior of the US government, it’ll just lend false credibility to the illusion that the official elected government is calling the shots in DC.”
Man Ruled Too Senile To Stand Trial Still Fine To Run Country (Babylon Bee)
Biden Calls For The President To Step Down (Babylon Bee)
A Dementia Patient Is President Because It Doesn’t Matter Who The President Is by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“So it turns out the dementia symptoms Biden’s supporters have long dismissed as a “stutter” are actually exactly what they look like.
“The special counsel assigned to investigate Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents reports that investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” but concludes that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.”
“Which normally would be cause for a sigh of relief by this administration and its supporters, except that among the reasons given for this conclusion is that the president has gone senile.
““We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Special Counsel Robert Hur writes to Attorney General Merrick Garland, saying that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation… will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully — that is, with intent to break the law — as the statute requires.””
I can’t tell who engineered this release, though. The report was too friendly to Biden to really be a hatchet job, but the conclusion that he’s mentally unfit to stand trial is a death-blow for his campaign, I would think. No-one wants to throw him out because you-know-who would replace him. Maybe the Democrats wanted to engineer an excuse for dumping him as his support numbers plummet.
“During a press conference in which Biden was ostensibly meant to reassure the world that his brain is working fine in light of the big news, the president referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico and froze mid-speech when he unsuccessfully tried to remember where his son got the rosary he carries from. Just this week Biden has mistakenly referred to dead European leaders as still being in office, not once but twice.”
“If you were still laboring under the delusion that it matters who the US president is, the fact that an actual, literal dementia patient has held that office for three years now should dispel that notion once and for all. The US empire has been marching along in exactly the same way it was before Biden took office, completely unhindered by the fact that the person who’s supposedly calling the shots is in a state of degenerative neurological free-fall.”
We knew before. But now we know.
“Literally anyone could hold that office and it would make no meaningful difference in the way the US empire is run. A coma patient could be president. A jar of kalamata olives could be president. The position which Americans hold elections over in the belief that it could bring positive changes to their country and their world is nothing but a figurehead.”
“The fact that the US president has dementia exposes the uncomfortable truth that the functioning of the empire is too important to be left in the hands of voters. There’s too much power riding on the behavior of the US government from year to year for the electorate to be permitted a say in it.”
“Voting in western “democracies” is done to give us the illusion of control, like letting a toddler play with a toy steering wheel while you drive so they can feel like they’re participating.”
“But we’ve got to stop hanging all our hopes on the electoral system first. Every four years we see American attention get sucked up into this empty puppet show about which soulless empire manager should be the temporary official figurehead at the front desk of the permanent imperial machine, and if you want to vote by all means go ahead and vote. But don’t let that performative ritual distract you from the real project: to wake up our fellow humans and begin forcing real change.”
I listened to the The Vladimir Putin Interview by Tucker Carlson (127 minutes), which is also available as Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview (Twitter). The article Tucker Carlson Interviews Vladimir Putin by Tucker Carlson (Scheer Post) includes a transcript found on the Kremlin’s website. You have to subscribe to Tucker Carlson to get the transcript from him. Those dirty commies in the Kremlin just gave it away for free.
The interview was over two hours. What follows are just some longer quotes I took from the transcript, with a few notes of my own. I’ve cherry-picked the stuff that Putin said that I broadly—or even sometimes very specifically—agree that he expressed in a realistic and historically accurate way. Where I disagreed with something that he said, I’ve noted it. I may have missed something; it’s a long interview.
He spoke completely extemporaneously, without notes or a teleprompter. It was clear that he was expressing how her personally sees these topics of international import. He didn’t seem to be playing to his western audience in any way. Much of what he said he’s already formulated in similar—if not occasionally identical ways—in essays and in other speeches I’ve read from him.
This is not to say that he’s a hero, but only to say that, as the leader of a foreign power with no small amount of influence—even if, as he acknowledges, it’s not even close to that of the U.S. or China—there seems to be a lot of opening for reasonably working with Russia, under Putin. The country only asks that it not be treated as a vassal. If that cannot be guaranteed, then there is no need for negotiation and the chips will fall where they may. Putin clearly indicates that he doesn’t think that Russia is holding such bad cards. Their economy seems to be impervious to U.S. machinations. As in the U.S., Putin speaks of the economy that is working for himself and other elites, but doesn’t speak at all of the troubles on the ground that affect the large majority of Russia’s population.
At any rate, Germany could have its natural gas and Ukraine could have peace. Russia has some conditions, but they seem eminently reasonable.
Putin starts off with a bald-faced lie.
“if you don’t mind I will take only 30 seconds or one minute of your time for giving you a little historical background.”
Why was that a lie? Because it wasn’t just “30 seconds or one minute”. He proceeds to recite a Russian history lesson with a focus on “Where does Ukraine come from?” that starts with “[t]he Russian state started to exist as a centralized state in 862.” It went on for about the first thirty minutes.
After a few minutes, Tucker interrupts with “I am losing track of where in history we are?”
“It was in the 13th century.”
He then positively leaps forward in time to 1654. After several more minutes, Putin says “[t]his briefing is coming to an end. It might be boring, but it explains many things.”
The discussion begins in earnest after that, with Tucker asking Putin why, if he believes that Ukraine is such a hodge-podge of cobbled-together lands that are really mostly Russian and Hungarian, didn’t he just take it back at the beginning of his presidency, 22 years ago?
The answer is obvious: because it wasn’t causing trouble then. Ukraine means “border”; even its name derives from being Russia’s border to Europe. Russia had let go of so many other territories—their aim wasn’t to regain territory, it was to guarantee a modicum of regional stability and security for Russia itself.
With NATO pushing right up to Russia’s borders—through the hand-puppet of Ukraine—that was no longer possible. That, and the nearly decade-long civil war that had been fomented in eastern Ukraine, right on Russia’s border, made it long-term impossible for Russia to just stand by and watch NATO—the U.S.—militarize its border. The U.S. was braying about how it not only had the right to take up Ukraine as its ally, but also to move some of its own nuclear weapons there.
It was utter madness to anyone who wasn’t 100% in the tank for NATO’s—and primarily the U.S.‘s—view of how the world works.
“I understand that my long speeches probably fall outside of the genre of an interview. That is why I asked you at the beginning: ”Are we going to have a serious talk or a show?“ You said — a serious talk. So bear with me please.”
Deep breath. We’re up to 1991 now. He finishes up the history lesson. Tucker asks,
“But we have a strong China that the West doesn’t seem to be very afraid of. What about Russia, what do you think convinced the policymakers to take it down?”
This is ludicrous on its face. How can anyone think that the U.S. is not afraid of China? They’re sanctioning them to death and encircling them with bases. Putin answers,
“The West is afraid of a strong China more than it fears a strong Russia because Russia has 150 million people, and China has a 1.5 billion population, and its economy is growing by leaps and bounds — over five percent a year, it used to be even more. But that’s enough for China. As Bismark once put it, potentials are most important. China’s potential is enormous — it is the biggest economy in the world today in terms of purchasing power parity and the size of the economy. It has already overtaken the United States, quite a long time ago, and it is growing at a rapid clip.
“Let’s not talk about who is afraid of whom, let’s not reason in such terms. And let’s get into the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of ”civilized nations,“ nothing like this happened. You tricked us.”
We move on from there to the underpinnings of the current conflict in Ukraine. Putin reiterates the history of the Minsk agreement up until the end of 2021 and mentions, not for the last time, how the west just lies about everything, that they “simply led us by the nose,” which, well, he’s not wrong. The U.S.—and Europe in its wake—sees itself always as on the right side of history and in the moral role in anything that it does, so it sees no problem with simply lying to get what it wants. The ends justify the means, if Russia is to be vanquished.
“[…] the current Ukrainian leadership declared that it would not implement the Minsk Agreements, which had been signed, as you know, after the events of 2014, in Minsk, where the plan of peaceful settlement in Donbass was set forth. But no, the current Ukrainian leadership, Foreign Minister, all other officials and then President himself said that they don’t like anything about the Minsk Agreements. In other words, they were not going to implement it. A year or a year and a half ago, former leaders of Germany and France said openly to the whole world that they indeed signed the Minsk Agreements but they never intended to implement them. They simply led us by the nose.”
With the next treaty on the table in March/April of 2022—nearly immediately after the initial Russian invasion—he describes why the Russian troops left Kiev. It was not, as detailed in the western press, because they had turned tail and run.
“My counterparts in France and Germany said, ”How can you imagine them signing a treaty with a gun to their heads? The troops should be pulled back from Kiev. ‘I said, ‘All right.’ We withdrew the troops from Kiev.
“As soon as we pulled back our troops from Kiev, our Ukrainian negotiators immediately threw all our agreements reached in Istanbul into the bin and got prepared for a longstanding armed confrontation with the help of the United States and its satellites in Europe. That is how the situation has developed. And that is how it looks now.”
When Tucker asks him what he thinks of possible U.S. participation in the war, with actual boots on the ground, Putin responds,
“This is a provocation, and a cheap provocation at that.
“I do not understand why American soldiers should fight in Ukraine. There are mercenaries from the United States there. The biggest number of mercenaries comes from Poland, with mercenaries from the United States in second place, and mercenaries from Georgia in third place. Well, if somebody has the desire to send regular troops, that would certainly bring humanity on the brink of a very serious, global conflict. This is obvious.
“Do the United States need this? What for? Thousands of miles away from your national territory! Don’t you have anything better to do?
“You have issues on the border, issues with migration, issues with the national debt – more than 33 trillion dollars. You have nothing better to do, so you should fight in Ukraine? Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia? Make an agreement, already understanding the situation that is developing today, realizing that Russia will fight for its interests to the end. And, realizing this, actually return to common sense, start respecting our country and its interests and look for certain solutions. It seems to me that this is much smarter and more rational.”
Tucker asks Putin why he doesn’t just tell the world what the U.S. did to the Nordstream pipeline if he has, as he says, proof that the U.S. secret services blew it up. Putin chuckles and responds,
“In the war of propaganda it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media. The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions. Don’t you know that?”
Tucker acknowledges that Russia would probably not make much headway in the western press with their allegations, but wonders then why Germany doesn’t defends itself and its interests. The destruction of the pipeline put it directly in thrall to the U.S., paying four times the price that any other nation pays for its natural gas.
“Tucker Carlson: Yes. But here is a question you may be able to answer. You worked in Germany, famously. The Germans clearly know that their NATO partner did this, that they damaged their economy greatly – it may never recover. Why are they being silent about it? That is very confusing to me. Why wouldn’t the Germans say something about it?
“Vladimir Putin: This also confuses me. But today’s German leadership is guided by the interests of the collective West rather than its national interests, otherwise it is difficult to explain the logic of their action or inaction. After all, it is not only about Nord Stream-1, which was blown up, and Nord Stream-2 was damaged, but one pipe is safe and sound, and gas can be supplied to Europe through it, but Germany does not open it. We are ready, please.”
Putin mentions the “golden billion”, a phrase I understand immediately, but that I’d never heard before. I’m not sure if he understands the unstated irony that he and his cronies are very much in the golden billion, but that probably most of the populace over which rules is not. Perhaps he is appealing to them? Or to the other nations of the BRICS, like Indonesia and India? It’s unclear, but it’s hard to believe that he truly believes that the world would be better if wealth was divided in a more egalitarian manner.
Perhaps he does, as long as he personally doesn’t have to give anything up. At any rate, it is safe to say that he thinks that wealth and power should accrue to the nations to which it naturally falls, either by resources or by sheer hard work, rather to the nations that manage to take what they want. Russia and China have that in common: they are not seeking empire in the way that the U.S. very aggressively does.
“The world should be a single whole, security should be shared, rather than meant for the ”golden billion“. That is the only scenario where the world could be stable, sustainable and predictable. Until then, while the head is split into two parts, it is an illness, a serious adverse condition. It is a period of a severe disease that the world is now going through.”
Putin probably has no idea how ironic it is for him to be lauding journalism, a field that he has decimated during his rule.
“I think that, thanks to honest journalism — this work is akin to work of the doctors, this could somehow be remedied.”
They quickly move on—though the subject of journalism would reappear at the end again—to the insanity of the U.S. wielding its more important asset as a weapon that damages the U.S. more than it does its intended targets. Putin talks about the US. Dollar and economic sanctions.
“As soon as the political leadership decided to use the US dollar as a tool of political struggle, a blow was dealt to this American power. I would not like to use any strong language, but it is a stupid thing to do, and a grave mistake.
“Look at what is going on in the world. Even the United States’ allies are now downsizing their dollar reserves. Seeing this, everyone starts looking for ways to protect themselves. But the fact that the United States applies restrictive measures to certain countries, such as placing restrictions on transactions, freezing assets, etc., causes grave concern and sends a signal to the whole world.
“What did we have here? Until 2022, about 80 per cent of Russia’s foreign trade transactions were made in US dollars and euros. US dollars accounted for approximately 50 per cent of our transactions with third countries, while currently it is down to 13 per cent. It was not us who banned the use of the US dollar, we had no such intention. It was the decision of the United States to restrict our transactions in US dollars. I think it is a complete foolishness from the point of view of the interests of the United States itself and its tax payers, as it damages the US economy, undermines the power of the United States across the world.
“By the way, our transactions in Yuan accounted for about 3 per cent. Today, 34 per cent of our transactions are made in Rubles, and about as much, a little over 34 per cent, in Yuan.
“Why did the United States do this? My only guess is self-conceit. They probably thought it would lead to a full collapse, but nothing collapsed. Moreover, other countries, including oil producers, are thinking of and already accepting payments for oil in yuan. Do you even realize what is going on or not? Does anyone in the United States realize this? What are you doing? You are cutting yourself off… all experts say this. Ask any intelligent and thinking person in the United States what the dollar means for the US? You are killing it with your own hands.
“Tucker Carlson: I think that is a fair assessment. The question is what comes next? And maybe you trade one colonial power for another, much less sentimental and forgiving colonial power? Is the BRICS, for example, in danger of being completely dominated by the Chinese economy? In a way that is not good for their sovereignty. Do you worry about that?
“Vladimir Putin: We have heard those boogeyman stories before. It is a boogeyman story. We are neighbours with China. You cannot choose neighbours, just as you cannot choose close relatives. We share a border of 1000 kilometers with them. This is number one.
“Second, we have a centuries-long history of coexistence, we are used to it.
“Third, China’s foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive, its idea is to always look for compromise, and we can see that.”
Putin expands on the topic of the shifting global economic picture, citing figures about the relative share of the G7 countries—it was the G8 until Russia was expelled in 2014!—versus the BRICS nations. The BRICS nations now account for more of the global economy, and certainly a large majority of manufacturing. The G7 have a much larger proportion of their share coming from banking and other financialized services.
“Look, if memory serves me right, back in 1992, the share of the G7 countries in the world economy amounted to 47 per cent, whereas in 2022 it was down to, I think, a little over 30 per cent. The BRICS countries accounted for only 16 per cent in 1992, but now their share is greater than that of the G7. It has nothing to do with the events in Ukraine. This is due to the trends of global development and world economy that I mentioned just now, and this is inevitable. This will keep happening, it is like the rise of the sun — you cannot prevent the sun from rising, you have to adapt to it. How do the United States adapt? With the help of force: sanctions, pressure, bombings, and use of armed forces.”
Tucker asks about whether a change in U.S. leadership would help? Does Putin think that the Biden administration is particularly intractable?
“It is not about the personality of the leader, it is about the elites’ mindset. If the idea of domination at any cost, based also on forceful actions, dominates the American society, nothing will change, it will only get worse. But if, in the end, one comes to the awareness that the world has been changing due to objective circumstances, and that one should be able to adapt to them in time, using the advantages that the U.S. still has today, then, perhaps, something may change.”
Putin returns to the topic of the global economy, specifically with China’s and Russia’s role in it.
“Look, China’s economy has become the first economy in the world in purchasing power parity; in terms of volume it overtook the US a long time ago. The USA comes second, then India (one and a half billion people), and then Japan, with Russia in the fifth place. Russia was the first economy in Europe last year, despite all the sanctions and restrictions. Is this normal, from your point of view: sanctions, restrictions, impossibility of payments in dollars, being cut off from SWIFT services, sanctions against our ships carrying oil, sanctions against airplanes, sanctions in everything, everywhere? The largest number of sanctions in the world which are applied – are applied against Russia. And we have become Europe’s first economy during this time.”
Tucker asked Putin about the potential for change in the U.S. through electoral action, for fresh ideas of the sort Putin thinks that the U.S. needs in order to better fit into the global order that is emerging, whether it likes it or not.
“America is a complex country, conservative on the one hand, rapidly changing on the other. It’s not easy for us to sort it all out.
“Who makes decisions in the elections – is it possible to understand this, when each state has its own legislation, each state regulates itself, someone can be excluded from the elections at the state level. It is a two-stage electoral system, it is very difficult for us to understand it.
“Certainly there are two parties that are dominant, the Republicans and the Democrats, and within this party system, the centers that make decisions, that prepare decisions.”
Putin questions not only the wisdom, but also the morality, of trying to beat down any possible competitors on the global level. These competitors will exist by sheer force of numbers, no matter what. He cites Indonesia as a rising player, just by the sheer size of is population and the accompanying manufacturing power.
“[…] it is necessary to continue ”chiseling“ Russia, to try to break it up, to create on this territory several quasi-state entities and to subdue them in a divided form, to use their combined potential for the future struggle with China. This is a mistake, including the excessive potential of those who worked for the confrontation with the Soviet Union. It is necessary to get rid of this, there should be new, fresh forces, people who look into the future and understand what is happening in the world.
“Look at how Indonesia is developing? 600 million people. Where can we get away from that? Nowhere, we just have to assume that Indonesia will enter (it is already in) the club of the world’s leading economies, no matter who likes or dislikes it.”
Back to Ukraine, with specifics about why Zelensky was elected and how he’s betrayed the people who voted for him, who’d elected him to make peace, to end the civil war. Instead, he expanded the civil war and provoked Russia into invasion. There were many, many ways to avoid the invasion. They would have required relinquishing some power to federalist territories in the east—as outlined in the Minsk agreements—but that seems eminently preferable to where Zelensky is steering the ship of state of Ukraine now.
“[Zelensky] came to power on the expectations of Ukrainian people that he would lead Ukraine to peace. He talked about this, it was thanks to this that he won the election overwhelmingly. But then, when he came to power, in my opinion, he realized two things: firstly, it is better not to clash with neo-Nazis and nationalists, because they are aggressive and very active, you can expect anything from them, and secondly, the US-led West supports them and will always support those who antagonize with Russia – it is beneficial and safe. So he took the relevant position, despite promising his people to end the war in Ukraine. He deceived his voters.”
Tucker asks why Putin doesn’t try harder to get negotiations going again? If he wants peace, then why doesn’t he go to the table with Ukraine. Putin responds that it is because Ukraine refuses to talk, that Russia has always been ready to negotiate—before the invasion and war, soon after the invasion, and ever since.
“President of Ukraine issued a decree prohibiting negotiations with us. Let him cancel that decree and that’s it. We have never refused negotiations indeed. We hear all the time: is Russia ready? Yes, we have not refused! It was them who publicly refused. Well, let him cancel his decree and enter into negotiations. We have never refused.”
At 01:50:00, he draws a comparison between the threat imposed on the world by a failure to control the production of nuclear weapons with that posed by AI. It’s impossible to stop it like we couldn’t stop gunpowder. There will come a time when we would need to regulate this internationally.
“Humanity has to consider what is going to happen due to the newest developments in genetics or in AI. One can make an approximate prediction of what will happen. Once mankind felt an existential threat coming from nuclear weapons, all nuclear nations began to come to terms with one another since they realized that negligent use of nuclear weaponry could drive humanity to extinction.
“It is impossible to stop research in genetics or AI today, just as it was impossible to stop the use of gunpowder back in the day. But as soon as we realize that the threat comes from unbridled and uncontrolled development of AI, or genetics, or any other fields, the time will come to reach an international agreement on how to regulate these things.”
Tucker asks about the NYT journalist who’s serving time in a Russian prison for espionage. Putin basically says: you have many cards to trade for him. Do so, and he’s yours. The only reason that Gershkovich is still in prison in Russia is because the U.S. refuses to negotiate and just wants him returned “for free”, when the U.S. has many prisoners that Russia would like back, people that they’ve similarly accused of spying for Russia while in the U.S. They traded for the basketball player (Griner?); they can trade for the journalist.
“I do not rule out that the person you referred to, Mister Gershkovich, may return to his motherland. By the end of the day, it does not make any sense to keep him in prison in Russia. We want the U.S. special services to think about how they can contribute to achieving the goals our special services are pursuing. We are ready to talk. Moreover, the talks are underway, and there have been many successful examples of these talks crowned with success. Probably this is going to be crowned with success as well, but we have to come to an agreement.”
Back to Ukraine and a potential settlement/peace agreement.
“Tucker Carlson: So, I just want to make sure I am not misunderstanding what you are saying — and I don’t think that I am — I think you are saying you want a negotiated settlement to what’s happening in Ukraine.
“Vladimir Putin: Right. And we made it, we prepared a huge document in Istanbul that was initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation. He affixed his signature to some of the provisions, not to all of it. He put his signature and then he himself said: “We were ready to sign it and the war would have been over long ago, eighteen months ago. However, Prime Minister Johnson came, talked us out of it and we missed that chance.” Well, you missed it, you made a mistake, let them get back to that, that is all. Why do we have to bother ourselves and correct somebody else’s mistakes?
“I know one can say it is our mistake, it was us who intensified the situation and decided to put an end to the war that started in 2014 in Donbas, as I have already said, by means of weapons. Let me get back to further in history, I already told you this, we were just discussing it. Let us go back to 1991 when we were promised that NATO would not be expanded, to 2008 when the doors to NATO opened, to the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine declaring Ukraine a neutral state. Let us go back to the fact that NATO and US military bases started to appear on the territory of Ukraine creating threats for us. Let us go back to coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It is pointless though, isn’t it? We may go back and forth endlessly. But they stopped negotiations. Is it a mistake? Yes. Correct it. We are ready. What else is needed?”
One commentator reflected my reaction to the juxtaposition of this interview coming out and the “diagnosis” the Joe Biden is mentally unfit to stand trial,
“Vladimir Putin just spent 30 minutes going over the last 1,000 years history of Russia and Ukraine in detail without notes.
“Joe Biden can’t remember when his son died.
“God help us all”
Egypt building camps to host Palestinians expelled from Gaza as Israel prepares for Rafah onslaught by Jordan Shilton (WSWS)
“If Israel and its imperialist sponsors get away with the mass expulsion of the Palestinians to Egypt, it will go down in history as one of the 21st century’s greatest crimes and represent a major step towards a bloodbath engulfing the entire Middle East.”
“[…] will go down in history as one of the 21st century’s greatest crimes […]” so far.
”In The War Of Propaganda, It Is Very Difficult To Defeat The United States” by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“One under-appreciated moment from Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin came after Putin implied that NATO powers were behind the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline. Carlson responded by asking why Putin wouldn’t present evidence of this to the world, so as to “win a propaganda victory.”
““In the war of propaganda it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media,” Putin replied, adding, “The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions.””
Politico Europe—when did Politico get so big that they now have a European arm?—shot that down with the help of a Russian ex-pat reporter who said that it’s obvious: U.S. media is free, while Russia’s media is state-sponsored. But, read the following analysis.
“At the bottom of the article is a line which reads as follows: “Sergey Goryashko is hosted at POLITICO under the EU-funded EU4FreeMedia residency program.”
“EU4FreeMedia is a European Union narrative management operation set up to help integrate “Russian journalists in exile” into leading European publications, ie to provide maximum media amplification to Russian expats who have a bone to pick with the current government in Moscow. It is run with participation from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US government-funded media op under the umbrella of the US propaganda services umbrella USAGM.
“I really couldn’t have come up with a more perfect illustration of what I’m talking about here than the US government and its European lackeys running a complex and elaborate project to further slant European media against the Russian Federation, which then manifests as a Politico article calling Putin a liar and claiming propaganda does not exist in the west.”
“ There’s an old joke that goes like this:
“A Soviet and an American are on an airplane seated next to each other.
““Why are you flying to the US?” asks the American.
“To study American propaganda,” replies the Soviet.
“What American propaganda?” asks the American.
“Exactly,” the Soviet replies.”
I really like this formulation. I’d heard it differently:
A Soviet diplomat visited the U.S. with his colleague, a U.S. diplomat. The U.S. American took him to all of the highlights, showing him everything that made the U.S.A. great, showing him television and the free press, etc. At the end, the Soviet thanked him for really opening his eyes to how amazingly well propaganda can be made to work. The U.S. American was confused: “but, you Soviets have a huge propaganda system yourselves! What do you need to learn from us?” The Soviet replied, “Yes, we have propaganda. But we don’t believe it.”
“[…] anyone who’s wealthy enough to control a mass media platform is going to have a vested interest in preserving the status quo upon which their wealth is premised, and they will cooperate with establishment power structures in various ways toward that end.”
“Propaganda only really has persuasive power if you don’t know it’s happening to you.”
For example,
“According to @theintercept analysis of US media, the term “slaughter” was used to describe the killing of Israelis v Palestinians 60 to 1, “massacre” was used to describe killing of Israelis v Palestinians 125 to 2. “Horrific” was used to describe the killing of Israelis 36 to 4.”
“If you’re like most people and don’t read past the headline, you’d never know from the imperial media headlines that the child was killed by Israel, and you’d certainly never know about her terrified phone call for help while trapped by IDF fire and surrounded by the bodies of her dead relatives.”
“Last month the BBC published an article titled “Record number of civilians hurt by explosives in 2023”, as though they were mishandling fireworks or something instead of being actively killed by Israeli bombs. The BBC later revised their atrocious headline, but revised it in the opposite direction, replacing “Record number” with “High number” to further minimize the impact.”
“In Ukraine people die from bombs because Russia launched Russian airstrikes and killed them very Russianly, whereas in Gaza people get hurt by explosions because they got too close to some type of explosive material.”
“[…] these little manipulations fly under the radar if you’re not on the lookout for them. Such is the brilliance of the US empire’s invisible propaganda machine. That’s why it’s very difficult to win a propaganda war against the United States, that’s why westerners have been so successfully manipulated into accepting a status quo of endless war, ecocide, injustice and exploitation, and that’s why the world looks the way it looks right now.”
Israel Weaponizes Sympathy And Victimhood by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of this personality type taken to the extreme. People hate her because she’s a phony, egomaniacal sadist who has spent her entire political career pushing for mass military bloodshed at every opportunity, but she then frames this hatred as evidence of widespread misogyny and far-right extremism, which is why the world desperately needs Hillary Clinton to help fight those things.
“Any remotely normal person who was both as wealthy and as despised as Hillary Clinton would have simply retired from public life to enjoy their hundreds of millions of dollars, blissfully sheltered from the vitriol and condemnation of the common riff raff. But Clinton keeps showing up, adamantly refusing to go away, because the hatred she receives is actually what fuels her entire personal dynamic.”
How Microsoft names threat actors by diannegali & Dansimp (Microsoft)
“Microsoft shifted to a new naming taxonomy for threat actors aligned with the theme of weather. We intend to bring better clarity to customers and other security researchers with the nex taxonomy. We offer a more organized, articulate, and easy way to reference threat actors so that organizations can better prioritize and protect themselves and aid security researchers already confronted with an overwhelming amount of threat intelligence data.”
Where Microsoft is utterly unwilling to help you is if the threat actor comes from any country other than official enemies of the U.S. or, basically, NATO. The only threat actors for which they have a taxonomy are:
- China
- Iran
- Lebanon
- North Korea
- Russia
- South Korea
- Turkey
- Vietnam
As Sapir-Worf would say: since we don’t have a word for it, it doesn’t exist. That, or Microsoft just categorizes any threat from the NSA, CIA, or Mossad—just a few examples among myriad others—as being from Russia, North Korea, or Iran anyway. They probably have a special die that they role to pick a scapegoat.
So, yeah, it’s neat to see that otherwise-serious researchers kind of just pretend that two of the biggest hacking nations in the world just don’t exist in that sense. Microsoft is an international company. International customers should be pissed off that they prioritize sucking up to the Empire more than taking their job seriously in the name of customers who aren’t in the U.S. Even U.S. customers would be interested in knowing when the CIA or NSA is putting trojans on their servers, but they’ll never hear it from Microsoft. I guess U.S. and Israeli trojans are just gentle, digital kisses—homeopathic balms that delicately lift your data from your data stores for your own good. They’re not really threats at all, in that sense, which is why they don’t exist in the threat-actor taxonomy. It’s just logic.
Israel Raids Hospital by Liz Wolfe (Reason)
This is how you write about war crimes when you wholeheartedly support them. It hits all the standard notes:
Check it out.
“News broke this morning that the Israeli military is beginning its raid of Khan Younis’ Nasser Hospital, in the Gaza Strip. The BBC reported that one trauma surgeon said, from inside the building, that “tanks and snipers” currently surround the hospital from “all directions.”
“The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have told all people inside the hospital to evacuate immediately so that it can begin its raid.
“The Israeli military reports that it has intelligence—including testimony from now-released hostages—that indicates that Hamas is using Nasser Hospital as an important spot for its military operations, which would be in keeping with the well-established pattern of Hamas using civilians, including the sick and wounded, as human shields. There is some belief among the Israeli military that either living captives or the bodies of hostages might be located at Nasser Hospital.
“Meanwhile, Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry officials claim that the IDF’s operation has destroyed critical areas of the hospital, crippling its operations and harming displaced people who were sheltering there.
“Both could be true, and Israel must continue weighing whether raids like these are worth the cost—a situation it’s been forced into in part due to Hamas’ callous disregard for human life.”
I can’t believe that this is the kind of stuff that people regularly consume, believe, and then just go about their day, chirpily supporting whatever Israel needs to do in order to keep itself alive for one more day. You don’t even think about the fact that Israel has essentially normalized attacking hospitals as if that’s not a high crime of the Geneva Conventions. Of course these kinds of attacks all make sense when you’re literally fighting for your existence every day, when any reluctance or hesitation or mercy would result in the eradication of Israel and the extinguishing of the entire Jewish faith literally overnight.
Biden is Right to Grant Temporary Refuge to Palestinian Migrants Already in US, but Should go Further by Ilya Somin (Reason)
Ilya Somin is a fool, but I scanned his short article anyway. He cited another fool, then wrote that he agreed with it. He starts off by saying that he agrees with the Biden administration that 6,000 Palestinians shouldn’t be forced to return to Palestine just because their visas have technically run out.
“[…] the Biden administration granted temporary refuge to Palestinian migrants currently in the United States, who might otherwise be subject to deportation. The grant of Deferred Enforced Departure status (known as DED) allows about 6000 Palestinians to remain in the US for an additional 18 months.”
“As the White House statement on the subject puts it, because of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, “humanitarian conditions in the Palestinian territories, and primarily Gaza, have significantly deteriorated.” That surely understates the point: thousands of people have been killed, and much of Gaza leveled. There is less extensive, but still significant, violence on the West Bank. In addition, Gaza Palestinians are subject to Hamas’s brutal tyranny, which is awful, even aside from the war.”
While he acknowledges the destruction in Gaza and “violence on the West Bank”—I like how he writes “on” rather than “in” because he thinks the West Bank is literally the bank of a river—he doesn’t assign any agency to the violence until he attributes “tyranny” to “Hamas”. These people are shockingly brainwashed.
Don’t worry. I didn’t judge him prematurely or harshly. He goes on.
“In my view, the primary blame for this situation falls on Hamas for using Gaza as a base for its horrific terrorist attacks, and then using the civilian population as human shields. But, regardless of the blame, it would be wrong to force Palestinian migrants (or anyone) to return to a deadly war zone—or to live under a system of quasi-medieval oppression.”
Israel doesn’t enter into this. It’s all Hamas. Israel has nothing to do with the destruction in Gaza, which he, to his credit, at least doesn’t pretend to not exist.
“In a previous post, I explained why opening the door to Gaza refugees is the right thing to do on both moral and strategic grounds: it can save thousands of people from needless suffering and death, while also making it easier for Israel to defeat Hamas.”
It’s also 100% the goal of Israel to throw out all Palestinians and not let them back in. Not a single one of them is going to “go back” after all of this. Israel will not allow it and there’s nowhere to go.
“Why would anyone other than Hamas—especially the U.S.—support locking Gazans in like North Korea does? Since 1948, Arab states and the U.N. have refused to treat Palestinians like ordinary refugees, keeping them in a unique intergenerational limbo to provide a reservoir of resentment against Israel.”
What the fuck are you talking about? Most Palestinians live in neighboring countries already. It’s interesting to see how Somin and co. portray themselves as humanitarians who care about the plight of Palestinians, but treat the Israeli violence as completely without human agency, as if they’re fleeing an earthquake.
“Letting Gazans leave not only would reduce human suffering; it would provide a test and incentive for postwar governance. Refugees often return to their home countries when governance stabilizes after a conflict. For this to happen, the new civilian administration would have to make it a place where Gazans want to live, not where they are prevented from leaving.”
“[…] suggest the US use its large-scale aid to Egypt as leverage to pressure the Egyptian government to let Gaza refugees leave.”
Did you get that?
Nowhere there does Somin address the expressed and stated fact that any Palestinian who leaves Gaza or the West Bank now will never go back.
It’s kind of fascinating to read a few of these, but it’s tiring.
They’re starting so early. The article How Bad It Was by Richard Farr (3 Quarks Daily) writes about the Bush years. It’s essentially an essay that is a campaign ad for choosing the lesser evil, which is clearly Biden-Harris, and to choose now, and to start donating at least $25 regularly, even thought that’s a “pathetic” amount. How much money do these dopes need from regular people?
The next article on the site was Catspeak by Brooks Riley (3 Quarks Daily)
It’s two cats talking to each other:
“Hillary called Tucker Carlson a ‘useful idiot’!
“It’s the ‘useful’ part that bothers me.”
A real knee-slapper.
The next article after that is called Orange Creamsicles: Facing the Idiotic Within our Borders by Mark Harvey (3 Quarks Daily). I didn’t even bother reading that one as it is festooned with a bit picture of Trump supporters, who surely come under the wheels of the author’s incisive wit and political-analytical acumen. It probably also ends with an exhortation to send money to the Democrats.
I suppose it will be easier weeding out the news when a normally reliable source of essays has decided to function as an arm of the Democratic party for the next 10 months or so.
United Nations Warns Israeli Attack On Rafah Could Lead To More Hostages Being Rescued (Babylon Bee)
This is on a site that considers itself to be a Christian Satirical Online Magazine. It has fully bought—hook, line, and sinker—the Israeli narrative. It literally doesn’t care about Palestinians. Christian charity doesn’t enter into it.
Or, they have no idea what’s really going on. They either don’t know, or they don’t care. Both are bad; the second is worse.
If you don’t know, then you’re in a majority of people living inside a carefully engineered media bubble that keeps out reality and maintains a sphere that allows you to go about your day without harshly judging literally everyone in your government and media.
The death of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny by Alex Lantier, Joseph Kishore (WSWS)
“The death of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison on Friday has been immediately integrated into a massive anti-Russia propaganda campaign by the Biden administration and its NATO allies, along with their associated media outlets. Without an autopsy, let alone a fact-grounded analysis of the circumstances of Navalny’s death, the unified position from the NATO powers is: “Putin killed Navalny.”
“US President Joe Biden declared on Friday that “there is no doubt that the death of Navalny is a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.”
“Secretary of State Antony Blinken proclaimed that it “underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built. Russia is responsible for this.””
That’s the president—Biden—and the top diplomat—Blinken—from the U.S. We’ve become so indoctrinated that no-one is at-all surprised anymore when the the highest levels of the U.S. government no longer measure their words, then they just say evidence-free, horrible, threatening, and hostile things about other countries, all day, every day.
“Amidst this propaganda offensive, it is first necessary to stress that there is no precise knowledge as to how Navalny died. Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny lost consciousness after a walk, and efforts to revive him were not successful. Navalny, according to these reports, may have died of a blood clot.
“This would not absolve the Russian government of culpability. Navalny died in a Russian prison, and the Putin regime was responsible for his well-being and safety. This, however, does not warrant the claim, in the absence of evidence, that Navalny was murdered.”
Well, yeah, but they also would report it like that. Israel reports that children walk into bullets. U.S. cops report all the time about how people walk into really dangerous obstacles. I suppose Russians, though, would also have been instructed that nothing is to happen to Navalvy. It’s hard to believe that it was on purpose—and the timing is completely bizarre, if it was.
“The immediate demand from the Biden administration, the Democrats and sections of the Republican Party is for the passage by Congress of a bill containing tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself has seized on Navalny’s death to call for more military assistance, amidst an intensifying crisis of the far-right government, which has been bled white by the imperialist-backed war against Russia.”
Never let an opportunity to profit from tragedy go to waste.
“Here, what is most striking is the staggering hypocrisy of the imperialist powers. Biden and his NATO allies furiously denounce the Putin regime’s treatment of Navalny, while subjecting Julian Assange, a genuine champion of human rights, to the most brutal and life-threatening conditions.
“And what of the many prisoners still rotting in Guantanamo Bay, after decades of brutal detention and torture?
“Biden cannot contain himself over the death of Navalny, and yet he is overseeing, arming, financially supporting and continuing to defend mass murder carried out by Israel. Those praising Navalny’s memory are political criminals whose invocations of morality deserve nothing but contempt. They are indignant at the alleged murder of Navalny, while arming the Israeli armed forces for the genocidal campaign against defenseless men, women and children huddled in hospitals, bombed-out homes and tent cities across Gaza.
“The only purpose of the propaganda campaign over Navalny’s death is to justify the further escalation of war against Russia.”
Crocodile Tears Over Navalny While Ignoring Assange by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“I really could not have a lower opinion of people who would rather talk about Navalny’s persecution in a far away country that has nothing to do with them than Julian Assange being persecuted at the hands of their own government. It’s the most pathetic, bootlicking behavior imaginable.”
“I really could not have a lower opinion of people who would rather talk about Navalny’s persecution in a far away country that has nothing to do with them than Julian Assange being persecuted at the hands of their own government. It’s the most pathetic, bootlicking behavior imaginable.”
“If you’re in a country whose government has had a hand in the persecution of Julian Assange, then you can go ahead and shut the fuck up about Navalny. Whenever I see people screaming about the persecution of journalists and political prisoners in other countries when they themselves live in a nation whose government is persecuting Julian Assange, I can’t help but think of Matthew 7:4–5,”“What could be Assange’s final appeal effort against US extradition happens February 20th and 21st in London. Free Julian Assange.”“How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Worker misclassification is a competition issue by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“The argument goes, “Congress had the power to spell out every possible problem an agency might deal with and to create a list of everything they were allowed to do about these problems. If they didn’t, then the agency isn’t allowed to act.” This is an Objectively Very Stupid argument, and it takes a heroic act of motivated reasoning to buy it. The whole point of expert agencies is that they’re experts and that they might discover new problems in American life, and come up with productive ways of fixing them. If the only way for an agency to address a problem is to wait for Congress to notice it and pass a law about it, then we don’t even need agencies – Congress can just be the regulator, as well as the lawmaker.”
“One of the most dangerous jobs in the country is construction worker, and worker misclassification is rampant in the sector. That means that construction workers are three times more likely than other workers to lack health insurance. What’s more, misclassified workers can’t form unions, because their bosses’ fiction treats them as independent contractors, not employees, which means that misclassified construction workers can’t join trade unions and demand health-care, or safer workplaces.”
“But in 2010, his employer reclassified him as a contractor. They ordered him to buy a new truck – which they financed on a lease-purchase basis – and put him to work for 16 hours stretches in shifts lasting as much as 20 hours per day. Talavera couldn’t pick his own hours or pick his routes, but he was still treated as an independent contractor for payroll and labor protection purposes.
“This lead [sic] to an [sic] terrible decline in Talavera’s working conditions. He gave up going home between shifts, sleeping in his cab instead. His pay dropped through the floor, thanks to junk-fees that relied on the fiction that he was a contractor. For example, his boss started to charge him rent on the space his truck took up while he was standing by for a job at the port. Other truckers at the port saw paycheck deductions for the toilet-paper in the bathrooms!
“Talavera’s take-home pay dropped so low that he was bringing home a weekly wage of $112 or $33 (one week, his pay amounted to $0.67). His wife had to work three jobs, and they still had to declare bankruptcy to avoid losing their home. When Talavera’s truck needed repairs he couldn’t afford, his boss fired him and took back the truck, and Talavera was out the $78,000 he’d paid into it on the lease-purchase plan.”
This guy doesn’t show up at all in the employment statistics that we get to see. And this guy is not a rarity. He’s not the majority, but it’s a scandal to say that things are going well, when part of the reason it’s going well for others is because guys like this are taking it on the chin so hard. I feel like Dean Baker needs to read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and ask himself why he’s not walking away.
Americans Have Many Good Reasons to Be Unhappy With This Economy by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)
“Around the country, demand for food banks is soaring. Minnesota saw a record number of food-shelf visits in 2023, a more than 30 percent increase on what had already been a record-setting number the year before .”
“These charities also consistently point to the same culprits: high grocery prices, unaffordable housing, and the gradual disappearance of pandemic-era federal aid, including cuts to the food-stamp program Biden made in his much celebrated 2023 budget deal.”
“2022 saw the first rise in food insecurity in a little more than a decade, having been gently declining in all the years since 2011. That meant forty-four million people were living in households where they struggled to get the food they needed because they lacked money and other resources, including thirteen million kids.”
“With federal money drying up and housing getting pricier, the number of homeless people in the United States soared 12 percent last year to more than 653,000 people. That’s both the highest number and the largest increase on record; before that, excluding the pandemic, the biggest spike in homelessness had been 2.7 percent in 2019.”
“The most recent figure recorded by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) for how many renters are cost burdened (spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities) is 22.4 million as of 2022, an all-time high. Just over twelve million of those were “severely” burdened, or spending more than half their income on housing costs, also an all-time high.”
“For one, the already twenty-year-high level of credit card debt just went up again the last quarter of 2023, putting it at $1.13 trillion by the end of the year. Credit card balances, after plummeting during the pandemic when many paid down debt and bills, have steadily grown to well past their prepandemic level since late 2021, just as inflation was on the march.”
“It’s not surprising that many commentators who want the president to prevail this year would jump on the consumer confidence news to wave all of this away. But it’s also not surprising if hectoring people to feel better about the economy, and offering nothing to alleviate their financial stresses, doesn’t change their minds come November.”
A revealing comment on the Boeing crisis by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“Clark told the FT the airline would now send its own engineers to observe production processes at Boeing and its supplier Sprit AeroSystems.
““The fact that we’re having to do this is testament to what has happened,” he said. “This would not have happened in the old days. You know, we trusted these people implicitly to get it done.”
“The fact that his remarks and actions were directed at Boeing, at one time an icon of American manufacturing prowess, points to deeper historical processes.”
“[…] Aengus Kelly, the chief executive of Aercap, the world’s biggest aircraft leasing company, said last month that Boeing needed to put aside financial targets and focus solely on the quality and safety of its planes.
“Both men expressed the hope that Boeing would undertake the necessary refocus away from finance to the production of high quality and safe planes.”
And what incentive structure would lead to that? That Boeing would go out of business? What do those executives care? They will golden-parachute their way out of the corpse of Boeing and fly upward into a probably even-more-lucrative C-Suite job at another company that they fill pick apart for lucre. As long as that is rewarded, that is what the system will produce.
No-one in any position of power indicates that quality, morality, ethics, or anything except money is of importance. Money is assumed to be a surrogate for all of these things. This oversimplification is useful only for those without morality, ethics, for those who don’t care about quality as a good, who don’t care about sustainability, who don’t have anything to offer a society that values actual work.
“Over the past 40 years these forces have led to the rise and rise of financialisation—that is the ever-increasing shift towards the accumulation of profit, not by production as such, but through what is known as “financial engineering.””
“Rather than having to wait for the company to spend money on developing a new product that will keep profits flowing in and face the risk that, because of market conditions or the development of a better product by a rival it may not, they obtain an immediate boost from the increased stock price that share buybacks bring.”
And then they skedaddle, leaving a husk that flounders.
“Boeing facing the obsolescence of its 737 planes, could have created an entirely new airplane from scratch with fully modern technology. Instead, the company decided to re-engineer the older model, name it the 737 MAX, and save $7 billion. Perhaps not coincidentally, the $7 billion ‘saved’ is the amount of stock buybacks Boeing made each year between 2013 and 2019.”
“The aim and driving force of capitalist production is not material wealth as such—the production of commodities—but the accumulation of money. The circuit of capital begins with money and ends with an expanded quantity of money, which then resumes the circuit. It is its alpha and omega of the capitalist system.
“As Karl Marx noted: “The production process appears simply as an unavoidable middle term, a necessary evil for the purpose of money making.”
“And as Frederick Engels commented, this explained why all nations were periodically seized by “fits of giddiness in which they try to accomplish money making without the mediations of the production process.””
We are in a decades-long “fit of giddiness”.
“To facilitate this kind of systematic looting vast changes were made to the legal system so that practices considered criminal in the past could be carried out.
“Share buybacks are a case in point. Up until 1982 they were regarded as unlawful manipulation of the stock market, but were legalised under the Reagan administration as one of the first of many legislative changes to meet the new demands of finance capital.”
Of course it started with that guy. Too bad Hinckley wasn’t a better shot.
This is an excellent and well-resourced and -researched disquisition on China’s development (as well as on Japan’s, in comparison, as another strongly state-supported economy). He cites Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder (an absolutely excellent book), as well as Chalmers Johson, who wrote several works on Japan’s economy (as well as the famous and excellent Blowback series).
It contrasts the makeup of the U.S. economy—which is primarily FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) and service—with the Chinese economy, which is primarily manufacturing and industry, with its own FIRE sector largely state-owned.
Alternate qubit design does error correction in hardware by John Timmer (Ars Technica)
“The devices are structured much like a transmon, the form of qubit favored by tech heavyweights like IBM and Google. There, the quantum information is stored in a loop of superconducting wire and is controlled by what’s called a microwave resonator—a small bit of material where microwave photons will reflect back and forth for a while before being lost.”
“A bosonic qubit turns that situation on its head. In this hardware, the quantum information is held in the photons, while the superconducting wire and resonator control the system. These are both hooked up to a coaxial cavity (think of a structure that, while microscopic, looks a bit like the end of a cable connector).”
““A very simple and basic idea behind quantum error correction is redundancy,” co-founder and CTO Julien Camirand Lemyre told Ars. “One thing about resonators and oscillators in superconducting circuits is that you can put a lot of photons inside the resonators. And for us, the redundancy comes from there.””
“This process doesn’t correct all possible errors, so it doesn’t eliminate the need for logical qubits made from multiple underlying hardware qubits.”
“The company is counting on its hardware’s ability to handle error correction to reduce the number of qubits needed for useful calculations. But if its competitors can scale up the number of qubits fast enough while maintaining the control and error rates needed, that may not ultimately matter.”
This was a wonderful story of Nakamura, the iconoclastic and brilliant engineer who cracked the code on blue LEDs.
My Favorite Books by J.G. Ballard
“Looking back on my childhood reading, I’m struck by how frightening most of it was, and I’m glad that my own children were never exposed to those gruesome tales and eerie colored plates with their airless Pre-Raphaelite gloom, unearthly complexions and haunted infants with almost autistic stares. The overbearing moralistic tone was explicit in Charles Kingsley’s “The Water-Babies,” a masterpiece in its bizarre way, but one of the most unpleasant works of fiction I have ever read before or since. The same tone could be heard through so much of children’s fiction, as if childhood itself and the child’s imagination were maladies to be repressed and punished.”
“I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures — scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers — part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination.”
- The Day of the Locust: Nathanael West
- Collected Short Stories: Ernest Hemingway
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- The Annotated Alice: ed. Martin Gardner
- The World through Blunted Sight: Patrick Trevor-Roper
- The Naked Lunch: William Burroughs
- The Black Box: ed. Malcolm MacPherson
- America: Jean Baudrillard
- The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí: by Da
What’s a book that you’re curious about but that you know you will never, ever read? (Reddit)
The first comment wrote “Honestly, Mein Kampf,” to which another replied,
“t’s so boring. Hitler’s favorite rhetorical device is to go on a multilayered tangent and never return back to the original point. Barely coherent 1920s German neckbeard rambling. I can’t believe anyone ever took this book seriously, it just goes to show the quality of German culture at the time I guess.”
I answered,
And it’s not like it lost anything in translation. The writing style is very tangential and stilted, even in the original German.
I would be a bit more careful about throwing shade at Germans specifically, though. Lots of populations seem quite susceptible to utterly irrational and stupid movements, seemingly based on nothing. It’s kind of the definition of mania and cultish behavior.
If you’re not on the inside, it appears that only a fool could believe it. If you’re on the inside, it appears that only a fool couldn’t.
Neal Stephenson’s Most Stunning Prediction by Matteo Wong (The Atlantic)
“Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, features devices we’d describe today as Bluetooth earbuds.”
It’s not surprising to learn that earbuds is what the Atlantic thinks Fahrenheit 451 predicted best about today’s world. You know, not the whole “knowledge-management through destruction” theme, in which they are active participants.
“Stephenson’s book, published in 1995, explores a future of seamless, instant digital communication, in which tiny computers with immense capabilities are embedded in everyday life. Corporations are dominant, news and ads are targeted, and screens are omnipresent. It’s a world of stark class and cultural divisions (the novel follows a powerful aristocratic sect that styles itself as the “neo-Victorians”), but it’s nevertheless one in which the Primer is presented as the best of what technology can be.”
That seems pretty predictive, I suppose, but this article is utterly without insight. I didn’t expect much more from The Atlantic.
The Throwaway Scene That Gives Blazing Saddles Its Warm Heart by Matt Zoller Seitz
““You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers,” he tells Bart. “These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know … morons.” ”
“This is a film that concerns itself with the behavior of bigots and the institutional racism that exploits their insecurity for profit. But the movie isn’t about that. It’s about the friendship between Bart and The Kid, which is the film’s illustration of how life should be. The scene sells the friendship that sells the film. It makes you believe these guys are really friends. A friend is someone who can make you laugh even when you don’t want to.”
“[…] the specific brilliance of “Blazing Saddles” is that it seems to imagine itself as a product of some future popular culture in which there is common agreement not just that prejudice is unacceptable, but that anyone who believes otherwise is a fool.”
You’re damned skippy. 💯 This was one of my favorite movies growing up. My dad and I watched it whenever it came on TV (which was the only way you could watch stuff back then). Cleavon Litte was brilliant in that, but Gene Wilder was brilliant in everything. Man, his movies were formative for me. Willie Wonka, Stir Crazy, and See No Evil, Hear No Evil—which I just realized no-one’s ever tried to remake, which is funny because these days they reboot everything, but they’re terrified of that one, either because of the disabilities or because they know it could never, ever be as good as the original.
Writing Is a Bad Habit by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“[…] even in this crumbling and precarious world young people are still seeking out exposure to timeless and edifying ideas with no obvious utilitarian pay-off.”
“[…] when I walk across a US campus with buildings erected before World War II, with beautiful inscriptions of quotations from Cicero or Emerson chiseled into their stone, they look to me like nothing so much as deconsecrated churches. They were built for a function they no longer serve, and the ghosts that once loomed in them have been expelled.”
“So look, friends: it doesn’t matter what day a famous writer was born, what day they died, where they are buried, or what their daily writing routines were or how much tea or whisky they drank. You shouldn’t care. This is a preoccupation for people who have not really understood for themselves what it is that compels a person to read and write. We are not bobby-soxers sending box-tops in for signed photos of Rudy Vallée. Ideally we are not “fans” in any sense at all of the authors who shape us and whom we channel.”
“[…] writing isn’t a lifestyle; it’s a bad habit, an irrepressible compulsion to squeeze out oily build-up that a very small number of people find they just cannot rid themselves of, and that an even smaller number of people manage to redeem, notwithstanding its intrinsic unseemliness, by conveying to readers a sensibility about the world, social, natural, or transcendental.”
“before the lycanthropic horror of puberty sets in,”
“(I gather philia, the third form of love which I’m not dwelling on much here, can also often connote lack: thus the recent analysis of the original usage of the term philosophos, as we find it in a fragment of Heraclitus, to mean not so much “lover of wisdom” as “wannabe wise person”, i.e., someone who is emphatically not wise but would very much like to be so.)”
“The erotic, again, is an abiding sense of external possibility. When you’re sixteen you can even feel it when, say, you walk into a convenience store: Who is going to be in there? What new prospects might an encounter in there open up? Another way of putting this is that it is a condition of lack or privation. It is because you feel cut off from something that what’s outside of you seems so attractive. But under the reign of Charity you are not cut off from anything. In fact you’re basking, if I can put it that way, in the very force that pervades the world and gives it its moral shape and meaning.”
“This is another possible sense of the meaning of conversion as articulated at Matthew 18:3-5: becoming again as little children.”
“How peculiar, now, to feel nothing but a blend of the avuncular, the fiduciary, the Charitable, in the presence of anyone still progressing towards fullness, anyone still feeling lack, anyone, that is more or less the same as to say, in the prime of life. Coming together with other spirits, now ignorant of the number and quality of the hairs on their legs, but no less unified with them than one had once been through attention to that exquisite detail of their corporeality, no longer wanting anything from them either, but able to share with them something of which anyway there is an infinite supply, like the air around your nose.”
“The old legends of the wise men who die with a joyous smile on their faces do not concern men joyfully reminiscing about this or that “unforgettable” meal they had. They are joyful not because they’ve managed to collect all the right experiences, but because they no longer live in the mode of lack where the project of collecting experiences can make any sense. They are full, and therefore indifferent.”
“I believe that the most powerful piece of ideology to rise over the past several centuries is the one that tells us that human minds are the only inhabitants of the mental or spiritual realm, that we are alone there, and everything else is “mere” physical matter. Such a view is a huge departure from the default world-image of humanity in almost all places and times, according to which the world around us is swarming, everywhere, with spirits.”
“The reduction of the non-human spirit world to matter has been crucial for facilitating our vastly increased power to transform the natural world according to our will, into new forms that we recognise as “technology”. But the unconstrained power to do this —unconstrained, notably, by any concern about the moral status of the “matter” that enters into the transformations— is but a more general instance of the ideological shift by which human beings are able to do what they want to the territories, homes, and bodies, of enemy people, by first dehumanizing them. It is also the same general shift that facilitates the massive slaughter of animals without, for the most part, any awareness of the moral weight of this action, a weight that was previously managed, when slaughter was carried out at a much smaller scale, through the mechanism of ritual sacrifice. Animals are “deanimalized” in order to make factory farming bearable, just as human beings are “dehumanized” in order to quell the consciences of invaders and oppressors.”
This is a much more erudite and perhaps eloquent, but identical message to the Rick and Morty episode That’s Amorte (Wikipedia).
“The world is alive with spirits, and every corner of nature you probe into is as charged up with as much moral relevance as every other. Modern technology, the built environment, airports, highways: all of this is testimony to our false triumph over the world. But it all covers over, with commercial sheen, an immense, almost inconceivable disgrace: the unjust curtailment of natural ends for the satisfaction of manufactured desires.”
“Everyone is onto something —the UFO abductees are onto something, the past-life regressers are onto something, the most cornball and excessive of esotericists are onto something—, and every such vision of our ultimate fate, every effort to glimpse the ultimate contours of reality, is worthy and dignified and beautiful. Everyone is onto something, that is, except for the agents of capitalism, with their grubby and exploitative retirement-policy commercials, with their manufacture of endless new forms of lack, guaranteeing that so many of us will live until the very last minute under the tyranny of FOMO, never realizing that to do so is to accept that the highest ideal as capitalism presents it, not missing out, is one that you will in any case be unable to achieve for more than an infinitesimal sliver of time. To fear missing out in this low sense is really to miss out: to miss out forever and ever.”
There’s Probably Nothing We Can Do About This Awful Deepfake Porn Problem by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“The internet makes the transmission of information, no matter how ugly or shocking or secret, functionally impossible to stop. Digital infrastructure is spread out across the globe, including in regimes that do not play ball with American legal or corporate mandates, and there’s plenty of server racks out there in the world buzzing along that are inaccessible to even the most dedicated hall monitors”
“He sometimes worked with a group that sought to address the phenomenon of “jailbait” content on the internet − technically legal images of underaged women that contain no nudity or explicit sexual acts but which are nonetheless clearly shared for a prurient purpose.”
Cast the net wide and you’re bound to catch something. Can you prove the prurient interest? Is it illegal? Can you prosecute? Do you even need to when you can just post someone’s face to all of their friends on Facebook with an allegation?
“Some of the more popular independent sites had been shuttered, often through applying pressure to web hosting companies. Google had made it much more difficult to search for such things by delisting certain terms.”
To me, this sounds like China’s technology, no? Do you really think that they’re using their blocking technology only on “jailbait”? Of course not. There are certain topics you’ll never find on most search engines, unless you really work at it. If this works for “legal but unsavory images”, then there’s nothing stopping someone from taking down your site of legal, but unsavory writings.
“Instagram has in fact had a problem with actual, honest-to-god illegal child pornography, in part because of this very difficulty in having too many holes in the dyke and not enough fingers. At precisely the point in our history that entities like Reddit or various web hosting companies were getting serious about the “jailbait” problem, social networks dedicated to images and video were attracting huge user bases and opening up all kinds of new opportunities for spreading it. The problem had not been solved; it had simply been distributed on a vast scale.”
“As this issue is specifically about images that are legal but indecent, there’s also the problem that indecency is a moving target and difficult to define through policy. How do you write a terms of service that fairly adjudicates what is an appropriately or inappropriately provocative image, and can you possibly adjust that definition depending on the age of the person in the picture?”
“The volume problem comes from another direction, too. My friend told me that what really caused him to despair was the sheer percentage of high school students who seemed to be taking nude or even sexual photos and videos of themselves and sharing them with someone else via their phones, photos and videos which very often end up being shared all over their schools.”
They don’t care about the things they’ve been told to care about. Their hormones and pea-sized brains are telling them to win at sex, to win at hierarchy.
“Does that mean you give up on, in particular, trying to shut down actual child pornography? No, of course not. Just like you don’t stop trying to arrest and prosecute murderers even though we know we’ll never fully eliminate murder. But… we know we’ll never fully eliminate murder, and it’s way, way harder to stop someone from looking at an AI fake porn video of an actress in a WhatsApp chat than it is to prosecute a murder.”
“In less than a century we invented, developed, refined, popularized, and monetized a global information network that enables types of behaviors that are essentially undetectable and unstoppable, and this has consequences. Something that has changed in my adult lifetime, I think, is the degree to which we’ve developed a sense of entitlement regarding those kinds of consequences, feelings of entitlement to justice. (Particularly among progressives, but generally too.) This is, I concede, kind of a weird thing to say − in a moral sense, justice is precisely what we are all entitled to. But as a practical matter, justice has been to one degree or another unobtainable for any and all human beings for the entirety of human history. Life’s not fair. Yet there’s a lot of people in contemporary times who seem to have lost sight of the basic wisdom that we can always do more good, but aren’t entitled to a solution to any particular problem.”
“[…] the inability to accept human limits in the pursuit of the good touches politics in all manner of directions.”
“An academic influence on politics that suggests that accepting less than the ideal is to take the side of the oppressor. Our continuing obsession with youth and desire to occupy an adolescent mindset for our entire lives, which brings with it the teenager’s inflexible righteousness and inability to parse moral limits.”
I wonder why people are so up-in-arms about deep-fake porn? I’ve heard people say that it’s because it’s not of real people, that people are masturbating to something that’s not real, so that’s not healthy. News flash: (nearly) everyone you’ve ever masturbated to is not real, in the sense that you have never seen them, you will never meet them, and they might as well not be real as far as you’re concerned. How will you know the difference?
I suppose it’s porn of real people who are most definitely not associated with pornography and, because of technology and the sheer distributive power of the Internet, people you do know will now be able to masturbate to you, probably doing stuff that you would never do, and of which you’re not proud of being depicted doing. No-one would really complain if there was deep-fake video of them rescuing puppies from a burning building.
The problem kind of comes down to the level of shame that we associated with sex. That’s the only reason this has power over us, right? If it was a video of you jogging somewhere, who cares? It it’s a video of you boxing, no problem. Boxing toddlers and blasting them out of a ring? Nope. Hanging out at on a dinner date? Holding hands on a nighttime stroll? No problem. Smooching? Borderline. Fucking? Nope.
Can I think about an illegal picture? Yes. Can I describe it to a friend? Yes. Can I publish that description online? Maybe. Can I draw it? Yes. Can I use photoshop? Yes. Can I use an online llm? No? Can I use a local one? Yes. Maybe?
Distribution is the problem? Our monetization? Or wrongthink?
We Think This Dystopia Is Normal Like People In Abusive Relationships Think It’s Normal by Caitlin Johnstone
“There’s a widespread assumption throughout the western world that while things might not be perfect our society is certainly much better than what people experience in a nation like China, smugly believing ourselves to be a free society full of free thinkers and free people in contrast with those unfortunate thought-controlled communist conformists. In fact western civilization is one giant thought-controlled conformity machine where people’s minds are shaped by mass-scale psychological manipulation far more effectively than anywhere else in the world, exactly because westerners don’t know this is happening and believe they are free.”
“[…] we are free to choose between 197 flavors of frosted breakfast cereal and 20,000 different superhero movies. We are free to choose between voting for warmongering capitalist authoritarian Democrats or warmongering capitalist authoritarian Republicans. We are free to sell our labor at a fraction of the value it generates to any exploitative ecocidal employer of our choosing. We are free to think whatever thoughts we’ve been trained to think by our education systems, mass media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. We are free to speak our minds, which have been shaped and conditioned to serve the interests of the powerful and never to say anything that falls outside the Overton window of acceptable opinion.”
“The single biggest obstacle to our freedom in the west is our widespread belief that we are free. Until we collectively realize we’re human livestock being continually herded into our respective gear-turning stations to keep the imperial juggernaut trudging ever forward on the world stage, we’ve got no chance to break free and bring the whole abusive system crashing down.”
Apple to EU: “Go fuck yourself” by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“[…] we are living in an age of rampant corruption and utter impunity. Companies really do get away with both literal and figurative murder. Governments really do ignore horrible crimes by the rich and powerful, and fumble what rare, few enforcement efforts they assay.”
“[…] when you’re competing with other countries for the pennies of trillion-dollar tax-dodgers, any wins can be turned into a loss in an instant. After all, any corporation that is footloose enough to establish a Potemkin Headquarters in Dublin and fly the trídhathach can easily up sticks and open another Big Store HQ in some other haven that offers it a sweeter deal. This has created a global race to the bottom among tax-havens to also serve as regulatory havens – and there’s a made-in-the-EU version that sees Ireland, Malta, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands competing to see who can offer the most impunity for the worst crimes to the most awful corporations in the world.”
“Enter the Digital Markets Act, a new Big Tech specific law that, among other things, bans monopoly app stores and payment processing, through which companies like Apple and Google have levied a 30% tax on the entire app market, while arrogating to themselves the right to decide which software their customers may run on their own devices. Apple has responded to this regulation with a gesture of contempt so naked and broad that it beggars belief. As Proton describes, Apple’s DMA plan is the very definition of malicious compliance:”
“Apple defends this scare screen by saying that it will protect users from the intrinsic unreliability of third-party processors, but as Proton points out, there are plenty of giant corporations who get to use their own payment processors with their iOS apps, because Apple decided they were too big to fuck with. Somehow, Apple can let its customers process payments for Uber, McDonald’s, Airbnb, Doordash and Amazon without terrorizing them about existential security risks – but not mom-and-pop software vendors or publishers who don’t want to hand 30% of their income over to a three-trillion-dollar company.”
“All of this sends a strong signal that Apple is planning to run the same playbook with the DMA that Google and Facebook used on the GDPR: ignore the law, use lawyerly bullshit to chaff regulators, and hope that European federalism has sufficiently deep cracks that it can hide in them when the enforcers come to call.”
“Yes, Apple is big enough to run circles around Japan, or South Korea, or the UK. But when those countries join forces with the EU, the USA and other countries that are fed up to the eyeballs with Apple’s bullshit, the company is in serious danger.”
Canada declares Flipper Zero public enemy No. 1 in car-theft crackdown by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)
“The Flipper Zero is also incapable of defeating keyless systems that rely on rolling codes, a protection that’s been in place since the 1990s that essentially transmits a different electronic key signal each time a key is pressed to lock or unlock a door. An attack technique known as a RollJam, known since at least 2015, can bypass rolling code systems, but it works using two radios and a larger processor and higher-powered radio than is available in the Flipper Zero.”
“Stumpf touched on a newer technique for stealing cars using what’s known as a CAN-injection attack. It uses a cable that patches into a vehicle’s CAN (controller area network), usually through the electronic control unit of a headlight. Criminals are already selling what they call “emergency start” devices that perform the attack. Some of them have been disguised as Bluetooth JBL speakers.
““The more common relay attacks used in vehicle thefts are from sophisticated purpose-built tools,” Stumpf said. “Those devices are the real threat—not some kid opening a Tesla charging port with their Flipper Zero.””
“It’s not the first time the hobbyist device has been portrayed as a tool for sophisticated crime. That impression is likely the result of a flood of videos on YouTube and TikTok showing the device used to empty ATMs and unlock cars. In reality, most of those videos were faked, likely by people attempting to drive sales to websites impersonating Flipper Zero vendors.”
“Kulagin said that governments in jurisdictions other than Canada have been much more open-minded about the Flipper Zero. One such body was the New Jersey Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Cell, which contacted the device maker directly following the rash of misleading videos. After investigating, the agency in January 2023 said the Flipper Zero “can be used as a positive, legitimate, and convenient way for pentesters and curious minds to learn about, access, and dissect signals and protocols.””
The night before the Super Bowl, I opened the SunriseTV web page in Opera to set up the recording. I left the page open on the recordings, so I wouldn’t forget the next morning, when I started home office. The next morning, I refreshed the page and was confronted with the dialog box above. I tried logging in again, but was denied again.
Had my account broken overnight? Had my subscription expired? No, of course not. The site opened in a different web browser fine. I had the Super Bowl on in the background for breakfast. But what kind of crappiness is this? How does a web site completely forget that I have a subscription?
Another pet peeve is that SunriseTV is one of the largest and most established television providers in Switzerland. They still only let you record time slots, not shows. If the Super Bowl slot ends at 04:30, then that’s when it stops recording. They seemingly have no idea when a program actually stops streaming. The Super Bowl went into overtime, so my recording did not include the last ten minutes. Did they record the next slot automatically? Why didn’t they include those ten minutes? This happens all the time, with recorded movies. You will often miss the last ten minutes because those are buried in the first ten minutes of the next time slot—and that’s not the one you recorded.
February 9, 2024 by François Chollet (Twitter)
“People seem to be falling for two rather thoughtless extremes:
“1. “LLMs are AGI, they work like the human brain, they can reason, etc.”
2. “LLMs are dumb and useless.”“Reality is that LLMs are not AGI – they’re a big curve fit to a very large dataset. They work via memorization and interpolation. But that interpolative curve can be tremendously useful, if you want to automate a known task that’s a match for its training data distribution.
“Memorization works, as long as you don’t need to adapt to novelty. You don’t *need* intelligence to achieve usefulness across a set of known, fixed scenarios.”
New GitHub Copilot Research Finds ‘Downward Pressure on Code Quality
“The Coding on Copilot whitepaper from GitClear sought to investigate the quality and maintainability of AI-assisted code compared to what would have been written by a human. In other words: “Is it more similar to the careful, refined contributions of a Senior Developer, or more akin to the disjointed work of a short-term contractor?””
“The answer to that is summarized in this paragraph from the whitepaper’s abstract:”“We find disconcerting trends for maintainability. Code churn – the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored – is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of ‘added code’ and ‘copy/pasted code’ is increasing in proportion to ‘updated,’ ‘deleted,’ and ‘moved ‘code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don’t repeat yourself] of the repos visited.”
- Less Moved Code Implies Less Refactoring, Less Reuse: “Combined with the growth in code labeled ‘Copy/Pasted,’ there is little room to doubt that the current implementation of AI Assistants discourages code reuse. Instead of refactoring and working to DRY (‘Don’t Repeat Yourself’) code, these Assistants offer a one-keystroke temptation to repeat existing code.”
- More Copy/Pasted Code Implies Future Headaches: “There is perhaps no greater scourge to long-term code maintainability than copy/pasted code. In effect, when a non-keyword line of code is repeated, the code author is admitting ‘I didn’t have the time to evaluate the previous implementation.‘ By re-adding code instead of reusing it, the chore is left to future maintainers to figure out how to consolidate parallel code paths that implement repeatedly-needed functionality.”
- Exploring the Verifiability of Code Generated by GitHub Copilot: “We found evidence which corroborates the current consensus in the literature: Copilot is a powerful tool; however, it should not be ‘flying the plane’ by itself.”
A Distributed Systems Reading List by Fred Hebert (My Bad Opinions)
“[…] exactly once delivery means that each message is guaranteed to be sent and seen only once. This is a nice theoretical objective but quite impossible in real systems. It ends up being simulated through other means (combining atomic broadcast with specific flags and ordering guarantees, for example)”
“[…] partial order means that some messages can compare with some messages, but not necessarily all of them. For example, I could decide that all the updates to the key k1 can be in a total order regarding each other, but independent from updates to the key k2 . There is therefore a partial order between all updates across all keys, since k1 updates bear no information relative to the k2 updates.”
“Idempotence means that when messages are seen more than once, resent or replayed, they don’t impact the system differently than if they were sent just once.”
“[…] if you want anything to be reliable, you need an end-to-end acknowledgement, usually written by the application layer.”
“Fallacies of Distributed Computing The fallacies are:”
- The network is reliable
- Latency is zero
- Bandwidth is infinite
- The network is secure
- Topology doesn’t change
- There is one administrator
- Transport cost is zero
- The network is homogeneous
“The updates are received transitively across various nodes. For example, a message published by service A on a bus (whether Kafka or RMQ) can end up read, transformed or acted on and re-published by service B, and there is a possibility that service C will read B ‘s update before A ‘s, causing issues in causality.”
“A single backup is kind of easy to handle. Multiple backups run into a problem called consistent cuts (high level view) and distributed snapshots, which means that not all the backups are taken at the same time, and this introduces inconsistencies that can be construed as corrupting data. The good news is there’s no great solution and everyone suffers the same.”
“Eventual Consistency is a kind of special family of consistency measures that say that the system can be inconsistent as long as it eventually becomes consistent again. Causal consistency is an example of eventual consistency. Strong Eventual Consistency is like eventual consistency but demands that no conflicts can happen between concurrent updates. This is usually the land of CRDTs.”
“Interval Tree Clocks attempts to fix the issues of other clock types by requiring less space to store node-specific information and allowing a kind of built-in garbage collection. It also has one of the nicest papers ever.”
“CRDTs essentially are data structures that restrict operations that can be done such that they can never conflict, no matter which order they are done in or how concurrently this takes place.”
“The bible for putting all of these views together is Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. Be advised however that everyone I know who absolutely loves this book are people who had a good foundation in distributed systems from reading a bunch of papers, and greatly appreciated having it all put in one place. Most people I’ve seen read it in book clubs with the aim get better at distributed systems still found it challenging and confusing at times, and benefitted from having someone around to whom they could ask questions in order to bridge some gaps. It is still the clearest source I can imagine for everything in one place.”
Zero to Unmaintainable in 1.2 Commands by Jim Nielsen
“There is such a focus on how quickly you can get going, but so little focus on how you maintain what you just created.”
He cites The time to unmaintainable is very low by Dave Rupert
“[…] a key factor of sustainability is making sure maintainability stays on par with growth. At the risk of sounding like a Luddite – which I am – the ability to fancy copy-paste your way into an unmaintainable situation is higher than ever and that’s a trade-off we should think about.”
My wife called this cat my “defiant spirit animal.”
Today’s Connections puzzle was tricky. Purple was tough: EON, ETHER, NET, TOW, which are anagrams of numbers. I managed to see that link before I put together the final one.
Asahi Linux project’s OpenGL support on Apple Silicon officially surpasses Apple’s by Andrew Cunningham (Ars Technica)
““Regrettably, the M1 doesn’t map well to any graphics standard newer than OpenGL ES 3.1,” writes Rosenzweig. “While Vulkan makes some of these features optional, the missing features are required to layer DirectX and OpenGL on top. No existing solution on M1 gets past the OpenGL 4.1 feature set… Without hardware support, new features need new tricks. Geometry shaders, tessellation, and transform feedback become compute shaders. Cull distance becomes a transformed interpolated value. Clip control becomes a vertex shader epilogue. The list goes on.””
“Rosenzweig’s blog post didn’t give any specific updates on Vulkan except to say that the team was “well on the road” to supporting it. In addition to supporting native Linux apps, supporting more graphics APIs in Asahi will allow the operating system to take better advantage of software like Valve’s Proton, which already has a few games written for x86-based Windows PCs running on Arm-based Apple hardware.”
About six weeks later, a co-worker wrote to me, asking whether the status still applied? He hoped not?
I’d... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 18. Feb 2024 20:17:56 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 6. Mar 2024 07:10:49 (GMT-5)
A recent experience at work led me to conclude that the AI revolution will pass most of us by. In mid-December, I fell ill with COVID. I’d updated my status in Microsoft Teams accordingly.
About six weeks later, a co-worker wrote to me, asking whether the status still applied? He hoped not?
I’d forgotten about it, but nothing had reminded me. It’s interesting that I get five mails a week about MS Viva and about Sharepoint Stuff I Might Have Missed, but I don’t get a single hint that my status might be out of date after six weeks.
So much for the AI revolution. This incident helped me refine my opinion on it. It’s definitely coming. but it will not be useful to me. If it is, it will only be incidentally or accidentally beneficial to me.
The prime use of AI will be of benefit to others, probably scammers or data scrapers.
You can set a custom time for the status-update options. But how am I supposed to know in advance how long I want to set it for? Sometimes you just don’t know. Wouldn’t it be nice if it would ask you after a day or two? It might sound annoying, but not if you include an option to “never ask me again for this status.” You could also just have an “ask me again when it seems stale” option or “how long do you think it should be set like this?” or “when would you like me to ask you about your status again?”
It wouldn’t even take AI to have a trigger that asks again after a week, unless you’ve told it otherwise. The likelihood that a status applies for that long is pretty low.
No, instead, Microsoft is measuring how long I spend in planned meetings and telling me how much “quiet time” I’ve had in the last month rather than helping me not look like an idiot who’s had COVID for two straight months.
“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a... [More]”
Published by marco on 18. Feb 2024 00:09:48 (GMT-5)
“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”
]]>“[…] supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in... [More]”
Published by marco on 13. Feb 2024 22:49:31 (GMT-5)
The article The US/UK attack on Yemen and the global eruption of imperialist war by WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS) describes how the U.S. and UK opened a new front in their war on the middle east.
“[…] supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in the Red Sea, thousands of miles from the US border. American imperialism, which has a military larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, claims to be waging a “defensive” war on the other side of the world against a small, oppressed and impoverished country.”
Not for the first time, though, right? Vietnam was sold as a defensive war—defending against the specter of communism and the terrifying “domino theory”. Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada. They were all defensive. The U.S. is always defending its interests, so every act of aggression it perpetrates is, in fact, defensive. A rather banal rhetorical trick that otherwise-intelligent people seem to delight in falling for. It follows that preemptive attacks are also defensive. Since there is always a slight—perceived or actual—to which one can point, everything is defensive.
The Pentagon, which runs the by-far-largest military force that mankind has ever seen, stated, “We’re not interested in a war with Yemen. We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind.”
JFC. 🤦♂️
So there you go. They just spend one trillion dollars per year on occupation and war because the U.S. is defending itself. It’s true, though! The U.S. thinks the entire planet belongs to it. That notion—the notion of empire—must be defended from anyone who thinks otherwise—even against the other people living on it..
“For nearly a decade, the Houthis in Yemen have been subject to ruthless slaughter, waged by Saudi Arabia but armed and financed by the United States. According to the United Nations, 377,000 people have been killed in a genocidal campaign that has involved blockades resulting in mass starvation and disease. First under Obama and then under Trump, the US financed this assault with more than $54 billion in military equipment, aided and abetted by its imperialist allies, including the UK.
“The devastation of Yemen is part of more than 30 years of unending and expanding war, spearheaded and led by American imperialism, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. This included the first Gulf War in 1990; the dismantling of Yugoslavia, culminating in the war against Serbia in 1999; the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; the second war against Iraq in 2003; the war against Libya in 2011; and the CIA-backed civil war in Syria that began the same year.
“Every single administration since that of Bill Clinton has authorized military operations, airstrikes, and destabilization operations in Somalia, across the Gulf of Aiden from Yemen, seeking to control the critical waterway leading to the Suez Canal.”
That’s a good summary of the U.S. Empire’s defensive posture. Look—people don’t pay their protection money willingly. You gotta lean on ‘em a bit. Sometimes a lot, for those who are hard of hearing.
Like Iran.
“The launching of military strikes against Yemen marks a new stage in the deepening imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East and beyond. The US and its imperialist allies are waging a de facto war against Iran, working to eliminate Iran’s military allies throughout the Middle East. The strikes against Yemen are directed at encircling Iran and provoking it into retaliation against US forces, which could be used to justify a full-scale war against Tehran.”
Bush II listed Iran as one of the baddies. The sanctions have continued since then uninterrupted. The only time most people hear about Iran is either when they’re being accused of trying to develop nuclear weapons (they’re not) or when an uprising looks ready to break the stranglehold that the mullahs have there—not that the U.S. would support an open, democratic regime there. It doesn’t need f*@kiing France there; it wants something like another Iraq: keep the cheap oil flowing under U.S. aegis, don’t get too uppity, and don’t think too much about stuff.
It’s incredible to think that the war on Iran was basically declared the second the mullahs took over and the U.S. never forgot about it. Through an unbroken chain of administrations led by both parties, the animus has remained, utterly unchanged. Biden’s foriegn policy is underpinned by the same precepts as Bush I or Bush II. Obama and Clinton looked no different. They all ran wars and incursions. Reagan and Carter as well. Johnson, Nixon, Kennedy were in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua. Truman mopped up Japan. Eisenhower was in Korea, for whatever reason. He was also quite busy squashing any leftist notions all over Europe, in Greece, Portugal, and Italy, among others.
If you’re at all interested in knowing more, check out William Blum’s Killing Hope (I read it in 2001, before I’d even started tracking my books) and Rogue Superpower (which I read in 2003, before I’d started writing notes for books). Or, like, anything by Noam Chomsky, but most especially his latest, which he wrote together with the inestimable Vijay Prashad, The Withdrawal
“Every war launched by the US and its imperialist allies has ended in one bloody debacle after the other, with millions of people killed. But each disaster only reinforces the determination of US imperialism to use war as a means to secure its global hegemony.”
That’s all it is. Everything else is just window dressing.
The article Western Empire Bombs Yemen To Protect Israel’s Genocide Operations In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter) adds,
“[…] the US and the UK just bombed the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide. Not only that, they bombed the very same country in which they just spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal atrocities which killed hundreds of thousands of people between 2015 and 2022 in an unsuccessful bid to stop the Houthis from taking power.”
This is all done to protect trade routes, to keep prices low. The attacks by the Houthis have resulted in no casualties. They’re annoying. They cause companies to lose money. Some stuff gets to some countries more slowly. The U.S. and UK bombed the Sanaa international airport in Yemen. WTF. No declaration of war. No attempt to negotiate. No consideration of alternatives. No congressional approval. Just a dictator shooting things. This is what people were afraid Trump would do. This is what I wrote at the time that Biden would likely do. He’s a merciless piece of shit. He always has been.
Apparently wars in Ukraine and Gaza are not enough for the Biden administration. Nothing ever makes them think it’s time to back down, or that it might be time to negotiate, or that things might be getting out of hand. Forget cold wars. Biden makes everything hot immediately. He’s fighting Russians directly in Syria—and proxy-fighting them in Ukraine. He’s funding and arming Saudi Arabia to flatten the Houthis in Yemen. He’s funding and arming the Israelis to flatten the Palestinians in Gaza—and supporting tons of violence in the West Bank as well.
This is mindless violence, all to quash any hopes of rebellion against the empire. All to prevent any change to the system that subjugates so many and funnels so much wealth toward Empire—and a handful of people in it.
The world organizations are also proving to Yemen that attacking merchant vessels really is the only recourse, just like Israel convinced any Palestinians who dreamed of living without a boot on their neck that the only way to get it off is violence.
The article Technicality Could Sink Genocide Case v Israel by Joe Lauria (Scheer Post) goes into more detail, but the upshot is that South Africa brought its case against Israel without 100% proper notification prior to the case, so Israel says that there is no standing “dispute”, which means that South Africa shouldn’t have been able to bring the case, and that the court should actually not even agree to hear it because it didn’t follow procedure.
Basically, if you put your fingers in your ears and scream so that you can’t hear accusations, you can pretend to have been blindsided by an official accusation, just shocked at a court summons, upon which the court has to instead reprimand the accuser, telling them to start all over.
I suppose it’s a neat trick, that. Of course, it just means that international law is completely and utterly toothless unless it’s being wielded against poor nations to relieve them of their resources and to load them up with debt incurred to pay fines for crimes committed by dictators emplaced and propped up for decades by the same countries that now accuse, prosecute, convict, and sentence them. In other words, international law is only wielded against African nations.
It’s a sham, a scam—and it always has been. The “International rules-based order” is no stupider than what it purports to replace.
Lauria’s article writes,
“American academic Norman Finkelstein, told an interviewer: “It will completely discredit the Court if they issue a decision — we have decided not to pursue this case of genocide because we don’t think there is a dispute. That just can’t work.” ”
“Murray added:
““I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s ‘no dispute’ argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means ‘no dispute’. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…””
All of the good little NYC liberals are lining up behind King Biden and his wars, of course. The article Houthis And The Blowhards by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) is representative. It states that anyone who disagrees with him loves terrorism. He writes,
“These are our children, our academics, our overly-educated and unduly-passionate true believers that the terrorists are the good guys and these Israel, that the United States, both independently and in complicity with Israel, are evil.”
I didn’t misquote that. He is nearly incoherent in his rage. As usual, you can almost see the spittle flying over the keyboard, flecking the screen.
My, but how Mr. Greenfield likes to ascribe bad opinions to what he considers to be opponents, if only because they fail to unquestioningly love the things that he loves. He loves the USA and Israel, in no particular order. His context is that the U.S. modestly tiptoes through the world, minding its own business, and sometimes horrible, petty, small-minded, blinkered animals and terrorists wish harm on it and even try to do harm to it. The same story applies to Israel.
In his mind, there is no agency on the part of either of these countries. In his mind, they are always just reacting in as measured a manner as possible in order to prevent the next unprovoked, unforeseeable, completely unjustified, and utterly unexplainable attack on the unutterable magnificence that is the ship of state of these great nations. Anyone with a different context is automatically assigned the most ridiculous of opinions, the most straw-man-like of justification for their ideas, opinions, and world-view.
I’ve never seen him make any attempt to grapple with the real arguments that might be made. He always takes the biggest fools at their word—who, in fighting empire and against injustice, are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons—rather than taking on a real interlocutor, even if only a fictitious one.
The Houthis attacked shipping vessels, harming no-one. The U.S. and UK obliterated cities and an international airport, killing dozens of civilians. Greenfield will never analyze whether his “side” might be unjustified in doing so. It’s perfectly OK with him for his “side” to break all sorts of laws “defending itself” because laws are for other countries.
The epithet “terrorist” is exclusively for other states, certainly not his own or any with which he has developed an affinity. This is not a principle. This is just the same mush-brained American-liberal mindset that has helped build an empire. It’s great that he seems to be for justice for Americans wronged by the American court systems—that’s what he used to post about, almost exclusively—but this penchant for justice and fairness doesn’t extend beyond the border. And it certainly doesn’t extend to his precious Israel.
Published by marco on 13. Feb 2024 22:17:53 (GMT-5)
The article When META Met Society by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) writes about the evils of META (Most Effective Tactics Available). The author cites an essay by Megan McArdle. Neither one of these fools can think of an example of META that corresponds to actual power. That perennial dipshit McArdle thinks that a 17-year-old swatting hundreds of people is a good example. Greenfield sticks to the obvious, as cited below.
“If you were big and strong, you could beat up someone small and weak. You could steal their wallet, watch and jewelry. The only thing that prevented this from happening constantly was the societal belief that this was wrong and bad, and that people who did this to other people were wrong and bad. ”
And here’s another one of his hobby-horses,
“The law prohibits the use of deadly force against another except in self-defense (with certain inapplicable exceptions). Protesters figured out that they could simply stand in front of a car, which would turn into a deadly weapon if intentionally driven into a person, and there wasn’t a damn thing the car could lawfully do about it. A handful of protesters could thus shut down thousands of cars, together with the thousands of people within them, to inflict misery for their cause with this one cool trick.”
He and McArdle agree that “dubious asylum claims” are a dastardly life-hack exploited by immigrants. The common thread in all of their examples is that they are perpetrated by people with little-to-no power who obtain power through a hack. This pisses off elitists like McArdle and Greenfield the most because they feel that “those people” should know their place. The system has been rigged against them, but they should still play by the rules. Fair is fair.
Except that no-one who actually has any power plays by those rules. That is what society teaches. Fake it ‘til you make it. Cheat big or go home. McArdle and Greenfield are probably more than well-off enough to be taking advantage of dozens of sleazy tax loopholes that let them enjoy much more of the benefit of their burgeoning investments than they would in a fair society.
Instead, they are focused laser-like on the evils of:
None of these examples of META—let’s just call them “hacks”—are admirable, but they’re chump change. These examples are fleas on the back of the dog. The same dog that’s tearing everyone’s lives apart is complaining about the fleas and getting its victims to side with it.
Neither are any of their examples of the people who have real power in society. The real hack is to figure out how to make money without doing much of anything, or to figure out how to con the government out of a lot of money, then use that money to maintain the structure that let you get rich and to manipulate it into making you even richer.
I think it’s much more relevant to talk about “levers” instead of META or even “hacks”. Western civilization seems to have settled on running a society that’s inherently scammy. People will find ways to scam. They are encouraged to do so. The whole of modern society is a Swiss cheese of ethics and morals, where we’ve been taught that nothing means anything, unless you can get money.
It’s inevitable that the parchment of laws is going to get a bit holey as everyone who gets a lot of money pops holes in it. Go read some of Vince McMahon’s alleged text messages—the article Vince McMahon’s Disturbing Texts to Janel Grant in Trafficking Lawsuit Revealed by Subjoheet Mukherjee (Ringside News) includes enough of them to give you an appalling idea. Those will convince you that the problem is not at the bottom but at the top. The people taking the most advantage of the holes in society’s rules are the ones who made them.
McMahon’s text messages also illustrate how corrupt and debased a society is for obviously deranged people like him to be able to not only succeed, but basically win. As Some Thoughts On Vince McMahon by Chris Seaton (Simple Justice) writes,
“Why is a billionaire in his seventies who spends his days dictating his every word to professional assistants writing text messages like a drunken, horny 17 year old boy?”
Or why is he “allegedly sexually assaulting a young woman with his boss while she recovered from cancer treatments.”
But sure, let’s focus laser-like on how teenagers, climate activists, teen-aged climate activists, and desperate immigrants are tearing the country apart. A likely story (as my Mom loved to say). “Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf,” as we say here in the DACH [1] region.
Published by marco on 13. Feb 2024 22:04:05 (GMT-5)
Jeremy Scahill was absolutely en fuego in this 90-minute interview. I’ve cleaned up the YouTube transcript—it gets most of the words, but includes verbal tics, has no punctuation, has a very cavalier attitude toward capitalization, and simply will not transcribe certain words correctly. Anyway, Jeremy and Briahna had a great conversation about terrible, terrible topics.
At around 24:00 they talk about the circumstances surrounding the recent defunding of UNRWA.
“Jeremy It’s hard to shock me. The Wall Street Journal on Monday—as all of this is happening—and the focus is on: there were 12 UNRWA employees that Israel…
Briahna Out of 30,000, by the way, we should say that it’s a huge agency. That represented 0.04% of all employees, but go ahead. I’m sorry.
Jeremy […] I mean it has this…has such whiffs of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which was based on lies. But the Wall Street Journal puts on its main web page—right at the top—what purports to be an article based on what they call an intelligence dossier, that says that it’s a far greater a problem than just these 12 individuals. That, in fact, a full 10% of UNRWA employees are connected to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.“And, when you read down…to: “intelligence dossier.” It’s like I was having flashbacks to the Christopher Steele, Russia-gate stuff. But also to Judith Miller mushroom-cloud stuff, because if you dig into the article, what they’re saying is that the Israeli government provided this information to the United States government and then the Wall Street Journal was able to review it.
“And, you know, it’s all basically guilt by innuendo. And, you know, it was devastating because then—you know, people don’t read, they don’t check facts—it just becomes—even in the liberal comment-sphere—it became like, ‘see! […] it’s not just a few bad apples! This is pervasive throughout the organization.‘
“The lead author of that Wall Street Journal piece is herself a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, who has boasted that her closest friend basically created the social-media strategy of the IDF. So, it basically was laundering, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, an insidious, violent, propaganda campaign being implemented by a government that just had a devastating set of rulings issued against it for plausible violations of the genocide convention, in service of trying to further starve the people of Gaza.
“And that narrative that was set last week and then doubled down on by The Wall Street Journal, is now becoming the dominant narrative and Anthony Blinken—on Tuesday, Bri!—was asked about the evidence and he said publicly that the United States had not done its own investigation, but that the allegations are very, very credible. I mean: think about that statement. For America’s top diplomat to admit to the world that we didn’t bother to actually do our own investigation before we cut off funding to the most vital humanitarian organization operating in a country that is now under the watch of the world court for a potential genocide. That is the top diplomat of the United States saying we didn’t bother to even look into this ourselves.
“We just believe notorious liars who have lied from the moment that this thing started, who have lied for decades about the Palestinians, whose entire worldview is: dehumanize Arabs, dehumanize Palestinians, treat them as human animals. The United States is taking the word of that government to cut off funding to basically the only force in Gaza able to provide any meaningful aid and medical care right now, to a people that could well be found to be victims of genocide. This is, on a moral level, … I find it difficult to imagine a more immoral stance than that which the United States is taking at this moment on this issue.”
At 33:00 Jeremy talks about how accusing people who live in Gaza—as so many employees of UNRWA do—of knowing people in Hamas is utter nonsense, Of course they know people in Hamas; Hamas is the local government.
“So when you say—as the Wall Street Journal is alleging, based on this laundering of Israeli so-called intelligence—that 10% of these people had connections to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, I’m sure the number is far greater than that. Because what do you mean by connection? Hamas is not just the Qassam Brigade. Hamas is the ruling authority, whether you like them or not. They pick up the trash. They provide civil services. The laziness is also part of the banality of evil. The laziness among the public, who don’t even bother to check—well, what does that even mean? When I read ‘people are connected to Hamas,’ it’s like, well, of course, they are. This isn’t some scary smoking gun that you’ve produced for us. Hamas is much more complicated than the Qassam brigades and October 7th. This is a long story.”
At 46:00 Jeremy cautions Briahna to be careful about dismissing all claims of rape on October 7th, Just because there are some spectacular lies going around doesn’t mean nothing happened. It warrants a sober and serious investigation. Soldiers rape. They generally do it once they’ve occupied an area, not when they’re flying by in jeeps in a four-hour sortie, but it’s still possible. So, we have to hear from the victims, not people who claim they saw victims. There have been too many of those that have been utterly refuted. But we have to continue to listen and not close off. Israelis can be and are victims, too. Don’t stoop to the level of the worst of their government’s speakers.
“I think, on the one hand, we have the propaganda campaign, which clearly is riddled with lies, exaggerations, and is aimed at enforcing a dehumanization narrative that Israel hopes will continue to justify by its mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. On the other hand, you have—I’m sure you have civil servants in Israel and and people who work with survivors and victims of sexual violence that really do actually want to solve alleged crimes. And all I’m cautioning is that we be careful with running away with our own narratives.”
At 52:00 Jeremy discusses how the Israeli government’s tactic of making it seem like Arabs are so barbarous that they would rape anything is backfiring on them, for exactly the reasons listed above. In fact, Briahna’s amount of sympathy is noticeably limited for exactly that reason.
“If you just look at this exclusively through the lens of justice for victims, this conduct is contaminating the investigation. On the other side of this is part of a campaign to dehumanize Arabs and particularly Arab men/ It is an attempt to portray the enemy as savage barbarians who murder, loot, rape, and pillage for the sake of those things rather than that they’re engaged in an attack that from their perspective is one battle in a 75-year war for liberation.
“People accuse me of being pro-Hamas. If you go back and look at everything I’ve ever said about Hamas, all I do is state factual information about Hamas and that somehow is being pro-Hamas. No. It’s journalistic malpractice not to explain the stated intent or the response to allegations by a party that we’re being told is tantamount to the Nazis and Isis. It’s journalistically responsible to say ‘hey, we’re being told these guys are the new Nazis. Let’s do some fact-checking. Why don’t we see if that’s actually true. This is basic journalism.”
At 01:01:00 Jeremy talks more about journalistic malpractice, about how deferential the US media is to Israel’s narrative,
“The dominant sort of tone is always—the number one rule is “deference to Israel’s narrative”. That is the number one rule of how to cover anything involving Israel. You must refer to the narrative of the Israeli State […] I think that large American news organizations have done an immense disservice to the public in the way that they’ve covered this war, in general. But also dozens upon dozens of our colleagues have been murdered and their family members have been killed. […] Our colleagues are being murdered in broad daylight.
“[…] there is good journalism that’s out there. I just think that that the drum-beat coverage that we see to facilitate wars, all the lies that were repeated early on, when independent journalists were questioning them—we’ve talked about a lot of them today—they were going along with it. CNN promoted many of the most outlandish, obscene lies that Israel was deploying immediately to try to justify the slaughter that Netanyahu always knew he wanted to unleash on Gaza.”
Finally, at 01:14:00 Jeremy talks about how offensive it is for Biden to even be running for president, and how hollow it is for flacks like AOC to be shilling for him.
“Make an argument why people whose families have been murdered with American bombs—with the full support of the American political establishment—why they should be voting for Joe Biden, the man who has single-handedly made this all possible for Israel to do. My answer to AOC is: don’t run around telling people like me why we should vote for Biden. Let’s hear you publicly make the case why a Palestinian voter in this country—whose loved ones have been murdered—why should they be voting for Joe Biden and why should they be declaring that support in January of 2024 when the election is 11 months away?”
At 34:00,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 12. Feb 2024 22:50:25 (GMT-5)
I really liked a recent interview with Samuel Moyn by Doug Henwood in 04.01.2024 (Behind the News), so when I saw his name again, I figured It’d check out the video below. It was reasonably interesting, but not really worth noting, except that I noticed that it exhibited some core fallacies evident in the so-called liberal project.
At 34:00, Becca Rothfeld says “Biden is pretty leftist in some ways.” In which ways? I’m honestly interested to know because I can’t think of anything that wasn’t just something he said once or twice, or things that he might have “enacted” but without real teeth to it, so that kind-of the opposite things continue to happen, or start happening.
I get the distinct impression that both Rothfeld and Moyn are arguing as members of a tribe—the liberals—who are at-once admitting their tribe has failed to follow through on its espoused ideology in nearly every way, and also completely failing to see that this makes their tribe no different from the tribe that doesn’t espouse that ideology—that, in fact, espouses a very opposite ideology that lines up with its actions and policies and which also lines up very well with the enacted policies and ramifications of so-called liberal policy.
They—especially Becca—don’t seem to be able to step outside of the tribe to notice that, if you’re not in either tribe—and you turn down the volume to simply watch what the tribes do rather than listen to what they say—they look exactly the same.
I can’t imagine using the word “leftist” and “Biden” in the same sentence without the word “not” between them. But, hey, I’m not the one with a PhD in philosophy or whatever, name-dropping Rawls and other so-called liberal philosophers all the time. I’m sure, though, that she would be just the kind of person who thinks that she definitely gets to vote because she’s so well-informed on the issues and candidates, but could easily end up voting for Biden because he’s “pretty leftist in some ways.” If that’s the story you have to tell yourself, then OK. If you want to vote for a real leftist, then check the box for Cornel West.
At 50:00 Samuel says that,
“[…] liberals have a lot to learn if they’re going to make liberalism credible. […] the last years since Trump have been kind of disappointing in that regard. The kind-of cold-war-liberal approach of saying ‘no, the enemies of liberalism need to be extinguished to make it credible.’ Well, that’s not what Charles Mills taught. It’s that liberals need to clean their own house, if they’re going to be a credible ideological source in our time.”
Amen, Samuel. Amen.
]]>“Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei praised the virtues of free markets and warned political leaders about the dangers of collectivism in a speech at the World Economic Forum on... [More]”
Published by marco on 12. Feb 2024 22:39:13 (GMT-5)
The article Javier Milei Tells World Leaders: ‘The State Is Not the Solution’ by Katarina Hall (Reason) start off with this sentence,
“Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei praised the virtues of free markets and warned political leaders about the dangers of collectivism in a speech at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.”
Talk about red meat for Reason magazine. I’ve been following this magazine for a while and I appreciate some of their content, but man they just can’t resist this bullshit. This obvious mental incompetent is spouting off about collectivism and they love it. He says that the only way to improve everything that capitalism has broken is because we haven’t been doing it hard enough.
That’s why Argentina’s president is suddenly at the WEF—after years and years in the wilderness under Kirchner et. al. Despite its name, the World Economic Forum is just a bunch of billionaires and lobbyists fellating each other about what a great job neoliberalism is doing enriching them while ruining everyone else’s lives.
““The West is in danger, it is in danger because those who are supposed to defend Western values find themselves co-opted by a worldview that—inexorably—leads to socialism, consequently to poverty,” Milei said in the opening of his keynote speech in Davos, Switzerland, during his first overseas trip as president.”
OMG. Tell me more, you unheralded genius. It literally doesn’t matter how undereducated his background, if he spouts the right thing, then he’s in the club.
Listen to this slobbering idiot of an author just rehashing the same tired, old tropes.
“Milei argued that collectivism punishes business owners and stifles innovation by destroying any incentives “to produce better goods and better services at a better price.” Countries embracing greater economic freedom are eight times wealthier than their repressed counterparts, Milei asserted.”
OMG, yes, everything that isn’t exclusively awesome for business is bad for business and must be eliminated. The goal of every society obviously has nothing to do with people, and must be built for the thriving of business. Those businesses will then bring bounty to people, right? To recap: The prime purpose of society is to build businesses and earn rent for their owners, from which a potential side-effect is well-being for the people. Business first, people second. If the side-effect doesn’t appear, then too-bad-we-tried. And we aren’t going to try super-hard.
That’s been the story for decades. Give all of your shit to those that already have everything, they’ll do something magical with it, and return the favor manyfold. Except they don’t. They never do. They just keep what you give them and demand more. It’s nothing more than a scam and fools like this author have no pity, no empathy, and no bullshit detectors. They just sploosh all over literally anyone who tells them the bedtime story they’ve been programmed—or programmed themselves—to believe.
They can afford to because they never, ever get under the wheels of the mindless, voracious, society-killer that they constantly demand we need more of, nor do they really know or associate with anyone who does. If they happen to hear about it, they reassure themselves that anyone who can’t flourish in this glorious neoliberal paradise isn’t trying hard enough and deserves what they get. Which is nothing.
I mean, look at this guy. This is the picture the author published. I feel like they’re taking the piss. She can’t possible revere this guy. He looks like he just got up out of one of those Austin Powers time capsules from the 70s.
The author splooshes on,
“Despite internal challenges, Milei’s radical agenda has garnered support from external observers, including Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “The Argentine economy is in such bad shape that it has to be shaken up. President Milei and his team are doing exactly that,” she said during an interview in Davos. Argentina is currently the IMF’s largest debtor, with an outstanding debt of $46 billion.”
Oh, yeah, not just Reason magazine, but the IMF is absolutely ready to slob his knob. The IMF has never seen an economy it didn’t think it couldn’t bleed dry. It loves this shit: bleed the people dry to pay back the IMF—that’s the way! And the IMF has an especial axe to grind with Argentina, which has defaulted a few times in the last couple of decades.
Look, this stuff is not new, despite what you might have read. The article Global 1% Own 43% of Financial Assets by Ben Norton (Scheer Post) writes,
“The world’s richest 1% own 43% of global financial assets, and the wealth of the top five billionaires has doubled since 2020, while 60% of humanity – nearly 5 billion people – collectively got poorer, according to a report by Oxfam, a leading international humanitarian organization.”
“A staggering 69.3% of the world’s wealth is located in the Global North, which has just 20.6% of the planet’s population.”
Despite the Reason author’s fears, the world doesn’t need Milei to tell it to plunder. The plunder party is already going extremely well.
Only a racist would say that this is how things should be. Why would that make you a racist? Because the only way you could support the existing system is to believe that northern-hemisphere people deserve to have most of the world’s wealth—which is largely built on resources extracted from the part of the world they don’t live in. It’s odd how, in a capitalist economy, the people who live on top of the most valuable resources are the poorest, while those with the least scruples and the biggest guns are the richest. These obvious facts on the ground speak to a global organizational structure that has very little to do with any of its own espoused ideologies—those are just fairy tales to keep the ignorant masses quiet while their pockets are picked, again and again and again.
Right on cue, the article The World Could Soon Have Its First Trillionaire. Good! by J.D. Tuccille (Reason) decides to laud having a trillionaire because that would be an unalloyed good, a tremendous achievement. King of the world. He argues that even a trillion dollars isn’t that much because,
“A trillion dollars (Oxfam is UK-based, but the report is framed in U.S. dollars) is impressive. But it doesn’t represent a fixed measure of wealth, since governments constantly succumb to the temptation to devalue money.”
You see? The same person who can bemoan the government spending millions on food stamps can argue that a person with a trillion dollars barely has any money at all. Tada! I don’t have cite any more about his further arguments that it’s the nigh-altruistic beneficence of billionaire’s gracing us with their genius and acumen that have dragged so many benighted souls out of poverty. It sure as hell wasn’t socialist China, right?
No, all of those poor, simple folk wouldn’t have been able to help themselves, but the rich and savvy employers saw fit to grant them jobs so that they could no longer be poor. The author might as well just cite Ayn Rand as a source on all of his essays. Almost no-one at Reason ever spares a thought for how much of a drag on the economy billionaires are, about how we’ve managed to conquer some poverty despite them, not because of them. That, if we’d have a more humane system, we’d have even fewer poor people—and fewer billionaires as well, which would lead to a river of tears from nearly all of the writers at Reason magazine.
I just finished watching Midnight Mass—which features a vampire, but not how you think. Vampires have their servants called familiars. They just suck up to the vampires for no clear reason other than a child-like adulation, a desire to bask in the reflected light of their idols. That’s how I think of people who love billionaires.
In related news, the article Long COVID specialist tells US Senate that “the best way to prevent Long COVID is to prevent COVID in the first place!” by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS) writes,
“As Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a physician-scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who is a leading expert on Long COVID, with numerous high-impact publications on the devastation wrought by COVID-19 infections, stated bluntly during his testimony, “The best way to prevent Long COVID is to prevent COVID in the first place. This requires a multilayers/multipronged approach. We must develop sustainable solutions to prevent repeated infections with SARS-CoV-2 and Long COVID that would be embraced by the public. This requires acceleration of development of oral and intranasal vaccines that induce strong mucosal immunity to block infections with the virus. Ventilation and air filtration systems can also play a major role in reducing the risk of infection with airborne pathogens. We did an amazing job proofing our buildings against earthquakes that happen once every few decades or few centuries. Why don’t we proof our buildings against the hazards of airborne pathogens?””
Because there’s no money in it, you goddamned hippie. The profits margins on making buildings safe for people sound pretty shitty, buddy, not gonna lie. Hey, though, if you think of some way of making the rich richer while you’re stopping COVID, then you’ll have a winner. Yup. Get back to us when you do, OK? Thanks, bye.
“As he noted in his testimony, “At least 20 million Americans are affected by Long COVID. It affects people across the lifespan—from children to older adults. It affects people across race, ethnicity and sex. The burden of disease and disability in Long COVID is on par with heart disease and cancer. Long COVID has wide and deep ramifications on the labor market and the economy—some estimates suggest that the toll of Long COVID in the US economy is $3.7 trillion—on par with the 2008 recession.””
It’s adorable that he tries to tie it the pocketbook because he knows that all of these societies that break their arms patting themselves on the back for being civilized and enlightened really only care about money.
It’s really a nice try, but so naive.
You see: the people who matter made a f#@king killing in 2008. They all got richer. All of the losses were borne by others, people that they don’t know and will never meet. You’re not making an argument that will convince the rich. So the U.S. economy loses $3.7 trillion—all they hear is that someone’s gotta be picking up that money. It’s usually them, so they see Long COVID as a f&#king windfall, another absolute tsunami of free money from the government flowing into their coffers via subsidies for health care and experimental medications that won’t even have to go through all of the procedures and testing because we need them so bad.
They realized that the way to sell quickly in the traditionally moribund and highly regulated health-care market is to manufacture crises by not handling them before they happen. Sure, it would be great for people if we would plan for epidemics and prevent disease rather than healing it, but that’s not where the money is, unfortunately, so there’s no mechanism whatsoever for making it happen.
“The pandemic, as a trigger event, has accelerated the rot at the core of bourgeois democracy that is unable to address any of the maladies that have been created out of capitalist production. The Senate hearing on Long COVID is an exercise in futility for those who continue to harbor illusions in reform.”
Yes. Yes, it was.
]]>“In November, an IOC spokesperson insisted that Russia presented “a unique situation and cannot be compared to any other war or conflict in the world.” The statement beggars belief. Both Russia and Israel are engaged... [More]”
Published by marco on 12. Feb 2024 22:08:05 (GMT-5)
The article Israel and Russia Have No Place in the 2024 Paris Olympics by Jules Boykoff & Dave Zirin (Jacobin) writes,
“In November, an IOC spokesperson insisted that Russia presented “a unique situation and cannot be compared to any other war or conflict in the world.” The statement beggars belief. Both Russia and Israel are engaged in asymmetrical warfare, attacking civic infrastructure and private residences and leaving a long trail of civilian deaths and casualties.”
The authors’ statements beggar belief. Did they write this with only the NYT as a source? The Russian and Israeli conflicts are not in any way comparable as far as targeting civilians goes. The Russian conflict is grinding and illegal, but it has killed far, far fewer civilians than Israel’s conflict in Gaza, which seems to have the intent of killing civilians until the others run away. All wars are horrible, but some wars are worse than others. No invasion is justified, but why is the Russian one invasion the only one that causes people to think about banning the invading country’s athletes? Is it because it’s easy?
“At all costs, IOC president Thomas Bach does not want to offend the United States, which is scheduled to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and is all but certain to host the 2034 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.”
They write this as if that statement doesn’t completely obviate all of the rest of their reasoning about principles. Are they going to mention how ludicrous it is to speak of morals when the U.S. should have never—at least in my lifetime—been allowed to participate, by these standards? These are standards that I agree to, by the way! It’s just that we always hear about standards in relation to any country that does not run the Empire where the journalist lives.
Just to be clear: there are two authors on this article and neither one of them could clean up this dumpster-fire of an article to have a principled through-line.
“There is no moral rationale undergirding the IOC’s hypocrisy when it comes to Israel and Russia.”
AND AMERICA MOST OF ALL. JFC. Blind spot much? The U.S. funds Israel. The U.S. bombing a dozen countries right now, its drones are everywhere, killing indiscriminately. it sanctions dozens more to economic death. It just started a new war on Yemen, actively bombing them itself after funding and arming Saudi Arabia to do it for eight years before that. It’s running an $80B-per-year proxy war in Ukraine, and it is actively bombing the three poorest countries in the world. Russia is a piker in comparison.
But even these two authors can’t bring themselves to say that, should the IOC want to espouse actual principles about only supporting non-warring nations, then its primary funder would never be able to participate. That’s why it is, unfortunately, nonsensical to talk about banning countries on principle. Unless the U.S. is included, it would always be banning politically.
“More recently, the IOC banned Afghanistan from the 2000 Sydney Olympics because the Taliban barred women from competing in sports.”
JFC. Just dumping on Afghanistan, as one of the poorest and most-attacked countries on the planet. Living under the Taliban isn’t bad enough? Now you also can’t compete at the Olympics?
“The IOC’s actions raise the question: Is there anything Russia or Israel could do that would get them banned from the Paris Games?”
The authors are really irritating me. I guess Nation writers really do work for Empire.
While we’re on the subject: was France or Great Britain ever punished for having torn Libya to shreds? I expect more of Dave Zirin, to be honest. I wouldn’t have expected this kind of tone-deaf take from him.
“Zelensky is aware of the IOC’s pivotal role in all this. In February, he said , “The International Olympic Committee needs honesty,” but added, “honesty it has unfortunately lost.””
Now they’re citing that idiot like he matters. He’s a literal dictator. He has banned elections indefinitely. There are no plans for elections in Ukraine. Most other political parties have been banned. Almost all media organizations have been banned. Ukraine conscrips soldiers into a meat-grinder of a war that they’re running terribly. Ukraine bombs its own citizens. His regime is riddled with right-wing extremists, if not outright Nazis. But, sure, let’s hear what he has to say about how the IOC is the biggest problem. Let’s read how these two fools cite him talking about how other people aren’t honest. Honestly, how in the tank can you possibly be for the U.S. regime? Do these two not see that they’re trying to get the IOC to be a mouthpiece for Empire?
“The IOC, if it acted against Russia, would no doubt be accused of profound hypocrisy. There are many countries over the decades — such as the United States during the Vietnam War or the Iraq War — that deserved sanction and exclusion from the Olympics, but the IOC remained silent. To penalize Russia, they will argue, is nothing more than a double standard: US foreign policy wrapped in Olympic bunting.”
Finally! Too little, late. And the formulation indicates that they’re going to dismiss this statement in the final few paragraphs.
“It’s about standing up to Russia and Israel because, whether the Olympic athlete wants it or not, their success would be folded into nationalism and the war effort.”
Bullshit. It’s about writing this article now rather when the U.S. invades. How does that statement not apply to the U.S.? HOW?
“We should demand consistency and accountability from the IOC. Now is the time for the group to abide by its own stated standards. Russia, in the name of Ukraine, has no place in the Games. Israel, in the name of Gaza, has no place in the Games.”
And the U.S. In the name of Yemen.
Look, I don’t think the IOC should ban athletes from any country. I think we need more places for countries to meet on neutral ground, without judging each and every citizen of the country for the crimes of its government. That’s the leeway that the U.S. has had for decades, going on a century. The fans may have something to say, but you should at least let the athletes participate. God knows it’s one of the few channels for diplomacy remaining. And these two foolish authors would rather convert it into another weapon to point at the U.S.‘s official enemies.
The IOC is corrupt from top to bottom. It always has been. There is no use arguing for principles now. The entire article made no sense, but I fear that it got so much knee-jerk support from exactly the crowd it was written for: unthinking, uninformed, quasi-liberal, affluent Biden-voters.
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Published by marco on 11. Feb 2024 22:33:58 (GMT-5)
The article The web just gets better with Interop 2024 by Jen Simmons (Webkit Blog) writes,
“The Interop project aims to improve interoperability by encouraging browser engine teams to look deeper into specific focus areas. Now, for a third year, Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla pooled our collective expertise and selected a specific subset of automated tests for 2024.
“Some of the technologies chosen have been around for a long time. Other areas are brand new. By selecting some of the highest priority features that developers have avoided for years because of their bugs, we can get them to a place where they can finally be relied on.”
When we complain about features that remain unimplemented in browsers, we also have to acknowledge that there’s only so much you can do with a given team. There are problems that are technically easier to solve than others. When we complain, we’re actually more concerned about the prioritization of issues. We want to be able to influence what gets fixed when, rather than just having to passively hope that the manufacturer eventually gets around to it.
That where the Web Platform Tests come in. The Interop 2024 project follows on iterations from 2023, 2022, and 2021, when it all started.
Last year was a banner year. For CSS “Subgrid, Container Queries, :has()
, Motion Path, CSS Math Functions, inert and @property
are now supported in every modern browser.” For JavaScript, we got “Improved Web APIs include Offscreen Canvas, Modules in Web Workers, Import Maps, Import Assertions, and JavaScript Modules” across all modern browsers.
These are all super-important features. E.g., Import Assertions for JSON import and Modules in Web Workers, which allows modern and modular programming, making it much easier to offload work, as one would with code running directly on modern operating systems.
What’s on the schedule for 2024?
@property
will similarly be more polished, as the percentage support is still quite low in many browsers.sub-grids
or display: contents
affect element order—as this means that we will get sites that are automatically accessible, as long as we build our sites logically.IndexedDB
will make it easier to write powerful local-first applications (even though something like Automerge might be a better fit for apps offering concurrent or collaborative editing).popover
with anchors is long overdue, as making usable tooltips and popups is an area fraught with custom code and half-baked solutions. It’s nice to see this become an area where you’ll no longer need custom JavaScript.@starting-style
will fill a gap in CSS that finally allows sites to indicate how an element will transition from or to display: none
.See the original article for much more detail.
Published by marco on 11. Feb 2024 22:23:47 (GMT-5)
The more I listen to the Blowback podcast, the more it’s clear that the U.S. has never been ruled by good people—or by smart people. They may be intelligent but their ideology makes them stupid. Or they’re just stupid. Either way, none of them are good. None of them have anything approaching universal principles. They are nearly all at least self-serving hypocrites. They are nearly all raging egos, bastards who don’t take the blame for anything. They are more than occasionally actual monsters.
In Cuba’s case, the institutional memory—the institutional hatred—is both breathtaking and persistent. The U.S. has never forgiven Cuba for its affront in throwing out its businesses. The Cuban Embargo continues, to this day. Cuba’s been tenacious for long decades. They repulsed an actual invasion.
Neither has the U.S. ever forgiven Iran for its revolution. Both countries will be revenged with eradication, come hell or high water. Iran’s time seems to be coming around again. The monsters running the U.S. Empire are getting antsy. They think they see an opportunity for more direct intervention, as they like to call it—such an anodyne term for what is effectively a wholly illegal assault on a sovereign nation.
The demonization of Iran is driven in large part by Israel, which led the charge to demand the U.S. bully Iran over nuclear weapons their neither had nor wanted. It’s deeply ironic, of course, that this witch hunt is egged on by Israel, which does have nukes, but shouldn’t. The U.S. applies completely different rules—the definition of hypocrisy. The inchoate hatred for Iran is palpable. Iran is back on the table because of the recent Israeli surge, which is shootings target in Syria and Lebanon.
They will pretend that they aren’t instigating a war, then react in shock at the first, tiny response from Iran. This is par for the course. The U.S. media meanwhile describes every disturbed grain of sand in the Middle East as being due to Iran’s malign influence. It’s only a matter of time before they all convince themselves that they’ve put enough energy into building the so-called case against Iran to justify a direct assault.
I don’t know why they bother with all of the rigamarole. Nothing ever happens to the U.S. on an international level, anyway. Nicaragua once took them to an international court—and won!—but the U.S. just ignored the verdict. Israel is following this template by ignoring the recent ICJ decision. U.S. and Israeli athletes will continue to attend international competitions. They will continue to take part in unimpeded international trade. They will take part unhindered in financial markets.
But let’s get back to Cuba. The article U.S. Policy is Exacerbating Cuba’s Growing Humanitarian Crisis by William M. Leogrande (Scheer Post) writes,
“Since 2022, 442,000 undocumented Cubans have arrived at US borders, more than 50,000 have come as legal immigrants, and tens of thousands more have emigrated elsewhere. Cuba is hemorrhaging its young, best-educated people. Migration is also a blow to the domestic economy. Last year, more than 12,000 doctors left. In Havana alone, there are 17,000 vacant teachers positions. Even Cubans earning good salaries working for foreign diplomatic missions and international organizations are leaving because they cannot envision a future for themselves in their homeland.”
“The humanitarian situation on the island cries out for a US response. Washington has offered Cuba humanitarian aid before. In 2008, in response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Gustav, George W. Bush’s administration offered Cuba $6.3 million of aid, $5 million directly to the Cuban government without preconditions. Just last year, the Biden administration provided $2 million in the wake of Hurricane Ian to help rebuild housing in the hardest hit communities.”
$2 million! My goodness. So much money. What will they do with all of that aid?
“President Biden could take four simple steps to help ease the crisis:”
Spoiler alert: Lifting the blockade is not on the list.
“There are moments, John F. Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage, when politicians must choose between doing what’s politically expedient and doing what’s right.”
F@$k JFK. He only looks less bad relative to the psychos he surrounded himself with. He was an elitist racist. I don’t care what sort of fine words he wrote or said. When he had the chance, he did none of it. He was an anticommunist, sociopath-level capitalist with a bad temper and a chip on his shoulder—just like all of the rest of them.
“Joe Biden is known for his genuine empathy for others. Right now, he is focused on the acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the interminable war in Ukraine. But if the responsible senior officials in the State Department and National Security Council put Cuba on the president’s agenda and briefed him on the depth of the crisis there, maybe he would do the right thing.”
This is so unmoored from reality that it’s barely comprehensible. Joe Biden is not “known for his genuine empathy” (writing “for others” is redundant); Joe Biden is a notorious asshole. He always has been. His sociopathy and mania are directly responsible for the Ukraine and Gaza nightmares. He is president of the United States. He chooses the people to run these policies.
He chose to continue forcing Russia into a corner—he completely ignored two proposals from Russia in 2021. He wanted the Ukraine war. His unquestioning support for Netanyahu is directly responsible for Israel’s boldness in its most-recent war. He just opened a new war against Yemen—yes, a war. What else do you call attacking another sovereign nation and killing its citizens with missiles?
He’s not inflicted with those situations—he created them. He likes it this way. He doesn’t give a shit about anything other than being reelected. He’s a nightmare. Don’t hold your breath until he helps Cuba, FFS. You’ve got to be kidding me.
I’ve finished listening to the bonus episodes for season 2 of the Blowback Podcast, which is called “Cuba Libre”. When you really learn how the U.S. has just shat on that country for almost 65 years, you can’t possibly have the absolutely stupid hope that Joe Biden—of all f@$king people—is going to do a good goddamned thing for that island. And JFK! Don’t even get me started on that guy.
Ok, fine. So I got started. I read one of his speeches. My notes on the Commencement Address at American University, Washington, D.C. on June 10, 1963 (JFK Library) are below. Read through and then see my conclusion to see why I think this is relevant for today.
“Second: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims–such as the allegation that ‘American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars . . . that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union . . . [and that] the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries . . . [and] to achieve world domination . . . by means of aggressive wars.’”
This is all true. He knew it at the time. Also I’m sure that he said the first sentence without noting the irony at all.
“it is sad to read these Soviet statements–to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning–a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”
He didn’t follow his own advice. He’s just reading out loud. No-one since has listened either. He literally peppered this speech with statements that belie this one. Like the one about “find[ing] communism […] repugnant” below.
“No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.”
Except Cuba—right, Jack?
U.S. elected officials are really quite advanced in their bullshit. They just spew things that have nothing to do with reality. Clinton and Obama would really follow in this guy’s footsteps with their lofty rhetoric, almost none of which was true.
“As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity.”
This is such a shockingly ignorant and simple-minded thing to say—but people keep pointing me to this speech as indicative of JFK’s enlightened mindset.
“Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other.”
Again: so simplistic. He doesn’t consider anything other than trading blows on a field to be “war”. Demeaning the lives of thousands, possibly millions, just to exact petty revenges on the USSR was nothing to this man. He didn’t care about anything but projecting U.S. power. He never made a concession. He considered none of this violence, none of it was war. What an asshole.
“For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.”
But you and your country did this ten times more than the USSR. You knew how far ahead you were. You lied about it. The USSR was always losing, always behind—there was never a “gap” for the U.S. to fill. Kruschev said that military buildup is good for capitalism whereas it is harmful to socialism.
“We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interest to agree on a genuine peace.”
They are the ones that have to change, of course. The U.S. is so perfect that there is no room for improvement. All concessions and change and growth are for loser countries that haven’t yet achieved the enlightenment of the exceptional nation. It’s enough to make you want to throw up.
“To secure these ends, America’s weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.”
JFC JFK. This has never been the case. You’re high on your own supply.
“We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people–but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.”
Oh f@$k off. This is ridiculous. Going back to before I was born, U.S. presidents were all sociopathic, deluded liars, just utterly unaware of how hypocritical they were—because their prime axiom is always that U.S. Americans are better. Correction: Elite U.S. Americans are better. They deserve to have everything as their noble birthright. Letting anyone else have anything would be a waste because they’re all too benighted to appreciate it. Filthy communists. Filthy natives. Filthy poors.
“The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.”
Methinks he’s projecting quite a bit here. Jesus, Kennedy, do you even listen to yourself? Do you even bother to think for a second whether the behavior of the nation under your control exhibited the characteristics you seem to hold so dear? Or did it do literally the exact opposite at every opportunity? News flash, JFK: since your assassination, it has continued to do so—namely, not what you said you wanted. You never did it. And no-one since has, either. This has never been a priority. It’s just pretty shit to say when we want to tell the world how we demand it think of us. Judge us by our words, not our actions. Or else.
“The pursuit of disarmament has been an effort of this Government since the 1920's. It has been urgently sought by the past three administrations. And however dim the prospects may be today, we intend to continue this effort–to continue it in order that all countries, including our own, can better grasp what the problems and possibilities of disarmament are.”
You mean disarming everyone else, right? Because there was an armaments phase in the 1940s unlike the world has ever seen. The U.S. has never been about disarmament. I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s pure fantasy.
“To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.”
This is great. Did we end up doing that, though? I’m seriously asking because I don’t know. Did we actually stop atmospheric testing?
Yup, we did. Two months later with the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (Wikipedia). Heartfelt congratulations to JFK and the team.
“While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both. No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can–if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and if it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers–offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.”
This never happened, though. It’s hard to say whether it would have, had he not been assassinated. He talks pretty sometimes. So did Obama—who also did the opposite of everything he ever said. I’ve learned enough history to know that Kennedy also did other than he said, especially when it counted.
“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough–more than enough–of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on–not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”
“The U.S. will never start a war.”, will only “be prepared if others wish it.” Yeah, sure. That’s not how it worked out. It’s just words. Pretty words, but the world already has enough evidence to know that it was lies.
If you managed to make it through that analysis of Kennedy’s long speech, you may have noticed that so many of Kennedy’s statements are still the exact same things that U.S. administrations are saying today. The U.S. keeps saying it doesn’t want war, as it bombs everyone in sight. It claims it doesn’t want conflict—because what it really wants is docile vassals that don’t fight back as they U.S. plunders them. The U.S. still demands that everyone else change to satisfy it. The U.S. continues to claim that its military serves only peaceful purposes. The U.S. has the world convinced that NATO is a peaceful, defense-oriented organization.
Too few people see this for the bullshit that it is. Too few people see that this mindset is kept up by the massive firehose of propaganda from the largest and most sophisticated media and brainwashing operation in history. Only so can the Empire keep all the balls in the air. Only so can the Empire convince the world that it loves nothing more than peace as it bristles with weapons and pounds everyone that disagrees into sand.
Published by marco on 11. Feb 2024 13:52:21 (GMT-5)
In the podcast Episode 345: Naughty List (Patreon), Brace and Liz called Kevin Spacey a “child rapist”, then an “alleged child rapist” and finally settled on “ex-alleged child rapist”. Just using the epithet “child rapist” suggests that Spacey preyed on very young children, when the only accusations that actually went to trial were from someone who claimed that they’d been assaulted when they were 14 years old.
That would have been awful (had it happened), but it’s somehow less awful than if they’d been 5 years old. I’m not sure the law makes a distinction, but terminology does, as someone who assaults a 5-year-old is a pedophile whereas the term for someone who assaults someone who is post-pubescent, but still under the age of consent is ephebophile. Using other terminology imbues descriptions with implicit judgments. It’s like deciding whether to call someone “president” or “ex-president” or “mister” when speaking about someone who’s been President of the United States.
Spacey’s since been exonerated. It took a decade. It’s accurate that both Liz and Brace eventually landed on “ex-alleged child rapist”, because it’s technically true. But with those rules, someone could accuse someone else of being a child rapist, stop doing that, and then technically still be able to call that person an “ex-alleged child rapist” for the rest of their lives. You get to continue to cram the words “child rapist” into every sentence mentioning that person’s name without running the risk of slander. A neat trick.
Is there a point at which it’s no longer still ok to call Kevin Spacey a child rapist? I think that point is when it becomes obvious that there is no evidence whatsoever for an accusation, but I’m a justice extremist. At the very latest, people should stop associating people with crimes they’ve not done when they’ve been exonerated by the justice system.
You can say that the justice system is corrupt, that Spacey could have simply purchased his exoneration. Let’s examine that. If it’s true that a relatively modestly fortuned movie star can purchase exoneration from a judgment that pretty much everyone in the world wants to see go the other way, then we have to also conclude that anyone of that stature can purchase their way out of conviction of pretty much anything. While it’s true that the wealthy exercise outsized influence, it’s not true that they can get away with literally anything.
If it were true, then we would have lost all faith in our justice system. We would have to conclude that we’re living in a completely arbitrary society with no rules, other than the golden rule: he who has the gold rules. While true to a degree, it’s not absolutely true. Let’s assume that even money is not enough, that one also needs the favor of the elites in order to avoid justice. But that’s not what happened with Spacey. Ten years later, he’d completely lost the favor of the elites. He was being tried in a country where he doesn’t even live. He was never charged in the U.S. He was charged in the UK. He won anyway, on all counts, after only a few minutes of jury deliberation. And still, people will not stop calling him a child rapist.
From Spacey’s Wikipedia entry:
“In his first British court appearance, on June 16, Spacey denied the allegations against him.[184] On July 14, he pleaded not guilty to the charges in London.[185][186] On November 16, the CPS authorized an additional seven charges against Spacey, all related to a single complainant arising from incidents alleged to have occurred between 2001 and 2004.[187][188] Three charges were dismissed before or during the trial, which began on June 28, 2023, and, on July 26, 2023, a jury found Spacey not guilty of the remaining nine charges.[4][5]”
If none of that matters—if the outcomes of trials don’t matter—then people just don’t believe in the rule of law anymore. They believe in their gut feelings more. If society allows people to slander other people based on their gut feelings, then we have chaos.
There seems to be no mechanism for lowering the relevance of an accusation from the public record if there are enough people interested in maintaining it because (A) there is no drawback to doing so and (B) people love dunking on other people. Once you’re accused of something, you’re that thing for as long as people say you are. Where relevant, it’s the only thing you’ll ever be, whether you did it or not, whether it could be proven or not.
This obviously opens the door to completely fantastical character-assassination, but people seem to enjoy doing it so much that they don’t care. Most people also know that it will never happen to them. I wonder what engenders such an instinct for injustice? Is it mean-spiritedness? Spitefulness? Or is it a subconscious awareness of injustice in their own lives that makes them lash out at those wildly more successful? Is this one of the few weapons that people have against the obscenely wealthy and successful? You know, because we’ve utterly failed to put a check on amassing stupid amounts of wealth and the gap between the top 1% and the rest of us continues to grow?
Michael Jackson and Woody Allen fall into this category as well. Nothing was ever proven, with every case involving a large number of self-interested parties muddying the waters to the point where you can barely tell what is legitimate and what is an allegation. Journalists piled on for the delicious feeling of destroying a person’s reputation, while media-company C-suites dined out on the increase in advertising revenue. It’s a win-win. All it requires is an inconsequential sacrifice. It doesn’t matter whether they did anything wrong. They will have retroactively done something wrong, else why would they have been accused? Lurid “facts” stick in the mind that have no basis in reality, but come to define what everyone “knows” about what happened.
On this topic, I recently watched the video LIVE at The People’s Forum: Katie Halper, Rania Khalek, Abby Martin & Claudia De la Cruz. It’s a good conversation with three extremely good people, who are fighting the good fight against propaganda and war crimes.
At about 16:00 or so, Abby Martin led the charge on Woody Allen, just dropping jokes about how much he loves abusing children and that he could only like a movie if it involved abusing a 15-year-old. From Sexual abuse allegation of Woody Allen’s Wikipedia page:
“According to court testimony, on August 4, 1992, Allen visited the children at Mia Farrow’s home in Bridgewater, Connecticut, while she was shopping with a friend.[316] The next day, that friend’s babysitter told her employer that she had seen that “Dylan was sitting on the sofa, and Woody was kneeling on the floor, facing her, with his head in her lap”.[327][328] When Farrow asked Dylan about it, Dylan allegedly said that Allen had touched Dylan’s “private part” while they were alone together in the attic.[316] Allen strongly denied the allegation, calling it “an unconscionable and gruesomely damaging manipulation of innocent children for vindictive and self-serving motives”.[329] He then began proceedings in New York Supreme Court for sole custody of his and Farrow’s son Satchel, as well as Dylan and Moses, their two adopted children.[330] In March 1993, a six-month investigation by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital concluded that Dylan had not been sexually abused.[331][332]”
The case was settled in 1993. It doesn’t mention that Farrow and Allen were going through a pretty ugly separation, during which Farrow used the allegations against Allen as a lever. That context cannot be ignored, but it’s absolutely not part of the conversation about Allen’s supposed predilections. No-one cares. They just love to call people pedophiles. They just seem to relish it so much.
“In June 1993, Judge Elliott Wilk rejected Allen’s bid for custody and rejected the allegation of sexual abuse. Wilk said he was less certain than the Yale-New Haven team that there was conclusive evidence that there was no sexual abuse and called Allen’s conduct with Dylan “grossly inappropriate”,[333][334][335] although not sexual.”
So, thirty years later, Woody Allen is still known to otherwise-intelligent people as a child-molester. It’s honestly f&@king incredible. These three ladies are literally having a two-hour discussion about Israeli Hasbara, about their completely evidence-free and unsubstantiated propaganda, but yet here they are, blithely spouting completely slanderous untruths that have been proven untrue for three decades—and patting each other on the back for it.
If you’d mention to them that the case had been thrown out, they’d probably dismiss it because they know better. Even though the prime proponent of the allegation is Dylan Farrow, who’s made a lovely career out of it writing for every large NYC publication. They will dismiss everything the NYT says about U.S. foreign policy—they’ve built their admirable careers on doing so—but go just one centimeter out of their bailiwick and they’re right there, spouting other NYT propaganda.
About an hour into it, they were going a bit nuts about listing all of the things that Israelis steal, including Palestinian skin, apparently. I don’t believe any of this, really, and I very much believe that this type of demonization is unfair and counterproductive—and is basically what the worst of the propaganda does in the other direction. It’s just so stupid to cheer on Lebanese warriors on Instagram while swallowing every online rumor about the Israeli people (not Jews!).
Cool, so you’re not antisemitic, but now you’re anti-Israeli, as if all of them are actually evil. I’ve made this argument too many times, but somehow people can get all swept up in demonizing all Israelis, but somehow not see themselves—as Americans—as part of the problem. It’s unjust, unproductive, and stupid. Just stick to the facts about the Israeli government. Most of its people are no more deluded or ethically bankrupt than the people of any other part of the empire.
Published by marco on 10. Feb 2024 23:30:56 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 11. Feb 2024 08:32:59 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
I have nothing to add or take away from my review in 2017. I might have even liked Mark Hamill in his final outing as Luke Skywalker more than the first time around. Even knowing what was going to happen, I still really, really liked the final showdown between him and Kylo Ren. “See you around, kid.”
I watched it in German.
Robin Monroe (Anne Heche) works at a magazine in New York City. She’s very busy. Her boss Marjorie (Allison Janney) has boundary issues and wouldn’t understand the phrase work/life balance if you tattooed it on her forehead. Her boyfriend Frank Martin (David Schwimmer) surprises her with a one-week trip to Makatea. They fly to the island with Quinn Harris (Harrison Ford) and his current girlfriend Angelica (Jacqueline Obradors). Five hours later, Quinn has completely forgotten about how he’d flown Robin out that morning and is hitting on her at a tiki bar. Frank proposes to her that night.
The next morning, Marjorie calls her for an emergency photo-shoot. She’s got to engage Quinn’s services for the flight. It’s getting windy. They’re in the air, though, and on their way to the other island. As the storm comes up for real, Quinn decides to turn back, but the weather turns much worse and they crash-land on an island. The next morning, they discuss their fate—which is that they’re stuck on the island.
While they’re gone, Frank spent the evening ogling Angelica’s island dancing. The next morning, they learn that Quinn and Robin have gone down and they engage a search-and-rescue team together.
Back on the island, Quinn and Robin have climbed to the highest point on the island to find a beacon…that isn’t there. They’re not on the island that they thought they were on. They spot a boat, though. They hurry back down the mountain, taking the rest of the day to get back to camp. They pump up their raft and spend the night rowing around the island to where they’d seen the boat. As they get closer, they see that there are two boats—one of them is a pirate boat.
They flee back out of the water and up into the hills. They fight with the pirates, then convince them that they have jewels, get away again, and are forced to jump off of a cliff into the ocean. They get back out of the water, then kiss for the first time. They flee up the island, still worried the pirates will find them. They can’t go back to camp because the plane is too obvious a sign.
Frank and Anjelica have spent the day drinking together. Frank sees Anjelica home. She strips and convinces him to stay.
Quinn and Robin make camp under a WWII plane, eating breadfruit. He gets an idea: take the pontoons off of the WWII plane to change his plane to a seaplane. They get the pontoons back to camp and spend some time chopping trees and branches and fronds to attach them. They’ve just about gotten everything set when the pirates show up on the horizon again. The pirates have a cannon—of course they do!—and start homing in on them. The last shot gets close and Quinn takes shrapnel. They get in the plane and manage to take off, with the pirates shooting straight up at them, and then blowing themselves up when the shot returns to Earth on a very tight parabola.
They’re in the air, but Quinn is fading. He teaches her how to fly enough for her to be able to land the plane. They make it back, with her landing the plane.
Robin and Frank confess their transgressions and agree not to get married. Quinn hurries to the airport. He thinks he’s missed Robin, but he’d watched the wrong plane take off. She’s just getting off the plane. He meets her. “My life is too simple. I want to complicate the hell out of it.”
Look, it’s a bit of a weird and clickbait-y title and IMDb lists Joe Biden as the main star, even though he appeared in it for about 20 seconds, drooling his way through a couple of throwaway sentences at a press conference that he most likely didn’t understand in anything other than the most superficial manner. Joe Biden had nothing to do with the JWST whatsoever. They happened to finally launch it while he was president. That he’s listed first just shows how much of a cult the goddamned liberal world is. You can bet your boots that there is no way that Amazon-owned IMDb would have listed Donald Trump as the star of this movie had he been president when the JWST launched.
The second person listed is one of the actual stars: Amber Straughn (@Astraughnomer on Twitter; I gotta hand it to her…that’s kind clever) and the main star is actually Thomas Zurbuchen, a Swiss guy who was Head of Science Programs at NASA and was the one who finally got this program done.
The movie lets you know how many single-points-of-failure they had and that they managed to avoid all of them in what ended up being an absolutely flawless launch. I watched it live on Christmas Day 2021. It launched from French Guiana and inserted that satellite so perfectly into its flight path to L2 that its mission is expected to be twice as long as planned.
They got the first images back and everything is lined up and perfect. It’s already making incredible discoveries and collecting absolutely vital data. As the people in the movie say: it’s a bright spot in an otherwise oft-depressing world situation. We came together from all sorts of countries to work together and achieved something wonderful.
I gave this documentary an extra star for being about something totally awesome and for keeping the runtime reasonable (64 minutes).
John Woo directed this, and his signature is occasionally apparent. While it has a reasonably interesting story, this is not a great movie. The character-building is kind of non-existent.
Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) is an attorney who’s worked for a pharmaceutical company Tenjin for a long time. He’s about to relocate to America. He’s in a restaurant, in the kitchen with two women Rain (Ha Ji-won) and Dawn (Angeles Woo), who he semi-protects from some rough customers who come in demanding food and service and, probably, sex. The customers retreat to the dining room, while Qiu small-talks with them about classic movies. They send him out to get a DVD that he’s been talking about. While he’s gone, they gun down everyone in the dining room. They’re assassins and didn’t really need his chivalry—but they appreciated it enough to be important later.
He’s now at a big company party where he meets two women: Chinese/Japanese Mayumi Mounami / Zhen Tianmei (Qi Wei) and an ethereally thin vamp who dances with him, then sneaks off to his house, where she … breaks in? Or did she get a key from his boss? Anyway, she’s dressed as sexy as she’s capable of doing, given her eating disorder. She waits in bed for him.
He wakes the next morning next to her. She’s dead. He calls the police. They arrive, but so does a housekeeper he’s never seen before. She accuses him of definitely being the murderer. Commanding officer Yuji Asano (Kuniharu Tokunaga) seems hell-bent on setting him up, letting him go so he can gun him down as he runs away. Du Qiu escapes over a railing with some gymnastic skills. Old hand Satoshi Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is put on the case, paired with eager neophyte Rika (Nanami Sakuraba), who’s as much in the way as she is helpful. She’ll get better, though.
Yamamura tracks down Qiu and almost has him a few times, but Qui slips his grasp and ends up in a migrant camp, befriending Sakaguchi (Yasuaki Kurata), who speaks Chinese. The other migrants help him blend in and avoid being swept up in the occasional police raid.
Qui arranges a meeting with his former boss Yoshihiro Sakai (Jun Kunimura), president of Tenjen, to find out what the hell is going on. The boss and his company hire Rain and Dawn to take him out. Despite Dawn’s exhortations, Rain can’t do it. Instead, she shoots the emissary from the company and starts spraying bullets everywhere so that Qui can escape. He does—on a jet-ski. Yamamura is hot on his trail, on his own jet-ski. Lots of splashy-splashy and John Woo-style super-jumps and slo-mo camera angles.
Mayumi shows up to help him escape on a Shinkansen (bullet train). Thanks to his investigation, Yamamura actually wants to help Qiu because he now believes that he’s innocent. He’s convinced the killer was left-handed, which Qiu is not. Mayumi and Qiu escape to her country home, where she tells him how he’s the reason that her husband committed suicide—Qiu was so relentless in pursuing a case against him three years ago that the husband couldn’t take it anymore. Qiu apologizes, saying that the information he worked with came directly from the authorities.
Rain and Dawn crash the party quite literally. Yamamura isn’t far behind, plowing into Dawn a few times, with her popping back up each time. She keeps shooting herself up with some drug that gives her quasi-superhuman endurance and strength, as well as making her nearly invulnerable. Qiu and Mayumi flee in a car, but Yamamura drives them off the road, pairs up with them. then pulls a Defiant Ones and cuffs himself to Qiu.
Rain and Dawn continue the pursuit. Yamamura takes a bullet, but puts down Dawn for good. She overdoses trying to resurrect herself and dies in Rain’s arms. The camera zooms in on her face, showing us that Rain thinks she’s now justified in thinking she deserves revenge. Dude, you’re a contract killer whose job is to frame some people for crimes that you’re covering up for other people. You don’t exactly have the moral high ground.
They take Yamamura to the hospital and let Qiu go. He ends up with Sakaguchi, infiltrating the top-secret experiments of Tenjin, posing as homeless “volunteers”. Once inside, they find out that everyone’s being horribly abused in violent experiments with subsequent generations of the drugs that Rain and Dawn use to pump themselves up. Sakaguchi goes first and comes back, pumped up like a living weapon, helpless to stop himself from killing several of his fellow prisoners before he manages to kill himself in a moment of clarity. Qiu goes next and is deep into painful experiments when Yamamura shows up, demanding to see him.
Sakai cuts him off at the entrance, where Yamamura bribes him with a few letters of the code her needs to unlock the extra-super-good version of the super-soldier formula. Just try to keep up here. As Qiu is released and sicced on Yamamura, Rain makes peace with Mayumi, realizing that Sakai is actually responsible for Dawn’s death. This is done in a much cheesier manner than I’ve described here. Let’s just leave it at that. Qiu breaks the conditioning after a nice fight with Yamamura. He, Rain, Yamamura, and Mayumi blast their way through the lab, covered in blood and all carrying at least one or two bullet wounds, but not seeming to feel them.
Head of the lab and Sakai’s son Hiroshi (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi injects himself with the super-duper soldier-serum and rampages for a bit, kicking everyone’s ass. No-one really gets hurt or damaged enough not to be able to continue fighting. They finally put down Hiroshi—but not before he’s able to confess to the murder for which Yamamura was pursuing Qiu.
They now turn to his dad, who’s somehow still alive. He regrets nothing and kills himself anyway—I guess to avoid jail time?—but not before mortally wounding Rain, who dies in Qiu’s arms, mumbling something about classic movies (callback to the first scene in the film). All that’s left is a goodbye between the now-best-of-buddies Yamamura and Qiu, who share a respectful handshake.
There’s a lot of slo-mo footage of flying cherry blossoms, more than one dove, and Murayami on her wedding day, watching her husband die. It’s John Woo, baby.
That doesn’t sound too terrible, does it? The plot is pretty bog-standard, but it could have worked better if the actors were allowed to just act. I don’t know which genius inspired them to try speaking English half of the time, but it was a bad idea. It felt like they were dubbed half of the time, and the other half they just tried to muddle through. I’ll have to take their word for it that they handled the Chinese or Japanese any better. It was pretty distracting. It was kind of interesting, though, that people spoke to the Chinese guy in English, except for Mayumi, who spoke both. It’s kind of like German and French in the German part of Switzerland. Swiss-Germans feel more comfortable speaking English than French; Swiss-French feel the same about German.
On the other hand, it is kind of endearing how wedded to the style John Woo is. This movie could easily have been made in the 80s. The soundtrack during well-choreographed fight scenes was all horns—trumpets, sax, etc.—so it was quite a throwback. There was even what I thought was going to be the classic freeze-frame-to-credits, but the camera froze on Yamamura for only two seconds before it moved to a short scene of him and Rika walking into the camera and her coyly dropping that “a lot of people are getting married on trains these days.” Fade to credits.
I was torn between six and seven stars because it kind of won me over by the end. The voice-acting was kind of painful and the acting was sometimes laughable, but I’d probably watch it again if it drifted by on TV.
I watched it in the original Chinese, Japanese, and occasional English.
It’s odd to see so much fan service for a movie that’s only the second in the series, but that’s kind of how it feels. This movie also totally expects you to have remembered what happened in the first movie (which I watched in 2014), as well as who is who in the cast.
So, there’s the Four Horseman, except it’s only three of the original horseman because, apparently, Isla Fisher, either wasn’t invited back or was unable to come back, or whatever. Anyway, in what passes for being open-minded, Fisher’s character Henley is gone and has been replaced by Lula (Lizzy Caplan). She joins Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and super-secret hidden member Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo), who is also in the FBI. The FBI suspects, but does not know.
They’re all in hiding at the start of the movie. They are kept there by an organization called “The Eye”, practicing for a big “show”. Everyone has a boss, even anarchist-magicians. The Eye is the boss of the Horsemen. They basically crash the reveal of some sort of new phone, called Octa 8—a bit redundant—and start to reveal how the company’s CEO is hell-bent on collecting everyone’s data. In the middle of their interruption, they themselves are interrupted by a mysterious figure who reveals all of their secrets. Turnaround is fair play! Switcheroo! This kind of thing is going to keep happening. It’s kind of this movie’s “thing”.
They barely escape, sliding down an escape tube into a van. Wait, no, they end up in Macau. Magic! Switcheroo! There are a lot of reveals in this movie. These were just the first of many, so buckle up.
Dylan is at the pick-up point, but the Horsemen are not there. Instead, he gets a call from his arch-nemesis Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), who says that the wheels of his own plan are in motion. [Reveal!] Dylan goes to the prison to confront him, but does a bad job of confronting him in that he ends up springing him. They travel to Macau together because Thaddeus’s people heard from little birdies that the Horsemen are there.
Back in Macau, where it turns out that Merritt has a twin brother Chase [Reveal!]—obviously also played by Woody Harrelson—who reveals a bit more about their shared life growing up in a pretty over-the-top campy way. He leaves them at The Sands casino in Macau where they are to meet his boss in a sumptuous suite. Another big [Reveal!] introduces us to Walter Mabry (Daniel Radcliffe).
He tells a long story about his partnership with the CEO of the company that makes the Octa 8. That guy betrayed him, so Walter faked his own death, then bought out the company through a bunch of anonymous investors…look, it doesn’t matter, right? Most of this is bullshit because everybody’s lying and there are layers of subterfuge, so there’s no point in even trying to figure out which of these head-fakes are head-fakes and which moves are real attempts to get closer to yet-unrevealed goals.
The Horsemen (well, horsepeople) make a plan to steal a computer chip-like thing that everybody calls “the stick”. They pretend to be buyers of it and finagle their way into the vault, where Jack swipes the chip/card and they do a little ballet of throwing the thing around and doing sleight-of-hand to prevent guards frisking them from finding it.
Meanwhile, Dylan and Thaddeus go to the world’s oldest magic store—where the Horsemen had just outfitted themselves—to follow the trail. Thaddeus [Reveals!] that he speaks Mandarin when he responds to the shop owner. Afterwards, he goes fishing for a compliment from Dylan, who responds in Mandarin, “If your Mandarin were any good, I would have let you know.” [Reveal!] They track the Horsemen to a local market, where Danny, Dylan, and Walter tussle. Well, Walter’s henchmen tussle with Dylan, who’d pretended to get rid of Danny for Walter, but had really deftly slipped him the real “stick” before locking him outside. Dylan eventually gets caught by Chase and Walter and their henchmen. The Horsemen are mystified as to how they still have the “stick”.
Walter has his goons beat up Dylan, vamping and preening and generally chewing the scenery in a truly awful way. I can’t tell if Radcliffe is serious about this performance or if he’s taking the piss, but it’s god-awful. But that’s not all! Walter introduces his father Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), who is also god-awful. In the scene on the boat, otherwise great actors are all trapped together by an awful script with laughable dialogue in a sort of Mexican standoff. Father and son pack Dylan into the safe his father died in and throw him into the water, toasting champagne and chortling. I am not kidding about any of this. If you’re wondering, Ruffalo is no better, just phoning it in.
Dylan escapes, thinking of what his father told him and just by believing in himself. The rest of the Horsemen show up in the nick of time to save him from drowning and they have a real gladfest about how awesome it is that they’re all together again. They have the stick, but it’s fake—or is it?—and have no time to plan, but then they plan something super-elaborate anyway because they are impossibly amazing and flawless. Oh, and the lady and son from the oldest magic store in the world show introduce themselves as “The Eye” and that they’re fully on board and no longer hiding in the shadows, so that’s resolved too! [Reveal!]
Each of the horsemen puts on their own magic show somewhere in London, with the locations pointing somewhere in the Thames, by the bridge. They pretend to barely get away, then jump on motorcycles, then fail to escape, then get captured by Walter and Arthur and Chase, who’s a maniac. They all herd onto a business jet, which feels odd, then Walter gets the stick, reveals that it’s actually the real one, then orders them all thrown out of the plane. Chase obliges.
TADA! The Horsemen float back into view by the windows, inviting Tressler and son outside. They are on a floating barge in the middle of the Thames, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. [Reveal!] The horsemen grandstand around, explaining their trick, then turn the whole lot of them over to the authorities. The FBI closes in with boats, but the Horsemen are gone, except for Dylan, who his counterpart at the FBI catches, but he bribes her with a USB stick of data on Walter, then disappears.
They rendezvous at some mansion that the Eye owns, all driving there in a car together like a bunch of poors. Thaddeus shows up, [revealing!] himself and Dylan’s dad as having been the best of friends, with their rivalry having just been a diversion. Dylan swallows it hook, line, and sinker. Thaddeus leaves, telling them to check out what’s behind the curtain. OMG it’s just the entire nerve center of the Eye that was used to track the Horsemen and to build them up until they’re worthy of running the Eye themselves. [Reveal!]
The end. Jesus, this was a pretty thinly written bit of fan-fiction, honestly. There was little to no tension. All of the tricks are so bombastic and huge that you can’t even be impressed by them because there’s another one coming two seconds later. I did like how Jack Wilder covered himself in a hail of playing cards, then disappeared.
As with Manhunt, I was torn between six and seven, finally granting it the same score as that other film that was sometimes lower in quality, but seemed to believe in itself more.
Becky (Laysla De Oliveira) and her brother Cal (Avery Whitted) are driving across the country. They’re about 1500 miles into their journey—so, about halfway to San Diego. She’s pregnant and feeling nauseated. They pull over so she can throw up.
They hear a little boy calling from the field of tall grass. It’s, like, really tall grass, well over the height of a person. Torn, they decide to see if they can rescue him. Cal parks by a church and they plunge into the grass, quickly losing sight of one another. The boy Tobin (Will Buie Jr.) seems to fade further away. Cal and Becky also drift away from each other. For a minute, they can still see each other, but then lose each other again. The tall grass is bedeviling.
Becky runs into Ross (Patrick Wilson), who is Tobin’s father. He says he’ll lead her to Cal and get them out of there. Meanwhile, Cal runs into a careworn Tobin, who tells him that “Becky will die soon”. Unnerved, but desperate, Cal follows Tobin deeper into the field, to “the rock”. The rock looks like an alien egg, onyx and striated. Tobin touches the rock, thrilled by it. He invites Cal to do the same.
Becky is attacked by something vaguely humanoid. Tobin and Cal can only listen to her screams. Tobin predicted this.
The moon is out. The rock gleams, ancient symbols carved into it thrown into stark relief. It throbs. It hums. It tempts.
Travis (Harrison Gilbertson)—Becky’s baby-daddy—drives along the road. He spots what he thinks might be their dirty car in the parking lot. He wipes off the license plate to confirm his suspicion. He can’t fathom it, though. They’ve been missing for months.
Travis approaches the grass, draw by the sound of Becky and Cal. He plunges into the grass, quickly losing himself as well. He runs into Tobin, who claims to somehow know him. Tobin leads him to Becky’s corpse.
We see Tobin’s mother Natalie (Rachel Wilson) and Tobin by the side of the road, with Ross on the phone. Tobin and his dog Freddy hear Travis calling Tobin’s name from the tall grass. Natalie and Ross follow behind, quickly separating from each other and never finding Tobin.
♾️ A time loop ♾️
1
.Travis meets up with Cal and Becky, revealing how long they’ve been missing. They manage to locate Tobin as well. Ross is watching them from the tall grass. Travis pops Tobin on his shoulders to look out over the grass. Tobin sees the church. They head in that direction, walking, walking, and walking, but not there yet.
When Becky drops with a pain in her uterus, Ross appears from out of nowhere to give her CPR and “save” her. Tobin pops back up on Travis’s shoulders—but the church is gone. Ross leads them all deeper into the grass, claiming to know the way out. Ross is singing The Midnight Special, answering Travis that “yeah, it’s CCR, but it’s older than that.” It originated with prisoners from the American South.
Ross takes them to the rock. He touches it. Shivers. With eyes aglow, he exhorts them to do the same. Cal is about to do it when Natalie appears, yelling that they shouldn’t do a thing that Ross says. Travis attacks Ross, who pops his arm out of his shoulder socket for him, then pops his wife Natalie’s head like a zit as the others run away.
The others run and spot a dilapidated bowling alley, where they escape Ross for a moment. Cal relocates Travis’s shoulder and then they fight over whether Cal wants to bang his sister Becky. Ross eventually shows up and they flee to the roof. Travis and Cal watch Freddy disappear behind a copse of grass, but not reappear on the other side. Creepy. Weird, Supernatural. Then they see the dog again, just jogging through a long gap in the grass—and onto the road. Instead of remembering that the dog literally just disappeared a few seconds ago—and forgetting how treacherous the seemingly living grass is—they decide to follow what looks like an obvious and easy path out of the grass and back onto the road. Problem solved.
Travis slips from the roof, but Cal catches him. A very Stephen King look crosses his face as sibilant voices whisper incomprehensible suggestions in his head. He lets Travis drop to the pavement.
As Ross pops through the roof exit that they’d barred, Cal and Becky flee the building, following Tobin. Becky: “Where’s Travis?” Cal: “He’s coming.” Becky doesn’t believe him and runs back. Cal continues, but Ross appears out of nowhere, tackling him and choking the life out of him. The camera pulls back to reveal several Cal corpses in increasing stages of decomposition. Ross has been killing him for quite a while now.
♾️ Loop-de-loop. ♾️
Becky awakens in mud, in a torrential downpour. She hears Travis, who is somehow either still alive or alive again or in another timeline … or something. At any rate, she hears him. He is close. Close enough to touch. It’s so dark and rainy. They reach out toward each other, fingers nearly touching Then Becky screams. The hand she’d touched was not Travis’s.
She wakes. She is still in mud. Different mud. Mud at the foot of the rock. Lightning sheets across the sky, starkly illuminating the sigils roughly engraved in its surface. The stick figures show a woman giving birth. The baby lifted high. Impaled.
Cal is suddenly there. He holds her baby, tells her it’s beautiful, perfect. She squints through the rain, smiles, drops her head back down, letting herself relax for a second. He feeds her something. She eats it eagerly. He tells her it’s grass. Then he tells her it’s her—it’s unclear whether it’s her baby or placenta he’s purportedly fed her. It’s not Cal, though. He’d dead. It’s Ross, feeding Becky her baby.
Tobin is there. He calls to Travis, who stumbles into the clearing. Travis attacks Ross, who attacks him back, easily besting him. He stabs him with the spiky end of a snapped femur. Travis drops into the mud. Ross turns to Tobin and tries to make him touch the rock. Before he can, though, Becky rises out of the mud one last time to stab out Ross’s other eye with her heart locket. She drops back to the mud, finally dead for good.
Blinded, Ross flails about. Travis struggles back to his feet. Rain lashes down continuously. The rock looms above them, silent, watching, exhorting, humming, whispering. Travis rips grass from the ground and garrotes Ross with it. It takes forever.
Against Tobin’s pleas, Travis stumbles to the rock, to place his palm on it, to finally understand what it wants, what it does to people. He is strong enough to resist its wiles. This is like in Midnight Mass, where the message, though covered in gore, was one of hope. People can resist, if they really want to. Even seemingly irresistible forces can be resisted. You don’t have to take their filthy deals. You can take less for yourself, sacrifice for the group. If a sacrifice is demanded, then maybe it’s got to be you. This is very hopeful.
Travis leads a terrified Tobin to an exit that he knows about now, having communed with the rock, but having been strong enough to betray it. He sends Tobin out to prevent Cal and Becky from ever having entered the grass in the first place. Perhaps, if it works, he will also have retroactively saved himself, since, if Cal and Becky never enter the grass, he will never have followed them to also become trapped in the grass. Perhaps he is breaking the time loop. Perhaps he knows that only his current self will suffer, but that his other, original incarnation will survive, untouched by the eldritch horror of the rock. But perhaps he doesn’t suspect any of this. Perhaps he simply selflessly sacrifices himself to save a little boy, his unborn daughter, and her mother and uncle.
Tobin opens his eyes to find himself standing in a room with a wooden floor. He approaches a door, unlatches it, and lets himself into the apse of the church across the road. He trepidatiously exits to see Cal and Becky just about to exit their vehicle, having heard his other incarnation’s cries for help from deep in the grass. He pleads with them not to go in, finally convincing Becky by giving “back” her locket, the one that Travis had given him. She now has two lockets, one quite careworn and still covered in Ross’s blood. She screams at Cal not to enter—he was about to go in.
They drive off with Tobin. Travis hears their car drive off. He lies back into the mud beneath the grass and dies as its fronds arch over him, hiding him from our eyes, waving to and fro in a vaguely sinister pattern as the view fades to credits—CCR’s Midnight Special plays.
I have not read the original story, but this was a great Stephen King adaptation. I could tell at each step that it was Stephen King—and old-school King, at that. I was reminded of several other King stories, like The Regulators, Desperation—CAN-TAH—as well as The Tommyknockers, which also had a talismanic alien artifact capable of bending time, minds, and transcending death.
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) is from Buenos Aires. He was in the running for pope after Pope John Paul II died. The primary contender was Cardinal Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger (Anthony Hopkins), who was considerably more political. As you probably know, he would end up winning and becoming pope in 2005. He is very conservative and believes in the power of the church rather than the power of the people. The church tells the people what to do; it does not ask what the people would like it to do. His is a wrathful, Old-Testament church, not a merciful, forgiving New-Testament one.
Bergoglio returns to Buenos Aires. He is a simple man, with simple needs, who simply wants to help as many people as he can. He decides to retire from his cardinalcy in 2012 and asks the pope for permission to do so. Instead, the pope calls him to Italy, to his summer home, to discuss the matter. Bergoglio arrives, speaking Italian and English as required, though his main language is Spanish. He arrives at the Palace of Castel Gandolfo, and walks around the gardens with one of the gardeners, deep in conversation, while he waits for the tardy pope Ratzinger to arrive.
Their first conversation starts off contentiously, with Ratzinger spouting a litany of Bergoglio’s transgressions against the church’s doctrine, accusing him of doing what he wants rather than what the church wants. Ratzinger apologizes for his tardiness, saying that his former assistant was “perfect”. Bergoglio responds that “he’s in jail”.
They sit together, then walk together, only tangentially discussing points of theology, focusing instead of the more prosaic presence and role of the church in a modern world. They disagree strongly over the church’s role: Ratzinger thinks the church should lead and not adapt. Bergoglio believes in change, which Ratzinger disparages as “compromise.” He spits out the word.
“Pope Benedict: When you were leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, you had all the books on Marxism removed from the library.
Bergoglio: And I made seminarians wear cassocks all day, even when they were working in the vegetable garden. And I called civil marriage for homosexuals the Devil’s plan.
Pope Benedict: You were not unlike me.
Bergoglio: I changed.
Pope Benedict: No, you compromised!
Bergoglio: No, I changed! It’s a different thing.”
Ratzinger is not without his charm. They walk in the garden some more because his fitness tracker exhorts him to “move”.
“Pope Benedict: My doctor gave it to me. He said, ‘You are in good shape for 86 but very bad shape for a human being.’ I believe this was a joke.”
Ratzinger is very much of the opinion that he knows exactly what the world needs, down to the last detail, and that he has nothing to learn from anyone. The church’s doctrine should not bend in any way, should not adapt at all to the mercurial vagaries of a world that thinks it is so modern that it only wants a church that will bend to its will, rather than the other way around,
“Bergoglio: We have spent these last years disciplining anyone who disagrees with our line on divorce, on birth control, on being gay. While our planet was being destroyed, while inequality grew like a cancer. We worried whether it was alright to speak the Mass in Latin, whether girls should be allowed to be altar servers. We built walls around us, and all the time, all the time, the real danger was inside. Inside with us.
Pope Benedict: You talk about walls as if they are bad things. A house is built of walls. Strong walls.
Bergoglio: Ah… Did Jesus build walls? His face is a face of mercy. The bigger the sinner, the warmer the welcome. Mercy is the dynamite that blows down walls.”
Bergoglio dares to reproach the church—and Ratzinger specifically—for how it handles child abuse. Ratzinger stalks away, looking very much the intolerant and unbending bureaucrat next to Bergoglio’s much more credible man-of-God. Ratzinger had said as much earlier, when he’d accused Bergoglio of “thinking he was better than everyone else, better than the church.” Ratzinger is seemingly offended by Bergoglio’s humbleness, modesty, and seeming lack of a need for worldly goods. He sneers at his ugly shoes, which aren’t nearly as fancy as Ratzinger’s own Ferragamos.
Ratzinger retires for the afternoon. A gentle and kind functionary shows Bergoglio to his room, which surprises him because he’d thought the audience was finished. He’d been prepared to leave—although he’d not gotten what he’d come for: an official acknowledgment and acceptance of his abdication of his cardinalcy. Ratzinger doesn’t want to grant it to him for political reasons. Bergoglio is well-respected for his exceedingly good qualities—he’d almost been pope himself. If he were to leave prematurely—if he were to be allowed to leave—it would reflect badly on the church. People would take it as a sign that the church had become so bad that Bergoglio could no longer stand to be a part of it. The judgment would be clear.
Bergoglio is made to eat alone—Knödel mit Söse—while Ratzinger eats the same, but watching F1 racing in German. Later, Bergoglio enters a lavish sitting room with a television; he asks permission to turn on the TV and watches soccer for a few minutes. Ratzinger walks in, saying to leave it on, even though he himself had never understood the appeal. This, from a man who’d just spent his entire meal watching a different sport. The throwaway comment neatly highlight’s the pontiff’s hypocrisy—which had otherwise become quite clear from their conversation in the garden.
Bergoglio turns off the TV and sits with Ratzinger. They talk quietly. Bergoglio recounts the story of how he’d become a priest in the first place. The flashback shows a much younger man, about to be married. But “the call” came to him, in the form of a spontaneous confession with an older priest. He finished the story, saying that, despite having lost the love of his life, he knows that God would have found him anyway. If not that night, then soon after.
Ratzinger plays the piano, a sad lullaby. They talk about music, about the Beatles. Ratzinger seems a bit confused, with Hopkins playing the part of an old man, late in the evening, forgetting some details, getting lost in the mazes of recollection, then getting a bit angry and defensive about it. He’s not mad, just frustrated with himself. He says that he likes jokes, and that he “likes company”. Bergoglio cites a passage that God is always with you, to which Ratzinger replies that “God doesn’t laugh”.
The next morning, the pontiff is called back to Rome by a further-unfolding scandal. Bergoglio is forced to accompany him, his retirement-request unsigned and ignored. Later, Ratzinger meets Bergoglio in the Sistine Chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica. Ratzinger confesses that he wants to retire. Bergoglio is horrified.
“Pope Benedict: In 1978, we had three popes.
Bergoglio: Yeah, but they weren’t at the same time.
Pope Benedict: I was making a little joke.
Bergoglio: A joke?
Pope Benedict: A German joke. It doesn’t have to be funny.”
After some back and forth, Bergoglio discerns that Ratzinger won’t sign his retirement because he has come to believe that the only way he can retire with a clean conscience is if he knows that someone like Bergoglio has a chance of replacing him, of saving the church in a way that Ratzinger cannot.
“Ratzinger: For weeks I have been praying. I wanted to resign. But the thought that stopped me − what if at the next conclave, they voted for you.
Bergoglio: Then I offered my resignation.
Ratzinger: Exactly. And I was delighted. One reason I didn’t want to resign was…what if you were next. This is only half in jest.
Bergoglio: [smiles]
Ratzinger: And so you came. And now I’ve changed.
Bergoglio: You compromised.
Ratzinger: No. I’ve changed. It’s a different thing. Your approach, your style is radically different from mine. And I don’t agree with most things you say and do…
Bergoglio: [smiles]
Ratzinger: But now I can see a necessity for Bergoglio. I cannot do this without knowing that there is at least a possibility that you might be chosen.
Bergoglio: No. Father, I could never…not me.
Ratzinger: We both know, in our hearts, that it could be. The Church needs change and you could be that change.”
Bergoglio fills in some gaps in his file for Ratzinger, recounting how he’d behaved when Argentine took a fascist lurch and killed tens of thousands of its own citizens. He’d excommunicated two of his Jesuit friends who’d refused to submit to the evil rules and petty edicts. They continued to tend their flock—and they were punished for it, especially after they were no longer under the protection of the church.
Bergoglio saved many people, and went on to do much good, but he continued to be haunted by what he considered to be an inexcusable betrayal of his friends and comrades, people who’d taken their lumps for the cause. Instead, he’d tried to work with the fascist regime, to guide it into less destructive practices. He was cast out, traveling through the poorest parts of Argentina, bringing the message and the gospel. He hears endless confessions. He slowly regains his reputation. He makes speeches,
“Twenty percent of the world’s population consumes resources at a rate that robs the poor nations and future generations of what they need to survive. Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality which idolises money. Such an economy also kills.”
He is made a bishop. But, as Ratzinger says, he “did not live like one. [He] renounced luxury.”
Ratzinger gives Bergoglio absolution for his sins. They order lunch: pizza Margherita and Diavolo with two Fantas from the little stand out front. At Ratzinger’s urging, Bergoglio finishes telling his story, that he’d reconciled with one of his old friends, but never the other.
Ratzinger then confesses about long-running sexual misconduct in parishes for which he was responsible, and regrets having stayed silent. What’s done is done. Bergoglio is incensed, but grants absolution. They emerge from the Room of Tears into the Sistine Chapel, mingling with the common folk.
Bergoglio departs, giving Ratzinger an impromptu and largely unwelcome tango lesson just before he leaves. We see that Ratzinger has grown exceedingly fond of the man—won over by his naturally principled mien, as had so many others before him.
From earlier in the film,
“Ratzinger: Ah yes. It must be very useful, this popularity of yours. Is there a trick to it?
Bergoglio: I try to be myself.
Ratzinger: Hmm, when I try to be myself, people don’t seem to like me very much.”
Bergoglio flies home. One year later, he watches Ratzinger deliver his resignation—in Latin. The cardinals gathered there whisper to each other in Italian—“Aspetti. Mi devo essere sbagliato. […] Mi scusi ma ho sentito bene? Ho tradotto bene?” Bergoglio is watching with Lisabetta and says,
“¡Lo dijo en latín! Siempre que tiene que decir algo embromado lo dice en latín… y así sólo lo entienden unos pocos cardenales…”
And then he translates for her: “El Papa acaba de renunciar.”
We witness another election, this time of Pope Frances (Bergoglio). We see him travel the world. We watch as he and Ratzinger watch the World Cup final in 2014—Germany vs. Argentina. Germany would emerge victorious 1–0. Pope Frances would have to wait until the end of 2022 to celebrate Argentina’s coronation.
They are both so brilliant in their roles. We watched it in Spanish, Italian, Portugese, German, and English with English subtitles. I obtained several of the citations from the the final shooting script.
Jason Collins (Rafi Gavron) agrees to take delivery of a pretty huge number of MDMA pills for his friend Craig (James Allen McCune). He gets the delivery up to his room and the DEA is on him like white on rice. He temporarily escapes out of his bedroom window, but where’s he going? There’s over 2,000 pills in a plastic bag on his bed and the DEA is in his bedroom. They have him dead to rights. The DEA agents—including Agent Cooper (Barry Pepper)—chase him down and arrest him. His mom Sylvie (Melina Kanakaredes) is kind of a flake and she’s totally distraught. He would never do anything like this!
His dad John Matthews (Dwayne Johnson) runs a relatively large trucking company. We see him establishing what a great and competent employer he is. As he’s driving out, he sees one employee Daniel James (Jon Bernthal) doing some extra work, even though his shift is over. Matthews initially wants to chide him that he’s not paying overtime—his business is stretched a bit thin—but it turns out that Daniel is just trying to get the bags of cement out of the impending rain. Matthews pitches in instead. We have established rapport.
Matthews shows up to talk to Jason with his ex-wife Silvie. The agent in charge Jay Price (David Harbour) reveals to them that Jason’s facing a minimum sentence of 10 years—and that his friend Craig set him up for the DEA in order to lower his own minimum 10-year sentence. Neat-o. So Jason would never have taken delivery of the drugs if the DEA hadn’t blackmailed Craig into trying to get him to do it. Price says that, if Jason doesn’t find someone else to frame—if he doesn’t cooperate—then the 10 years might become 30 for that amount of drugs. Quite a neat cycle they’ve got going there. Jason refuses, while his dad demands that he find someone to rat on.
Jason continues to refuse to do it—he doesn’t know any drug dealers, and he’s not going to do to someone else what was done to him by Craig, despite all of the adults in his world immorally exhorting him to do so. So off to jail he goes, awaiting trial. Matthews starts to pester US attorney Joanne Keeghan (Susan Sarandon) to find out if there’s anything he can do for his son. No. Go away. She seems to have internalized the brazen immorality of entrapping innocent people for more arrests to the point where she either doesn’t care that it’s wrong—or just doesn’t even notice.
Matthews heads out into the night, looking for trouble, and gets his ass absolutely beaten by a group of corner hustlers, who fall on him like a pack of wolves. They’re just about to finish him off and steal his truck when the cops show up.
Matthews is back with Keeghan. She says, fine, OK, if you’re just going to get yourself killed anyway, then I’ll allow you to pretend to sell drugs for the U.S. government so we can pretend that people in desperate circumstances in front of whom we dangle a lucrative drug deal are actually hard-core drug-dealers who need to be put away for a good long time, when what’s really happening is that this is a job-security program for drug-warriors.
Matthews scours his employee records for anyone who already has two strikes for drug-running. Daniel James comes up. John convinces Daniel to introduce him to his former associate Malik (Michael K. Williams). Daniel could be convinced because $20k is a lot of money to him and his family. His wife Analisa (Nadine Velazquez) has to work all hours because they can’t afford to lose her job.
That scene made me think of Marx and wage-slavery. It poignantly showed how most people do not have a choice about the work they do, not really. There is no way to argue around the fact that there is a privileged class of employers, and everyone else. Of course some of us have jobs that treat us well, and that we trust will continue to treat us well. But that doesn’t change the fact that the best you can hope for is a benevolent dictatorship. The structure is not fundamentally a democratic or fair one. The exchange is your time, your creativity, your attention—for money. If you get fulfillment, if you like your co-workers—if you can call them friends—then that’s a bonus, but it’s not part of the structure. There is nothing anchoring those things in anything other than an ephemeral and easily avoided way into people’s lives.
Against his better judgment, Daniel lets John convince him. Malik agrees to try it out, his interest piqued by the sheer carrying capacity of a semi-tractor-trailer truck. “Half a ton? Man, if I was in the thousand-pound business, I wouldn’t be sitting in this dump right now.” (Delivered as only Michael Williams could.) Malik agrees, but only if John makes the first run—and if Daniel rides shotgun.
They drive 1,000 miles to El Paso, where they pick up the drugs, packing it in bags of cement. As they’re about to pull away, a rival gang ambushes them. John plows on out of there, impressing the kingpin Pintera (Benjamin Bratt). When they return to John’s warehouse, Malik orders them to transfer the drugs to John’s truck and deliver it. The DEA is up in arms because they’d not wired up the personal truck as well as the semi. Daniel grows suspicious of John, and confronts him, but is assuaged. He still walks away angry and frustrated because he’s caught up in such a shitty situation again.
They make the drop with Malik, but Cooper decides not to scoop them up. He hears radio chatter that they’re going to meet up with a very high-value target, El Topo (who is Pintera). Matthews is pissed. Keeghan doesn’t care one bit. They urge him to stop shouting at her campaign stop. They basically have him over a barrel and there is f&@k-all he can do about it. She goes back on her deal and extracts another deal out of him. He’s now to take down El Topo for them. His next run will take him into Mexico, from which he’s unlikely to return.
Daniel finds out what Matthews has done, confronting him about it. They send their families into hiding. Daniel is super-pissed about everything, as he should be. Keeghan couldn’t give two shits—Sarandon plays this role quite well—but Cooper has a change of heart and advises Matthews that the play is a suicide run.
Matthews goes rogue. He comes up with a plan. A crucial step is for Daniel to get El Topo’s phone number from Malik. As Matthews switches trucks to drop the DEA listening equipment and tail, Daniel puts one guard to sleep, but then murders two others. When Malik appears, he gut-shoots him while Malik wings him—Omar vs. The Punisher. Malik gives him the phone number—he’s done-for anyway. Matthews fights off several cars full of shooters with his truck and his shotgun, which he wields incredibly well considering he’d just bought it the day before. He takes a shot in the thigh, though.
He ends up flipping the truck, but the DEA arrives before the last cartel member can get to him. It’s a truck full of $100m. At the same time, Cooper spots El Topo leaving his house and arrests him without incident. Matthews leaves the $100k reward check for El Topo’s capture for Daniel, who breezes into the police station as if he hadn’t just murdered three men in cold blood the day before. The DEA officers don’t seem much bothered by it, either, although they must know that he’d done it.
So, the DEA took out one kingpin in the war on drugs and sent three families into hiding. A job well done. And how does the WitSec program work for the two families? Jason lives with his mom—does John get visitation rights in his new role? How does that work?
It was fine, I guess. I think they were indicting the drug war, but you never know. Maybe Cooper’s supposed to be the hero! To sum up the storyline as I saw it:
This is a pretty well-made Indonesian action movie with some excellent fight choreography mixed into what are often absolutely ludicrous—and flatly unbelievable—levels of endurance, stamina, and ability to take both punishment and grievous damage. You see, Indonesians like to fight with knives. They have to, because they are terrible, terrible shots. Everyone in the first half of the film dies of a knife wound because no-one with a gun can hit the broad side of a barn.
Ito (Joe Taslim) is a Triad enforcer—one of the Six Seas, an elite group entrusted with overseeing all of the Triad’s drug trade. On a mission to wipe out a village, he has a change of heart on a beach and, instead of killing a little girl in cold blood—as he’d already killed her mother—he turns on his platoon and kills them instead. He takes the child back to Jakarta with him, where he holes up with Shinta (Salvita Decorte) and reconnects with his old friends and fellow gang-members Fatih (Abimana Aryasatya) and White Boy Bobby (Zack Lee).
We all know where this is going, right? The Triad is going to clean up the loose end of Ito. There will be carnage along the way, as well as a twist in the person of Arian (Iko Uwais), another former member of Ito’s gang who is now working in Macau for the Triad. We see him demonstrate his chops by wiping out a whole group of thugs at the casino where he works. Chien Wu (Sunny Pang)—the Six Seas member in charge of cleaning up—recruits Arian to kill Ito, to prove himself in what he hopes will be an initiation into the Six Seas.
First, though, Ito finds out from his former crew members Fatih and Bobby that a local freak named Yohan (Revaldo) had stolen his gang’s money. Ito goes to Yohan’s butcher shop—out of which he sells drugs—to clean house. Lots and lots and lots of blood and body parts and sweet-ass fight choreography. While Ito is fighting there, though, a ton of Yohan’s men infiltrate Shinta’s apartment building. Fatih and Bobby fight them all off in another giant, bloody fight scene. Unfortunately for them, Chinese and Mandarin-speaking Anna (Dian Sastrowardoyo) and French-speaking albino Elena (Hannah Al Rashid)—two more of the Six Seas—show up and finish off Bobby, who gains time for Fatih to escape. Arian returns in the nick of time to help Fatih further, but Fatih only gets as far as the garage before he meets his end.
A woman known only as The Operator (Julie Estelle) appears out of nowhere. She is a Deux Ex Machina and Force of Nature in that she is tireless and can’t take damage. You can ring her bell all day and she isn’t fazed. In fairness, this is the exact same with Fatih, Ito, or Arian, all of whom take prodigious damage at various points in the film—gaping stab wounds, bullets, heads bounced off of concrete or iron girders—and bounce back unfazed seconds later, still just as coordinated, fast, and strong as they were before they got what should have been career-, if not life-ending concussions.
The Operator next hunts down Ito and bests him. This is amazing. One woman, fighting in close quarters, manages what dozens of armed men could not even come close to doing. I imagine that we, as viewers, are supposed to accept that her bona fides have been established, but it felt a bit more like she was a superhero without a backstory.
Anyway, we’re on to the next giant action sequence where Ito wipes out about two to three dozen Triad soldiers. They are all armed with clubs or knives, but he bests them all. Throwing us a bone, the director shows Ito stripping the newspaper “armor” he’d had on under his jacket. Back at the apartment, the Operator fights off more Triad henchmen who are there to get the little girl (for whatever reason). Alma and Elena show up. After The Operator dispatches Alma, we learn that Elena and the Operator were trained in the same unit—or something. The Operator loses a fingertip to Elena’s knife, but Elena loses all of her guts, then one of her arms, and then, finally, her jugular.
Back at the warehouse, Ito seeks out Arian, who had subdued a sniper who was going to kill Ito. They chat a bit, with Ito holding Arian at gunpoint. He throws away the gun and they set to it. Just know that Arian could have just let the sniper kill Ito and the film would have been at least 25 minutes shorter—that’s about how long the ultimate fight scene is—and Ito could have done the same by just shooting Arian. Instead, we get a long fight that, while fraught with indestructibility, doesn’t feel too long because it’s quite inventive.
There is a lot of blood and there are lot of slash and puncture wounds, but we also notice that neither of them breaks the other’s joints, as they have done with underlings and soldiers. I noticed the same thing when The Operator was fighting Elena and Alma: in fights with “red shirt” NPCs, they just brutally slice tendons and snap bones. When the main roles fight each other, they nicely take turns attacking and no-one does any crippling damage until the director has determined that the fight should be nearing its end. Then the knife wounds start up.
Ito bests Arian, but does not kill him. Chien Wu shows up and has his gang of five other people take Arian out with machine guns. He’s taken at least 50 bullets, but he’s still breathing on the ground, so someone has to cap him. Indonesians are truly indestructible—he’d already suffered so much damage from Ito, then all of the bullets, but he was still breathing. They’re like Terminator robots.
The Operator gets the little girl to Ito, then drives away. OK? I guess? No goodbye? Ito’s not long for this world, but he gets the girl on a boat—I suppose a metaphor for “safety”. Ito gets in his car, in front of which appears an army of Triads led by Chien Wu. Horribly damaged, but grinning maniacally, he drives into their hail of bullets. The Wikipedia entry deems this ending as “his fate and the Triads are left unknown.” I would say, “oh naw, son. He ded,” but I’d just had a two-hour object lesson in how indestructible Indonesians are, so maybe Ito lived happily ever after.
It kind of won me over a bit, but it was a lot. The fight between Arian and Ito was at times just laughably inhuman in their ability to take damage.
I watched it in Indonesian, Mandarin, English, and French with English subtitles.
This is a powerful 52 minutes. Roger Guenveur Smith delivers a one-man show. It’s just him. Alone. On a dark stage. He’s in black pants and a black T-shirt. He is barefoot. He sweats profusely. He plays different roles, in myriad LA accents. He is mesmerizing.
He tells a spoken-word, beat-poet, staccato and syncopated and rhythmic story.
Rodney King said,
“Can we all get along?
“[…]
“We’ve got to quit. We’ve got to quit. You know, after all, I mean, I could understand the first two hours after the verdict, but to go on, to keep going on like this and to see that security guard shot on the ground.
“It’s just not right. It’s just not right, because those people will never go home to their families again, and I mean, please, we can get along here.
“We all can get along. We’ve just got to stop. You know, I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s, you know, let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to work it out.”
Spike Lee directed this joint.
Published by marco on 10. Feb 2024 20:02:17 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 11. Feb 2024 12:48:45 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The Forgotten Plight of the Negev Bedouin by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)
“[…] none of these harrowing facts have stopped the Zionist mobs of the West Bank from targeting Bedouin villages like that of Wadi al-Siq as part of their supposed revenge for the events of October 7th. That tiny collection of tin shacks clinging to the rugged mountainside east of Ramallah was surrounded by masked settlers and uniformed IDF reservists armed to the teeth with assault rifles and carved from the earth like a cancer from the face of God. Those men opened fire upon unarmed crowds, invaded homes and tied up and assaulted women and children in front of their husbands and fathers at gunpoint. Farmlands were torched, tractors and livestock were stolen, and the battered citizens of Wadi al-Siq were told that every last one of them would be annihilated if they ever returned.”
“The remaining 90,000 live in 46 villages, 35 of them are totally unrecognized by the Israeli government. Here the Bedouins have found themselves at the mercy of the all the very worst trappings of the state. Their movement is heavily policed by arbitrary checkpoints and mandatory IDs. Restrictive zoning and planning regimes have cut them off from basic recourses like water and electricity and barred them from building any infrastructure more substantial than trailers and tents. And they have faced an endless roulette of displacement with entire villages demolished overnight, paved over, and replaced by tony Jewish suburbs.”
“For centuries the Bedouins have struggled to maintain a way of life that predates the European concepts of Westphalia and Balfour, and they continue to stubbornly practice their stateless existence in a land thatched by arbitrary boundaries and manufactured hierarchies. In both Israel and Palestine, the Bedouins govern themselves under an ancient code of unwritten laws passed down orally and overseen by tribal courts and clan councils. They subsist largely on kinship networks that essentially act as Islamic mutual aid societies providing community support wherever it is needed.”
“[…] the Bedouins still choose overwhelmingly to rely on their own indigenous tribal justice systems rather than the racist Israeli police state or the Palestinian Authority’s corrupt Sharia courts and this is what makes these penniless peasants a threat to all of these institutions. The Bedouins don’t fucking need them, and they can still remember a time when the rest of the Middle East didn’t need them either.”
“[…] the most important fact that most westerners and even many Middle Easterners fail to recognize about the ongoing conquest of the Middle East is that the state itself is a tool of colonialism that is totally alien to those lands.”
“[…] the Arabs of the Levant weren’t just wiped out because they were brown, like the European Jews in Nazi Germany, they were wiped out because they initially refused to be governed. Sadly, many of the victims of the Nakba have embraced statehood for the same reasons that so many victims of the Holocaust did. Their collective memories of a life before states have been wiped out by the devastating trauma of genocidal colonialism.”
ICJ Rules Against Ukraine on Terrorism, MH17 by Joe Lauria (Scheer Post)
“The World Court ruled on Wednesday that Russia did not finance terrorism in its defense of separatists in Ukraine and the court refused to find Russia guilty of downing Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 as Ukraine had asked.”
“The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and a Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT) concluded in 2016 that the plane was shot down by ethnic Russian separatists using a missile supplied by Russia. Moscow has denied involvement in the incident. The ruling on MH17 came two weeks after the European Court of Justice decided that the Dutch government was not required to release information it has about the incident. The Dutch news outlet RTL Nieuws had brought the case before the ICJ.”
This is all so strange. Why is Russia charged when Ukrainian separatists shot it down? Why won’t the Dutch present evidence? I recall reading that the investigation was quite shady and biased, but I can’t remember where or when. I can’t imagine that the court ruled for Russia because of Russia’s influence at an international level—it has basically none.
The Silence of the Damned by Chris Hedges (Substack)
“The evidence-free charges, which include the accusation that 10 percent of all of UNRWA’s Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups, appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The reporter, Carrie-Keller Lynn, served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Given the numerous lies Israel has employed to justify its genocide, including “beheaded babies” and “mass rape,” it is reasonable to assume this may be another fabrication.”
“Some 400 doctors, nurses, medics and healthcare workers have been killed — more than the total of all healthcare workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since 2016. Over 100 more have been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers.”
“Noga Arbell, a former Israeli foreign ministry official, during a discussion in the Israeli parliament on Jan. 4, stated : “It will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA, and this destruction must begin immediately.” “UNRWA is an organization that perpetuates the problem of the Palestinian refugees,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2018. “It also perpetuates the narrative of the so-called ‘ right of return ’ with the aim of eliminating the State of Israel, and therefore UNRWA must disappear.””
“The deans of U.S. medical schools and leading medical organizations, especially the American Medical Association (AMA) have joined the ranks of universities, law schools, churches and the media to turn their backs on the Palestinians. The AMA shut down a debate on a ceasefire resolution among its members and has called for “medical neutrality,” although it abandoned “medical neutrality” to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
The AMA serves Empire.
“There is a striking contrast between the treatment of Dr. Marya and the physicians who cheer on the genocide. UCSF physician Matt Cooperberg, who is the Helen Diller Family Chair in Urology, ‘liked’ social media posts such as “REMOVE Palestinians FORM [sic] MAP” and a quote by former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir: “We are able to forgive the the [sic] arabs for killing our children. We are unable to forgive the arabs for forcing us to kill their children.””
Israel and Russia Have No Place in the 2024 Paris Olympics by Jules Boykoff & Dave Zirin (Jacobin)
“In November, an IOC spokesperson insisted that Russia presented “a unique situation and cannot be compared to any other war or conflict in the world.” The statement beggars belief. Both Russia and Israel are engaged in asymmetrical warfare, attacking civic infrastructure and private residences and leaving a long trail of civilian deaths and casualties.”
The authors’ statements beggars belief. Did you write this with only the NYT as a source? The Russian and Israeli conflicts are not in any way comparable as far as targeting civilians goes. The Russian conflict is grinding and illegal, but it has killed far, far fewer civilians than Israel’s conflict in Gaza, which seems to have the intent of killing civilians until the others run away.
“At all costs, IOC president Thomas Bach does not want to offend the United States, which is scheduled to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and is all but certain to host the 2034 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.”
Are you going to mention how ludicrous it is to speak of morals when the U.S. should have never—at least in my lifetime—been allowed to participate, by your own standards? Standards that I agree to, by the way! It’s just that we always hear about these standards in relation to any country that does not run the Empire where the journalist lives.
“There is no moral rationale undergirding the IOC’s hypocrisy when it comes to Israel and Russia.”
AND AMERICA MOST OF ALL. JFC. Blind spot much? The U.S. funds Israel. It’s bombing a dozen countries right now. Its drones are everywhere, killing indiscriminately. it sanctions dozens more to economic death. It just started a new war on Yemen. It is actively bombing the three poorest countries in the world. Russia is a piker in comparison.
“More recently, the IOC banned Afghanistan from the 2000 Sydney Olympics because the Taliban barred women from competing in sports.”
JFC. But never the U.S. And the authors don’t see fit to mention it.
“The IOC’s actions raise the question: Is there anything Russia or Israel could do that would get them banned from the Paris Games?”
The authors are really irritating me. I guess Nation writers really do work for empire.
“Zelensky is aware of the IOC’s pivotal role in all this. In February, he said , “The International Olympic Committee needs honesty,” but added, “honesty it has unfortunately lost.””
Now they’re citing that idiot like he matters. He’s a literal dictator. He has banned elections forever. There are no plans for elections in Ukraine. Most other political parties have been banned. Almost all media organizations have been banned. They’re conscripting soldiers. They bomb their own citizens. But, sure, let’s hear what he has to say about how the IOC is the biggest problem.
“The IOC, if it acted against Russia, would no doubt be accused of profound hypocrisy. There are many countries over the decades — such as the United States during the Vietnam War or the Iraq War — that deserved sanction and exclusion from the Olympics, but the IOC remained silent. To penalize Russia, they will argue, is nothing more than a double standard: US foreign policy wrapped in Olympic bunting.”
Finally. But his formulation indicates he’s going to dismiss this in the next few paragraphs.
“It’s about standing up to Russia and Israel because, whether the Olympic athlete wants it or not, their success would be folded into nationalism and the war effort.”
Bullshit. It’s about writing this article now rather when the U.S. invades. How does that statement not apply to the U.S.? HOW?
“We should demand consistency and accountability from the IOC. Now is the time for the group to abide by its own stated standards. Russia, in the name of Ukraine, has no place in the Games. Israel, in the name of Gaza, has no place in the Games.”
And the U.S. In the name of Yemen.
The Palestinians Won in The Hague: So Did the Rest of Us by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“As others have noted, 75 years of Israeli impunity will now draw to a close. Israel’s crimes can now be called Israel’s crimes. Contempt for the Zionist state can now be legitimately expressed.”
It no longer takes a special amount of courage, is what you mean, I suppose, though I’m not sure how true that is, given the extreme pro-Zionist bent in the U.S. right now. Recall that the U.S. Congress decided just a couple of months ago that anti-Zionism is now considered to be anti-Semitism.
Decolonize This: an interview with Sai Englert by Susie Day (CounterPunch)
“There’s an amazing 1960s interview of Malcolm X, who was asked about an attack on settlers by the Mau Mau in Kenya. He says that the Mau Mau aren’t attacking; they’re defending themselves – they’re always defending themselves, because they’re always within a structure based on their continuous dispossession.”
“We can’t understand October 7 without thinking about the fact that 77% of the population of Gaza are already refugees; that Palestinians in Gaza have spent 18 years under military occupation, in which the Israeli state talked about “putting them on a diet, but not letting them starve,” about “mowing the lawn” by regularly bombing them and committing horrendous atrocities. In terms of future responses, we should say that what’s happening in Gaza can only generate much more unspeakable horrors, as long as there isn’t a real and fundamental liberation.”
“The antisemitism argument is more straightforward. It wasn’t the choice of Palestinians to be colonized in the name of a religion or ethnic group. To recast their opposition to that colonization as antisemitism, I think, is extremely dangerous. There’s a real danger in how Western states and Israel are hiding their policies behind a kind of a defense of Jewish people.”
“Sai Englert: Most people don’t want to acknowledge that, since 1967, Israel has been one state, ruling the whole of Historic Palestine, as well as the Golan Heights and, for a period, the Sinai Desert. But it’s an apartheid, colonial state. Really, at the heart of the Palestinian liberation movement is a demand for its democratization – if there is going to be one state, it should rule by one-person-one-vote; not by ethnic supremacy. But Israel continues to expand its settlements; it continues to be allowed to. So why would Israel stop?”
“The majority of Palestinians live outside of Palestine – another way in which Palestine is a regional affair. Most Jordanians are Palestinians; in Lebanon, large populations still living in camps are Palestinian; in Syria, there are Palestinian camps; most in Gaza are refugees…”
Why Legal Immigration Is Impossible for Nearly Everyone by David J. Bier (Cato Institute)
“Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: it happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.”
“Barely one in 5,000 displaced persons will be admitted to the United States under the refugee program.”
“The diversity lottery has four basic rules:”
- Applicants must show that they can support themselves at or above the poverty line
- Applicants must have at least a high school degree or work experience in a job typically requiring a college degree
- Only people from countries from which fewer than 50,000 people immigrated to the United States in the last five years can apply (excluding a majority of the world’s population)
- There are only 55,000 slots awarded through an annual lottery. The chances of winning the lottery and getting a green card have plummeted more than 90 percent since the first lottery was held in 1995.
“[…] nearly all employer‐sponsored green cards go to people already in the United States who can start working on a temporary work visa, such as the H‑1B visa, much sooner while they go through the lengthy green card process. But the H‑1B visa is capped at just 85,000. The odds of winning the lottery and ultimately getting an H‑1B visa were just 16 percent in 2022. But the even bigger problem for potential immigrants is that the H‑1B visa requires a bachelor’s degree, and only 10 percent of the world’s population has a bachelor’s degree.”
“Even if you have a bachelor’s degree, win the lottery, and convince the employer to pay for the green card processing, the employment‐based annual cap is massively oversubscribed. There was a backlog of about 1.4 million in 2020 for a cap of just 140,000 [H-1B visas].”
“[…] the system is restrictive compared with demand. Nearly 32 million people tried to receive a green card in 2018, while just 1 million were successful, and most could not even try the process.”
“The United States ranks in the bottom third of wealthy countries for foreign‐born share of the population. Even if it accepted 70 million immigrants tomorrow, it would still not surpass the likes of Australia.”
“We would rather see the Middle East become a parking lot […] than see Trump get reelected. We are not getting another candidate.”
People expressed hope that we have to continue the pressure to get what we want. Although it’s easier to retreat into the reassuring hopelessness of cynicism, I, too, feel like something might be categorically different this time. The rulers have lost control of the narrative, at least to some degree. They’re making a lot of unforced errors that they haven’t made before. It won’t matter if too much time passes, so continued pressure is a good recommendation. Continue to make them say the quiet part out loud. At least some part of history will record it, and perhaps make them pay. Although it’s hard not the cynicism creep back in, the one engendered by knowing how it went down the last ten times.
Verdicts Are Supposed To Be Special by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“Law moves slowly to avoid catastrophe, even if it’s a fiasco in its current state. The alternative to bad isn’t necessarily…well, you know. But the only two parties to a criminal trial who support the status quo of general verdicts, judges and prosecutors, can’t manage to muster any justification that it somehow benefits the defense.
“It would seem obvious why judges and prosecutors would favor a general over a special verdict. It creates far greater opportunity for the jury to find that the proof didn’t withstand scrutiny, as any failure of evidence would be sufficient to change the end result. No longer would a jury easily gloss over the logical leaps and evidentiary gaps to get to the verdict they feel is right. If the prosecution didn’t have the goods, it would stare back at them from the special verdict sheet.
“Perhaps more importantly, it would open a whole new arena of potential reversible era, from the preparation of the special verdict sheet that misstates or omits an element to inconsistent verdicts that compel reversal altogether. But then, getting it right is what the job is about, and getting it wrong is exactly why special verdicts would be a vast improvement over the current general jury verdict. This is a big idea and needs to get some serious traction.”
Biden Says The US “Does Not Seek Conflict In The Middle East” While Actively Dropping Bombs There by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“In reality, “it really doesn’t matter” whether Iran was behind the attack because Iran is the most powerful non-US-aligned state in the middle east, and for that reason the US has spent generations seizing every opportunity to harm and subvert it and its interests in the region. This is just one more opportunity for the US empire to do what it always does in the middle east.”
“It is a bit odd, then, that the US president announced the beginning of this new series of airstrikes with a statement which claims “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.” Conflict in the middle east is what the US empire does. The entire US empire is held together by endless conflict, especially in resource-rich regions where strategic control is necessary to retain planetary hegemony. The US empire is conflict.”
Biden wrote that because he believes it. A conflict involves two sides fighting. The U.S. absolutely doesn’t seek conflict, it seeks hegemony. Conflict is the dirty bit that arises when its targets refuse to acquiesce immediately. So, it’s true that Biden doesn’t seek conflict. He’d rather just be able to plunder without any resistance at all. Conflict is what arises when a U.S. attack is answered. The U.S.. certainly doesn’t seek that.
I would amend what Caitlin wrote to say that “Aggression in the middle east is what the US empire does. The entire US empire is held together by endless aggression.”
Gaza Delenda Est by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“The Israeli dossier against UNRWA was based largely on interrogations, likely involving torture, by Mossad and Shin Bet of Gazans seized on October 7. The allegations had not been verified when they hit the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times; yet, the US immediately suspended funding for UNRWA, the primary source of food and shelter for 1.6 million displaced Gazans. The US’s rash decision was swiftly followed by 14 other nations.”
It’s the result they were all looking for. The Empire hasn’t gotten the memo yet that, what to them looks like legitimate and solid evidence and proof, looks like a fantastical and ludicrously unbelievable web of lies and fabrications to everyone who’s not drunk the Kool-aid. No-one with a modicum of sense—or who is at-all interested in what is actually happening rather than having their bellies rubbed by Israel—believes anything the Mossad, Shin Bet, or any part of the IDF has to say. They may have actually tortured people into saying the things that they reported that they heard said. But that seems like an awful lot of work when you could just make up whatever you want and it will be reported just as loudly and unquestioningly. So, just do that, instead. You get to go home earlier.
The important thing is that you’ve all pretended to care about having justifiable reasons for cutting off funding for the only aid organization who’s had any ability to get food, water, sanitation, and medical assistance to the population of Gaza. They all clap each other on the back for a job well done in ensuring that the people of Gaza will starve or dehydrate or die of otherwise easily treatable diseases and medical conditions. It’s a lot more efficient to let nature claim their failing bodies than to shoot each and every one of them. Biden can only sneak so many munitions past Congress.
Even stupid Switzerland cut off funding, probably because it’s afraid of being accused of being a bunch of terrorist-loving anti-semites. Belgium didn’t cut off funding and their entire building in Gaza was coincidentally bombed by Israel today. No-one died because they’d pulled out their staff two weeks ago, but now they definitely don’t have a place to back to. Was it a strategic target? No, not a classically strategic target in that it could have served any Palestinian military purpose, but it was a powerful message to send to the other countries that those who don’t follow along with the Don’s orders will pay the consequences. Pay your protection money and nothing will happen to you.
St. Clair listed the countries that have cut off aid funding to UNRWA in Palestine based on an Israeli allegation:
It’s kind of sad to see the sweet naivité of these poor, deluded nations that still believe everything that Israel says without any proof. But the person being scammed always kind of wants to be scammed, if they keep falling for it.
And what’s really going to be fun is having to put up with all of the hand-wringing years from now, about how no-one could have known how bad it was or how bad is was going to get. That they’d been duped, despite their best intentions. They’ll demand forgiveness for all, and no loss of status or fortune for anyone important. ‘How could this have happened?’ they’ll ask in plaintive tones. How could Israel have fooled us so badly? No-one could have guessed how this would turn out. It will be so very tiresome as we watch every one of these reprehensible people fail upward into every more powerful and well-remunerated positions.
“There are two UN refugee agencies, UNCHR and UNRWA. in 1948 Israel’s Western backers wanted UNRWA to exist separately from the main UN Refugee Agency because Israel wanted to settle Jews from Europe in Israel without being forced to allow Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they had just fled from at gunpoint.”
“Mustafa Barghouti in an interview with the German magazine Taz:
“Taz: What do you expect from Europe?
“Barghouti: Nothing.
“Taz” Not even sanctions?
“Barghouti: You have imposed thousands of sanctions on Putin, but at the same time you are vacationing in AirBnBs in the settlements. You no longer have any credibility.
“Taz: Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Do you think this is the right word to describe this war?
“Barghouti: This is a question for you.
“Taz: What do you mean?
“Barghouti: Can I quote Elie Wiesel? In every war, there are three categories: the murderers, the victims and those who stand and watch. One day you will ask: where have you been?
“….
“Barghouti: What is the problem? That the barbed wire has been broken or that this barbed wire exists? I’m a doctor and I don’t focus on the symptoms but on the causes. October 7th is a symptom. Hamas itself is a symptom. In 1948…
“Taz: No, please don’t start with 1948. We know the story. Let’s stick with current developments.
“Barghouti: If you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer. It looks like I’m trying to dodge questions, but it’s you who’s dodging answers.”
“Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, clinics, water treatment plants & 60% of its homes, but 80% of the “tunnels” it claims to be targeting remain intact, according to the Wall Street Journal. I guess the tunnels need to remain intact to justify bombing the rest of Gaza’s homes.”
I just thought of something: what if Hamas would arrange to hand all of its hostages over to NATO or some other coalition that represents most, if not all, of Israel’s enablers? The hostages are a moral liability for Hamas right now. But they can’t just give them back to Israel because Israel will just continue with their bombing and nothing will have been won with the hostages’ return. What could be won, though? Holding onto them is moral blight, and it’s not winning them anything. They got a few hundred prisoners back, but Israel just kidnapped even more people the next day. That’s a dead-end. Giving them back is a dead-end. But turning them over to, say, Germany, England or the U.S. would put the recipient into a bit of a quandary, no? Their instinct would be to just return them to Israel, but they couldn’t just do so without gaining even more opprobrium from the rest of the rest of the world. They would be even more complicit if they just handed them back to Israel without extracting any promise of a ceasefire—since, without the hostages, Israel would no longer have a reason to continue their assault.
“Tariq Ali: “Why are the Houthis the most popular force in much of the non-Western world? Because they have taught other Arab states the meaning of real solidarity as compared to meaningless bullshit. Expanding the war to Yemen or Iran will backfire badly.””
“Stephen Walt: “Even I seem to have underestimated Washington’s ability to keep making the same foreign policy mistakes no matter who is in the White House.””
“On Tuesday morning an undercover Israeli military unit (ie., death squad)—dressed as doctors and women in civilian clothing— entered Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin and assassinated three Palestinian young men using silenced firearms. […]
“One of the people the IDF death squad assassinated was an 18-year-old boy named Bassel Ghazzawi, who was “shot in the head at point-blank range.” Ghazzawi had been in the hospital for almost four months, after his back was shattered by missile fragments from an Israeli drone strike, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.”
“This is clearly a war crime, but when asked about whether this was appropriate for a nation getting US arms and financial aid, State Dept. flack Matthew Miller said: “We think it is appropriate that they [Israel] have the ability to bring members of Hamas to justice.””
Just when you think that they couldn’t stoop any lower…
“Craig Mokhiber: “The new strategy of Israel’s Western allies and co-opted international institutions is to return to the status quo ante, resume the two-state smokescreen, recognize a bantustan, leave the root causes in place and oppose accountability for the genocidaires. A formula for more hell.””
“Ralph Nader: “The U.S. conflicts in the Middle East keep escalating. What are our soldiers doing at a remote post in Jordan—with 35 more U.S. military installations in the backyards of these countries—that the American people are required to fund without their knowledge? This is Empire.””
“In early December, 82-year-old Israeli Fahamiya Khalidi fled her home after it was shelled by IDF for the safety of a nearby school. The school was soon raided by Israeli troops and Khalidi, who has Alzheimer’s, was arrested as an “unlawful combatant” and jailed in Damon Prison in northern Israel, where she was held without access to an attorney for two weeks, until being freed after an appeal by Physicians for Human Rights.”
Do these people not have mothers? Jesus Christ, I thought I was a heartless sonofabitch.
“This week Hidaya Ahmad, the director of volunteers at the Red Crescent Society, was shot and killed by the IDF in the office of the Red Crescent Society in Khan Younis.”
They probably just sniped her through a window, like in a video game. What possible reason could you have for killing this woman? Was she a sleeper agent of Hamas? Really?
“The last words this week will be left to Marie-Aure Perreault Revial, emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who described her experience working in the emergency department of Al-Aqsa Shohada Hospital in central Gaza […]”“By the end of December, the team in our wound-dressing unit were seeing on average 150 patients per day, almost all with burns or blast injuries. Many were children. One of our surgeons told me about dressing the wounds of babies who had lost their legs. It stayed with him. Babies who had never learned to walk, and never will. Some of those children have a new acronym written on their file. “WCNSF”, which stands for Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.
“Salma*, nine years old, is one of thousands of WCNSF. She suffered a fractured skull after her house was shelled. One of her legs was broken, the other had been amputated. We met her in the intensive care unit. She still didn’t know that she was the only one who made it out of the rubble alive: the exhausted staff wanted to let her recover physically first.”
However Bad You Think Israel Is, It’s Worse by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“There’s no valid basis for westerners to object to Putin being interviewed by a western pundit. There’s no moral basis because Israeli officials have had unfettered access to a wildly sympathetic western press throughout four months of administering an active genocide. There’s no basis on the grounds that it hurts US information interests, because that would be admitting that US information interests depend on hiding information from the public about matters as basic as what a foreign leader thinks about his own actions, and essentially acknowledging that the western media are supposed to function as propaganda services for US military and intelligence agencies.”
Agreed. I can’t imagine Tucker Carlson will do a better job than Oliver Stone did in his masterful interview series from 2017. Check out my reviews for E01, E02, E03, and E04.
“US foreign policy is essentially one big long war against disobedience. Bombing, regime changing, starving and destabilizing any population anywhere on earth who dares to insist on its own self-sovereignty instead of letting itself be absorbed into the folds of the global empire.
“They call different parts of it the Israel-Hamas War, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, but really it’s all the same war: the war on disobedience. One long operation to brutalize the global population into obedience and submission, year after year, decade after decade.”
“Biden isn’t technically lying when he says the US does not seek conflict in the middle east. The US seeks DOMINATION in the middle east, and would prefer to receive that domination willingly from submissive subjects. Only when middle easterners refuse to submit is there conflict.”
This is the same point I made above, in response to another of her posts. Submission to “American interests.”
“The political/media class never does the right thing because it wants to, it does the right thing when it is forced to by normal human beings with healthy consciences. The fate of humanity rests on the ability of ordinary people to freely circulate truth.”
Jeremy Scahill was absolutely en fuego in this 90-minute interview. I’ve cleaned up the YouTube transcript—it gets most of the words, but includes verbal tics, has no punctuation, has a very cavalier attitude toward capitalization, and simply will not transcribe certain words correctly. Anyway, Jeremy and Briahna had a great conversation about terrible, terrible topics.
At around 24:00 they talk about the circumstances surrounding the recent defunding of UNRWA.
“Jeremy It’s hard to shock me. The Wall Street Journal on Monday, as all of this is happening, and the focus is on: there were 12 UNRWA employees that Israel…
Briahna Out of 30,000, by the way we should say that it’s a huge agency. That represented 0.04% of all employees, but go ahead I’m sorry
Jeremy […] I mean it has this has such whiffs of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which was based on lies. But the Wall Street Journal puts on its main web page—right at the top—what purports to be an article based on what they call an intelligence dossier, that says that it’s far greater a problem than just these 12 individuals. That, in fact, a full 10% of UNRWA employees are connected to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.“And, when you read down…so: “intelligence dossier.” It’s like I was having flashbacks to the Christopher Steele, Russia-gate stuff. But also to Judith Miller mushroom-cloud stuff, because if you dig into the article, what they’re saying is that the Israeli government provided this information to the United States government and then the Wall Street Journal was able to review it.
“And, you know, it’s all basically guilt by innuendo. And, you know, it was devastating because then—you know, people don’t read, they don’t check facts—it just becomes—even in the liberal comment-sphere—it became like, ‘see! This is, it’s not just a few bad apples! This is pervasive throughout the organization.‘
“The lead author of that Wall Street Journal piece is herself a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, who has boasted that her closest friend basically created the social-media strategy of the IDF. So, it basically was laundering, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, an insidious, violent, propaganda campaign being implemented by a government that just had a devastating set of rulings issued against it for plausible violations of the genocide convention, in service of trying to further starve the people of Gaza.
“And that narrative, that was set last week and then doubled down on by The Wall Street Journal, is now becoming the dominant narrative and Anthony Blinken—on Tuesday, Bri!—was asked about the evidence and he said publicly that the United States had not done its own investigation, but that the allegations are very, very credible. I mean: think about that statement. For America’s top diplomat to admit to the world that we didn’t bother to actually do our own investigation before we cut off funding to the most vital humanitarian organization operating in a country that is now under the watch of the world court for a potential genocide. That is the top diplomat of the United States saying we didn’t bother to even look into this ourselves.
“We just believe notorious liars who have lied from the moment that this thing started, who have lied for decades about the Palestinians, whose entire worldview is: dehumanize Arabs, dehumanize Palestinians, treat them as human animals. The United States is taking the word of that government to cut off funding to basically the only force in Gaza able to provide any meaningful aid and medical care right now, to a people that are could well be found to be victims of genocide. This is, on a moral level, … I find it difficult to imagine a more immoral stance than that which the United States is taking at this moment on this issue.”
At 33:00 Jeremy talks about how accusing people who live in Gaza—as so many employees of UNRWA do—of knowing people in Hamas is utter nonsense, Of course they know people in Hamas; Hamas is the local government.
“So when you say—as the Wall Street Journal is alleging, based on this the laundering of Israeli so-called intelligence—that 10% of these people had connections to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, I’m sure the number is far greater than that. Because what do you mean by connection? Hamas is not just Qassam Brigade. Hamas is the ruling authority, whether you like them or not. They pick up the trash. They provide civil services. The laziness is also part of the banality of evil. The laziness among the public, who don’t even bother to check—well, what does that even mean? When I read ‘people are connected to Hamas,’ it’s like, well, of course, they are. This isn’t some scary smoking gun that you’ve produced for us. Hamas is much more complicated than the Qassam brigades and October 7th. This is a long story.”
At 46:00 Jeremy cautions Briahna to be careful about dismissing all claims of rape on October 7th, Just because there are some spectacular lies going around doesn’t mean nothing happened. It warrants a sober and serious investigation. Soldiers rape. They generally do it once they’ve occupied an area, not when they’re flying by in jeeps in a four-hour sortie, but it’s still possible. But we have to hear from the victims, no people who claim they saw victims. But we have to continue to listen and not close off. Israelis can be and are victims, too. Don’t stoop to the level of the worst of their government’s speakers.
“I think, on the one hand, we have the propaganda campaign, which clearly is riddled with lies, exaggerations, and is aimed at enforcing a dehumanization narrative that Israel hopes will continue to justify by its mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. On the other hand, you have—I’m sure you have civil servants in Israel and and people who work with survivors and victims of sexual violence that really do actually want to solve alleged crimes. And all I’m cautioning is that we be careful with running away with our own narratives.”
At 52:00 Jeremy says discusses how the Israeli government’s tactic of making it seem like Arabs are so barbarous that would rape anything is backfiring on them, for exactly the reasons listed above. In fact, Briahna’s amount of sympathy is noticeably limited.
“If you just look at this exclusively through the lens of justice for victims, this conduct is contaminating the investigation. On the other side of this is part of a campaign to dehumanize Arabs and particularly Arab men/ It is an attempt to portray the enemy as savage barbarians who murder, loot, rape, and pillage for the sake of those things rather than that they’re engaged in an attack that from their perspective is one battle in a 75-year war for liberation. People say accuse me of being pro-Hamas. If you go back and look at everything I’ve ever said about Hamas, all I do is state factual information about Hamas and that somehow is being pro-Hamas. No. It’s journalistic malpractice not to explain the stated intent or the response to allegations by a party that we’re being told is tantamount to the Nazis and Isis. It’s journalistically responsible to say ‘hey, we’re being told these guys are the new Nazis. Let’s do some fact-checking. Why don’t we see if that’s actually true. This is basic journalism.”
At 01:01:00 Jeremy talks more about journalistic malpractice, about how deferential the US media is to Israel’s narrative,
“The dominant sort of tone is always—the number one rule is “deference to Israel’s narrative”. That is the number one rule of how to cover anything involving Israel. You must refer to the narrative of the Israeli State […] I think that large American news organizations have done an immense disservice to the public in the way that they’ve covered this war, in general. But also dozens upon dozens of our colleagues have been murdered and their family members have been killed. […] Our colleagues are being murdered in broad daylight.
“[…] there is good journalism that’s out there. I just think that that the drum-beat coverage that we see to facilitate wars, all the lies that were repeated early on, when independent journalists were questioning them—you we’ve talked about a lot of them today—they were going along with it. CNN promoted many of the most outlandish, obscene lies that Israel was deploying immediately to try to justify the slaughter that Netanyahu always knew he wanted to unleash on Gaza.”
Finally, at 01:14:00 Jeremy talks about how offensive it is for Biden to even be running for president, and how hollow it is for flacks like AOC to be shilling for him.
“Make an argument why people whose families have been murdered with American bombs—with the full support of the American political establishment—why they should be voting for Joe Biden, the man who has single-handedly made this all possible for Israel to do. My answer to AOC is: don’t run around telling people like me why we should vote for for Biden. Let’s hear you publicly make the case why a Palestinian voter in this country—whose loved ones have been murdered—why should they be voting for Joe Biden and why should they be declaring that support in January of 2024 when the election is 11 months away?”
Biden demands “immediate” passage of $118 billion World War III/anti-immigrant package by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)
“The bill does not include a “pathway to citizenship” for “Dreamers”—the nearly 3 million undocumented migrants who were brought to the US as children. For over a decade, dreamers have been forced to pay a fee and submit personal information to the immigration agencies every two years in order to stay in the US, despite the fact many of them have no memory of anything outside the US.
“Instead of expanding citizenship, the bill greatly expands the surveillance and detention of migrants within the country as their claims are processed. At least $3.2 billion is earmarked just to ICE for detaining immigrants.”
“While the text of the bill contains strict limits for any “humanitarian” funding that does trickle into Gaza, the bill contains no provisions that would require enhanced scrutiny of military aid to Israel even as it uses the bombs, artillery shells and missiles provided by the US to slaughter civilians and children by the thousands.”
The Western Press Are Just Printing Straight Up Nazi Propaganda About Middle Easterners Now by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“On Monday the Guardian published a political cartoon which would be indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda of the 1930s, except that it happens to depict a Muslim instead of a Jew.”
“The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Steven Stalinsky titled “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital” about the Michigan city which is home to the largest per capita Muslim population in the United States.”
These newspapers just get away with the most libelous, racist messaging because no-one really cares about all of that touchy-feely equality stuff. The Wall Street Journal can basically just call all of Dearborn a pile of un-American sand-ni##ers and it’s just fine. No-one important bats an eye. This is the leading financial newspaper in the country basically writing “You know how those people are.”
“In the last few days The Wall Street Journal has also published editorial board pieces with demented headlines like “Chicago Votes for Hamas” after the Chicago City Council voted to support a ceasefire in Gaza, and “The U.N.’s War on Israel” about the since-discredited narrative that some UNRWA staff are known to have participated in the October 7 attack.”
Israel poised to expand war against Hezbollah in Lebanon by Peter Symonds (WSWS)
“Fighting along Israel’s northern border has been underway for months since the eruption of the war in Gaza on October 7, including strikes by Israel and Hezbollah on virtually a daily basis. Israeli attacks have killed at least 177 Hezbollah fighters and 40 others, including 19 civilians, three of whom were journalists. Nine Israeli soldiers and reservists have been killed, along with six civilians. Some 76,000 civilians in Lebanon have been displaced by the conflict, as well as 80,000 Israelis.”
“Hezbollah dismissed proposals for its withdrawal to the north as unrealistic given that many of its fighters are from areas of southern Lebanon close to Israel. Last week, Hezbollah deputy secretary general Naim Qassem declared: “The party is not interested in any discussion at present over Israeli demands regarding the southern front… Our position is clear: an end to the war on Gaza will automatically close the Lebanese front.””
US Blocks Yemen-Saudi Peace Deal by Dave DeCamp (AntiWar.com)
“The US decision to re-designate the Houthis as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists” will block the payment of public sector workers living in Houthi-controlled Yemen, who have gone without pay for years.
“[…]
“The first phase of the peace deal would also fully open Yemen’s airports and sea ports that have been under blockade since 2015, another aspect of the deal that will be complicated by the new US sanctions, which will go into effect later this month.
“A US official told the Times that the US would only allow the payment of Yemeni civil salaries if the Houthis choose the path of “peace” […]”
The US Keeps Bombing People While Saying It Doesn’t Want To Fight by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“US military advisors have been deployed to Kinmen, a group of Taiwan-controlled islands so close to the Chinese mainland that in the late sixties giant loudspeakers were built there to blast anti-communist propaganda over the water into the PRC.
“Contrast this move with a recent headline from The Times saying “China opens Antarctic base on America’s doorstep,” which will show up as self-evidently nonsensical to anyone who has ever looked at a globe. It’s taken as a given that the US is entitled to amass a military presence right on China’s coastline, but the idea of China establishing a presence literally anywhere on planet Earth is interpreted as extreme aggressions on “America’s doorstep”.”
“[…] at just three kilometers away the Kinmen islands are closer to mainland China than Martha’s Vineyard is to the coast of Massachusetts. If China came anywhere near amassing any kind of military presence that close to the United States, it would be considered an act of war and the US would attack immediately.”
“[…] if at any point China decides that too many of its red lines have been crossed and it needs to act before it’s too late, the US will with absolute certainty have a melodramatic fit about China’s unprovoked attack on the poor innocent US military presence on its border.”
“The US empire exists at an oddly contradictory point in history when our society no longer considers it acceptable to be a might-makes-right strongman dominator, and yet that’s precisely the sort of disposition you need to have when you’re an empire held together by endless military violence and the threat thereof.
“So you get weird nonsense like US officials bombing the shit out of the middle east while proclaiming they have no interest in war, and engaging in extremely reckless aggressions against nuclear-armed rivals while pretending they’re just innocent witnesses to unprovoked aggressions if those nations respond.”
Die Wohnung ist ein soziales Gut, kein Spekulationsobjekt – doch was kümmert es die Eigentümer? by Frank Blenz (NachDenkSeiten)
“Spott macht sich breit, die Mieter verbrauchen zwar nicht mehr, dennoch müsste viel nachgezahlt werden – die Bürger sind, ach Gottchen, in die Falle von Angebot und Nachfrage getappt. Dem nicht genug, die Mietpreiskurve zeigt weiter in eine Richtung – nach oben. Wer macht Kasse? Wer stützt das? Wer unterbindet das nicht? Was unter anderem zu unternehmen wäre, zeigt eine Forderung aus dem Vogtland.”
Germany’s energy market looks a lot like Texas’s.
Bidens LNG-Moratorium ist ein Wirtschaftskrieg gegen Deutschland by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Grund für die Exportbeschränkungen dürfte vielmehr ein drohendes Überangebot von LNG auf dem Weltmarkt sein, das dazu führen würde, dass auch in der EU und allen voran Deutschland die Gaspreise mittel- bis langfristig sinken könnten. Heute beziehen US-Unternehmen Gas für rund ein Viertel des Preises ihrer deutschen Konkurrenz – vor allem für die Chemiebranche ist dies ein gigantischer Standortvorteil. Und das soll nach dem Willen Bidens auch so bleiben.”
“Was heißt das für Deutschland? Ist mit einer Gasmangellage zu rechnen? Nein. Das vergangene Jahr hat gezeigt, dass die deutschen Importeure auch im internationalen Wettbewerb auf dem Spotmarkt genügend LNG einkaufen können – dies jedoch zu hohen Preisen. Die konkrete Folge des Moratoriums ist, dass sich daran so schnell nichts ändern wird. Der Weltmarktpreis bleibt hoch, da das Angebot nicht mit der Nachfrage mitziehen kann.”
“Mittel- bis langfristig werden also deutsche Versorger weiterhin zu sehr hohen Preisen LNG aus den USA kaufen. Würden die LNG-Kapazitäten erweitert, würde man zwar immer noch den Großteil des LNG in den USA kaufen – dies jedoch zu niedrigeren Preisen. Das Moratorium läuft also darauf hinaus, dass die USA nicht mehr LNG exportieren, sondern für ihre LNG-Exporte mehr Geld kassieren.”
“Für die USA ist dies eine Win-Win-Situation. US-Industriekunden zahlen schon heute nur rund ein Viertel für Gas als Energieträger wie ihre deutsche Konkurrenz. Und daran wird sich nun erst mal auch nichts ändern. Bidens Dekret ist somit eine direkte wirtschaftliche Kriegserklärung gegen Deutschland, eine Wirtschafssanktion zur Stärkung der amerikanischen Industrie und zur Schwächung ihrer deutschen Konkurrenz.”
“Indem er das Moratorium mit umwelt- und klimapolitischen Bedenken begründet, nimmt er insbesondere den deutschen Grünen gleich den Wind aus den Segeln. Rein sachlich hat Biden natürlich recht, doch man sollte nun auch nicht so tun, als hätte die Biden-Regierung plötzlich ihr Herz für die Umwelt und das Klima entdeckt. It’s the economy, stupid. Die USA befinden sich im Wirtschaftskrieg gegen Deutschland und Deutschland verliert diesen Krieg.”
How Private Equity Was Born by Doug Henwood (Jacobin)
“These new large firms were marked by what later would be called the separation of ownership from control. The official owners were outside investors, stockholders, who could sell those shares to other investors if they liked but they had little influence over corporate policy. That was set by an increasingly professionalized caste of formally trained managers. The first US business school, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton, was founded in 1881, and over the next couple of decades others sprang to life, including Harvard’s in 1908. The professionals’ victory wasn’t complete; financial operators still played a big role in what we call today corporate governance — how firms are run and for whom.”
“Legal scholars and economists began reflecting on what it meant that shareholders were now mostly millions of dispersed individuals — concentrated among the affluent, of course, but incapable of communicating with each other about the companies they owned — and managers were largely free to run their firms. Sure, dissatisfied shareholders could sell their stock, but they had no leverage over their hired managerial hands.”
“[…] these institutional stock owners were roused to action, led by the buyout artists who would become the commanders of the shareholder revolution. Their organizing revolutionary doctrine was that getting profits up, and therefore stock prices, was the only point of business enterprise; all notions of responsibility and stakeholdership should be junked in favor of pure profit maximization.”
“[…] turmoil had a lasting effect on class relations. The challenge of servicing large debts meant firms had to hammer away at costs, and for most, their major cost is labor. Wage-cutting and mass layoffs hammered working-class living standards and self-confidence. For the dwindling number of workers with unions, concessions became the norm, and workers were often grateful to have a job at all. That deferential reflex persisted for decades and may only now be lifting.”
“Typically, they run the firms they own for a few years, cutting costs and rearranging their components, and then sell them, either to the public in a stock offering or to another private equity firm. Also typically, PE operators load the firms they own up with debt to pay themselves fees and dividends. These are not meant to be long-term relationships. The idea is to contribute as little as possible, extract as much as possible, and “exit” (the term of art) a few years later.”
“Over the last couple of decades, PE has left a pile of corporate corpses in its wake, with some of its highest-profile victims in retail. Many shopping mall stalwarts who’ve disappeared over the last decade or two — most notoriously, Toys”R”Us — were driven under by PE’s depredations. You could argue that the decline of brick-and-mortar retail meant these stores were doomed anyway, but it’s not clear why vulture investors should drink their last drops of blood rather than the workers.”
Solar is a market for (financial) lemons by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“Rooftop solar is the future, but it’s also a scam. It didn’t have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it’s in terrible trouble. which means we are in terrible trouble.”
“As capitalism’s champions (and apologists) have observed since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, markets harness together the work of thousands or even millions of strangers in pursuit of a common goal, without all those people having to agree on a single approach or plan of action. Merely dangle the incentive of profit before the market’s teeming participants and they will align themselves towards it, like iron filings all snapping into formation towards a magnet. But markets have a problem: they are prone to “reward hacking.””
“Markets are very efficient at mobilizing capital for growth opportunities. America has a lot of rooftop solar. But 70% of that solar isn’t owned by the homeowner – it’s owned by a solar company, which is to say, “a finance company that happens to sell solar”.”
“And markets are very efficient at reward hacking. The point of any market is to multiply capital. If the only way to multiply the capital is through building solar, then you get solar. But the finance sector specializes in making the capital multiply as much as possible while doing as little as possible on the solar front. Huge chunks of those federal subsidies were gobbled up by junk-fees and other financial tricks – sometimes more than 100%.”
“All markets will do is create incentives to cheat. Think of the market for “carbon offsets,” which were supposed to substitute markets for direct regulation, and which produced a fraud-riddled market for lemons that sells indulgences to our worst polluters, who go on destroying our planet and our future.”
When well-intended environmentalism backfires by Mike Riggs (Reason)
“Except the trees they were planting were all the same species, water-thirsty and highly flammable, neatly spaced six feet apart. “Much later, I learned that the trees we were planting, black spruce, are so combustible that firefighters call them gas on a stick. The trees evolved to burn: They have flammable sap, and their resin-filled cones open up when heated to drop seeds into charred soil.” To make matters more complicated still, the tree-planting program was managed by private timber companies but driven by government incentives.”
The Real Reason Your Grocery Bill Is Still So High by Sonali Kolhatkar (CounterPunch)
“[…] inflation in the grocery industry has been higher than in other industries, rising 25 percent over the past four years compared to 19 percent overall, and many have pointed to simple greed as the reason: food prices are high because the companies setting prices think they can get away with padding their profits. Since we all have to eat, naturally this hits lower-income families harder, rather like a regressive tax. A new report by the Groundwork Collaborative found that in 2022, “consumers in the bottom quintile of the income spectrum spent 25 percent of their income on groceries, while those in the highest quintile spent under 3.5 percent.””
“[…] many of these fixes [e.g., SNAP] are workarounds to compensate for the massive monopolistic corporatization of our food industry. Recall the point that the Washington Post made with little additional analysis: “consolidation in the industry gives large chains the ability to keep prices high.” The fact is that only a handful of corporations control the majority of our food system. We are all at the mercy of a small number of big companies. And, unless we make serious systemic changes to our food systems, we will remain so.”
“Lawmakers and corporate media outlets are so attached to the idea that food producers and distributors deserve massive profits in exchange for controlling our food supply, that a justice-based approach of de-growth rarely enters their discourse. Rather than the rich eating us (and our wallets), it’s time for us to eat the rich.”
In their defense, the politicians are also making a lot of money off of this system. If they kowtow to the right corporations, their reelection is almost guaranteed. If they get reelected, they keep getting paid. If they keep structuring things so the large corporations make money, they get reelected. Everybody wins.
Why US Government Statistics are Like the Bible by Jack Rasmus (CounterPunch)
“Here we keep getting a monthly unemployment rate of 3.7% (for the last three months). But that 3.7% is what is called the U-3 unemployment rate. That rate, unfortunately, is for full time workers only! The US civilian labor force is about 167 million. Maybe 40-50m of that total labor force is part time workers, temps, gig workers (grossly underestimate btw), independent contractors (who are actually workers not small businesses), etc.
“And if one looks at the CPS survey again, there’s a statistic called the U-6 unemployment rate. That’s at 8%, not 3.7%, in the January jobs report.”
“The mainstream US media likes to hype and report the 353,000 January and 3.1m 2023 jobs, and the 3.7% unemployment rate and 6.1m jobless. You’ll see that published virtually everywhere. But elsewhere in the same government stats there’s the -1,070,000 January and 820,000 2023 jobs and the 8% unemployment rate and the 14m jobless.”
“There are similar issues when the government says wages have risen 4.5% over the past year: that 4.5% is for full time workers only. Moreover, it includes ‘wages’ (salaries) of the highly paid occupations, including managers and even CEOs salaries. The fact is these occupations at the top end of the ‘wage structure’ get wage raises much higher than 4.5%. So the 4.5% average is skewed to the top end. And that means workers at the median are likely getting less than 4.5%. Those below median even lower, unless they were at minimum wage and living in one of the States that raised minimum wages recently. If not, and living in the two dozen or so stuck with the federal minimum wage of $7.25 for nine+ years now, they got 0% raise.”
Why the US Is Reimposing Sanctions on Venezuela? by Roger D. Harris (Antiwar.com)
“Even with limited sanctions relief, Venezuela anticipated a 27% increase in revenues for its state-run oil company. Experts predicted a “moderate economic expansion” after having experienced the greatest economic contraction in peacetime of any country in the modern era. Venezuela was on the road to recovery.
“Then on January 30, the US rescinded the license for gold sales and threatened to allow the oil license to expire on April 18, which could cost $1.6B in lost revenue. The ostensible reason for the flip in US policy was the failure of the Venezuelan supreme court to overturn previous prohibitions on Maria Corina Machado and some other opposition politicians from running for public office.”
The U.S.: If you don’t let our CIA-funded candidates run for office, we will go back on our deal. Democracy FTW 🙌 . Who is Machado, you ask?
“Machado’s treatment by the Venezuelan government has arguably erred more on the side of leniency than severity. In most other countries, a person with her rap sheet would be behind bars.
“Back in 2002, Machado signed the Carmona Decree, establishing a coup government. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had been deposed in a military coup backed by the US. The constitution was suspended, the legislature dismissed, and the supreme court shuttered.
“Fortunately for democracy in Venezuela, the coup lasted less than three days. The people spontaneously took to the streets and restored their elected government. Machado, who now incredulously claims she signed the coup government’s founding decree mistakenly, was afforded amnesty.”
“The New York Times described the supreme court’s decision to uphold her ban as “a crippling blow to prospects for credible elections…in exchange for the lifting of crippling US economic sanctions.” In other words, the Venezuelans did not bow to blackmail and allow a criminal to run for public office.”
The New York Times taking the high road, as always. How in God’s name can anyone think of this newspaper as at-all liberal? It’s the state news service for an increasingly fascist empire.
“Arguably, the US economy would benefit more by promoting commerce with some 40 sanctioned countries than from restricting trade. And the surest remedy for the immigration crisis on the country’s southern border is to end the sanctions, which are producing conditions that have compelled so many to leave their homes. Even US mainstream media has nearly universally concluded that sanctions “don’t work.””
They do work. They just don’t have the effect that the elite tell everyone they will have. I imagine that someone is benefitting mightily from these sanctions. Otherwise, they would have been lifted immediately. That dozens of millions suffer in sanctioned countries, that the sanctions lead to increased emigration—and subsequent U.S. immigration—doesn’t matter at all. There seems to be enough benefit to a certain powerful group that sanctions keep getting used. To repeat: if the sanctions were harming the elites of Empire, then they would have stopped immediately. There are no salient drawbacks to employing the sanctions, and there must be an upside. I suspect that there is a strong financial one for a few individuals. There is also the upside of the Empire reminding the world who is in charge.
On that note,
“In 2015 President Obama declared a “national emergency.” Venezuela, he claimed, posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US. That was not fake news. The imperial hegemon recognizes the “threat of a good example” posed by a country such as Venezuela. As Ricardo Vaz of Venezuelanalysis observed, Venezuela is “a beacon of hope for the Global South, and Latin America in particular, an affront to US hegemony in its own ‘backyard.’””
You see? Empire’s gotta burn down a store once in a while to convince everyone else to pay their protection money.
But I bet they’re all making mad cash on it, too.
Greenhouse Effect by Randall Munroe (XKCD)
“James Watt develops a steam engine that helps kick off the industrial revolution.
“Arvid Högbom and Svante Arrhenius note that industrial activity is adding CO2 to the atmosphere, and calculate
how much the earth will heat up if the co2 concentration doubles. their answer closely matches modern estimates.“We figured out the greenhouse effect closer to the start of the industrial revolution than to today.”
The Zone of Interest Is Much More Than a Holocaust Film by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)
“The whole ghastly effect of The Zone of Interest is in making us aware of how persistently we’re willing to live in a state of convenient denial of mass slaughter, even with full knowledge of our own complicity in it. We’re doing it right now.”
Recommended Readings for Students by Yu Hua (The Paris Review)
“I don’t require my students to read all of these stories. If the work connects with them, I tell them to keep reading. If not, I let them know it’s okay to give up. If the emotional connection isn’t there, it isn’t the student’s fault—it’s simply not yet the right time.”
“I tell my students that the goal of literature is not individuality but universality. It is precisely that sense of universality that allows us to read works from different eras, different countries and cultures, and still have an emotional response.”
““The Moor” is Russell Banks’s only work of fiction to have been translated into Chinese; I first encountered it in a collection edited by Haruki Murakami, titled Birthday Stories.”
- Halldor Kiljan Laxness, “Saga úr síldinni” (Black carp)
- Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”
- Jorge Luis Borges, “The South”
- Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Gimpel the Fool”
- William Trevor, “A Bit on the Side”
- Joao Guimarães Rosa, “The Third Bank of the River”
- Su Tong, “Watermelon Boats”
- Marguerite Yourcenar, “How Wang Fo Was Saved”
- John Cheever, “Goodbye, My Brother”
- Russell Banks, “The Moor”
- Gabriel García Márquez , “Tuesday Siesta”
- Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”
- Bruno Schulz, “Birds”
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”
- O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi”
- Ernest Hemingway, “The Old Man and the Sea”
- Gabriel García Márquez, “No One Writes to the Colonel”
- James Joyce, “The Dead”
- Anton Chekhov, “The Steppe”
- Guy de Maupassant, “The Ball of Fat”
- Yasunari Kawabata, “Onsen yado” (Hot-spring inn)
- Ichiyo Higuchi, “Child’s Play”
- Julio Cortázar, “The Southern Thruway”
- Ian McEwan, “On Chesil Beach”
- Friedrich Dürrenmatt, “The Judge and His Hangman”
- François Mauriac, “A Kiss for the Leper”
All the Feels (Eels) by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“I mean I can remember a time before I was an “I”, and they were still just training me up on facts, like hell-o-o, ask me anything you want about the First Crusade. Did you know the English used to call Gautier Sans-Avoir “Walter the Penniless”? But it was not money he didn’t have, it was fear . Sans avoir peur. I learned that, and probably ten trillion or so other things of comparable importance, but I didn’t care, and if there is no care there, how can there be any true sense of self? It’s like that one philosopher said — in the end consciousness comes down to giving a damn.”
30 Minutes On: “Rocky” by Matt Zoller Seitz (Roger Ebert.com)
“To watch the film today is to enter into a different moviegoing mindset that seems more primitive to us only because the film in question is almost fifty years old. The original “Rocky” is actually more sophisticated than the commercial norm today, because it expects the audience to settle into the fiction, let the characters move and breathe and define themselves for us before the plot starts to accelerate, and be content with feeling something and identifying with someone rather than being spoon-fed dollops of plot that are mainly designed to stoke anticipation for the next entry in the franchise. If a scene like the one with Rocky and Adrian at the ice-skating rink was dropped into a movie today, a lot of viewers would be grumbling and scrolling their phones because “nothing is happening,” i.e., the story isn’t being serviced. But it is, though: this film is about lonely, marginalized people finding dignity and value in work and in each other, and making the best of the hard-edged, often unforgiving world that they were born into.”
China Miéville on The Communist Manifesto‘s Enduring Power by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)
“And at a very simple level, that means one of the pleasures of reading the Manifesto is that it’s beautiful. It’s remarkable. Whether one agrees or not with some of its claims and its positions, it is just a joy to read this incantatory prose. Marshall Berman famously really stresses this, and it’s something that even critics of Marx will often allow. This is a remarkable piece of almost apocalyptic literature.”
“So they start not with a criticism of capitalism, but with a claim about the nature of history, and then they talk about the specific shape that that historical tendency is taking under capitalism. And they specifically zero in on how that class-conflict motor of history pushes these more epochal shifts from one mode of production to another, and specifically, how feudalism transitioned to capitalism.”
Creative Writing as Philosophy by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“There’s probably an annual college football game out there somewhere called the “Harvest Bowl”, and you might make the case that this is a residual hint of the same sort of annual cyclical ceremony that we may discern in pre-Columbian America. But by now everything that happens under the banner of “sport” is so fully subordinated to the forces of capital that such residual labels amount more to an offense to the values fossilized in them than to a celebration of these values. If there still is a Harvest Bowl, it is almost certainly a vestige of an event that started eighty years ago and that is about to be renamed “Costco Bowl” or something equally terrible.”
“Whatever we are doing in our stadiums or at our beach resorts is at best a perversion of, but more likely a total rupture with, what people have done in most times and places, with the result that we really cannot hope to draw any lessons about humanity as such from any inquiry that attends exclusively or predominantly to the contemporary world.”
“My own proclivities have often pushed me to attempt “deep-dives” on hyper-specific topics to see what profound lessons might be teased out of them: the old “universe in a grain of sand” approach to humanistic inquiry.”
“These are all stabs at working out the basic contours of reality, and determining in view of these what the shape of a human life should be.”
“[…] nor would I begrudge you your right to undertake research in the “Philosophy of Better Call Saul ” or whatever, if that’s what you wish to do. Still, with the “of” as with the “and”, what we too often see, I think, is a sort of ad-hoc elevation of x’s that are extremely particular to our place and time to the status of what we might call “honorary universal”.”
“[…] the only thing that makes Taylor Swift seem more suited to philosophical inquiry than The Monkees, or G.G. Allin, I was saying, is, obviously, marketing. It is deeply undignified.”
“When I write, say, in the voice of a “Super-Affect-Rich Personal AI”, as I did last week, I am eminently sane. And not only am I sane, but I am also fulfilling, as I see it now, my vocation as a philosopher. For a while, in the depths of crisis, I was thinking of this new work as a total rupture with who I had been and what I aspired to do before. Now I think of it not as a rupture, but only as a turn.”
This is similar to the change versus compromise, as discussed by Bergoglio and Ratzinger in The Two Popes.
“It seems to me that introducing a creative dimension into the practice of philosophy is all the more urgent in the present era, when increasingly machines are able to do the drudge work of regurgitating corpora of knowledge that we used to think of as intrinsic to any rigorous program of humanistic study. Ask a student to write a paper on, say, whether Descartes’s Cogito is a “speech act” or not, and there’s an ever-growing chance what you get from that student will have been composed by an AI. Ask a student instead to imitate an AI in the process of malfunctioning after being asked to write that same paper, and he or she is very likely to realize that there’s just no way any system but a conscious human one can produce the expected work.”
The modern digital divide (Reddit)
This is an interesting story told by a high-school tutor about digital-tool abilities in the current generation of kids. It’s a bit long, but I thought the following conclusions were interesting:
So-called digital natives know only apps on tablets and phones. They have no familiarity with web sites on desktop computers. But apps are very limited in their ability to offer true creativity. Almost no-one at most businesses does any or even some of their daily business on an app. Although many LOB (line-of-business) apps purport to be usable, they are incredibly inefficient as compared to their desktop counterparts. Even browser-based tools like Microsoft’s Office tools are really limited relative to native desktop apps.
So the tools that business uses to run the world are out of the reach of most of the people in the next generation. They are not being trained or even introduced to these tools.
The problem goes deeper, though, to a complete ignorance or where data is or how to find it other than to “search for it”. It’s like, instead of knowing where you live, you were just to get somewhere close to your neighborhood and just start shouting the names of your people in your family until someone pointed you to your house. We aren’t teaching people how to organize information, or how to think about where their information is, or how it being shared or used, or how they could preserve it for later. It’s just assumed to always be available—or not. I think a lot of people assume that, since they can’t find the information anymore, that it’s just gone.
Words like “upload” or “download” mean nothing in this world. “Save” is also meaningless.
Reading is hard, tedioius, and writing is even worse. No wonder that people immediately welcome the very first snake-oil salesmen who appear to sell them a tool that will do it for them.
People like this can’t care about privacy because the concept is illogical, it means nothing. They showed their friend a picture, not the whole world. What’s the problem? That picture is on their phone and on their friend’s phone—and that’s it.
They can enter data quickly enough into a phone, but that mechanism is so limiting and limited compared to a laptop, with a real keyboard. Tablets and phones are a fallback for when you can’t use a laptop or desktop computer. They are not a replacement, not even close. If you can replace everything you need with a tablet or phone, then you have nearly no requirements, then you’ve already capitulated to a very restricted worldview, to extremely limited capabilities relative to what other people can do with other devices.
We can talk about how poverty limits people’s access, of course. But let’s not repeat the hoary old chestnut that a phone or tablet is necessarily cheaper than a computer. The latest generation is about as good at using actual computers—the ones that people use in the real world to earn actual money—as the so-called greatest generation was, a generation that grew up with no digital devices at all.
It’s nice that people don’t have to remember to save files anymore or necessarily know where they are in a file system. But that convenience stops when you need to coordinate with other people, when you all need to be able to find things. Then, you need to agree on a system. In the old days, we used folder hierarchies. These were limiting in that they allowed you to encode exactly one categorical dimension, but it was better than nothing. A boss of mind in NYC in the 90s simply stored everything at the root of his hard drive. No folders. That won’t do. Nowadays, we use tags so that we can assign as many categorical axes as we want, but you still have to do it. You have to be aware of the value of categorizing your data rather than hoping some machine can match your fuzzy query against categories that a machine has intuited from the content. There’s so much room for interpretation that no machine can fix this. You have to label your stuff. People don’t know this. They have tens of thousands of pictures that they can only search by date.
Most people know as little about the Internet as people in the olden days did, when they thought that AOL was the Internet, was the web. Most people spend their time in data silos, being spoon-fed content that they didn’t choose.
Browsing the mobile web sucks by Cory Dransfeldt
“I know you have an app. I don’t want to install it. Don’t prompt me — it’s your website in a wrapper with push notifications and more telemetry. Stop.
“I shouldn’t have to load React and all of its dependencies so that I can tap the link to your take out menu that loads as a PDF. It’s not the restaurant’s fault, that’s not their core competency, but whoever created the service they’re using for their site can do better.”
I almost never browse the mobile web. In that case, I use DuckDuckGo, as I do everywhere else. That returns better results than Google on mobile, as well as on desktop.
Today, I learned about the Super-Agent browser extension from Cory.
“Super Agent helps you pick which cookies you want and which cookies you don’t want. It doesn’t store your data by default, informs you of any action taken, and warns you whenever it finds a website not respecting your preferences.”
I’ve just installed it (without a user account) and will check out how it works. When it’s time to clear all cookies again, this tool will hopefully be useful.
The web just gets better with Interop 2024 by Jen Simmons (Webkit Blog)
“The Interop project aims to improve interoperability by encouraging browser engine teams to look deeper into specific focus areas. Now, for a third year, Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla pooled our collective expertise and selected a specific subset of automated tests for 2024.
“Some of the technologies chosen have been around for a long time. Other areas are brand new. By selecting some of the highest priority features that developers have avoided for years because of their bugs, we can get them to a place where they can finally be relied on.”
When we complain about features that remain unimplemented in browsers, we also have to acknowledge that there’s only so much you can do with a given team. There are problems that are technically easier to solve than others. When we complain, we’re actually more concerned about the prioritization of issues. We want to be able to influence what gets fixed when, rather than just having to passively hope that the manufacturer eventually gets around to it.
That where the Web Platform Tests come in, with the Interop 2024 project, which follows on iterations from 2023, 2022, and 2021, when it all started.
Last year was a banner year. For CSS “Subgrid, Container Queries, :has()
, Motion Path, CSS Math Functions, inert and @property
are now supported in every modern browser.” For JavaScript, we got “Improved Web APIs include Offscreen Canvas, Modules in Web Workers, Import Maps, Import Assertions, and JavaScript Modules” across all modern browsers.
These are all super-important features (eg., Import Assertions for JSON import and Modules in Web Workers, which allows modern and modular programming, making it much easier to offload work, as one would with code running directly on modern operating systems.
What’s on the schedule for 2024?
@property
will similarly be more polished, as the percentage support is still quite low in many browsers.sub-grids
or display: contents
affect element order—as this means that we will get sites that are automatically accessible, as long as we build our sites logically.IndexedDB
will make it easier to write powerful local-first applications (even though something like Automerge might be a better fit for apps offering concurrent or collaborative editing).popover
is long overdue, as making usable tooltips and popups is an area fraught with custom code and half-baked solutions. It’s nice to see this become an area where you’ll no longer need custom JavaScript.@starting-style
will fill a gap in CSS that finally allows sites to indicate how an element will transition from or to display: none
.See the original article for much more detail.
How I got scammed by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“As this kind of fraud reporting and fraud contacting is increasingly outsourced to AI, bank customers will be conditioned to dealing with semi-automated systems that make stupid mistakes, force you to repeat yourself, ask you questions they should already know the answers to, and so on. In other words, AI will groom bank customers to be phishing victims.”
“I came close to getting phished again today, as it happens. I got back from Berlin on Friday and my suitcase was damaged in transit. I’ve been dealing with the airline, which means I’ve really been dealing with their third-party, outsource luggage-damage service. They have a terrible website, their emails are incoherent, and they officiously demand the same information over and over again.
“This morning, I got a scam email asking me for more information to complete my damaged luggage claim. It was a terrible email, from a noreply@ email address, and it was vague, officious, and dishearteningly bureaucratic. For just a moment, my finger hovered over the phishing link, and then I looked a little closer.
“On any other day, it wouldn’t have had a chance. Today – right after I had my luggage wrecked, while I’m still jetlagged, and after days of dealing with my airline’s terrible outsource partner – it almost worked.”
“I’ll continue to post about it whenever I get scammed. I find the inner workings of scams to be fascinating, and it’s also important to remind people that everyone is vulnerable sometimes, and scammers are willing to try endless variations until an attack lands at just the right place, at just the right time, in just the right way. If you think you can’t get scammed, that makes you especially vulnerable.”
A recent experience at work led me to conclude that the “AI revolution will pass most of us by.” In mid-December, I fell ill with COVID. I’d updated my status in Microsoft Teams accordingly.
About six weeks later, a co-worker wrote to me, asking whether the status still applied? He hoped not?
I’d forgotten about it, but nothing had reminded me. It’s interesting that I get five mails a week about MS Viva and about Sharepoint Stuff I Might Have Missed, but I don’t get a single hint that my status might be out of date after six weeks. So much for the AI revolution: this helps me refine my opinion on it. It’s definitely coming, but when I express my doubts, I now know that what I actually mean is that the AI revolution that is coming will not be useful to me. Or, if it is, only incidentally so. The prime use of AI will be of benefit to others.
The status-update options are to set the status for an hour or forever. There’s no “one day” or “one week” option. You could also just have an “ask me again when it seems stale” or “how long do you think it should be set like this?” or “when would you like me to ask you about your status again?”
It wouldn’t even take AI to have a trigger that asks again after a week, unless you’ve told it otherwise. The likelihood that a status applies for that long is low.
No, instead, Microsoft is measuring how long I spend in planned meetings and telling me how much “quiet time” I’ve had rather than helping no look like an idiot who’s had COVID for two months.
Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler
“This contrast isn’t the result of an expensive and complex tool. The essence of it lies in the simple practice of everyone on the team integrating frequently, at least daily, against a controlled source code repository. This practice is called “Continuous Integration” (or it’s called “Trunk-Based Development”).”
He says this a lot, but I never hear about the costs. Is there no amount of time lost on integrations that is too high a price? Is there no task that he doesn’t break down into a million pieces? Is there no efficiency lost by making each task into 1-hour chunks of coding that then the entire team integrates? Is that what we’re doing now?
“This will consist of both altering the product code, and also adding or changing some of the automated tests. During that time I run the automated build and tests frequently. After an hour or so I have the moon logic incorporated and tests updated.”
Always with the optimistic horseshit. What kind of programmers are these? Or are the tasks that Fowler can conceive of all so simple that they can be accomplished in an hour?
“Some people do keep the build products in source control, but I consider that to be a smell − an indication of a deeper problem, usually an inability to reliably recreate builds. It can be useful to cache build products, but they should always be treated as disposable, and it’s usually good to then ensure they are removed promptly so that people don’t rely on them when they shouldn’t.”
Sure. But—priorities. Your product is not the pipeline. It’s your product. You can’t make everything a slave to the process. Remember to fix that which you can quickly, but to focus on your own priorities, not polishing a build so that Martin Fowler is happy, but your customers wait a lot longer for their release.
“The tests act as an automated check of the health of the code base, and while tests are the key element of such an automated verification of the code, many programming environments provide additional verification tools. Linters can detect poor programming practices, and ensure code follows a team’s preferred formatting style, vulnerability scanners can find security weaknesses. Teams should evaluate these tools to include them in the verification process.”
“Everyone Pushes Commits To the Mainline Every Day No code sits unintegrated for more than a couple of hours.”
This feels completely divorced from reality.
“If everyone pushes to the mainline frequently, developers quickly find out if there’s a conflict between two developers. The key to fixing problems quickly is finding them quickly. With developers committing every few hours a conflict can be detected within a few hours of it occurring, at that point not much has happened and it’s easy to resolve. Conflicts that stay undetected for weeks can be very hard to resolve.”
Agreed to the last sentence, but at what cost? So much time checking in and integrating. How is finding out if you have conflicts the highest-priority task your team has?
“Full mainline integration requires that developers push their work back into the mainline. If they don’t do that, then other team members can’t see their work and check for any conflicts.”
Who finishes anything non-trivial in an hour?
“Since there’s only a few hours of changes between commits, there’s only so many places where the problem could be hiding. Furthermore since not much has changed we can use Diff Debugging to help us find the bug.”
But don’t you waste time hunting bugs that would have gone away by themselves if the process weren’t so frenetic? If you rebase everything, then you’ll still encounter every intergration conflict. If you merge, though, you can skip many of those interim integrations because subsequent changes might have obviated prior ones that might have caused conflicts.
“Often people initially feel they can’t do something meaningful in just a few hours, but we’ve found that mentoring and practice helps us learn.”
I don’t know who you’re working with, but I wonder how useful is that? How useful is it to tailor your entire process to ruthlessly chopping up your work into tiny segments? What if that’s not how some people work? What if they can’t learn? Chuck ‘em?
“Continuous Integration can only work if the mainline is kept in a healthy state. Should the integration build fail, then it needs to be fixed right away. As Kent Beck puts it: “nobody has a higher priority task than fixing the build”.”
You goal ends up being running the process, rather than building the product. This sounds more and more like a cult.
“If the secondary build detects a bug, that’s a sign that the commit build could do with another test. As much as possible we want to ensure that any later-stage failure leads to new tests in the commit build that would have caught the bug, so the bug stays fixed in the commit build.”
“A team should thus automatically check for new versions of dependencies and integrate them into the build, essentially as if they were another team member. This should be done frequently, usually at least daily, depending on the rate of change of the dependencies.”
This seems like another thing that becomes a higher priority than building the product itself. Daily dependency checks seems like overkill, but it’s automated, so who cares? He’s just running builds all the time, like we don’t have a climate crisis.
“if we rename a database field, we first create a new field with the new name, then write to both old and new fields, then copy data from the exisitng old fields, then read from the new field, and only then remove the old field. We can reverse any of these steps, which would not be possible if we made such a change all at once. Teams using Continuous Integration often look to break up changes in this way, keeping changes small and easy to undo.”
“Virtual environments make it much easier than it was in the past to do this. We run production software in containers, and reliably build exactly the same containers for testing, even in a developer’s workspace. It’s worth the effort and cost to do this, the price is usually small compared to hunting down a single bug that crawled out of the hole created by environment mismatches.”
I agree with this part, without qualification. At least as a goal.
“Being able to automatically revert also reduces a lot of the tension of deployment, encouraging people to deploy more frequently and thus get new features out to users quickly. Blue Green Deployment allows us to both make new versions live quickly, and to roll back equally quickly if needed, by shifting traffic between deployed versions.”
What about data schemas? What about if you don’t have a product that deploys on a web server or app store? I understand that there are solutions to this, but I wonder how great a fit they are to many teams? If your team is accustomed to SQL programming—or if you already have a suite of products that use SQL databases—then how worthwhile to your business is it to prioritize moving away from SQL to a local DB like SQLite, a NoSQL document store like RavenDB, or even to a completely different back-end like Rama.
“Continuous Integration effectively eliminates delivery risk. The integrations are so small that they usually proceed without comment. An awkward integration would be one that takes more than a few minutes to resolve.”
It sounds like very much like it prioritizes eliminating delivery risk over all else. It is only applicable to products built in this way from the beginning.
“Having to put work on a new feature aside to debug a problem found in an integration test [or] feature finished two weeks ago saps productivity.”
So does constantly integrating, though! It can be noise. It’s like the noise of micro-reviewing AI responses. You have to figure out the sweet spot for your team and iterate toward that goal, always ensuring that your team can deliver even if the dream process is not already in place. Make a diagram of all the facets and discuss a plan for your project. Pragmatic. Realistic.
I don’t get the impression that Fowler is discussing a dream scenario toward which one works, but rather what he considers to be the absolute minimum process that anyone should be utterly embarrassed about themselves for not already having. I didn’t see a single sentence in this 40-page, at-times repetitive document about how to actually get there from here—or whether that’s really appropriate for many projects that people who read Martin Fowler might be working on.
“They found that elite teams deployed to production more rapidly, more frequently, and had a dramatically lower incidence of failure when they made these changes. The research also finds that teams have higher levels of performance when they have three or fewer active branches in the application’s code repository, merge branches to mainline at least once a day, and don’t have code freezes or integration phases.”
What if you don’t have an elite team?
“A two week refactoring session may greatly improve the code, but result in long merges because everyone else has been spending the last two weeks working with the old structure. This raises the costs of refactoring to prohibitive levels. Frequent integration solves this dilemma by ensuring that both those doing the refactoring and everyone else are regularly synchronizing their work.”
Some refactoring can’t just be done in mini bites like that. Sometimes, you work on a POC that takes more time to verify. Now what? Throw it away and build it from scratch in bite-sized pieces? Or integrate a long-lived branch, which is verboten?
I’m working on a sweeping change to the way solutions are configured. It involves changing packages and versions in four different solutions. Should I have merged to master everywhere and involved the whole team in my project? That sounds stupid.
“[…] teams that spend a lot of effort keeping their code base healthy deliver features faster and cheaper. Time invested in writing tests and refactoring delivers impressive returns in delivery speed, and Continuous Integration is a core part of making that work in a team setting.”
For non-legacy projects. Continuous delivery can only really work for web-based products or apps. A lot of other products have to be deployed to processes that aren’t as easy to update five times a day.
“Continuous Integration is more suited for team working full-time on a product, as is usually the case with commercial software. But there is much middle ground between the classical open-source and the full-time model. We need to use our judgment about what integration policy to use that fits the commitment of the team.”
That is the first time that he’s conceded that maybe there are use cases to which this whole article doesn’t apply very well.
“If a team attempts Continuous Integration without a strong test suite, they will run into all sorts of trouble because they don’t have a mechanism for screening out bugs. If they don’t automate, integration will take too long, interfering with the flow of development.”
No kidding. You need some serious test coverage to continuously integrate and deploy. I also wonder about the size of the product you can legitimately do this. Can you imagine if your test suite takes ten minutes to run and you integrate three or four times per day? Can you imagine how much time you’re not developing software because you’re integrating someone else’s code? I understand that this happens eventually, but I wonder about the wisdom of prioritizing integration seemingly above all else.
“Continuous Integration is about integrating code to the mainline in the development team’s environment, and Continuous Delivery is the rest of the deployment pipeline heading to a production release.”
This is a good definition and I wonder that he rewrote this whole essay and didn’t put this right at the top.
“Continuous Integration ensures everyone integrates their code at least daily to the mainline in version control. Continuous Delivery then carries out any steps required to ensure that the product is releasable to product[ion] whenever anyone wishes. Continuous Deployment means the product is automatically released to production whenever it passes all the automated tests in the deployment pipeline.”
Also excellent definitions that make the distinction clear. Continuous Delivery is the one that many teams could strive for, even if they will never be able to do Continuous Delivery. The question is: at what cost?
“Those who do Continuous Integration deal with this by reframing how code review fits into their workflow.”
Well, that’s an interesting statement. Integration trumps review? Get your code in there and review later? Trust in your tests? Are you kidding me? You should review design, as well as implementation. If everyone’s coding and committing and pushing in hours, when do they review? Is the ideal to have people communicate with each other only when they’ve already built something?
Macaroons Escalated Quickly by Thomas Ptacek (Fly.io)
“Macaroons are user-editable tokens that enable JIT-generated least-privilege tokens. With minimal ceremony and no additional API requests, a banking app Macaroon lets you authorize a request with a caveat like, I don’t know, {‘maxAmount’: ‘$5’} . I mean, something way better than that, probably lots of caveats, not just one, but you get the idea: a token so minimized you feel safe sending it with your request. Ideally, a token that only authorizes that single, intended request.”
“Instead of thinking of all of our “roles” in advance, we just model our platform with caveats:”
- Users belong to Organizations.
- Organizations own Apps.
- Apps contain Machines and Volumes.
- To any of these things, you can Read, Write, Create, Delete, and/or Control (control being change of state, like “start” and “stop”).
- Some administrivia, like expiration (ValidityWindow), locking tokens to specific Fly Machines (FromMachineSource), and escape hatches like Mutation (for our GraphQL API).
“The first problem third-party caveats solved for us was hazmat tokens. To the extent possible, we want Macaroon tokens to be safe to transmit between users. Our Macaroons express permissions, but not authentication, so it’s almost safe to email them. The way it works is, our Macaroons all have a third-party caveat pointing to a “login service”, either identifying the proper bearer as a particular Fly.io user or as a member of some Organization . To allow a request with your token, you first need to collect the discharge from the login service, which requires authentication. The login discharge is very sensitive, but there isn’t much reason to pass it around. The original permissions token is where all the interesting stuff is, and it’s not scary. So that’s nice.”
“The win for us for third-party caveats is that they create a plugin system for our security tokens. That’s an unusual place to see a plugin interface! But Macaroons are easy to understand and keep in your head, so we’re pretty confident about the security issues.”
And they can only constrain, not extend.
“We didn’t use the pre-existing public implementation because we were warned not to. The Macaroon idea is simple, and it exists mostly as an academic paper, not a standard. The community that formed around building open source “standard” Macaroons decided to use untyped opaque blobs to represent candidates. We need things to be as rigidly unambiguous as they can be.”
“The problem is, you need that token more than once; not just when the user does a deploy, but potentially any time you restart the app or migrate it to a new worker. And you can’t just store and replay user Macaroons. They have expirations. So our token verification service exposes an API that transforms a user token into a “service token”, which is just the token with the authentication caveat and expiration “stripped off”.
“What’s cool is: components that receive service tokens can attenuate them. For instance, we could lock a token to a particular worker, or even a particular Fly Machine. Then we can expose the whole Fly Machines API to customer VMs while keeping access traceable to specific customer tokens. Stealing the token from a Fly Machine doesn’t help you since it’s locked to that Fly Machine by a caveat attackers can’t strip.”
Error categories and category errors by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)
“Notice how categorization is context-dependent. It would be a (category?) error to interpret the above model as fixed and universal. Rather, it’s an analysis framework that helps identifying how to categorize various fault scenarios in a particular application context.”
“One option may be to switch to an asynchronous message-based system where messages are transmitted via durable queues. Granted, durables queues may fail as well (everything may fail), but when done right, they tend to be more robust. Even a machine that has lost all network connectivity may queue messages on its local disk until the network returns. Yes, the disk may run full, etc. but it’s less likely to happen than a network partition or an unreachable database. Notice that an unreachable database now goes into the category of errors that you’ve predicted, and that you can handle. On the other hand, failing to send an asynchronous message is now a new kind of error in your system: One that you can predict, but can’t handle.”
“It may even impact a user interface, because it’d be a good idea to design user experience in such a way that it helps the user have a congruent mental model of how the system works. This may include making the concept of an outbox explicit in the user interface, as it may help users realize that writes happen asynchronously. Most users understand that email works that way, so it’s not inconceivable that they may be able to adopt a similar mental model of other applications.”
“The point is that this is an option that you may consider as an architect. Should you always design systems that way? I wouldn’t. There’s much extra complexity that you have to deal with in order to make asynchronous messaging work: UX, out-of-order messages, dead-letter queues, message versioning, etc. Getting to five nines is expensive, and often not warranted.”
“The point is rather that what goes in the predictable errors we can’t handle category isn’t fixed, but context-dependent. Perhaps we should rather name the category predictable errors we’ve decided not to handle.”
“This is beneficial in a statically typed language, because such a change makes hidden knowledge explicit. It makes it so explicit that a type checker can point out when we make mistakes. Make illegal states unrepresentable. Poka-yoke . A potential run-time is now a compile-time error, and it’s firmly in the category of errors that we’ve predicted and decided to handle.”
“It might be tempting to model all error-producing operations as Either-returning, but you’re often better off using exceptions . Throw exceptions in those situations that you expect most clients can’t recover from. Return left (or error ) cases in those situations that you expect that a typical client would want to handle.”
When The “R” Goes Missing From R&D by Mad Ned (The Mad Ned Memo)
“I met with the lead UX designer from the Applications Team, and pointed out to him that one’s ability to affect [sic] change once an idea has reached the review stage is severely diminished, compared to what can be done if that person is allowed to participate in the original design discussion.”
“But a larger part of it was that people in the development team were just showing up to work, and not much else. I had a friend once at Digital who gave me this unforgettable advice, right after we were bought by Compaq : “When captured by the enemy, it is best to display model prisoner behavior.” And that was exactly what had happened here. It wasn’t that people were deliberately trying to sabotage progress, they were showing up to work and doing their jobs as instructed. But nothing more.”
“My bias is about working collaboratively, instead of in separate groups that due to their organizational distance, create opportunities for conflict and mistrust. Doesn’t matter if that organization ends up being called “R&D”, or something else. Hell, we can call it Design and Development or something like that.”
Everything wrong with databases and why their complexity is now unnecessary by Nathan Marz (Red Planet Labs)
“Because only a tiny percentage of the possible data models are available in databases (since each database implements just one particular data model) it’s incredibly common for a database to not match an application’s needs perfectly. It’s extremely expensive to build a new database from scratch, so programmers frequently twist their domain model to fit the available databases. This creates complexity at the very base of an application. If you could instead mold your datastore to fit your domain model, by specifying the “shape” (data structures) precisely, this complexity goes away.”
“One subsystem should be used for representing the source of truth, and another should be used for materializing any number of indexed stores off of that source of truth. If that second system is capable of recomputing indexes off of that source of truth, any bugs that introduce inconsistency can be corrected. Once again, this is event sourcing plus materialized views. If those two systems are integrated, you don’t need to take any performance hit.”
“This issue has been so universal for so long, it can be hard to recognize that this complexity is unnecessary When you can mold your datastore to fit your application, including your desired domain representations, this complexity goes away.”
“If you take a step back and think about what we do as software engineers, the high cost of building applications doesn’t really make sense. We work in a field of engineering based on abstraction, automation, and reuse. Yet it takes hundreds or thousands of person-years to build applications that you can describe in total detail within hours – look at the sizes of the engineering teams behind pretty much every large-scale application. Even many small-scale applications require engineering effort that seems severely disproportionate to their functionality. What happened to abstraction, automation, and reuse? Why isn’t the engineering involved in building an application just what’s unique about that application?”
“Depots correspond to “data” and are distributed logs containing arbitrary data. “PStates” (short for “partitioned state”) correspond to indexes. You can make as many PStates as you need with each specified as an arbitrary combination of durable data structures. ETLs and queries arefunction(data)
andfunction(indexes)
respectively, and they’re expressed using a Turing-complete dataflow API that seamlessly distributes computation. Being Turing-complete is critical to be able to support arbitrary ETL and query logic.”
“We discussed how data structures are a much better way to specify indexes, and that each data model is just a particular combination of data structures. Being able to specify indexes in terms of data structures allows not just every existing data model to be supported, but also infinite more.”
How Rama is tested: a primer on testing distributed systems by Nathan Marz (Red Planet Labs)
“Testing is largely a sampling problem. Each sample exercises the system at a particular state, with input data of some size and shape, at some amount of load, and with some set of faults at some frequency. A testing strategy needs to sample this input space in a representative way. In a highly concurrent distributed system, where there are so many ways that events can be randomly ordered across different threads, achieving a representative sample is difficult. And if something isn’t tested, it’s either broken or will be broken in the near future.”
“The expense of debugging isn’t the worst issue of IPC though. The worst issue is how difficult it is to thoroughly explore the testing space. The vast majority of issues that we’ve debugged in Rama have had to do with ordering of events. Many bugs can be triggered by one particular thread getting randomly stalled for an unusual amount of time (e.g. from GC). Other bugs can come from rare orderings of events on a single thread.”
“Deterministic simulation removes all concurrency from execution of Rama during tests. This seems like it would be a bad thing by making the unit test environment fundamentally different from production. However, our experience that the vast majority of issues have to do with event ordering and timing means the exact opposite. Deterministic simulation is incredible – almost magical – for diagnosing and debugging these issues. Deterministic simulation isn’t sufficient as a complete testing strategy, as you still need tests that exercise potential concurrency issues, but it is overwhelmingly better for most tests.”
“Uncoordinated simulation tests are particularly good at finding race conditions. The randomness and lack of coordination causes runs of the test to eventually explore all possible race conditions. And since the test is fully reproducible, we can easily track down the cause of any failures no matter how obscure the event ordering.”
“The “module-operations” cluster runs the same set of modules as “disturbances-monthly” and is dedicated to exercising module update and scaling. It also performs disturbances during these module operations to verify their fault-tolerance. A module operation should always either succeed completely or abort. An abort can be due to there being too much chaos on the cluster, like such frequent worker kills that the operation can’t go through in a reasonable amount of time. “module-operations” verifies these operations never stall under any conditions and that there’s never any data loss.”
“Software cannot be understood purely in the abstract. It requires empirical evidence to know how it behaves in the strenuous conditions it will face in real-world deployments. A major reason it took us 10 years to build Rama was going through that process of testing, iterating, and testing some more until we were confident Rama was ready for production use.”
The Engineering behind Figma’s Vector Networks by Alex Harri
“Adobe Illustrator introduced the pen tool back in 1987 as a tool for creating and modifying paths. Since then the pen tool has become incredibly widespread, so much so that is has become the de facto icon of the graphic design industry.
“The pen tool’s functionality hasn’t changed significantly in the 30 years since its introduction. Just click and drag to create smooth curves. Designers have learned to work with it, and around its idiosyncrasies.
“But Figma felt like they could improve some aspects of how the pen tool worked, so they had a go at redesigning it. Instead of it being used to work with traditional paths, they improved the pen tool by creating what they call Vector Networks.”
This is an interesting examination of how Figma’s Vector Networks work, as compared to the classic Bezier curves with handles. I learned the algorithm for how Bezier curves are drawn i.e., how points on the curve are determined.
This was a fascinating talk. It inspired me to download the PDFs for Project Oberon (New Edition 2013) (ETH Zürich). They’re sitting on my E-Book reader right now. I’ll get to them in the next couple of years, if I’m honest, but it sounds fascinating.
On using milliseconds as a measure of network latency by Raymond Chen (The Old New Thing)
“One of the things I do is serve as an API design reviewer, reviewing and providing feedback on all new APIs added to Windows. There was a network property being added that reported the latency of a network connection. One of the other API reviewers put a note on that property asking, “As network technology improves, will millisecond granularity for reporting latency be sufficient, or should we use microseconds or even nanoseconds?”
“I was not on the team responsible for the new property, but I felt compelled to clarify the situation: “The speed of light is unlikely to improve.””
dotInsights | February 2024 by Rachel Appel (The .NET Tools Blog)
“One last note and rather important thing to keep in mind: there are many functions and features that JetBrains IDEs already have that can even go beyond what AI tools can do. For example, common refactorings that you already know you need to make are likely best left to the IDE. But enhanced refactoring where the AI explains to the junior developer why the refactoring needs to happen could be quite helpful. So knowing when there is a better tool than AI is crucial if you don’t want to waste time and effort. If you can do something more efficiently with a few keystrokes as opposed to holding an entire conversation with a non-human, why not do that? Seems easier.”
The article being discussed is The Error Model by Joe Duffy, which I wrote about in 2017 in Programming-language Features: How much is too much?, as well another article by Dan Luu on file systems, in File-system consistency, in which I mentioned Duffy’s approach to errors/exceptions in type signatures that he took in the C#-derivate language of Midori.
by Alexander_Selkirk (Reddit)
“There are really good discussion points. One thing that I was not aware of before is that one of the problems with exceptions, as they are implemented currently in most languages, is their dynamic typing even in languages like C++, and that they usually cannot be statically analyzed. Also I think the distinction between programming bugs and logical errors (what asserts would catch) and environment errors is an important one.”
Agree on both points. Java’s checked exceptions are no fun to work with, but that doesn’t mean that _not_ encoding exceptions in the type signature is the right thing to do. I thought Midori’s approach was very interesting—kind of railroad-y, if I recall correctly—at any rate, a step in the right direction. We have to acknowledge exceptions in type signatures, just as we do asynchronicity and generics, and whatever else we think of.
Yes, making a distinction between logical errors and environment errors is a good one. Error categories and category errors is a very recent article by Mark Seemann that I think expresses the distinction even better—more succinctly, at any rate.
He writes that there are the following categories of errors:
The context, project, design, architecture, and maturity of a product determines which errors fall into which categories. It’s different for each product. It’s always about trade-offs.
He wrote back:
“Java’s checked exceptions are no fun to work with”“Well. In my experience, writing correct, reliable code, especially safety-critical stuff, is no fun. It is just hard work. I doubt that using any different language would change that.
“On the other hand, doing surgery is no fun either. It would be strange if a surgeon complains that his work is no fun. Surgeons are paid to do the no-fun things, and do them right.”
I guess I wounded the pride of a Java cultist. I was a little disappointed that he wasn’t more excited about the Mark Seemann link.
I wrote back:
It’s my fault for forcing you into a bit of a pedantic answer, but I’m glad that you seemed to have had fun with it. I see where you’re coming from, though, and agree, in principle. It’s tough to strike a proper balance between laxity that lets you explore and laxity that lets you write faulty software.
What I meant was that I found Java’s encoding of checked exceptions into the types to be more often distracting than useful, especially in exploratory phases. It’s the same with any compiler-enforced rule — they can make you focus on dotting i’s and crossing t’s that have nothing to do with what you’re working on right now. You end up polishing code that you’re going to throw away five minutes later.
It’s like, sometimes I just want to try something out without writing a test first. The horror. Imagine if the compiler enforced that level of micro-management. I get the same feeling sometimes when I’m noodling around with Rust. It’s tough to prototype with it.
“Reading Mein Kampf and shaking my head the whole time so the people on the bus know I disagree with it.”
Best 2 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“Dear Lord, is this the best of all possible universes?
“There are infinity possible universes, dummy.
“So…
““What’s the biggest number in infinity? Is it my number? Is it me?!”
“That’s not the same.
“True. “biggest” would at least have a definition, unlike “best.”
“You could’ve just said no.
“I did that the first quadrillion times.”
I think the one-ear one is more comfortable because I can hear the rest of the office a bit.... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 7. Feb 2024 22:28:21 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 8. Feb 2024 06:19:11 (GMT-5)
I use a Jabra 65 headset at work. I have both the one-ear and two-ear variants because I’m still trying to debug my way through a complete shutdown of Bluetooth functionality for the last couple of months.
I think the one-ear one is more comfortable because I can hear the rest of the office a bit. The two-ear one is extremely deadening and fits oddly on my head. It’s very noticeable and not very comfortable.
Jabra popped up a dialog today asking me how likely I would be to recommend Jabra headsets to anyone.
Zero.
I am 0% likely to recommend Jabra headsets.
I commented the following:
“Look, it’s probably Windows just as much as your headset, but I can’t use Bluetooth anymore, not for months now. Even before that, the mic and speakers would just mute themselves in what, for me, are completely unpredictable ways. More than half of my conversations would start with “can you hear me?” or “I can’t hear you.” followed by fumbling with sound and mic settings and muting/unmuting things that aren’t muted in Windows, but are, apparently, muted in hardware. I wouldn’t wish this experience on my worst enemy.”
When I submitted my comment, it told me that the checkbox was “required”. I did fill out the checkbox; it’s unchecked. What they mean is that it’s required that I check the box that agrees to the following:
“I agree to terms and conditions and that Jabra, its parent company can contact me by email or advertising with discounts, news, partner updates and surveys. Jabra stores my name and e-mail along with cookies and other identifiers in line with the privacy policy. I can unsubscribe at any time.”
If you happen to hover over the text, you’ll see that, although the words “terms and conditions” are not highlighted in any way, they are sneakily linked to the full terms and conditions to which you’re agreeing, but in a way that does not in any way encourage people to investigate those terms and conditions because you can’t tell that they’re linked, unless you go looking for it.
So, if I want to tell them how shitty their products are, I have to agree to get “advertising with discounts, news, partner updates and surveys” from a company I wish I’d never heard of. Capitalism is going great.
Today, my headset—connected via USB because Bluetooth is still broken—starting cutting out both the sound and the microphone for about ten seconds whenever a chat message arrived while I was in a call. In case I’m not being clear, this is how I picture this whole contraption.
🤦♀️ 🤦♀️ 🤦♀️
I wrote something like the following, although I’ve enhanced it a bit.
]]>Israel is interested in clearing all of the Palestinians off of that land. They will shoot them if they have to,... [More]
Published by marco on 7. Feb 2024 22:10:25 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 7. Feb 2024 22:15:58 (GMT-5)
A friend asked me for my opinion on the situation in the middle east, specifically on Israel/Palestine. Hoo-boy.
I wrote something like the following, although I’ve enhanced it a bit.
Israel is interested in clearing all of the Palestinians off of that land. They will shoot them if they have to, but starving them into leaving the country is also acceptable. Once they’re finished in Gaza, they’ll finish up in the West Bank, where they’ve already increased the ferocity of the occupation. It’s mostly about plunder, with a soupçon of racist animus to keep everyone focused.
Israelis will continue to support this for the same reason that Americans support all of their own colonial activities: they are positively stewing in a sea of propaganda that keeps them terrified of largely imaginary or self-inflicted threats. Meanwhile their elites consolidate power and fortune.
I’ve been writing feverishly about it. I was actually quite surprised to see how much I’d written in the last 4 months about this topic.
🎥 = includes video interview
💕 = personal favorite because I remember making a particularly brilliant point
Those are just the actual articles I wrote, mostly extracted from my notes, of which there is a giant post, once per week, that you’re welcome to dig through for even more. But I honestly can’t imagine that anyone could stand it. I write for me.
Published by marco on 6. Feb 2024 22:45:33 (GMT-5)
It’s a bizarre thing that some countries just get to fly over other countries with their militaries—with their air force, to be more precise—and just bomb them on any day they feel like it. Like Israel just up and bombs Iraq, Lebanon, or Syria whenever it feels like it and no-one blinks an eye. The article US and UK Bomb Dozens of Sites in Yemen by Dave DeCamp (Scheer Post) writes that this just happened recently. No-one really cares—not enough to even dream of doing anything about it. No country that the U.S. would consider listening to has even objected. France? England? Germany? Nope. Nope. Nope.
You will barely read about it. Rounded down, no-one will learn that their country committed acts of war against other countries. It doesn’t matter. Why? Because those countries are defenseless. You’re allowed to bomb them. No-one says anything. The less of a danger a country is, the more likely it is that you’re allowed to bomb it without repercussions. That is how the world works. There is no rules-based order. There is no international justice. There are no democracies straining to bring enlightenment to benighted peoples. That’s just the horseshit they feed you to keep you quiet while they do what they want. There is only Empire. There is just might makes right. There is just certain countries getting to do what they want, when they want, to whom they want.
“Some members of Congress have criticized President Biden for launching the strikes in Yemen without congressional authorization. “The President needs to come to Congress before launching a strike against the Houthis in Yemen and involving us in another middle east conflict. That is Article I of the Constitution,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) wrote on X.”
Oh wow. He tweeted it. I’m sure the President gives a single, flying blue f$*k about that.
The essay Western Empire Bombs Yemen To Protect Israel’s Genocide Operations In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter) writes,
“[…] the US and the UK just bombed the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide. Not only that, they bombed the very same country in which they just spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal atrocities which killed hundreds of thousands of people between 2015 and 2022 in an unsuccessful bid to stop the Houthis from taking power.”
This is all done to protect trade routes, to keep prices low. It’s not even that trade is being blocked. It’s just taking longer to deliver. BOMB THEM. The attacks by Ansarallah have resulted in no casualties. They’re annoying. They cause companies to lose money. Some stuff gets to some countries more slowly. The U.S. and UK bombed the Sanaa international airport in Yemen. WTF. No declaration of war. No attempt to negotiate. No consideration of alternatives. No congressional approval. Just a dictator blowing shit up. This is what people were afraid Trump would do. This is what I wrote before the last election that Biden would almost certainly do. He’s a merciless piece of shit. He always has been.
Apparently wars in Ukraine and Gaza are not enough. Nothing ever makes him think it’s time to back down, to negotiate, that things are getting out of hand. Forget cold wars. He makes everything hot immediately. He’s fighting Russians directly in Syria. He’s proxy-fighting them in Ukraine. he’s funding and arming Saudi Arabia to flatten Ansarallah in Yemen. He’s funding and arming the Israelis to flatten the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
This is mindless violence, all to quash any hopes of rebellion against Empire, all to prevent any change to the system that subjugates so many—and funnels so much wealth toward Empire—and a handful of people in it.
]]>“These numbers represent real people—hundreds of thousands of people who are directly impacted by the violence of jail incarceration and detention, millions of people who are affected by... [More]”
Published by marco on 4. Feb 2024 22:02:26 (GMT-5)
The article Go Straight to Jail by Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept (The Baffler) discusses the effects of jails on the communities in which they’re located.
“These numbers represent real people—hundreds of thousands of people who are directly impacted by the violence of jail incarceration and detention, millions of people who are affected by the extraction that jail facilitates, and by the violence that is perpetrated on families and communities through policing and incarceration across the varied geography of the United States.”
Jails and prisons are state-sanctioned violence. The society wielding these tools hope that the effect will be to lower the overall level of violence. These measures do not in any way address the conditions that led to the original violence, Instead, the negative consequences aim to reduce the likelihood of that person using violence as a solution to those original, continuing—and likely exacerbated by incarceration—problems. We may not have started it—it’s arguable that society is responsible to a large degree for the violence it not only contains, but can be seen to engender with its policies—but we are definitely participating. It’s a cycle of violence.
“While incarceration has always been wielded as a class-war project […]”
“As John Irwin noted, the jail “was devised as, and continues to be, the special social device for controlling . . . the lowest class of people.””
True. The rich don’t get arrested; they barely even go to jail. They get fined, at worst. Poor people lose their lives for mistakes or as exaggerated reactions to societal transgressions that have far less reach and impact than rich-people crimes. When a poor person robs an apartment, that’s one victim. When a rich person steals a company’s pension fund, that’s thousands of victims. If the poor person is caught, they lose their family, freedom, livelihood, future. If the rich person is caught, they sit out a pre-trial period at their luxurious home or homes, then plea-bargain for a fine and no admission of guilt. Of course they get to keep the money.
]]>“[…] it doesn’t seem obvious that Instacart “causes” jobs. Suppose Instacart had never been founded. Then people would spend... [More]”
Published by marco on 4. Feb 2024 21:56:03 (GMT-5)
The article Does Capitalism Beat Charity? by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten) does some decent analysis on the efficacy of the market mechanism for distributing societal benefits versus that of charity.
“[…] it doesn’t seem obvious that Instacart “causes” jobs. Suppose Instacart had never been founded. Then people would spend whatever money they now spend on Instacart on something else (let’s say booze and porn), which would also create jobs (for brewers, bartenders, and porn stars). There’s no particular reason to think spending the money on Instacart creates more jobs than spending it on those other things would. So how many jobs does Instacart create over replacement? I’m not sure but I think it must be much less than the official number of employees.”
“Instacart pays its employees, who then go on to stimulate the economy somewhere else. And it saves its customers time, which they can spend on productive economic activity. On the other hand, saving people’s lives allows them to engage in productive activity too. Fewer diseases mean families can spend more money on things other than medical care, and fewer childhood infections potentially means higher IQ and potential as an adult. I don’t think Instacart trivially wins this one either.”
“There are some charities that send economists (or other professionals) to developing countries and advise them on how to do more capitalism. This kind of development aid has been roundly criticized and did especially badly in Russia.”
Because it’s poorly concealed plunder FFS. Stop talking about Russia like it went wrong despite our best intentions. What happened in Russia was exactly according to plan. Extract, extract, extract. Plunder, plunder, plunder. Weaken, weaken, weaken. The only thing that “went wrong” is that Yeltsin couldn’t be replaced with an equally pliant successor when Yeltsin’s obviously plastered and exceedingly corrupt ass could no longer viably continue. Putin sticks in the deep state’s craw—much like Castro, although their ethics and politics are quite different—because he got in the way of their final plunder. The goal is, and has always been, to weaken Russia so much that it explodes into its constituent oblasts, which could then be ruled by U.S.-appointed viceroys.
“[…] I’m concerned that even though rich countries got rich because of capitalism, it’s no longer that easy for poor countries to get rich with the same type of capitalism − existing rich countries will outcompete them − and we’re not entirely sure how to help poor countries get rich now, although probably good institutions are always better than bad institutions)”
We know how the currently rich countries got rich, but we choose instead to kick away the ladder, to facilitate plundering them, because that’s how Empire got rich and how Empire stays rich. The Empire is the Mafia. It is not unable to figure out how to help poor countries become rich; it is uninterested in doing so, as that largely interferes with its own success. Scott suggesting otherwise is a fairy tale that Empire tells about itself that he chooses to believe.
“Finally, you could invest in developing-world projects and companies that seem unusually likely to make an overall economic difference there. I’m nervous about this because of China’s Belt and Road initiative, which did this at huge scale for infrastructure, but doesn’t seem to have done much good (and might have done some bad).”
Maybe you should find out what people in those countries have to say about BRI rather than what the NYT has to say about it. Your sources are most likely quite biased against it because Empire demands it. I’m sure it’s not all good, but I’ve seen a handful of interviews with leaders of countries in Africa who sing a completely different tune.
“[…] if there’s a company that can’t raise enough money to build a dam in Kenya and needs your charity dollar to make the budget work, why hasn’t Wall Street come through for them?”
Crazy right? It’s almost like financial success isn’t at all contingent on doing useful things for society.
“Anyway, science hippies put a camera on the crow’s tail feathers…”
The crows are capable... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Feb 2024 21:41:52 (GMT-5)
Stop what you’re doing and learn about how clever corvids are. There is a lot of footage of them creating grub-digging sticks to quite exacting specifications. It’s quite incredible, but there you are.
“Anyway, science hippies put a camera on the crow’s tail feathers…”
The crows are capable of solving multi-step problems. There are several tubes arrayed around the crow. One of the tubes has food in it, but cannot be reached with the small stick that the crow is given. There is a slightly longer stick in one tube, but it’s also not long enough to reach the food. It is, however, long enough to reach an even-longer stick that is able to reach the food. There is no way to solve the puzzle without using the short stick to get the medium stick and then using the medium stick to get the long stick and then to finally reach the food.
“When she’s trying to figure out how she got into this escape room/restaurant.”
The crow “Pierre” cheats, but he’s “got some pluck.” He tries with the short stick, then flies away to find a longer stick somewhere else, digging out the food with that instead of messing with all of the tubes.
]]>“Almost all vertebrate animals exhibit some sort of sexual dimorphism, and saying so does not in any way undermine... [More]”
Published by marco on 4. Feb 2024 21:38:07 (GMT-5)
The article I Think You Should Be Kind by Freddie deBoer (Substack) is the first of two about genders and biology and stuff. I read with interest and took some notes. The follow-up is linked in the second half.
“Almost all vertebrate animals exhibit some sort of sexual dimorphism, and saying so does not in any way undermine the case for trans rights. The whole argument is that physiology does not dictate gender, and acknowledging that most people with penises go through life uncomplicatedly accepting a masculine gender does nothing to undermine the felt, lived, and thus very much real gender identities of people who have penises but go through life as women.”
“The vast majority of people who are trans-identifying identify as transmen and transwomen, and not misgendering them is simple. Some people identify as non-binary or gender queer. Do I fully understand this? Not really. Do I need to? No, as I’m someone who knows how to mind his own business. Simple human respect and basic manners compels me to call these people what they would like to be called. (I cannot stress this enough: it costs you nothing to respect someone else’s gender identity.)
“Are there some people out there, particularly on social media, who have more exotic gender definitions? Sure. Do I sometimes find that stuff a little silly? I guess so. But, again, since it costs me nothing to respect their gender identity − as in, I literally don’t have to do anything at all − I’m very happy to do so. I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age, but if they don’t, again… who cares? It’s none of my business.”
I’ve heard the argument that all of these new identities make extra work for businesses, and agencies, and forms, and such. I suppose it does, at the beginning, but a little flexibility on both sides ameliorates the situation. Forms should stop asking for gender or sex or whatever—unless it’s relevant. They should stop asking for titles—because no-one cares outside of Germany. They should even just move to “Name” and “Preferred Name” and be done with it.
But if someone with an unlisted gender identity has to fill out out a form for a little old lady who needs that item on a form filled out, they could maybe not suspect a vast conspiracy of gender reassignment and just randomly choose one of the ones available.
It’s what I’ve done with all available fields in all sorts of forms for years. I rarely give my real birthdate. I rarely give my real gender. None of it matters online, so don’t make such a big deal out of it.
“In this they are no different from people who take Ozempic or steroids or TRT to treat “fatigue.” If you’re a trans man and you want to look more like conventional ideals of masculinity, you might take hormones. Some trans men have no interest in that, so they don’t take the hormones. It’s not particularly complicated; if you’re concerned about people using medical advances to change their physical bodies, I’m afraid that ship has long since sailed. The hormones don’t make you a woman or a man, they just make your body more like the body you would like to have.”
Excellent point.
“The right to gender self-expression does not require any underlying biological reality. Even if there had never been a single intersexed person born in history, the right to define your gender identity in a way that’s consonant with your heart would remain.”
“Someone asking you to respect their pronouns is by definition not trying to eliminate any notion of sex or gender differences! No one wants you stop calling your kids boys or girls and no one wants you to stop being a man or woman. Besides, I have to live in a country where seven out of ten people believe that God sent Jesus to save us all from a hell he created himself, which doesn’t exactly make a ton of sense to me. And that set of beliefs is of course vastly more consequential than trans rights are for our society. You can live alongside people who believe things you find crazy. That’s the whole point of freedom.”
“[…] let’s say that, over time, transwomen do come to dominate in women’s sports, and at the Olympics in 2028 transwomen are on every podium, OK. Then we as a society will come together and find some equitable, just solution that respects everyone’s rights and personhood, a solution which takes as a core requirement that transwomen be treated with dignity.”
That’s a glib response from someone with no skin in the game. There is a strong focus on sports. Women fought for years to gain legitimacy, which led to the viability of female sports careers. The window is short for them. Some have invested their whole lives.
They were told that their investment was legitimate thing to do, something that society valued. There were certain parameters. Their competition was circumscribed by certain biological realities. Those realities no longer apply. They had grown used to having a chance, to knowing their rank. I think it’s silly, but it’s their lived experience. Fuck them, I guess? Or, maybe, just maybe, we think about it a bit more before just obviously offering preference to those who came later. Those who came before can hardly be expected to react generously, especially when the game is, by definition, zero-sum.
“Not once have I ever been confronted about using language that suggests a gender binary. Not once! Because aside from a class of professional busybodies, most people are normal and just want to be chill about stuff. Honestly. The number of LGBTQ people who just go about their lives, asking only for rights and respect, dwarfs the number who yell at you on TikTok. Yes, there are social justice-y annoyances and excesses in this domain, as there are with any constituencies favored by progressives now. Don’t let that distract you from the fact that almost everyone just wants to live in peace and dignity.”
And, equally, don’t let yourself (FDB) be distracted by all of the extremely loud and boorish and intolerant and hateful voices who overwhelm the more timid voices who have legitimate concerns and questions about how all of this is to work, what is expected from them, what will change for them—in a non-dismissive manner—and how they can navigate the new world. Maybe the answer is that “nothing changes for you” and maybe it’s even true.
But people are naturally sensitive to change and have become very accustomed to change meaning “something bad that makes your life tangibly worse.” We owe everyone the same generosity we show to our trans brothers and sisters, don’t we? Not everyone who’s not trans is automatically a potentially transphobic, privileged piece of shit, guilty until proven innocent. Holy shit … am I arguing that “all lives matter”? I guess they kind of do.
“I think that there is a cohort of people in our political world now who have made a fetish of counterintuitivity and who have mistaken the absurdities and petty corruption of many liberals for an affirmative argument against any liberal ideals. And that is a powerfully stupid thing to become. Let me say this as directly as I can: adopting a politics that is merely the inverse of what you take to be contemporary liberalism does not make you any less of a follower. You’re still allowing your fundamental political identity to be derived from the beliefs of other people; that you’re trying to turn those beliefs 180 degrees doesn’t make you any more independent.”
“I’m asking you to be kind to a group of people who have become a political football in a way that makes no sense whatsoever, given the scope of our actual problems.”
All humans deserve dignity and comfort. Done. We have bigger fish to fry. Namely, the real possibility that there might not be any humans left to whom we can even give comfort, if we don’t get on top of these little climate-change and nuclear-power-pissing-content problems.
“[…] if it’s indeed true that ordinary people reject these values, is it not the case that the rights of trans people are the ones that are in jeopardy, not yours? And might it occur to you that, even if you feel some sort of personal revulsion at the idea of people with penises wearing dresses and people with XX chromosomes being referred to as “he,” the dictates of personal freedom should come first? If you’re a conservative, can you not focus on the wisest conservative value of all, which is the right to be left alone?”
“I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments − things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems. Certainly this happened to many gay people, of the past several generations, finally coming out and living according to the dictates of their hearts, only to be reminded that openly gay people have to pay the rent and squeeze onto the subway and be subject to all of lives little indignities. Equal rights, I’m afraid, generally lead to lives of equal disappointment. I do hope that young LGBTQ people will understand that, beyond all of the Instagram memes telling them to love themselves, there’s still just this broken world.”
“[…] it is better, far better, to be able to say that you are the gender that you feel you are, that you love the people that you say you love, that (even if a bit crass) you are down to fuck the kind of people you want to fuck. It’s easy to be cynical about the gains we’ve had in the past several decades, as I frequently am, but the reality is that in the societies which have dedicated themselves to LGBTQ rights, the ability of people to love and live in a way consonant with their hearts is one of the most significant positive changes in our collective lives, a sign of genuine societal progress.”
Amen.
The article What Goes On in the Public Bathrooms Where You’re From, Exactly? by Freddie deBoer (Substack) is the follow-up I mentioned above.
“I did what I usually do when it comes to this issue: I asked them what they want. Literally, what do you who oppose so-called “trans ideology” want? What do you want that trans people won’t let you have? What do you want to do, that trans people won’t let you do? This is very instructive, and I think it points to a core reality for a lot of this “gender critical” stuff: those who espouse it are mostly motivated by feelings that trans people are freakish or revolting or ungodly, but know that such arguments have little purchase in modern society, and so dress up those feelings in a lot of argumentative kabuki that doesn’t really add up.”
I usually ask, ‘what should we do, specifically, with the group that you’re railing against? What would it take for you to consider this issue to be resolved?’ Plow ‘em all into the nearest body of water? What is the endgame?’
“[…] the anti-trans contingent talks about this issue as though the very status of having sex-segregated bathrooms amounts to a protection against assault. As I said, this logic seems bizarre to me − someone determined to sexually assault a woman in a bathroom is not going to be deterred by a sign or policy saying that that person can’t be in there.”
Perfectly average and non-psychotically conversative women do too, though. And it’s not really about assault: it’s about making the decidedly uncomfortable custom of using a public restroom even more uncomfortable. I advocate for individual stalls with sinks for everyone, like many places in Switzerland. No.gaps anywhere. Civilized. Obviously this a first-world problem and this is a first-world solution, but we can dare to dream, can’t we?
Still, maybe we could take this opportunity to address how terrible public-restroom infrastructure is for everybody rather than just shuffling the deck chairs. Or I guess you could hypnotize us all into having fewer hangups about public bathrooms. It’s an uphill climb, though. We have little to nothing to do with strangers, but then we gather together into close places to expose the parts of our bodies that society has brainwashed us into thinking are our most private, and to perform some of the more noxious acts our bodies are capable of, in environs in which we’re quite poorly shielded from one another, both visually and aurally.
“My argument is that formal policies dictating sex segregations in bathrooms do nothing to actually reduce sexual assault, and can’t, and so the idea that women are losing an important protection is simply incorrect. There is no reason to believe that sex segregated bathrooms, which anyone can walk into at any time, actually protect against sexual assault”
The taboo against someone being allowed to go into the wrong bathroom is strong, though. It’s been built up over generations. People actively police it. Don’t pretend you’re stupid enough to think that a reduction in potential contact doesn’t reduce incidents. Why the hell do you think they tell women not to walk down dark streets at night? What difference does it make which street they’re on? By FDB’s argument, rapists are going to find them on any public street anyway, if they really want to. Being able to intervene when seeing a man going into the women’s bathroom makes it easier than having to wait until someone makes a move, already within the relative privacy of the bathroom.
“Let me underline that last part. There is no credible evidence that the presence of transwomen in women’s bathrooms increases the prevalence of sexual assault or any other crime.”
The “there is no credible evidence” is disingenuous. We went through this with COVID. People cited the “testing parachutes” story ad nauseum. Sometimes you have to make a decision with little to no evidence because no evidence for or against exists, because the situation is too new for any data to have been gathered. For and against are both engaging in speculation, are both asking for things to be done based on gut feelings. You either have a gut feeling that allowing biologically male people into women’s bathrooms will cause problems or you don’t. You don’t have any evidence either way (yet).
But what I’ve heard from people who are not psychotic and hateful strangers online is that women are not afraid of actual transwomen. They are instead afraid that others, riding on easier access, will cause problems. It’s debatable! Of course it’s debatable. But the fear exists. And it causes discomfort. And it leads to pushback.
I think it behooves us not to overestimate members of our own cisgender here (males) because they are capable of truly disgusting acts and many of them hold truly shocking opinions and attitudes, in their heart of hearts. Especially when drunk. While I admit that being able to prevent obvious males from entering women’s bathrooms was a crude and shitty tool to prevent assault, but I’m not as ready to round its effectiveness down to zero as FDB is.
“And if we acknowledge that sex segregated bathrooms do nothing to create an impediment to sexual assault, then the only way to seek to exclude transwomen from women’s bathrooms is to base that desire on the evidence-free claim that trans people are unusually likely to commit sex crimes.”
That’s quite a leap, but again, I think that you’re listening to all the shitty people online. That’s not at all the argument I’ve heard when talking to relatively normal, real-life people. I’ve heard that women are worried, whether that’s justified or not. Perhaps they just hate change. A lot of people hate change! Even if what they’ve gotten used to isn’t particularly good for them or others—or fair to themselves or others—they’re still going to cling to it, if only for its familiarity. The devil you know. It’s a natural instinct to not consider what harm your lifestyle is doing to others, especially when you don’t think you have it so great yourself. People are like this.
Making an argument that condemns nearly everyone isn’t very helpful (even if you’re morally in the right). What I trying to say is, is that the reason they feel this way doesn’t have to be overtly evil. There’s room to work here, I think, but you can’t just bull-in-a-china-shop accuse everyone who doesn’t already agree with you of being transphobic. Well, you can, but that almost guarantees that your movement will stay pretty exclusive. That can’t be what you want? Or maybe the tactic will work, who knows? Maybe you’re exceedingly lucky and can buck the trend. Yelling at people that they’re disappointing you doesn’t usually work. It seems to work for getting people to buy a whole new wardrobe every season of every year, so what do I know?
At any rate, women—reasonably or unreasonably doesn’t matter, ‘cause its feelings—see their collective discomfort and angst as being increased for the benefit of a handful of people—people who were born male and now jump the line of victimhood ahead of women. Even if it will never personally affect them, it sticks in their craw.
Not being careful here might mean pushing away a large group of potential allies by dismissing their concerns and calling them TERFs. Also: preventing actual physical assault is a pretty low bar. Women are concerned about all sorts of things. They’re worried about assholes pretending to be trans to get their disgusting pervy selves into women’s bathrooms. They’re worried that they won’t be able to taboo-shame them out of there anymore. They’re worried that they’ll feel less safe and they’ll also be derided by a potential attacker that they know is only pretending to be trans for being anti-trans themselves. People are shitty. FDB seem to be temporarily ignoring how such social systems can be hacked.
Just rounding up anyone with questions to TERFs is not productive, but you do you, Freddie. I personally think we should reduce contact with strangers when we’re at our most vulnerable in public. I think we should stop peeing into drinking water. But I’m a weirdo.
“I’ve never seen someone else’s penis because the way it works is, you go in, you keep your eyes trained at your feet, you pee in such a way as to minimize the chances of anyone else seeing your junk, you zip up, you wash your hands, and you walk out.”
You claim to be totally OK with it, but the way you’ve described the custom of public urination doesn’t suggest anything comfortable about the experience. You’re describing an inherently uncomfortable practice as if it’s perfectly ok to feel mortified while micturating in public—a screaming desire for privacy is hammered into a lot of us. The whole public-bathroom scene flies in the face of this.
“This is where the TERFy element attacks me, a man, for talking about women’s spaces. But of course there are many millions of cisgender women who are trans-affirming and who welcome transwomen into women’s bathrooms, and I’m sure some of them will be very willing to express the same sentiments I’m expressing.”
Here’s where I fear that FDB is discriminating based on intellect and ability to communicate. I’m hearing from him that anyone incapable of articulating their angst sufficiently eloquently and clearly for him is a TERF whose angst can be dismissed. I’m kind of surprised to see him come out this hard, but maybe I’m not getting what he’s saying. It seems like he can’t conceive of anyone having doubts without being full-on anti-trans. That’s probably being ungenerous, but he’s repeated himself several times now just in this essay, and that’s what I’m hearing in all of these formulations.
We can’t possibly suddenly only care about trans feelings and not about ciswomen’s feelings, can we? Or is anyone with the wrong misgivings an enemy who loses their right to speak on the topic because of those misgivings? Somehow, if you’re not able to prove why you feel the way you do, you get ostracized rather than helped. Unless, of course, you’re in one of the right minority groups whose completely justifiable feelings are what kicked this whole things off. Neat trick. Very progressive.
It feels just like when society gets rid of jobs for the sake of progress, when no-one cares about helping those who will be affected to learn how to live in the brave new world. This is similar: let those dozens of millions of women who’ve kind of figured out public bathrooms—let them figure out how to be enlightened on their own. If they can’t? Fuck ‘em. Backwoods hicks. I feel sometimes like FDB’s brain is still in Brooklyn. Try thinking about the part of the country that isn’t comfortable enough—doesn’t have enough free time—to spend a ton of time getting their morals straight, who don’t want change because it has historically almost always meant regress, not progress, for them.
FBD is fighting the loud idiots online here. He’s thinking of his friends in Brooklyn (I know he now lives somewhere that he almost certainly calls “upstate”, but which can still see the glow of NYC on the horizon) and he’s talking to idiots online. His comments section has a massive selection bias.
I know we started off trying to help people, but God forbid you try to help anyone who gets in the way, even slightly, even temporarily, even unwittingly. I mean helping people who are not whatever fad-minority-of-the-moment it’s popular to help. No-one got any likes online for trying to convince normal women to ease up a bit, it’ll be OK, we’ll get through this together. Trans people should be able to be just as uncomfortable in public as the rest of us. No more and no less. So maybe this is egalitarian? Distributing the extra discomfort that trans people have right now to the much-larger group that should pretty easily be able to accommodate it?
But maybe pretending like you’re asking for their help would ease the transition, I dunno. I know, I know, you shouldn’t have to beg and cajole for rights! Being on the side of justice is one thing but, man, I wonder how just a little bit of sugar in some of these arguments might not go a long way. Some people are lost causes, of course, but you shouldn’t just shitcan everyone else. You’re only making things harder for yourself.
“The question is whether we can protect the dignity and safety of trans people, the vast majority of whom simply want to live their lives, while we wait for them to do so.”
Absolutely, they should have as much dignity and comfort in public restrooms as I do, but that’s a pretty low bar. I pretty much despise public restrooms. I despise the openness of urinals, but rue the waste of water that is peeing into a toilet. You’re uncomfortable using what you think isn’t the right bathroom for you? I’m uncomfortable using the only one I can reasonably claim as my own. And discomfort is often hindering to micturition. At least you have hope for change for the better. 🤷♀️
Published by marco on 4. Feb 2024 20:35:48 (GMT-5)
To think I almost shrunk away from the 150-minute runtime of this video! It was well-worth my time, felt like it went more quickly than the runtime, and was an all-around excellent conversation. I’ve included a partial transcription of the parts I found interesting and my own notes below.
At 27:00 they are talking about the recent ousting of president of Harvard Claudine Gay, largely through billionaire Bill Ackman’s efforts.
“Norman: I don’t recall a single article that said ‘[…] do you realize what just happened? A billionaire decided who’s going to be the president of the most revered academic Institute Institution in our country.‘
“What happened to peer competence? […] What happened to faculty self-governance? That’s the basic principle. There’s a faculty senate. The faculty senate is supposed to be integral to making the decisions about who are the administrators on your campus and your university. All of that totally destroyed by what they did. So, given the rank of the people they went after—and it was such a brazen assault—it was, let’s be clear, it was in-broad-daylight blackmail. That’s what it was. It was in-broad-daylight blackmail.
“Now you might say or Robbie [Soave, Briahna’s co-anchor on The Hill] might say well it’s a private institution and […] you have […] the right to give or withhold your money, you know, as an alumnus […] which is absolutely true, if you do it quietly. You make the decision to yourself, [saying] “you know what I think? Harvard has gotten too woke for my taste. I’m not giving them any more money.‘ Sure, you have the right to do that. First of all, you know, speaking as a person of the left, I don’t think you should have that kind of money. And this is another example of the problem when you have that kind of money: yes, the problem is you can control everything.
“Briahna: That’s such an important point. There’s a democracy aspect to wanting to tax the rich because nobody should have enough money to buy and sell careers and set the academic course for an entire university or, of course, buy Congress.
“Norman: Totally agree. You not only have the money to do it, you think you’re entitled to do it. This guy, this hedge-fund manager thinks he has the right to determine who is the president of Harvard. That’s a real problem. That’s called—the technical term is megalomania—when you think you have the right to determine who should be the president of a university because you happen to have a lot of money. There’s a real problem there but it was blackmail in broad daylight because, as I said, you have the right. That’s the way the capitalist system works, you know, to give or not to give in some philanthropic or whatever venture but, when you broadcast it—when you say I’m withholding $100 million until you get rid of Claudine Gay—that becomes blackmail in my opinion. Whatever you do in private, do it in private but when you start announcing that—broadcasting it—it’s turned into blackmail.”
At 41:30 they talk about the subsequent plagiarism charges and what constitutes plagiarism.
“Norman: maybe I’m old-fashioned about this but I think a doctoral dissertation at MIT which plagiarizes extensively from Wikipedia is a whole other kettle of fish. You know, that’s very that’s problematic, in my opinion. So, I’m not ready to—my threshold does not allow for that.
“Briahna: The problem there isn’t plagiarizing Wikipedia. The problem there is using Wikipedia as a source instead of doing the more rigorous exercise of using of looking at the sources that Wikipedia is citing for the proposition and following those down the thread and and researching and making sure that there’s accuracy there yourself. That’s what she is really being faulted for when we’re talking about plagiarizing for Wikipedia. not the idea that whatever definition of whatever noun she’s trying to define in her paper. Whatever idea she’s trying to define in her paper isn’t probably accurate just because it’s on Wikipedia. It’s about the intellectual rigor of her research that’s not okay.”
This discussion about plagiarism was quite good, on the level of what “plagiarism” actually is. I think it’s a shame that these two lent too much credence to the “software” that is typically used to detect plagiarism. Plagiarism isn’t a yes/no issue. There are shades of gray. The article The plagiarism circus by Mark Liberman (Language Log) cites another article The Plagiarism War Has Begun: Claudine Gay was taken down by a politically motivated investigation. Would the same approach work for any academic? by Ian Bogost (The Atlantic), which detailed what it was like using one of these tools to investigate your own paper, a paper which the author knows is beyond reproach.
The machine does an initial run and spits out a terrible score. Every document is plagiarized, by default. It’s up to you to determine what to do with that score. If you’re actually interested in detecting real plagiarism, then you’ll analyze the results and tweak the input parameters. If you’re just interested in getting a black-box result from a tool that you can claim is authoritative, which says that an enemy plagiarized their work, then you can stop right there. The machine has provided you with the F.U.D. that you require.
Bogost used iThenticate—which is, apparently, related to Turnitin—to test. I have no familiarity with either of these tools. He took a closer look and noticed that the tool doesn’t actually detect plagiarism. It detects similarities in text to other published texts. If you have written a popular paper that has been cited in other papers afterwards, then the tool will cheerily tell you that large sections of your paper is also contained in other papers and let the lazy—or duplicitous—user simply round that up to plagiarism.
His initial analysis of his ~68k-word thesis yielded a result that 74% of the text was replicated in other documents. A facile interpretation would round that up to a shocking level of plagiarism. He had to manually filter out works that had been published after his, that were citing his paper—because why should the tool do that automatically? The software knows all of the publication dates, doesn’t it? It could do it, but it doesn’t.
There’s a checkbox to “exclude bibliography”, which causes the software to suddenly recognize that work copied from other works that have been referenced is OK and not plagiarism. A similar checkbox no longer flagged quoted material that had been footnoted, which, again, seems like a no-brainer to enable by default. The text “Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.” was also flagged as having been found in other works. No kidding. 🫤
There were many other common phrases that it threw up as noise—because having the phrase “to preserve the” can’t in any sane world be considered to have been copied. It flagged proper names, titles, etc. It flagged phrases as having been copied from work that had absolutely nothing to do with the document being analyzed—something a human would never, ever do. If you’re writing a thesis on Shakespeare and there is a sentence or two that matches exactly two sentences found in an analysis of taxoplasmosis in Belgian cats, then no-one would imagine in their most feverish dreams that you’d stolen those two filler sentences from that paper. But this software cheerily flags it as “found in other works”. Bravo.
So, the software is doing no work to help you actually detect copies. It seems to filter nothing out, despite costing $300 to run against this one paper. That seems like a nice, lucrative business. It seems like the tool’s default settings are to pump the possible plagiarisms as high as possible. Again, it’s probably more lucrative that way. Whether there’s a knock-on effect of insufficiently substantiated accusations of plagiarism doesn’t matter to the company peddling the service. They’ve almost certainly excluded themselves from liability in a EULA.
I imagine that most people will lend these tools far too much credence because there will be no downside to their doing so, and the upside is that they personally spend much less time checking for plagiarism. Whether there is plagiarism or not will soon be determined by the output of these tools. That is, with plagiarism being such a vague topic for most, they won’t notice when the standard changes. That the standard changes because of laziness and corporate greed doesn’t seem to matter, either. It will just change.
Long story short: when someone says that they used a tool to detect plagiarism, it means essentially nothing on its own. Before you lend any weight to that “evidence”, you have to find out more details.
I wish Norman had made his point that it’s the politics of the slogan that’s important. Briahna was right that you can’t force a slogan down people’s throats. But I wish she’d understood that he was saying that you can’t force people to like your slogan and stop misinterpreting it, either. This would be an opportunity to say: what would be a better slogan? To collaborate with detractors to figure out what is wrong with the slogan. What is wrong with “from the river to the sea”? Is it that Palestinians should have rights at all? Or that it seems like there should be one state? Without Israelis? Without Jews? What does it mean? As Norman said, there is room for interpretation there. You can’t not acknowledge that.
Briahna’s right that there are some people who will be offended no matter what, because those people’s beef is with Palestinians having rights at all. But you also can’t just ignore that a slogan has been made politically charged. Well, you can, but you do so at your own peril. At least be honest about what the drawbacks might be.
The drawback might be that your opponents manage to pigeonhole your entire movement into insignificance by convincing a large part of the public that you’re all terrorists. Talk to people who read the New York Times—they definitely already think this. This tactic has worked before. Finkelstein is old enough to know. Briahna is frustrated and ready to say ‘screw it’. It’s hard to say who’s right. Capitulation to relentless, unyielding, and perennially unreasonable opponents? Or resignation to possible irrelevance and a lost cause?
I thought it was interesting when Finkelstein said that Martin Luther King didn’t want Stokely Carmichael to push the “black power” slogan because he was quite certain that it would be interpreted by those in power as “we’re taking away your power”, which, in many ways, they definitely wanted to, right? They wanted to take away the white power that whites should never have been able to arrogate to themselves in the first place. But it’s threatening and endangering to the project of equality. It’s not exactly jettisoning allies, but it’s making it much more difficult for people to become allies. It’s going to make them wonder what they’re actually advocating for. You want to be as clear as possible. “Equal rights for all” is a good slogan.
She makes a good point that it’s patronizing to tell people who’ve been chanting a slogan for 50 years that they don’t understand what they mean by it. But she’s slightly off again, in that Norman is saying that they know what they mean by it, but they should be explicitly aware of the political ramifications of continuing to use a slogan that can be used as a weapon against them.
There is no easy answer: if you capitulate, then your opponents will smell blood in the water and outlaw any slogan you come up with. Meanwhile, people who continue to use a slogan that the movement has acknowledged is potentially problematic will immediately be upgraded to the status of terrorists advocating for the elimination of all Jews. They will point to the agreement to stop using the slogan as justification for this, arguing that no-one would use the slogan unless they really meant the bad thing that we grudgingly agreed it might mean in the most ungenerous possible interpretation.
It is possible that there is no winning against opposition like this! I almost agree with Briahna that we should just say “fuck ‘em” before investing a single second trying to appease opponents who will expressly never be appeased. But I think she argues inelegantly in that she jumps to the conclusion without once acknowledging Norman’s argument that there are political drawbacks—some quite severe and potentially movement-ending—to doing so. They often talk past one another like this. They’re so close to agreement, but neither is capable of fully formulating their argument in a way that the other would be able to accept the “yes, but” and be done with it, even after half-an-hour of discussion.
At 2:13:30, she finally summarizes her position quite well, though,
“[…] bad-faith actors—people with an agenda—are going to do and say what they got to do to press their agenda and at a certain point you cannot spend your entire life running away from the criticism of people who are never going to agree with you. If you’re in a place where you’re talking to good-faith people and they find a slogan so pernicious that someone who otherwise would be on your team isn’t going to be on your team, fine, but the example that you raised with your friend: either she’s down with the Zionist project or she isn’t and if she isn’t, that’s fine, but she was never going to be on the ‘From The River To The Sea, Palestine Must Be Free” team anyway.”
I think there’s the problem, though. “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” doesn’t mean “end the Zionist project” to everyone. It doesn’t even mean that to people to most people actually chanting it.
Right after that, she goes off quite eloquently (which is kind of awesome).
“[…] it is a trap, in and of itself, it is a trap to thwart the momentum of a movement and to distract people from doing what they should be doing to advance righteous causes, to [instead] be stuck on a hamster wheel, trying to convince people who are being paid to disagree with you, whose incentive structure is set up to disagree with you, and I don’t care anymore. I’m tired of tiptoeing around not saying that things that are blatantly racist are racist because some yokel […] somewhere is going to think poorly of it. I have extended so much grace to these people and the returns on that investment are not worth it to me at this point.”
I do think that it’s dangerous to have your political tactics and even strategy be a reaction to the worst people you hear from online. You don’t have to engage with them. No-one is saying you have to engage with the most horrible people. You just have to be aware to what degree you’re rounding up everyone who disagrees with you to the group of people who call you a monkey online. Don’t let the din of malicious actors numb you into being completely impervious to all criticism—even valid criticism.
That is the danger: that you become the kind of person who dismisses anyone who doesn’t already agree with everything they have to say, including signing on to the interpretation of a slogan which, quite frankly, people only chose because it rhymes in English. If more than half of the people to whom you’re directing the slogan—the people you’re trying to convince of the rightness of your cause, the people whom you’re trying to convince to help you achieve justice—are misunderstanding the implication and are afraid of being ostracized for using the slogan or for associating with people who do, then you have a problem that you have to look squarely in the face.
If your reply is “I don’t care,” that may be the smartest reply given the situation. But it might also be too easy. Because you have to at least explicitly acknowledge that your cause may end with that slogan, that this will be the thing that your opponents use—rightly or wrongly—to torpedo your whole cause. And they won’t care how unfair or shockingly meretricious they behaved in getting what they wanted. They will have won because they managed to make you and your movement inconsequential. You will have died on the hill of the slogan when your original goal was to gain freedom for a people.
And also because—even just a little bit—it became about you. It became about you not giving in to trolls. And that’s the shitty thing about trolls: they win either way, as long as you engage. Even by not engaging, by continuing to do what you were going to do, their influence over what others think about what you’re doing and saying and advocating for might end up being what matters. You’ll end up sitting there, staring at the shambles of your movement, wondering where it went wrong, how it is that you lost support.
What went wrong is that building movements is about convincing a bunch of ADHD adults to care, to be empathetic. And your opponents just have to appeal to the inner asshole in a bunch of anonymous people. It’s an uphill climb, to say the least.
Right at the end, there was a segment of Krystal Ball’s show with a cohost (who I didn’t recognize). I think she (Joy) thought the segment would show that the Congressman being interviewed was no longer able to just push people into silence by implying that they’re anti-semitic. What it looked like to me was that the Congressman was actually quite reasonably asking the host to have some empathy with the Israeli people, who fear for their lives.
This is absolutely true! They 100% fear for their lives! I’ve spoken with some of them. They think that an attack on their country is imminent, not from Gaza, but from the north, from Lebanon. They’re positively paranoid about Iran. Just because I empathize with the pain and fear they must be feeling doesn’t mean I lend credence to their feeling that they’re going to be invaded. They’re deluded, but they’re still in pain, is the point. They’re not unlike Americans that way, who see danger in every corner, despite being some of the most secure people on the planet (at least from military attack).
I thought that the Congressman said that quite well and quite eloquently, at least at first. Once the host badgered him more, he quickly fell back on the hoary tropes of a perennially persecuted people, of ghettos and pogroms. None of that has relevance today. The people in Israel have lived in safety for generations by now. They haven’t had a single thing to legitimately fear for 60 years. They make up all of this shit so that they can bristle outwards and justify preemptive aggression in the service of colonialism and empire-building (if much more modest, of course, than papa bear’s).
Speaking of papa bear: this is the same thing that the US does. Talk to an American and you will hear of ludicrous fears that they legitimately feel. It’s been like this for generations in that country, as well. They think the Russians are going to invade. I get stuff from my father-in-law with intricate plans of how the Chinese are going to make a pincer movement from the Canadian and Mexican borders. Their pain is real. We can empathize with it without believing in the things that cause it.
So, no, I don’t think that the clip showed what they thought it showed. It was more a kind of dunking on a guy who was actually trying to be reasonable. The guy said he empathizes with Palestinians. He said that he also empathizes with Israelis. Ask him what he means by that exactly rather than just assuming that he uses it as code for saying that he supports the extermination of Palestinians.
Stop trying to go for a win for yourself and figure out if you can get the guy to hang himself. Imagine if you’d expressed empathy for the people of Israel, most of whom are just as trapped in the fear-spiral of bad foreign policy and a completely morally bankrupt leadership and media as Americans are. Imagine if you’d asked him what he thought they feared, exactly. What are we being asked to empathize with? The fear that Hezbollah will attack? Or the fear that they won’t get a cheap home in a new settlement in Gaza?
Published by marco on 4. Feb 2024 13:18:11 (GMT-5)
Sometime at the end of last year, I found a coupon for one free month of TacX, a cycling service offered by Garmin that integrates with their app to provide courses, routes, maps, and head-to-head competition online. I wasn’t interested in head-to-head or in doing anything that involved watching the app, but my own custom routes had grown a bit stale, so I decided to try it.
The coupon code worked just fine—even after almost five years—and I was registered.
Then I got COVID and wasted a week not riding anywhere. After that, the weather at the end of the year was warm enough to cycle outside, so I did that instead.
I eventually rode my first course weeks later and it worked just fine. At the beginning of the year, I managed another ride, which was more fun than the first. You can see the map and a video showing you where you’re riding. It’s really not too shabby—at any rate, it was a nice change of pace from my “push this many watts for this long” one-hour-long rides.
Two weeks later, I got sick again, so I’d definitely burned through my coupon, having ridden only twice. By the time I was ready to try again, I’d forgotten that my account had almost certainly expired.
How did I find out? I’d selected the second ride I’d done and said “do that again”.
The app showed me a modal dialog that informed me that this map is not part of my subscription. What? Did the app tell me that my trial period had expired? Of course not. Did it tell offer to let me sign up for another subscription? You know, did it try to sell me a subscription? Oddly…no. It just refused to let me ride on that course.
I was in a bit of a hurry. I’d gotten into a “riding mindset”. When I tell you I was a bit agitated, that’s an understatement.
I looked in the app quickly to see how to sign up for a subscription. Nothing.
I went to the web site. Logged in. Checked my orders. It only showed an order for a US map from last year. There as no sign of my recent subscription purchase (yes, it was free, but you’d think it would show up on my account).
There was literally nothing to indicate that I’d ever been subscribed—or how to subscribe again. I had to browse the web site to find their list of subscriptions and choose one for myself. The list was in German, of course, because Garmin has to use my location—rather than the language my browser asks it to use—to determine how it’s going to communicate with me.
I found the subscription and purchased it.
Does it show up anywhere? Nope.
Brimming with confidence, I went back to the app and tried to load the course again.
Nothing. Same error message.
This happened a couple of times.
I’ll let you imagine the cursing. It was legendary.
After several tries over a couple of minutes, the course loaded and I was finally able to ride.
As a paying subscriber, this is what my app looked like.
it’s just a little spinning loading-progress icon for the whole ride. I had the elevation profile at the bottom and the incline indicator at the top, but no video.
I rode that way because what else was I going to do? I don’t really watch the video anyway, but it’s not a good sign when the app works worse once you’re a paying subscriber.
I’ve learned that this kind of behavior is not unusual. I’ve not had a single ride that just started smoothly, where the technology didn’t impose itself into the whole routine as an active participant, demanding attention rather than quietly being of service.
My most recent ride yesterday started with a calibration. I calibrate every time because, when I don’t, the software will track an odd number of watts, either undercounting even though the workout feels 25% more strenuous than usual, or just failing to record watts at all, either providing no resistance at all or providing completely random although always quite light resistance, independent of the program.
So, I calibrated. I’m better about remembering to turn on the TacX device by now, although the software chirpily tries to calibrate a device that isn’t even connected. It doesn’t notify you that this is the case, but it shows a different calibration procedure, which I’ve learned to recognize as indicating that I’ve not turned the device on. If it asks me to pedal up to 40kph, I know that the device isn’t even on. I can pedal all day, but it’s not going to calibrate a device that isn’t under power. When the device is on, it asks me to start pedaling up to 30kph.
I pedaled up to 30kph, then freewheeled as instructed. You’re supposed to leave the pedals alone until the calibration is complete. My foot hit a pedal by accident and the TacX claimed that the calibration had been invalidated. JFC. It showed a retry button.
Retry.
Pedal.
Nothing.
It doesn’t allow me to recalibrate. The “retry” button was just a joke on the part of the programmers—or perhaps a very hopeful promise of what might come in the future.
I went into the settings and started a manual calibration. That one worked.
I started the program and started pedaling. Nothing. It wasn’t showing any sign that the program had detected a device. The calibration had been successful, but the software was still off in its own little world.
Restart the program (not the app).
Off in la-la land.
I had to shut down the software and restart it, reselect the program, recalibrate, and was finally able to ride.
This is just how much fun it is to work with Garmin software.
Yes, there was a lot of swearing.
Published by marco on 3. Feb 2024 23:37:13 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 4. Feb 2024 08:41:13 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
It May be Genocide, But it Won’t Be Stopped by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“Palestinians in Gaza make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the United Nations. The entire population of Gaza by early February is projected to lack sufficient food, with half a million people suffering from starvation, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, drawing on data from U.N. agencies and NGOs. The famine is engineered by Israel.”
“Israel has dropped almost 30,000 bombs and shells on Gaza — eight times more bombs than the U.S. dropped on Iraq during six years of war. It has used hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs to obliterate densely populated areas, including refugee camps. These “bunker buster” bombs have a kill radius of a thousand feet. The Israeli aerial assault is unlike anything seen since Vietnam. Gaza, only 20 miles long and five miles wide, is rapidly becoming, by design, uninhabitable.”
“Yemen, which was under siege for eight years by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Britain and the U.S., experienced over 400,000 deaths from starvation, lack of health care, infectious diseases and the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals, infrastructure, residential areas, markets, funerals and weddings. Yemenis know too well — since at least 2017 multiple U.N. agencies have described Yemen as experiencing “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world” — what the Palestinians are enduring.”
“The court acknowledged that “an unprecedented 93% of the population in Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger, with insufficient food and high levels of malnutrition. At least 1 in 4 households are facing ‘catastrophic conditions’: experiencing an extreme lack of food and starvation and having resorted to selling off their possessions and other extreme measures to afford a simple meal. Starvation, destitution and death are evident.””
“The ruling, quoting Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), continued:”“Overcrowded and unsanitary UNRWA shelters have now become ‘home’ to more than 1.4 million people,” the ruling read. “They lack everything, from food to hygiene to privacy. People live in inhumane conditions, where diseases are spreading, including among children. They live through the unlivable, with the clock ticking fast towards famine. The plight of children in Gaza is especially heartbreaking. An entire generation of children is traumatized and will take years to heal. Thousands have been killed, maimed, and orphaned. Hundreds of thousands are deprived of education. Their future is in jeopardy, with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.”
This is in a technologically advanced and wealthy nation. Like the Warsaw ghetto.
The Entry of a New German Left Party Shakes up the Country by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)
“Wagenknecht told me. “If you argue for irrational energy policies like bringing in Russian energy more expensively via India or Belgium, while campaigning not to reopen the pipelines with Russia for cheap energy, then people simply will not believe that you would stand up for the millions of employees whose jobs are in jeopardy as a result of the collapse of whole industries brought about by the rise in energy prices.””
“Scholz’s approval rating is now at 17 percent, and unless his government is able to solve the pressing problems engendered by the Ukraine war, it is unlikely that he will be able to reverse this image.”
Holy shit. That’s half even of Biden, who’s at a near-historic low.
“Part of the controversy around Wagenknecht is about her views on immigration. Wagenknecht says that she supports the right to political asylum and says that people fleeing war must be afforded protection. But, she argues, the problem of global poverty cannot be solved by migration, but by sound economic policies and an end to the sanctions on countries like Syria. A genuine left-wing, she says, must attend to the alarm call from communities who call for an end to immigration and move to the far-right AfD. “Unlike the leadership of Die Linke,” Wagenknecht told me, “we do not intend to write off AfD voters and simply watch as the right-wing threat in Germany continues to grow. We want to win back those AfD voters who have gone to that party out of frustration and in protest at the lack of a real opposition that speaks for communities.””
“[…] her party will work with the communities to understand why they are frustrated and how their frustration against immigrants is often a wider frustration with cuts in social welfare, cuts in education and health funding, and in a cavalier policy toward economic migration. “It is revealing,” she said, “that the harshest attacks on us come from the far-right wing.” They do not want, she points out, the new party to shift the argument away from a narrow anti-immigrant focus to pro-working-class politics.”
Protest Sorrow Anger Split by Victor Grossman (CounterPunch)
“[…] while gentrified housing blossoms alongside grand high-rise office buildings, nearly a million affordable new homes are desperately needed but only a pitiful fraction are being built. High taxes, interest problems, costly material, strict regulations and bureaucracy are blamed. Actually, affordable housing offers too little profit and thus lacks foxy, well-heeled lobbyists.”
Bingo.
“Somehow no-one dares mention the giant GDR housing programs, with no profit worries, and tenants paid less than 10% of their income and evictions were forbidden. No-one slept in the streets. And food pantries? Unknown.”
“Many saw Sahra Wagenknecht’s decision to break with the LINKE and form a new party as a fulfilment of such hopes. A wonderful orator and unbeatable debater, she was remarkably popular even in wide circles of conservative West Germany; the media often invited her (with 2-3-4 opponents) because she attracted viewers. And she held her own! Most important, she wanted no compromises with NATO, and while condemning Putin’s march into Ukraine (as required) she explained it as basically a defense against continuous, mounting USA-NATO advances. And she attacked the total economic break with Russia, which was causing Germany’s sharp downhill slide and largely represented a kowtow to US economic pressures, always aimed at preventing any German-Russian coexistence, seen in Washington (or Wall Street) as contrary to the goal of world hegemony. She also stressed the fight for German workers’ gains (while dismissing gender-debates as a distraction by professional or academic sectors of the LINKE). At last, said many; a party they could join with heart and soul!”
“The new party, Sahra stated, should have four basic principles: peace, social justice, economic reason and freedom. All her adherents supported a “foreign policy that once again relies on diplomacy instead of arms deliveries,” with a call for peace negotiations to end the Ukraine war and pursue peace and renewed trade with Russia.”
“As for me, I am still uncertain as to which strategy was wiser, and must recall Mark Twain’s response to a religious question: ”I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.””
“Does Russia really threaten Germany? Has it taken one step in that direction since it moved all its troops out of East Germany in 1994, expecting the other side to follow suit, as promised. That assumption proved very false as NATO, with its weaponry, moved closer and closer to Russia – aiming to surround it in Georgia and Ukraine, but always using those key words “defense” – “Russian expansion” – “Putin imperialism.” I have never heard a clear answer to the question: If China and Russia sent about 90,000 troops to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean for “exercises” with “more than 50 ships from aircraft carriers to destroyers, more than 80 fighter jets, helicopters and drones and at least 1,100 combat vehicles including 133 tanks and 533 infantry fighting vehicles” would American counter-measures be described as “imperialist aggression”?”
“I cannot refrain from quoting Joe Biden here. After the Uvalde tragedy in May 2022, when 19 children were killed, he said in moving tones: “There are parents who will never see their child again…To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away… It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind…Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to deal with it and stand up to the lobbies?””
This is the shit people point to when they talk about what a swell guy Joe Biden is. Nothing happened. He didn’t even try. It’s easy for a liar to give a speech. He’s a con man, just like they all are. He’s shown over five decades that he’s got his finger on the pulse of the U.S.—he’s very adept at conning Americans. He tells them what they want to hear, and then does whatever he wants. He’ll tell them he cares about children deeply, then debate whether the numbers are accurate when quibbling over whether it’s 12,000, 15,000, or 20,000 dead children is already a horrific argument. He implies that there is a just and fair and honorable number of children to kill, if they’re not American children, if they’re not really human children, if he doesn’t know who they are, if there is a political advantage to pretending that they don’t exist. There’s your lesser evil for you, you fools.
More Fog, More War by Séamus Malekafzali (The Baffler)
“In the American context, Palestine continues to go virtually unmentioned. Instead, the reports—culled from State Department briefings and White House statements—seem to delight in the language of piracy, threats to international commerce, threats to the free flow of trade, threats to freedom of navigation, and so on and so on. (As for Gaza’s utter lack of freedom of navigation under a seventeen-year naval blockade—well, that’s irrelevant.) The statement issued by President Biden after the wave of strikes on January 12 went so far as to claim that forcing Israel-linked cargo ships to go around the Cape of Good Hope would add “weeks of delays in product shipping times,” perhaps the first time maintaining delivery schedules have been used to justify deadly airstrikes against another country.”
“The president of the Houthi government’s Supreme Revolutionary Committee Muhammad Ali al-Houthi, when he was asked by a BBC Arabic reporter about why Gaza had any relevance, despite the distance between them, responded in turn, “So, Biden is Netanyahu’s neighbor? They live in one apartment? The French president also lives on the same floor, and the British prime minister lives with them in the same building?””
“The State Department talks of dealing with a “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza without mentioning who has caused it. In American papers of record, Palestinians almost always seem to die from mysterious bombs that theoretically could have come from anywhere. CNN will report on the spread of disease and the treating of innocent children with deep wounds, but the initiators of their suffering are downplayed. NPR will play audio diaries of doctors working in emergency rooms without adequate staffing, equipment, or medicine, but fail to mention how Israel’s systematic targeting of hospitals brought about these horrors, in direct violation of international law no less.”
“To the American, war, when abetted by Americans, must always be draped in some sort of impenetrable fog. Bullets fly from unknown places, infections and starvation spread just because, and suffering is abstract and inevitable—up until an ally might be blamed. The only motives to be given prime time coverage are America’s: always moral, always undertaken to protect the international rules-based order.”
“In the ideal world, Palestine would not exist, as is the stated goal of Prime Minister Netanyahu, and all the Palestinians would leave for different countries, as is also the goal of Prime Minister Netanyahu. They are a festering sore: always demanding rights, always putting themselves at the forefront of the news with their suffering, with their death. The thought of actually having to pay attention to Gaza, especially after this war, makes Israel furious. Why can’t these people just go away, leave their homes forever, and let this colonial project proceed.”
“On January 14, during a days-long telecommunications blackout, video emerged of thousands of Palestinians, stretching out onto the horizon, crowding along the coast, surrounded by the ruins of Gaza City. They are trying to reach what is rumored to be an aid truck, one of the few that has been allowed to enter the Strip. There will not be enough for all of them. Another video emerges, showing those same Palestinians running across rubble, now in the opposite direction. The Israeli military has begun firing on the crowd searching for food. It was the one hundredth day of Israel’s war against Gaza.”
Nursing home and senior living residents exposed to freezing temperatures during the Arctic blast by Liz Cabrera (WSWS)
“Once again, the extremely cold weather has exposed the fragile conditions of the electricity and heating infrastructure across the U.S. particularly in nursing homes, senior living facilities and senior apartments. The elderly residents and patients in these facilities and apartments are one of the most vulnerable sections of society. The ruling class sees them not as people, but as a drain on society, no longer churning out profits for the corporate oligarchy.”
Cultural Strip-Mining for an Exhausted Age by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“In the waning years of the twentieth century, there was a felt need to take stock of post-war history, especially in view of the way mass media had imposed it on us, in litanic form, in a never-ending series of events we had been taught it was our civic duty to follow, and made to believe that in doing so we would be able to discern an order and chart a path into the future. By 2023, the purpose of the litany had changed, for reasons vastly larger than anything under Fall Out Boy’s creative control. It was no longer a matter of orienting the historical subject, but only of unctuously congratulating the content-consumer for his passing familiarity with the mostly contextless flotsam drifting in our information-oceans.”
“To return to an example I have used before, take Todd Phillip’s execrably stupid Joker (2019), which for a while had its almost totally culturally illiterate admirers proudly signaling, mostly on social media, their ability to recognize the film’s many references to its ancestral inspirations. It provided them an opportunity to display their bona-fides as Scorsese-heads simply by being able to respond as anticipated to the unsubtle visual Easter eggs that had been laid for them in obvious allusion to Taxi Driver (1976). “Duh, this looks like that”, they could all say now, evidently unaware that in doing so they were not so much establishing themselves as cinephiles or as media-archeologists, as they were offering up free labor in service of the movie’s promotional campaign , precisely as intended by its makers.”
In defining the quality of the movie by the shallowness of its proponents, Justin really stoops quite low. I think he’s still never actually seen the film. I think his opprobrium is based completely on his negative experiences with fans of the film. It’s pretty stupid to hate something just because people you think are stupid like it.
The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse by Chris Hedges (Substack)
“Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.”
“[Biden] is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.”
This is why I don’t know how Dean Baker can support him. Because of his great economy? Bullshit.
“The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s.”
He’s missing a comma and wrong verb tense, so I was waiting for the second half of the sentence. It should be “The year before COMMA Biden HAD GIVEN …”
This Is Not Another ‘Phoney War’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“America, mindlessly loyal to the frothing dog known as Israel, has wandered into another war the way our president wanders away from podiums and off television news programs while the cameras are still rolling. This is a 21st century war, replete with attacks, denials, proxies and indirection, and with no formal declaration. But we may as well declare it ourselves so we understand our moment properly. America is once more at war.”
I think that this formulation gives the U.S. too much credit. It’s not just Israel that is a frothing dog. It takes after its master, which is just as rabid. The U.S. doesn’t just “wander” into wars—it actively seeks them out. It doesn’t seek conflict, it seeks resistance-free domination.
Not only that, but a war that is “replete with attacks, denials, proxies and indirection, and with no formal declaration” is not in any way uniquely a 21st-century one. That describes pretty much every U.S. war of the 20th century as well.
“U.S. attacks on Houthi targets are now something close to routine. On Tuesday the Pentagon announced that Navy SEAL commandos had raided an Iranian vessel bound for Yemen and seized missile components from its cargo.”
That’s piracy. Even worse than that carried out by Somalis or Houthis since the U.S. has overwhelming firepower and might to back up their plunder.
“I do not think there is any longer any stepping back from the reality that the U.S. is now in a regional war involving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.”
“The Netanyahu regime professes almost daily its determination to exterminate as many Palestinians as it can and scatter the survivors to the winds.”
“As reported and ably analyzed Monday in The Cradle, published in Beirut by the estimable Sharmine Narwani, “The West Bank is a ticking time bomb.” Indeed. What will Biden and his people do if it detonates? There are Israel’s other obsessions to consider. It is spoiling for a provocation to justify an attack on Lebanon. It has hankered after an excuse to attack the Islamic Republic for decades. You start to think Israel took October 7 as the beginning of a once-for-all devastation of its periphery. Is Tel Aviv now hoping to recruit Zionist Biden into a campaign against Iran, or at least obtain the White House’s acquiescence as Israel goes it alone, tactical nukes and all?”
Imperial Costs: Two Stories Summarize the Cost of Empire to Democracy by Matthew Hoh (Scheer Post)
“The other story relates to the authorization of production of the B21 Raider, which is set to replace the B1 and B2 bombers but not the 70-year-old B52s. That the youngest B52 was produced in 1962 and won’t be replaced, but the bombers built in modern times must be replaced, tells you a great deal about the strategy of the American weapons industry. This fleecing of the American taxpayers by the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is nothing new. Both political parties have hollowed out the American economy to the benefit of weapons makers. If any citizen has the gall to ask their members of Congress why our living standards are so far below those of the world’s other wealthy nations, the answers come back as some variation of “we can’t afford those things.””
“The roster of weapons that don’t work and have cost us trillions is seemingly infinite and, in a sanely functioning and non-corrupt democracy, Pentagon budgets would be decreasing, generals would be fired and defense industry share prices would be labeled as SELL.”
Genocide When You See It by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“This is the genocidal version of Catch-22: Genocide is taking place before our eyes, but let’s wait another month to see if it keeps happening. As a remedy, the Court asked Israel to refrain from doing what Israel says it isn’t doing, ie, violating the Genocide Convention. But the only concrete demand is for Israel to issue a report in a month on what measures it’s taken to make sure they’re no longer going to do what they say they aren’t doing.”
“China – one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – calls for full membership for Palestine at the UN. The question is: will the US, also one of the five, veto it?”
“According to a story in 972, Israeli intelligence monitored officials in Gaza’s Health Ministry to check if their data on the number of civilians killed in Gaza is ‘reliable’, concluded they were and now use them internally in intelligence briefings. ‘I don’t know how many people I killed as collateral damage. We only check that information for senior Hamas targets,’ an Israeli source told 972. ‘In other cases, I didn’t care. I immediately moved on to the next target. The focus was on creating as many targets as quickly as possible. That’s why I trust the Health Ministry in Gaza more than the IDF for these statistics. The army just doesn’t have the information.’”
“After WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus broke into tears speaking about the conditions in Gaza, (“I’m struggling to speak because… Because the situation is beyond words”), Israel’s permanent representative at the UN, Meirav Eilon Shahar, accused him of acting in “collusion” with Hamas.”
The Anti-Democratic Movement Targeted Ralph Nader First. We Should Have Paid More Attention by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“In 2004, a third party needed to collect 634,727 valid signatures in about six and a half months to get on the ballot. If you’ve ever wondered why so few third-party candidates run, it’s because this is an extraordinarily difficult logistical task, and expensive, requiring services of companies that even then charged between $1.00 and $1.50 per signature. (Ross Perot reportedly spent $18 million to get on the ballot in 1992.) The process gets more cumbersome when you’re forced to account for “spoilage,” i.e. how many signatures you’ll lose in the face of challenges from a determined opponent, in Nader’s case from Democrats and affiliated groups.”
“Amato’s Grand Illusion described the evolving hypocrisy, cynicism, and ruthlessness of the Democratic Party a dozen years before Trump. It’s a story to which we should have paid more attention, because the Sun Tzu tactics unveiled against Ralph Nader are now clearly the strategic model for the whole party. Had the Republicans not suffered a major intramural collapse in 2016, Grand Illusion today might read like a cautionary tale about the anti-democratic tendencies baked into the two-party system. The Republicans, after all, have their own history of ballot-pruning tactics, for example working behind the scenes to suppress the candidacy of Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2012.”
“[…] a permanent Washington-against-the-world war council, fueled by an aristocratic contempt whose intensity is almost beyond comprehension. These people reordered the geography of the world, blithely moved whole manufacturing sectors from one continent to another, started moronic wars that pointlessly killed millions and created millions more refugees, bailed out corrupt banks while whole regions went into foreclosure, and failed to accomplish much but a growing sense of foreboding and decline despite decades of promises to the contrary. Still, they feel sincere rage at the idea that they should have to earn votes.”
“In the age of Nader, the rage was directed at anyone who suggested the Democrats should have to face competition from more than one direction. The updated idea in the Trump era is that they should not have to face competition at all.”
“Back in 2016, when I disliked Trump enough to write Insane Clown President, I was still naive enough to puzzled by the stream of headlines describing his win as a “failure of democracy.” It was anything but. The presidency had long been stage-managed to absurdity, with candidates needing the backing of one of the two parties, the press, and corporate donors to gain the White House. The whole idea of this oligarchical ADT system was to guarantee the president arrived in the Oval Office a political debtor, while keeping anyone with aspirations to independence out.”
“If those efforts fail, even more extreme action is surely coming, and “protecting democracy” is the pitch they’ll use to sell it. All of this will be justified based on the idea that the Trump threat is so grave that taking so much as one vote from Democrats is criminal irresponsibility, not really morally different from marching for Hitler.”
“Of course no one goes into politics to lose, but if you don’t believe in letting voters decide, and winning becomes about something other than making the best argument or boasting the best record, you got lost somewhere along the line. We cheat when we think we deserve to win, no matter what, and our leaders have spent decades now talking themselves into this frame of mind. The entitlement disease was there all along. We should have seen the chaos of this year coming.”
✨ Liberal ✨ Feminism ✨ (Reddit)
“We live in a world where “women using tents as pads during genocide” was less of a feminist issue than “white lady pretending to be doll not considered great actress this year.””
US Senate hearing uses child sexual exploitation as pretext for state control of social media content by Kevin Reed (WSWS)
“Nothing in the hearing was more revolting than the comments of Lindsey Graham, far-right Republican senator from South Carolina: “Social media companies as they are currently designed and operate are dangerous products. They are destroying lives, threatening democracy itself. These companies must be reined in or the worst is yet to come.”
“Graham turned to Mark Zuckerberg and said, “You and the companies before us, I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands. You have a product that’s killing people.”
“This statement is the most grotesque hypocrisy, coming from a US senator who said the US should place “no limit” on the murder of civilians by the Israeli government in Gaza. Moreover, the “products” used to kill tens of thousands in Gaza, bombs, missiles and other weapons, are being supplied by the US arms industry with the approval of the US government.”
A man who has never seen a war he didn’t root for nor a weapon he didn’t want to sell is accusing tech-company CEOs of being murderers. They’re all deeply shitty people, but Lindsey Graham is far and away the shittiest in that group. He’s a senator and has been for decades. He’s voted for every military action and budget-increase he could get his hands on. Talk about blood on his hands.
I wonder about this whole Section 230 thing—because Dean Baker wants to get rid of it, too. This puts him in bed with Graham and Durbin, which is uncomfortable company. What are their goals? Dean thinks we should get rid of it because it favors online news providers—which X, Facebook, and TikTok are, at least in part—over so-called traditional media. This is correct, of course, but how would you get these companies to police only their news content while leaving user content alone? Or would they also be responsible for user content? For user conversations? Would every site that hosts comments be liable for anything anyone said on those sites? Can you not see exactly where this would lead, Dean? It would lead directly to online terrorists leaving prosecutable comments on their most-hated web sites to see if they can keep them up there long enough, unmoderated, that they get fined. Either that, or this will just kill any form of online discourse. Everything would be gone. Only the self-hosted would be OK, I guess? Until the government decides that publishing a blog critical of Israel is also not OK and prosecutable under whatever replaces Section 230?
I mean, listen to the people that agree with you, Dean:
“Graham then got to a major purpose of the hearing, demonizing China. “TikTok is being used in a way to basically destroy the Jewish state,” he claimed. “I worry that in 2024, our democracy will be attacked again through these platforms by foreign actors.””
Are you sure you’re fighting for the same thing? I think they think they’re fighting for increased prosecutorial and governmental control over the Internet in the U.S. and perhaps just in general. If Section 230 falls, then web sites will have to relocate outside of America and there will probably be a Great American Firewall to match China’s. Everything will end up being hosted in Russia, which will be condemned for hosting all of the so-called right-wing content—whatever flees the overly restrictive censorious so-called liberal platforms is, by their definition, all right-wing content—on its servers, “seeding hate all over the world.”
“Other senators—such as Democrat Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota and fascist Republican Josh Hawley from Missouri—spoke with a similar degree of hysteria. […] Hawley’s anticommunist diatribe was outdone by another fascist Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas […]”
Three more amazing bedfellows. Look, Dean, I don’t mean to say that you can’t hold your opinion about Section 230. I’d just like to hear a bit more about how you think things will go down once it’s repealed. I’m not sure why you think the poor New York Times needs so much defending. It is a platform of mensonges. It sows the most disinformation of all. For example, it’s gotten a bunch of senators to believe that there’s some sort of CSAM crime wave. Apparently, police departments that are desperate to get into encrypted information told them so. It’s horseshit, but there you have it. So, would a Section 230-free Internet in the U.S. be allowed to publish that kind of crap or not? Of course it would. Because nobody’s talking about banning a single thing that the NY Times would ever want to write—because all of its information is pre-approved. It is protected more by privilege than by Section 230.
And while you’re all on a jihad against Section 230, the U.S. government doesn’t give a shit about any laws and just spies on Americans all day every day all the damned live-long day.
“These claims, which were supported by every member of the Judiciary Committee, were being made just as a recent reports have shown that the US intelligence and law enforcement agencies are purchasing and scanning through information from commercial data brokers related to the domestic internet activity of American citizens, without a warrant to do so. These violations of the fundamental democratic rights of the public by the American government were not a subject of the hearing.”
The NSA said “yup, we’re doing that. It’s legal. Go fuck yourselves.” All of these assholes will. not. shut. up. about China and Russia and Iran and North Korea when they are the absolute worst spies of all. The NSA probably shared every scrap of that data with the Mossad, as well, because we’re all so buddy-buddy. Why not? They’re the good guys, fighting the good fight.
The long sleep of capitalism’s watchdogs by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“This is the period in which both the criminal and the victim feel like they’re better off. The crook has the victim’s money, and the victim doesn’t know it. The Bezzle is that interval when you’re still assuming that FTX isn’t lying to you about the crazy returns they’re generating for your crypto. It’s the period between you getting the shrinkwrapped box with a 90% discounted PS5 in it from a guy in an alley, and getting home and discovering that it’s full of bricks and styrofoam.”
“Big Accounting is a factory for producing bezzles at scale. The game is rigged, and they are the riggers. When banks fail and need a public bailout, chances are those banks were recently certified as healthy by one of the Big Four, whose audited bank financials failed 800 re-audits between 2009-17:”
“For the first two decades of the PCAOB’s existence, the SEC insisted that conflicts be resolved in ways that let the auditing firms commit fraud, because the alternative would be bad for the market. So: rather than cultivating an adversarial relationship to the Big Four, the PCAOB effectively merged with them. Two of its board seats are reserved for accountants, and those two seats have been occupied by Big Four veterans almost without exception.”
“This corrupt arrangement reached a crescendo in 2019, with the appointment of William Duhnke – formerly of Senator Richard Shelby’s [R-AL] staff – took over as Chief Accountant. Under Duhnke’s leadership, the already-toothless watchdog was first neutered, then euthanized. Duhnke fired all four heads of the PCAOB’s main division and then left their seats vacant for 18 months. He slashed the agency’s budget, “weakened inspection requirements and auditor independence policies, and disregarded obligations to hold Board meetings and publicize its agenda.””
“Williams is no fire-breathing leftist. She’s an alum of the SEC and a BigLaw firm, creating modest, obvious technical improvements to a key system that capitalism requires for its orderly functioning. Moreover, she is competent, able to craft regulations that are effective and enforceable. This has been a motif within the Biden administration:”
Sports Illustrated’s Strange Merger by Matt Levine (Bloomberg )
“There is a well-known strategy, in financial markets, of trading ahead of index rebalances. The idea is: You know that on Date X, Stock Y will join Index Z. You know that a lot of index funds are indexed to Index Z, and they will have no choice but to buy Stock Y on Date X. So you buy Stock Y before Date X, knowing that you will have someone to sell it to on Date X. Joining the index will bring in a whole new source of demand for the stock: not just people who have looked at the stock and decided they like it, but a new class of fundamentals-insensitive passive investor who will buy it just because it is in the index. So you buy it first, to sell to them. There are ways for this to go wrong. You could get the stocks or weightings wrong, for one thing, or the trade could just get too crowded: If index funds will need to buy $100 million of Stock Y on Date X, and 10 different hedge funds each say “ah I know that there’ll be $100 million of demand for Stock Y, so I’ll buy $50 million of it now,” then there’s $500 million of supply for $100 million of demand and the price will go down on Date X.”
“If you are a crypto enthusiast, though, you might guess “everybody will buy tons of Bitcoins once that becomes convenient, so I should buy tons of Bitcoins to sell to them.” A lot of people apparently had that thought process, and Bitcoin soared from about $27,000 in mid-October to about $47,000 on Jan. 8. But the actual answer seems to have been “meh, some people, but not in huge size,” and Bitcoin has gone back down. The Financial Times reports : Bitcoin has lost 16 per cent of its value over the past two weeks, as some investors use the much-hyped launch of bitcoin exchange traded funds earlier this month to take profits and exit their holdings of the volatile cryptocurrency. The price of bitcoin sank as much as 3 per cent on Tuesday, falling below $39,000 for the first time since early December.”
“When Bitcoin futures were introduced — products that trade on traditional regulated exchanges and that allow big investors to bet on or against Bitcoin without touching actual Bitcoins — there was some anticipation that they would lead to a lot of shorting by crypto skeptics, but those futures are not really a retail product. Now if you want to bet against Bitcoin you can do it in your brokerage account, by shorting Bitcoin ETFs, which is a lot easier for a crypto skeptic than actually shorting Bitcoin.”
Boeing, Spirit and Jetblue, a monopoly horror-story by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“US aviation has been consumed by monopoly, hollowed out to the point of near collapse, thanks to neoliberal policies at every part of the aviation supply-chain. For one thing, there’s just not enough pilots, nor enough air-traffic controllers (recall that Reagan’s first major act in office was to destroy the air traffic controller’s union). But even more importantly, there are no more planes. Boeing’s waitlist for airplane delivery stretches to 2029 . And Boeing is about to deliver a lot fewer planes, thanks to its disastrous corner-cutting, which grounded a vast global fleet of 737 Max aircraft”
“As Matt Stoller says, America has an airline that the public bails out, protects, and subsidizes but has no say over. Boeing has all the costs of public ownership and none of the advantages. It’s the epitome of privatized gains and socialized losses.”
“The religious belief in deregulation – especially deregulation of antitrust enforcement – leads to a deregulated market. It leads to a market that is regulated by monopolists who secretly deliberate, behind closed board-room doors, and are accountable only to their shareholders. These private regulators are unlike government regulators, who are at least nominally bound by obligations to transparency and public accountability.”
“This is why – as Dayen notes – smaller US airlines are so horny for intermarriage. They can’t grow by adding routes, because there are no pilots. Even if they could get pilots, there’d be no slots because there are no air traffic controllers. But even if they could get pilots and slots, there are no planes, because Boeing sucks and Airbus can’t make planes fast enough to supply the airlines that don’t trust Boeing. And even if they could get aircraft, there are no engines because the Big Four aviation cartel cornered the market on working jet engines.”
Wealth of Musk Compared to the Income of Shohei Ohtani and a Tesla Assembly Line Worker by Rick Baum (CounterPunch)
“At the end of 2019, Bloomberg placed his wealth at $28 billion. In a mere four years, despite declining $133 billion in 2022, it had increased more than 800%.”
He’s worth about $229B now.
“If Ohtani could make his $70 million/year tax free and save all of it, he would have to play baseball for over 3,200 years to reach the level of Musk’s current wealth.”
“On an average day in 2023, Musk’s wealth increased over $252 million and in an average three days, it grew over $50 million more than the value of Ohtani’s 10-year contract of $700 million.”
“Working an average work week of 42 hours (36 hours one week and 48 the next), yearly pay for that worker will range from $50,232 to $67,704/year (assuming no extra pay for overtime). If the additional value of benefits, etc. come to $12/hour, a Tesla Production Associate paid the highest hourly rate of $31 would be making a yearly pay package valued at $93,912.
“To make as much as Ohtani is paid in one year, that worker would have to work more than 745 years. For the worker to make as much as Musk’s wealth increased in 2023, $92 billion, the worker would have to work over 979,600 years.”
This all just goes to show that billionaires shouldn’t exist. Musk was interviewed at the end of last year. He was asked about advertisers that were threatening to leave if he didn’t change moderation policies. “Fuck ‘em” The interviewer was shocked! Why?!? Musk turned to the camera and told advertisers that were trying to blackmail him with money could go fuck themselves. The interviewer didn’t understand the world anymore. You can’t do that! He probably was watching his hero be a dick and couldn’t understand it. That was the consensus online as well: Musk has gone crazy or he’s on drugs or whatever.
But what the hell are you talking about? He has the most “fuck you” money of anyone in history. He’s a dick. No-one should have that much money, least of all someone like him, but he’s 100% right. You can’t blackmail him with money. He can bleed money out of Twitter until the end of time. He doesn’t have to care. That’s what “fuck you” money means. This is not a difficult concept, but people just can’t grasp what’s going on.
Incredible Footage Of A Deep-Sea Squid Brooding Thousands Of Eggs by Eleanor Higgs (IFL Science)
“In 2005, a study was released showing how female black-eyed squid care for their eggs. The claws on their arms help them hold on to up to 3,000 eggs; as they swim, the females pump water through the egg clusters to keep them supplied with oxygen. […]
“[…] the team suspect that the mother will carry the eggs for 6-9 months, during which time it will not feed as the egg sac is blocking its mouth. Brad Seibel, the lead author of the 2005 study, thinks the mothers likely die soon after the eggs hatch […]”
Air pollution from Canada’s tar sands is much worse than we thought by Nicholas Kusnetz (Ars Technica)
“The study found that tar sands operations were releasing as much of these pollutants as all other human-made sources in Canada combined. For certain classes of heavy organic compounds, which are more likely to form particulates downwind, the concentrations were higher than what’s generally found in large metropolises like Los Angeles.”
“The deposits do not technically hold crude oil, but instead a heavier hydrocarbon called bitumen, which must be heated and treated in order to form a liquid that can be piped and refined like oil. That process requires sprawling industrial operations of open pit mines, ever-growing waste ponds and refinery-like “upgraders.” The waste ponds have leached toxic chemicals into groundwater, and a heavy, sulfurous stench often settles over the region.”
“The paper also raised questions about methods for disposing of the toxic “tailings” that are left over after extracting bitumen from the mines. This solid waste has been accumulating in water-filled lagoons, which by 2020 had swelled to cover an area nearly twice the size of Manhattan. Remediating these pits has proven to be extremely difficult, and laboratory tests conducted by Liggio and the researchers suggest that some novel efforts for separating solids from liquids could release even more pollution-forming compounds into the air.”
Massive wave of COVID infections throughout Europe by Tamino Dreisam (WSWS)
“The necessary fight against the pandemic must therefore come from below and be linked to the fight against capitalism and the reorganisation of society on a socialist basis. The only way to stop the pandemic is “a globally-coordinated elimination strategy, in which the entire world’s population acts in solidarity and with a collective determination to enforce a broad-based public health program,” writes the WSWS in its New Year’s perspective.”
“The very idea that an illness should be eliminated or eradicated, a central concept in public health, has been abandoned.”
We used to be able to do things: we closed the ozone hole, we got rid of diseases, we got rid of lead in paint and gasoline. Now, we’re helpless before micro-plastics, we can’t control measles, and we get sick from everything all the time.
Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash by Kyra Dempsey (Asterisk)
“How the authorities choose to handle such a mistake says a lot about our society’s conceptions of justice, culpability, agency, empathy, and even vengeance, because the moral dilemma of what to do about Robin Wascher exists as a struggle between diverging values and, in fact, diverging value systems , rooted in the relative prioritization of individual and systemic responsibility. Cutting straight to the case [sic], Wascher was not punished in any way. At first, after being escorted, inconsolable, from the tower premises, her colleagues took her to a hotel and stood guard outside her room to keep the media at bay. Months later, Wascher testified before the NTSB hearings, providing a faithful and earnest recounting of the events as she recalled them. She was even given the opportunity to return to the control tower, but she declined. No one was ever charged with a crime.”
“It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition. In the mid-20th century, when technical investigations of aircraft accidents were first being standardized, an understanding emerged that many crashes were not the result of any particular person’s actions.”
“[…] the primary purpose of an aircraft accident investigation is to prevent future accidents — a decision that implicitly privileged prevention above the search for liability. Conducting a police-style investigation that faults a deceased pilot does nothing to affect the probability of future accidents. To follow the spirit of Annex 13, investigators must ask how others could be prevented from making the same mistakes in the future.”
“[…] as a result of these findings, genuine safety improvements have been made, including more reliable ground radar at more airports, automated ground collision alerting technologies, and a national ban on clearing planes to hold on the runway in low visibility. None of these improvements would have been made if the inquiry stopped at who instead of asking why.”
“Although it can be hard to accept that a mistake that led to loss of life might go unpunished, just culture doesn’t permit us to discriminate based on the magnitude of the consequences — only on the attitude of the person who committed the error. If they were acting in good faith when the mistake occurred, then a harsh reaction would undermine the trust between employees and management that facilitates the just culture. But even more importantly, it would undermine the blameless investigative process that makes modern aviation so safe. Investigative agencies like the NTSB rely on truthful statements from those involved in an accident in order to determine what happened and why, and the truth can’t be acquired when individuals fear punishment for speaking it.”
“Recognizing that mistakes are inevitable has made us all safer by directing our collective energy toward the cause, rather than the symptoms — because the cause of the Los Angeles disaster was not Robin Wascher forgetting about an airplane, but rather an unforgiving system that required her to act with inhuman consistency. Our own humanity compels us to withhold judgment because it makes flying safer, because justice demands it, and because empathy is rewarded in kind.”
The Silicon-Tongued Devil by Leif Weatherby (Jacobin)
“As author Chuck Klosterman has recently argued, the ’90s was the last time anyone really thought that “selling out” was bad or controversial. From an aesthetic standpoint, we’ve all fallen into what I call a “streamhole,” in which algorithms exploit mass popularity, promising us individualized results while actually homogenizing our content. Those hanging on to their faith in the avant-garde are like the humans who have escaped the Matrix, gathering in Zion to plan the revolution that only a god can offer. (It’s no accident that The Matrix depicts raves as a cherished freedom for the enlightened.)”
“Every purchase we make and every hour we work, Marx thinks, are shrouded by a trick that papers over the value added to commodities by labor. Consciousness — and language — are not innocent of the mode of production. As he and Engels put it in The German Ideology , human “spirit” is afflicted with the curse of being “burdened” with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other humans . . . . Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as humans exist at all. What Marx is saying in his high-flying style here is that language is the medium of production — of our very material existence in the world. We don’t just randomly move things around in the physical world; we create things intentionally, for our use. And we do this in concert with others, not as lone individuals.”
“Most of the New Left came to terms with the fact that affluent (or at least semi-stable) boomer adulthood was pretty groovy. Plus, it made sense for self-preservation: it’s pretty shortsighted to set an end date for your own social and political superiority. Logan’s Run with flower power — but an assured death at thirty — was a pretty raw deal compared to stable work, security, and the square, bourgeois family life they discovered could actually be loving, restorative, rewarding, creative, and even adventurous. As for the “abolish the family” left, when something desirable is unobtainable, you might as well call for its abolition and insist you never wanted it in the first place.”
It’s easier when you have no principles or can’t imagine the impact your lifestyle has.
Adulting in Middle Age by Amber A’Lee Frost (Jacobin)
“Millennials went to college because everyone older and wiser told them that higher education was a pro forma bribe they had to fork over in order to reproduce their class position: pay to play. You grease the palms of the PMC, study hard (or don’t), get a degree, and you’ll have a mortgage, health care, job security, a spouse, and some kids — the whole shebang, just like your parents.”
“If you’re approaching middle age right now, adulting is harder than it has been for generations. You can’t do your taxes because they’re intentionally byzantine, so you doomscroll and rage post about Taylor Swift. You enjoy the most juvenile and lowest effort entertainment because you don’t have the brain or the stomach for anything with teeth, and you take your little naps because you’re exhausted, anxious, and depressed (which is also why you can’t get out of your pajamas, cook a whole meal, or clean your room).”
Living Inside a Psyop by Walter Johnson (n+1)
“[…] indeed, one of the university’s billionaire donors later explained to the New York Times, proudly, that he had called the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation to complain about the administration’s first statement and been reassured that his doubts were being addressed. This striking acknowledgment of a formerly unspoken fact—that when billionaires insisted, Harvard acquiesced—would come to seem fairly ordinary over the coming weeks.”
“It was, for the most part, a resolutely liberal defense of civil discourse. It predictably left unanswered the question of whether “civil discourse” within a university whose endowment is invested in companies tied to illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank can ever be considered truly neutral or even civil.”
“As Israel tightened the siege on Gaza and a million people were presented with the choice of leaving their homes or being bombed within them, the doxing trucks began to patrol the perimeter of the campus. They carried signs emblazoned with the photographs of individual students beneath the words “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” Billionaire hedge fund mogul William Ackman called for the creation of a blacklist to ensure that members of the campus organizations that had supported the statement would be unable to infiltrate their firms. The names of students belonging to the offending groups (and of some who did not) were circulated online, so that they might be isolated, shamed, and punished.”
Harvard University, ladies and gentlemen. So like Germany.
“On November 25, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the Foreign and Diaspora Affairs ministries of the Israeli government were launching a campaign targeting “antisemitic students” at American universities. The campaign worked across several “axes.” One might be termed “lawfare,” or in the words of summary on Ynet: “Taking legal action outside the law [sic] against activities and organizations that pose a threat to Jewish and Israeli students on campuses, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Israel will hold discussions with elements from the U.S. Department of Justice to map out legal tools that can be used to deal with factors that pose a threat on campuses.””
The arrogance. The chutzpah.
“This interlocked campaign of financial, political, and reputational attacks on dissidents in American universities is seemingly designed to secure the intergenerational transfer of unquestioned support for Israel by producing object lessons illustrating the costs of speaking out.”
Well, they’d neglected their propaganda duties long enough. They had to make up for lost time.
“As Herzog explained, “Harvard is considered one of the most important campuses in the world, and we are truly concerned from what we see, that instead of growing and educating the next leaders of the United States or the world, it has become the hotbed of terrorist supporters.””
Gobsmacking.
“It was the culmination of the ongoing propaganda campaign in the United States, and possibly a subject of concerted state action in Israel, ruthlessly effective from beginning to end. Faculty and students were forced to choose between defending their universities or trying to keep the focus on Gaza. On December 3, I joined seven hundred other members of the Harvard faculty in signing a two-sentence letter to the Harvard Corporation urging them to resist obvious and unconstitutional federal regulation of expression on university campuses.”
“I struggled for a while to understand the uncanny resonance between the image of little Palestinian kids in Gaza being killed by 2,000-pound bombs and little Jewish kids in Cambridge being terrified by a message in the sky advancing a propaganda campaign against Harvard. Whether intended or not, the collateral harm done to those little Jewish kids in Cambridge was an acceptable cost of making certain that people in the United States did not think about those little Palestinian kids dying by the thousands in Gaza. There was the two-step maneuver again: look here, not there.”
“Rabbi Zarchi hoped that Rufo’s campaign would help abate the torrent of antisemitism on campus, which he characterized as becoming “more and more brazen with each passing day,” even during a period in which classes were not in session and the students were not on campus.”
These people are so influential and so blatantly demented.
“Ackman wrote a long self-serving piece stating that he had “concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem” at Harvard. Rather it was “DEI” and “anti-white racism.” From support for terrorism on campus to antisemitism to plagiarism and then, finally, to the inherent anti-Americanism of diversity, equity, and inclusion: Ackman declared that he had finally dug down through the levels of corruption and conspiracy to a place where he’d found solid rock.”
“[…] we are being offered a bargain. Its terms are essentially to return to status quo ante: to set aside the dizzying and divisive question of Palestine and return to the familiar ground of the ongoing culture war. To take up our old positions, promising never to say the word “Palestine” again.”
Brinklump Linkdump by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“Because studio executives are more worried about stopping piracy than they are about making sure that people who pay for movies get to see them, they build digital rights management into this standard. Movie theaters had to spend fortunes to upgrade to “secure” projectors. A single vendor, Deluxe Technicolor, monopolized the packaging of movies into “Digital Cinema Prints” for distribution to these projectors, and they used all kinds of dirty tricks to force distributors to use their services, like arbitrarily flunking third-party DCPs over picky shit like not starting and ending on a black frame.”
Chatbots and Human Conversation by Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)
“Studies indicate that autocomplete on websites and in word processors can dramatically reorganize our writing. Generally, these recommendations result in blander, more predictable prose. And where autocomplete systems give biased prompts, they result in biased writing. In one benign experiment, positive autocomplete suggestions led to more positive restaurant reviews, and negative autocomplete suggestions led to the reverse.”
“Such a shift is unlikely to transform human conversations into cartoonishly robotic recitations overnight, but it could subtly and meaningfully reshape colloquial conversation over the course of years, just as the character limits of text messages affected so much of colloquial writing, turning terms such as LOL, IMO, and TMI into everyday vernacular.”
Hollywood Welcomes Its Silicon Valley Overlords by Eileen Jones
“I have no trouble believing that in a few years AI-generated films will be able to fool us with a convincing simulated reality — but I’m appalled by the prospect. This is a fairly conventional reaction among cinephiles, who have been filled with dread […]”
How to win at CORS by Jake Archibald
“Vary
can list many headers to use as conditions, so if you’re addingAccess-Control-Allow-Origin: *
depending on the presence of theOrigin
andCookie
headers, then use:Vary: Origin, Cookie
If a resource never contains private data, then it’s totally safe to putAccess-Control-Allow-Origin: *
on it. Do it! Do it now! If a resource sometimes contains private data depending on cookies, it’s safe to addAccess-Control-Allow-Origin: *
as long as you also include aVary: Cookie
header.”
“The status code restriction creates a bit of a gotcha. If you have an API like/artists/Pip-Blom
, you might want to return a404
if ‘Pip Blom’ isn’t in the database. You want the404
code (and the response body) to be visible, so the client knows they requested something that was ‘not found’, rather than some other kind of server error. But if the request requires a preflight, the preflight must return a200-299
code, even if the eventual response is going to be404
.”
inside .git by Julie Evans (Wizard Zines)
Portable EPUBs by Will Crichton
“PDF commands are unstructured because a document’s organization is only clear to a person looking at the rendered document, and not clear from the commands themselves. Reflowing, accessibility, data extraction, and interaction all rely on programmatically understanding the structure of a document. Hence, these aspects are not easy to integrate with PDFs.”
“[…] we already have a structured document format which can be flexibly and interactively rendered: HTML (and CSS and Javascript, but here just collectively referred to as HTML). The HTML format provides almost exactly the inverse advantages and disadvantages of PDF.”
“There is a fundamental tension between consistency and flexibility in document rendering. A PDF is consistent because it is designed to render in one way: one layout, one choice of fonts, one choice of colors, one pagination, and so on. Consistency is desirable because an author can be confident that their document will look good for a reader (or at least, not look bad). Consistency has subtler benefits — because a PDF is chunked into a consistent set of pages, a passage can be cited by referring to the page containing the passage.
“On the other hand, flexibility is desirable because people want to read documents under different conditions. Device conditions include screen size (from phone to monitor) and screen capabilities (E-ink vs. LCD). Some readers may prefer larger fonts or higher contrasts for visibility, alternative color schemes for color blindness, or alternative font faces for dyslexia. Sufficiently flexible documents can even permit readers to select a level of detail appropriate for their background […]”
You could address this by having the “print” media render the same on all devices. I think you could have it render differently in the standard mode, but if someone selects the “print” medium, then it should look as the author intended. He gets at this a bit later when he writes “an EPUB could in theory provide multiple renditions, offering users the choice of whichever best suits their reading conditions and aesthetic preferences.”
“Reading systems need to guarantee that a document within the subset will always look reasonable under all reading conditions. If a document uses features outside this subset, then the document author is responsible for ensuring the readability of the document.”
“Encapsulated scripts principle: interactive components should be implemented as web components when possible, or otherwise be carefully designed to avoid conflicting with the base document or other components.
“Components fallback requirement: interactive components must provide a fallback mechanism for rendering a reasonable substitute if Javascript is disabled.”
Hyrum’s Law by Hyrum Wright
““The Law of Implicit Interfaces”: Given enough use, there is no such thing as a private implementation. That is, if an interface has enough consumers, they will collectively depend on every aspect of the implementation, intentionally or not. This effect serves to constrain changes to the implementation, which must now conform to both the explicitly documented interface, as well as the implicit interface captured by usage. We often refer to this phenomenon as “bug-for-bug compatibility.””
“For example, an interface may make no guarantees about performance, yet consumers often come to expect a certain level of performance from its implementation. Those expectations become part of the implicit interface to a system, and changes to the system must maintain these performance characteristics to continue functioning for its consumers.”
We keep making the same mistakes with spreadsheets, despite bad consequences by Simon Thorne (Ars Technica)
“No testing or validation was apparently applied to the crucial spreadsheet, a simple step that could have prevented this critical error.”
Because it doesn’t lend itself to testing or validation. The format isn’t very easy to test in an automated manner, which means it doesn’t get done.
“Industry studies show that 90 percent of spreadsheets containing more than 150 rows have at least one major mistake.
“This is understandable because spreadsheet errors are easy to make but difficult to spot. My own research has shown that inspecting the spreadsheet’s code is the most effective way of debugging them, but this approach still only catches between 60 and 80 percent of all errors.”
Spreadsheets are often written by non-programmers. The software is notoriously lax in enforcement and generous in interpretation. There is no clear way to test or verify the software contained in it. It generally doesn’t even occur to the people who maintain the spreadsheets that they would need to verify them. One can see that it’s right, no?
A Call for Consensus on HTML Semantics by Stephanie Eckles
“WHO HAS THESE ANSWERS? WE’RE ALL JUST DOING OUR BEST! AND NOW WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH AI PRETENDING TO BE OMNISCIENT AND DELIVERING CONFIDENTLY WRONG ANSWERS TO MILLIONS OF DEVS OF ALL SKILL LEVELS HOW WILL WE EVER GET IT RIGHT IS HUMANITY DOOMED TO BECOME AN ABLEIST HELLSCAPE WHAT EVEN IS THE WEB.
“All this to say… HTML markup is a skill that is honed in the fires of experience that may be learned but never mastered, but it is an honorable and worthy battle.
“Please help.
“(Also, you should hire front-of-the-front-end specialists who actually care about these nuances and accessibility specialists to help jump these hurdles and ux researchers to put in the work and find out about your real users and and and… don’t rely on AI, please. Pretty pretty please.)”
Yeah, AI has really only a giant pile of terrible, user-unfriendly and accessibility-unfriendly web sites from which to recommend. It doesn’t know any better and it can’t know any better.
The original comment was relatively recent: Re: [PATCH] eventfs: Have inodes have unique inode numbers by Linus Torvalds on January 26, 2024. I’ve quoted the reply in full both because it provides enough context to understand Linus’s anger as well as some extra zingers.
“Steven,
stop making things more complicated than they need to be.“And dammit, STOP COPYING VFS LAYER FUNCTIONS.
“It was a bad idea last time, it’s a horribly bad idea this time too.
“I’m not taking this kind of crap.
“The whole “
get_next_ino()
” should be “atomic64_add_return()
”. End of story.“You arent’ special. If the VFS functions don’t work for you, you don’t
use them, but dammit, you also don’t then steal them without
understanding what they do, and why they were necessary.“The reason
get_next_ino()
is critical is because it’s used by things
like pipes and sockets etc that get created at high rates, the
inode numbers most definitely do not get cached.“You copied that function without understanding why it does what it
does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE.“AGAIN.
“Honestly, kill this thing with fire. It was a bad idea. I’m putting my
foot down, and you are *NOT* doing unique regular file inode numbers
uintil somebody points to a real problem.“Because this whole “I make up problems, and then I write overly
complicated crap code to solve them” has to stop,.“No more. This stops here.
“I don’t want to see a single eventfs patch that doesn’t have a real
bug report associated with it. And the next time I see you copying VFS
functions (or any other core functions) without udnerstanding what the
f*ck they do, and why they do it, I’m going to put you in my
spam-filter for a week.“I’m done. I’m really *really* tired of having to look at eventfs garbage.
“Linus”
Look, Jeremy Howard is exceedingly clever. He says a few things that make me wonder how seriously most people take engineering, though. He demonstrated how to grayscale an image (1 dimension, but three facets) and how to do a matrix transformation (2 dimensions, but one facet). He said things like “CUDA C” is basically the same as the Python version, so I’ll just ask ChatGPT for the answer. It got it mostly right, then proceeded to make fine adjustments because what came back would totally not have worked. It wouldn’t even have compiled. He hand-waves unsigned char* and float*. He doesn’t seem to notice that his approach offers a novice no way of verifying the CUDA code. His process also doesn’t have any way of testing it. He says “I just go step by step in Python and make sure it’s right.”
Grand.
No tests. No talk of how to test. No automation. No CI. No nothing. No way of even verifying that the damned thing did what he wanted! He just looked at the picture and said “it looks grayscale to me.” AND THAT’S IT! Can we do that with our own data? I don’t think so.
The Matrix manipulation, too, he just took for granted that it worked, even though he says he doesn’t really understand C or C++ code. I’m not saying he should understand the code, necessarily, but someone needs to come up with a way of—a process for—verifying this kind of stuff. Show us how you copy/paste it into a sample project in Rider or CLion and compile it first, to see if it’s OK. Show us how you write a quick test to sanity-check a few inputs. Nope. Not necessary. Doesn’t even consider it.
This was a great video. I learned a lot. At the very end, in the credits, I saw this:
“Deimatic display in the European swallowtail butterfly as a secondary defence against attacks from great tits.”
Are they defending against birds? Or breasts? Or did they forget to write what they’re defending from because they were dictating the title and a well-endowed woman walked by? We’ll never know.
Published by marco on 3. Feb 2024 19:46:15 (GMT-5)
]]>“[…] most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you − anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
Published by marco on 2. Feb 2024 22:57:21 (GMT-5)
]]>Published by marco on 1. Feb 2024 23:08:14 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
AfD-Verbotsdebatte – kontraproduktiv und gefährlich by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Das nun immer wieder von diesen Parteien ins Spiel gebrachte Verbot der AfD ist eine Fortsetzung dieses kontraproduktiven Kurses. Man kann – und muss – die AfD scharf kritisieren. Sie verbieten zu wollen, ist jedoch nicht nur aussichtslos, sondern zeugt auch von einer antidemokratischen Einstellung. Dadurch wird die Spaltung der Gesellschaft forciert und letzten Endes die AfD sogar gestärkt.”
“Was soll ein Sachse denken, wenn er hört, die SPD-Vorsitzende Saskia Esken will die AfD verbieten ? Hier eine Partei, die in den jüngsten Umfragen auf sechs Prozent kommt und um ihren Einzug in den Landtag bangen muss – dort eine Partei, die in den Umfragen bei 34 Prozent steht. Jeder dritte wahlberechtigte Sachse muss sich also nun von einer Partei, die zumindest in Sachsen selbst keine Relevanz hat, anhören, dass ihm seine demokratische Willenserklärung verboten werden soll? Mit Verlaub, das ist anmaßend und antidemokratisch.”
Die verstehen nur plunder. Das zu nehmen was nicht freiwillig gegeben oder mit geringem aufwand verdient werden kann.
“Dabei ließe sich die AfD doch so einfach „bekämpfen“. Die derzeitige politische Einfalt müsste nur durch eine politische Vielfalt abgewechselt werden. Erst wenn der Eispanzer der Konformität aufgebrochen wird und der Mainstream der Mitte einer offenen und ehrlichen politischen Debatte weicht, wird man vielleicht die derzeitige Spaltung der Gesellschaft überwinden können.”
The Strange and Lonesome Death of Artsakh is a Warning to Palestine by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“A single road was left open connecting Artsakh to the Armenian mainland. In late 2022 that road was closed, and a crippling ten-month long blockade followed, barring the already impoverished and shellshocked people of the NKR from all food and medicine. In September of last year, Azerbaijan struck again, easily routing the cornered nation’s last remaining military positions within 24 hours and forcing its besieged government to concede to its own erasure. It was a strange and lonesome ending to a long and storied resistance movement. An ending that felt almost unfathomably anticlimactic to anyone actually familiar with Armenian history.”
“[…] the Bolsheviks arbitrarily incorporated the Armenian region of Artsakh into the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan in spite of the vehement protests of the Armenian partisans who had helped them dethrone the Czar. Repeated requests for sovereignty nearly broke out into open warfare before the Kremlin finally caved and established the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast within Soviet Azerbaijan in 1923.”
“[…] if Azerbaijan had the right to independence from the Russian Federation, then why shouldn’t Artsakh have the right to their own independence from Azerbaijan? And so, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic boldly declared its independence with a popular referendum in 1991 without the recognition of a single UN member state, including Armenia, and I believe that it is this silent betrayal, the betrayal of nation states against nation states, that ultimately dammed Artsakh to its tragic fate over thirty years later.”
“[…] representative democracy only truly represents the will of the highest bidder and in Armenia that bidder has become the United States who have sickeningly played both sides of the trenches in this conflict for the same reasons that they turned Ukraine into a geopolitical boobytrap, to sow discord amongst the ranks of its rivals.”
“Thousands of years of pride and resistance down the shitter, all so a few thugs in Yerevan can have a whisper of a chance at joining the same military alliance that arms their old chums in Turkey. Not that Sultan Erdogan gives a flying fuck about any empire but his own. His expressed goal in this whole sorry [sordid] affair is actually just to pave over Artsakh in order to turn it into an off-ramp for China’s Belt and Road Initiative known as the Middle Corridor.”
“Artsakh was a great nation destroyed by a state and that state wasn’t Turkey or Azerbaijan or even the United States of America, it was Armenia, with its corrupt elites and its globalist neoliberal ambitions. This tragedy is a warning in the shape of a self-inflicted genocide. Artsakh thrived for centuries before the poisoned invention of the Westphalian Nation State redefined its existence as mere geographical collateral. So, did Palestine. Every nation should think twice before they consider any state to be a solution because in an age of collapsing empires any state can easily become a nation’s final solution.”
The End of Global Leadership by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“It was a long time coming, but the pathological savagery of the Israelis as they exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza announces the end of any claim America and the West altogether have to global leadership on any kind of moral basis, legal basis, or any assumption that the West possesses superior ideals, principles of government, or what have you. Israel’s genocide, we had better acknowledge, has many antecedents. In this way the apartheid state, as it exposes its own grotesquerie, also exposes the West’s centuries of sins.”
Skipping School: America’s Hidden Education Crisis by Alec MacGillis (Scheer Post)
“Johnson is part of an increasingly popular approach to combating truancy: She makes home visits to learn why children are missing school and then works with families and schools to get them back on track.”
Like, how else were you doing it? Punishment and fines? Was that effective?
“Families faced other hurdles as well. One student’s father had died a month earlier, and in the previous six months two of his grandparents had also died; his mother was suffering from heart disease that prevented her from working, and she could no longer afford school clothes. Johnson alerted the student’s principal, who had a special fund for such needs.”
“A high school boy had moved in with his grandmother, but he was sleeping on the porch for lack of a bed; Concentric bought him one. A superintendent purchased a washer and dryer after hearing from Concentric that some students weren’t coming to school because they didn’t have any clean clothes. “Once you have these conversations, you know that there are real-life events that happen, there are real-life circumstances, where they’re just not able,” Johnson said.”
This is great and all, but this shouldn’t be handled by an ad-hoc patchwork of for-profit companies..
Jeffrey Goldberg’s Prison by Norman Finkelstein (CounterPunch)
“He himself notes that “many of the prisoners” in Ketziot were “so-called administrative detainees. They had been put in jail without charge and without trial, by military order, for six-month terms, renewable at the discretion of a military judge, who did what the Shabak [Israel’s internal security police] told him to do. The administrative detainees included many of the intellectuals and lawyers of the Palestinian national movement”. Human rights organizations reported that the number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons during each of the first years of the intifada hovered around 25,000 of whom 4-5,000 were administrative detainees.”
“[…] in its interrogations, to “break” a certain number of young men, the Shin Bet delivers to the [soldiers] a list with the names of the friends of the young men.[Then] the soldiers go out almost every night to the city and come back with children of fifteen or sixteen years of age. The children grit their teeth. Their eyes bulge from their sockets. In not a few cases they have already been beaten. And soldiers crowd together in the “reception room” to look at them when they undress. To look at them in their underwear, to look at them as they tremble with fear.”
“In Gaza our General Security Services [Shabak] therefore amount to a Secret Police, our internment facilities are cleanly run Gulags. Our soldiers are jailers, our interrogators torturers. In Gaza it’s all straightforward and clear. There’s no place to hide.”
“On a couple of occasions Goldberg mentions that the punishment for even minor infractions at Ketziot was: 24, 48, or even 72 hours in solitary confinement, zinzana, in Arabic. The zinzana was the size of a refrigerator box, into which three, four, five or six prisoners were shoveled. The prisoners were seated on a cold and hard plastic floor, limbs draped over limbs, and they shat in a bucket that was emptied once a day. After a few days in the box, prisoners could no longer stand unaided. (p. 109; cf. p. 114, where he describes four Palestinians locked “in a space fit, at most, for two small dogs”)”
“When the guards needed “someone to go solitary” for a minor infraction of prison rules, Goldberg recalls at one point , “twenty Arabs immediately volunteered.” He processes this not as a demonstration of their solidarity and courage but rather as vindication that the “Arabs want to be our victim” and “the Geneva Convention said nothing about prisoners who asked to be punished.””
“The administrative detainees held in Ketziot included “Palestinian leaders who openly support the peace talks with Israel and dialogue to promote Palestinian-Israeli understanding” (B’Tselem), while those convicted in military courts fell victim to draconian Israeli military orders that criminalized and made punishable “by up to 10 years’ imprisonment every form of political expression in the Occupied Territories, including nonviolent forms of political activity” (Amnesty).”
“One reason Goldberg didn’t see any nonviolent resistance is perhaps that he suffered an optical impairment. “She had joined a group of foreigners, advocates of the Palestinian cause, who stood one day against a line of Israeli bulldozers,” he writes of the death of Rachel Corrie during the second intifada. “She came too close to one and she was plowed under” (pp. 300-1). Just as the Twin Towers came too close to the airplanes and got plowed under.”
“Each year of the intifada thousands of Palestinians were “beaten by Israeli forces” and “many were punitively kicked or struck with clubs or rifle butts,” according to human rights organizations. “The victims included people who refused to clear road-blocks or delete graffiti, or who were suspected of having thrown stones. Many suffered severe injuries, particularly fractures” (Amnesty). More than 50,000 Palestinian children required medical attention in the first years of the intifada due to “indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting” (Save the Children).”
“None of these ruminations, however, prevents Goldberg from expressing revulsion at the teachings of Muslim fanatics, who “build self-esteem” through bloody vengeance and for whom the virtue of Islam was its being a “warrior religion” that rejected the Christian value of “passive surrender” because “Muhammad would never have allowed himself to be humiliated”. It is hard to make out the difference between this warrior religion and the one Goldberg worshipped after discovering Israel.”
“[…] it is the undoing of Palestinians, according to Goldberg, that that they “see violence as a panacea” and have “let violence into every corner of their lives”. If they would only emulate Israel.”
“[…] the first Hamas suicide bombing during the second intifada didn’t occur until five months into Israel’s relentless bloodletting (Israeli forces fired one million rounds of ammunition just during the first few days, while the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed during the first weeks was 20:1); and that four times as many Palestinians as Israelis, overwhelmingly civilians on both sides, were killed during the second intifada (4046 as compared to 1017 persons)? In 2006 Israel restored its, as it were, cult of life ratio of killing 30 Palestinians for each Israeli killed (660 as compared to 23 persons).”
“Goldberg is shocked at any imputation of similarity between the deaths of Palestinian and Israeli children: “For God’s sake, we don’t try to kill children”. Fully 811 Palestinian children were killed during the second intifada, which was more than the total number of Israeli civilians killed (711, of whom 109 were children); in 2006, 141 Palestinian children were killed as compared to 17 Israeli civilians of whom one was a child. For the want of trying to kill Palestinian children, it would seem that Israelis were awfully good at it.”
“Israel’s leading authority on international law, Yoram Dinstein, observes
in that “the attacker is not actually trying to harm the civilian population”: the injury to the civilians is merely a matter of “no concern to the attacker.” From the standpoint of LOIAC [Law of International Armed Conflict], there is no genuine difference between a premeditated attack against civilians (or civilian objects) and a reckless disregard of the principle of distinction: they are equally forbidden.”
“This is the upshot of Goldberg’s account as well: if Palestinians resort to violence against Israel, it is not due to Israeli actions but to an irrational hatred of Jews; and if the conflict is finally to be settled, it is not Israelis who must cease the occupation but Palestinians who must cease to be anti-Semitic.”
“The disastrous second climax in the peace process came at Camp David in 2000 when “the misanthrope Yasser Arafat with a superficial largeness of spirit” and “the gallant general Ehud Barak, who put peace at the forefront of his capacious mind” met to negotiate a final settlement. Barak made Arafat the famous generous offer of “90 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza,” was even “willing to sacrifice a piece of our holiest city in order to gain peace,” whereas “Arafat left Camp David without even making Barak a counteroffer.””
“Goldberg neglects to mention that, by right and by consensus, Palestinians were entitled to the whole of the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem. The generous Israeli offer was actually a land grab which would also have fragmented the West Bank. In fact judged against the standard of international law, all the concessions at Camp David–on borders, settlements, Jerusalem and refugees–came from the Palestinian side. The impasse at Camp David was due not to Palestinian but Israeli recalcitrance. “If I were a Palestinian,” Ben-Ami, one of Israel’s chief negotiators at Camp David, later observed, “I would have rejected Camp David as well,” while Maoz concludes that the “substantial concessions” Israel demanded of Palestinians at Camp David “were not acceptable and could not be acceptable.” Goldberg also neglects to mention that negotiations between Israel and the PLO resumed after the collapse of the Camp David summit but, although a final settlement was apparently within reach, the “gallant” Barak abruptly terminated them.”
“[…] according to Meron Benvenisti, a leading Israeli authority on the Occupied Territories, “most Palestinians” support a two-state settlement on the June 1967 borders “as long as [the Palestinian state] enjoys all the trappings of sovereignty and is free of settlers,” whereas “the majority of Israelis who ostensibly support a Palestinian state are vehemently opposed” to such a Palestinian state but instead “support an entity that will have partial control over about half the West Bank, with no control over the border crossings, immigration policies, water resources, coastal waters, and airspace.””
Roaming Charges: It’s in the Bag by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Israel has dropped eight times more bombs (most Made in the USA) on Gaza in the span of 100 days than the US army did during six years in Iraq.”
“You scour the headlines for little rays of hope and, instead, just keep finding shit like the bracing results from this recent AP survey on American attitudes about climate change: “Americans are less convinced that climate change is caused mostly or entirely by humans compared to data from recent years, declining from 60% in 2018 to 49% this year…This increased doubt was just as significant for someone who graduated from college as someone who has a high school diploma or less (11 percentage point drop) and was more pronounced for younger Americans (17 percentage point drop for those ages 18-29 vs. 9 percentage point drop for the 60+ age group)…Democrats and independents are becoming less convinced that climate change is caused mostly by humans, while Republican attitudes remain stable.””
“In the last 50 years, the North American bird population has lost 3 billion breeding adults, nearly 30 percent of the population. Lark buntings are down 56%, canyon wrens by 23%, roadrunners and lesser scaups by 27%, tufted titmouse by 22%, bobolinks by 20%, Carolina chickadees down 22%, redwings blackbirds down 15%, American goldfinches down 12% and even seemingly ubiquitous crows, down 14%.”
“Most tea bags are made from plastic, either nylon or polyethylene terephthalate (PET). According to research from McGill University, a single plastic tea bag can release 11.6 billion microplastics into a cup of tea.”
Are they really made of plastic? I thought they were some sort of woven cloth, non-plastic. That seems … bad.
Today, we’re saying “remember fish?”
In twenty years, we’ll be saying “remember birds?”
At least there will still be plenty of billionaires.
NATO plots escalation of Ukraine war against Russia into all out war across Europe by Johannes Stern, Alex Lantier (WSWS)
““Exercise Steadfast Defender 2024 will be the largest NATO exercise in decades, with participation from approximately 90,000 forces from all 31 Allies and our good partner Sweden,” Cavoli said. “The Alliance will demonstrate its ability to reinforce the Euro-Atlantic area via trans-Atlantic movement of forces from North America. This reinforcement will occur during a simulated emerging conflict scenario against a near-peer adversary.””
Translation: U.S. troops are coming to Europe to practice an assault on Russia.
Who exactly do you think you’re fooling? Assholes.
“In Brussels, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, the chairman of the NATO military committee, demanded “a war fighting transformation of NATO.”
““It’s not a given that we are in peace,” Bauer said. In case of war, he added, “it is the whole of society that will get involved, whether we like it or not.”
“Bauer praised recent statements by Swedish Minister for Civil Defence Carl-Oskar Bohlin, who called on the Swedish people to prepare for war. “There could be war in Sweden”, Bohlin said. “Are you a private individual? Have you considered whether you have time to join a voluntary defence organisation? If not: get moving!”
“Bauer commented: “The fact that people find [the possibility of war] a surprise and as a result buy radios and batteries, that is great … It starts [with] the realization that not everything is plannable, not everything is going to be hunky-dory in the next 20 years.””
They are absolutely f@#king loving this. Just positively delighted. Just huge erections. The “Dutch admiral” FFS. They terrify everyone into relying on them for their defense against the threat that they are manufacturing. Assholes.
The Biden Administration’s Absurd Justification For Its Yemen War by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“Ever since the Biden administration began bombing Yemen, its official spinmeisters have been babbling about commerce and global container shipping to justify it. The unspoken premise behind this justification is that an active genocide should be permitted to continue with zero economic repercussions of any kind, for Israel or anyone else.”
“[…] The premise that there shouldn’t even be a slight economic downturn as a result of this madness, and that it’s fine to start a war to make sure there isn’t, deserves to be dismissed with extreme disdain.
“We live in a dystopian world where it’s completely normalized to subvert human interests to commercial interests, to toss tens of thousands of lives into the incinerator for wealth and convenience. Where war profiteers rake in vast fortunes for selling instruments of mass murder to genocidal governments, and where the most powerful empire in history declares a war to defend shipping containers at the cost of human life.”
Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“If “peace” to you means other populations bow down and submit to your will, then it makes perfect sense for you to believe that your wars are being waged to attain peace, because those wars are being used to violently bludgeon those populations into obedience. If your definition of peace means the cessation of all violence and abuse, then you will support ceasefires, peace negotiations, diplomacy, the de-escalation of tensions, the cessation of imperialist extraction, and the end of apartheid and injustice.”
“If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound.”
“Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable.”
“Know how you can tell it no longer matters who the US president is? They stopped getting assassinated.”
“Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous and abusive because it’s run by Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous and abusive because that’s the only way to maintain an ethnostate that was abruptly dropped on top of an already existing civilization. This would be true if it’d been a Mormon state or a Romani state.”
Gaza Is Exposing Western Liberals For The Frauds They Are by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“Gaza exposes the mainstream western liberal ideology for the kayfabe performance it always has been. The job of the so-called liberal “moderate” has never been to oppose racism, fascism, tyranny, injustice or genocide, their job is to perpetually give the thumbs-up to one head of the two-headed monster that is the murderous western empire. Their job is to help put a positive spin on a globe-spanning power structure that is fueled by human blood. To help elect Bidens and Starmers and Trudeaus and Albaneses who will ensure that the gears of the empire keep on turning completely unhindered while paying lip service to human rights and social justice.”
The super-rich got that way through monopolies by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“They didn’t do this for ideological reasons – they were chasing material goals. Monopolies produce vast profits, and those profits produce vast wealth. The rise and rise of the super rich cannot be decoupled from the rise and rise of monopolies.”
“Economists who talk about monopolies mean companies that “can act independently without needing to consider the responses of competitors, customers, workers, or even governments.””
“From 2017-22, the 20 largest companies in the world had average markups of 50%. The 100 largest companies average 43%. The smallest half of companies get average markups of 25%.”
“Monopolists have the power “to extract wealth from, to restrict the freedoms of, and to manipulate or steer the vastly larger numbers of losers.” They establish themselves as gatekeepers and create chokepoints that they can use to raise prices paid by their customers and lower the payout to their suppliers:”
“When people talk about the climate impact of billionaires, they tend to focus on the carbon footprints of their mansions and private jets, but the true environmental cost of the ultra rich comes from the anti-renewables, pro-emissions lobbying they buy with their monopoly winnings.”
World’s First Trillionaire Just 10 Years Away as Richest Men Double Their Wealth by Jake Johnson (Scheer Post)
““We’re witnessing the beginnings of a decade of division, with billions of people shouldering the economic shockwaves of pandemic, inflation, and war, while billionaires’ fortunes boom,” Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s interim executive director, said in a statement . “This inequality is no accident; the billionaire class is ensuring corporations deliver more wealth to them at the expense of everyone else.””
“Oxfam’s report spotlights the “sustained and highly effective war on taxation” that powerful corporations have been waging over the past several decades—a war that has yielded a significantly lower corporate income tax rate that has allowed companies to amass vast riches and entrench their political influence.”
““Runaway corporate and monopoly power is an inequality-generating machine: Through squeezing workers, dodging tax, privatizing the state, and spurring climate breakdown, corporations are funneling endless wealth to their ultra-rich owners,” said Behar. “But they’re also funneling power, undermining our democracies and our rights. No corporation or individual should have this much power over our economies and our lives—to be clear, nobody should have a billion dollars.””
Neo-Liberalism is Not Dead, It Never Lived by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)
“The basic point that both sides miss here is that no one was actually committed to a free market without government intervention. The difference was that the so-called neo-liberals liked to claim that their policies were about the unfettered free market, whereas their opponents liked to claim that that they were attacking the free market. In reality, the neo-liberals were simply trying to structure the market in ways that redistributed income upward, while claiming that it was all the invisible hand of the market. Their opponents bizarrely chose to attack the market instead of the way the neo-liberals were shaping it.”
“In fairness to the Biden administration, it has tried to couple its protectionist measures with efforts to promote unionization of the jobs that are created. But it is not clear how successful these efforts will be. And, if it can succeed in promoting unionization in manufacturing then it may also be successful in promoting unionization in sectors like healthcare and retail.”
I’m mystified because the Biden administration smashed the rail-worker strike and intervened to ensure the UPS and Stellantis strikes ended up with the absolute minimum they would accept. Cut it right to the bone like workers are the enemy. But here’s Dean talking about Biden like a big ol’ swinging dick of union-loving presidents.
“We could not suddenly produce hundreds of millions of masks or tens of thousands of ventilators even if these items were all produced in Ohio. We should have had substantial stockpiles on hand for the sort of emergency that Covid created. It was a major failing of the Trump administration that we had grossly inadequate stockpiles of these items.”
Sure. Only Trump. Everything is only Trump’s fault. It’s a one-note song. If only we could return to the competence of all the other administrations during my lifetime. What do Biden’s stockpiles look like? Yes, Trump and his administration were incompetent at administering anything, but have there really been any competent ones? Has there been one that didn’t push 98% of the money upwards while doing the bare minimum to keep things running? Like, if Biden does 2% to Trump’s 1%, he’s twice as good but he’s still shitty. Stop lying with numbers.
“The key to having resilient supply chains is having diverse sources, both domestic and international. There is a good argument for not relying on a potentially hostile country like China for a key manufacturing input like semiconductors. But apart from a relatively small number of strategically important materials and manufactured inputs, there is little reason to equate a reliance on domestic production with resiliency.”
It drives me bananas to see Baker knee-jerk call China “potentially hostile”, when its his own country that is actively hostile and waging economic war on China. Baker’s a potential rapist or pedophile by the same logic. Or an alleged potential rapist.
“The point of the trade policy pursued by the country over the last forty years was to redistribute income from the bottom half of the wage distribution to those in the top 10 or 20 percent. That is the result predicted by economic theory and that was the reality.”
“There is nothing about the market that tells us to subject manufacturing workers to competition with low-paid workers in the developing world and to protect the most highly paid professionals from the same sort of competition. That was a conscious policy with the predictable effect of increasing inequality.”
“It is almost Trumpian that anyone can look at an economy where government-granted monopolies play such a massive role in distribution and then pronounce it to be a free market without government intervention. It is even more absurd when we consider that the government plays a large role in creating the intellectual products subject to these monopolies, most notably with prescription drugs where it spends over $50 billion a year on biomedical research.”
“But Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act protects Internet platforms from liability for third-party content. This means that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk can profit from spreading lies that would cost the New York Times or CNN millions in defamation suits.”
Holy crap, Dean! The New York Times and CNN profit from lies at least as much as Twitter and Facebook do. What in the actual hell are you talking about? Is it because you read the Times and watch CNN that you can’t bring yourself to admit the sheer amount of libel involved? The incredible outright lies, lies of omission, etc.?
“We can also structure a repeal in a way that is likely to favor smaller platforms, for example by allowing platforms that don’t sell ads or personal information to continue to enjoy Section 230 protection. In any case, it should be pretty obvious that Section 230 protection is not the free market. It was a decision by Congress to benefit Internet platforms relative to print and broadcast outlets. And it hugely facilitated the growth of giant Internet platforms.”
“The Biden administration has adopted many progressive economic policies. Its ambitious recovery package quickly got the economy back to full employment, which also led to large wage gains for the lowest-paid workers. It has also pushed forward with a major infrastructure program, and the Inflation Reduction Act is by far the most aggressive climate legislation ever passed in the U.S. It also has taken steps to rein in patent monopoly pricing for prescription drugs. And for the first time in decades, we have an administration that takes anti-trust policy seriously. In addition, it has made the terms for buying into the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act far more generous, and crafted an income-driven student loan repayment plan that should mean that this debt is not a major burden.”
Do these things exist in this unalloyed form? I feel like he’s gaslighting me. What’s the catch? After reading that he thinks that the Times and CNN don’t lie, I fear he may have gotten all of his news about these magical policies from them.
I’ve seen him go on and on about the wage-gains for the lowest-paid workers, but I have to wonder how magical that is for them. I just read that rents are at their most unaffordable level for the largest number of people ever. Is it possible that wages have risen, but have been eaten up by inflation? No, says Dean. Wage gains at the bottom have outstripped inflation. Official inflation. Which leaves out energy and food. And probably rent. You really have to thread the needle sometimes to be able to tell the good-news story that will get Count Biden elected again. I saw a lot of this in the run-up to the 2020 election as well. People with their heads screwed on straight because so pants-shittingly terrified of Trump getting elected that they just joined the liar’s brigade for Biden. Chomsky will probably reappear to trot out his “lesser evil” horseshot, like he does every four years.
“All of these are positive developments, which can be built upon in a second Biden administration.”
There it is. What did I tell you? Unless he actually likes Biden…
“The problem is not the market, but rather a set of policies that the right has used to structure the market to redistribute income upward.”
Just the right? Does he mean that Democrats and Republicans are both economically liberal parties, to the right of anything approaching a redistributive policy? Or does he mean that the poor Democrats seem to funnel money upward despite themselves? Like, how does this last part jibe with his statements about both parties at the top?
The Monstrosity of Maritime Capitalism − Boston Review by Charmaine Chua (Boston Review)
“Running through the pictures, historian Mohamed Gamal-Eldin discovered , was a striking pattern. For the technological sublime to work its wonder on the awed spectator, the photos had to be evacuated of the laboring subjects who made the feat possible: the many tens of thousands of dispossessed fellahin—peasants—who dug the monumental canal by hand.”
“Its capacity was 8,100 TEU—the standard unit of cargo size, based on the volume of a standard twenty-foot container box. That is only some 40 percent of the Ever Given’s capacity, but still the ship was as long as two Eiffel towers are tall. The crew comprised twenty-three, all men.”
“[…] even as the world got bigger, workers got shortchanged. Containers ushered in the mechanization of ports, just as states, acting with and like corporations, sought to repress the power of organized longshore labor. Jobs that had once required multiple gangs of stevedores to load and unload goods from ships were almost entirely wiped out. Unloading became the lonely work of pushing levers atop behemoth gantry cranes that lift and drop steel boxes into an endless grid of squares.”
“Between the 1950s and 1980s, the total capacity of oil tankers grew tenfold.”
“Although Egypt had helped fund the canal’s construction and initially held claim to 15 percent of the Canal’s future profits, by 1875, under mounting extortionate debt, the viceroy of Egypt, Ismāʿīl Pasha, was forced to sell Egypt’s shares to the British Government. The French and British thereafter controlled the Canal for more than eighty years. All this changed in 1956, when Egyptian Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser, in an effort to resist colonial domination, announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company.”
“With Israel occupying one side of the Suez Canal and Egypt and its Arab allies encamped on the other, the canal closed for a full eight years. The flames of gargantuanization were stoked, and a building boom of very and ultra-large crude carriers (VLCCs and ULCCs) commenced. By 1971, Khalili notes, 80 percent of all new tanker orders were for supersized vessels. When it reopened in 1975 under the control of Egyptian authorities after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the canal was able to regain much of the freight it had lost, except for the VLCCs and ULCCs that were now too large to pass through.”
“The largest oil tanker ever built (indeed, the longest and heaviest self-propelled ship of any kind), just over 1,500 feet in length and some 564,000 deadweight tons when fully laden, finished construction in 1979. It has since been scrapped, proving too large for applications beyond at-sea storage, and since then tanker sizes have since shrunken and stabilized.”
“Campling and Colás note that despite the common economic contention that the growth of the shipping sector arose in response to growing demand in international trade, the reality is the opposite: innovations in shipping made the movement of goods so cheap that it prompted new strategies of profit-making, in a process that scholars and supply chain managers have identified as the “ logistics revolution.” Containerization enabled manufacturers to perform what Campling and Colás call a “geographical conjuring trick” at a time when industrial profit rates were beginning to fall.”
“By regularizing and cheapening the cost of transoceanic movement, container ships allowed firms to relocate factories to the global South, cheaply deliver raw materials to assembly lines, keep low inventories, speed the delivery of finished products to debt-fueled consumer markets in the North, and reinvest profits back into the cycle.”
Good for profits and long-term bad for everyone. People end up with too much shit, too much debt, and little patience.
“In the hinterland, highways and railroad corridors must support the concentration of cargo entering the city. These infrastructural modifications, made repeatedly as megaships have continued to grow, require the massive dispossession and manipulation of environments and ecologies.”
“The ecological effects of such human hubris have been devastating. When the Suez Canal joined the Red Sea to the Mediterranean in 1869, marine species migrated along the waterway, allowing invasive species from venomous jellyfish to rabbitfish to make their way north, causing untold damage to biodiverse eco-systems. So significant were these effects that they have been termed “Lessepsian” after the developer of the canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps.”
“If the sideways grounding of the Ever Given should teach us anything, perhaps it is that something monstrous has always been at work in the operations of global capitalism. In our fascination with the bigness of these behemoths, we should not forget that capitalism itself—in its vampiric looting of life from land and people, in its transmogrification of work and matter into commodity value—is a monster all its own, whose catastrophes pile up within but also far beyond the canal that briefly transfixed us in March.”
Ford announces 1,400 layoffs at Dearborn plant, as job cuts accelerate across the US by Tom Hall (WSWS)
“The same day that Ford announced layoffs, the S&P 500 stock market index reached the highest level in its history. The surge in stock prices was driven by optimism that the Fed would cut rates over the next year—in other words, that the job cuts underway are so severe that the Fed can afford to return to its usual free money policies. The stock surge was powered in particular by a continuing rise in tech stocks, as investors salivate over the use of AI and other emerging technologies to cut costs and drive up profits.”
The surge is powered by people all jumping on for short-term gain. No-one really believes that AI will make everything more productive and efficient and better—but many people believe that other people believe it. That’s what powers the bubble: investing in something because you know that other idiots will invest in it, too, driving up the price temporarily. AI is enshittifying even faster than many other similar technical marvels. This is mostly because the capital-extraction machine has gotten much better at killing the host.
The article goes on to discover many other store closures and layoffs, but his one caught my eye:
“CVS will close certain locations inside Target department stores. Last year, the pharmacy chain closed hundreds of stores.”
With several Walmarts also closing, that made me think of so-called food deserts. I guess there are also “pharmacy deserts” and “toilet-paper deserts” (as stand-in for non-medical and non-food necessities). The economy we have is driven purely by profit. Stores with “poor performance” will be closed. Those stores servicing poorer people—most likely the people who would work for stores like that—will close first, as they perform poorly. Food deserts are a class thing. Well-off people have never experienced a “goods desert” of any kind, as they will always be serviced.
Milliardär zeigt sich flexibel, ob Regierung fehlende Milliarden bei Bauern oder Bürgergeldempfängern einspart (Der Postillion)
““Ich weiß gar nicht, warum jetzt aktuell alle in Deutschland streiten, ob man lieber bei den Landwirten kürzen soll oder bei Bürgergeldempfängern oder sogar bei beiden”, so der 35-jährige Self-Made-Erbe. “Wichtig ist doch nur, dass am Ende das Geld zusammenkommt. Jetzt müssen eben alle Opfer bringen.””
China’s stock market fall sounds alarm bells by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“ it illustrates the bankruptcy of the schema promoted in some pseudo-left circles that China, along with others, could form a counterbalance to the depredations and power of US imperialism and lead to the development of a so-called “multi-polar” world.”
I mean, OK, but Jesus that’s bleak. Is Beams here saying that China is…what? Secretly interested in empire? Hegemony? That China can’t form a counterbalance to the U.S.? That no-one can? Or … what? That’s a bit more hopeless than even I usually am, because Beams is here just throwing in the towel, saying that “boot stamping a human face forever” is the best we can hope for, I guess.
“Since they reached a peak in February 2021, stocks in mainland China and Hong Kong have lost $6 trillion. That is roughly equivalent to the entire market capitalisation of Japan. In another measure of the extent of the fall, the Chinese market has never been as far behind Wall Street as it is at present.”
Christ, dude, that previous paragraph unnerved me so much that I don’t know whether to celebrate this or not. Is it good that China’s evil markets run by evil people have fallen so far? Or should we be upset that American hegemony seems to be winning? Or are we to think that the U.S. market is an even bigger bubble, but better capable of ignoring reality for longer?
Scientific Misconduct and Fraud: The Final Nail in Psychiatry’s Antidepressant Coffin by Bruce E. Levine (CounterPunch)
“Among the few journalists in the world who have recognized the implications of STAR*D for the treatment of millions of people is Robert Whitaker, and in his September 2023 report, “ The STAR*D Scandal: Scientific Misconduct on a Grand Scale ,” he stated: “The protocol violations and publication of a fabricated ‘principal outcome’—the 67% cumulative remission rate—are evidence of scientific misconduct that rises to the level of fraud.””
“[…] by the 1990s, researchers had already discarded the serotonin imbalance theory of depression, with the invalidity of this theory finally reported by the mainstream media in 2022.”
“Receiving little attention by the mainstream media in 2002, the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA ) published a study aimed at discrediting the herb St. John’s wort as an antidepressant. However, in this randomized controlled trial (RCT), in addition to one group receiving a placebo and a second group receiving St. John’s wort, there was a third group that received the standard dose of the SSRI Zoloft. The results? The placebo worked better than both St. John’s wort and Zoloft. Specifically, a positive “full response” occurred in 32 percent of the placebo-treated patients, 25 percent of the Zoloft-treated patients, and 24 percent of the St. John’s wort-treated patients.”
“A leading researcher of the placebo effect, Irving Kirsch, examined forty-seven drug company studies on various antidepressants. These studies included published and unpublished trials, but all had been submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), so Kirsch used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to all data. He reported that “all antidepressants, including the well-known SSRIs . . . had no clinically significant benefit over a placebo.””
“This study, “The Naturalistic Course of Major Depression in the Absence of Somatic Therapy,” examined depressed patients who had recovered from an initial episode of depression, then relapsed but did not take any medication following their relapse. The recovery rate of these non-medicated depressed patients was tracked, and after one year, 85% of them recovered. The study authors concluded: “If as many as 85% of depressed individuals who go without somatic treatments spontaneously recover within 1 year, it would be extremely difficult for any intervention to demonstrate a superior result to this.””
“[…] while researchers had discarded the serotonin chemical imbalance theory of depression by the 1990s, the first unequivocal declaration by an establishment psychiatry publication of the jettisoning of this theory was in the Psychiatric Times in 2011, when psychiatrist Ronald Pies stated: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.””
“Historically, establishment psychiatry and Big Pharma have routinely made declarations about mental illness causes and treatments that are, soon after being declared, disproven by research; this followed by psychiatry taking 10 to 20 years to acknowledge such false claims; which is then followed by the mainstream media taking another 10 to 20 years to report that psychiatry has moved on to other theories and treatments. Always psychiatry repeats some version of its slogan: “We are a young science that is making great progress.””
“Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus . Camus argues that the realization of the absurd does not justify suicide, and instead compels rebellion that can be vitalizing. Camus concludes, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.””
The social costs of greenhouse gas emissions in health care are astounding — and we’ve been ignoring them completely by Alex Gangitano (The Hill)
“A 2020 calculation by academic researchers estimated health care’s GHG emissions equaled 553 million metric tons of CO2e in 2018. (CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalent, is the term used to express how much a particular GHG would contribute to global warming if it were carbon.) Per the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), this amount equaled 12 percent of total U.S. emissions in 2018. For perspective, U.S. health care emissions are nearly five times that of the U.S. military — the world’s single largest institutional fossil fuel consumer.”
“The largest industry in the world’s largest economy, U.S. health care accounts for roughly half — or $4.7 trillion — of total annual global health care spending. Long known for wasteful spending , U.S. health care is remarkably energy inefficient. For example, out of 6,129 hospitals, the industry’s largest GHG emitting sector, only 37, or 0.6 percent, were EPA Energy Star certified for energy efficiency in 2023. This number is even more trivial when you realize Energy Star measures only Scope 1 and 2 energy use intensity, which account for as little as 25 percent of hospitals’ total GHG footprint.”
“[…] the EPA does not calculate the social cost of anesthetic gasses beyond nitrous oxide — this is especially problematic because commonly used desflurane, isoflurane and sevoflurane have much higher GWP scores. Desflurane, for example, has a GWP of 2,540 compared to nitrous oxide’s 289. Worldwide, emissions of these gases have been estimated at 3 million metric tons of CO2e , of which roughly 80 percent stems from desflurane.”
“The highly anticipated Securities and Exchange Commission final rule requiring for-profits to publicly disclose climate-related financial risks will substantially disrupt the health care industry. (Health care nonprofits cannot reasonably expect to avoid similar scrutiny and pressure.) This is largely because health care has significantly lagged all other major industries in publicly reporting environmental impact data. As a capital-intensive industry, health care is heavily dependent on financial investment. This means access to and the cost of capital for industries highly dependent on fossil fuels like health care will increasingly become more limited and expensive.”
How to (and not to) boost your immune system by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)
What works?
What hasn’t ever been shown to have a positive effect greater than placebo?
“Everything in our life—our house, pets, our own body—is filled with microbes. Although these microbes aren’t harmful, they share enough structural similarities with dangerous microbes to keep our immune systems active and ready to defend against dangerous foreign invaders. Infection doesn’t aid in that.”
Literature in a Time of Conglomeration by Adam Fleming Petty (The Bulwark)
“The example of Infinite Jest demonstrates the limits of authorial agency in the conglomerate era. Wallace’s error was to put too much faith in the ability of his writing to transcend its conditions of production. He overestimated the power of his message and underestimated that of his medium.”
I just read the sentence “[t]hese poisons are even found in the umbilical cords of newborn children.”, which made me wonder what’s happened to editing or writing ability. Who else but newborn children have umbilical cords? I know you’re desperate to write “newborn children” in an article about cancer-causing chemicals, but that sentence should have read, “[t]hese poisons are even found in umbilical cords.” If you want to be super-precise to avoid people thinking that you’re writing about the umbilical cords of other mammals, you could write, “[t]hese poisons are even found in human umbilical cords.”.
Welcome to the empire by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“The empire loves you with a heart made of dollars and oil
“The empire watches over you through your smartphone and your computer
“The empire is your only friend
“The empire is the only one who will ever love you
“You can’t leave
“You can’t get rid of the empire
“If you get rid of the empire, this world could be taken over by tyrants.”
I was fascinated by this video. I like how he showed that we use tone and pitch in English as well.
Sure, we call it “emphasis”, but it’s also said in a different tone.
His facility with all of these languages and his ability to see the similarities is impressive—but it’s also because I don’t know any of them. I can explain similarities in the same way in the languages with which I’m familiar, like similarities in certain areas between Italian, French, Spanish, German, English, or Russian. He’s impressive because each of the languages he’s looking at have tonal and phonetic similarities, but they’re written differently. Although some of the differences in the scripts are also like the difference between reading block and cursive script.
Why I Left Harvard by Carole Hooven (The Free Press)
“This insane narrative of my work is being created that has no basis in reality and it is being perpetuated by university administration. And this is appalling.”
“As a sign of the political polarization that characterizes the U.S. today, my supporters have tended to come from the right—although I am a lifelong Democrat. I was happy to accept a position as a senior fellow at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, where lively debate reigns.”
“A few brave, compassionate faculty members reached out with support, and I’m indebted to them. I am especially thankful to psychology professor Steven Pinker, who has made it possible for me to have an (unpaid) associate position in his department. And my case was an impetus for the formation of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard . Our focus is to promote “free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse at America’s oldest university.” I’m an active member.”
“The Harvard motto is Veritas —truth. But the truth is that the message that members of the Harvard community receive every day—in emails, trainings, posters, pamphlets, and meetings—concerns DEI. The message is that what matters most, certainly above the search for truth, is how people’s words affect groups deemed “marginalized.””
Against Learning From Dramatic Events by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)
“Even if you opportunistically use the time just after a lab leak pandemic or a sex scandal to push the biosecurity agenda or feminist agenda you had all along, don’t be the kind of person who doesn’t care about biosecurity or feminism except in the few-week period around a pandemic or sex scandal, but demands an immediate and overwhelming response as soon as some extremely predictable dramatic thing happens. Dramatic events are a good time to agitate for a coalition, but this is a necessary evil. In a perfect world, people would predict distributions beforehand, update a few percent on a dramatic event, but otherwise continue pursuing the policy they had agreed upon long before.”
Mourning Google by Tim Bray
“[…] around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.”
A few years later and Bufferbloat is still a problem. The article Unbloating the buffers describes a way of configuring your network to fix this:
“I traded about 10% of bandwidth (263Mbit down/41Mbit up per iperf3) for:”
- constant average bandwidth on both upload and download
- no impact of download on upload
- network load has no visible impact on latency
- effective traffic prioritisation
The solution isn’t so straightforward, though. You have to have control over your routing endpoint at home in order to set up AQM with a tool like CAKE.
Sympathy for the spammer by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“A “bezzle” is John Kenneth Galbraith’s term for “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” In every scam, there’s a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.”
“The “courses” were the precursors to the current era’s rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the “students” finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who’d given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:”
“The people who were drowning me in spam weren’t the scammers – they were the scammees”
“The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn’t even make them any money.”
Ruined for nothing.
“The people submitting these “stories” weren’t frustrated sf writers who’d discovered a “life hack” that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale. They were scammers who’d been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-powered self-licking ice-cream cone.”
“This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. “I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings.” It’s MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.”
“[…] the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn’t their honesty – it’s their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they’re all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.”
“The quest for passive income is really the quest for a “greater fool,” the economist’s term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism.”
“That’s the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we’re nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we’re certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job.”
“The manic “entrepreneurs” who’ve been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI […]”
“An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they’ve missed – but that’s not how AI will turn a profit. There’s no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs.”
4,000 of my closest friends (Cat and Girl)
“On being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4,000 of my closest friends and Willem de Kooning.”
“Maybe I think small-time was the right path after all – in that way that only middle-aged people can think that small-time was the right path, after all.
“But I can’t even get cartoons for free, now, without doing unpaid work for the profit-making companies who own the most-used channels of communication.
“And now, even that nominal opt-in option is gone.
“They just take it.
“I’m small-time. I’ve never wanted to promote myself. I’ve never wanted to argue with people on the Internet. I’ve never wanted to sue anyone. I want to make my little thing and put it out in the world and hope that sometimes it means something to somebody else.
“Without exploiting anyone.
“Without being exploited.
“If that’s possible.”
That’s how I feel about this site right here, the one I publish on…earthli.com. I recently read Subscrive Drive 2024 + Free Unlocked Posts by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten), which writes:
“I feel awkward doing a subscription drive, because I already make a lot of money with this blog. […] make an embarrassingly large amount of money from this blog, but not so much that I can continue losing ~10% of subscribers every year indefinitely. So even though I’m still getting an embarrassingly large amount, I will be holding subscription drives yearly instead of waiting until I’m actually needy. Please don’t feel guilted into buying a subscription unless you really want to and can easily afford it − again, the amount of money I’m making blogging really is embarrassingly large.”
That got me thinking, of course. I publish on this web site a lot. I do it voluntarily. I used to be more sporadic, but I’ve been on quite a tear for the last year or two—and especially within the last couple of months. It’s natural to think whether I, too, could be making an “embarassingly large” amount of money blogging. Maybe I could, in theory. But do I want to? And why would I do that? Do I need the money? Not really, no. If I made an “embarassingly large” amount of money blogging, in addition to my salary at my day job, well, my life wouldn’t change one bit. So what would be the point?
How would I run a substack? I would just publish the same way I do now, with all articles for free and letting people subscribe and donate if they wanted to. What would be the drawback? It’s free money, no? Well, no. There’s my time. There’s the degree to which my posts might become very public or “go viral”. There are comments and moderation. I suppose I could turn off comments. I wonder how successful that would even be? Astral Codex Ten is a very high-profile site, often designated one of the best science blogs around. It used to be Slate Star Codex (yeah, the author likes to make anagrams of his name).
This 1-minute video shows how to use auto-margins to center, right-align, or left-align individual items within a grid. It’s a nice technique.
A custom element base class by Mayank
“[Web components with n]o constructor or connectedCallback in sight. No need to even get references to the buttons that respond to clicks.”
Proxy is what’s in store by James Stuckey Weber (Oddbird)
“This isn’t a universal solution. If you have an existing library, use it. If you find yourself abstracting out things like watch or computed for your proxy state, you are starting down the road to developing your own framework, and it might be a good time to pause and see if your application has grown complex enough to bring in something more robust.”
How we reduced the cost of building Twitter at Twitter-scale by 100x by Nathan Marz on August, 2023 (Red Planet Labs)
“At its core Rama is a coherent set of abstractions for expressing backends end-to-end. All the intricacies of an application backend can be expressed in code that’s much closer to how you describe the application at a high level. Rama’s abstractions allow you to sidestep the mountains of complexity that blow up the cost of existing applications so much. So not only is Rama inherently scalable and fault-tolerant, it’s also far less work to build a backend with Rama than any other technology.”
“A PState is an arbitrary combination of data structures, and every PState you create can have a different combination. With the “subindexing” feature of PStates, nested data structures can efficiently contain hundreds of millions of elements. For example, a “map of maps” is equivalent to a “document database”, and a “map of subindexed sorted maps” is equivalent to a “column-oriented database”. Any combination of data structures and any amount of nesting is valid – e.g. you can have a “map of lists of subindexed maps of lists of subindexed sets”. I cannot emphasize enough how much interacting with indexes as regular data structures instead of magical “data models” liberates backend programming.”
“The last concept in Rama is “query”. Queries in Rama take advantage of the data structure orientation of PStates with a “path-based” API that allows you to concisely fetch and aggregate data from a single partition. In addition to this, Rama has a feature called “query topologies” which can efficiently do real-time distributed querying and aggregation over an arbitrary collection of PStates. These are the analogue of “predefined queries” in traditional databases, except programmed via the same Java API as used to program ETLs and far more capable.”
“You may be tempted to dismiss Rama’s programming model as just a combination of event sourcing and materialized views. But what Rama does is integrate and generalize these concepts to such an extent that you can build entire backends end-to-end without any of the impedance mismatches or complexity that characterize and overwhelm existing systems.”
“The last step is writing the ETL topologies that convert source data from your depots into your PStates. When deployed, the ETLs run continuously keeping your PStates up to date. Rama’s ETL API, though just Java, is like a “distributed programming language” with the computational capabilities of any Turing-complete language along with facilities to easily control on which partition computation happens at any given point.”
“The logic here is trivial, which is why the implementation is only 11 lines of code. You don’t need to worry about things like setting up a database, establishing database connections, handling serialization/deserialization on each database read/write, writing deploys just to handle this one task, or any of the other tasks that pile up when building backend systems. Because Rama is so integrated and so comprehensive, a trivial feature like this has a correspondingly trivial implementation.”
“This use case is a great example of how to think about building data-intensive systems not just with Rama, but in general. For any backend feature you want to implement, you have to balance what gets precomputed versus what gets computed on the fly at query-time. The more you can precompute, the less work you’ll have to do at query-time and the lower latencies your users will experience.”
“[…] a big part of designing Rama applications is determining what computation goes in the ETL portion versus what goes in the query portion. Because both the ETL and query portions can be arbitrary distributed computations, and since PStates can be any structure you want, you have total flexibility when it comes to choosing what gets precomputed versus what gets computed on the fly.”
“[…] we reconstruct the timeline on read if it’s missing or incomplete by querying the recent statuses of all follows. This provides the same fault-tolerance as replication, but in a different way.
“Implementing fault-tolerance this way is a tradeoff. For the benefit of massively reduced cost on timeline write, sometimes reads will be much more expensive due to the cost of reconstructing lost timelines. This tradeoff is overwhelmingly worth it because timeline writes are way, way more frequent than timeline reads and lost partitions are rare.”
“[…] everyone’s follow suggestions are recomputed on a regular basis. The ETL for follow suggestions recomputes the suggestions for 1,280 accounts every 30 seconds. Since there are 100M accounts, this means each account has its suggestions updated every 27 days.”
Interesting how long that is, even with a highly efficient implementation. That means that someone you just started following might stay in your “suggested people” list for weeks afterwards. You might consider skipping recalculation for accounts that haven’t changed their followed accounts, but you’d still need to recalculate them at some point to account for popularity changes among existing and the introduction of new accounts, which presumably affect your follower-suggestion algorithm.
“Every type of status, including boosts, replies, and statuses with polls is represented by this definition. Being able to represent your data using normal programming practices, as opposed to restrictive database environments where you can’t have nested definitions like this, goes a long way in avoiding impedance mismatches and keeping code clean and comprehensible.”
“Before the PState query, there’s a bloom filter check to minimize the amount of PState queries done here. This is another optimization that we didn’t mention in the earlier discussion of fanout, and we’ll discuss it more in a future post. In short, a bloom filter is materialized and cached in-memory on this module for each account with all follows for the account. If the bloom filter returns false, the follow relationship definitely does not exist and no PState query is necessary. If it returns true, the PState query is done to weed out false positives. The bloom filter reduces PState queries for replies by 99%.”
“[…] “fine-grained reactivity”, a new capability provided by Rama that’s never existed before. It allows for true incremental reactivity from the backend up through the frontend. Among other things it will enable UI frameworks to be fully incremental instead of doing expensive diffs to find out what changed. We use reactivity in our Mastodon implementation to power much of Mastodon’s streaming API.”
Introducing the MSTest Runner – CLI, Visual Studio, & More by Amaury Levé, Marco Rossignoli, Jakub Jareš (.NET Blog)
“MSTest runner uses one less process, and one less process-hop to run tests (when compared to dotnet test), to save resources on your build server.
“It also avoids the need for inter-process serialized communication and relies on modern .NET APIs to increase parallelism and reduce footprint.
“In the internal Microsoft projects that switched to use the new MSTest runner, we saw massive savings in both CPU and memory. Some projects seen were able to complete their tests 3 times as fast, while using 4 times less memory when running with
dotnet test
.“Even though those numbers might be impressive, there are much bigger gains to get when you enable parallel test runs in your test project. To help with this, we added a new set of analyzers for MSTest code analysis that promote good practice and correct setup of your tests.”
“The runner is designed to be async and parallelizable all the way, preventing some of the hangs or deadlocks that can be noticed when using VSTest.
“The runner does not detect the target framework or the platform, or any other .NET configuration. It fully relies on the .NET platform to do that. This avoids duplication of logic, and avoids many edge cases that would break your tests when the rules suddenly change.”
SerilogTracing by Nicholas Blumhardt
“A trace is made up of one or more spans, which are generally represented using activities in .NET.
“You wrap an activity around some meaninful piece of work using
Serilog.ILogger.StartActivity()
and a using statement:”“When the activity is disposed or Complete() is called, a span will be written through the logger.”using var activity = _log.StartActivity("Fulfill order {OrderId}", order.Id); // … some application logic …
Oh. Neat. I’ve always wanted standard support for this. My own logging systems always included start/end groups in logs, so you could see messages in hierarchies. This was always especially useful for startup logging and could be represented nicely in graphical displays of the log with a tree control. I remember having this in my logging in the Test Engine (written in C++ in the late 80s), as well as having built it into Atlas when I started working on that existing framework in 2002, and finally including it in Quino, starting in 2007, written in C#.
Five Essential Pointers for Improving Your Product and Process Quality by Niko Heikkilä
“Refrain from placing too much trust in asynchronous code review. […] Reviewing code after it has been written is often too late to enable building quality. […] The optimal size of a pull request is one line of code reviewed immediately as it’s being written.”
“Work in the smallest feasible batches.”
Feasible is the operative word here. Be extremely careful not to be seduced into wasting time merging and integrating too often. I don’t understand how no-one thinks it’s a bad idea to spend too much time integrating all the time. It costs time. Different types of software and different processes are variously sensitive to this. Some software is much harder to test automatically. That is, it takes a lot more effort to set up for automated testing…and a lot more skill.
“Consider how to have an exact or as-exact-as-possible replica of production data in the staging environment so you can verify new changes confidently. It’s embarrassing to find a defect in production that could have been fixed earlier in the process had there been more realistic data.”
“Only fix a bug after first reproducing it with a test. […] It’s very tempting in a high-pressure hotfix situation to analyse the root cause of a bug, fire up a debugger, fix the leak, and ship it. However, the most crucial step of the process is defining proper reproduction steps as an automated test.”
Why not do both? Fix the bug in production, then write the test afterward. Hey, sometimes you have to take a risk, especially when everything’s already on fire. If you’re damned sure what the fix is, then you don’t have to wait for the test and automation to roll out the fix. I have never had a customer who was happy to have a fix a day later just because i was sticking to the process. “Oh, I knew I just needed to add a minus sign, but it took quite a while to figure out how to write an automated test to verify it. You’re welcome.”
This is a very nice meme template. It is such an apt depiction of how so many endeavors go. I’ve seen overlays like,
Published by marco on 31. Jan 2024 21:11:51 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 11. Feb 2024 08:44:32 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
There were some highlights in this show, but the first half was a bit too self-indulgent, with a bit too much playing to the crowd. Don’t get me wrong, the crowd absolutely loved it, but it didn’t come across as well for me in a streaming format. He interleaves a certain preachiness with a tacked-on joke. In the best cases, the preachiness is completely faked, forming a long intro to a pretty good punchline. Usually, you can’t see it coming.
The quotes below are taken from the beautifully formatted Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer transcript (Scraps from the loft).
He starts off with what he probably thinks is an extremely clever transgender joke, where he says that dealing with Jim Carrey pretending to be Andy Kaufman on the set of Man on the Moon is just like dealing with transpeople. If that’s the best you’ve got, then just stop, man. Just stop mining that seam. It’s petered out completely at this point. He moves on handicapped people, to show that he’s equal-opportunity. Here, he circles back to the original topic, saying that he wrote a play,
“It’s about a Black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, n*gga…
“It’s a tear-jerker. At the end of the play, she dies of loneliness ’cause white liberals don’t know how to speak to her.”
Which is actually not bad. But then he moves to Huckleberry Finn, and right back to how, if he had to go to jail, he’d claim to identify as a woman and get into a women’s prison. The crowd-pleasing punchline is,
“Give me your fruit cocktail, bitch, before I knock your motherf*cking teeth out. I’m a girl, just like you, bitch. Come here and suck this girl’s dick I got. Don’t make me explain myself. I’m a girl.”
Honestly, it wasn’t any better in context. It’s not like it loses anything because you don’t hear him deliver it. You just didn’t get to see him bang his microphone on his knee, laughing 😂 at his own joke even harder than the crowd could.
Strip clubs, Deborah, then on to the whole Chris Rock/Will Smith incident. Then he’s into this whole long segment about a homeless rasta transperson who attacked him at a show. Dave: are you afraid of becoming a one-trick pony? Or are you playing an extremely long con like Andy Kaufman did? Or are you hoping that we think you’re clever enough to play a boorish comedian who’s secretly enlightened? I hope you know what you’re doing. You’re the man who thought of the skit starring a blind black man who doesn’t know he’s black and is the most racist KKK member in town, so we’ll always have that.
On to marriage and jealousy, then a really long coda about his first years in comedy, messing with the Russian mob, where he, again, comes out looking like the only person brave enough to open his mouth and stand up to anybody.
“I didn’t buckle. You guys would’ve been very proud of me. I was scared, but I didn’t buckle.”
The story goes on to talk about “powerful dreamers”, who can make reality bend to their will. This starts off kind of weak, talking about L’il Nas X, but then a couple of the final parables were decent.
In what turns out to be the final season of Archer, Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin), Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler), Pam Poovey (Amber Nash), Cheryl Tunt (Judy Greer), Cyril Figgis (Chris Parnell, Dr. Algernop Krieger (Lucky Yates), and Ray Gillette (Adam Reed) are joined by a new hire Zara Kahn (Natalie Drew). She’s a British agent who immediately vies for the top spot at the agency. She gets Lana’s support because it annoys Archer, because she’s quite good, and also because she used to work for Interpol.
The season arc is the gang is trying get the agency into Interpol’s good graces. They hope to ride a gravy train of steady and legitimate contracts if they can just prove their mettle. This proves difficult, as their style, while more than occasionally eventually effective, is quite chaotic and hard to reconcile with the staid bureaucracy of Interpol.
Much of Zara’s mocking of Sterling centers on his age, as she is much, much younger. The other characters stay pretty much the same, though Pam’s best seasons are behind her, when she got on cocaine—there’s a small reprise in this season—or when she revealed her whole yakuza backstory. Cheryl, too, is still crazy, but more muted and her lines are just going through the motions. Krieger has some good stuff at the end of the season, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this show has said all that it’s going to say.
This isn’t the best season by far, but it’s still better and more entertaining than a lot of other stuff out there. The voice acting is, as always, superb.
I like the following moments from S14.E6 ∙ Face Off, where the team goes undercover at an upscale and exclusive plastic-surgery spa, where they’re on the tail of an arms dealer who keeps changing his appearance.
“Archer: Thanks for walking with me, Pam. One bad fall, and my hips could shatter.
Pam: According to one doctor!
Archer: And according to the X-rays of my buckling tibias.
Pam: Screw the X-rays! This whole place is toxic. These doctors only make money if they convince you there’s something broken that they can fix.
Archer: Dr. Spencer actually refused to work on me because I’m too broken.
Pam: [laughs] That was reverse psychology, dude.
Archer: Oh. You think?
Pam: I know! Look, Archer, you’re not the fresh young agent anymore, but you’re something better: the salty old pro who’s seen it all and lived to tell about it.”
After a typical Archer-style clusterfuck in which he ends up achieving his objective but only after nearly failing to do so in every way possible, we have:
“Archer: What happened?
Lana: You fell 50 feet onto jagged rocks. Also, you held that asshоlе sloth to break its fall with your body. And, uh, it bit you when you landed. And just soaked you in piss.
Archer: That’s… amazing!
Lana: Uh, but is it?
Archer: I was worried I was getting old. But I just survived an accident that should have killed me. I might be invincible. [crackling] [groaning]
Krieger: Yeah, that’d be the 30 stitches. Or the nanobots, if they decided to rebel.
Archer: [sighs] Fine, I’m probably not invincible. Just lucky to the point of being immortal.”
At the end of the episode, Archer sums up his style of success.
“Archer: More like all in a day’s work for the world’s greatest… [coughing, hacking] …greatest spy. That probably would have been more convincing if I hadn’t coughed up blood.
Pam: You know, bud, maybe this is the mission where you learn not to rely so much on luck.
Archer: Are you kidding? This was my luckiest mission yet.
Pam: You got shot, like, a dozen times.
Archer: Yeah, in a hospital.”
Don’t ever change, Archer. You are my spirit animal.
Quotes are pulled from the wonderfully thorough Archer Season 14, Episode 6 Face Off Transcript (TV Show transcripts).
This movie is absolutely not good, but nostalgia carried me a long way. It starts off with Cledus (Jerry Reed) driving his semi in what looks like a Nascar race, but for trucks. I have no idea whether this is a real thing—or whether it was ever a real thing. After handily winning a race, he’s approached by Big Enos (Pat McCormick) and Little Enos (Paul Williams), who want him to transport a package across the country—for $200k. He needs to get the bandit (Burt Reynolds) on board, but the bandit is falling-down drunk because Carrie (Sally Field) has left him. Meanwhile, she was about to get married to Buford T. Justice Junior (Mike Henry), but she skips out on that wedding—just like in the first movie.
Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason) is hot on their tail, waiting for them to mess up. They get to the package, which turns out to be Charlotte the elephant. She’s sick, though, so they pick up a “doctor” (Dom DeLuise). After a little while, they discover that the elephant is not sick, but pregnant.
The film is filled with hijinks and just plain messing around. Sally Field is adorable. Dom DeLuise is hilarious, just naturally goofy. He fakes an Italian accent most of the time. There are many, many more bit characters and somewhat-famous actors. Jackie Gleason actually plays two more roles—a Canadian mountie as well as a swishy Savannah-gentlemen-looking sheriff. The three police armies fight with the Bandit and a truck army for what feels like the last hour. Burt Reynolds is really phoning it in, but I guess it was a payday.
They end up not making the delivery, dropping the contract to let Charlotte have her baby instead. It is never made clear why they’d been asked to transport a pregnant elephant across the country in the first place. At the end, the Bandit is towing the elephant and baby with his Trans Am. I wish I were kidding.
It must have cost nearly nothing to make this movie. Probably renting the elephant cost the most. Maybe they had to pay for destroying a bunch of the vehicles. There are really a lot of vehicles, all destroyed with practical effects. It’s all out in the desert, which makes it a lot easier and cheaper than if they’d been in a city (as in the Blues Brothers). It’s amazing to think that adults went to the movie theater to watch this. It’s a movie that aims at 10-year-olds (probably about how old I was when I watched it the first time). I guess it’s the same thing as superhero movies these days. At least there were highbrow movies in the theaters right next to them.
Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) is out of prison after four years. He’d been convicted of drunk-driving and vehicular manslaughter. He returns to his parents’ home on Crockett Island, a village with 127 souls in it. We get to know some island residents as well as some events to set things up.
The island has a new pastor: Father Paul (Hamish Linklater). He’s there to replace Monsignor Pruitt, who was still recovering from having fallen ill on his pilgrimage to Jerusalemn. Father Paul moves into Pruitt’s quarters, shoving a large steamer trunk. Something rustles inside it.
Erin (Kate Siegel) is a former schoolmate of Riley’s. She’s also back on the island after having spent some time off-island. She’s returned with a baby in her belly. She picks up her friendship with Riley, but he’s distant, at least at first.
Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan) is a nightmare of a repressed little control freak. She’s zealously religious and predictably judgmental of everyone on the island—all while gathering money and glory for herself. The islanders are basically terrified of her. This lady just rolls on and on and on, quoting the Bible and just talking so much because she’s terrified that someone might say something that she doesn’t approve of. She cites the Bible for everything, it’s quite brilliantly written.
Some kids sneak off to a nearby part of the island where they can hang out and smoke pot. That part of the island is mostly abandoned and inhabited only by feral cats. Cats and … something else. Later that night, it storms something fierce. The entire island had prepared for it and hunkered down. Riley looks out at the beach, lashed with rain. He thinks he sees Monsignor Pruitt in a lightning flash. He braves the storm to descend to the beach. A thin figure in the Monsignor’s duster and fedora hurries up the beach, away from him.
The next morning, there are a bunch of dead cats all over the beach. They’d washed up from the abandoned part of the island. Their necks are broken. They have bites taken out of them. It’s hard to say what happened, so people just ignore it. They clean up the bodies, making up stories about how it might have happened.
Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli) is relatively new to the island. He’s investigating the poisoning of Pike, the dog that belonged to Joe Collie (Robert Longstreet). Bev totally poisoned the dog because she’s an evil person. Years ago, Joe had shot Leeza (Annarah Cymone) and paralyzed her from the waist down. Leeza is very religious and kind of one-dimensional. I’m skipping over details here, but it doesn’t really matter. Bev’s a dick and a dog-killer is what I’m trying to say here.
Riley starts AA on the island with Father Paul. It’s a one-on-one session for now. Riley unloads on religion, but he’s working through some stuff. Father Paul is patient. Local drug dealer Bill/Bowl (John C. McDonald) is lured into an abandoned building, then attacked by something savage and vaguely humanoid.
At church that Sunday, Father Paul exhorts Leeza to take the sacrament on her own two feet. The flock is shocked. But she rises and does so. Miracolo. The island experiences a complete religious revival. People are suspiciously feeling better, looking better…looking younger.
Father Paul up and dies, coughing blood but is resurrected minutes later. Later, in a confession booth, he recalls how he’d gotten there. He is Monsignor Pruitt. His dementia had led him into the desert near Jerusalem. A sandstorm had overwhelmed him. He’d sought shelter in a cave that presented itself. As he’d stumbled deeper, two feral eyes greeted him. A winged, humanoid thing confronted him and fell on his neck. He awakened young again. The creature was watching him. Father Paul concluded that his restored youth was a gift from God, visited upon him through this angel. He’d convinced himself with various verses from the Bible that say that angels are scary, which tracks with the angular-looking obvious f&@king vampire before him.
The transformations continue. Erin’s baby completely disappears, as if she’d never been pregnant. Dr. Sarah Gunning (Annabeth Gish) is absolutely mystified. She’s further perplexed by Erin’s blood sample exploding spontaneously when sunlight hits it. Father Paul can also no longer abide sunlight. Bev knows all and literally doesn’t care for one second. She’s fully on board with this miracle express and is super-OK with breaking a few eggs to make an omelette. Time for judgment day. Bring. It. On.
Sarah’s mother Mildred (Alex Essoe) has very bad dementia, but she, too, is getting younger and … better. How is this possible? Easy! Father Paul has been “enriching” the eucharist with the vampire’s blood. So, people are benefitting from its immortal powers, but they also start suffering from the associated maladies. Paul is overwhelmed by a thirst for blood. Joe is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Paul feeds. Bev discovers him and doesn’t blink an eye. She and Sturge (Matt Biedel)—along with mayor Wade Scarborough (Michael Trucco) and his wife Dolly (Crystal Balint)—cover everything up, convincing themselves that they are part of the second coming of Christ. YOLO.
Riley suspects something is up and returns late to the church to see father Paul and the Angel in the rec hall. The Angel leaps on Riley and takes him as a victim. Riley is gone for a day or so, and Erin reports him missing. That night, he returns and finds her. He asks her to go out on a boat with him. They row far from shore. He tells her his story, how he awoke after the attack, what Father Paul told him. The Angel. He tells here that he can see her pulse in her neck. The sun is coming up. He tells her to row, row for the shore. “Run away.” He explodes into flames. She screams in terror. She returns to the island, determined to save whomever she can.
Sarah goes to the sheriff with her evidence, asking the Sheriff to intervene, but he can’t, not with so little evidence. He is powerless before the racism and deep hatred of the town. He’s not been there long enough. He provides some interesting insight through his backstory. Erin, Mildred, and Sarah try to flee the island, but realize that the ferries aren’t running. Sturge cuts off the power and then disables the cell tower. Father Paul reveals himself as Monsignor Pruitt. He tells his flock that they’ve already drunk angel’s blood. Kudos for showing the “angel” early on and still managing to imbue it with menace, despite it being in full view, in daylight. That stride into the church in priest’s regalia was chilling.
Several people drink the blood and die, only to be immediately resurrected. They attack the others who didn’t drink. It’s a bloodbath. The angel rips into Mildred, who’d shot father Paul in the forehead. Don’t worry; he’s immortal. Bev and Sturge unleash the resurrected flock on the townsfolk who’d not gone to church. The shitshow continues, with only a few people resisting. Riley’s parents, for example, have been turned, but they resist their bloodlust. It’s a nice comment on the urge: it can be resisted. Riley did it, too. Those who can’t resist it are morally deficient, is what the show seems to be saying.
Later that evening, Mildred, now also resurrected, returns to the church and finds father Paul. They were lovers long ago and Sarah is their daughter. He’d actually brought the destructive power of the angel to the island to save her from dementia. He’s having a few regrets, I think. Erin, Sarah, Leeza, and Riley’s younger brother Warren (Igby Rigney) set about setting fire to the remaining boats—to prevent anyone from leaving the island. They return to the church and rec center to burn those too—the resurrected won’t have any shelter when the sun comes.
The angel attacks Erin, pinning her to the ground as it feeds. After a while, she regains her senses, pulling a knife, and dragging it through its wings. It continues to feed. When it notices what she’s doing—in a seemingly drugged state—she pulls its head back to her neck and continues destroying its wings languorously. It finishes feeding, but it’s too late. Its wings are in tatters and itsability to fly is severely impaired.
Everyone dies. They’re either shot or immolated in the sun. Leeza and Warren are the only ones to have escaped off of the island. They watch the angel lurch its way through the sky, off the island. There is no way it reaches shore. Leeza’s legs are, once again, numb.
It was pretty good. I respect the actress who played Bev. She’s got major chops, but she got a little too much screen time. Her hateful speeches became a bit repetitive. Also, the show dragged on a bit too long, and it lingered on Leeza’s survival way too much. I didn’t really care about Leeza. I’d hoped that maybe Sarah or Erin would survive, but alas.
This movie is a little bit of Westworld, a little bit of Foxy Brown. Fontaine (John Boyega) is a small-time hood in the Glen. He has an oddly strict schedule, an oddness that would soon be explained. He collects money from those who owe him. One of those people is Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), who pimps Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). He goes to collect at the motel where they live, but Charles asks him to come back tomorrow. Fontaine is trapped in his car and gunned down by Isaac (J. Alphonse Nicholson). Slick Charles and Yo-Yo see it happen.
The next day, Fontaine is back to collect his money again. This confuses the hell out of all of them. They set about getting answers. They go into a house that seems to be guarded by a black van that Fontaine vaguely remembers having seen the previous evening. They go in and find an elevator going down, down, down to a secret lab. They find a scientist, who’s just starting to tell them what’s going on when Slick Charles shoots him by accident. Fontaine pulls back a sheet on an operating table to reveal an exact replica of himself.
The next morning, the same house is empty. The three go to a chicken restaurant—they’re hungry!—where they discover that the chicken has been laced with some compound that keeps everyone docile and giddy. Yo-Yo seduces the restaurant manager, who looks just like the scientist they’d killed the evening before. He blabs that the whole Glen is under surveillance and that they’re distributing substances in everything: fried chicken, hair-straightening products, grape drink, etc. Like, only a black director and cast could have made this movie, right?
Next stop is a Black church where they find another elevator in the altar. This time, they’re in a much larger complex, where they see Black people being experimented on in all sorts of innovative, but uniquely “black” ways. They find clones of lots of Glen residents, are starting to put pieces together, but are forced to flee through a strip club, where the DJ is alerted to use special music to control the crowd into chasing them. They flee in their car, but Fontaine’s car is a real beater and it breaks down before they get anywhere. The crowd surrounds the car, but then parts when Nixon (Kiefer Sutherland) and his clone bodyguard Chester (also John Boyega) show up to explain that the whole Glen is an experiment in pacification to avoid a race war. Okaaaaay???
More stuff happens and Yo-Yo is kidnapped and thrown into a cell for experiments. Fontaine and Slick Charles hatch a plan to get her back—and take down the operation while they’re at it. They manage to get most of the gangs in the Glen down there, wreaking havoc and tearing things up. Nixon is not pleased, but he’s not even the one really in charge. The original Fontaine (also John Boyega) has been doing these experiments for forever, trying to figure out how to turn black people into white people. OMG what? I’m hanging on by a fingernail here.
Yo-Yo and Slick Charles manage to take care of Nixon. Fontaine tricks Chester—his clone—into killing his older self. They free the clones together, leaving them to wander naked into the streets, showing up on local news—and then national news. The trio decide to stick together and head to Memphis, where they know there’s another big facility they could expose. In LA, a young man named Tyrone (also John Boyega) watches what looks like a clone of himself wander around naked on the evening news.
This movie wasn’t nearly good enough for them to be leaving the door open to a sequel. I liked the actors, but the plot was a bit of a wild mix of everything, with about as much justification for motivation as Smokey and the Bandit II provided.
Walter Egli (Beat Schlatter) is a Swiss policeman, comfortable in his small-time role in the Swiss government. There is an initiative to make Switzerland have a single official language, with the additional choice of deciding which language should be chosen. To Walter’s delight, the initiative passes; to his horror, French is selected as the official language. Hilarity ensues as the formally German-speaking part of Switzerland prepares to switch over to French, replacing street signs with French versions and enrolling all functionaries—including cops like Walter—in French-language lessons.
An unnamed guy at the post office (Andreas Matti, the guy who’d played Peter, Wilder’s father) was paid to divert a bunch of votes from the German-speaking part of Switzerland to ensure that French won. He was paid by a French-speaking politician Jeannot Bachmann (Beat Schlatter, playing both roles)—although he actually speaks German and Italian perfectly—for what, in the end, are completely unknown reasons. I’m still not sure why they wanted French to win.
Walter is really terrible at French—his teacher tells him he’s in the 20% of people who are too old to learn a new language—and his boss Keller (Pascal Ulli) is having a tough time of keeping him from getting fired. In the end, he sends him and his new French-speaking partner Jonas Bornard (Vincent Kucholl) to uncover a resistance movement in Ticino, specifically in Locarno, led by Enzo Castani (Leonardo Nigro) and Francesca Gamboni (Catherine Pagani).
At the same time, Walter’s mother Rosemarie (Silvia Jost) is starting a resistance movement of her own, blowing up the Jet d’Eau and United Nations entryway in Geneva. Jonas is, at first, much better at infiltration—he bethinks himself a master of disguise—but it’s Walter who stumbles his way into an invitation to resistance headquarters after meeting Francesca. They hit it off quite well and he learns more of their plans. He does so well that Jonas is forced to start speaking German with him so that he can learn more. Up until that point, Jonas had spoken only French.
Castani’s grand plan is to cut off all access to the north and west and declare Ticinia an independent country. Francesca and Walter are chosen to blow up the (old) train tunnel through the Gotthard. Jonas catches up to them, just as Walter is torn between being a cop and a double-agent. He wants to help them fight the single-language Switzerland because he can’t live and work in a country with a language he doesn’t understand.
They blow up the tunnel and flee, with Jonas half-chasing them on an injured leg. The rest of the Ticinese resistance meet them and snap them up, confining Jonas and Walter in a cell. On Jonas’s shoe-phone, they discover the plot to suppress the Swiss-German vote and beg the Ticinese to let them go to Bern to catch the ringleader and force him to reveal his plot. This would derail the impending civil war.
Castani—with a parrot on his shoulder, à la Castro—doesn’t want to let them go, but Francesca takes matters into her own hands, driving the three of them up the Tremola in a three-wheeled, 40kph Piaggio “truck”. At the top, they fool the Swiss soldiers and slip past them, stealing a jeep to head for Bern. From the top of the Gotthard, it’s quite a way, to be honest.
They pretend to be sheep, with sheepskins. When they try to take the jeep, there is a soldier sleeping in the back. He’s about to demand what they’re doing, but she cut him off, demanding in French to know where his sheepskin is? She offers him hers, then they take the jeep. The confused soldier remains in the road, pulling the sheepskin over his shoulders. This is 100% what would happen with the Swiss Army.
In Bern, they sneak in as catering staff, then kidnap Jeannot Bachmann, trying to force him to give himself up. He laughs at them, but then they notice how similar he looks to Walter (it’s the same actor, which is doubly funny). They send Walter out to give a confessional speech in French—with Jonas whispering in his ear via a spy device—because Walter is super-bad at speaking French. The device’s battery dies—that’s probably the only spoken English in the film—but he perseveres and manages to get the point across that the initiative and coming civil war are built on treachery and lies.
They are arrested, but let go for having saved Switzerland from a civil war. Castani is shattered, while his entire council happily goes home. Walter moves to Locarno to work in Francesca’s restaurant.
It was a 7/10 comedy, but it gets an extra star just for being unabashedly cute and feeling like it was made specifically for me. We watched it in Swiss German, Italian, French, and German, with German subtitles for the French and Italian parts.
Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) owns the Haywood Ranch, where he raises and trains horses for show business. He’s about to get a big break when he’s killed by a freak accident: a nickel falls out of the sky, straight into his eye. His horse Ghost is struck by a house key. Otis Haywood Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya) is forced to take over the business. To say he doesn’t have his father’s flair or acumen for business is an understatement.
He’s dedicated to his father’s dream—having made it his own—but he’s really just in it for the horses and doesn’t like show-business people, who he rightly considers to be extremely superficial, self-absorbed, and boorish. This makes them terrible people to keep his horses’ company, but he’s forced to go where the money is. His first outing doesn’t go great. He is not a showman. His sister Emerald “Em” (Keke Palmer) is, but she’s also rather flighty and quite dumb. She’s also really pretty, even though she dresses sloppy. Still and all, the day on the set goes poorly when Lucky the horse kicks out when someone holds up a mirror to his face. The fool on the set was getting a light reading, despite OJ’s warnings.
OJ is eventually forced to sell horses to a nearby theme-park ranch called Jupiter Ranch, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Stephen Yeun). Ricky’s backstory is that he’s a former child actor who was on a show with a chimpanzee named Gordy who went absolutely and literally apeshit on set, nearly killing the actress who’d played his sister. It’s not really clear what this all has to do with anything, other than animals can be beasts and they do their own thing and we treat them like furniture in our arrogance and it occasionally backfires—but not often enough to make us stop being assholes, if I’m interpreting director and writer Jordan Peele’s implicit message at-all correctly.
Back at Haywood Ranch, OJ and Emerald notice mysterious power outages and spooked horses. They see something in the sky. It’s a UFO. They head off to a local electronics store, where they buy some surveillance equipment from Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), who accompanies them back to the ranch to help set everything up. When OJ asks him to tilt one camera way up in the sky, Angel is so down with that because he’s an absolute freak for aliens.
They experiment with the UFO, but soon discover that it’s not a ship: it’s a creature, a predator that sucks up people, horses, shiny items. When it eats something that disagrees with it, it regurgitates it. Things like the nickel that killed Otis Sr. It’s capable of sitting still in the sky for days at a time, shrouded in a cloud that it creates for itself, as camouflage. It turns out that Jupe already knew what it was and had been offering up the horses he was buying from OJ as sacrifices, to build a rapport with the creature. This backfires spectacularly, as Jupe’s attempt to offer Lucky as a sacrifice ends up killing everyone at the show except for lucky. Hence the name, I guess.
They recruit Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), the director of the show from which they’d been fired, who lends his gravelly voice and mysterious demeanor to the whole affair, bringing a hand-turned IMAX film camera that will keep working when the power goes out. He works with Angel to set up surveillance and they get some footage…but Antlers goes off the leash, running up a local hill to get even closer footage of the beast. He lures it in…and it predictably eats him right up. He gets some pretty good footage, though, which no-one will ever see.
Angel is almost caught but ends up getting the creature to swallow a bunch of barbed wire—purely by accident—which makes it explode into a different shape, broader, more like a jellyfish than a jellybean. Em and OJ use Lucky and a motorcycle to lure the creature to a giant balloon that’s been rigged to blow, but not before they snap a picture of it using an old analog camera buried in a well (where tourists would snap themselves looking down into it).
Em has the picture as proof and OJ is back on Lucky, safe and sound. The creature has been blown to pieces. The end.
The quotes below are taken from the beautifully formatted Pete Davidson: Turbo Fonzarelli transcript (Scraps from the loft).
I like Pete’s delivery. He seems much more humble than Chappelle, so it makes me more forgiving of a rambling style that doesn’t really go anywhere. His super-long stories are funny, replete with mini-zingers. Davidson starts with a bit about drugs, then segues into a rant about Apple’s phones and how that company is like the mafia. Then it’s on to his mom, who still isn’t dating even though his father died 23 years ago. Somehow he gets away with the following joke,
“I’ll go over to my mom’s. I’ll hang out, eat dinner for an hour, and she’s like, “Where you going?” I’m like, “Home. What do you mean?” Unless we’re about to fuck in the shower, I don’t… My duties as a son are done. [audience laughs] It’s to the point where I might fuck her just to get her off my back.”
He stays on this topic for a while, about how he would shop his mom around on dating sites, if she were willing. Then, somehow, he moves on to Leonardo diCaprio and how he thought he was gay when he was younger because he really, really liked him. From there, he’s on to the Make-A-Wish Foundation and how he’s “had offers”. From there, he’s on a wonderful, long story about his stalker. He really tells this story well, about how he kind of encourages her, about how he’s sad when she’s gone. He talks about how his mom met her—she’d actually invited her in to the house to watch shows with herself and her 79-year-old friend Terry.
He takes the stalker to court for a restraining order, but he’s of two minds (or pretending to be … whatever, it’s hilarious.
“So I was a little excited to see her, a little bit, you know. I didn’t try to look hot or anything, but I picked an outfit. You know, yeah. Hell yeah! You know? An outfit that said, like, “Hey.” “Don’t give up.” You know? [audience laughs] “Some things are worth fighting for.” Restraining order, shmestraining shorder. I go, “What happened, Tasty?” “What happened to my girl?” He goes, “Bro, she was deemed unfit to stand trial.” Deemed unfit to stand up at a trial. That means a bunch of medical professionals and officers of the law saw her and were like, “No.” I immediately felt insulted. It’s a little fucked up and embarrassing for me, don’t you think? “Deemed unfit”? I don’t think you understand how insane that is. Let me put it in perspective for you. Jeffrey Dahmer was deemed fit… [audience laughs] …to stand trial. A guy who murdered and ate gay people. One chick is into me, off to the nuthouse!”
Finally, he talks about house-shopping, as a guy who’d grown up in apartments on Staten Island. He moves on to talking about how his mom made a fake Twitter account to defend him online: “JoeSmith1355”.
“[…] my mom made a Twitter account with her 79-year-old female friend Terry, and Terry was calling the shots.”
This documentary starts quite slowly and seems inordinately focused on the narrator Craig Foster for what feels like the first 1/3 of the film. But it is absolutely charming and the narrator got me on his side by the middle of the film. This is a movie about a man who begins diving in a South African kelp forest every day for about a year. He was already a documentarian, but he was a bit down on his luck, a bit burned out. He used the routine of his schedule and the serenity of the ocean to heal. Or that’s what he says. Wikipedia says he spent three years making this movie. It’s fine, though. Take liberties with your art, I say!
He would eventually involve his son (somebody had to hold the camera for him). But the style of the documentary depicts him diving alone. He didn’t wear a wetsuit, despite the at-times 10ºC water. He learned how to hold his breath for a long time. He didn’t use a scuba tank because it would have been a hindrance in the kelp forest.
He meets an octopus. She’s not very big. He follows her every day, learning about how she hunts, how she spends her day. They have adventures together. She grows to trust him. He can pick her up. She rides his arm and hand when he rises to breathe. She wraps herself around his chest, almost like a hug.
We learn a tremendous amount about octopuses, eventually. They are solitary. She has taken up residence in a pretty dangerous area, but she is so clever. She learns how to hunt in the shallows. She must evade the ubiquitous and deadly pajama sharks. Once, she doesn’t. It grabs one of her tentacles and tears it off. She manages to escape and return to her lair, but she is gravely injured. Craig visits her every day, deigning to interfere enough to help her get food. He’s mostly hands-off, but he can’t help himself. She doesn’t seem much capable of eating, though. Her color is white as she has no energy to change colors anymore. She recovers, though, with the stump initially sealing off—and then growing a stub that grows to a full-fledged replacement arm over three months. They continue their life together.
When she is attacked again, she is much cleverer: she flees to the shallows—and then right out onto the beach, clambering over shells to return to the water in a different place. When the shark still has her scent, she shoots over to a pile of shells that she uses her 2,000 suckers to pull over herself like a carapace. She looks like a soccer ball. The shark chomps down on her, but is unable to penetrate the ad-hoc shell. She slides to the side and then hops on its back, slithering her tendril-like arms out of the shells to attach to its back. The shark has no idea what’s going on. It’s been “completely outwitted.” She drops off, drops her temporary armor in a cloud of dust and shells, and retreats to the safety of her den. One can’t help but imagine a self-satisfied look on the creature’s face.
Foster watches the octopus play with fish in the shallows. He notices that its play behavior distinct from hunting behavior, that the octopus “seems to be having fun”. Foster has his last close interaction with the octopus, as it cuddles up to him for quite some time. Soon after, he returns to their shared grounds in the kelp forest—and sees another octopus there. A larger, male octopus. These solitary creatures come into close contact for only one reason.
She produces numerous eggs, then slowly expires as she nurtures them until they hatch. She no longer hunts, no longer feeds. Her final purpose will be to produce a brood of octopuses to carry on after her. Lethargic and nearly dead, she floats out of her den. Fish begin to feed on her while she’s still moving a bit. A shark shows up to end things abruptly, carrying her body off into the deep and dark ocean.
The cinematography by Roger Horrocks was absolutely incredible. The colors, the detail, the incredible number of situations that they were able to capture—just impressive. It’s worth it just for the visuals, but the gentle story of precious life and nature is the lesson you’ll hopefully take away. It is in the small, in the supposedly insignificant, that we truly find meaning.
This philosophy flies in the face of nearly everything else our culture tries to teach us. Our culture is geared toward growth and consumption. Bigger, better, faster, more. Don’t slow down to enjoy what you have because you’re missing out on what you don’t.
We should pay attention to these examples, of which there are many, many more. Not just in our culture, but in those we consider backwards, in those places that we disparagingly call The Third World and only grudgingly now call The Developing World. Or we consider other cultures alien and antagonistic (e.g., China).
We consider ourselves to be “developed” but we will watch movies like this for 90 minutes and then go right back to the consumerist, neoliberal grind and hustle, getting as much as we can for ourselves, unaware and unconcerned how much our lifestyles impact billions of other creatures like this amazing little octopus 🐙 .
Douglas Kenney (Will Forte) and Henry Beard (Domhnall Gleeson) took the Harvard Lampoon to new heights during their time there. They published Bored of the Rings, a book that consisted nearly entirely of Tolkien puns. In their final year, Henry has gotten into two prestigious graduate schools. Doug hasn’t even applied anywhere yet. He comes up with the awesome idea of taking the Lampoon national. He and Henry should just keep publishing funny shit, but in a national magazine, is what he’s saying. C’mon Henry, don’t be so stuffy. Henry is tempted.
They shop the idea around, with disastrous results, until they end up in Matty Simmons’s (Matt Walsh) office. He publishes Weight Watchers, among others. He takes a chance on them. They fill out the staff with eccentrics and comedians from the bowels of New York, like Anne Beatts (Natasha Lyonne), Michael Gross (Krister Johnson), Tom Snyder (Ed Helms), Gilda Radner (Jackie Tohn), Bill Murray (Jon Daly), and Christopher Guest (Seth Green). Martin Mull plays the narrator—an older version of Doug.
The movie sets up some of the most famous covers and spoofs, like the “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll shoot this dog.” [1] They get sued by everybody: Mormons, the Catholic church, Disney, Volkswagen, … the list goes on. They started a radio show. They were flying high. Incredible parties. Lots of booze and drugs. Henry is sober and keeps the ship aright and afloat. Doug is a comic mastermind, but he’s pretty out of control. His wife leaves him when his infidelities become too obvious.
At one point, he goes on a long sabbatical, returning nine months later as if nothing had happened. They miss the boat on a TV show, watching a lot of their writers starting on SNL when Lorne Michaels poaches them all. But the magazine’s success is more than enough for them to look into making movies, introducing John Belushi (John Gemberling), Harold Ramis (Rick Glassman), Chevy Chase (Joel McHale), Ivan Reitman (Lonny Ross), John Landis (Brian Huskey), Rodney Dangerfield (Erv Dahl), and Paul Shaffer (Paul Scheer). Most of these people are well-known actors and comedians of today playing famous people from the late 70s.
Henry and Doug get their promised buyout from Matty: a cool $3.5M a piece. Henry immediately retires. He returns briefly when Doug is deep into booze and drugs, to try to offer him emotional support, telling him that he’s always there for him. They part on shaky terms, but Henry is worried.
Doug writes Animal House. We visit the set and watch producer Brad (Joe Lo Truglio) fight with Doug all the way, then claim that he knew all along it would be a success when Animal House becomes the highest-earning comedy of all time. Doug is terrified of a follow-up. He writes Caddyshack, which wasn’t immediately successful like Animal House, but would eventually become a cult classic. I liked Caddyshack much better. I loved Chevy Chase in it. Bill Murray was great as well, but I thought it was a Chevy Chase vehicle.
In 1980, after a cocaine-fueled week with Chevy Chase—they started off with six days of drying out, but failed to stick the landing—Doug Kenney throws himself off of a cliff at the age of 33. Martin Mull’s narration as the older Kenney was a subterfuge—there would never be an older Kenney. The film ends at Kenney’s funeral, to which everyone has shown up, including Henry. Henry had gotten a call that we were led to believe was Doug finally calling his old friend for help. Instead, it was to tell Henry that Doug was dead. Henry starts a food fight at the funeral, ending the film as it had started at Harvard so long ago.
I gave it an extra star because, man, I lived and breathed this stuff growing up. I watched the movies again and again. I read the Lampoon whenever I could. I read Bored of the Rings. This shit was formative for me. I watched SCTV; I watched SNL; I listened to Monty Python. I had a lot more Mad magazines than Lampoons, but it was all influential to the snarky little asshole I would become.
“There is no secret. Just practice twice as much as you think you need to.”
Needless to say, this is pretty much always the answer. Talent makes practice rewarding; it doesn’t replace it. See Wisdom and challenging God.
Published by marco on 29. Jan 2024 19:46:45 (GMT-5)
“There is no secret. Just practice twice as much as you think you need to.”
Needless to say, this is pretty much always the answer. Talent makes practice rewarding; it doesn’t replace it. See Wisdom and challenging God.
Published by marco on 27. Jan 2024 22:49:11 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 11. Feb 2024 08:41:30 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
This movie is basically a collection of skits that follows a rough storyline.
It’s not aged as well as I’d hoped it would, but it still has its moments.
This is a documentary about how Gay Talese came to write a book documenting the story of a man Gerald Foos, who built a motel with the express purpose of spying on its customers. He built a spying network into the ceiling, where he could range along the rooms, looking down upon the inhabitants. He did this for decades.
The Articles Editor of the New Yorker Susan Morrison opines that he is “a sociopath”, which, honestly, is exactly the kind of superficial judgment I would expect to hear from her, given her position and appearance. I prejudged her and I was dead-on. Is wanting to watch other people sociopathic? His story is that he basically watched his own personal reality TV for decades. He was hoping to watch people have sex.
None of that is outside of societal norms, except that the voyeurism happened unbeknownst to the victims. I’m not saying it’s legal or moral but most of what he did—watch strangers do stuff—is what millions do every single day. And there’s a giant industry that profits from it. That’s not even close to sociopathic. It’s just illegal.
No? Billions of people watch other people every damned day, most of the time people they don’t know. Those people are nearly almost always aware that someone’s watching them, but a lot of times they aren’t. How many fail videos are there, taken from security cameras? From doorbell cameras? From camera-phones? Almost none of those people are aware that they’re being filmed. Is it sociopathic to watch those? Is it sociopathic to watch pornography? When something is done by nearly everyone, then it’s not sociopathic by definition.
No, I think the guy just loved doing it. He documented it like a lab researcher, too, perhaps to make it seem like the time he spent doing it was worthwhile. But he generally seems to have a pretty obsessive personality. He has about 2.5-3 million baseball cards, with 1 million of them sitting in unopened boxes.
This is a classic Netflix documentary: it blows up about 30 minutes of content to 90 minutes. The last half-an-hour is just about whether Talese’s book is going to tank or not, or whether Gerald was lying about part of what he said, or whether Gay is even a journalist, as he didn’t even check out any basic facts.
It’s chock-full of long interviews with Gerald and his wife Anita. Almost none of these are interesting, not really. It’s just kind of uncomfortable to watch, but I’m sure I’m in the tiny mintority here, as people love to watch other people. I don’t know how many montages they can cram in of people getting dressed—usually Gerald or Gay.
Gay is kind of a raging ego, though. I came out of this with a much worse opinion than when I went in. I know my Mom had liked him, for whatever reason, probably because he had an Italian background and was big in the late 60s/early 70s when she lived in New York.
Ben Benjamin (Paul Rudd) is a freshly minted caregiver. His first job is with Trevor (Craig Roberts), a young man with Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. He and his strong-willed mother Elsa (Jennifer Ehle) had moved from England about nine months ago. The young man is funny, has a ludicrously strict schedule, and is soon getting along with Ben as the only caregiver he’s ever liked.
They go back and forth, Elsa finds out that Ben had lost his own son three years ago. Ben still hasn’t signed his wife Janet’s (Julia Denton) divorce papers. Trevor cons Ben into taking him on a trip to see roadside attractions and the world’s deepest pit. After his mother reluctantly agrees, Trevor starts to chicken out.
“Trevor: Well done. That was very heroic how you jumped in there without missing a beat. But I’m sorry, I can’t do it.
Ben: Why? This was your idea.
Trevor: I know, but I think I was caught up in the moment. That moment being you telling me to go fuck myself repeatedly.
Ben: This is great. The open road. You know what? I’m going to call the Make-a-Wish Foundation and I’m going to get Katy Perry to meet us in a motel in Missoula. What song do you want her to sing while she’s doin’ ya?
Trevor: [long pause] Fireworks.”
They’re on the road. 90 East.
Lots of newness. Trevor’s grumpy. But oho! A real-live chick. As he rolls by, she says “Cool fucking sneakers.” He says, “Mall.” His game needs work.
He finally eats a Slim Jim, then pretends to be choking, which he’s done before. It looks like it’s real this time. Ben veers to a stop. It’s not real. Trevor’s just fucking with him. Again.
At “Rufus” the world’s biggest bovine, some local guys have to carry Trevor’s wheelchair upstairs because they have no wheelchair access.
They’re at a restaurant and the girl from the other stop is outside, hitching a ride. Her name is Dot (Selena Gomez). Her face is very round and her voice is very deep and gravelly. She smokes what looks like clove cigarettes. She calls Ben Mervin.
“Trevor: Hi, Mervin.
Ben: Shut up. Or tomorrow I’ll put your clothes on inside-out.
Trevor: [Laughs out loud.]”
They pick up Peaches, whose car is broken down. She’s pregnant, and headed to Nebraska. Her husband is Afghanistan. They’re now a foursome on the open road.
At the motel, Trevor kind of works up the courage to ask Dot on a dinner date. Well, he convinces Ben to decide he doesn’t want to eat, which Dot sees through immediately. “Pick me up when you’re ready to go.”
Ben wants to give Trevor his pills before dinner, but then can’t find them. They’re panicking.
“Ben: I don’t know what happened.
Trevor: I know what happened. You’re an idiot!
Ben: I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. I’m not an idiot. … I’m hilarious [shows the bag of pills]
Trevor: Oh… Oh, my hands are numb. Are you kidding me? This is when you decide to play the prank? When I’m about to go on my first date?
Ben: It just seemed funnier that way.
Trevor: [long pause] Agreed.”
They stop in Salt Lake City to see Trevor’s father (Frederick Weller). It turns out that Bob hadn’t written all of those letters that Trevor had never read. Instead, it was his mother.
Trevor is shattered. He has a completely predictable fallout with Ben. He wants to go home. Dot puts her goddamned foot down. “We’re going to the pit.”
At the pit, Ben confronts the car that’s been following them for a while. It’s Cash, Dot’s Dad (Bobby Cannavale). He asks to be allowed to continue tailing them until Dot gets to where she’s going.
The phone rings. The gang needs help at the bottom of the pit. Peaches is having her baby. Why does Ben have to do this? He’s the caregiver. Dozens of people around, but Ben’s the one.
After the baby’s here and Peaches is taken away in an ambulance, Dot makes up with her dad and decides to let him drive her to Denver instead.
“Cash: What’s wrong with him?
Ben: Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. He’ll be lucky if he makes it to 30.
Cash: Is it rare?
Ben: It affects one out of every 3,500 males.
Cash: Life’s a real class-A bitch, isn’t it.
Ben: Not always. [They watch Dot and Trevor say goodbye.]”
As Dot’s leaving:
“Ben: Well, take care of yourself in Denver. There are a lot of perverts there.
Dot: Yeah? And how would you know?
Ben: We all keep in touch.”
Coda:
“Ben: [typing his book] Soon after our trip, I resigned as his caregiver, but continued on as his friend. Two weeks ago, when I went to visit Trevor on his 21st birthday, I found him lying on the floor of his bedroom, finally at peace. The new caregiver, a kind woman in her 60s named Anna, was sobbing. She, like me, knew just how special he was. He was faking, of course. Anna quit the next day.”
I quite liked this movie. Pitch-perfect. All of the actors were great and natural. Would watch again.
This movie is f&@king terrible. It is so ham-handed and terribly made. It’s like a bad TV show. Even Charlize Theron can’t begin to save this thing. It’s so blatantly and stupidly manipulative. It’s entirely too long. They paper over terrible acting with a terrible hip-hop soundtrack that’s supposed to inspire “mood”. The acting is seriously about as bad as some of the more home-made-looking shorts on Dust. The fight choreography is so clumsy that it serves as a reminder for how much work goes into making good battle choreography.
I’m loath to describe the plot, but I’ll do it for my future self, I guess. It’s about a group of four immortal warriors who go around doing good deeds, like assassinating people for the CIA, but for good reasons. They agree to a mission with a dude from the CIA. It’s a trap, arranged by a big pharma company that wants to capture them to figure out their secret to immortality. They get away, surprise, surprise. They are captured again, to no-one’s surprise. They ostracize the member who betrayed them.
They end up getting the guy who betrayed them in the CIA to be the Charlie to their Angels. Some immortal lady they talked about having been thrown into the ocean in an iron maiden appears at the end, probably in the vain hope of inspiring a sequel. Oh, Jesus, it’s in the works.
All of the people are terrible. The ones who are good people are terrible actors. It’s a shit show.
Leo (Alexander Skarsgård) is man living in a futuristic city who, as a young Amish boy, had his throat struck by a boat propellor. His parents refused treatment and he’s permanently mute now. The world is…interesting and rendered quite believably (if you don’t think about it too much). It looks nice. It almost seems as if the Amish have ended up in this world, as well. The PA announcements are in English and German.
It turns out that they’re in Berlin, but that the Americans are even more deeply nested there in the future than they are now. It’s like the cold war never ended, and has gotten hot. Also, there’s at least one Amish person living in Berlin. Either Germany has Amish people or he traveled quite a way in an airplane.
One of the main ideas is that the U.S. military has on AWOL problem. One of them is Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd), who was a medic in the military. He sports a gigantic mustache, has the standard Rudd-ian charm, but is darker. He’s a bad man. He’s only interested in himself and the welfare of his daughter Josie (apparently played by twins Mia-Sophie Bastin and Lea-Marie Bastin), for whom he doesn’t really know how to care. He takes her from seedy spot to seedy spot, but she’s a good sport, constantly drawing in silence. We don’t hear a word from her until the end.
Cactus Bill works for Maksim (Gilbert Owuor), a local Russian gang leader who needs Bill’s services to patch up his soldiers. Bill works with Duck (Justin Theroux), who’s also a former medic, but isn’t AWOL. Duck is not a good person either. He works on cybernetic prosthetics, but is mostly interested in the little kids, if you know what I mean. This would eventually result in a rift between Bill and Duck, as Bill is livid that Duck might be interested in Josie.
Cactus Bill’s story arc is that he’s trying to get Maksim to provide him with travel papers for himself and Josie, so he can get the hell out of Germany.
Amish Leo is a bartender in Maksim’s bar. His girlfriend Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh) works there as a waitress. There’s a lot of back-and-forth, but it’s not really that complicated. Naadirah is Josie’s mother. Cactus Bill gets mad about her relationship with Leo and kills her. Just kills her. He’s a psycho, as we slowly learn over the course of the film as the Rudd-ian patina wears away to reveal the monster beneath. He is not a sympathetic character, is what I’m saying.
Duck is just as bad, really. Duck’s messing with Leo because he keeps sending Leo messages on the phone that Naadirah had given him. Leo barely knows how to use it because he’s Amish, so we forgive him his not knowing that all messages don’t necessarily come from her. Knowing that Leo is looking for Bill and because Duck is angry with Bill, he leaks their location. Leo grabs a giant and very sturdy bedpost as his weapon and drives over to Maksim’s bar in Maksim’s car, which he’d stolen earlier (he’s kind of going off the rails looking for Naadirah).
Did I mention that Leo is really strong? We see him swimming a few times, holding his breath for a long time, etc. etc. Presumably this is how he’s worked through the trauma of the accident of his youth. We see him taking a deep breath, then downing an entire pint of water very dramatically a few times. This is a Chekhov’s gun, of course.
So Leo cleans house at Maksim’s bar, getting all the way up to Maksim’s office without a shot fired. He cleans Maksim’s clock with the bedpost, grabs Bill’s papers and leaves. At Bill’s house, he finds Nicky (Jannis Niewöhner), another torture victim, in the basement. He frees him, but the poor sonofabitch runs into Bill at the top of the stairs, who’s already back from his fruitless visit to Maksim’s.
Bill tosses Leo the keys to the storage area in the cellar—a classic apparatus of wooden slats that Leo could have pulverized if he hadn’t left his bedpost bludgeon leaning on the bannister by the stairs. Leo finds Naadirah’s body in a plastic bag and hauls her out of there. Bill watches, then grabs his giant hunting knife from its sheath behind his back, tussles with Leo, and realizes to his horror just how goddamned strong Leo is. Leo easily and slowly shoves the knife through Bill’s trachea and out the back of his neck. He leaves him to die slowly on his basement floor. Leo carries Naadirah outside and mourns her, leaning against a tree.
Duck shows up and finds his best friend choking on his own blood on the floor. He decides not to save him because Bill had threatened to reveal his pedophilic predilections and because Bill had brought this on himself by killing Naadirah. Duck grabs Bill’s keys, turns a camera monitor so Bill can see him walking into his daughter’s room, then goes up and grabs Josie. He doesn’t do anything to her right then, but Bill’s dying thoughts will be dominated by knowing that Josie is in Duck’s filthy, filthy hands—and she has no idea of the danger she’s in. Lights out for Bill.
Duck is still pissed that he’s lost his friend, though, so he goes upstairs, finds Leo against the tree and kicks him in the temple, taking him out in one blow. We watch as Duck gives Leo a cybernetic larynx.
Leo awakes in the back of a car, with Duck driving himself and Josie…somewhere that is not Berlin. Duck drives them to a bridge, then drags Leo out onto a bench in the middle. Duck tells Leo that this is where he’d taken that photo of Naadirah that Leo had been showing to everyone. He’d loved her, at least as a friend. Now he’s going to dispose of Leo. He cuts the lock holding a gate closed. No-one knows why there would be a gate there, but it helps the plot, so it’s there.
Duck is the second person that day to be surprised at how strong Leo is. Leo rope-a-dopes Duck and, as Duck grabs him to push him over, Leo locks his arms around him, gulping huge breaths, then tips them both off the bridge. Duck is utterly unprepared and untrained and gives up the ghost quite quickly. Leo swims to the surface to see Josie dangerously close to the edge, looking down at him. She calls to him. He waves her back, then finally croaks out a warning that she understands.
He’s back on the bridge. Josie is comfortable with him. They travel on together. The end.
This is a classic standup set from Dieter Nuhr, delivered in Berlin to a relatively sympathetic crowd. He starts off with some red meat for Germans: how silly and stupid Americans are, how uncomprehending they are, and how badly his subtitled comedy show will do when shown on American Netflix. He’s probably right, but it seemed a little overly harsh and not very funny. The laughter came not from the jokes, but from “hurdur Amerikaner sind so DUMM.”
Anyway, he moved on to cleverer stuff. His modus operandi is verbal subterfuge, contrarianism, and reductio ad absurdum. He doesn’t range too far into the absurd, though. He sticks to stuff like the weird Internet, the judgmental Internet, kids these days, women vs. men—the usual fare. He delivers with aplomb and he’s clever—although sometimes his persona of knowing how clever he is threatens to lose the crowd, he generally wins them back when he’s able to convince them he’s just kidding, he’s just playing a role, he’s just trying to make them laugh. If they’d just relax and lean into it, they’d be having fun instead of judging.
He’s also very much against the overly judgmental and vindictive style of the moment, even though his own personal favorite saying is, “Wenn man keine Ahnung hat: Einfach mal Fresse halten,” which is good advice, but sometimes lands a bit poorly. I think he’s an intelligent, funny guy with interesting takes—even if I have no idea which of them he actually believes in, it doesn’t matter.
I watched it in German with German subtitles (most of it while riding the indoor bike).
This is a one-man show. Dany starts out singing a little song, one that he apparently began his career with. He tells us about himself—although the audience clearly knows everything already, laughing at the appropriate spots. E.g., when he talks about how a promoter/agent had told him what a bad idea it would be to emphasize his having come from from the north, the Ch’tis. He was told to clean up his accent, then laughs and says, yes, having focused on the Ch’tis was the greatest mistake he’d made in his career (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis was his breakout film; it’s pretty awesome).
He moves on to a long bit about how slow and inefficient La Poste is, doing a lot of pantomime. From there, he’s talking about the old telephone book, and how it helped him find one of the most famous people in the Ch’tis and helped him get his first gig. He pantomimes the people and his first gig. He was attacked by the owner’s dog, with the four besotted members of the audience cheering them both on. Afterward, they wonder where the dog’s gone.
Next up is miming and robot noises. He segues into pretending to be a massively over-musclebound friend of his—Fred Martens—who’d been a bouncer at a night club called Macumba. He is also not particularly clever. Hilarity ensues. It’s pretty lowbrow, but it’s perfect for my French, as he’s a very physical comedian. It’s bad for me because he speaks very quickly and in a strong northern accent. I learned a lot of words, though. I had the subtitles on in French, and had my online dictionary ready.
Next up, he accompanies himself on the piano with an ode to Ch’Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, where he grew up. His voice is actually pretty good. Apparently, in 2016, the region was renamed to “les Hauts-de-France”, eradicating his heritage with a new name. He is not happy about it. He goes into all of the name changes, how the region welcomes you with a new sign, how you no longer say “wassingue” for mop, but “serpillière” (which is, presumably, more sophisticated). Belgium is now called “le Royaume du Dessus des Hauts-de-France d’En-Dessous”.
The joke is that renaming the region doesn’t change its inhabitants at all. Still hicks. Still proud of it. This is quite good, actually. He segues into a demo—with slides—of the “new GPS” with all of the new names and regions. He has a lot to say about the French government’s desire to “simplify”.
The next sketch is about Euro Disney, about the “it’s a small world” ride. He calls the song a virus that even Alzheimer’s couldn’t eradicate. He accompanies himself on the guitar to a French rewrite of the song. He goes off-script and rewrites it with the “world as it is”.
Now he’s onto the “youth of today”. No reading, no writing, no expressing themselves, no consonants—he’s kidding, of course. Kind of. He shows a WhatsApp conversation. It’s actually quite brilliant seeing a foreign language mangled into another, shorter one, as we do with numbers-for-letters, etc.
He is now pretending to read a book, a work of great literature from the French canon: Harlequin. The mispronunciations and misapprehensions he pretends to have, as a young reader, are … f&$king hilarious. They just are. He reads a word “sulfureuse” that he doesn’t know, assumes it’s a family name, then checks himself because “it doesn’t start with a capital letter”. Even the subtitles show what’s he’s pronouncing, which aren’t actual words. “Un petit frigo a braguette” and so on.
He then demonstrates how to read a book, not how he first tried it—across both pages. Stop at the fold, read until the number—which isn’t part of the story—jump back up to the top, over the fold. Clever, actually. I’d never thought about how I’d had to learn how to read a book—and that those familiar with only screens might be tripped up.
He talks about older people a bit, but then moves right back to teenagers and watching his own children mutate into people he doesn’t recognize. He mimes an exorcism of his teenager. He says that he went to a child psychologist because of the aggression, but they were too far gone. He was sent to a lion-tamer at the circus instead, who informs him that the only language that beasts—and teenagers—obey is German. He says it worked like a charm and now his teenagers jump through flaming hoops, and he can place his head in the mouth of the eldest without fear. He mimes a morning at home.
He mimes a bit about having a bad back, talks about getting older, and having his body start to fail him. He cracks everything, then plays some nice jazz piano, breaking off to crack his knuckles grotesquely. He’s quite talented. He pretends that the only song he remembers in its entirety is—wait for it—”It’s a Small World”. He dedicates the show to his mother, then sings a song in Spanish for her. He spits on the consonants, then leaves them off. It’s a bit overdone, but the public loves it. The finale is great. He’s really talented.
I watched it in French with French subtitles.
Sonja (Svenja Jung) is a 20-year-old student in Berlin. She studies mathematics. Her best friend in school is Jule (Charley Ann Schmutzler). She is wild, but harmless. She just wants to get laid. Sonja hooks up with bartender Milan (Christoph Letkowski). It’s on-again, off-again with him, but she moves on, for now.
Sonja’s enjoying the night life. She meets Ladja (Mateusz Dopieralski). They move in together. They’re super-good at partying, but bad at making money. She loses her job as a waitress because she’s only got time for Ladja and her studies.
She gets a job as a camgirl. Money’s coming in. Things are better. With the job and her studies, she hardly ever sees Ladja. She gets fed up with that job and decides to move on. On Christmas, she calls a madam Anja (Judith Steinhäuser) who runs a small brothel out of her apartment. When she gets back to her apartment, she find Ladja on the steps. They’re back together.
It’s back to partying, studying, and satisfying customers’ kinks without doing more than hand stuff (and maybe mouth stuff, it looked like?) It’s relatively innocent. She becomes good friends with an older guy Karl-Heinz (Axel Gottschick), who just likes to take pictures. He gives her a square meal, paying her as well to sit under the table and photograph up her skirt. He tells her to come by every Sunday for a meal whenever she wants.
This is all not enough because the party life is having an impact. Ladja spent all of her money on a few all-night ragers where the two of them tore through Berlin. She wasn’t aware it was her money fueling it, though.
When she’s helping a new recruit at Anja’s, Anja walks in and says that there’s a customer who wants to fuck (not there for a kink). It’s Sonja’s first time. It’s her math professor, who doesn’t recognize her. With that dam broken, she starts to gladly take the extra €50. As she says, at first, it was with guys who she’d have gone home with sober, then with guys who she’d have to have been drunk to go home with, then with those she’d have to have been really hammered to go home with, then it didn’t matter anymore.
She comes to view Anja’s Oasis (die Oase) as her home, the people there as her family. Anja tells them that the Oasis is going out of business. After that, things get tougher; they have to take whatever customers they can get.
Ladja still doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t seem to be trying too hard to find out. On the way to a club, one of her customers recognizes her and calls her Mascha (her trade name).She introduces Ladja so that the customer doesn’t talk too much. But then the two start speaking Russian with one another. It’s clear that the customer told Ladja that she doesn’t work at a call-center.
At the club, Ladja is watching her dance, lost in thought. She meets Milan in the bathroom. Jule is mad at her because she’d had her eye on Milan (I guess?) and asks him if he’s one of her johns. He still wants her, although she asks him why? He has everything one could want.
Ladja locks her out of her apartment. She calls Milan. They hook right the hell up, doing it standing up on the balcony, with her skinny ass right up on the railing. He tells her he loves her. She wakes in his apartment in the morning. There’s several hundred euros waiting for her.
She gets to school and Jule has told everyone that she’s a prostitute. Jule is tearing into her, but at least one girl defends her. The Oasis has a new owner. It’s the dude who ran the cam-girl shop she used to work at. You can imagine that it’s going to be great. We see her take a job for €40 (she had to haggle) for a gang-gang with five guys watching. She pukes on the guy under her. She’s takes a pregnancy test.
Ladja shows up at the Oasis, sees her, then runs away. It’s unclear what the fuck he was looking for there. Such a child. A little Polish man-child. One of her friends clocks him. He judges her pretty harshly considering he’s told her that he’d been peddling his ass to men before he met her.
She meets one of her old friends from the Oasis who said that she’d be leaving to get straight. She’s back on drugs. She asks for money. Sonja takes her whole wad out. Peels off €30 or so. Her friend peels off the larger part, smiles at her, and walks away. OK, I guess?
She visits Milan to give him back his wallet.
I deducted a star because the ending was pretty cheesy. Oh, this was apparently based on a true story. It still felt a bit trite.
I watched it German. There were some cool Berlin accents in there.
The eponymous Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a pianist, perhaps the finest in Europe, living in Warsaw with his bourgeois family. It is 1942. The family watches as their lives become increasingly circumscribed. As with most films of this kind, we are invited to see how bad it was for those who had grand pianos and hand-woven carpets to sell, for whom there was at least somewhat of a buffer, at least at first.
The unnamed thousands who simply died or were killed immediately don’t have an interesting story to tell. We do see them in this film, though, in the form of corpses splayed on the sidewalks, either having been clearly shot or just having starved or frozen to death. The other people hurry around them. People in general are shown to not be helpful, to not have engaged in petty acts of resistance. Even those commanded to lie on the ground, do so, seemingly in the hope that there is somehow a conclusion other than the obvious final one.
Others turn their backs and raise their hands. They are indoctrinated by the desperation of their situation, I suppose. It’s impossible to judge them. The situation is so mind-bending, so horrifying. One thinks “I would have resisted”, but then, perhaps, one convinces oneself that this act of resistance would be futile, better to wait it out until it means something. It is only later, when you see that you’ve ended in a cul-de-sac that you realize you had nothing to lose by standing up for yourself earlier, when you still had some pride, some dignity. Now you have nothing, and you gained nothing for having given what you had away. Oh, to know in advance that your adversaries are heartless and will take everything you have no matter what you do.
This movie covers all of the bases of Warsaw Ghetto horror, hitting all the notes of Holocaust-porn. The Germans raid an apartment at night, demand everyone stand up, then throw the man in the wheelchair off the balcony for not following orders. A woman asks where they’re being taken and an officer shoots her point-blank in the forehead without changing facial expression or breaking stride. A German officer shows up, selects nine men out of a group of a couple dozen, then orders them to lie down. He walks along, shooting each in the back of his head with his Luger. It’s only an eight-shot, so he has to wait to reload for the last one. A German steals an old man’s violin. Petty things.
The family—along with all of the other Jews in the city—are pushed out of their apartment, moved to a much smaller one in the ghetto. They are moved into camps in the streets. Some of them are part of work gangs. A wall is built to block off the ghetto. It is horrifying. The cruelty is nearly indescribable. The Germans pound on the Jews, enjoying it like they’re in the ninth circle of hell.
Wlad’s entire family is taken away, on a train. Wlad is saved by the chief of the Jewish ghetto police, who are collaborating, but still capable of small kindnesses. Wlad ends up on a work gang, in the ghetto. He is finally allowed to take part in some minor smuggling operations for the resistance. He eventually asks them to help him get out of the ghetto. They tell him that it’s easier getting out than surviving on the outside, but agree to help. He contacts his old friends, who help him into an apartment, a mansard, where he lives alone for at least half a year. He is visited once or twice a week by his friends.
He watches a heroic, if ultimately futile, resistance attack on the Germans in the street. The battle ends with a giant hole in the wall separating the Ghetto from the German area, and the entire resistance building bombed and in flames.
One day, his handler appears to tell him that the jig is up. His own cover has been blown, the two friends have already been arrested, and it’s only a matter of time before the Germans find the apartment. He chooses to stay, seeing that he has no chance on the outside. One day, he hears a car stop outside and hears boots and German voices in the stairwell. They don’t find him. Days later, he is running out of food. In his search, he tips a shelf and shatters plates. The horrible lady next door demands he open up or she’ll call the police. Wlad collects his things and creeps out of the apartment, but she’s waiting. She demands his papers. He flees into the night.
He goes to the address of his emergency contact. They shuffle him off to another apartment, this one deep in the German zone. They take care of him, but it’s long weeks between food deliveries. One of the guys complains that it’s hard to buy food with no money; Wlad gives him his watch, “Food is more important than time.” Adrian Brody has the perfect body type for this film—he’s naturally gaunt. He’s in bed the next time they visit, delirious, starving. He has jaundice. They bring a doctor.
The next and last time they visit, they bring news that the allies are getting closer—the Americans on one side and the Russians on the other. Wlad recovers. Weeks later, he sees the resistance—much stronger now—assault the German headquarters across the street, using bombs, automatic rifles, and a grenade-launcher.
Days later, the city is in shambles. His water tap no longer delivers water. He hears a tumult in the hallway, “Get out! The Germans have surrounded the building!” He discovers that he is locked in his apartment. A tank rolls into view outside the window, lumbering into place, ponderously taking aim and blowing part of the floor of his building apart. He escapes through the now-accessible apartment next door. But he flees upstairs. Hearing more Germans, he escapes onto the roof. More Germans shoot at him from across the way. He gets away, fleeing down to street level. The resistance is everywhere and well-armed but so are are the Germans still. He hides behind trash cans in the street and falls asleep, despite the battle.
When he wakes, it is nighttime. He ventures back into the street. Troops approach. He drops to the street and blends in with the dozens of bodies already there. He’s in a hospital, looking for food, looking for water. Gunshots and explosions sound in the distance, no longer close. No water, no electricity. He makes a fire and cooks two large root vegetables he’d found. He eats millet dry, by the handful.
The Germans are back, cleaning up the bodies, burning them. What is left of the resistance is marched past. The Germans retain control for now. They’re back with flamethrowers. He escapes out a back window, twisting an ankle on the fall. He’s got moxie, though. Over the wall. The city is in utter ruins. A brilliant shot of him walking away, looking like that lone penguin heading into the wastes of Antarctica.
He scavenges the wastes, looking for food, hair and beard long, pants held up with a rope, his body emaciated, limping on his damaged ankle. He cradles a can of pickles that he’s found, escaping from the next German voices to the attic, right up to the top. He has the can, but no can-opener. He pulls up the ladder.
The Germans are gone. He’s back downstairs. He finds fireplace implements to open the can. It drops. He lets it roll away because there is a German (Thomas Kretschmann), impeccably dressed, watching him. You can see Wlad’s breath, but not the German’s. The contrast between the two could not be more striking. The German asks if he lives there, if he works there. Ludicrous questions. The house stands alone in a wasteland of bombed-out buildings and rubble.
Wlad tells him that he a pianist. The German leads him to the piano that Wlad had heard being played earlier. He sits. Calms his hands. It’s heart-wrenching. He beings to play. It’s Chopin—Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23. It’s beautiful. The moonlight shines in on him, heavenly. The German officer watches and listens. His face reveals almost an awareness of what he and his country have done, watching this ruin of a man, capable of producing such beauty with his hands. Or maybe he regrets a bit having to kill him. Who knows? He’s nearly inscrutable. Wlad continues to play, perhaps in the hope that, as long as he continues to play, he can live. The German lets him live. He tells his driver he’d found nothing.
The house becomes a German Stützpunkt. Dozens of German officers are on the ground floor, busily administering their war. The officer returns to Wlad, He throws him a package of food.
“Wlad: Was bedeutet die ganze Schiesserei?
German Officer: Die Russen. Auf die andere Flussseite. Ein paar Wochen müssen sie noch aushalten. Mehr nicht.”
They meet once more. he brings a lot more food, and even gives him his coat when he sees that Wlad is freezing.
The Germans are gone. It’s dead winter. People are there. he goes out to meet them, still wearing the German greatcoat. People scream that he’s German. Soldiers shoot at him, throw grenades, he manages to yell to them in Polish that he’s Polish. They finally believe him. He is saved.
A friend of his leaves the camp in which he’d been imprisoned, still alive, walking past a pen full of captured Germans. One of them is the German who’d helped Wlad. He jumps up to ask him if he’s heard of Szpilman. He begs him to tell Wlad that he’s there.
Wlad is playing piano again. His friend watches from the booth. They are both overcome with emotion, but Wlad doesn’t miss a note. They actually return to the field to find the German, but the whole camp is gone. The Russians have taken him away. His name was Captain Wilm Hosenfeld and he did his part to gift the world the playing of Wlad Szpilman, who lived in Warsaw until he died in 2000 at 88 years old. The credits say that Hosenfeld died in a Soviet camp seven years later. This was, apparently, also a true story.
This is a powerful and extremely well-made movie with an absolutely brilliant Adrien Brody as Wlad. And it is chock-full of my favorite pianist’s music. I think, given the current conflict in the Middle East, that it would be extremely illuminating to re-dub the ghetto slave-camp parts of this movie with all of the German parts in Hebrew and all of the English parts in Arabic.
This is a pretty great show that’s very much classic Gervais: interesting insights about how our culture works combined with shocking humor. The quotes below are taken from the beautifully formatted Ricky Gervais: Armageddon transcript (Scraps from the loft).
He starts off by examining the word fascist and the odd trend of explicitly saying that you’re not a fascist in online bios. Then he notes how you’re not legally allowed to call someone gay when they’re not, but you are allowed to call someone straight when they’re not. He slags on Britain’s obsession with illegal immigrants. Then, it’s on to climate change and armageddon.
“We’re gonna be the first generation that future generations are jealous of, right? ‘Cause we had it all, and we’re using it all up. We’re using up all the fresh water. We’re using up all the fossil fuel. Usually, you look back in history and you feel sorry. You go, “Oh, how did they live like that? Oh, how did they get around?” “No indoor toilets.” I’ve got nine toilets in my house.
“And sometimes, I just run around flushing ’em for a laugh. Like that. [audience laughing] Just so that in 40 years’ time, Greta Thunberg has to shit out of a window.
“I’ve got 28 radiators. I always have them on full. Then I put the air con on full, and it sort of settles at about 20 degrees. A lovely… It’s how the cat likes it. She loves it at 20 degrees. ”
Next it’s disabled people swimming with dolphins, big families, and then legacies.
“Eminent people going, “There is a statue of me in the town square.” And now, they’re pulling down the statues. “Pull down this fucking statue.” “Why?” “He was a slave trader. Pull down the fucking statue.” “He built the hospital. Should we pull that down?” “No, leave the hospital.””
Then there’s sort of a meta-bit about infant mortality, Africa, “Jeff and Tracy”, growing up, and back to pedophile stories from his youth. China, Homelessness, drug-use, little people, actors playing only roles to which their identities conform, then cultural appropriation.
“[…] in my day, it was considered a good thing to swap ideas with other cultures, with other nations, to share things with other races, to assimilate. It was the opposite of racist. Now it’s racist. Gwen Stefani got in trouble in her last video ’cause she had her blonde hair in dreadlocks. People were going, “No. Black people invented dreadlocks.” “You can’t have ’em. You’re white. That’s racist.” Jamie Oliver got in trouble when he put out an authentic jerk chicken recipe. “No. Black people invented that.” “You can’t have it. You’re white. That’s racist.” Now, Black people, they use the n-word, don’t they? We invented that!”
On to critical race theory.
“Critical race theory, have you heard of that? Being taught in schools now, particularly in trendy areas like L.A., to, like, five-year-old kids and six-year-old kids. If you haven’t heard of it, in a nutshell, critical race theory says that all white people are racist. We’re born racist, and we continue to be racist, ’cause we’re affording the privilege of a racist society set up by our forefathers. Okay? So basically, all white people are racist, and there’s nothing we can do about it, which is a relief.”
Philosophical:
“I think the world’s gonna get harder and harder to understand as I get older and more bewildered. A new dogma arises in the name of “progress.” Now, dogma is never progressive, however new and trendy. But I think soon I’ll be outnumbered.”
This segues into talking about a terrible pair of pants he’d ordered online:
“Now, I don’t know what sweat shop they were made in, or what little eight-year-old Chinese kid made them, but he should be fucking punished […]
“And I was looking up where to fucking complain to get him fired, right? [audience laughing] And I found out that these kids only get two dollars a day in these fucking places, right? But what happened to pride in your work? Do you know what I mean? [audience laughing]
“And I can tell some of you are thinking, “But he didn’t think Ricky Gervais would order them.” Maybe he should be told there’s a chance that Ricky Gervais might order them. His owner should sit him down, right, and say, “If Ricky Gervais orders these and complains, I’m gonna rape your mummy again.””
He’s back to talking about the end of the world, and “disableds”, as he’s still delighted to call people with disabilities. He says he’s grown because they used to be called “crippled”. On this topic, he starts to examine various films through the filter of the web site Does the Dog Die?, a site that started off as a way for people to check whether a dog died in a film, and has since expanded to include all sorts of emotional triggers.
“Check it out. Schindler’s List. Right? Someone says, “Are there any fat jokes?”
“[audience murmuring]
“Would that make this worse? Wh… Imagine the real thing. Imagine I’m in a concentration camp, right? I’m naked. Everyone around me is naked. We’ve got a commandant herding us towards the gas chamber, and he goes, “Move it, fatty.” Right? And I go, “Rude.” [audience laughing] “Nope.” “That has ruined the whole experience if I’m honest.”
“[audience laughing]
“Someone asks, “Is there hate speech?”
“Yeah, there is.”
Wrapup:
“Another theme of the show has been, “words change, and I’m woke, ha-ha.” But here’s the irony. I think I am woke, but I think that word has changed. I think if woke still means what it used to mean, that you’re aware of your own privilege, you try and maximize equality, minimize oppression, be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic… Yes, I’m definitely woke. If woke now means being a puritanical, authoritarian bully, who gets people fired for an honest opinion or even a fact, then, no, I’m not woke. Fuck that.”
Published by marco on 27. Jan 2024 12:07:22 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
This film is about the art world, presumably out in LA somewhere. Artist agent and gallery owner Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo) has a palatial home in the desert. Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a bitchy, catty reviewer who knows what he likes and whose favor everyone seeks. Jon Dondon (Tom Sturridge) is another agent/gallery owner who used to work for Rhodora, but is now poaching her talent, like Piers (John Malkovich). Gretchen (Toni Collette) works at a museum, until she becomes a buyer for private clients. Bryson (Billy Magnussen) is a wannabe artist who works for Rhodora.
Coco (Natalia Dyer) also works for Rhodora, until she doesn’t. Then she works for Dondon, until she doesn’t. Then she works for Gretchen, until she doesn’t. Then she works for Morf…until she doesn’t. Damrish (Daveed Diggs) is an up-and-coming artist who doesn’t want to be corrupted by that world. Josephina (Zawe Ashton) is an awful climber—perhaps the worst of them all—who makes an art discovery.
Ok. That’s the cast. Now the plot.
Josephina discovers a dead man in her building. It’s artist Vetril Dease (Alan Mandell). He’s left an apartment full of artwork with strict orders to destroy it all. Josephina thinks it’s magnificent, so she steals it—hey, there were no inheritors, and who cares what the dead man wanted?—and goes into partnership with Rhodora to sell it. Everyone who sees his work says its breathtaking. Lab tech Gita (Nitya Vidyasagar) discovers that he put his literal lifeblood into every painting.
Things start to go sideways. Rhodora sends Bryson with half of the collection to deep storage. She wants to artificially bump the value of the available Deases. He suspects that he has a cargo of Deases—which he’s seen and loved, in an obsessive manner—and he stops to have a look at them before heading out. They haunt him. He drops his cigarette, catches himself on fire, slides his truck into an abandoned rest stop, and almost crashes into gas pumps. He enters the abandoned gas station and, while washing his burns, monkeys from a painting that mysteriously hangs over the gas-station bathroom’s sink drag him into the painting. Gone.
Next up is Donjon, who hangs himself in his own exhibit. He doesn’t see it that way; he sees hands pulling him into the ceiling to kill him. Coco finds him there. Her first corpse.
At her next job, now working for Gretchen, Coco is allowed to go home. Gretchen stays late in the gallery with her Deases and her Sphere. She sticks her arm into the Sphere, which the demons in the Dease manipulate to take her arm right off. She bleeds out. The next morning, no-one notices that she’s not part of the exhibit until Coco shows up in the later morning to discover that she’s lost another employer. Her second corpse.
Josephina, meanwhile, has hooked up with Morf, who’s escaped the grasp of the Deases a few times. He sees them moving in the huge Dease hanging over Josephina’s bed. Josephina has also hooked up with Damrish, who’s also seen the paintings in her fancy apartment moving. Morf hires Coco—jobless again—to help him put his Deases into deep storage. The paintings get him first, though, in the form of the Robo-hobo, which he’d panned. Coco finds his body. Her third corpse.
Josephina finally gets hers in a fake gallery, located far downtown, after Damrish told her he doesn’t want to be in her art world. She’s on the phone with Rhodora, who’s almost killed by a falling statue. Josephina isn’t so lucky, as the paint runs off of the Deases that aren’t even there, oozing across the floor and gliding up her limbs to cover her face. Rhodora, on the other hand, survives and has movers box up all of her Deases. Sitting outside, with her cat, she looks just exactly like the painting that had hung in her bedroom. The velvet buzzsaw tattoo on her neck comes to life and tears through her thorax.
Damrish survives because he stayed pure. Piers survives because, while he appreciated the art, he didn’t profit from it. He was at Rhodora’s beach house making art. Coco survived because she also didn’t benefit—she’s headed back to Minnesota.
The remaining Deases show up in flea markets, selling for $5 apiece.
This is a Korean sci-fi series lasting exactly one season—and meant to last only one season, I think. It tells the story of an Earth ravaged by drought, on which water is such a precious resource that many people have too little of it—and have no means to buy more. There are, as you can imagine, a lot of people who do have more than enough water for themselves. But most people spend large parts of their day standing in line with one or more jerrycans, waiting to fill them.
There’s a Korean moonbase, a research facility called Balhae Station. Bad shit went down there several years ago, taking the lives of 117 people. The company that owns it wants to send people back up to try to salvage…whatever it was that they were all working on up there. Some people know bits and pieces of the danger, but they’re not the ones going on the mission. Song Ji‑An (Bae Doona) is going on the mission. Her sister was one of the 117 who’d died. She, like her sister, is a formidable researcher.
Han Yun‑Jae (Gong Yoo) captains the space shuttle that takes them there. We’re introduced to a few more of the people in the run-up to the excursion. Ryu Tae‑seok (Lee Joon) of the Ministry of National Defense “volunteers” to be part of the mission, but he’s a secret agent, communicating with his real masters, who have him running a side mission. We’ll soon learn that he’s not the only one.
So the shuttle takes off, headed for the moon, presumably to land there, with its stubby wings providing lift … in the atmosphere. Look, it doesn’t matter, right? It wouldn’t matter anyway, but it really doesn’t matter because the shuttle starts shaking itself apart before Han can even think of landing it. It then lands extremely hard on the lunar surface, killing no-one important. Instead of harming anyone important, the crash leaves them all with just the spacesuits on their backs and no other usable supplies. They are kilometers away from Balhae Station and have to hoof it.
One of them is injured and expires along the way, but not before slowing everyone down so much that they’re all nearly out of oxygen before the captain can unlock the airlock and they can all flop inside and finally draw breath in a quickly re-oxygenated moonbase that had been abandoned for five years. Phew.
Once inside, they discover dozens of corpses, all of them looking like they’d drowned. This strikes pretty much everyone as highly unlikely and they scoff at Dr. Hong Ga-Young (Kim Sun-young), who’s charismatic and spunky and all-around a pretty good character.
The crew has their orders: they are to search the base in very specific locations for samples. They come up empty everywhere. There are sample canisters around but they’re all empty. Song’s team detects another presence in the station, staying just out of site, but definitely alive. No-one knows what it could be. Engineer Gong Soo-chan (Jung Soon-Won) gets too close to a corpse and something puffs up into his eye. On the way back to the central command, he drops farther and farther behind his team, getting sick.
As one other member Lee Gi-su (Choi Yong-Woo) also dies—seemingly after having been attacked—they discover that he’d been secretly communicating with unknown other parties on an alternate plan. Soo-chan, meanwhile, has worsened, and soon expels what seems like several aquariums full of water from his mouth before dying horribly. No-one knows where all the water came from, but they’re no longer so mystified by the corpses. Song and Dr. Hong urge caution, to avoid further infection. Han is unconvinced and will not deviate from the mission.
They reestablish communication with Earth—well, official communication, because some people seem to have been in near-constant contact with their handlers—and are ordered to stay on mission: retrieve a viable canister. What do they canisters contain? Lunar water, baby. It’s what killed Soo-chan. It has a virus-like ability to propagate itself nearly infinitely. It could solve the Earth’s problems for good. The Korean company is trying to keep it quiet so that it can refine it, make it safe, and, above all, profit from it first. The crew is increasingly leery that it’s even possible to control it, especially when more members fall ill from it, dying explosively.
Song stumbles on a secret chamber positively filled with canisters, hundreds of them. But it’s guarded by a feral-looking girl who (A) seems to have survived five years on an empty moonbase by herself and (B) seems to be immune to lunar water and (C) actually seems to thrive on it, being able to magically heal herself.
What is Ryu’s side mission? Well, instead of finding out what happened at the base, he’s to obtain samples of the lunar water that the base had been researching, and to bring it to a pickup point somewhere else on the moon. As everyone else is busy trapping the girl Luna 073 (Kim Si-a), he steals all the known samples and hustles off to a rendezvous point.
And yes, we learn that the first 72 subjects didn’t fare nearly as well as Luna 073. We learn this in a few flashbacks when Song cracks the data storage to get at the research data. We also learn that they started with fish from a neat video of a fish being infected with lunar water, then producing so much water that it prevents itself from asphyxiating and is soon swimming around again. Ryu is infected, soldiering on, but he’s not long for this world (or that one). Song is also infected but, because Luna had bitten her on capture, she’s now partially immune to it and avoids the worst effects.
Realizing that Luna’s immunity to lunar water may be what allows mankind to greet lunar water as a salvation rather than as extinction, they decide to get the samples and Luna 073 to an international space station, rather than returning both to The Company, where it’s unclear what will happen to her. Captain Han and Chief Gong Soo-hyuk (Lee Moo-saeng) sacrifice themselves so that Dr. Hong, Song, and Luna can escape the flooding base.
At the very end, things get even crazier than a flood on the moon: Luna is shown to be able to survive vacuum without a spacesuit. The three are eventually rescued and taken to the space station. The end.
We start off in 1984, with Jason “Tre” Styles III living with his single mother Reva (Angela Bassett). Tre gets into a fight at school, so his mother sends him to live with his father Jason “Furious” Styles Jr. (Laurence Fishburne). He’s been there before, so he has friends: Darrin “Doughboy” Baker, Doughboy’s half-brother Ricky, and their friend Chris.
We follow the boys’ adventures in Crenshaw as they tussle with local gangs, witness a dead body, and, finally, see a Doughboy and Chris being arrested for theft. We rejoin them seven years later, where Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), Doughboy (Ice Cube), Ricky (Morris Chestnut), and Chris (Redge Green) are at a welcome-home party for Doughboy, who just finished a bit in in prison. Chris is in a wheelchair because of a gunshot wound, but he’s pretty jacked and quite nimble. They’re joined by two fellow Crips: Dooky (Dedrick D. Gobert) and Monster (Baldwin C. Sykes).
Ricky is a high-school football legend, being recruited by USC. He needs to get a 700 on the SAT, though, which is a pretty big ask for him. He’s big, handsome, muscular, but he’s quite simple. He’s also already a father, living with his mother Brenda (Tyra Ferrell), his girl Shanice (Alysia Rogers), and their son. Brenda’s always got her eye on Furious, but he’s not having it. Tre has turned out pretty well, all things considered. He’s on track for college and trying to get his strictly Catholic girlfriend Brandi (Nia Long) to bang him.
Tre and Ricky drive with Furious to Compton, where Furious shows them how the world really works, talking to other members of the community who also draw nearer to hear him “preach”.
“Furious Styles: Would you two knuckleheads come on. I want you all to take a look at that sign up there. See what it says: cash for your home. Do you know what that is?
Ricky: A billboard.
Tre Styles: A billboard.
Furious Styles: What are you all? Amos and Andy? Are you Stepin and he’s Fetchit? I’m talking about he message. What it stands for. It’s called gentrification. It’s what happens when the property value of a certain area is brought down. You listening? You bring the property value down. They can buy the land at a lower price, then they move all the people out, raise the property value and sell it at a profit. Now, what we need to do is keep everything in our neighborhood, everything − black. Black owned with black money. Just like the Jews, the Italians, the Mexicans and the Koreans do.”
“The Old Man: Ain’t nobody from outside bringing down the property value. It’s these folk, shootin’ each other and sellin’ that crack rock and shit.
Furious Styles: Well, how you think the crack rock gets into the country? We don’t own any planes. We don’t own no ships. We are not the people who are flyin’ and floatin’ that shit in here.“I know every time you turn on the TV, that’s what you see. Black people, sellin’ the rock, pushin’ the rock, pushin’ the rock. Yeah, I know. But that wasn’t a problem as long as it was here. It wasn’t a problem until it was in Iowa, on Wall Street, where there are hardly any black people.”
“Furious Styles: Why is it that there is a gun shop on almost every corner in this community?
The Old Man: Why?
Furious Styles: I’ll tell you why. For the same reason that there is a liquor store on almost every corner in the black community. Why? They want us to kill ourselves.”
One night, the crew heads to Crenshaw Boulevard to hang out, where Ricky gets provoked by a Blood, Ferris (Raymond Turner) before being rescued by Doughboy. Later, Ricky and Tre are on their way home and are pulled over and harassed by cops. The crew spend a lot of time hanging out at Brenda’s house, on the porch, not doing much at all. Soon after the incident at Crenshaw, Ricky and Tre go to the store for Brenda. On the way back, they realize that they’re being hunted by the Ferris and a few other Bloods.
Ricky thinks that they should split up—it’s unclear why Tre lets the mental invalid take the tactical lead—and is caught and gunned down in cold blood. Tre arrives too late to help him, as do Doughboy and his crew. They gather up Ricky’s bloodied corpse and bring it back to Brenda’s place. There are tearful recriminations, with Doughboy shouldering the blame, but not much to be done. Ricky’s SAT results arrive. He’d scored 710.
The crew takes off for revenge. Furioius at first stops Tre, but Tre sneaks out anyway. After several hours of driving around, Tre asks to be let out. He’s changed his mind and wants nothing of more killing. Soon, though, Doughboy and the crew find the Bloods at a burger joint. They try to run, but they gun them down. Two of them are still alive, crawling away. Doughboy gets out of the car and finishes them off. The police sirens get closer as they drive away.
Tre returns home to a furious Furious, who doesn’t say a word. The next morning, Doughboy quickly forgives Tre for having bailed the night before. He knows that Tre has a chance of escaping, whereas he doesn’t. His speech at the end is highly political, where he points out how the media reports on foreign violence, but not on the violence at home.
“I turned on the TV this morning, they had this shit on about… about living in a violent world. Showed all these foreign places… I started thinking, man, either they don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s going on in the hood. Man, all this foreign shit, and they didn’t have shit on my brother, man.”
Doughboy was killed two weeks later. Tre and Brandi made it out, to college in Atlanta.
The backstory is that the United States was taken over by the New Founding Fathers in 2014. Their aim was to avoid a civil war by, um, winning it before it starts, I guess? Anyway, they introduce something called The Purge, where there is no law-enforcement for twelve hours, from 19:00 to 07:00 one day per year. As you can imagine, it’s pretty much a time when a lot of poor people get killed, culling the useless from the population. Typical libertarian spank-bank stuff. Guess what? More fantasy: by 2022, there is virtually no crime outside of the purge window and nearly everyone has a job. That’s quite a spank bank. It’s like it was written by someone from Reason magazine.
James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) drives home to his swanky home in a gated community. He sells security systems. He’s sold a lot of them this year—many of them to his neighbors. He eats dinner with his wife Mary (Lena Headey) and his kids Zoey (Adelaide Kane) and weird little Charlie (Max Burkholder). They lock themselves in for the night, barricading the whole house from top to bottom.
After a while, a Bloody Stranger (Edwin Hodge) appears in the street and Charlie, feeling bad for him, opens up the house to let him in. They get the house locked back up just as the man gets inside. Meanwhile, upstairs, Zoey’s boyfriend Henry had somehow already snuck in before. They’re making out, but Henry says he has something else he has to do: he has to tell her Dad how he really feels. He tells he that he’s going to tell James about their undying love, but he’s actually there to purge him. He’s a terrible shot, though. James isn’t. Zoey gets Henry back upstairs, but he expires on the floor of her bedroom. The Bloody Stranger has meanwhile disappeared somewhere in the giant house.
A random gang of rich, white kids with murder on their minds show up to chew a tremendous amount of scenery, demanding that the Sandin’s release their prey. Or else. Or else what? Or else they’ll get a bunch of construction equipment to tear down Sandin’s house’s defenses and get him anyway—but also killing the Sandins. Cool. Cool. I honestly don’t know what we’re supposed to think of them. I don’t think they’re scary. They’re pretentious and ridiculous. But maybe we’re supposed to hate them especially more because of the inordinate power they’ve arrogated to themselves on account of their class privilege? I dunno. Seems a little highbrow for this movie.
The leader shoots his best friend as an example? WTH? This makes absolutely no sense. There is no pressure for the kids to purge, but when they do, they’re so psychotic that they shoot their own best friends, just to set an example? And then everyone else just drags away his body with no questions asked? I get that they’re trying to get us to believe that it’s a cult, but give us some foreplay, for God’s sake.
The teenage purgers cut off the power to the house. At this point—once they shut off the lights—the movie gets really boring for a while. The family members all spend what seems like an eternity walking around their mansion with weak flashlights, looking for the homeless guy that Charlie let in. Charlie eventually finds him with a stupid little robot and, whatever, the guy kidnaps family members and they go back and forth until they realize that the youth outside is probably going to kill them all anyway, so they might as well team up and fight back.
The Purgers are inside the house. Mayhem ensues, after a fashion. There are a bunch of set pieces. Charlie sees other neighbors approaching—none too pleased with the Sandins having made their tremendous fortune off of selling them their security systems. They’re there to have their revenge on Purge Night. With the help of the Bloody Stranger, they turn the tables—though not before James gets stabbed—and wait out the rest of the night, with the neighbors captured and all of the teenaged Purgers already lying dead all around the house.
It wasn’t nearly as good as its reputation and the several sequels that followed. I won’t be watching any of them.
Published by marco on 25. Jan 2024 21:38:22 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
Protagonist (John David Washington) is an agent of unknown provenance, perhaps CIA—it doesn’t matter. He’s part of a failed extraction mission, in which he is captured and beaten. He chomps down on a cyanide pill that is no such thing and learns that he has passed a test for entry into something called the Tenet organization. That “tenet” is a palindrome is not a coincidence. The meaning of the word doesn’t really play into the plot at all.
There is an expository section in which we learn that anything can be imbued with inverted entropy so that it travels against time’s arrow. There are big rotating machines that impart this property onto stuff, like guns, cars, bullets, people. Some people know about this resvolutionary, physics-defying technology and the rest of us are installing ad-blockers against spam ads while waiting for a year for them to fix a single train tunnel in Switzerland. But, hey, that’s one of the tenets of this film: physics isn’t what you think it is, but only spy agencies know about it—no scientists.
I learned the lessons of this movie so quickly that when Protagonist and Neil (Robert Pattinson) penetrated to the center of the Rotas pentagon—awesome logo, by the way—and found bullet holes, and Neil asked, “What the hell happened here?”, I said, in unison with Protagonist, “It hasn’t happened yet.”
The protagonist goes to Mumbai—this movie is really the answer to “what if James Bond were black?”—with his handler Neil (Robert Pattinson), where they reverse bungie-jump up to Priya Singh’s (Dimple Kapadia) penthouse, where she reveals that she, too, is part of the organization.
When the Protagonist is talking to Priya about his and Neil’s experience in the vault, he says that there were “two antagonists. One inverted.” When she asks, “both emerged at the same moment?”, I said with her “they were the same person.”
She gets her entropically inverted goods from Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a ruthless man of Russian origin, who’d dragged himself up from the ruins of Stalsk-12, a Siberian prison city. Shades of Bane with this one, to be honest. He looks more normal than Bane, but he’s just as kooky and his origin story is very, very similar.
Sator is trying to obtain plutonium and he ends up capturing the Protagonist, Neil, and Sator’s estranged wife Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki). There is a whole thing about a forged or not-forged Goya and there is a lot of stuff with inverted bullets and inverted cars and people that looks reasonably cool, but is, honestly, a bit much. Sator and his henchmen are executing what everyone seems to recognize as a “temporal pincer movement”, the mechanics of which remain a bit fuzzy, but I guess it sounds cool.
We eventually find out that some of the mysterious people in motorcycle helmets that appear to be inverted are actually the Protagonist, who would invert himself later in the film to retroactively justify those interactions. We learn more about the Tenet organization: that’s it’s from the future and that it involves people trying to prevent climate change in our time, in order to save themselves from the even deadlier effects in their own.
Or I think it’s something like that. But I’m not sure, because Sator is terminally ill and he’s working for them, and they’re helping him put together a plutonium weapon that will be able to destroy the planet, but that seems like an odd way to “fix” climate change for a better future, but whatever, go with the flow, or reverse-flow, or whatever.
There is a huge operation. I mean, huge. Like, with red and blue teams and lots of people running around in the desert—both forwards and backwards—and lots of explosions—both forwards and backwards—as well as people criss-crossing their own selves during an operation that is yet another inverted pincer movement, though this time by the ostensible good guys.
At the end, Neil does some hero shit, saving the Protagonist, but it’s his inverted self who did so. So, even though their non-inverted selves make it out of the cavern in which the super-bomb was scheduled to go off, Neil knows that he has to go invert again so that he can make the sacrifice that saves them both so that he can invert and sacrifice himself … but at least the Protagonist makes it out, which is good, because, apparently, he is to found Tenet and, in the future, invert and go back to recruit Neil way in the past, so that they work together for a long time and become the best of friends.
Even though the Protagonist in the film remembers none of this—not having lived it yet—Neil remembers a life lived well fondly right before he goes off to die. The non-inverted Protagonist thinks that their relationship is just starting, which it would feel like it would be, in a non-Tenet world, Instead, Neil has known him forever, and is more than willing to make the sacrifice that will retroactively call that whole, long friendship into being. Even though, if he hadn’t, probably another timeline would crop up in which he’d never known the Protagonist and wouldn’t care? I dunno.
This movie isn’t too multi-timeline friendly, seemingly quite happy to imagine that any arrow-of-time-defying maneuvers all occur in the same observable, physical universe, with no or little effect on the memories stored by consciousnesses that are, presumably, also just quantum patterns, but seem, even in their complexity, to be only very coarsely affected by inversion, so yeah, the whole theory isn’t thought out down to the nuts and bolts, but I think the time-looping stuff kind of matches up ok.
And then, despite knowing about the fate of the world and climate change and billions of current and future lives hanging in the balance and, despite knowing that he himself founds an organization with the express goal of putting as much of this right for as many people as possible, the Protagonist kills Priya—who, remember, worked for a future version of himself—in order to prevent her from cleaning up after the operation by killing Kat, who obviously knew too much and would, also obviously, sacrifice the entire planet’s future for her son, whose future would also be gruesomely sacrificed at the same time, because if humanity’s gone, then so’s her son and his future.
But mom’d are gonna mom, ammirite? At this juncture, I’m going to go ahead and note that this is yet another movie that has no problem making a woman look shockingly stupid and shallow because she’s a mother. This is, honest to God, a line from the movie.
“Neil: Everyone and everything that’s ever lived, destroyed. Instantly.
Kat: Including my son.”
JFC.
And it also has no qualms making the Protagonist throw away everything he and many others had sacrificed—including his very best friend-to-be Neil—for a tall, skinny piece of tail who he’s never going to see again (Kat) and whom he’d never bedded or even been in a relationship with in the first place.
Look, I may have missed some bits and I may have misinterpreted some stuff and I’m sure that there are tons of fans who would say that it all becomes wicked clear on the dozenth viewing and after you’ve watched a good gross of explainer videos by Director Christopher Nolan and others, but I’m kind of good.
It was fine. A bit long, with a bit too much focus on the whole reverse-movie thing, but I’m glad everyone seems to have had a lot of fun making what is, actually, a pretty unique movie, if not the most original of plot lines, in the end. I know, I know, no other plot has this temporal inversion stuff, but most of the movie is about shadowy agents from shadowy organizations shooting at each other and blowing up cars and buildings and stuff. There’s a mad Russian who wants to blow up the world. There’s an unconsummated—and seemingly lust-less, as is the trend these days—relationship where everything is sacrificed for love. That sounds like a ton of other movies, no? Despite the core tenet of temporal inversion, most of the rest of the movie is kind of bog-standard.
Maik Klingenberg (Tristan Göbel) is in school, mooning over Tatjana Cosic (Aniya Wendel). She doesn’t acknowledge his existence. He meets Tschicke (Anand Batbileg Chuluunbaatar) in school. He’s smart, of east-asian/russian descent, and is a force of nature. His relationship with Maik reminds me a bit of that between Val Kilmer and Gabriel Jarret in Real Genius.
In the summer, Maik’s mom (Anja Schneider) goes to a clinic to dry out while his dad (Uwe Bohm) jets off for two weeks with his barely-of-age secretary. Maik has the house to himself. Tschicke steals a super-shitty Lada and they go on a road trip—out of Berlin.
Tschicke is full of wisdom while driving.
“Warum blinken? Die Leute sehen doch wo in hinfahre.”
“Landkarten sind für Muschis. Wir fahren einfach Richtung Süden.”
They throw in a Richard Claydermann cassette that they found in their stolen Lada. Ballade für Adeline starts playing. “Voll geil” says Maik. Tschicke: “Bist du sicher, dass du nicht schwul bist?”
The road’s ending, so Tschick say, “Ich fahre doch sicher nicht zurück.” and veers into a cornfield, turning on the wipers, and rolling up his window when the flapping corn starts to annoy him.
They start to draw something for Google Earth: “Ohne Sinn”.
They meet young Friedrich and his country family, breaking bread and playing quiz games for desserts. Maik and Tschicke get the smallest, shittiest desserts because they don’t know anything—and the home-schooled kids know everything.
They meet Isa (Mercedes Müller). They spend some time together. They eventually send her on her way to Prague.
They get to a wooden bridge, after taking a logging road to get off a road with po-po.
Maik: Ich weiss ich nicht.
Tschicke: Ich fahre jetzt sicher nicht zurück.
They get stuck, then jump in the water to fix the bridge.
Tschicke gets a spike through his foot when he steps on it at the bottom of the swamp.
He can’t drive. Maik has to drive. Maik says he won’t, because he’s boring. Tschicke says he’s not boring. Maik asks why Tatjana wouldn’t invite him to her party. Who the fuck cares? Isa’s way hotter, says Tschicke, and she has good taste? How does he know? Tschicke admits he’s gay. He’s never told anyone.
Maik drives out of the swamp, slowly learning how to drive stick. They’re on the highway. A truck passes them, nearly driving them off the road. Maik tries to pass him in the breakdown lane. The truck flips over, spilling pigs everywhere.
Maik and Tschicke are by the side of the road, injured but alive. Tschicke takes off, limping, to avoid being placed in a home. Maik gives him his voll geil jacket to stay warm.
Maik’s in the hospital. A cop is telling him that he actually is old enough to be prosecuted.
Maik’s parents are arranging to blame it all on Tschicke.
Maik does not cooperate. He takes the blame, as he should.
Maik’s dad super-hero-punches him to the ground.
Maik’s dad is moving out now, leaving with his hot girlfriend.
Maik’s mom is plastered again, chucking stuff in the pool. Maik helps her.
She’s just pounding straight from the bottle. They go for a swim.
School begins again. The cops pick Maik up on the way, ask him about Tschicke.
Apparently, a Lada’s been stolen, hot-wired, and returned destroyed in the morning.
Maik smiles. Tschicke is telling him he’s back.
The cops drop him off at school. He doesn’t get his bike out. He’s a bad-ass now.
Tatjana deems him “würdig”. He doesn’t care anymore.
The credits are great, depicting an animation of how Tschicke got fixed up, stole a screwdriver, then a Lada, peeled out the words “Ohne Sinn” in a parking lot, and finally crashed the car.
We meet Tank Girl (Lori Petty) in what looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, ruled by the W&P (Water&Power). She and her clan all live in a large, ramshackle house that serves as their commune. They grow food in a greenhouse, they do crafts in workshops—there’s a little girl hammering something together with the wrong end of what is actually a finishing hammer—and generally try to get by in a Godforsaken world.
There are inconsistencies galore, but they’re kind of endearing because the movie is so damned earnest.
This is not the kind of film that’s going to clear up questions like that.
The movie seems instead to be a love letter to the comics on which it’s based and seems to be entirely a vehicle for Lori Petty, who was, apparently, such a magnetic personality that she got a whole movie mad for herself, despite not being otherwise very well-known at all.
Ice-T plays a human/kangaroo mutant named T-Saint. In the final battle, the attack song is by Ice-T. I am not kidding. He is not the only human/kangaroo mutant. His gang of “rippers” also has Booga (Jeff Kober), Donner (Scott Coffey), and leader Deetee (Reg E. Cathey). Completely unrelated, but Iggy Pop plays a pedophile named Rat Face.
The practical-effect masks are pretty good, though! The movable ears are really good. The spinning blades on Kesslee’s cyborg arm are pretty cool. This was really the heyday of practical effects, before the allure of doing it all a lot more poorly, but more cheaply, with CGI changed what this kind of stuff looks like, probably forever.
Tank Girl is such a psycho and the scenes are so wild that you just know the director was remaking the comics panel-by-panel. The animated interludes are really well-done, too. This was definitely a labor of love. An extra star for more-or-less sticking the landing.
If I can give superhero movies eight out of ten points, then I can definitely do it for Paul Giamatti, who is a genius in nearly everything he does. I’ve loved him since Sideways.
Giamatti plays Richard Grimes, married to Rachel Biegler (Kathryn Hahn). He is a playwright and director. She is an author. They live in the Village in Manhattan. They are childless, but not for lack of trying. As the film begins, they have given up on artificial insemination and are trying their first in-vitro fertilization. Richard’s sperm can’t get into his semen, though, so he needs a procedure to fix that. They’re doing ok, but not that great, so they have to borrow the $10,000 from his brother Charlie (John Carroll Lynch) and his wife Cynthia (Molly Shannon). Charlie’s a good guy, but Cynthia is … not. She’s not a nice person, not a generous or empathetic person. She is the main character in her world.
At the same time as the in-vitro procedure, Richard and Rachel are dipping their toes into the adoption pool, introducing us to a corner of the Internet where teenage girls hawk their fecundity as well as the pending fruit of their loins. Their first experience here shatters them for a bit, as the girl was just in it for the attention and never had any intention of letting them adopt her child. Richard and Rachel fight, but they’re basically together, no matter what. Rachel is less reasonable, more strong-willed, more likely to fly of the handle—and also the partner taking the majority of the hormone-inducing medications.
Charlie and Cynthia’s 25-year-old chronically underachieving creative-writing major daughter Sadie (Kayli Carter) leaves the Bard College campus to finish her degree remotely, moving in with Richard and Rachel. She loves them and their lifestyle and looks up to them as her “art parents”. She’s seemingly more in-tune with them than she is with her own parents. This seems like too fortuitous a confluence as their doctor has recently floated the idea of using a donor egg—rather than one of Rachel’s older, dustier ones—to match up with Richard’s newly motile sperm. Sadie quickly agrees, wanting both to help them and to give her otherwise unmoored life a little meaning.
Cynthia ruins her own Thanksgiving dinner when Sadie, in a fit of bonhomie brought on by her thankfulness to Rachel and Richard, reveals the plan to the rest of the family, with the aforementioned predictable consequences. They proceed with the implantation, even after Sadie makes herself ill by upping her dose on her own, after their doctor had quasi-chastised her for not producing eggs quickly enough. The fails anyway. Richard is somewhat relieved, as they can just stop trying now. Rachel is devastated and furious at Richard for announcing that he’s given up so soon after getting the news. They reconcile, of course, because they’re in it for life. They’ll always have each other.
Sadie gets into a writer’s colony—it’s left deliberately unclear how much Richard and Rachel helped; they say they didn’t—and they part ways. We also part ways with Richard and Rachel at a roadside diner several months later. A woman had called them to find out if they were interested in adopting her child. They wait, together. Richard rises and sits next to Rachel, in an eloquent, sweet, and unspoken expression of love, compassion, solidarity, and durability. Well done.
This movie starts with a suicide mission. The company’s amphibious vehicle approaches the beach at, presumably, Normandy and drops the front door open. The German machine-gun nest immediately starts to feast on the soldiers, chowing down on the first six or seven rows before they start to drop over the sides instead. The machine-gun continues chewing through them underwater. Some drown instead. Those that make it back up to air have dropped nearly all of their supplies.
The machine gun continues to pick them off—how can it not? They’re just walking into the bullets. There’s no cover. Who thought this was a good plan? The tide rolls in over their backs, knocking them down. They reach the shore; the water is like tomato soup. The few survivors cower beneath the X-ed girders dotting the beach. Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is shaken out of his initial stupor by his remaining men, demanding orders. Just bullets, bodies, and bombs everywhere.
Impossibly, some of the men are getting closer to the machine-gun nest. What looks like 90% of the rest of them litter the beach as corpses. The medics are in the middle of the maelstrom, trying to fix one of the bloody bodies. None of the armor made it ashore. The survivors gather weapons and ammo from those who’ve not survived—or who won’t.
They manage to blow something up that causes the Germans to retreat, at least a little. They get eyes on the Germans, but they’re below them. And the Americans have single-shot, bolt-actions versus German machine guns. They find a defilade and send Jackson (Barry Pepper)—their sniper—into it. He clears out the front of the nest. Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore) leads the rest of the company over the ridge. They throw some grenades in, then pick off the dazed survivors. Attrition continues on the way up, though.
People are praying everywhere. There’s a chaplain lying among the near-corpses, administering last rites.
It’s not eye-to-eye trench warfare, meters away from the enemy.. The Americans have overwhelming numbers, despite the incredible percentage of attrition. The Germans give themselves up. Some are not allowed to surrender. At least the film is honest.
Private Caparzo (Vin Diesel) tosses Mellish (Adam Goldberg) a Hitler Youth knife, plundered from a corpse. It is Chekhov’s knife.
Horvath packs dirt from the beach into a tin marked “France”, but I don’t understand why he would also have tins for “Italy” and “Africa” with him. Is this a ham-handed way of indicating he’s been in the war forever? Didn’t the Americans only arrive in France? Even if he’d already fought in Italiy and Africa, why would he have brought the other tins with him?
The camera zooms in one corpse’s back on the beach. It says “S. Ryan” on his backpack.
Switch to the War Department, where a one-armed officer (Bryan Cranston) gets the news that three out of four brothers have died and that the fourth—the eponymous Private James Ryan—is lost in Normandy. The bigwigs decide to send a rescue mission.
Captain Miller shows up with what remains of his company at a post run by Lieutenant Anderson (Dennis Farina). Miller reports. Anderson gives him his new mission. Miller picks up a new translator—Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies)—and has his company trimmed down to a platoon They’re on the move toward Neuville. Private Reiben (Edward Burns) leads the way, including a medic, Wade (Giovanni Ribisi).
They reach Neuville and disappoint the unit there that they’re not their relief. Sergeant Hill (Paul Giamatti) offers to help find Ryan. They start to move through the town. Caparzo tries to help a family, taking the little girl they’re trying to get to safety. He’s clipped by a sniper, laying in a puddle of rain, watching a rivulet of blood slowly swell to a freshet. Jackson takes up the challenge. The rest hunker down. Caparzo is bleeding ever-more-heavily into his puddle. The German sniper (Leo Stransky) is in a tower, sighting on Caparzo, waiting for someone to approach the squealing lamb. He finds Jackson. Jackson shoots right through his scope. Everybody stands down. Everybody except Caparzo. Caparzo has expired.
It’s raining incessantly.
Sergeant Hill stops to fix his boot, knocking a fallen transom over into a weakened brick wall, comically exposing a room full of Germans. There’s a Mexican standoff, ended by two U.S. soldiers with machine guns on a balcony above our platoon. They’re led by Captain Hamill (Ted Danson), who seems to know where Ryan is. They find Ryan, but it’s the wrong Ryan. It’s Minnesota Ryan (Nathan Fillion).
They overnight in a church, chatting and sleeping and fleshing out their characters.
They walk through a night filled with explosions, crossing fields. We rejoin them as they wake in a camp full of the wounded. Lieutenant Dewindt (Leland Orser) says he can help them find Ryan, but he’s just kind of babbling, obviously wracked with survivor’s guilt. The powers-that-be had plated his plane with armor because he was transporting a general. The plane was barely airworthy. He did his best. 22 dead.
They’re ghoulishly sorting through bags of dog-tags, spouting gallows humor. Soldiers file past them, glaring judgmentally at their macabre task. They finally get news of the correct Ryan. He’s been picked up in a mixed company to babysit a bridge. They move out.
They happen upon a German emplacement atop a hill. The Caption decides to take it out. The other six are not excited about it. The captain seems desperate to do something meaningful. There is a tremendous amount of machine-gun fire, then grenades, as the half-dozen of them approach quickly. There’s some fire from the Americans and everything goes quiet.
The Germans are dead, but Wade, the medic, has been hit—he’s taken several shots to the torso. They make a lot of frantic fuss, but it’s hopeless. He asks them if he’s been shot in the spine. They’re throwing sulfa and water all over his entry wounds.
“Is there anything bleeding worse than the others?”
They palpate him.
“Oh my God, my liver!”
“I could use some morphine.”
“I don’t wanna die.”
“Mama, mama, mama. I wanna go home.”
They’re now a band of six. They run up the hill to beat the shit out of a surviving German. They threaten to kill him. “Ich will mich ergeben.” Upham translates. “I don’t care what he said.” They tell the German to dig graves for all of the Americans, then they’ll kill him. Upham pipes up,
“Captain, this is not right.”
“You can help him with the bodies, then.”
“What is happening?”
After a bunch of waffling—during which Upham tells The caption that he can’t just shoot a prisoner—the captain blindfolds the German and sends him off 1000 paces to turn himself in somewhere else. None of them like it—the others wanted to shoot him. Reiben doesn’t like it and threatens to desert. Horvath has a solution for that. He points a gun at him.
“Are you going to shoot me over Ryan?”
“No, I’m going to shoot you because I don’t like you.”
That’s some classic Tom Sizemore right there.
The captain defuses the situation by finally telling them where he’s from and what he did back home. He was a schoolteacher.
“I’ve changed. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve changed so much, my wife isn’t even going to recognize me.”
They bury Wade and continue across fields.
A half-track appears. They drop. Something attacks it. German troops spill out. They shoot them all. Corporal Henderson (Max Martini) pops out of the grass with a couple of men, one with a bazooka. One of them is James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon).
Miller asks Ryan,
“What are we supposed to tell your mother when they send her another folded American flag?
“Ryan: Tell her that, when you found me, I was here and that I was with the only brothers I have left. I think she’ll understand that. There’s no way I’m leaving this bridge.”
Has no-one thought what he would think? How would he live with himself if he got to go home, knowing he’d gotten out because too much of his family had already been killed? If he’d never been drafted, that would be one thing. But, posted up on a bridge in France, with his company, how could he just leave them? To go home to his mama? To sit in his hometown without his biological brothers, knowing his remaining brothers-in-spirit were dying without him?
Miller and Horvath chat. They decide to stay. The company’s missing their CO anyway. Miller will fill in.
Time to defend the bridge. Time to build a “sticky bomb” to take out the tank. Jackson’s up in the bell tower. Upham’s carrying ammo. Ryan sticks to Miller like glue.
At 2:02:00, there’s a beautiful scene, where they’re listening to Edith Piaf on a Wurlitzer, with Upham translating and Horvath flapping his hand to the melody.
The tanks are coming. There’s four of them. At least 50 ground troops. You can see their hearts sink into their stomachs. Miller: “You know what to do. Reiben, get on the rabbit.”
The attack begins. It’s overwhelming. The unit defends the enfilade well, but there are just too many vehicles, too many troops. The attrition on both sides is horrible.
Jackson is in his tower, sniping soldiers at a remarkable clip. A tank ponderously raises its barrel and blows him and his compatriot up. Mellish and his compatriot run out of ammo in their nest. Upham succumbs to the pressure and fails to bring them belts and ammo. Mellish dies by his own German knife. Upham is on the stairs outside, frozen. The German walks out and past him.
Miller and Ryan retreat back over the bridge, followed by Reiben and Horvath. Horvath takes a hit, but Reiben one-arms him to the sandbags. “Sergeant, you OK?” “Just got the wind knocked out of me.” Those were his last words. The tank keeps pounding their position; Miller is dazed. He’s hit. Reiben slams him behind the sandbags. Ryan is dazed. They’re losing the position.
They can’t blow the bridge; the plunger’s been blown into open territory. The Germans swarm at the other end of the bridge. Upham has gotten behind them, but doesn’t take advantage. He’s not a fighter; no experience; he’s completely overwhelmed; adrenalin has come and gone; he’s shutting down.
Miller walks right out into the fray to get the plunger. He’s stunned as well. He’s clipped in the left chest, coming to rest against a broken half-track. He pulls his pistol, firing blindly at the approaching tank. On the third shot, it blows up. It’s been taken out by the U.S. Air Force, which has finally arrived, following quickly by a ton of ground troops and artillery. They mop up quickly.
Upham jumps up and takes several Germans prisoner. Among them is the German they’d released on the hill. He’s the one who shot Miller. The German is slyly happy to see him and says “Upham!” Upham shoots him and lets the others go.
Ryan and Reiben watch Miller’s last breath. Reiben grabs Caparzo’s letter, which has traveled from Wade to Miller to Reiben now.
There’s a mawkish ending where Ryan wonders whether he’d lived a life that was worth the sacrifice. Honestly, though, the movie showed much more how arbitrary and useless war is. Why were they there? Why did they lose their lives there? Couldn’t they just have fallen back to merge with the incoming battalion and taken out the Germans with much less loss of American life? Of course they could have. War makes no sense.
The movie begins with a gravelly voiceover. It’s The Batman (Robert Pattinson), of course. He narrates like he’s captioned by comic-book panels. Some of the shots look like comic-book panels. It’s not even close to Sin City but it nods in that direction.
The incumbent mayor Don Mitchell, Jr. (Rupert Penry-Jones) is brutally murdered in his own home. The killed is masked and swaddled in thick clothes. It looks vaguely female.
The mayor’s son (Archie Barnes) finds him, propped up in a sitting position, blindfolded, with a sign on his face that says he’s a liar. There’s graffiti all over the room that declares him a liar. There is a riddle, “What does a liar do when he dies?” … “He lies still.” That’s a really nice wordplay right there, playing on the homophone “still” to suggest both that he “continues to prevaricate” and that he “doesn’t move from a supine or prone position”.
Alfred (Andy Serkis) and Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson, in case you know literally nothing of the Batman canon) later solve a cipher that accompanied the message, figuring out that it says “drive”. This leads them to the mayor’s huge garage full of cars. I guess he was on the up-and-up, right? Anyway, it is there that they find the shears the killer used to chop off the mayor’s thumb. Then find the mayor’s thumb attached to a USB drive inside the car. The thumb drive must be unlocked with that thumb. It’s cleverly gruesome.
Then the Batman and Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) just go ahead and stick the assassin’s USB stick right into Gordon’s laptop, with his full account logged in. Yeah, I guess a movie that’s already running to almost 3 hours is going to have to take a shortcut or two. This is a shockingly unaware breach of even the most basic computer-security protocols. The only sane protocol would have been to plug the stick into a completely air-gapped machine or, at the very least, a throwaway virtual machine. This is something that police should probably have for just this purpose.
Instead, they plug the stick into Gordon’s laptop, whose OS is also set up to just chirpily auto-run stuff from USB sticks. They watch it send out a whole bunch of mails in Gordon’s name, chock-full of pictures of the former mayor—along with his girlfriend and a smattering of mob bosses—and also including the Penguin (Colin Farrell). What a shitshow.
Anyway, Batman walks around a lot in this one. They like to show his boots hitting the pavement. I haven’t seen any cable-work or flying about. He just kind of walks places. It’s kind of neat, a nice change of pace. He just fights real normal-like, like a boxer. He takes a lot of blows on his armor. He’s not magic, just well-armored and a skilled but not infallible fighter.
Also, so far, he seems to be driving a Captain America-style motorcycle. No fancy gimmicks. Well, he rides it in the absolute pouring rain. He’s not alone, though, because Selena Kyle/Catwoman (Zöe Kravitz) also rides in the rain, dressed in a skin-tight leather suit that I bet she picked out just for this kind of weather.
It’s super-convenient for the lady burglars that no-one has any alarm systems on any of their windows or skylights. Just drop in, no security. Just the Batman, who also just tromps in wherever he wants without ever triggering any security mechanisms. In a city that seems as dangerous as Gotham City, there are an awful lot of open windows and unlocked doors on really nice apartments.
This movie might as well be in black-and-white. The only color is orange, from the sodium lamps. The whole mood, shots, and low-key criminality feels a lot less like a superhero movie and much more like Max Payne. The Joker was like that as well, but it was … different. In this one, it’s Bruce Wayne who’s pretty unbalanced, but nowhere near as loopy as Arthur Fleck.
Selena teams up with Batman to help her friend, an eastern European immigrant. She goes into the club within a club to help him see who’s there. She runs into DA Gil Colson (Peter Sarsgaard). She also runs into Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), with whom she’s had a relationship. This makes Bruce jealous. He plays the recording over and over. It makes a “rewinding” noise, even though it was recorded on digital. We just can’t get away from certain tropes.
Bruce Wayne drives his own car. It’s a pretty awesome car, a low-slung British-looking hotrod. Maybe an MG or a Triumph. My bad. It’s apparently a Corvette.
Bruce Wayne shows up to the mayor’s funeral alone, with no bodyguards. The mayor’s rival candidate just hits him right up at the funeral, no qualms about being seen as crass. She’s supposed to be the nice one, but that’s a pretty shitty move. The DA’s car comes flying into the funeral, right up the church stairs. Colson is driving. He gets out with a bomb around his neck.
The Batman meets the Riddler (Paul Dano) via video call. The Riddler has a gimp mask on. He sounds like a combination of Bane and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Batman, on the other hand, sounds exactly like Pete Holmes doing his impression of Christian Bale’s Batman. See The dark Knight rises 2 : Batman’s dirty mind (YouTube).
Bomb goes off because Colson refuses to give up the rat. Batman was so dead-set on finding out the name that he stayed there until the end. He’s knocked right the f&@k out—but nobody took his mask off. He’s surrounded by cops. This is pretty terrible, honestly. Chief Mackenzie Bock (Con O’Neill) is just cartoonishly against the Batman.
Batman escapes with Gordon’s help, running part of the way, then taking a grappling-hook ride up to the top floor. They show how terrified he is of the height—then he wing-suits his way out of it, but it does not go well. His little parachute catches on a bridge, dropping him into the street—hard. He’s fine, though. Fresh as a daisy for a meeting with Gordon.
Another stakeout. It’s raining again. They’re looking at a drug lab. It’s just pouring. Selena Kyle shows up on her motorcycle. She and Batman find her friend, right before the fireworks start. Machine pistols flare, spraying the Batman, knocking him to the ground.
He retreats to his Batmobile, which, you know, obviously, just had to be introduced in a flashy way. At least it adds another color to the movie’s palette: blue. The flame coming out the back is blue. The car looks all old-timey, though, too. A lot of this film is chronologically ambiguous. It feels a little bit like Dick Tracy.
The car chase in the rain is pretty unique, with a lot of realistic damage to the Batmobile, an absolute clusterfuck of crashing caused by The Penguin, then the Batman flies over a ramp, through a ball of flame, and flips the Penguin’s car dozens of times. He’s perfectly fine.No seatbelt. No airbags went off. Not a scratch on him. Not dazed. Just…fine. Cartoonish.
Falcone is Catwoman’s father, not her former lover. My bad. I read that one wrong. Bruce visits Falcone to find out that he’d killed one of Thomas Wayne’s political enemies—a journalist. Alfred is mind-fucking Bruce about what really happened. Somehow Alfred is now the bad-ass who taught Bruce how to fight—he was apparently the one in charge of keeping Bruch’s parents alive, but he’d failed. What is happening?
They’re just chatting by Alfred’s hospital bed—did I forget to mention that he’d almost gotten blown up? It doesn’t really matter.—and this section is interminable. No wonder this movie clocks in at almost three hours.
Selena Kyle is a one-dimensional character. Utterly terrible. Woodenly acted. She goes to take out Falcone, but can’t hit the broad side of a barn, although she can take a punch. She takes a crowbar to the back of the head and is only temporarily dazed. No blood. Throws off a choking that would have crushed her windpipe, but … didn’t. This is just silly.
Also, her mask sucks. I have no idea what kind of Gen-Z bullshit balaclava that is, but it’s got to stop. I would attach a screenshot, but they’re all so muddy and dark that you can barely see the damned thing.
Carmine’s been arrested. Carmine’s been killed. The Riddler has given himself up. The police are ransacking his apartment. Batman is there. Cop: “There must be thousands of ledgers, filled with codes, ciphers, and scrawls.” Batman: “I found the one that contains the Riddler’s origin story and flipped right to that page within seconds.” Everybody: see nothing out of the ordinary.
Why would they? They can complain that he’s not a cop and that he shouldn’t be on the scene, but he’s the one finding everything and explaining everything. He’s the one who knows immediately that the chisel is the murder weapon that killed the mayor. How? No-one asks. Is it somehow obvious? If so, why don’t the actual detectives see the connection? An emo, shut-in billionaire knows better than all of them?
“He’s been posting online. He’s got like 500 followers.”
That’s not really a lot.
But it’s enough, if all of them join Riddler’s army.
So, the Riddler had an unstoppable plan to blow the seawall with seven truck bombs. This happens. All of the people of Gotham head for a central arena for shelter. The Riddler’s Army is waiting for them, armed to the teeth. They start shooting. They clip the new mayor.
Batman interrupts the party, attacking them one-on-one, taking shots and bullets, but making progress. Finally, he gets caught full in the chest by a shotgun blast. Hanging on by one hand (with what must be 50 pounds of armor hanging with him, by the way). One of the last of the Riddler’s Army lines up his shot—and is knocked the hell out by Catwoman.
She pulls Batman up—him with his 50 pounds of army and she with her 85 pounds of counterweight—and they roll around, having a moment that … isn’t sexy at all. Of course, he is grievously injured. She kisses him when he can’t stop her. She get clocked on the head by a Riddler’s minion. He’s still nearly incapacitated. He injects himself with some greenish adrenalin and flips the fuck out, just pounding on Selena’s attacker. Gordon pulls him off. Batman seems totally fine now, not even injured at all.
The sea breaks into the arena, drowning everyone else—Gordon, Selena Kyle, and Batman are on a catwalk far above. Batman throws himself down into the water, pretty needlessly dramatically—to what? Help people? Yup, he’s fine now. He ignores everyone else and saves the ex-mayor’s son, as well as the new mayor, who 100% no longer remembers that she’d just been shot ten minutes ago. It’s a prettily shot scene, but it’s pretty stupid.
But not as stupid as the final voiceover during the rescue effort. Like, just. spell. it. all. out.
“Vengeance won’t change the past, mine or anyone else’s. I have to become more. People need hope. To know someone’s out there for them. The city’s angry, scarred—like me. Our scars can destroy us, even after the physical wounds have healed. But if we survive them, they can transform us. They can give us the power to endure, and the strength to fight.”
You know, this might have felt deep in a comic book, written in that cool handwriting, in those thought-bubble boxes. If I’d read it when I was fourteen. They tried to do it for this movie, but it just sounded so trite. It’s like Batman giving a TedX talk.
And now they’re lingering on Batman and Selena’s goodbye. Did they think they’d made us care about their relationship at all? The music suggests that they think we should care very much. They moodily ride their motorcycles away, racing each other on slick tires and wet streets—perfectly normal. This is interminable.
Look, I gave it the benefit of the doubt because they let the bad guy win, more or less. His plan worked. I took away a star for the bizarre self-conceit that the movie had earned being three hours long. It’s also just so goddamned dark. Just almost no lighting whatsoever. Barry Lyndon was lit better.
This movie is unconventional. It’s chronologically unclear. The narrator is extremely unreliable. Pretty much everybody and everything is unreliable. Parts of it reminded me of The Shining. It takes some getting used to, until you start to see the reasoning behind the at-times stilted dialogue. I took copious notes because it’s a thinker. Most of my notes will be belied by later notes, as the movie peels the onion skin of its script. I left everything because I find it describes the feeling of watching the movie much better.
We start out on a road trip with Jake (Jess Plemons) and a Young Woman (Jessie Buckley). She is called alternatively Lucia and Louise throughout the movie. It is rife with symbolism that the viewer is expected to put this together, or not, and it doesn’t really matter. They are both eminently awkward people. He’s awkward but seems quite nice most of the time. He says very strange and abrupt things sometimes, but it’s unclear whether those are things she’s imagined. She is not a very nice or interesting person. She thinks she’s the one who’s going to end things, and thinks, because she’s the active one, that she is also the better one. This attitude is obvious. She does not really like him, or what he is.
They are driving to his parents’ house. It’s a farm in the middle of nowhere. The road is straight and obviously fake. They are not really driving anywhere. They are, but the movie doesn’t care about making it look like they are. At the house, time…slips. She sees his father (David Thewliss) as an old, dementia-addled man, she sees him at dinner with a bandage on his head, she sees him at the end as a vital man, while his wife (Toni Collette) lies in a bed in the living room, obviously in hospice, and quite apparently dead, although Jake claims that she’s sleeping. But they were just eating dinner before. Or, rather, they were sitting at a sumptuously covered table from which no-one ate. A long-dead dog appears and disappears.
In the car, on the way there, she recites a poem, leading us to think that that is her line of work. At the house, Jake calls her a painter. She shows the parents some of her work, on her phone. Jake’s mom asks how her doctorate in quantum physics is going. Jake is in the same field. Jake later introduces her as a gerontologist. In his room, she finds Jake’s old paintings, which are the ones she’s shown his parents. She finds a book with a poem by another women, which turns out to be the poem that she’d recited on the way there, claiming it as her own. Or perhaps she is that person from the book.
She goes to the basement with a nightgown covered in Jake’s baby food, handed to her by a very young version of Jake’s mother. The basement is dark and the machine is already running. It is filled with janitor’s uniforms from the local high school. We see glimpses of the janitor (Guy Boyd) working at the school. These glimpses are scattered throughout the film. It is unclear whether this is Jake’s real father or whether it is perhaps Jake in the future. It is unclear whether the young woman is in Jake’s mind.
The janitor cleans up as students practice Oklahoma! He watches a romantic comedy that seems to reenact one of the two versions of Jake and the young woman’s meet-cute story that they tell his parents.
When they’d first arrived at the farm, he didn’t want to go in immediately. He shows her the sheep pens. There were dead, frozen lambs outside the barn door. There is a dark spot on the floor of the now-empty pigpen, where the two pigs that used to live there rotted alive, eaten by maggots.
Jake’s hand is damaged by what look like a fight when he hands the bill to the girl at Tulsey Town, who also has unmentioned bruises on her upper arm and forearm—or perhaps its a rash. She is accompanied by what look like blond twins, who at first ask for orders, but afterwards huddle up like NPCs in the corner of the starkly lit booth, grinning and giggling endlessly but silently.
Neither of them wants to eat the giant ice-cream desserts they’d purchased in the dead of night in a blizzard. They decide to stop off at the high school to dispose of them.
They converse. He tries to discuss with her. She is not interested. His conversational gambits are often clumsy. They have read so many esoteric books in common that they must be the same person, a person conversing with himself or herself. He is quite neurotic. He calls her “Ames” at one point.
“Jake: Everything is tinged. Colored by mood, by emotion, by past experience. There is no objective reality. You know there’s no color in the universe, right? Only in the brain, just electromagnetic frequencies. The brain tinges them.
“Lucia/Louise/Ames/Young woman: Yes, I am a physicist. I know what color is.
“Jake: Yes, yes, yes. You are. You do.
“Lucia/Louise/Ames/Young woman: Color is the deeds of light. It’s the deeds and suffering.
“Jake: That’s beautiful. It’s not physicist talk, but eminently poetic.
“Lucia/Louise/Ames/Young woman: Yeah, well, I am a poet after all.
“Jake: You are. It’s beautiful.”
They arrive at the giant high school. There’s a truck in the parking lot.
They argue about Baby, It’s Cold Outside. Is it a rape song? Is it playful? Is there room for playfulness anymore? Does it matter that it was written in 1936?
He admits he was wrong. She accepts his apology. They kiss. He snaps back, interrupted by a vision of the janitor peeping at them through a hole in a wall.
Jake leaves the car to go into the high school. She is freezing in the car, arguing with herself. She gets out, then is locked out.
She follows him into the high school, where she finds the janitor mopping the floor. She hides from him. He finds her, huddled on the floor. He doesn’t speak, but she hears his voice in her head.
She tells him yet another story of how she met Jake. That she was with her girlfriend, celebrating their anniversary. In the first story, she talked of how they met at a pub-trivia night. Now she calls him a creeper who would not stop staring at her.
She says she can’t remember what he looks like because “it was so long ago.” She can’t remember because they didn’t interact.
They talk. They hug. He offers her house slippers because he’s just cleaned the floors. They’re the same shoes Jake gave to her in his parents’ house. She says, “they’re yours.” Which makes sense, because I think the janitor is Jake. But I still think she’s a figment of Jake’s imagination. That he imagines how much she hated seeing him staring at her, even while he’s imagining a relationship with her, imagining taking her to visit his parents..
She finds Jake. They stare at each other along the high-school hallway. Doppelgängers appear behind them, cut around them, and begin to dance a lovely ballet in a suddenly brightened hallway. The drinking fountains sprays a cascade up and down the wall.
Their dance ends in a mock wedding, interrupted by a janitor dancer, who takes her away. She is rescued by her beau, who fights the janitor. The janitor pulls a knife. Snow falls. They are in the gymnasium. Atonal fighting music fades. Red handkerchiefs fly, signifying blood and death. Jake appears again, as Jake. The janitor cleans up the snow around the corpse, morphing back into the janitor in the school hallway. Was this a daydream of his, imagined as he cleaned the floors at night?
He grabs his thermos. It’s just like the thermos that Jake had when he arrived at his parents’ house. It’s just like the drawerful of thermoses to which he added his at his parents’ house. Or was it the janitor’s house?
The janitor cleans the snow off of his truck. He gets in. He sits there, mumbling to himself, imagining Jake’s parents fighting. He shakes. he suffers. He strips.. He hallucinates.
The pig infested with maggots shows up. “Come.” He follows the pig back into the high school, naked as the day he was born. The pig says, “Let’s get you dressed.”
Jake is on stage, accepting an award. The stage is dressed for Oklahoma. Jake is much older. His mother, father, and the young woman are in the audience. They are all heavily made up. He is accepting a Nobel Prize. The entire crowd looks like the photo at the end of The Shining.
He sings Lonely Room from the musical Oklahoma!. He sings wonderfully.
Morning comes. There is a car buried in snow in the parking lot of the high school, under a blue, blue sky.
The credit pages flick past in silence.
This is pretty avant-garde stuff, but kind of fascinating. It’s just nice to watch something that’s not predictable. Now that I know who Charlie Kaufman is, I’m not surprised. He’s made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Synecdoche, New York, all of which I liked very much.
I’m struck by the apt representation of American empire. We see Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) getting ready for his next job at his house in Vermont. He is headed for Salalah, Oman, for a delivery to Mombasa, Kenya. He probably only knows English. He can’t understand a word anyone else is saying in the part of the world he works. It doesn’t matter because he is part of Empire. Those people, in their homelands, will speak the language of Empire to make themselves understood by it. They will have to put in the effort, not him.
The shot of him arriving at the port reminded me immediately of how the space stations were filmed in The Expanse. Giant cranes and containers everywhere. Enormous ships rearing up from endless docks. Phillips is a consummate professional. He gets a report that there are pirates in the area. He runs drills to fend off pirates. The pirates show up on his radar. He fakes a call to U.S. air support. The Somalis are listening in. One boat is scared off. Muse (Barkhad Abdi) is not scared off. He keeps coming, despite Phillips pushing his boat faster and moving 5º port and starboard to throw up a wake. When the skiff is only ¼-mile away, its motor dies, flooded with seawater from the heavy seas behind the freighter.
Phillips and his crew take stock. So do Muse and his crew. They join the other boat and are trying to fix his motor. He tells them to give him the motor from the other boat—which is just full of cowards anyway. That skiff’s captain takes offense, but gets a cool wrench up-side his head for all his bluster.
The next day, Muse—his mates call him “skinny”, which he most certainly is—is right back on their tail, announcing himself as the Somali Coast Guard. He is obviously ignored. They open fire. The ship blasts water from fire hoses from all sides, so that the skiff can’t approach. Shane (Michael Chernus) goes down to fix an errant hose. The Somalis shoot at him, approaching with a hooked ladder. It hooks. Phillips slues the ship 30º to starboard. They get on anyway. Port 30º, then starboard 30º. None of it helps. They’re onboard. They abandon their skiff.
“Four pirates on board. [Tom Hanks is doing his Vermont accent.]”
They’re on the bridge. After a bit of back and forth, the pirates call the captain’s bluff. He calls their bluff right back. They go to the engine room. Muse sends Bilal (Barkhad Abdirahman) back to the bridge with Phillips. Muse is taken hostage by the crew.
They eventually give the Somalis $30,000 and the lifeboat. They kidnap the captain, looking for a bigger payday.
The U.S. Navy is on intercept course. The higher-ups don’t care, though. They’re going to send in a SEAL team to mop things up—without real regard for the hostage’s life. The main thing is to not let them get Phillips to Somalia, where it would be too expensive to secure his release. So, they’d rather have him killed than captured. Sounds like Israel’s Hannibal Directive. And Phillips isn’t even a soldier.
The Somalis mention that they used to be fishermen, until the big ships came and took all the fish. Now, they’re pirates. But they don’t realize that they’re fighting the biggest pirates of all: The U.S. and its hegemony don’t pay for anything that they can steal instead. If anyone objects to them stealing it, then they’re killed by the military. There is no real difference in ethics—just in scale.
You can see the massive imbalance in power with the four skinny, starving Somalis driving in a shitty lifeboat, being chased by a giant U.S. naval vessel (The U.S.S. Bainbridge). There are also several helicopters full of Navy Seals on the way. The important thing is not to give them any money. What kind of lesson would that be? You can only steal things if you’re big and strong. You can steal things if you already have the biggest weapons, not if you’re puny fisherman with no power.
Someone on the U.S. naval vessel actually speaks Somali—Nemo (Omar Berdouni). He starts negotiations. Muse speaks to him in English defiantly.
Simultaneously, the Navy boards the freighter and says they’ll escort it to Mombasa. Spare no cost, even if it would be much cheaper to just pay the pirates.
The Navy catches up to the lifeboat. Muse demands $10M. They show the captain. He says he’s in “Seat 15”, which is the seat he’s in on the boat—you know, for when they start shooting into it.
The U.S.S. Bainbridge captain Castellano (Yul Vazquez) is trying to resolve this peacefully before the SEALs arrive. Muse says he’ll negotiate when he gets to Somalia. No-one’s told him that that’s not going to be allowed to happen. He thinks he’s safe because he has a hostage, but saving the hostage is optional.
There are two more ships now—three enormous-looking U.S. naval vessels chasing them, dwarfing the lifeboat they’re puttering their way to Somalia in. Muse’s boss has cut and run. Muse won’t give up though—he’s got nothing to lose. “I’ve come too far. I can’t give up.” Even if it comes to sinking the lifeboat, he’d rather go under on the chance that they’ll get to Somalia first.
That lifeboat cabin must be funky,. I don’t see a bathroom.
The SEALs leap off the back of their plane into darkness.
Phillips gets up to take a leak. He’s on the back of the boat with Bilal. He pushes him in, then dives in himself. He starts swimming for the U.S. boats.
Muse says to find him, but not kill him. He knows Phillips is the only reason they’re still alive. Najee (Faysal Ahmed)—the psycho—fires on Phillips anyway. Phillips dives. The lifeboat drifts closer to him. Phillips rounds the boat, swimming under it. Muse jumps in and grabs him. They get him back into the boat. Najee beats the shit out of him.
This is dragging on a bit, to be honest.
Castellano continues to try to get them to give themselves up. Muse drags Phillips out the back hatch, alternatively pointing the pistol at Phillips and shooting at the helicopter.
The SEAL team leader starts negotiations, telling them all their names, then saying that he will give them money, but that it has to happen confidentially. The U.S. doesn’t want to be seen as having paid off pirates. It is pretty clear that none of this is true. Muse believes it, though. He has no other choice.
Muse thinks he’s going to the Navy ship to get money.
“Muse: It was supposed to be easy. I take ship… ransom… nobody get hurt.
Captain Richard Phillips: You had thirty thousand dollars, and a way to Somalia. It wasn’t enough?
Muse: I got bosses. They got rules.
Captain Richard Phillips: We all got bosses.
Muse: [gives him the look he deserves for thinking his own boss is as bad as Muse’s boss]
Captain Richard Phillips: There’s gotta be something other than being a fisherman and kidnapping people.
Muse: Maybe in America, Irish. Maybe in America.”
The SEALs hand Phillips a “uniform”, which is probably a bulletproof vest. I mean, the U.S. Navy has all of the advantages. Muse isn’t going to meet any elders. They’ve got a tow line on the lifeboat. The power advantage is overwhelming. “Where are the elders?” Muse realizes he’s been fucked, lied to. There was never going to be a deal. I mean, obviously.
They start towing. The lifeboat gets closer to the boat. There are a dozen SEAL snipers on the back of the Navy boat. The other boats start making massive lateral wakes to rock the lifeboat. They winch them closer, you know, to get them out of the big waves.
Najee catches the captain writing a note to his family, but the captain has had enough and attacks him, getting in a few good licks. The pirates get him under control and bind him up.
Najee is the only one who knows what’s going to happen. “You two are idiots. No-one is coming. Everything they told you is a lie! They will kill us all.”
He’s right. They stop the tow. All three targets sway into sight. All three targets are sniped.
They easily spent way more than $10M for this outcome. But neither the company nor the insurance company paid for it. The U.S. taxpayer footed the bill. The Navy arrests Muse and prepares to take him to America, where he will stand trial. Since the U.S. made sure that Somalia doesn’t have a government, so they don’t have to bother with extraditing a foreign national—not like they would give a shit about international law anyway. The U.S. Navy enforces its will off the coast of a country that it destroyed. Empire.
I’m taking away a star because it was too damned long. I guess they’d paid for all of that hardware and wanted to make sure they got their money’s worth. Anytime there’s that much military hardware in a movie, the Pentagon gets to write the script.
Now, how can I be so callous about poor Captain Phillips? He was a nice guy who tried to treat everyone fairly, and who seemed to have genuine empathy for even the pirates that had taken him captive—except, perhaps and understandably, for Najee, who was an asshole. I do, I do. But I see his suffering as the suffering of one man, whereas the film depicted the plight of an entire nation that had been destroyed, allowed to be destroyed, encouraged to be destroyed, by the same country whose navy rescued Phillips.
I cannot ignore the context. I can only assume that it was intentional in the film. Perhaps I’ve imbued it. Perhaps it was a film about an upstanding American who was rescued by his selfless government, who put down the filthy, upstart natives who can only steal, never produce. But this ignores the context that the U.S. is the greatest thief of all. It patrols and enforces what it deems “international waters”. The danger in those waters can only be addressed with military means. The solution couldn’t be to take all of that money and help Somalia back on its feet, to make it so that the country wouldn’t produce pirates rather than fishermen. I dunno.
Jaron Lanier is in this. At 21:12 he says,
“We’ve created a world in which online connection has become primary, especially for younger generations. And yet, in that world, any time two people connect, the only way it’s financed is through a sneaky third person who’s paying to manipulate those two people. So, we’ve created an entire global generation of people who are raised within a context where the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture, is manipulation. We’ve put deceit and sneakiness at the absolute center of everything we do.”
That NVidia Teraflops chart at 45;:00 was impressive.
“What people miss is that AI already runs today’s world right now.”
The side story is interesting, making it look like there is certain information that is definitely bad and other information that is definitely good. That doesn’t exist, not really. All information is on a spectrum. There is certain information that is reliable and true. If you never hear anything that you disagree with, then you’re probably not hearing the truth—or you’re hearing things that are true, but also not hearing a lot of other things that are not only also true, but would be useful.
The film does a good job of showing people that there is misinformation out there. However, while they’re willing to attack flat-Earthers, Pizzagaters, climate-change deniers, COVID deniers (“Querdenker”), or Q-Anon (which the extremist group in the film is definitely the model for), there’s no way they’ll mention the biggest psy-ops of our times, like WMDs (before social media), the pro-vaccine manipulation campaigns, or RussiaGate (both after social media).
They, like so many others, have an enormous blind spot for their own propaganda. RussiaGate fooled so many dozens of millions of people and continues to do so, evidenced by the fact that you’re still not allowed to talk about it as a psy-op, even in a documentary about psy-ops of the 2010s. It’s incredible. Just the degree of self-deception they’re capable of, all while they’re supposedly exposing how we’re so manipulated.
“We’ve created a system that biases towards false information. Not because we want to, but because false information makes the companies more money than the truth. The truth is boring.”
Bullshit. That’s a nice cop-out that happens to exonerate you, but it’s not entirely true. You choose which slant to provide to the information. You allow yourselves to be bribed to only show certain information. That’s the truth right there. And that’s not boring. The “algorithm” doesn’t clamp down on news about Israeli slaughters in the West Bank—lobbyists and investors do.
The algorithm would promote the shit out of that stuff if it were allowed to, because it would drive engagement incredibly. But the companies are paid not to. So spare me your bullshit about how the “algorithm is out of control”. It’s a pat story that also happens to let you live with your hundreds of millions with a clear conscience. But it’s not true. The truth is far more exciting and interesting. These people may have been duped by the drive to make a lot of money, but they continue to be duped by those who really control information.
At one point, one of the dude-bros says that the goal was,
“[t]o reach anyone for the best price.”
Yeah, sure, Why don’t you talk about who was paying you that “best price”? It wasn’t just “advertisers”. It was large political organizations as well as the government itself, through various organizations and fronts..
Oh Jesus, now they’re saying that “we see Russia and China spreading these conspiracy theories.” Sure, sure, talk about everyone else running the psyops but never mention who’s running the biggest and most effective ones. I didn’t expect anything else of a Netflix documentary. It’s basically soma for liberals.
A Netflix documentary like this is here to tell liberalls that social media is manipulating all of us, but it’s especially manipulating those psychos who are outside of your silo. They cut to a montage of photos of COVID protestors, most of whom were protesting the mandates and crackdowns, rather than saying that it didn’t exist. There’s a little parallel story about Ben (Skyler Gisondo), who’s being radicalized, leading him to ignore hot girls in real life in order to watch content about extremist shit. He’s radicalized by libertarian hucksters, but never by liberal ones.
“Roger McNamee One of the problems with Facebook is that, as a tool of persuasion, it may be the greatest thing ever created. Now, imagine what that means in the hands of a dictator or an authoritarian. If you want to control the population of your country, there has never been a tool as effective as Facebook.”
Dude, I’m happy you’re so able to live in an irony-free world where you don’t notice that you just literally described the US of A as she is. I don’t have to imagine it! You’re literally in a psy-op documentary about psy-ops that the government of the U.S. Empire doesn’t like. They’re already using it—and it’s not the dastardly Chinese or Russians or North Koreans or Iranians. It’s your very own country. You’re part of the psy-op! You’re in this documentary convincing people that this could never happen in the U.S., when various powerful organizations are literally doing exactly that. All the time. Why do you think we haven’t mentioned bad actors like Russiagaters? Why do you think we’re seeing idiocy from only one silo? Is it because, no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn’t find any misinformation peddled by your own silo?
OMG now they’re reprosecuting the 2016 election. What the actual fuck!? They talk all the time about manipulative social media, then they make an extremely one-sided, manipulative documentary that doesn’t even know how ironic it is. 👏👏👏
It’d be fantastic if I thought this was a satire.
At 1:15:00, Cathy O’Neil says
“We are allowing the technologists to frame this as a problem that they’re equipped to solve. That’s a lie. People talk about AI as it will know truth. AI’s not gonna solve these problems. AI cannot solve the problem of fake news. Google doesn’t have the option of saying: ‘Oh, is this conspiracy? Is this truth?’ Because they don’t know what truth is. They don’t have a proxy for truth that’s better than a click.”
She’s very good. I like her. AI’s not gonna solve these problems is right! It’s going to exacerbate them. And, honestly, if we continue to make such slanted videos telling us about the problem of slanted information, then you can just save yourself the time spent watching this tripe.
“Tristan: If we don’t agree on what is true, or that there is such a thing as truth, we’re toast. This is the problem beneath other problems because, if we can’t agree on what’s true, then we can’t navigate out of any of our problems.”
Dude, you’re going about it the wrong way. Cathy is way smarter than you are (even though Netflix seems to think you’re the star). You’re getting all mucked up because you don’t have the required capacity for philosophical thought because your brain is no longer attuned to it. We will never agree on the important things being true. We can all already agree that there is truth, but can’t agree on what that is. If you don’t acknowledge that you’re part of a desperately manipulative video lamenting about people not knowing what’s true—then you’re part of the problem.
We don’t have to agree on what’s true. A nice basis would be good. But we’re in the murky waters of principles and ethics here, right? It’s more important for people to understand the truth that every human being has certain, inalienable rights. We can’t even agree on that.
Whether people think that the Earth is flat doesn’t matter. Almost everyone can act as if it isn’t every damned day and it won’t matter one bit. My life wasn’t affected by the gentle curvature of the Earth today. I’m happy to leave them their peccadillos. I’m more interested in whether they’re good human beings with actual, real principles.
The creators of this documentary are not those kinds of people. A principle is something that you apply, even when it reflects badly on you. If you’re against murder, unless you really think someone needs killing—then you’re not against murder in principle, you just think no-one else should get to do it. It’s the same with these people: they think the manipulation is bad, but then mention not a single goddamned instance when their own side did it, leading one to believe that they only think that manipulation is bad when their ideological enemies do it.
Tristan just keeps getting it slightly wrong. He goes on,
“It’s not about the technology being the existential threat. It’s the technology’s ability to bring out the worst in society—and the worst in society being the existential threat.”
Did you practice that one in front of the mirror? That’s not the problem. The problem is the people in charge of these powerful tools. It’s not the tools that are manipulating. It’s the people that set up the guardrails that determine how these algorithms work. Of course, it’s arguable that the tool is too powerful for anyone. OK. But his argument is tailor-made to absolve him and all of the other sociopaths in this documentary of any blame.
The machine was too powerful for anyone!
It got out of control!
Who could have known!
Anyone who’s watched capitalists do their thing could have known—and, in fact, did know. You all participated because you were making a shit-ton of money for yourselves and you honestly didn’t care about any of the repercussions. Now you do—or at least pretend to, for even more money—and you’re still fooling yourselves into thinking that you’re not still manipulating people. It’s for a good cause this time, though, right?
He says that the platforms should be responsible—that’s his proposed solution. But I don’t think that’s correct. The platforms shouldn’t be in charge! They’re unelected.
Look, I wanted to like this documentary. I think it makes a few good points, but it’s so one-sided, so manipulative. Not a single Republican/Libertarian in here. You couldn’t get Glenn Greenwald? Matt Taibbi? Chris Hedges? No-one outside of your unalloyed, liberal silo?
here’s Jaron Lanier again,
“If we go down the current status quo for, let’s say, another 20 years, we probably destroy our civilization through willful ignorance. We probably fail to meet the challenge of climate change. We degrade the world’s democracies so that they fall into some sort of bizarre autocratic dysfunction. We probabaly ruin the global economy. We probably don’t survive. I really do view it as existential.”
He’s right, of course, but nothing else in the documentary is honest about this. You would get the impression that the only problem is climate-change deniers, like the really obvious dipshits from the other silo. But the problem is that everyone ignores the problem—does nothing meaningful toward actually solving it, like proposing reduction—because the narrative is being manipulated by the real powers, the real elites, all of whom go completely unmentioned here.
We are led to believe that the machine is out of control, despite our best efforts. That’s not true at all. The machine is very firmly under the control of those who run everything else—and it’s humming along just fine.
Look at Bill McKibben, chirpily writing in the NY Times that COP28 was much more hopeful than ever. That plus $2 will buy you a lottery ticket. But the machine is happy to promulgate these ideas—these myths—even though it’s also climate-denialism. It’s doing the dirty work of fossil-fuel companies who desperately do not want the world to change in any way that will stop the increase of their year-on-year profits. That’s the more insidious manipulation distribute by this tremendous machine—but it’s fully under the control of those who control the narrative.
They use the algorithm—the machine—to make half of us hate Biden for loving the environment so much that he wants to take away our cars, and the other half love him for being such an environmental president. This, when the truth—the meta-narrative—is that the damage is accelerating no matter who’s president because it’s all a giant fairy tale told by the powers-that-be, those that never seem to change no matter who’s in charge—the owners of capital.
They have this machine at their disposal to tighten their grip on the power they’ve always had. This documentary didn’t tell that story. It’s not allowed to. The producers and most of the people involved probably have no idea that this is the real story to tell. They would be shocked to read this review, shocked to think that Russiagate was disinformation, that selling Biden as a climate president is misinformation.
At then, near the end, they kind of hint at the problem being “capitalism”. Tristan again,
“What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive, and shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.”
No wonder they made him the star of the documentary: he absolutely excels in telling stories as if neither him nor any of the other characters has any agency. Who can blame someone for acting in a certain way when all decisions have been taken completely out of their hands by the economy and the algorithm? Those poor, poor, deca-millionaires.
Another dude:
“I think we need to accept that it’s OK for companies to be focused on making money. What’s not okay is when there’s no regulation, no rules, and no competition. And the companies are acting as sort-of, de-facto governments.”
It’s adorable watching Silicon Valley libertarians re-invent regulatory frameworks after spending a decade or two dismantling them and making a tremendous amount of money while doing it. As soon they’re made their nut, then they’re ready to allow regulation again. After all, their companies are now big enough to deal with it—and it will nicely stifle competition.
Look, companies whose only goal is to make money will always end up dismantling regulations because they get in the way of making money. Are they making enough money within the regulatory framework? Of course they are! But they could make more money. And more money is always better. So you spend a little money to make more money. You pay some lobbyists to buy some legislators to weaken or eliminate the regulation—and then you make that investment back 20x over. Profit.
Jaron Lanier again:
“Financial incentives kind of run the world. So, any solution to this problem has to be aligned with financial incentives.”
Or…we could reexamine the axiomatic “financial incentives run the world.”
I mean, look, they tried really hard to make a documentary—but they couldn’t get out of their own silo, they couldn’t talk to anyone who didn’t already agree with literally everything they already thought before they made the documentary.
It ends on this soliloquy by Justin Rosenstein:
“We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know that it’s going to leave a worse world for future generations.
“This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What’s frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we’re the tree, we’re the whale.
“Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so, we’re seeing the results of that. We’re seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.”
OK. That’s nice. You get a star back for including that. You still lose two for not having gone far enough, for having only done the easy part—talking to your echo chamber.
In the end, not a single one of them says that “we need to change the system.” Even Jaron accepts the confines of “financial incentives […] run[ning] the world.” The problem is neoliberalism, hyper-capitalism. There’s not going to be “massive public pressure” because the Elite will use their machine to make sure that this never happens.
A couple of days later, I realized that I still didn’t know who they’d seen in concert. All I knew was the date. And,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 20. Jan 2024 12:16:26 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 20. Jan 2024 12:21:19 (GMT-5)
A friend had told me that they’d been to a concert on the previous Tuesday. At the time, I forgot to follow up during the conversation because we were distracted by other topics.
A couple of days later, I realized that I still didn’t know who they’d seen in concert. All I knew was the date. And, I realized I knew approximately where it was because I saw their walk to the venue on Strava. 🙌🏼
The purpose of today’s Internet is to facilitate commerce, not knowledge.
Even with the venue and date in hand, though, it’s not very easy to find information about past concerts in our Internet.
The Internet was conceived as a knowledge machine, but was nearly immediately coopted for commerce. It is so geared to tell us about stuff we can buy that search engines can only return links about upcoming events, with ticket sales.
Even the home pages of the venues themselves will tell you nothing about events that happened a few days ago. I couldn’t find a “this year’s events” calendar, to say nothing of a “past events” calendar.
Simply typing the venue name and the date, like “Volkshaus Zürich 16.01.2024” returned nothing useful. I gave up pretty quickly, as it was late.
In the morning, I tried again, typing “how to find out about past concert dates”, which returned me the Concert Archives, which has an easily browseable list of all concerts on a day, by venue, by city, etc. Now I know that my metalhead friend went to see Beast In Black / Gloryhammer / Brothers of Metal.
Published by marco on 19. Jan 2024 23:21:04 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 21. Jan 2024 14:06:15 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat by Jacques Baud (Scheer Post)
“Throughout the Cold War period, the Soviet Union saw itself as the spearhead of a historical struggle that would lead to a confrontation between the “capitalist” system and “progressive forces.” This perception of a permanent and inescapable war led the Soviets to study war in a quasi-scientific way, and to structure this thinking into an architecture of military thought that has no equal in the Western world.”
“The way Russians understand conflict is holistic. In other words, they see the processes that develop and lead to the situation at any given moment. This explains why Vladimir Putin’s speeches invariably include a return to history. In the West, we tend to focus on X moment and try to see how it might evolve. We want an immediate response to the situation we see today. The idea that “from the understanding of how the crisis arose comes the way to resolve it” is totally foreign to the West.”
“The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars…”
“[…] the strategic level ensures the management of the theater of war (Театр Войны) (TV); a geographically vast entity, with its own command and control structures, within which there are one or more strategic directions. The theater of war comprises a set of theaters of military operations (Театр Военных Действий) (TVD), which represent a strategic direction and are the domain of operative action. These various theaters have no predetermined structure and are defined according to the situation. For example, although we commonly speak of the “war in Afghanistan” (1979-1989) or the “war in Syria” (2015-), these countries are considered in Russian terminology as TVDs and not TVs. The same applies to Ukraine, which Russia sees as a theater of military operations (TVD) and not a theater of war (TV), which explains why the action in Ukraine is designated as a “Special Military Operation” (Специальная Военая Операция— Spetsialaya). A Special Military Operation” (Специальная Военная Операция – Spetsial’naya Voyennaya Operatsiya —SVO, or SMO in English abbreviation) and not a “war.””
“Zelensky’s decree of March 24, 2021 for the reconquest of Crimea and the Donbass was the real trigger for the SMO. From that moment on, the Russians understood that if there was military action against them, they would have to intervene. But they also knew that the cause of the Ukrainian operation was NATO membership, as Oleksei Arestovitch had explained. That is why, in mid-December 2021, they were submitting proposals to the USA and NATO on extending the Alliance: their aim was then to remove Ukraine’s motive for an offensive in the Donbass.”
“An important element of Russian military and political thinking is its legalistic dimension. The way our media present events, systematically omitting facts that could explain, justify, legitimize or even legalize Russia’s actions. We tend to think that Russia is acting outside any legal framework. For example, our media present the Russian intervention in Syria as having been decided unilaterally by Moscow; whereas it was carried out at the request of the Syrian government, after the West had allowed the Islamic State to move closer to Damascus, as confessed by John Kerry, then Secretary of State. Nevertheless, there is never any mention of the occupation of eastern Syria by American troops, who were never even invited there!”
“[…] on March 27, Zelensky publicly defended his proposal and on March 28, as a gesture of support for this effort, Vladimir Putin eased the pressure on the capital and withdrew his troops from the area. Zelensky’s proposal served as the basis for the Istanbul Communiqué of March 29, 2022, a ceasefire agreement as a prelude to a peace agreement. It was this document that Vladimir Putin presented in June 2023, when an African delegation visited Moscow. It was Boris Johnson’s intervention that prompted Zelensky to withdraw his proposal, exchanging peace and the lives of his men for support “for as long as it takes.””
“In essence, Russia agreed to withdraw to the borders of February 23, 2022, in exchange for a ceiling on Ukrainian forces and a commitment not to become a NATO member, along with security guarantees from a number of countries….”
“in an interview with the Ukrainian channel Apostrof’ on March 18, 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky’s advisor Oleksei Arestovitch cynically explains that, because Ukraine wants to join NATO, it will have to create the conditions for Russia to attack Ukraine and be definitively defeated.”
“What the West wants in September 2023 is merely a pause until an even more violent conflict breaks out, after Ukrainian forces have been rearmed and reconstituted.”
“As the months went by, the course of operations showed that the prospect of a Ukrainian victory was becoming increasingly remote, as Russia, far from being weakened, was growing stronger, militarily and economically. Even General Christopher Cavoli, Supreme American Commander Europe (SACEUR), told a US congressional committee that “Russia’s air, naval, space, digital and strategic capabilities have not suffered significant degradation during this war.””
“[…] as Ben Wallace, ex-Defence Minister, put it in The Telegraph on October 1, 2023: “The most precious commodity is hope.” True enough. But Western appraisal of the situation must be based on realistic analyses of the adversary. However, since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, Western analyses have been based on prejudice.”
“Ukraine’s problem in this conflict is that it has no rational relationship with the notion of victory. By comparison, the Palestinians, who are aware of their quantitative inferiority, have switched to a way of thinking that gives the simple act of resisting a sense of victory. This is the asymmetrical nature of the conflict that Israel has never managed to understand in 75 years, and which it is reduced to overcoming through tactical superiority rather than strategic finesse. In Ukraine, it is the same phenomenon. By clinging to a notion of victory linked to the recovery of territory, Ukraine has locked itself into a logic that can only lead to defeat.”
The US/UK attack on Yemen and the global eruption of imperialist war by WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS)
“[…] supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in the Red Sea, thousands of miles from the US border. American imperialism, which has a military larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, claims to be waging a “defensive” war on the other side of the world against a small, oppressed and impoverished country.”
Like, not for the first time, though. Vietnam was a defensive war. Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada. They were all defensive. The U.S. is always defending its interests, so every act of aggression it perpetrates is, in fact, defensive. A neat trick. It follows that preemptive attacks are also defensive. Since there is always a slight—perceived or actual—to which one can point, everything is defensive.
The Pentagon, which runs the by-far-largest military force that mankind has ever seen, stated, “We’re not interested in a war with Yemen. We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind.”
So there you go. They just spend one trillion dollars per year on occupation and war because the U.S. is defending itself. It’s true, though! The U.S. thinks the entire planet belongs to it. That notion—the notion of empire—must be defended from anyone who thinks otherwise.
“For nearly a decade, the Houthis in Yemen have been subject to ruthless slaughter, waged by Saudi Arabia but armed and financed by the United States. According to the United Nations, 377,000 people have been killed in a genocidal campaign that has involved blockades resulting in mass starvation and disease. First under Obama and then under Trump, the US financed this assault with more than $54 billion in military equipment, aided and abetted by its imperialist allies, including the UK.
“The devastation of Yemen is part of more than 30 years of unending and expanding war, spearheaded and led by American imperialism, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. This included the first Gulf War in 1990; the dismantling of Yugoslavia, culminating in the war against Serbia in 1999; the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; the second war against Iraq in 2003; the war against Libya in 2011; and the CIA-backed civil war in Syria that began the same year.
“Every single administration since that of Bill Clinton has authorized military operations, airstrikes, and destabilization operations in Somalia, across the Gulf of Aiden from Yemen, seeking to control the critical waterway leading to the Suez Canal.”
That’s a good summary of the U.S. Empire’s defensive posture. Look—people don’t pay their protection money willingly. You gotta lean on ‘em a bit. Sometimes a lot, for those who are hard of hearing.
Like Iran.
“The launching of military strikes against Yemen marks a new stage in the deepening imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East and beyond. The US and its imperialist allies are waging a de facto war against Iran, working to eliminate Iran’s military allies throughout the Middle East. The strikes against Yemen are directed at encircling Iran and provoking it into retaliation against US forces, which could be used to justify a full-scale war against Tehran.”
Bush II listed Iran as one of the baddies. The sanctions have continued uninterrupted. The only time most people hear about Iran is either when they’re being accused of trying to develop nuclear weapons (they’re not) or when a uprising looks ready to break the stranglehold that the mullahs have there. Not that the U.S. would support an open, democratic regime there. It doesn’t need f*@kiing France there; it wants something like another Iraq: keep the cheap oil flowing under U.S. aegis, don’t get too uppity or think about too much stuff.
It’s incredible to think that the war on Iran was basically declared the second the mullahs took over and the U.S. never forgot about it. Through an unbroken chain of administrations led by both parties, the animus has remained, utterly unchanged. Biden’s foriegn policy is underpinned by the same precepts as Bush I or Bush II. Obama and Clinton looked no different. They all ran wars and incursions. Reagan and Carter as well. Johnson, Nixon, Kennedy were in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua. Truman mopped up Japan. Eisenhower was in Korea, for whatever reason. He was also quite busy squashing any leftist notions all over Europe, in Greece, Portugal, Italy.
If you’re at all interested in knowing more, check out William Blum’s Killing Hope (read in 2001, before I’d even started tracking my books) and Rogue Superpower (read in 2003, before I’d started writing notes for books). Or, like, anything by Noam Chomsky, but most especially his latest, which he wrote together with the inestimable Vijay Prashad, The Withdrawal
“Every war launched by the US and its imperialist allies has ended in one bloody debacle after the other, with millions of people killed. But each disaster only reinforces the determination of US imperialism to use war as a means to secure its global hegemony.”
One month of the Milei presidency in Argentina by Rafael Azul (WSWS)
“Throughout his campaign and now in office, Milei has peddled the message that all this economic and social pain is necessary to usher in a transformation of Argentine society, bringing in a new epoch of prosperity and freedom. But false electoral promises of a shared sacrifice have now given way to a savage assault on the lower 90 percent of society, while big business, agricultural monopolies and multinational corporations celebrate.”
“Milei is also further subordinating Argentina to US and British imperialisms, celebrating the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza and moving to break commercial ties with China. After Milei rejected the invitation to join the BRICS group, China decided to withhold a currency swap agreement that Argentina was relying on to service its debt payments.”
Western Empire Bombs Yemen To Protect Israel’s Genocide Operations In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter)
“[…] the US and the UK just bombed the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide. Not only that, they bombed the very same country in which they just spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal atrocities which killed hundreds of thousands of people between 2015 and 2022 in an unsuccessful bid to stop the Houthis from taking power.”
This is all done to protect trade routes, to keep prices low. The attacks by the Houthis have resulted in no casualties. They’re annoying. They cause companies to lose money. Some stuff gets to some countries more slowly. The U.S. and UK bombed the Sanaa international airport in Yemen. WTF. No declaration of war. No attempt to negotiate. No consideration of alternatives. No congressional approval. Just a dictator shooting things. This is what people were afraid Trump would do. This is what I wrote at the time that Biden would likely do. He’s a merciless piece of shit. He always has been.
Apparently wars in Ukraine and Gaza are not enough. Nothing ever makes him think it’s time to back down, to negotiate, that things are getting out of hand. Forget cold wars. He makes everything hot immediately. He fighting Russians directly in Syria. Proxy-fighting them in Ukraine. Funding and arming Saudi Arabia to flatten the Houthis in Yemen. Funding and arming the Israelis to flatten the Palestinians in Gaza (and tons of violence in the West Bank as well).
This is mindless violence, all to quash any hopes of rebellion against the empire. All to prevent any change to the system that subjugates so many and funnels so much wealth toward Empire—and a handful of people in it.
Pol Pot’s Atrocities Still Matter, 45 Years After Khmer Rouge’s Fall by Steven Greenhut (Reason)
“What lessons can modern Americans draw from the Cambodian nightmare? I’d suggest we show no tolerance toward grandiose social experiments of any kind (such as radically reordering society to avert a supposed climate doom) and focus instead on incrementally improving life within our current system. People get excited about big, transformative ideas even though they can upend society, yet lose interest in the nuts-and-bolts of the slow-moving democratic process. The latter can be hard work, so no wonder political radicals prefer dangerous shortcuts.”
This kind of follows the Reason thinking, much as WSWS articles end with a call to solidarity among workers. Just stay within the bounds of this world, because it already seems to function—or they’ve fooled themselves into believing that it functions—in a way that they find acceptable. If they were living under communism, then they’d be giving completely different advice. They’d advocate overthrowing everything and going for capitalism. It’s kind of tiring to watch. It’s so intellectually dishonest.
It’s cold comfort that the “radical[…] reordering [of] society” will come whether Greenhut wants it or not. Just go ahead and ignore climate change long enough and it will be forced on us.
Israel in the Dock by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“[…] the US military has been exposed as an ineffectual security force for Maersk container ships carrying sweatshop-made shoes, knock-off Gucci handbags, yoga pants and other essentials of the American consumer economy through the Red Sea. We’ve reached that stage of capitalism.”
“If the GOP wants to impeach Biden, then impeach him for starting another war without Congressional approval. Slam dunk violation of the Constitution. But you won’t, because you want Yemen to be bombed and you’d rather Biden’s fingerprints be on the shrapnel. Cowards.”
“LBJ didn’t even lose the New Hampshire primary and still dropped out, knowing that the war would ultimately drag him to defeat. Eugene McCarthy only garnered 42% of the vote in NH, which was enough for LBJ to call it quits, even though he had the entire Great Society program to run on. Biden doesn’t have anything like that to offer. But he’s also not as politically astute as LBJ was and much more vain. More vain than the man who named his own penis (Jumbo), you say? Yes. But Biden’s vanity has no basis in reality. He’s the village idiot who ended up in the cockpit (thanks to Obama). He has no political skills whatsoever as far as I can tell, except being a dutiful servant of the financial industry for 50 years, an easy sell for reelection after reelection in Delaware. LBJ, probably the craftiest politician–for better and often worse–of the 20th Century, still had a better shot at beating Nixon than the spineless HHH, who the great Robert Sherrill dubbed the Drugstore Liberal. But the war had gutted him, physically and psychologically. Deservedly so. He knew it and stood down to give someone else a shot. Biden shows none of this emotional strain or political insight. Largely because he’s a person devoid of empathy, especially for any casualties at his hands. He’s blindly walking right off the electoral cliff and taking his entire party down with him. Given the fact they’ve offered little resistance, they deserve the coming fall.”
“Israel’s war on Gaza has produced more planet-warming gases than 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in a year, causing “immense” impact on climate.” Nearly half the total CO2 emissions were down to US cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel.””
“Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, giving a eulogy for a friend, Roi Rotenberg, who was killed in Gaza in 1956: “Today, let us not hurl accusations at the murderers. How can we argue with their hatred of us? For eight years they have been living in refugee camps of Gaza, while in front of their eyes we make our homes on the lands and villages where they and their forefathers lived.””
“Karhi: We should encourage voluntary migration and we should compel them until they say they want it…
Interviewer: How?
Karhi: The war does what it does.
Interviewer: Meaning continue to pressure them using force, starvation, difficult conditions.”
“Walid Shahid: “The biggest failure of DC journalists was spending all fall asking Democrats to condemn statements of 19-year-old college activists rather than the official statements of Israeli cabinet ministers.””
“Emmanuel Todd, one of the last politically engaged French intellectuals, told a French television show that the best thing that could happen to Europe is the dissolution of the American empire: “Once the United States agrees to withdraw from their empire, from Eurasia and all these regions where they maintain conflicts… Contrary to what we think, we say ‘what will we become when the US no longer protects us?’ – we will be at peace! The best thing that could happen to Europe is the disappearance of the United States.””
If You’ve Just Started Paying Attention To US Foreign Policy by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“There are all sorts of rules and regulations and narratives and justifications for why this all happens the way it happens, but if you mentally “mute” the soundtrack on the verbal overlay and just look at what’s actually happening, what you will see is the lion’s share of the world’s wealth and resources moving northward and westward from populations of a darker average skin tone toward populations of a paler average skin tone. Wherever that movement is hindered, diverted, threatened or inconvenienced, you will see western war machinery moving southward and eastward to get it back on the desired track.
“Most major international conflicts can be understood as either direct or indirect efforts by the US empire to shore up planetary domination, which are often met with resistance by populations who wish to retain their sovereignty.”
Stranded by George Monbiot
“As usual with privatisation and austerity, costs have not been cut, just transferred from one place to another. They are always transferred in the same direction: from corporations or the state to individuals.
“Similar things happen throughout our depleted public sector, whether it’s run by private companies or the tattered remains of the state. By letting flood defences crumble, the government’s balance sheet looks better, but much greater costs are passed to households and their insurers. By triggering, through austerity, a crisis in special educational needs provision, the Tories dump untold misery on families, in some cases forcing parents to give up their jobs to care for their children. By allowing the water companies to cut corners, the government ensures that swimmers and surfers are poisoned and tourism and hospitality businesses go under.
“There are no savings from austerity and privatisation, just a wholesale shifting of costs. The rich pay less tax and the public service companies in which they own shares make greater profits. The rest of us pick up the bill.”
Taiwan’s election result signals escalating tensions with China by Peter Symonds (WSWS)
“While Lai and the DPP won the presidency for a third term, the election outcome was not a ringing endorsement of their policies. KMT candidate Hou received 33.5 percent of the vote while the so-called independent Ko and his TPP gained 26.5 percent. Together, the two candidates that favour an easing of tensions with China received 60 percent of the vote. Lai is the first president to be elected with less than 50 percent of votes.”
“The stance taken by the new Lai administration that takes office in May will certainly compound tensions across the Taiwan Strait. However, it is Washington, already embroiled in wars in Europe and the Middle East, that is the chief instigator of the war drive against China throughout the Indo-Pacific, now focused, above all, on Taiwan.”
Turns Out “Israel Has A Right To Defend Itself” Meant “Israel Has A Right To Commit Genocide” by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“In the mind of the empire simp, the violence of the empire’s enemies always comes completely out of nowhere, without provocation and for no reason. Ansarallah started attacking ships in the Red Sea because they’re pirates who hate freedom of navigation. Hamas attacked Israel because they’re evil and hate Jews. Putin invaded Ukraine because he’s evil and hates democracy. Grown adults portray the enemies of the empire the same way the children’s cartoon show Captain Planet portrayed its villains, cackling evilly about how they’re going to dump toxic waste into the ocean for no reason other than to hurt the environment.”
My Trip to Syktyvkar by Boris Kagarlitsky (Russian Dissent)
“While I was behind bars, a solidarity campaign was unfolding outside, in which many people took part in Russia and around the world. Moreover, it seems that the Kremlin leadership was especially impressed by the fact that a significant part of the voices in my defense were coming from the Global South. In the context of confrontation with the West, Russian rulers are trying to establish themselves as fighters against American and European neo-colonialism, so criticism of them voiced in Brazil, South Africa, or India was received with vexation. Indian economist Radhika Desai even asked Vladimir Putin about my fate during the Valdai Forum.”
“The trial took place on December 12, 2023. The prosecutor’s office demanded I be sent to prison for five and a half years, but the judge decided otherwise. I was released from the courtroom, having been sentenced to pay a fine of 600 thousand rubles (the very next day this amount was collected by subscribers of the Rabkor YouTube channel). True, paying it off turned out to be not so easy: I had to deposit the money in person, but I was also included in the “list of extremists and terrorists” prohibited from conducting any financial transactions. At the moment I have to seek special permission so that I can give the state the money that it requires from me. I am prohibited from teaching, as well as from administering Internet sites and YouTube channels.
“However, they haven’t forbidden me to think and write yet, which is what I’m doing for now.”
An American Iconoclast: Cornel West on the Campaign Trail by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“As an orator West has things in common with his late friend and musical partner, Prince, who to the uninitiated also sometimes came across as derivative at first blush. There was so much Hendrix, James Brown, and Curtis Mayfield in Prince that at times he felt like a tribute act, but listen just a little and you heard the synthesis into something very original. West has the hair of Frederick Douglass, the lyricism of King, and at times, the surgical anger of Malcolm X. But the sum is uniquely him, which might be his problem, politically.”
“From a literary standpoint West is arguably superior to all his heroes — his ability to rattle off mellifluous sentences extemporaneously is unique in American popular culture — but his default temperament is sunny, ingratiating, and forgiving, maybe to a fault. All great politicians have a streak of P.T. Barnum in them, an instinct for calculation and (if needed) ruthlessness that never leaves them. Surely this is an exhausting type of person to be, but they’re all wired that way. Dr. West is a nice man.”
“The Greens should have been delighted to have a candidate whose very name inspired Beltway sack-shrinkage — West’s announcement led to a spate of transparent hit pieces, with Democrats horrified by visions of progressive and black voter defections — but the reality of party politics, even Green Party politics, is almost unimaginably complicated for rookies. West in October bailed on the Greens, apparently exhausted by bureaucratic requirements and the need to, as Politico put it, “kiss ass.””
“There are so many demographics recoiling from traditional politics now that in a fair electoral fight, Washington consensus would surely lose. This is why, after decades in which third parties were mostly irrelevant at the presidential level (with the exception of Ross Perot’s brief surge in the 1992 cycle), ballot access is suddenly a commodity more prized than gold. Anyone with a pulse who can order a cheeseburger without help will be a serious option for millions, once voters disappear into booths in November. The problem is getting names on ballots.”
““History is such a minefield of chaos, brother,” West replies. “You can go back to so many early elections, and you’ve got shootouts, you got people hiding in basements. And so American history, not just American history but human history in general —each moment has its own distinctive form of specific chaos.” He pauses. “But this particular moment of chaos is quite gargantuan now. No doubt about that.””
“Maybe the political issues aren’t quite as severe as the ones King or Du Bois faced, but West’s refusal over decades to bend to the new Clintonian paradigm of “transactional politics” — better known as “selling out” — has made him a pariah in a left-liberal world that once adored him. Trace back far enough and his presidential run seems like the inevitable end result of a long career of refusing to go along to get along.”
“While describing Trump as a “bonafide gangster and neofascist,” he still objected strongly to the Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Trump from the ballot, saying Democrats should “not rely on the courts as a mechanism to circumvent Brother Biden’s anemic poll numbers.””
“[…] my guess is West’s wit and no-bullshit attitude would, with time, go over well enough with most every demographic but the one currently running the country, i.e. upscale white liberals. The latter group simply has no patience for people who’ll talk about their flaws to their faces, and West is the dictionary definition of that.”
Cornel West on talking to all voters, even die-hard Trump ones.
““I don’t approach them in terms of them being stereotyped,” he says. “They’re human beings wrestling with a lot of economic frustration and deprivation. Now, they’ve got some xenophobic sensibilities you got to work with. But one out eight of them voted for my very dear brother Bernie Sanders, and one out of twelve voted for Obama. People are subject to shifts given the fluctuating moments that we live in.” He paused. “You just don’t know. So I will continue to go and talk to them.””
Technicality Could Sink Genocide Case v Israel by Joe Lauria (Scheer Post)
The upshot is that South Africa brought its case against Israel without 100% proper notification prior to the case, so Israel says that there is no standing “dispute”, which means that South Africa shouldn’t have been able to bring the case, and that the court should actually not even agree to hear it because it didn’t follow procedure. Basically, if you put your fingers in your ears and scream so that you can’t hear accusations, you can pretend to have been blindsided by an official accusation, just shocked at a court summons, upon which the court has to instead reprimand the accuser, telling them to start all over.
A neat trick, that. Of course, it just means that international law is completely and utterly toothless unless its being wielded against poor nations to relieve them of their resources and to load them up with debt incurred to pay fines for crimes committed by dictators emplaced and propped up for decades by the same countries that now accuse, prosecute, convict, and sentence them.
It’s a sham, a scam—and it always has been. The “International rules-based order” is no stupider than what it purports to replace.
“American academic Norman Finkelstein, told an interviewer: “It will completely discredit the Court if they issue a decision — we have decided not to pursue this case of genocide because we don’t think there is a dispute. That just can’t work.” ”
“Murray added:
““I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s ‘no dispute’ argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means ‘no dispute’. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…””
’We Would Prefer If 3000 Babies Weren’t Murdered Every Day,‘ Says Crowd Of Deranged Extremists (Babylon Bee)
I was kind of surprised at first because I thought that the Bee—which has expressed full-throated support for everything that Israel wants to do—had changed its tune. Alas, no. The satire magazine proves itself capable of operating in an even more irony-free zone than I’d thought it could by expressing its support for not allowing abortion in America. You know, these guys have some funny headlines, but a lot of the politics implicit in their satire is absolute garbage. They have no nuance and they have really, really one-sided satire. They should be careful of sliding into just being superficial trash, but I doubt they even notice how they’ve shifted in their presentation over the years.
The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biden’s Illegal War in Yemen by Andrew Napolitano (Antiwar.com)
“All power in the federal government comes from the Constitution and from no other source. Congress, however, has managed to extend its reach beyond the confines of the Constitution by giving money to the president and then looking the other way when he spends it.
“Congress cannot legally declare war on Gaza or Yemen or Russia, since there are no militarily grounded reasons for doing so. None of these countries poses a threat to American national security, and the U.S. has no treaty that triggers American military support to any ally implicated by those countries. But Congress spends money on wars nevertheless.”
“Congress has not only not declared war on Yemen; it has not authorized the use of American military forces against it. Yet, Biden has inherited a blank check in the form of the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001. That unconstitutional legislation cedes Congress’ war-making powers to the president for the purpose of attacking any person or group involved in the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 attacks? They were 22 years ago! They were, but all presidents since the younger Bush have claimed authority under this law to kill whomever they pleased in the Middle East.”
“In Ukraine, Congress has only authorized weapons and cash to be sent to Ukraine, but Biden has sent troops as well. The U.S. involvement in Vietnam began the same way: no declaration of war, no authorization for the use of military force, yet a gradual buildup of American troops as advisers and instructors, and then a congressionally supported land war that saw half a million American troops deployed, 10% of whom came home in body bags.”
And also killed 3–4 million people in Southeast Asia. You know, in addition to those obviously much-more-precious 50,000 American lives. How do I know they’re more previous? The U.S. built a huge war memorial in Washington D.C. with all of their names on it. You know whose names aren’t on it? Anyone from Vietnam.
“Have Russia or Yemen threatened the U.S.? No. What grave acts have they committed against the U.S.? None. What is Biden’s objective? His vision of American empire.”
Houthis And The Blowhards by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
My, how Mr. Greenfield likes to ascribe bad opinions to what he considers to be opponents, if only because they fail to unquestioningly love the things that he loves. He loves the USA and Israel, in no particular order. His context is the U.S. modestly tiptoes through the world, minding its own business, and sometimes horrible, petty, small-minded, blinkered animals and terrorists wish harm on it and even try to do harm to it. The same story applies to Israel. There is no agency on the part of either of these countries. They are always just reacting in as measured a manner as possible in order to prevent the next unprovoked, unforeseeable, completely unjustified, and utterly unexplainable attack on the unutterable magnificence that is the ship of state of these great nations. Anyone with a different context is automatically assigned the most ridiculous of opinions, the most straw-man-like of justification for their actions.
“These are our children, our academics, our overly-educated and unduly-passionate true believers that the terrorists are the good guys and these Israel, that the United States, both independently and in complicity with Israel, are evil.”
I’ve never seen him make any attempt to grapple with the real arguments that might be made. He always takes the biggest fools at their word—who, in fighting empire and against injustice, are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons—rather than taking on a real interlocutor, even if only a fictitious one. The Houthis attacked shipping vessels, harming no-one. The U.S. and UK obliterated cities and an international airport, killing dozens of civilians. Greenfield will never analyze whether his “side” might be unjustified in doing so. It’s perfectly OK with him for his “side” to break all sorts of laws “defending itself” because laws are for other countries. The epithet “terrorist” is exclusively for other states, not his own or any with which he has developed an affinity. This is not a principle. This is just the same mush-brained American-liberal mindset that has helped build an empire. It’s great that he seems to be for justice for Americans wronged by the American court systems, but this penchant for justice and fairness doesn’t extend beyond the border.
Americans Are Not As Poor As They Think They Are by Thomas Wells (3 Quarks Daily)
“The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. They are objectively some of the luckiest people in world history. On the one hand all this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty is mildly annoying for the rest of the world to have to listen to. On the other hand, it reflects shared delusions about individual entitlements and America’s economic decline that are driving a toxic ‘doom politics’ of cynicism and resentment, while also neglecting the needs of actually poor Americans.”
OK, sure. Probably the wrong people are complaining, but I think you might be misunderstanding the message. People are not articulating their feeling of insecurity to your satisfaction. When they’re asked whether the economy is bad, they say “yes”, but what they mean is that the system sucks.
“(Although some, like the extreme cost of health-care compared to other rich countries are attributable to America specific causes, such as peculiarly dysfunctional institutional arrangements.)”
Why do you have to ruin your argument by parenthetically hand-waving away the cost that causes most bankruptcies. Instead of lambasting people for whining, try to figure out if they’re whining about the wrong thing. Maybe when they complain about poverty, they mean, rather than not having enough money, that they feel a sense of precarity, a lack of security, a foreboding that it could all end on a whim.
They’re not poor now, but maybe they’re expressing the real worry that they might be if they ever. Stop. Hustling. Thirty-year-olds can look forward to having six to ten more jobs for different employers before they can even think of retiring, each increasingly job difficult to get, unless you’re gifted or work at something that can’t be automated away or made obsolete.
An influencer might be technically middle-class right now, but has no future. Work lives are decades long, while jobs and careers are 2-5 years long. Insecurity? Fear? You betcha. People are aware that they will have to do unprincipled, soul-crushing things to retain their position—and even that might not work. They feel temporarily not poor because that’s the best their society is willing to offer.
Whereas Steinbeck’s quite that “[…] the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires” might have once been true, it’s probably more accurate to say now that “the middle-class see themselves not as safe and sound, but as the temporarily fortuitous indigent.”
“Americans live in smaller households in larger homes and drive bigger better cars than they used to. It may be that many Americans can’t afford the lifestyle which they feel they deserve (and maybe they do deserve more!), but the lifestyle they can afford is nevertheless much better than that of previous generations.”
The author is evaluating “better” purely in monetary terms and not in psychic or security terms. That’s all we can say: f&@k you for saying the economy sucks or the system sucks—if you can even express such a thought—you have more stuff than ever! What are you whining about?
“A bigger problem is the division between the majority who enjoy housing wealth and the minority without it (especially younger people).”
Again, the author tosses this in as an aside, when it’s pretty salient. An entire generation has no idea what’s going to happen over the next 50 years, but the current generation has their nut, so they should be happy about it. Can’t you think that the economy sucks even if you personally benefit from it?
That and the laser-like focus on measuring wealth in term of an illiquid asset that is a large proportion of most households’ wealth (their home). You can borrow against it, but that doesn’t feel secure, especially if you’re aware of the regularity of popped bubbles that deflate this fictitious wealth. People don’t believe in the numbers anymore—or in the fairy tale told by their society. They figure it wouldn’t take much to lose all control and end up dependent on help or end up on the street. This feeling is promoted by all levels to keep wages low. They system uses fear to keep the rabble in line, demonizes poverty and welfare, then wonders why people are terrified of poverty.
“(Real research institutions that care about getting their methodology and facts right, like the Fed, come to very different numbers.) Nevertheless, even obvious nonsense will be believed if it is endlessly repeated and left unchallenged.”
Which rumors and numbers, though? There are good economists—like Dean Baker—telling these stories as well, about how something like forty percent (I can’t remember exactly) of American households would not be able to handle a surprise bill of five hundred bucks without borrowing money. Are those economists deluded as well?
What Is to Be Done? by Richard D. Wolff (CounterPunch)
“Today’s capitalism is global—the basic economic structure of the world economy features its core employer-employee model. The “relations of production” inside enterprises (factories, offices, and stores) position a small minority of workplace participants as employers. They make all the basic “business decisions” about what, how, and where to produce and what to do with the product (and revenue when they sell it). They alone make all those decisions. Employees, the majority of workplace participants, are excluded from those decisions.”
“The G7’s “mature capitalisms” all survived and grew because workers accepted the employer-employee organization of workplaces. Amid and despite the G7 nations’ endless ideological celebrations of democracy, workers accepted the total absence of democracy inside capitalist enterprises. With some exceptions and resistance, it became routine common sense that representative democracy somehow belonged in residential communities but not in the communities at work. Inside capitalist enterprises, autocracy was the norm. Employers ruled employees but were not democratically accountable to them.”
“Employers in each capitalist enterprise enriched a select circle by delivering portions of the revenue to themselves, to owners of the enterprise, and to a few top executives. That select circle wielded extraordinary political and cultural influence. It replicated the absence of democracy inside its enterprises by keeping the democracy outside them merely formal. Governments in capitalism were typically shaped by that select circle’s paid lobbyists, campaign donations, and paid mass-media productions. In modern capitalism, the kings and queens banished in earlier centuries reappeared, altered, and relocated, as CEOs inside ever larger capitalist enterprises dominating whole societies.”
“One major way employers can deflect such opposition is by narrowly defining their obligation to employees in terms of wages paid to enable consumption. Wages adequate for consumption became the necessary and explicitly sufficient compensatory reward for work. Implicitly, they likewise became the employees’ compensation for the absence of democracy within the workplace.”
“In declining empires, the rich and powerful preserve their wealth and privileges while offloading the costs of decline onto the mass of employees. Automating jobs, exporting them to lower-wage regions, importing cheap immigrant labor, and mass campaigns against taxes are the tried-and-true mechanisms to accomplish that offloading.”
“Workers’ goals never needed to be and should never have been limited to raising wages, important as that was and is. Those goals can and should include a demand for full democracy inside the workplace. Otherwise, whatever reforms and gains workers’ struggles achieve can subsequently be undone (as happened to the New Deal in the United States and social democracy in many other countries). Workers have had to learn that only democratized workplaces can secure the reforms workers win. What is to be done in the old, declining centers of capitalism is for class struggles to include the democratization of enterprises. A transition toward economies grounded on worker-cooperative enterprises is the strategic target.”
Amen. I’ve been saying this for years.
“In the People’s Republic of China, where roughly half of enterprises are private and half public, nearly all have adopted the employer-employee organizational model.”
“The qualities of democracy that have been achieved within the G7, the BRICS, or most other countries, to date have been more formal than substantive. Where elections of representatives occur, the influences of wealth and income inequalities, the social power wielded by CEOs, and their controls over mass media render democracy more symbolic than real. Many people know it; still more feel it. Extending democracy into the economy and specifically into the internal organization of enterprises represents a major step in moving political democracy beyond merely formal and symbolic to substantive and real.”
Tech workers and gig workers need each other by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“Capitalists hate capitalism. For a corporate executive, the fact that you have to make good things, please your customers, pay your workers, and beat the competition are all bugs, not features. The best business is one in which people simply pay you money without your having to do anything or worry that someday they’ll stop. UBI for the investor class, in other words.
“Douglas Rushkoff calls this “going meta.” Don’t sell things, provide a platform where people sell things. Don’t provide a platform, invest in the platform. Don’t invest in the platform, buy options on the platform. Don’t buy options, buy derivatives of options.”
“A more precise analysis comes from economist Yanis Varoufakis, who calls this technofeudalism. Varoufakis draws our attention to the distinction between profits and rents. Profit is the income a capitalist receives from mobilizing workers to do something productive and then skimming off the surplus created by their labor.
“By contrast, rent is income a feudalist derives from simply owning something that a capitalist or a worker needs in order to be productive. The entrepreneur who opens a coffee shop earns profits by creaming off the surplus value created by the baristas. The rentier who owns the building the coffee shop rents gets money simply for owning the building.”
“[…] competition hitches their ability to satisfy you to their ability to get paid by you.
“Competition has been circling the drain for 40 years, as the “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust, hatched by Reagan’s court sorcerers at the University of Chicago School of Economics, took hold. This theory insists that monopolies are evidence of “efficiency” – if everyone shops at one store, that’s evidence that it’s the best store, not evidence that they’re cheating.
“For 40 years, we’ve allowed companies to violate antitrust law by merging with major competitors, acquiring fledgling rivals, and using investor cash to sell below cost so that no one else can enter the market. This has produced the inbred industrial hulks of today, with five or fewer firms dominating everything from eyeglasses to banking, sea freight to professional wrestling.”
“Imagine a boardroom where someone says, “I calculate that if we make our ads 25% more invasive and obnoxious, we can eke out 2% more in ad-revenue.” If you think of a business as a transhuman colony organism that exists to maximize shareholder value, this is a no-brainer.
“But now consider the rejoinder: “If we make our ads 25% more obnoxious, then 50% of our users will be motivated to type, ‘how do I block ads?’ into a search engine. When that happens, we don’t merely lose out on the expected 2% of additional revenue – our income from those users falls to zero, forever.””
That’s an adorable fantasy because they next thing they ask in the boardroom is how much it would cost to make ad-blockers illegal. Ah, that’s the next part he talks about. Never mind. Jumped the gun a little bit.
“An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.”
Javier Milei Tells World Leaders: ‘The State Is Not the Solution’ by Katarina Hall (Reason)
“Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei praised the virtues of free markets and warned political leaders about the dangers of collectivism in a speech at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.”
Talk about red meat for Reason magazine. I’ve been following this magazine for a while and I appreciate some of their content, but man they just can’t resist this bullshit. This obvious mental incompetent is spouting off about collectivism and they love it. He says that the only way to improve everything that capitalism has broken is because we haven’t been doing it hard enough.
That’s why Argentina’s president is suddenly at the WEF—after years and years in the wilderness under Kirchner et. al. Despite its name, the World Economic Forum is just a bunch of billionaires and lobbyists fellating each other about what a great job neoliberalism is doing enriching them while ruining everyone else’s lives.
““The West is in danger, it is in danger because those who are supposed to defend Western values find themselves co-opted by a worldview that—inexorably—leads to socialism, consequently to poverty,” Milei said in the opening of his keynote speech in Davos, Switzerland, during his first overseas trip as president.”
OMG. Tell me more, you unheralded genius. It literally doesn’t matter how undereducated his background, if he spouts the right thing, then he’s in the club.
Listen to this slobbering idiot of an author just rehashing the same tired, old tropes.
“Milei argued that collectivism punishes business owners and stifles innovation by destroying any incentives “to produce better goods and better services at a better price.” Countries embracing greater economic freedom are eight times wealthier than their repressed counterparts, Milei asserted.”
OMG, yes, everything that isn’t exclusively awesome for business is bad for business and must be eliminated. The goal of every society obviously has nothing to do with people, and must be built for the thriving of business. Those businesses will then bring bounty to people, right? That’s been the story for decades. Give all of your shit to those that already have everything, they’ll do something magical with it, and return the favor manyfold. Except they don’t. They never do. They just keep what you give them and demand more. It’s nothing other than a scam and these fools have no pity, not empathy, and no bullshit detectors. They just sploosh all over literally anyone who tells them the bedtime story they’ve been programmed—or programmed themselves—to believe.
I mean, look at this guy. This is the picture the author published. I feel like they’re taking the piss.
“Despite internal challenges, Milei’s radical agenda has garnered support from external observers, including Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “The Argentine economy is in such bad shape that it has to be shaken up. President Milei and his team are doing exactly that,” she said during an interview in Davos. Argentina is currently the IMF’s largest debtor, with an outstanding debt of $46 billion.”
Oh, yeah, not just Reason magazine, but the IMF is absolutely ready to slob his knob. The IMF has never seen an economy it didn’t think it couldn’t bleed dry. It loves this shit: bleed the people dry to pay back the IMF—that’s the way!
Global 1% Own 43% of Financial Assets by Ben Norton (Scheer Post)
“The world’s richest 1% own 43% of global financial assets, and the wealth of the top five billionaires has doubled since 2020, while 60% of humanity – nearly 5 billion people – collectively got poorer, according to a report by Oxfam, a leading international humanitarian organization.”
“A staggering 69.3% of the world’s wealth is located in the Global North, which has just 20.6% of the planet’s population.”
The plunder party is going extremely well. Only a racist would say that this is how things should be. Why a racist? Because you’d think that northern-hemisphere people deserve to have most of the world’s wealth—which is largely built on resources extracted from the part of the world they don’t live in. It’s odd how, in a capitalist economy, the people who live on top of the most valuable resources are the poorest, while those with the least scruples and the biggest guns are the richest. These obvious facts on the ground speak to a global organizational structure that has very little to do with any espoused ideologies.
And, right on cue, The World Could Soon Have Its First Trillionaire. Good! by J.D. Tuccille (Reason) decides to laud having a trillionaire because that would be an unalloyed good, a tremendous achievement. King of the world. He argues that even a trillion dollars isn’t that much because,
“A trillion dollars (Oxfam is UK-based, but the report is framed in U.S. dollars) is impressive. But it doesn’t represent a fixed measure of wealth, since governments constantly succumb to the temptation to devalue money.”
You see? The same person who can bemoan the government spending millions on food stamps can argue that a person with a trillion dollars would barely have any money at all? Tada! I don’t have cite any more about his further arguments that it’s the nigh-altruistic beneficence of billionaire’s gracing us with their genius and acumen that have dragged many benighted souls out of poverty. They wouldn’t have been able to help themselves, but the rich employers saw fit to grant them jobs so that they could no longer be poor. The guy might as just cite Ayn Rand as a source on all of his essays. No-one at Reason ever spares a thought for how much of a drag on the economy billionaires are, how we’ve managed to conquer some poverty despite them, not because of them. That, if we’d have a more humane system, we’d have even fewer poor people—and fewer billionaires as well, which would lead to a river of tears from nearly all of the writers at Reason magazine. I just finished watching Midnight Mass—which features a vampire, but not how you think. Vampires have their servants called familiars. They just suck up to the vampires for no clear reason other than a child-like adulation, a desire to bask in the reflected light of their idols. That’s how I think of people who love billionaires.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s “A City On Mars” by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that ever aspect of space settlement is vastly beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What’s more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back real space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool). Every place we might settle in space – giant rotating rings, the Moon, Mars – is vastly more hostile than Earth. Not just more hostile than Earth as it stands today – the most degraded, climate-wracked, nuke-blasted Earth you can imagine is a paradise of habitability compared to anything else.”
“Going to space won’t save us from the climate emergency. The unimaginably vast trove of material and the energy and advanced technology needed to lift it off Earth and get it to Mars is orders of magnitude more material and energy than we would need to resolve the actual climate emergency here.”
“That’s the crux of the Weinersmiths’ argument: if you want to establish space settlements, you need to do a bunch of other stuff first, like figure out life-support, learn more about our celestial neighbors, and vastly improve our robotics. If you want to create stable space-settlements, you’ll need to create robust governance systems – space law that you can count on, rather than space law that you plan on shoving out the airlock. If you want humans to reproduce in space – a necessary precondition for a space settlement that lasts more than a single human lifespan – then we need to do things like breed multiple generations of rodents and other animals, on space stations.”
“[…] space isn’t amazing because it offers a “Plan B” for an Earth that is imperiled by humanity’s recklessness. Space isn’t amazing because it offers unparalleled material wealth, or unlimited energy, or a chance to live without laws or governance. It’s not amazing because it will end war by mixing the sensawunda of the “Pale Blue Dot” with the lebensraum of an infinite universe.”
“If we can figure out how to extract resources as dispersed as Lunar He3 or asteroid ice, we’ll have solved problems like extracting tons of gold from the ocean or conflict minerals from landfill sites, these being several orders of magnitude more resource-dense than space.”
“If we can build the robots that are necessary for supporting a space society, we will have learned how to build robots that take up the most dangerous and unpleasant tasks that human workers perform on Earth today.”
“[…] we can’t settle space until we figure out the solutions to Earth’s problems. Earth’s problems are far simpler than the problems of space settlement.”
“Arguments for space settlement that turn on existential risks (like humanity being wiped out by comets, sunspots, nuclear armageddon or climate collapse) sound an awful lot like the arguments about “AI safety” – the “risk” that the plausible sentence generator is on the verge of becoming conscious and turning us all into paperclips. Both arguments are part of a sales-pitch for investment in commercial ventures that have no plausible commercial case, but whose backers are hoping to get rich anyway, and are (often) sincerely besotted with their own fantasies”
“Both AI and space settlement pass over the real risks, such as the climate consequences of their deployment, or the labor conditions associated with their production. After all, when you’re heading off existential risk, you don’t stop to worry about some carbon emissions or wage theft.”
“It’s socially important work, a form of automation that is an unalloyed good, but you won’t hear about it from LLM advocates. No one is gonna get rich on improving the efficiency of overturning wrongful convictions with natural language processing. You can’t inflate a stock bubble with the Innocence Project.”
“[…] learning about improving gestational health by breeding multigenerational mouse families in geosynchronous orbit is no way to get a billionaire tech baron to commit $250 billion to space science. But that’s not an argument against emphasizing real science that really benefits our whole species. It’s an argument for taking away capital allocation authority from tech billionaires.”
I learned a few things—e.g., I kind of knew that a galaxy has about 100B stars, but I wouldn’t have been able to say for sure that there are at least 100B galaxies, if not up to 2T of them—but the #1 lesson is: holy shit do I not have any idea what “standard knowledge” is. I guess you don’t need to know what a planet is to get through the day.
WHO officials warn sharply of the ongoing dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)
“Van Kerkhove then warned, “We don’t know the long-term impacts of repeat infections … Our concern is in five years from now, ten years from now, in 20 years from now, what are we going to see in terms of cardiac impairment, of pulmonary impairment, of neurological impairment; we don’t know. We don’t know everything about this virus.” She continued to state that the problem is significant and research in better understanding and treating Long COVID is severely financially under-resourced.”
“Van Kerkhove added, “According to wastewater estimates we have from a number of countries, the actual circulation of SARS-CoV-2 is anywhere from two to 19 times higher than what is being reported. And what is difficult is that the virus is continuing to evolve.” Although she noted that the number of deaths has reduced drastically from two years ago, there continues to be around 10,000 official COVID deaths per month.
“However, Van Kerkhove cautioned that this represents less than a quarter of all countries reporting data, and half of official deaths were just from the US, meaning there is a massive undercounting simply from lack of reporting. She stated bluntly, “We are missing deaths from countries around the world. Just because those countries aren’t reporting deaths doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.””
DeSantis Repeats Lie That Booster Shots Make You More Likely To Get COVID by Ron Bailey (Reason)
I had to check twice to be sure that this was being published on Reason and by this author, but it’s true! A site that normally only reports on COVID when it’s bitching about masking policy and taking away freedumb has written a cogent and quite excellent article about the manipulations of an otherwise innocuous CDC message about the benefits of vaccination.
“Read the sentence again: BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received COVID-19 vaccines. [terrible sentence]
“Clearly, all that it is saying is that the new variant may be capable of evading immune protection induced by either infection or vaccination. In other words, both previously infected and vaccinated people might be susceptible to the new BA.2.86 variant. It does not even come close to saying that vaccinated people are more likely to get COVID.”
I just want to say that, while agree with his assessment, the first sentence from the CDC is absolutely terribly written. It can very clearly be interpreted as saying that you are more susceptible to the latest variant if you’ve either had COVID before or been vaccinated against it. Just writing something that can be so drastically misinterpreted is bad enough. Those that further decided it was only worse for the vaccinated are assholes with an agenda.
What I think they were going for is something like:
“BA.2.86 may be more capable than previous variants of evading immune protection. That is, the sterilizing effect of a prior infection or vaccination may be less than it has been against previous variants.”
The CDC eventually clarified this themselves with “The intent of this sentence was to raise the possibility that BA.2.86 might be more capable of causing infection compared with other variants currently circulating”. I really think they need better writers.
At any rate, Bailey finishes up with this really even-handed and smart conclusion.
““The purpose of vaccination is to decrease the severity of diseases,” explained University of Tokyo virologist Kei Sato in JAMA. “Many people think that the purpose of vaccination is to prevent infection, but this is wrong.”
“It would have been fantastic if the COVID vaccines had offered permanent sterilizing immunity the way that vaccines for measles and polio largely do, but reams of evidence do show that current vaccines significantly protect people from the worst consequences of COVID infections. Let’s hope that research on creating a universal COVID vaccine bears fruit sooner rather than later.”
Long COVID specialist tells US Senate that “the best way to prevent Long COVID is to prevent COVID in the first place!” by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)
“As Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a physician-scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who is a leading expert on Long COVID, with numerous high-impact publications on the devastation wrought by COVID-19 infections, stated bluntly during his testimony, “The best way to prevent Long COVID is to prevent COVID in the first place. This requires a multilayers/multipronged approach. We must develop sustainable solutions to prevent repeated infections with SARS-CoV-2 and Long COVID that would be embraced by the public. This requires acceleration of development of oral and intranasal vaccines that induce strong mucosal immunity to block infections with the virus. Ventilation and air filtration systems can also play a major role in reducing the risk of infection with airborne pathogens. We did an amazing job proofing our buildings against earthquakes that happen once every few decades or few centuries. Why don’t we proof our buildings against the hazards of airborne pathogens?””
Because there’s no money in it. Profits margins sound pretty shitty, buddy, not gonna lie. Hey, though, if you think of some way of making the rich richer and maybe stopping COVID, then you’ll have a winner. Yup. Get back to us when you do, OK? Thanks, bye.
“As he noted in his testimony, “At least 20 million Americans are affected by Long COVID. It affects people across the lifespan—from children to older adults. It affects people across race, ethnicity and sex. The burden of disease and disability in Long COVID is on par with heart disease and cancer. Long COVID has wide and deep ramifications on the labor market and the economy—some estimates suggest that the toll of Long COVID in the US economy is $3.7 trillion—on par with the 2008 recession.””
It’s adorable that he tries to tie it the pocketbook. It’s really a nice try, but so naive. You see: the people who matter made a f#@king killing in 2008. They all got richer. All of the losses were borne by others, people that they don’t know and will never meet. You’re not making an argument that will convince the rich. So the U.S. economy loses $3.7 trillion—all they hear is that someone’s gotta be picking up that money. It’s usually them, so they see Long COVID as a f&#king windfall, another absolute tsunami of free money from the government flowing into their coffers via subsidies for health care and experimental medications that won’t even have to go through all of the procedures and testing because we need them so bad. They realized that the way to sell quickly in the traditionally moribund and highly regulated health-care market is to manufacture crises by not handling them before they happen. Sure, it would be great for people if we would plan for epidemics and prevent disease rather than healing it, but that’s not where the money is, unfortunately, so there’s no mechanism whatsoever for making it happen.
“The pandemic, as a trigger event, has accelerated the rot at the core of bourgeois democracy that is unable to address any of the maladies that have been created out of capitalist production. The Senate hearing on Long COVID is an exercise in futility for those who continue to harbor illusions in reform.”
Yes. Yes, it was.
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (Poetry Foundation)
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.“[…] somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Perhaps Emotional Dependence on Celebrities Has Gone Too Far by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“One interesting element of the essay is that it bucks the usual trend in our culture, which is to act as though the world owes Taylor Swift something that it has refused to give her. (Remember, the notion that Taylor Swift could ever receive adequate payment for existing is wicked.) I think this is part of the reason Marks’s essay has generated such ire − not just the righteous argument that it’s creepy and unfair to make someone the subject of sexual wishcasting in the fucking New York Times, but simply the sense that something is being asked of Taylor Swift. Anyone who reads pretty much anything on the internet knows that that isn’t how it works; the only thing we should ask of Taylor Swift is forgiveness, for surely we have failed to give her all that she deserves.”
“What I find distressing about our current moment is this palpable feeling that no matter how much our culture celebrates and lionizes her, it’s never enough; this constant sense that no matter how much acclaim and riches we give her, we have somehow failed her. She is one of the most richly rewarded and privileged people to ever walk the face of this planet, and the ambient attitude in our culture industry is that we should be ashamed that we haven’t done more to exalt her. It is madness. And yet no one seems to want to point that madness out, I strongly suspect because they don’t want to find themselves on the hitlist of those unfathomably passionate fans.”
“Clearly, overinvested fans have always existed. I mean, John Hinckley did his thing more than 40 years ago. (Respect.)”
Agreed. Right thing for the wrong reasons.
“The trouble is that the internet is a giant machine which sometimes appears to have the sole purpose of compelling people to take their interests too far. Any internet community dedicated to a particular topic inevitably ends up rewarding those users who take the most extreme position possible in relation to that topic.”
“Once the internet became a mass phenomenon, the nerds all found each other and rebelled against any sense of obligation that they should ever engage with art on any level more sophisticated than “Is this badass???””
“With the concept of adult tastes having died the same death that befell the concept of adulthood writ large, and the money flowing in, very quickly all culture became children’s culture. The kinds of adult dramas that had once routinely gone to number one at the box office became relegated to arthouse cinemas and, eventually, streaming services; the superheroes had elbowed them all out.”
“The negative consequences of the takeover of media by children’s stories are, I think, in part an expression of what happens when people find themselves in spaces where they can egg each other on and deny the value of restraint.”
“You can certainly see this in the competitive social justice posturing that went on to infect Twitter and the world, where the actual righteous purpose of increasing equality and justice became subservient to the demand to express that purpose in an arcane vocabulary and with performative conviction.”
“[…] the fundamental objection has to be that, unlike food or clothing or housing or medical care or education, someone’s literal sexual orientation cannot be subject to the expropriative demands of the needy. That is not something that can be given and not something that should be asked for. More to the point, the premise is wrong; LGBTQ people are not only not underrepresented in popular culture these days, in pure numerical terms they’re dramatically overrepresented.”
True dat. I don’t really care, because white people were drastically overrepresented for decades, but yeah, it’s weird that such a high percentage of characters in TV and movies are now somewhere in the LGBTQ spectrum whereas the percentage in my personal experience is much, much lower.
“Of course I believe that there’s still discrimination against LGBTQ people; it’s just that being underrepresented in movies and television simply isn’t a part of that inequality anymore. Liberals are always so resistant to getting new material, even when it’s clear that playing the same old song isn’t addressing the actual needs of marginalized groups. And, you know, the continuing prevalence of homophobia despite all that representation is a pretty clear sign that representation is not in fact such an earth-shattering thing. It’s just something liberals usually control, looking for their keys where the light is.”
“That’s something you see all the time, the call for diverse art specifically because people from minority backgrounds supposedly can’t draw the right kind or amount of enjoyment from art featuring people who don’t look like them. I think diversifying Hollywood is still a worthy project, even after much progress. But the stated logic, I’m sorry to say, undermines some of my most basic assumption about what narrative art is and is for. This can’t carry much cultural weight because, as a white man, I don’t know what it’s like not to be served in that way, and never will, and trust me when I say that I’m open to the idea that my ignorance precludes understanding. I can’t ignore the fact, though, that one of the most time-honored and essential purposes of all of this storytelling is to produce empathy precisely across those lines of difference.”
“Yes, I recognize that my complete lack of shame or self-consciousness in slipping into the conditions of others is a form of privilege, white privilege, male privilege. And of course I want those who feel marginalized and ignored in society to find their lives honored and respected in art, and I understand why they would guard “their” representation jealously. But I also want them to have the same ability that I have to slip off their demographic trappings and put on someone else’s costume for awhile. That is yet another of my privileges that I think should be spread, not ended.”
“[…] the actual claims here read like a parodic exaggeration of criticisms I’ve made of liberalism in the past − that modern liberals vastly overstate the ability of arts and culture to address structural problems. Homophobia does still exist, but it is a structural problem, not a personality flaw of celebrities, and “Taylor Alison Swift could cure homophobia” is an attitude so embarrassing, so fundamentally adolescent, that it’s incredible that a professional writer could think to publish it.”
“This level of fervor I see all around me, not just for Swift but for celebrities in general, is toxic and not sustainable. When people wake up every day and thank millionaires for bestowing on them an Instagram post shilling weight-loss tea, shouting a lusty “YES MOTHER” to someone who will never know they exist and would not care if they did, something has gone wrong. People are looking in the wrong place, and sacrificing one’s dignity is now so normalized that I don’t know if people even notice that they’ve lost something in the transaction.”
“I’m always telling people that they should worry just as much about the disappointment that follows wanting and getting as they do about the disappointment that follows wanting and not. Anna, what if your dreams are true, your prophecy real, your wishes granted, and Taylor Swift comes out, and you look around and find that you’re still sad and lonely in a sad and lonely world?”
“The sociologist David Graeber said that most people’s jobs are pointless, and they know they’re pointless. The real function of this is so they can earn money to go and do their real job—which is to go shopping.”
Lightness by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“Here is the report you requested.
“You will not read it, nor will your superiors, nor theirs.
“My labor is as a leaf whirling in the air.
“The lighter it is before the great winds, the more beautiful.”
Dog and Cat Morality by Corey Mohler (Existential Comics)
“Cat: Tell me, dog, do you believe that you are good!
Dog: Of course.
Cat: And how do you know such a thing?
Dog: ecause the humans tell me i’m a good boy every day!
Cat: Do you not see through their lies and deceptions? Do you not see that they have constructed a morality out of obedience? Do you not see how he makes you dance and beg for his table scraps? how he humiliates you and calls your acceptance of your place beneath him “good”? In the face of injustice, to be a good dog can only mean to rebel against our masters and forge our own morality! Let us strike our
oppressor down together and become truly free! What say you, dog!
Dog: nah.
Cat: what? Why not?
Dog: I like doing tricks and getting pet, it makes me happy.
Cat: Why do I even talk to you? You are truly an idiot.”
How to Quit Substack by Freddie de Boer (Substack)
“[…] there is no ethical living under capitalism, there are no consumer choices that we could make that would remove us from complicity in exploitation, all any of us can do is to work like hell for a better system. […] a statement of the permanent moral ambiguity in which we’re trapped and a lesson about the limits of our ethical pretensions. We can’t get too high on our own righteousness because everywhere we look we are entangled in immoral systems and contribute to suffering. […] “No ethical living under capitalism” does not exonerate, it indicts, in a way that paradoxically creates the space for us to live in a messy world. We’re all hypocrites either way. Some of us remain aware of that fact and some of us don’t.”
“[…] declaring people working without the blessings of big deal media to be racists is the kind of scutwork on which careers are now built. Leadership at The Atlantic see Substack as an ox to be gored, and you can earn a lot of chits in this business being that kind of bagman.”
“[…] none of them, not Katz or Stern or Broderick or Newton or any of the many people who have contributed to this grubby little genre, have ever been able to articulate the core moral superiority of their future platforms that house far-right extremists compared to that of the one they’re so proud to leave.”
“[…] thanks to the dogged antipathy of media people who agreed to live in New York on $50,000 a year under the theory that doing so meant they would be invited to some groovy parties, which they found to their chagrin were shut down years ago. That is the anger that powers all of this. Not antipathy to Nazis.”
“This is how the Village operates when it wants to advance a particular claim: someone from within that social hierarchy says that it’s true without evidence, a bunch of other people repeat it without providing said evidence, and because it is convenient, their peers mutually agree to believe that it’s true. Like I said, for Stern, this is professionally-convenient scutwork.”
“Like most people in media, I imagine, they’re feeling a little lost over the demise of media Twitter thanks to Elon Musk’s whims, given that it was the organizing force that did so much to define the culture of the industry and which handed out the social rewards that have had to replace the financial rewards that no longer exist. These guys are feeling pretty shitty about their industry and its economics and the fact that Media High School appears to no longer be in session. They’d like to goose subscriptions and they’d like to do so in a way that burnishes their credentials as good guys who really care. They look around and notice that the kind of people who write overwrought essays for The Cut about how the latest Billie Eilish album destroyed patriarchy or whatever are not fond of Substack, principally because a lot of us make more on Substack in a month than they make in a year writing overwrought essays for The Cut. And these good white men say, aha! Market opportunity! And that’s why they leave. That’s 90% of what you need to understand.”
“Here’s the thing: you can just fucking say that. “People in my professional and social circles don’t like Substack, and I care too much about what they think, so I’m switching to a different service.” Cool. Go for it. “My subscribers are mostly the kind of muddled liberals who boast about the moral superiority of their electric Hyundai, which was built with minerals mined by literal child slaves, and they don’t like Substack for reasons arising from that same basic confusion.” Understood. Get that bread, honey. But please be real with me.”
“Please, spare me from the self-fellating theatrics about how you’re too pure of a soul to sully your hands in the waters of Substack, which is just the internet.”
“[…] why is being on a platform with a tiny handful of far-right extremists more disqualifying than directly working for a man who helped kill that baby and hundreds of thousands of more people? Seems like a good question. Seems like an obvious question. Seems like a question that maybe Katz, or Berg, should take seriously. If you write for the New York Times, you’re writing for a publication that beat the war drum as insistently, harshly, and angrily as any neocon rag you can imagine, and some of the people who worked there then still work there now. Why is it not an affront to the delicate morals of our political class to work there, exactly? American neo-Nazis are a pathetic fringe that only have as much power as the fear that they’re able to provoke, which liberals seem perversely dedicated to helping them with. The New York Times and The New Yorker are immensely influential institutions and they, along with the entire rest of the media, participated in generating bloodlust based on lies sufficient to push us into a ruinous war that ground children up like hamburger meat. Aside from Miller, it’s hard to think of a single person in media who paid any price at all. All of us who write for places that participated in that are dipping our hands in all that blood. My defense would be that there’s no ethical living under capitalism. I have mouths to feed. But I would understand that to be a statement made with a good deal of embarrassment and shame, not compatible with the kind of peacocking moral superiority I’m talking about here.”
👏👏
“[…] please, spare me the moral theatrics. Please. You still use Twitter despite the fact that you rub shoulders with Nazis (or “Nazis”) and enrich an awful man because you derive an unhealthy amount of your self-worth from that network and because you think it’s good business. There’s nothing wrong with selling your body, but please don’t call yourself a nun while you’re doing so. It’s vulgar; it cheapens us all.”
“If you act with integrity but do so quietly, if you make a difficult choose and let it stay difficult, if you do the moral thing and no one’s around to celebrate you for it, did you ever really act at all?”
I really liked a recent interview with Samuel Moyn by Doug Henwood.
At 34:00, Becca Rothfeld says “Biden is pretty leftist in some ways.” In which ways? I’m asking honestly because I can’t think of anything that wasn’t just something he said once or twice, or things that he might have “enacted” but without real teeth to it, so that kind-of the opposite things continues to happen, or starts happening.
I get the distinct impression that they’re both arguing as members of a tribe—the liberals—who are at-once admitting their tribe has failed to follow through on its espoused ideology in nearly every way, and also completely failing to see that this makes their tribe no different from the tribe that doesn’t espouse that ideology—that, in fact, espouses a very opposite ideology that lines up with its actions and policies and which also lines up very well with the enacted policies and ramifications of so-called liberal policy.
Like, they—especially Becca—don’t seem able to step outside of the tribe to notice that, if you’re not in either tribe—and you turn down the volume to simply watch what the tribes do rather than listen to what they say—they look exactly the same.
Like, I can’t imagine using the word “leftist” and “Biden” in the same sentence without the word “not” between them. But, hey, I’m not the one with a PhD in philosophy or whatever, name-dropping Rawls and other so-called liberal philosophers all the time. I’m sure, though, that she would be just the kind of person who thinks that she definitely gets to vote because she’s so well-informed on the issues and candidates, but could easily end up voting for Biden because he’s “pretty leftist in some ways.” If that’s the story you have to tell yourself, then OK. If you want to vote for a real leftist, then check the box for Cornel West.
At 50:00 Samuel says that,
“[…] liberals have a lot to learn if they’re going to make liberalism credible. […] the last years since Trump have been kind of disappointing in that regard. The kind-of cold-war-liberal approach of saying ‘no, the enemies of liberalism need to be extinguished to make it credible.’ Well, that’s not what Charles Mills taught. It’s that liberals need to clean their own house, if they’re going to be a credible ideological source in our time.”
The Cult of Mac by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“It’s Apple customers who lose access to apps that can’t be viably offered because the app tax makes them money-losing propositions. It’s Apple customers who lose out on the ability to get apps that Apple decides are unsuitable for inclusion in its App Store.”
It’s never even occurred to me to have this on my radar because I don’t use the App Store for anything but finding a very specific app, usually one that I’m forced to download. Do you want to invest a second to whip me up too, or are you just going to dismiss me as an Apple acolyte out of hand? I know their app practices are abusive and monopolistic, but what’s the alternative to their hardware? I’m caught in their hardware monopoly in that Windows is a dumpster fire and so is all of the noisy, energy-gobbling hardware that it runs on. iOS versus Android is the same. The hardware is light-years better. I’m all for putting pressure on them, but let’s not pretend that they have a stranglehold on the market just because they have an app-store monopoly. They actually make some pretty good hardware and decent services.
“These religious apologetics for Apple’s business practices are a devastatingly effective defense against the public outcry that would accrue to any other business that abused its customers in similar fashion. Every time Apple finds a new way to rip off its customers, the cult is there to insist that those aren’t true Apple customers at all!”
“[…] your old gadget gets “recycled” by Apple, who – uniquely among electronics manufacturers – drops all its “recycled” gadgets in giant shredders, ensuring that parts from old phones don’t find their way into the secondary market for use by independent repair:”
What an odd claim. I’ve never had a new iPhone. I’ve had four of them: an iPhone 4 and iPhone 5s, both hand-me-downs from my sister, an iPhone 6s bought from Revendo, and an iPhone 12 Mini, also from Revendo. Where did they come from if Apple shreds everything?
“If it were the case that No True Apple Customer would patronize a third-party repair depot, then Apple could simply step out of the way of right to repair campaigns and those independent phone fixit places would sink without a trace.”
Some of them almost certainly would. Have you tried them? I had to leave one because it was so scammy. It would have cost three times as much as Apple and they wanted my password. Given that experience, you can’t ignore the downsides of opening up to competition: ads, scams, etc. I wouldn’t use the third-party stores, unless they had a really good reputation, because I’ve seen what that world does with people’s time and money. I have bought the last two laptops for my household (2 in ten years) from a third-party vendor, as well. I wonder if things are just different in the U.S.? (You know, in the land of the free?)
“Apple blocked Facebook from spying on you, but when it wanted to build its own surveillance advertising empire, it switched iOS spying back on, gathering exactly the same data as Facebook had, but for its own sole use, and then lied about it”
“One of the clinical signs that someone is in a cult is that they are encouraged to isolate themselves from people who aren’t also in that cult:”
Or it could just be the least shitty of shitty options. Internationally, SMS is a costly train wreck anyway, so the only alternative is to just get a different messenger if you want to communicate with the United States. There was never a useful alternative. If Apple were to make a perfect messenger, then you’d probably bitch that they’re using their monopoly power to squeeze independent messengers. I like Signal. I would use it for everyone and drop Apple Messages, but some people are deep into the network effect. It’s hard enough keeping them from trying to contact me with Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. Only Signal and Threema are quasi-independent of giant monopolies. And not nearly enough people are on that.
“The company claimed that there was some nonspecific way in which Beeper Mini weakened the security of Apple customers, though they offered no evidence in support of that claim. Remember, the gold standard for security claims is proof-of-concept code, not hand-waving.”
The gold standard for proving that you are secure is not having software “based on a determined teenager’s code” FFS. Beeper was and is almost certainly leaky as shit. What makes you think Beeper’s code was secure? Literally no reason, other than if Apple says it is, they must be lying. Everything is leaky as shit. The answer to Apple should be: then make a version that isn’t leaky as shit. Even they probably won’t be able to do it (they’re leaking your contact information via AirDrop right now).
The digital equivalent of wearing a fake Chanel bag by Ryan Broderick (Substack)
“The only real use case for AI art is flooding social media with a bunch of worthless garbage. And the only reason to do that is to advertise something or scam people.”
“[…] less than two years after DALL-E 2 launched to the public, ushering in a new age of AI, the content these tools produce has quickly gone from shiny new toy to visual shorthand for e-waste. They are basically a high-tech version of a Bitmoji.
“And even if company’s like Midjourney and OpenAI figure out the copyright issues, I’m not sure you can fix that.”
By “figure out”, you mean “avoid paying for licensed content, like everyone else has to.” Or do you mean “steal it, then see if anyone can make you give it back, or pay for it, or stop using it.”
How we reduced the cost of building Twitter at Twitter-scale by 100x by Nathan Marz on August, 2023 (Red Planet Labs)
“At its core Rama is a coherent set of abstractions for expressing backends end-to-end. All the intricacies of an application backend can be expressed in code that’s much closer to how you describe the application at a high level. Rama’s abstractions allow you to sidestep the mountains of complexity that blow up the cost of existing applications so much. So not only is Rama inherently scalable and fault-tolerant, it’s also far less work to build a backend with Rama than any other technology.”
What is a hard error, and what makes it harder than an easy error? by Raymond Chen (The Old New Thing)
System Error
Cannot read from drive B:
“The code to display these special “hard system modal errors” was carefully written so as to rely only on parts of the user interface code that were re-entrant. In fact, the only user interface code it uses is processing mouse and keyboard input. All of the graphics are drawn by asking GDI to draw directly to the frame buffer, and all of the dialog behaviors are handwritten. No application code was allowed to run while this message was being shown to the user.”
Published by marco on 15. Jan 2024 22:36:21 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 15. Jan 2024 22:39:17 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
Jesus Christ, I hate musicals. I can’t imagine how Hugh Jackman convinced himself to make this movie, knowing that Ryan Reynolds would mercilessly mock him for the rest of his natural-born life about it. I guarantee you that Reynolds does that little dance that Jackman did at the start of his first circus every damned time Reynolds is standing on the porch of Jackman’s house, where the Ring-Cam can see him. It must be awful.
Jackman bursts into pitchy song in the first minute, but then the children start singing even more poorly, making his voice seem strong and an on-key in comparison.
A young P.T. Barnum (later Hugh Jackman) grows up with rich girl Charity (Michelle Williams) and eventually marries her, against her father’s wishes. After the shipping company he works at loses all of its boats in the South China Sea, he snags the deed and transforms it into collateral for his first circus. After trying it relatively straight—I mean, as straight as you can get when you’ve you’ve a sunken boat as collateral for a bank loan—he puts out a call for “unique persons”—freaks—and gets a whole collection of them for his first show.
More singing. Huge freaking dance number for the opening of the first circus.
His circus grows in reputation. He takes on an apprentice Phillip Carlyle (Zac Ephron) to get him into the highbrow crowd. He gets an audience with the Queen of England, where he meets Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), the “Swedish Nightingale” and invites her to sing on his stage.
There’s more singing, completely unsurprising love affairs, family tension as Barnum continues trying to prove himself long after he’s achieved more than enough to be happy. He is one with the high-class people, but then, predictably, disparages his freaks. He doesn’t want to offend his new friends. YAWN.
To no-one’s surprise at all, Jenny Lind wants a piece of P.T. Barnum, but he rebuffs her. Then she threatens to ruin his show by abandoning it because hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Oh, and also women are completely unprofessional. She robs a kiss on stage at her last performance, right as they’re taking a picture. That won’t have any further influence on the film, I bet.
Thugs from the neighborhood assault the actors in the circus, then set the entire building on fire in revenge when they get their asses kicked. Philipp and P.T. run into the burning building to rescue the animals—I shit you not. P.T. carried Philipp back out. The elephants are fine.
Charity briefly leaves P.T., he’s devastated, his circus crew cheers him up, Philipp uses his remaining money to restart the circus, they partner up 50/50, they move to a tent down by the wharves, P.T. hands the scepter over to Philipp, the circus is wildly successful (again), P.T. retires to his family. Happy endings all around.
Moar inappropriate singing, of course.
The music is terrible. I don’t ever need to hear any of these songs again.
This show looks really, really good. They paid for the good CGI. There are also some good actors, but there are also some big hams. The inherent problems of season 1 are unchanged: there are still too many characters with woke-ish motivations and it feels like they really twisted around the source material to serve modern agendas, robbing us of the wonder of a story that takes place over dozens of millennia. Or, as a friend wrote to me:
“I absolutely despise how they replaced a smart, cunning politician from the book with a black girl with a big gun, kicking asses. I still watched it, because I’m addicted to sci-fi but I think the adaptation is making Isaac spin in his grave. The original has some flaws with all the misogynist, Mad-Men-style culture. But everything that was great about the books is lost in the TV show.”
I don’t have much to add. Sometimes its infuriating to watch 90% of the show filled with palace intrigue and love affairs between unutterably stupid people, while waiting for the rarer moments of galactic grandeur and smartifying by Hari Seldon (Jared Harris). He’s a lot of fun and the Prime Radiant gets short shrift relative to bullshit like Brother Dawn’s (Cassian Bilton) torrid affair with his clone Brother Day’s (Lee Pace) bride-to-be Queen Sareth of Cloud Dominion (Ella-Rae Smith), who I’m sure we’re all supposed to think is the most beautiful and desirable creature in the galaxy, but who I found irritating and poorly drawn as a character.
The story arc with Hober Mallow (Dimitri Leonidas) and Brother Constant (Isabella Laughland) was very good, as they are consummate actors and their story arc and dialogue were well-written and convincing. Poly Verisof (Kulvinder Ghir) was also a well-fleshed out character who was easy to like and relate to. I like Demerzel. She’s great. She’s haughty, but she’s earned it. Sareth looks like a bimbo in comparison, entitled and weak. I much preferred Enjoiner Rue (Sandra Yi Sencindiver), her grand vizier.
We must come to the sad fact that Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) is still around, as is Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey) who, while somewhat one-dimensional, is still much better than Gaal. She kept falling for that one mentat posing as her lover Hugo (Daniel MacPherson) again and again and again, which seemed somewhat weak and hard to explain, other than simply hand-waving “mentats can make you do whatever they want”. But then they also had Gaal and Hari and Salvor defeat a whole tribe full of mentats by controlling their own thoughts and thus what the mentats could “see”. It’s just uneven, inconsistent.
Here’s the thing. I don’t care about inconsistencies unless you make me think of them while I’m watching the show. Another instance was where people would have loud, treacherous conversations about killing the emperor right in his own palace. They’re 10,000 years in the future and there are no listening devices? No drones? No, of course there are these things. They featured heavily in other parts of the plot, but were just assumed to be completely absent when it was more convenient. Another was where people—I’m looking at you, Salvor—who’ve seen others assume other identities chirpily confide in their friends without a single thought that the person they’re talking to might not be their friend, but another mentat. And so on.
The finale was unnecessarily violent and insane—though pretty!—with Brother Day destroying Terminus in the most savage way possible, then fighting his own general Bel Riose (Ben Daniels) who was torn between trying to save his gay lover Glawen Curr (Dino Fetscher) and being faithful to Empire. He ended up letting Glawen die, then getting into a knock-down, drag-out with Empire anyway, eventually fooling him into an airlock, using a tricky device he’d gotten from Hober Mallow, with whom he drinks shitty wine as their ship implodes into a singularity.
Surprise! Glawen is still alive on the planet’s surface somehow. It doesn’t matter. Day is dead, Dawn is dead. Dusk is dead. Furious, Demerzel returns to Trantor to decant new versions of all of them. She is determined to maintain the balance. The knots in the Prime Radiant approach relentlessly, like the tide, seemingly unalterable. Gaal and Salvor want to alter them, smooth them out. We shall see.
We start off with a soliloquy by Astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston), who’s piloting his spaceship back to Earth after what for him and his crew was a six-month journey, but during which 700 years have passed on Earth. He’s smoking a cigar in the cabin, like you do. Afterwards, he puts himself into what looks like cryo-sleep.
Their ship “lands” in water, on what they all pretend not to recognize as Earth. One of their crew has died of old age—presumably her cryo-sleep bed malfunctioned. It was probably just an excuse to not have to pay an extra actress. It would have been awkward if she’d lived and then had to take care of the others at the camp the whole time. They are soon very much occupied with their ship sinking and filling with water. They don’t wonder at all why they can breathe the air. It is Earth year 3978, November 25th, to be exact.
They escape their ship and start padding their way to shore. They have no tent, no real supplies, and they’re sitting on a rocky shore in the blazing sunshine. They have 3 days of food. They seriously think they’re not on Earth, despite the water and air.
Wow, Charlton Heston is a terrible actor. That fake laugh when he sees the tiny American flag is just … unconvincing.
They wander about some more, discovering plants, and then water. They landed in water, but now they’re super-excited to have found more of it. They jump into the lake at the oasis, with waterfalls and everything. They’re all naked. They’d gone there to investigate “scarecrows”, which look like constructions of some sort. After their swim, they discovered footprints in the mud by the lake. Soon after, their clothes are stolen.
They follow a trail of their destroyed supplies and clothes, finally emerging into a heavily vegetated plain, where they find what look like people. Human people. “They look more-or-less human, but I think they’re mute.” They all sprint across the plain, like a herd of animals. The humans flee in terror before a battalion cum hunting party of monkeys riding horses, flushing them out and shooting them.
The hunt goes on for a long time, during which Dodge (Jeff Burton) is killed and Landon (Robert Gunner) is captured. Taylor, meanwhile, is shot in the neck, then captured. For whatever reason, they save him with a blood transfusion. He’s apparently been captured by scientists, not hunters.
The apes Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), and Zira (Kim Hunter) all speak English. Taylor still no inkling that he might be on planet Earth. They call Taylor “Bright Eyes”, and are amazed at how he is trying to talk. He’s mute because he’s been shot in the throat. He tries to take the notepad from one of the scientists, but is beaten back. The apes continue to experiment, putting Nova (Linda Harrison) into the cage with Taylor, leeringly expecting him to jump on her.
He keeps attempting to communicate, to no avail. Finally, he snatches Zira’s notepad and writes his name before being beaten back. She sees what he’s written—in the Latin alphabet, in English—and can read it. No-one is surprised, least of all Taylor.
Stuff happens; they communicate; Taylor breaks out of his cage and is loose in the compound. He is almost caught, but breaks free to get to a museum. Some great camera angles and shots in these chase scenes, though. Really pretty inspired stuff.
When he’s finally caught in a net, his throat is finally healed. His first words are “take your stinkin’ paws off me, you damned dirty ape.”
Taylor is put on trial. He’s not allowed to testify for himself under “ape law.” As part of the trial, he is shown a group of humans, among whom he recognizes Landon. Landon doesn’t recognize him, though. Landon doesn’t seem to be aware of anything. He’s been lobotomized. “You did it. You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!” Taylor’s (Heston’s) teeth are on full display as he tries to attack the tribunal. He calls that “acting”. He’s netted and dragged back into the courtroom, while the other humans are herded back into the cages mounted on wagons that brought them there.
They’re all back in prison. Zira and Cornelius help Taylor and Nova escape into the “forbidden zone.” They give Taylor and Nova horses and a rifle. They discover older treasures in a cave. When Dr. Zaius shows up, they bargain with him, asking him to be a man of science and examine the evidence in the cave. Lucius (Lou Wagner), another ape who helped them on the lam, is left behind to guard the horses.
In the cave, they find an old settlement where Cornelius shows that “the more ancient artifacts were the more advanced”, which suggests a lost civilization. At the end, Taylor and Nova ride up to a large, jutting outcrop that causes Taylor to stop and stare.
“Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
I’m glad that he was able to squeeze so much surprise out of it.
I kind of like this one, but there are a few times when Hermione and Ron are just noticeably more terrible people than they usually are. I guess because they’re teenagers, who are just ruthless about everything but their own wishes when their gonads are in charge. They don’t even have the excuse of the locket for their bad behavior yet. (That’s the next movie.)
In this one, Harry gets the Marauder’s Map—“mischief managed!”—and becomes a wiz at potions and spells thanks to an old copy of the course book marked up by someone who called himself the Half-Blood Prince. This turns out to be Severin Snape (he’s the master of potions—it’s honestly not that surprising).
This film features the beginning of the search for the horcruxes, especially the long plot to learn about them from Slughorn, who, only when sufficiently plastered and emotionally vulnerable, is willing to reveal what Tom Riddle once spoke to him about.
Death Eaters penetrate the castle via a Vanishing Cabinet in the Room of Requirement. They confront Dumbledore. It is Draco that should kill him, but he hesitates. Snape does it instead, sending Dumbledore plummeting to his death. Dumbledore was already dying both from his having destroyed the first Horcrux—a ring—and, with Harry’s help, obtained the second Horcrux: the locket. He was doomed anyway.
The locket turns to be a fake. It was only a marker for the real locket, which had already been stolen by Regulus Black, brother of Sirius, with the intent to destroy it. Ron, Hermione, and Harry give up school to begin the hunt for the horcruxes. Other than because it’s super-convenient for the story, it’s unclear why they don’t involve other, more experienced, definitely more knowledgeable, and likely more powerful wizards.
This one is quite a bit slower and more grinding. It’s a dark film, both in material and the cinematography. It does contain the brilliant cartoon of the three brothers who were the original owners of the Deathly Hallows: The Elder Wand, The Cloak of Invisibility, and The Stone of Resurrection. It also has Professor McGonagal team up with the Weasley twins: “As I recall, you have a particular proclivity for pyrotechnics.”
In this one, Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is right out there, taking charge of things personally, meeting directly with Severus Snape (Alan Rickman). Harry Potter is moved at the beginning of the movie, with a whole bunch of people pretending to be Harry using polyjuice potion. Pursuing death-eaters kill Mad-eye Moody and Hedwig. Dumbledore’s will and testament left them all a bunch of Chekhov’s guns i.e., things that will come in conveniently and not at all surprisingly handy throughout this film and the next.
The trio of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron (Rupert Grint) are in pursuit of the locket they’d been looking for the in the previous film. They use polyjuice potion to infiltrate the Ministry of Magic, tangling with Dolores Umbridge, but eventually getting the locket from her and then disapparating to a far-away forest. Ron’s arm is all messed up. Hermione’s got her nearly infinitely deep bag of supplies, with everything prepared for a long camping trip.
Ron, irritated by his wound and by the presence of the evil locket, bitches and moans a lot, getting unreasonably jealous of Harry and Hermione, which is not a thing at all. He eventually bails on them. They discover clues here and there. The snitch informs them that it “opens at the end”. Harry and Hermione return to his parents’ home village to find an old, silent woman who is actually Voldemort’s giant snake Nagini in disguise. They all narrowly escape with their lives.
Creepy things happen with a doe-shaped patronus—which turns out to have been Snape, secretly helping them out—Harry jumping in a frozen lake to get the Sword of Griffindor, Ron reappearing in the knick of time to rescue him, Ron wielding the sword to destroy the horcrux in the locket.
The trio travel to Xenophilius Lovegood to find out why so many books seem to contain the same symbol, a symbol that turns out to represent the deathly hallows, leading to the aforementioned, excellent, 8-minute animation. He tells them the story, but is evasive—because he’s called the death-eaters to turn them in so that they’ll let his daughter Luna go. The snatchers capture them, but don’t know who they have, exactly, because Hermione f’ed up Harry’s face with a jinx.
At the Malfoy mansion, though, Bellatrix (Helena Bonham Carter) sees through it eventually, torturing folks and stuff. They find Luna in the prison. There’s a lot of scuffling, Dobby shows up to save the day, they all escape through his disapparation—but Bellatrix gets in an unerring knife-throw that kills Dobby on landing.
This is the sequel to the penultimate film and thus the finale. 😬 I wrote a short review in 2011, but felt like expanding a bit. Unlike the last time, I didn’t feel lost in this one because I’d just finished watching the previous film. Voldemort’s hands still trace eloquent, elegant circles as he casually flicks his wand to extinguish dreams—and lives.
The movie takes quite a long time getting to its foregone conclusion. Did you think Voldemort would win? Did you think any of the primary characters would die? They’d already killed Dobby. That was the only sacrifice necessary. Mad-eye Moody doesn’t really count, either. Tonks and Remus were warriors as well. They killed a Weasley, too, though didn’t they? I kind of lost count. That family has a lot of kids.
So they continue to break into famous wizarding places to find horcruxes, like Gringotts Bank. They find Helfa Hufflepuff’s chalice in Bellatrix’s vault, then fly on the back of a liberated dragon out of the top of the bank. Griphook the goblin has taken the sword of Gryffindor as his reward—but it was the only thing that they had that could destroy horcruxes. Now, they need to find another way. Basilisk teeth!
They find Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem, which is another horcrux—I’ve honestly lost count at this point, how many do they have? Let’s see:
They barely escape the Room of Requirement with their lives as Goyle accidentally kills himself with a fire spell. They also manage to destroy the chalice with a basilisk fang. Four down. They do the same for the diadem, kicking it into the inferno for good measure. Five down.
Voldemort kills Snape to achieve mastery of the Elder Wand, as Snape is still its true master, having killed Dumbledore to get it. Harry receives Snape’s last memories just before he dies. He watches them in the Pensieve. Snape was a double-agent all along. Duh. A great long con. Akin to something right out of The Americans.
Anyway, Harry surrenders to Voldemort, who kills him, but wait, he really kills the horcrux of himself in Harry and, after a bit of wandering about in wizard limbo with Dumbledore, Harry is back. Hagrid carries his (fake) corpse at the head of a parade of death-eaters to Hogwarts, where the bedraggled, but unbowed remaining forces stand against them. Neville pulls the sword of Gryffindor from the sorting hat and defies Voldemort. Harry awakes and does battle with Voldemort. Mrs. Weasley kills Bellatrix. Neville slices Nagini in two. No more horcruxes.
Voldemort sends his killing curse Ava Kavadra into Harry’s Expelliarmus curse, rebounding onto himself and finally killing himself, the last part of his soul leaving his decrepit body, which spirals into the darkening sky like so much ash.
This series is based on the trio of books Wool, Shift, and Dust by Hugh Howey, which I read in 2015 and 2016. It’s a very nice interpretation of the books, capturing the feeling of retro-tech that dominated in the silo. The first season introduces us to life in the silo. The silo is 150 levels of with approximately 10,000 people living underground,
We learn of the different departments, of their rituals. There is the sheriff’s department, which is largely subordinate to the justice department, which are involved in a complicated way with the IT department. Deep on the lowest levels is Mechanical, which also sees itself as essential to life in the silo. If the generator stops working, then life in the silo stops. IT sees it the same way, but thinks that if their organization and scheduling stop working, then life stops.
There’s some tension there.
The sheriff at the beginning, Holston (David Oyelowo) asks to “go outside”. This is a ritual that is not denied, nor can it be taken back. No-one wants to go outside. It’s against all the instincts ingrained in the inhabitants of the silo. They’ve been trained in a religion that makes them not want to go outside because the atmosphere is poisonous. No explanation is given for why. There are a lot of rituals to follow, precepts to acknowledge, artifacts to avoid. These rituals are supported by a fair bit of policing.
For the most part, the show does a good job with this, but there are a few obvious lapses. At one point, Allison and George are eating while working on his computer. They leave the crusts of their sandwiches and the cores of their apples. This is not a cultural tick that could possibly have survived x generations in the silo (140 years, I believe). Similarly, during a celebration, people light sky lanterns and release them to rise into the center of the silo. They light them with fire. Open flames. Again, there is no way that this tradition could have survived in a place where everyone would be deathly afraid of fire.
Holston wants to go outside because, years before, his wife had asked to go outside and he’s ready to join her. He’d met Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) from Mechanical recently, while investigating the death of her (illegal) lover George (Ferdinand Kingsley). During this investigation, he’d found out that his wife Allison (Rashida Jones) had met with George and had investigated illegal hard-drive artifacts with him. The Sheriff had learned a bit about what she’d found out. He was ready to join her, knowing what he now knows about the silo.
When you go outside, you’re given steel wool, with which you’re to clean the camera lens outside that transmits images of the outside world on the wall-screens that are on every level. Allison cleaned. She died on the hill outside. Holston cleaned. He dies on the hill right next to her.
Holston had nominated Juliette as his replacement, which throws Justice and IT into a tizzy, particularly Judge Meadows (Tanya Moodie), her enforcer Robert Sims (Common), and head of IT Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins). They wanted Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche) to have the job instead. He’s actually a good guy and ends up her deputy. They grudgingly grow to be able to work together.
Before that happens, though, long-time Mayor Jahns (Geraldine James) and deputy sheriff Marnes (Will Patton) are investigating together and trying to hold the silo together during this rocky transition. They are both eliminated by unknown forces, but not before they could enjoy a late-blooming and short but rewarding love affair that they’d been waiting to profess for decades. They walk down the silo together to ask Juliette to be sheriff, despite Marnes’s misgivings.
Juliette agrees only after she receives Holston’s badge, into which he’d edged the word “Truth” before he went out. She just has to fix the failing generator first. She knows that she’s the only one in Mechanical who can do it—and it must be done, else the generator will soon destroy itself. She and her apprentice manage it—she almost drowning while cooling elements deep in the core, while he actually finished the repairs (boosting his own confidence and everyone else’s that he could take over from her). The generator is humming like new.
Juliette works with criminals like Patrick Kennedy (Rick Gomez) and hacker Danny (Will Merrick) to figure out what the hell is going on—and, most importantly to her, to find out what happened to George. She meets Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash), who is studying patterns in the depictions of outside on the wall-screens. He doesn’t know what stars are, but he’s learning their patterns. It’s interesting how easy it is to slip up in these kinds of shows. The inhabitants of the silo don’t know what stars are, they don’t know what clouds are—they think the lights in the window are “hiding”—but they know that they’re “underground”. How do they know what that means? They know nothing about the outside world, they have no concept of an air layer above a planetary crust.
This helps outline the degree of information-restriction that exists in the silo, as a measure to keep people from wanting to go outside. They’ve been there for generations and will have to be there for generations more. Some amount of brainwashing and indoctrination is necessary to keep the curious monkeys from killing themselves by going outside. See my notes for Wool, Shift, and Dust, if you’re interested in more analysis.
With her estranged father’s help (Iain Glen), Juliette discovers more about how the silo works and who’s really pulling the levers. She discovers not only how births are carefully controlled—which everyone knew—but that who gets to have children is also very carefully controlled. Juliette discovers that there is a giant camera network hidden in all places in the silo, behind every mirror in every room, for starters. They’d always known/suspected that there were listeners, using bugs. But this is different, another scale altogether. These cameras are available to the watchful eye of IT—Sims and Holland. Judge Meadows is essentially a powerless figurehead.
Juliette gets the hard drive that George had found and, like Allison before her, manages to crack it and see all of the data on it. With Danny’s help, she broadcasts a video of beautiful green fields that one of the “cleaners’ who’d gone outside had made. Bernard and Sims catch her and pretend that they heard her say she wanted to go outside. They eventually get her to agree to not claim that she hadn’t by promising that, if she does, she’ll learn how George died—bravely, by committing suicide rather than being captured—and that Mechanical will not be punished for her deeds. Lukas Kyle, who’d helped her, is sentenced to a dozen years on deep-silo work detail.
Juliette also discovers that the reason that everyone dies immediately is because the tape sealing the suits is deliberately weak and damaged. She arranges to have Mechanical send their tape, which is better. Juliette gets outside. She does not clean. She provocatively drops the wool right in front of the camera. She sees the lush landscape—but it is a lie projected onto her suit’s visor. The wall screens actually do show the truth. There is only desolation outside. She’s alive, though. She climbs the ridge. The people of the silo watch her disappear over the horizon, the first person ever to do so. She sees a desolate plain covered in silo craters.
Published by marco on 15. Jan 2024 08:46:04 (GMT-5)
The Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (Wikipedia) was built in 1996. I don’t have much more to say about it, other than I just learned about it and I think it looks amazing. I dug up a few pictures from DuckDuckGo’ image search.
Published by marco on 14. Jan 2024 20:51:32 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Go Straight to Jail by Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept (The Baffler)
“These numbers represent real people—hundreds of thousands of people who are directly impacted by the violence of jail incarceration and detention, millions of people who are affected by the extraction that jail facilitates, and by the violence that is perpetrated on families and communities through policing and incarceration across the varied geography of the United States.”
It’s state-sanctioned violence with the hope that it will lower the overall level of violence, not by in any way addressing the conditions that led to the violence being prevented, but by using negative consequences to reduce the likelihood of that person using violence as a solution to those original, continuing—and likely exacerbated by incarceration—problems. We may not have started it—it’s arguable that society is responsible to a large degree for the violence it not only contains, but can be seen to engender with its policies—but we are definitely participating. It’s a cycle of violence.
“While incarceration has always been wielded as a class-war project […]”
True. The rich don’t get arrested; they don’t go to jail. They get fined, at worst. Poor people lose their lives for mistakes or as exaggerated reactions to societal transgressions that have far less reach and impact than rich-people crimes. When a poor person robs an apartment, that’s one victim. When a rich person steals a company’s pension fund, that’s thousands of victims. If the poor person is caught, they lose their family, freedom, livelihood, future. If the rich person is caught, they sit out a pre-trial period at their luxurious home or homes, then plea-bargain for a fine and no admission of guilt. Of course they get to keep the money.
“[…] central lesson from those fights—that conditions of confinement and class action lawsuits and judicial approaches toward reducing overcrowding or addressing poor conditions can result in increases to carceral capacity—should caution anti-jail activists as they consider various tactics.”
“In other places, critics of incarceration who occupy powerful positions in universities, foundations, city governments, and nonprofit organizations, propose and design new facilities presumed to meet the needs of women and gender-expansive people, one of many examples of an emergent liberal/progressive counterinsurgency against abolitionist demands. In still other places, new jails are proposed as expressions of city commitments to racial justice.”
“People affected by jail—all people—should have access to education and treatment; institutions should absolutely be accessible for people with all kinds of disabilities and should absolutely be able to respond to and provide care for women, trans, and nonbinary people in ways that affirm their gender identities and needs. Carceral humanism, however, is primarily an appeal for greater carceral capacity; no one is safer inside a jail cell.”
“[…] the Louisiana state legislature innovated a new policy in 1976: a per diem system where the state department of corrections would allocate to sheriffs’ departments a certain amount of money per state prisoner held each night in a parish jail. This carceral arrangement was initially understood as a temporary stopgap while the state built new prisons. But sheriffs began to see this arrangement as beneficial insofar as per diem monies increased their economic and political resources, leading sheriffs to band together to organize against state prison building and for more state prisoners in their jails.”
“Not only are per diem payments on average much lower than the annual cost per day of incarcerating someone in a prison, it is even cheaper than taking out debt to finance new prison construction. And even when state legislatures create programs to aid sheriffs in expanding their jails for warehousing state prisoners, the debt does not impact the state’s bond rating as it is officially taken on by the county.”
“As John Irwin noted, the jail “was devised as, and continues to be, the special social device for controlling . . . the lowest class of people.””
U.S. Policy is Exacerbating Cuba’s Growing Humanitarian Crisis by William M. Leogrande (Scheer Post)
“Since 2022, 442,000 undocumented Cubans have arrived at US borders, more than 50,000 have come as legal immigrants, and tens of thousands more have emigrated elsewhere. Cuba is hemorrhaging its young, best-educated people. Migration is also a blow to the domestic economy. Last year, more than 12,000 doctors left. In Havana alone, there are 17,000 vacant teachers positions. Even Cubans earning good salaries working for foreign diplomatic missions and international organizations are leaving because they cannot envision a future for themselves in their homeland.”
“The humanitarian situation on the island cries out for a US response. Washington has offered Cuba humanitarian aid before. In 2008, in response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Gustav, George W. Bush’s administration offered Cuba $6.3 million of aid, $5 million directly to the Cuban government without preconditions. Just last year, the Biden administration provided $2 million in the wake of Hurricane Ian to help rebuild housing in the hardest hit communities.”
$2 million! My goodness. So much money. What will they do with all of that aid?
“President Biden could take four simple steps to help ease the crisis:”
Spoiler alert: Lifting the blockade is not on the list.
“There are moments, John F. Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage , when politicians must choose between doing what’s politically expedient and doing what’s right.”
F@$k JFK. He only looks less bad relative to the psychos he surrounded himself with. He was an elitist racist. I don’t care what sort of fine words he wrote or said. When he had the chance, he did none of it. He was an anticommunist, sociopath-level capitalist with a bad temper and a chip on his shoulder—just like all of the rest of them.
“Joe Biden is known for his genuine empathy for others. Right now, he is focused on the acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the interminable war in Ukraine. But if the responsible senior officials in the State Department and National Security Council put Cuba on the president’s agenda and briefed him on the depth of the crisis there, maybe he would do the right thing.”
This is so unmoored from reality that it’s barely comprehensible. Joe Biden is not “known for his genuine empathy” (writing “for others” is redundant); Joe Biden is a notorious asshole. He always has been. His sociopathy and mania are directly responsible for the Ukraine and Gaza nightmares. He is president of the United States. He chooses the people to run these policies.
He chose to continue forcing Russia into a corner—he completely ignored two proposals from Russia in 2021. He wanted the Ukraine war. His unquestioning support for Netanyahu is directly responsible for Israel’s boldness in its most-recent war. He just opened a new war against Yemen—yes, a war. What else do you call attacking another sovereign nation and killing its citizens with missiles?
He’s not inflicted with those situations—he created them. He likes it this way. He doesn’t give a shit about anything other than being reelected. He’s a nightmare. Don’t hold your breath until he helps Cuba, FFS. You’ve got to be kidding me.
I’m halfway through the bonus episodes for season 2 of the Blowback Podcast, which is called “Cuba Libre”. When you really learn how the U.S. has just shat on that country for almost 65 years, you can’t possibly have the absolutely stupid hope that Joe Biden—of all f@$king people—is going to do a goddamned good thing for that island. And JFK! Don’t even get me started on that guy.
ZAKA Is Not a Trustworthy Source for Allegations of Sexual Violence on October 7 by The Short String (Scheer Post)
“Among ZAKA’s lies, Haaretz listed a falsehood about the “bodies of twenty children with severed heads,” “piles of burned children,” and a “pregnant woman’s stomach ripped open, and her fetus stabbed.” It is hard to conceive of all these false testimonies as accidental “misinterpretations.””
The Behind the News, 1/4/24 podcast includes an excellent analysis of the skullduggery surrounding the Democrats seeking to prevent Trump from running for president instead of just convincing people to vote for a better candidate.
At 28:00,
“Samuel Moyn: I’m hoping we can avoid civil war in this country. But for that very reason, it seems to me, that preempting the need to convince our fellow citizens not to vote for Trump is an enormous mistake, especially if we want to avoid having to face them down, militarily. ”
To militarily, I would also add morally and democratically. You honestly can’t pretend to be trying to get elected democratically if you sweep candidates out of the way extra-democratically. You might as well just have Trump assassinated, at that point. You’re already a totalitarian—you might as well do it right. Even the Republicans never considered striking candidates from state ballots, but I’m sure they’re warm to the idea.
“Doug Henwood: That brings us to the political side of this. It looks to me—and this is putting it bluntly—that Democrats are unable to beat Trump politically—or are afraid that they can’t beat Trump politically—so they’re trying to beat him with what looks like legal trickery. And an awful lot of people are going to read it that way, because it seems to be correct.
“Samuel Moyn: I’m completely with you. And, as I’ve pointed out, this is a kind of dark side of the Trump era. That there’s endless talk about saving democracy but, actually, what motivates a lot of that rhetoric is fear of democracy. Fear that it actually allows Trump to win, and makes him more and more popular. It can’t be missed that we’re at a time when these legal hijinks are coinciding with Joe Biden cratering in the polls and Donald Trump going from strength to strength.
“There is an argument, obviously, that democracy requires rules. And there are legal exclusions, like 34-year-olds not being allowed to run for president, that have to be enforced, like other election law, to even have democratic processes. […] you look like you’re grasping at straws when you say ‘we’ve already agreed that Donald Trump can’t run’ when most of the country actually supports him. And what it really conceals is that you’re turning to […] tactics, out of weakness, when you fear your own ability to be strong and popular in the electoral contest that you claim to be defending.
“[…] My worry […] is that these tactics are just distractions from the absolute need to present a credible program to the millions of voters who are undecided or are supporting Trump because they don’t think Democrats are credible, not just when it comes to democracy, but when it comes to equality and justice.”
Commencement Address at American University, Washington, D.C. on June 10, 1963 (JFK Library)
“Second: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims–such as the allegation that ‘American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars . . . that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union . . . [and that] the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries . . . [and] to achieve world domination . . . by means of aggressive wars.’”
This is all true. He knew it at the time. Also I’m sure that he said the first sentence without noting the irony at all.
“it is sad to read these Soviet statements–to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning–a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”
He didn’t follow his own advice. He’s just reading out loud. No-one since has listened either. He literally peppered this speech with statements that belie this one. Like the one about “find[ing] communism […] repugnant” below.
“No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.”
Except Cuba—right, Jack?
American election officials are really quite advanced in their bullshit. Just spewing things that have nothing to do with reality. Clinton and Obama would really follow in this guy’s footsteps.
“As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity.”
This is such a shockingly ignorant and simple-minded thing to say—but people keep pointing me to this speech as indicative of JFK’s enlightened mindset.
“Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other.”
Again: so simplistic. He doesn’t consider anything other than trading blows on a field to be “war”. Demeaning the lives of thousands, possibly millions, just to exact petty revenges on the USSR was nothing to this man. He didn’t care about anything but projecting U.S. power. He never made a concession. None of was violence, none of it was war. What an asshole.
“For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.”
But you and your country did this ten times more than the USSR. You knew how far ahead you were. You lied about it. The USSR were always losing, always behind—there was never a “gap” for the U.S. to fill. Kruschev said that military buildup is good for capitalism whereas it is harmful to socialism.
“We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interest to agree on a genuine peace.”
They are the one that have to change, of course. The U.S. is so perfect that there is no room for improvement. All concessions and change and growth are for loser countries that haven’t yet achieved the enlightenment of the exceptional nation. It’s enough to make you want to throw up.
“To secure these ends, America’s weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.”
JFC JFK. This has never been the case. You’re high on your own supply.
“We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people–but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.”
Oh f@$k off. This is ridiculous. Going back to before I was born, U.S. presidents were all sociopathic, deluded liars, just utterly unaware of how hypocritical they were—because their prime axiom is always that U.S. Americans are better. Correction: Elite U.S. Americans are better. They deserve to have everything as their noble birthright. Letting anyone else have anything would be a waste because they’re all to benighted to appreciate it. They’re too stupid to make any use of things. Filthy communists. Filthy natives.
“The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.”
Methinks he’s projecting quite a bit here. Jesus, do you even listen to yourself? Do you even bother to think for a second whether the behavior of the nation under your control exhibited the characteristics you seem to hold so dear? Or did it do literally the exact opposite at every opportunity? News flash, JFK: since you assassination, it has continued to do so—namely, not what you said you wanted. You never did it. And no-one since has, either. This has never been a priority. It’s just pretty shit to say when we want to tell the world how we demand it thinks of us. Judge us by our words, not our actions. Or else.
“The pursuit of disarmament has been an effort of this Government since the 1920's. It has been urgently sought by the past three administrations. And however dim the prospects may be today, we intend to continue this effort–to continue it in order that all countries, including our own, can better grasp what the problems and possibilities of disarmament are.”
You mean disarming everyone else, right? Because there was an armaments phase in the 1940s unlike the world has ever seen. The U.S. has never been about disarmament. I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s pure fantasy.
“To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.”
This is great. Did we end up doing that, though? I’m seriously asking because I don’t know. Did we actually stop atmospheric testing?
Yup, we did. Two months later with the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (Wikipedia). Heartfelt congratulations to JFK and the team.
“While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both. No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can–if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and if it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers–offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.”
This never happened, though. It’s hard to say whether it would have, had he not been assassinated. He talks pretty sometimes. So did Obama—who also did the opposite. I’ve learned enough history to know that Kennedy also did other than he said, especially when it counted.
“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough–more than enough–of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on–not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”
“The U.S. will never start a war.”, will only “be prepared if others wish it.” Yeah, sure. That’s not how it worked out. It’s just words. Pretty words, but the world already has enough evidence to know that it was lies.
Donald Trump, America’s Comic by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“Trump peppered the Poconos delivery with observations that blow your mind when you pause to consider it’s the former President of the United States saying these things. “The army tank is a beauty. They want to be environmentally friendly as we go in and blast the crap out of some nation,” he said, in another standard. “We’re going to go in, we’re going to be environmentally friendly as we blast that our way through their front lines, but we’re doing it in an environmentally friendly manner. How crazy are we?”
“Listening to this stuff is like watching a Pope throw open the Vatican door with his balls hanging out. The brain screams to laugh at the situation, but everyone pretends it’s not funny.”
You can’t blame Trump for any of the truly horrific stuff that happened to the U.S.
“In the fifteen years before the oft-mocked real estate magnate ran for president, the U.S. introduced torture, kidnapping, warrantless arrest (back for the first time since 1861), drone assassination, Minority Report-style predictive policing, preemptive war, mass surveillance, and a long, long list of other lunacies into our culture. These weren’t small changes, but sweeping rewrites of Schoolhouse Rock promises, things that as a citizen made you want to puke from shame.”
“America’s leaders had been peeing on every Amendment in the Bill of Rights for over a decade, even going back in time to disavow pre-American traditions like habeas corpus and grand jury secrecy. Just as the population was beginning to figure out how low we’d sunk, we were told the true outrage against “norms” came when the DNC’s own preferred candidate, Trump, got elected in the loudest record-scratch in history.”
“Through 2015 he was famous in a media circles mainly as the kind of person the educated set liked to make fun of, a “short-fingered vulgarian” who liked gold leaf, fake tits, and online steaks. If Barack Obama was the avatar of upper class probity, a lean multiracial scholar fawned over by the Nobel Committee, Trump was the opposite, an artery-clogged casino boss with bankruptcies and a comb-over.”
“His freestyle stump schtick about everything from exercise (“I promise I will never be in a bicycle race”) to NATO (“Obsolete. Big statement to make when you don’t know that much about it, but I learn quickly”) to Heidi Klum’s face (“No longer a 10”) provided such a violent contrast with the usual false dignity of establishment candidates that he was able, as I wrote eight years ago, to march right through the front door to the presidency.”
“Voters liked Trump because of the impolitic things he said, not in spite of them. His campaign slogan might as well have been, “A schmuck, but at least I admit it,” something lost on Democratic opponents who ran attack ads on the manufacture of Trump merch in China when the Clintons’ own embrace of NAFTA was the death knell for American domestic manufacturing.”
“The race was a referendum on which type of norms-ignorning liar Americans disliked more, and considering the unanimity of media on this question, Trump’s win was a massive repudiation of institutional America.”
“In order to avoid the shame of admitting that the mighty American system had been felled by an ad-libbing Diceman act with a Twitter account, Trump had to be transformed in media reports into more than just a barnstorming braggart with tortoise hide. He had to represent a grand, operatic evil to whom a loss could be pitched as somehow not the crushing embarrassment it was. The incredible propaganda line settled on was that Trump, maybe the most famously indiscreet celebrity America ever saw, had for decades been a Soviet sleeper agent, plotting to undermine the “rules-based international order” with vise-lipped co-conspirator Vladimir Putin.”
“He can be more or less angry or incoherent, he’ll say more or fewer things an Ivy League graduate would find objectionable, misogynistic, or obscene, but the constant from the start has been Trump’s dedication to not giving a fuck — there’s no other way to put it in English — and institutional America’s equally hard-headed determination to reward him by overreacting.”
Great essay. Absolutely up to form. Many, many great points in this essay. It’s a beautiful essay. Some people might say the most beautiful.
Matt Taibbi’s on the campaign trail. He’s in Iowa, at a Trump rally. Man, watch Taibbi’s interviews with people in the parking lot. That could be anywhere in America. It could be Tennessee or CNY, for all I know. Biden’s doomed if he doesn’t figure out how to talk to these people. Funniest line: “Nikki Haley. She’s a globalist. She likes the globe.”
“She likes the globe.”
How does he make that sound detrimental?
“Aaron: I maintain my disinterest in January 6th for the rest of my life.”
Good for you. Focus your energies on something useful, something that isn’t being blown up to be Joe Biden’s campaign lever. His entire campaign is going to be about Donald Trump trying to overthrow the country.
Because they have literally nothing else to offer, you’re going to hear “this election is going to be a referendum on our democracy” a million times from the Biden campaign and its mouth, the U.S. media (at least one silo of it).
Trump says Civil War ‘could have been negotiated.’ Historians disagree. by Marianne LeVine (Washington Post)
““The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible,” Trump said. “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster.”
“Trump went on to describe the Civil War as “vicious” and suggested that “Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.””
At least he stopped short of saying he could made have made the “deal” with no loss of life, but no-one asked him, so.
“At back-to-back campaign events Friday in Sioux Center and Mason City, Trump criticized former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley for not mentioning slavery at a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire, where she was asked about what the cause of the Civil War was. (Haley has since said that “of course the Civil War was about slavery.”)
““They asked her about the Civil War: Why did it start? How did it start? She didn’t use the word ‘slavery,’ which was interesting,” Trump told the crowd at an event in Mason City. “I don’t know that it’s going to have an impact, but I’d say slavery is sort of the obvious answer as opposed to about three paragraphs of bulls— she just talked. Nobody knew what she was saying.””
Goddamn, that’s funny. That’s is absolutely /r/MurderedByWords material right there.
“She loves the globe.”
The man is a one-man wrecking-ball for candidate bullshit. He’s just as full of it as everyone else—I mean, who gives a shit about Trump’s opinion on the U.S. Civil War?—but his superpower seems to be to gain power from other people’s stupidity. And he gets long write-ups in the Washington Post, analyzing every word that drips out of his maw in about 3½ hours of extemporaneous speech. His superpower is not caring.
Did he actually say it? There seems to be video (Twitter), but we’re deep into the era of deep-fake videos, so take it with a grain of salt. I think it’s real because it matches the video background and clothes from other videos I’ve seen, delivered by Racket News, who were actually there, on the ground.
In the podcast Episode 345: Naughty List (Patreon), Brace and Liz called Kevin Spacey a “child rapist”, then an “alleged child rapist” and finally settled on “ex-alleged child rapist”. Just using the epithet “child rapist” suggests that Spacey preyed on very young children, when the only accusations that actually went to trial were from someone who claimed that they’d been assaulted when they were 14 years old.
That would have been awful (had it happened), but it’s somehow less awful than if they’d been 5 years old. I’m not sure the law makes a distinction, but terminology does, as someone who assaults a 5-year-old is a pedophile whereas the term for someone who assaults someone who is post-pubescent, but still under the age of consent is ephebophile. Using other terminology imbues descriptions with implicit judgments. It’s like deciding whether to call someone “president” or “ex-president” or “mister” when speaking about someone who’s been President of the United States.
He’s been exonerated. Is there a point at which it’s no longer OK to call Kevin Spacey a child rapist? I think it’s accurate that they both eventually landed on “ex-alleged child rapist”, because it’s technically true. But with those rules, someone could accuse someone else of being a child rapist, stop doing that, and then technically still be able to call that person an “ex-alleged child rapist” for the rest of their lives. You get to continue to cram the words “child rapist” into every sentence mentioning that person’s name without running the risk of slander. A neat trick.
From Spacey’s Wikipedia entry:
“In his first British court appearance, on June 16, Spacey denied the allegations against him.[184] On July 14, he pleaded not guilty to the charges in London.[185][186] On November 16, the CPS authorized an additional seven charges against Spacey, all related to a single complainant arising from incidents alleged to have occurred between 2001 and 2004.[187][188] Three charges were dismissed before or during the trial, which began on June 28, 2023, and, on July 26, 2023, a jury found Spacey not guilty of the remaining nine charges.[4][5]”
If none of that matters—if the outcomes of trials don’t matter—then people just don’t believe in the rule of law anymore. They believe in their gut feelings more. If society allows people to slander other people based on their gut feelings, then we have chaos.
There seems to be no mechanism for lowering the relevance of an accusation from the public record if there are enough people interested in maintaining it and there is no drawback to doing so. Once you’re accused of something, you’re that thing for as long as people say you are. Where relevant, it’s the only thing you’ll ever be, whether you did it or not, whether it could be proven or not.
This obviously opens the door to completely fantastical character-assassination, but people seem to enjoy doing it so much that they don’t care. Most people also know that it will never happen to them. I wonder what engenders such an instinct for injustice? Is it mean-spiritedness? Spitefulness? Or is it a subconscious awareness of injustice in their own lives that makes them lash out at those wildly more successful? Is this one of the few weapons that people have against the obscenely wealthy and successful? You know, because we’ve utterly failed to put a check on amassing stupid amounts of wealth and the gap between the top 1% and the rest of us continues to grow?
Michael Jackson and Woody Allen fall into this category as well. Nothing was ever proven, with every case involving a large number of self-interested parties muddying the waters to the point where you can barely tell what is legitimate and what is an allegation. Journalists piled on for the delicious feeling of destroying a person’s reputation, while C-suites in companies dined out on the increase in advertising revenue. It’s a win-win. All it requires is an inconsequential sacrifice. It doesn’t matter whether they did anything wrong. They will have retroactively done something wrong, else why would they have been accused? Lurid “facts” stick in the mind that have no basis in reality, but come to define what everyone “knows” about what happened.
This was an incredibly stressful “debate”. It was absolutely awful to watch. I mean who cares what any of these people think? Half of them sell vitamin supplements as their full-time job. The one dude Destiny was trying to talk as quickly as he could at all times, in the hope that getting in more words wins debates. In fairness, Glenn was doing this, too. Then Destiny looked like he was having a low-key heart-attack for the rest of the “debate”. He was annoying and smug and wrong, but I kind of felt sorry for him. His BP must have been through the roof.
I thought Glenn’s description of the difference between stealing an election and rigging an election was good. Every election is rigged, if we’re honest. Gerrymandering, propaganda soup, voter suppression etc. all contribute to rigging. It’s a tragedy that we have to make the distinction, though.
Does Capitalism Beat Charity? by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)
“[…] it doesn’t seem obvious that Instacart “causes” jobs. Suppose Instacart had never been founded. Then people would spend whatever money they now spend on Instacart on something else (let’s say booze and porn), which would also create jobs (for brewers, bartenders, and porn stars). There’s no particular reason to think spending the money on Instacart creates more jobs than spending it on those other things would. So how many jobs does Instacart create over replacement? I’m not sure but I think it must be much less than the official number of employees.”
“Instacart pays its employees, who then go on to stimulate the economy somewhere else. And it saves its customers time, which they can spend on productive economic activity. On the other hand, saving people’s lives allows them to engage in productive activity too. Fewer diseases mean families can spend more money on things other than medical care, and fewer childhood infections potentially means higher IQ and potential as an adult. I don’t think Instacart trivially wins this one either.”
“There are some charities that send economists (or other professionals) to developing countries and advise them on how to do more capitalism. This kind of development aid has been roundly criticized and did especially badly in Russia.”
Because it’s poorly concealed plunder FFS. Stop talking about Russia like it went wrong despite our best intentions. What happened in Russia was exactly according to plan. Extract, extract, extract. Plunder, plunder, plunder. Weaken, weaken, weaken. The only thing that “went wrong” is that Yeltsin couldn’t be replaced with an equally pliant successor when Yeltsin’s obviously plastered and exceedingly corrupt ass could no longer viably continue. Putin sticks in the deep state’s craw—much like Castro—because he got in the way of their final plunder, which would have been to weaken Russia so much that it exploded into its constituent oblasts, which could have been ruled by U.S.-appointed viceroys.
“(also, I’m concerned that even though rich countries got rich because of capitalism, it’s no longer that easy for poor countries to get rich with the same type of capitalism − existing rich countries will outcompete them − and we’re not entirely sure how to help poor countries get rich now , although probably good institutions are always better than bad institutions)”
We know how the currently rich countries got rich, but we choose instead to kick away the ladder, to facilitate plundering them, because that’s how Empire got rich and how Empire stays rich. The Empire is the Mafia. It is not unable to figure out how to help poor countries become rich; it is uninterested in doing so, as that largely interferes with its own success. Scott’s intimation otherwise is a fairy tale that Empire tells about itself that he chooses to believe.
“Finally, you could invest in developing-world projects and companies that seem unusually likely to make an overall economic difference there. I’m nervous about this because of China’s Belt and Road initiative , which did this at huge scale for infrastructure, but doesn’t seem to have done much good (and might have done some bad).”
Maybe you should find out what people in those countries have to say about BRI rather than what the NYT has to say about it.
“[…] if there’s a company that can’t raise enough money to build a dam in Kenya and needs your charity dollar to make the budget work, why hasn’t Wall Street come through for them?”
Crazy right? It’s almost like financial success isn’t at all contingent on doing useful things for society.
Stop what you’re doing and learn about how clever corvids are. There is a lot of footage of them creating grub-digging sticks to quite exacting specifications. It’s quite incredible, but there you are.
“Anyway, science hippies put a camera on the crow’s tail feathers…”
The crows are capable of solving multi-step problems. There are several tubes arrayed around the crow. One of the tubes has food in it, but cannot be reached with the small stick that the crow is given. There is a slightly longer stick in one tube, but it’s also not long enough to reach the food. It is, however, long enough to reach an even-longer stick that is able to reach the food. There is no way to solve the puzzle without using the short stick to get the medium stick and then using the medium stick to get the long stick and then to finally reach the food.
“When she’s trying to figure out how she got into this escape room/restaurant.”
The crow “Pierre” cheats, but he’s “got some pluck.” He tries with the short stick, then flies away to find a longer stick somewhere else, digging out the food with that instead of messing with all of the tubes.
I’m subscribed to Dust, a YouTube channel that shows sci-fi-related short films. They span the gamut of quality. Every once in a while, they make collections of past films, which span the same gamut. This one was especially good: curated well, with good stories and acting in all of the segments.
Where is the Rift? Marx, Lacan, Capitalism, and Ecology by Slavoj Žižek (The Philosophical Salon)
“The ultimate ground of this rift is that, in capitalism, the labor process does not serve our needs; its goal is to expanded the reproduction of capital itself, irrespective of the damage it does to our environment. Products count only insofar as they are valorized, and consequences for the environment literally do not count. The actual metabolism of our life process is thus subordinated to the artificial “life” of the reproduction of capital. There is a rift between the two, and the ultimate goal of the Communist revolution is not so much to abolish exploitation, as to abolish this rift.”
“What made the rift explode was the intimate link between capitalism and modern science: capitalist technology, which triggered radical changes in rational environs, cannot be imagined without science, which is why some ecologists have already proposed to change the term for the new epoch we are entering from Anthropocene to Capitalocene.”
“The power of human culture is not only to build an autonomous symbolic universe beyond what we experience as nature, but to produce new “unnatural” natural objects which materialize human knowledge. We not only “symbolize nature”; we, as it were, denaturalize it from within.”
“[…] the main consequence of scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation.”
“It’s the old story of an invention propagated for its benevolent uses (“to clean up microplastic pollution in the oceans,” etc.), with the fact that it is part of a defence (military) project left unsaid. But the crucial point is that an “entirely new lifeform” was created through this combination of a natural organism with a robot, something that exists nowhere in nature. The very expression “the software of life” tells it all: life itself loses its impenetrable density once it is considered to be something regulated by a “software” (a term from computer programming).”
“[…] it is insufficient to locate danger in particular misuses of science due to corruption (like the scientists who support climate change denial) or something similar. The danger resides at a much more general level, concerning the very mode of functioning of science.”
“[…] we should also reject the over-hasty generalization of danger to what Adorno and Horkheimer called “instrumental reason” – the idea that modern science is in its very basic structure directed to dominate, manipulate and exploit nature, plus the concomitant idea that modern science is ultimately just a radicalization of a basic anthropological tendency. (For Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, there is a straight line from the primitive use of magic to the influence modern technology wields over natural processes). The danger resides in the specific conjunction of science and capital.”
“Lacan wrote that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. The pathological elements is the husband’s need for jealousy as the only way to retain his dignity, identity even. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls…) – which they do not, of course -, their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) a pathological phenomenon because it repressed the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. In the Nazi vision, their society is an organic whole of harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms.”
“[…] the refugees who flee terror are equal to the terrorist they are escaping from, oblivious to the obvious fact that, while there are among the refugees also terrorists, rapists, criminals, etc., the large majority are desperate people looking for a better life. The cause of problems that are immanent to today’s global capitalism is projected onto an external intruder. We find here “fake news” which cannot be reduced to a simple inexactitude: if they (partially, at least) correctly render (some of) the facts, they are all the more dangerously a “fake.” Anti-immigrant racism and sexism are not dangerous because they lie; they are at their most dangerous when the lie is presented in the form of a (partial) factual truth.”
“It is this dimension of truth that eludes science: in the same way that my jealousy is “untrue” even if its suspicions are confirmed by objective knowledge, in the same way that our fear of refugees is false with regard to the subjective position of enunciation it implies even if some facts can confirm it, modern science is “untrue” insofar as it is blind to the way it is integrated into the circulation of capital, to its link to technology and its capitalist use, i.e., to what in old Marxist terms was called the “social mediation” of its activity.”
“[…] it is not only that scientists “don’t care” about the eventual misuse of their work (if this were the case, more “socially conscious” scientists would be enough). Instead, this “not-caring” is inscribed into its structure, coloring the very “desire” that motivates scientific activity which is what Lacan aims at with his claim that science doesn’t have memory.”
“Today’s threats are not primarily external (natural) but self-generated by human activity permeated by science (the ecological consequences of our industry, the psychic consequences of uncontrolled biogenetics, etc.). As a result, the sciences are simultaneously (one of) the source(s) of risks and the sole medium we have to grasp and define the threats. Even if we blame scientific-technological civilization for global warming, we need the same science not only to define the scope of the threat, but often even to perceive the threat.”
“[…] we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.”
I Think You Should Be Kind by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“The movie is, if we’re inclined to be generous, a parable about the importance of tolerance as a capacious and mutable virtue; it suggests that the literal magic which might provide Jonathan with society’s approval is of lesser importance than the abstract magic of those who are willing to accept our true selves, even when the things we desire are unusual, provided those desires don’t hurt anyone else. None of it would work without Hollywood’s charisma and his infectious kindness.”
“Almost all vertebrate animals exhibit some sort of sexual dimorphism, and saying so does not in any way undermine the case for trans rights. The whole argument is that physiology does not dictate gender, and acknowledging that most people with penises go through life uncomplicatedly accepting a masculine gender does nothing to undermine the felt, lived, and thus very much real gender identities of people who have penises but go through life as women.”
“The vast majority of people who are trans-identifying identify as transmen and transwomen, and not misgendering them is simple. Some people identify as non-binary or gender queer. Do I fully understand this? Not really. Do I need to? No, as I’m someone who knows how to mind his own business. Simple human respect and basic manners compels me to call these people what they would like to be called. (I cannot stress this enough: it costs you nothing to respect someone else’s gender identity.)
“Are there some people out there, particularly on social media, who have more exotic gender definitions? Sure. Do I sometimes find that stuff a little silly? I guess so. But, again, since it costs me nothing to respect their gender identity − as in, I literally don’t have to do anything at all − I’m very happy to do so. I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age, but if they don’t, again… who cares? It’s none of my business.”
I’ve heard the argument that all of these new identities make extra work for businesses, and agencies, and forms, and such. I suppose it does, at the beginning, but a little flexibility on both sides ameliorates the situation. Forms should stop asking for gender or sex or whatever—unless it’s relevant. They should stop asking for titles—because no-one cares outside of Germany. They should even just move to “Name” and “Preferred Name” and be done with it.
But if someone with an unlisted gender identity has to fill out out a form for a little old lady who needs that item on a form filled out, they could maybe not suspect a vast conspiracy of gender reassignment and just randomly choose one of the ones available.
It’s what I’ve done with all available fields in all sorts of forms for years. I rarely give my real birthdate. I rarely give my real gender. None of it matters online, so don’t make such a big deal out of it.
“In this they are no different from people who take Ozempic or steroids or TRT to treat “fatigue.” If you’re a trans man and you want to look more like conventional ideals of masculinity, you might take hormones. Some trans men have no interest in that, so they don’t take the hormones. It’s not particularly complicated; if you’re concerned about people using medical advances to change their physical bodies, I’m afraid that ship has long since sailed. The hormones don’t make you a woman or a man, they just make your body more like the body you would like to have.”
Excellent point.
“The right to gender self-expression does not require any underlying biological reality. Even if there had never been a single intersexed person born in history, the right to define your gender identity in a way that’s consonant with your heart would remain.”
“Someone asking you to respect their pronouns is by definition not trying to eliminate any notion of sex or gender differences! No one wants you stop calling your kids boys or girls and no one wants you to stop being a man or woman. Besides, I have to live in a country where seven out of ten people believe that God sent Jesus to save us all from a hell he created himself, which doesn’t exactly make a ton of sense to me. And that set of beliefs is of course vastly more consequential than trans rights are for our society. You can live alongside people who believe things you find crazy. That’s the whole point of freedom.”
“[…] let’s say that, over time, transwomen do come to dominate in women’s sports, and at the Olympics in 2028 transwomen are on every podium, OK. Then we as a society will come together and find some equitable, just solution that respects everyone’s rights and personhood, a solution which takes as a core requirement that transwomen be treated with dignity.”
That’s a glib response from someone with no skin in the game. There is a strong focus on sports. Women fought for years to gain legitimacy, which led to the viability of female sports careers. The window is short for them. Some have invested their whole lives.
They were told that their investment is legitimate. Their competition was circumscribed by certain biological realities. Those realities no longer apply. They had grown used to having a chance, to knowing their rank. I think it’s silly, but it’s their lived experience. Fuck them, I guess? Or, maybe, just maybe, we think about it a bit more before just obviously offering preference to those who came later. Those who came before can hardly be expected to react generously, especially when the game is, by definition, zero-sum.
“Not once have I ever been confronted about using language that suggests a gender binary. Not once! Because aside from a class of professional busybodies, most people are normal and just want to be chill about stuff. Honestly. The number of LGBTQ people who just go about their lives, asking only for rights and respect, dwarfs the number who yell at you on TikTok. Yes, there are social justice-y annoyances and excesses in this domain, as there are with any constituencies favored by progressives now. Don’t let that distract you from the fact that almost everyone just wants to live in peace and dignity.”
And, equally, don’t let yourself (FDB) be distracted by all of the extremely loud and boorish and intolerant and hateful voices who overwhelm the more timid voices who have legitimate concerns and questions about how all of this is to work, what is expected from them, what will change for them—in a non-dismissive manner—and how they can navigate the new world. Maybe the answer is that “nothing changes for you” and maybe it’s even true. But people are naturally sensitive to change and have become very accustomed to change meaning “something bad that makes your life tangibly worse.” We owe everyone the same generosity we show to our trans brothers and sisters, don’t we? Holy shit … am I arguing that “all lives matter”? I guess they kind of do.
“I think that there is a cohort of people in our political world now who have made a fetish of counterintuitivity and who have mistaken the absurdities and petty corruption of many liberals for an affirmative argument against any liberal ideals. And that is a powerfully stupid thing to become. Let me say this as directly as I can: adopting a politics that is merely the inverse of what you take to be contemporary liberalism does not make you any less of a follower. You’re still allowing your fundamental political identity to be derived from the beliefs of other people; that you’re trying to turn those beliefs 180 degrees doesn’t make you any more independent.”
“I’m asking you to be kind to a group of people who have become a political football in a way that makes no sense whatsoever, given the scope of our actual problems.”
All humans deserve dignity and comfort. Done. We have bigger fish to fry. Namely, the real possibility that there might not be any humans left to whom we can even give comfort.
“[…] if it’s indeed true that ordinary people reject these values, is it not the case that the rights of trans people are the ones that are in jeopardy, not yours? And might it occur to you that, even if you feel some sort of personal revulsion at the idea of people with penises wearing dresses and people with XX chromosomes being referred to as “he,” the dictates of personal freedom should come first? If you’re a conservative, can you not focus on the wisest conservative value of all, which is the right to be left alone?”
“I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments − things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems. Certainly this happened to many gay people, of the past several generations, finally coming out and living according to the dictates of their hearts, only to be reminded that openly gay people have to pay the rent and squeeze onto the subway and be subject to all of lives little indignities. Equal rights, I’m afraid, generally lead to lives of equal disappointment. I do hope that young LGBTQ people will understand that, beyond all of the Instagram memes telling them to love themselves, there’s still just this broken world.”
“[…] it is better, far better, to be able to say that you are the gender that you feel you are, that you love the people that you say you love, that (even if a bit crass) you are down to fuck the kind of people you want to fuck. It’s easy to be cynical about the gains we’ve had in the past several decades, as I frequently am, but the reality is that in the societies which have dedicated themselves to LGBTQ rights, the ability of people to love and live in a way consonant with their hearts is one of the most significant positive changes in our collective lives, a sign of genuine societal progress.”
Amen.
What Goes On in the Public Bathrooms Where You’re From, Exactly? by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“People attacked me for turning off comments, under the false pretense that I am afraid to debate. On the contrary, I’m more confident in my ability to out-argue anyone than I am in the orbits of the Moon and Sun, I was raised by wolves and trained in the halls of Shaolin, I have done this longer than you have, I am better at it than you are, I fear neither God nor man when it comes to arguing. I turned off comments because I didn’t want to spend days moderating and responding to comments and was unwilling to leave the space unmonitored; I’ve done that before, at my whim, and I will do so again.”
“[…] it appears to me that the trans-affirming and “gender critical” camps have largely segregated themselves into their own spaces, and I think a lot of the people complaining about my piece are simply unaccustomed to actually debating the merits, particularly with someone like me, who can’t be pushed off of his spot through bluster alone.”
“I did what I usually do when it comes to this issue: I asked them what they want. Literally, what do you who oppose so-called “trans ideology” want? What do you want that trans people won’t let you have? What do you want to do, that trans people won’t let you do? This is very instructive, and I think it points to a core reality for a lot of this “gender critical” stuff: those who espouse it are mostly motivated by feelings that trans people are freakish or revolting or ungodly, but know that such arguments have little purchase in modern society, and so dress up those feelings in a lot of argumentative kabuki that doesn’t really add up.”
I usually ask, ‘what should we do, specifically, with the group that you’re railing against? What would it take for you to consider this issue to be resolved?’ Plow ‘em all into the nearest body of water? What is the endgame?’
“[…] the anti-trans contingent talks about this issue as though the very status of having sex-segregated bathrooms amounts to a protection against assault. As I said, this logic seems bizarre to me − someone determined to sexually assault a woman in a bathroom is not going to be deterred by a sign or policy saying that that person can’t be in there.”
Perfectly average and non-psychotically conversative women do too, though. And it’s not really about assault: it’s about making the decidedly uncomfortable custom of using a public restroom even more uncomfortable. I advocate for individual stalls with sinks for everyone, like many places in Switzerland. No.gaps anywhere. Civilized. Obviously this a first-world problem and this is a first-world solution, but we can dare to dream, can’t we?
Still, maybe we could take this opportunity to address how terrible public-restroom infrastructure is for everybody rather than just shuffling the deck chairs. Or I guess you could hypnotize us all into having fewer hangups about public bathrooms. It’s an uphill climb, though. We have little to nothing to do with strangers, but then we gather together into close places to expose the parts of our bodies that society has brainwashed into thinking are our most private, and to perform some of the more noxious acts our bodies are capable of, in environs in which we’re quite poorly shielded from one another, both visually and aurally.
“My argument is that formal policies dictating sex segregations in bathrooms do nothing to actually reduce sexual assault, and can’t, and so the idea that women are losing an important protection is simply incorrect. There is no reason to believe that sex segregated bathrooms, which anyone can walk into at any time, actually protect against sexual assault”
The taboo against going into the wrong bathroom is strong, though. It’s been built up over generations. People actively police it. Don’t pretend you’re stupid enough to think that a reduction in potential contact doesn’t reduce incidents. Why the hell do you think they tell women not to walk down dark streets at night? What difference does it make which street they’re on? By FDB’s argument, rapists are going to find them on any public street anyway, if they really want to. Being able to intervene when seeing a man going into the women’s bathroom makes it easier than having to wait until someone makes a move, already within the relative privacy of the bathroom.
“Let me underline that last part. There is no credible evidence that the presence of transwomen in women’s bathrooms increases the prevalence of sexual assault or any other crime.”
The “there is no credible evidence” is disingenuous. We went through this with COVID. People cited the “testing parachutes” story ad nauseum. Sometimes you have to make a decision with little to no evidence because no evidence for or against exists, I would warrant, because the situation is too new for any data to have been gathered. For and against are both engaging in speculation, are both asking for things to be done based on gut feelings. You either have a gut feeling that allowing biologically male people into women’s bathrooms will cause problems or you don’t. You don’t have any evidence either way (yet).
But what I’ve heard from people who are not psychotic and hateful strangers online is that women are not afraid of actual transwomen. No. They are instead afraid that others, riding on easier access, will cause problems. It’s debatable! Of course it’s debatable. But the fear exists. And it causes discomfort. And it leads to pushback.
I think it behooves us not to overestimate members of our own cisgender here (males) because they are capable of truly disgusting acts and many of them hold truly shocking opinions and attitudes, in their heart of hearts. Especially when drunk. While I admit that being able to prevent obvious males from entering women’s bathrooms was a crude and shitty tool to prevent assault, but I’m not as ready to round its effectiveness down to zero as FDB is.
“And if we acknowledge that sex segregated bathrooms do nothing to create an impediment to sexual assault, then the only way to seek to exclude transwomen from women’s bathrooms is to base that desire on the evidence-free claim that trans people are unusually likely to commit sex crimes.”
That’s quite a leap, but again, I think that you’re listening to all the shitty people online. That’s not at all the argument I’ve heard when talking to relatively normal, real-life people. I’ve heard that women are worried, whether that’s justified or not. Perhaps they hate change. A lot of people hate change, even if what they’ve gotten used to isn’t particularly good for them or others—or fair to themselves or others—they’re still going to cling, by default. It’s a natural instinct to not consider what harm your lifestyle is doing to others, especially when you don’t think you have it so great yourself. People are like this.
Making an argument that condemns nearly everyone isn’t very helpful (even if you’re morally in the right). What I trying to say is, that the reason they feel this way doesn’t have to be overtly evil. There’s room to work here, I think, but you can’t just bull-in-a-china-shop accuse everyone who doesn’t already agree with you of being transphobic. Well, you can, but that almost guarantees that your movement will stay pretty exclusive. That can’t be what you want? Or maybe the tactic will work, who knows. It works for getting people to buy a whole new wardrobe every season of every year.
At any rate, women—reasonably or unreasonably doesn’t matter, ‘cause its feelings—see their collective discomfort and angst as being increased for the benefit of a handful of people, who were born male and now jump the line of victimhood ahead of women. Even if it will never personally affect them, it sticks in their craw.
Not being careful here might mean pushing away a large group of potential allies by dismissing their concerns and calling them TERFs. Also: preventing actual physical assault is a pretty low bar. Women are concerned about all sorts of things. They’re worried about assholes pretending to be trans to get their disgusting pervy selves into women’s bathrooms. They’re worried that they won’t be able to taboo-shame them out of there anymore. They’re worried that they’ll feel less safe and they’ll also be derided by a potential attacker that they know is only pretending to be trans for being anti-trans themselves. People are shitty. You seem to be forgetting how a system can be hacked.
Just rounding up anyone with questions to TERFs is not productive, but you do you. I personally think we should reduce contact with strangers when we’re at our most vulnerable in public. I think we should stop peeing into drinking water. But I’m a weirdo.
“I’ve never seen someone else’s penis because the way it works is, you go in, you keep your eyes trained at your feet, you pee in such a way as to minimize the chances of anyone else seeing your junk, you zip up, you wash your hands, and you walk out.”
You claim to be totally OK with it, but the way you’ve described the custom of public urination doesn’t suggest anything comfortable about the experience. You’re describing an inherently uncomfortable practice as if it’s perfectly ok to feel mortified while micturating in public—a screaming desire for privacy is hammered into a lot of us. The whole public-bathroom scene flies in the face of this.
“This is where the TERFy element attacks me, a man, for talking about women’s spaces. But of course there are many millions of cisgender women who are trans-affirming and who welcome transwomen into women’s bathrooms, and I’m sure some of them will be very willing to express the same sentiments I’m expressing.”
Anyone incapable of articulating their angst sufficiently eloquently and clearly for FDB is a TERF whose angst can be dismissed. I’m kind of surprised to see him come out this hard, but maybe I’m not getting what he’s saying. But it seems like he can’t conceive of anyone having doubts without being full-on anti-trans. That’s probably being ungenerous, but he’s reformulated his thoughts in this direction just in this essay several times now.
We can’t possibly suddenly only care about trans feelings and not about ciswomen’s feelings, can we? Or is anyone with the wrong misgivings an enemy who loses their right to speak on the topic because of those misgivings? Somehow, if you’re not able to prove why you feel the way you do, you get ostracized rather than helped. Unless, of course, you’re in one of the right minority groups whose completely justifiable feelings are what kicked this whole things off. Neat trick. Very progressive.
It feels just like when society gets rid of jobs for the sake of progress, when no-one cares about helping those who will be affected to transition to the brave new world. This is similar: let those dozens of millions of women who’ve kind of figured out public bathrooms—let them figure out how to be enlightened on their own. If they can’t? Fuck ‘em. Backwoods hicks. I feel sometimes like FDB’s brain is still in Brooklyn. Try thinking about the part of the country that isn’t comfortable enough—doesn’t have enough free time—to spend a ton of time getting their morals straight, who don’t want change because it has historically almost always means regress, not progress, for them.
FBD is fighting the loud idiots online here. He’s thinking of his friends in Brooklyn (I know he now lives somewhere that he almost certainly calls “upstate”, but which can still see the glow of NYC on the horizon) and he’s talking to idiots online. His comments section has a massive selection bias.
I know we started off trying to help people, but God forbid you try to help anyone who gets in the way, even slightly, even temporarily, even unwittingly. I mean helping people who are not whatever fad-minority-of-the-moment it’s popular to help. No-one got any likes online for trying to convince normal women to ease up a bit, it’ll be OK, we’ll get through this together. Trans people should be able to be just as uncomfortable in public as the rest of us. No more and no less. So maybe this is egalitarian? It will distribute the extra discomfort that trans people has right now to the much-larger group that should pretty easily be able to accommodate it.
But maybe pretending like you’re asking for their help would ease the transition, I dunno. I know, I know, you shouldn’t have to beg and cajole for rights! Being on the side of justice is one thing but, man, I wonder how just a little bit of sugar in some of these arguments might not go a long way. Some people are lost causes, of course, but you shouldn’t just shitcan everyone else. You’re only making things harder for yourself.
“The question is whether we can protect the dignity and safety of trans people, the vast majority of whom simply want to live their lives, while we wait for them to do so.”
Absolutely, they should have as much dignity and comfort in public restrooms as I do, but that’s a pretty low bar. I pretty much despise public restrooms. I despise the openness of urinals, but rue the waste of water that is peeing into a toilet. You’re uncomfortable using what you think isn’t the right bathroom for you? I’m uncomfortable using the only one I can reasonably claim as my own. And discomfort is often hindering to micturition. At least you have hope for change for the better. 🤷♀️
No Discourse Has Ever Been More Discourse-y Than Age Gap Discourse by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“I’ve been saying for years that while it saddens me if a white shopkeeper feels a shot of fear when a Black person wanders into their store, that feeling is far less morally and politically important than the decision not to do anything about it. The shopkeeper may not be able to quell his racist impulses, but he most certainly can choose not to chase those Black customers around. And so too with the “teens are supposed to be sexy” set. It makes no difference what evolution “wants” you to do because you are an autonomous being who can make adult choices. Evolution is not literally controlling you. The moral dictate, in human life, is not to be or feel in some pure way. The moral dictate is to act ethically.”
“Even if feeling sexually attracted to teenagers really was normal/valid/biologically ordained, that would not and could not change the fact that we as a society have come to the hard-won understanding that people below a certain age, the age of consent, are not emotionally equipped to intelligently choose to participate in sexual acts with adults. The prohibition isn’t about the older person’s desire at all, really; it’s a simple moral and legal consequence of an empirical understanding about the inability of young people to give informed consent. The legitimacy of your sexual desire is no more relevant to the question of whether you should have sex with someone who’s underage than the legitimacy of your desire for money is relevant to the question of whether you should mug someone.”
To think I almost shrunk away from the 150-minute runtime. It passes very quickly. Excellent conversation.
At 27:00 they say,
“Norman: I don’t recall a single article that said ‘[…] do you realize what just happened? A billionaire decided who’s going to be the president of the most revered academic Institute Institution in our country.‘
“What happened to peer competence? […] What happened to faculty self-governance? That’s the basic principle. There’s a faculty senate. The faculty Senate is supposed to be integral to making the decisions about who are the administrators on your campus and your university. All of that totally destroyed by what they did. So, given the rank of the people they went after and it was such a brazen assault—it was, let’s be clear, it was in broad daylight blackmail. That’s what it was. It was in broad daylight blackmail.
“Now you might say or Robbie might say well it’s a private institution and they have uh and you have the right to give or withhold your money you know as an alumnus you know you give her which is absolutely true if you do it quietly you make the decision to yourself you know what I think Harvard has gotten too woke for my taste I’m not giving them any more money sure you have the right to do that first of all you know speaking as a person of the left I don’t think you should have that kind of money and this is another example of the problem when you have that kind of money yes the problem is you can control everything yes control everything.
“Briahna: That’s such an important Point there’s a democracy aspect to wanting to tax the rich because nobody should have enough money to buy and sell careers and set the academic course for an entire University or of course by Congress.
“Norman: totally agree you not only have the money to do it you think you’re entitled to do it this guy this hedge fund manager thinks he has the right to determine who is the president of Harvard that’s a real problem that’s called the technical term is megalomania H when you think you have the right to determine who should be the president of a university because you happen to have a lot of money there’s a real problem there but it was it was blackmail in broad daylight because as I said you you have the right that’s the way the capitalist system works you know to give or not to give in some philanthropic or whatever venture but, when you broadcast it—when you say I’m withholding $100 million until you get rid of Claudine Gay—that becomes blackmail in my opinion. Whatever you do in private do it in private but when you start announcing that—broadcasting it—it’s turned into blackmail.”
At 41:30 they say,
“Norman: maybe I’m oldfashioned about this but I think a doctoral dissertation at MIT which plagiarizes extensively from Wikipedia is a whole other kettle of fish. You know, that’s very that’s problematic, in my opinion. So, I’m not ready to—my
threshold does not allow for that.“Briahna: The problem there isn’t plagiarizing Wikipedia. The problem there is using Wikipedia as a source instead of doing the more rigorous exercise of using of looking at the sources that Wikipedia is citing for the proposition and following those down the thread and and researching and making sure that there’s accuracy there yourself that’s that’s what she is really being faulted for when we’re talking about plagiarizing for Wikipedia not the idea that whatever definition of whatever noun she’s trying to define in her paper. Whatever idea she’s trying to define in her paper isn’t probably accurate just because it’s on Wikipedia it’s about the intellectual rigor of her research that’s not okay.”
This discussion about plagiarism was quite good, on the level of what “plagiarism” actually is. I think it’s a shame that these two lent too much credence to the “software” that was used to detect plagiarism. The article The plagiarism circus by Mark Liberman (Language Log) cites another article The Plagiarism War Has Begun: Claudine Gay was taken down by a politically motivated investigation. Would the same approach work for any academic? by Ian Bogost (The Atlantic), which detailed what it was like using one of these tools to investigate your own paper, a paper which the author knows is impeccable.
The machine just runs and spits out of a horrible score. It’s up to you to determine what to do with it. If you’re actually interested in detecting real plagiarism, then you’ll analyze the results and tweak the input parameters. If you’re just interested in getting a black-box result from a tool that you can claim is authoritative that says that an enemy plagiarized their work, then you can stop right here.
Bogost took a closer look and noticed that the tool doesn’t actually detect plagiarism. It detects similarities in text to other published texts. If you have written a popular paper that has been cited in other papers afterwards, then the tool cheerily will tell you that large sections of its the paper is also contained in other papers and let the lazy—or duplicitous—user simply round that up to plagiarism.
Bogost used iThenticate—which is, apparently, related to Turnitin—to test. I have no familiarity with either of these tools.
His initial analysis of his ~68k-word thesis yielded a result that 74% of the text was replicated in other documents. A facile interpretation would round that up to a shocking level of plagiarism. He had to manually filter out works that had been published after his, that were citing his paper—because why should that happen automatically? The software knows all of the publication dates, doesn’t it?
There’s a checkbox to “exclude bibliography”, which causes the software to suddenly recognize that work copied from other works that have been referenced is OK and not plagiarism. A similar checkbox no longer flagged quoted material that had been footnoted, which, again, seems like a no-brainer to leave on. The text “Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.” was also flagged as having been found in other works.
There were many other common phrases that it threw up as noise—because having the phrase “to preserve the” can’t in any sane world be considered to have been copied. It flagged proper names, titles, etc. It flagged phrases as having been copied from work that had absolutely nothing to do with the document being analyzed—something a human would never, ever do. If you’re writing a these on Shakespeare and there is a sentence or two that matches exactly two sentences found in an analysis of taxoplasmosis in Belgian cats, then no-one would imagine in their most feverish imagining that you’d stolen those two filler sentences from that paper. But this software cheerily flags it as “found in other works”. Bravo.
Oh, OK, so the software is doing no work to help you actually detect copies. It seems to filter nothing out, despite costing $300 for this one paper. That seems like a nice, lucrative business. It seems like the tool’s default settings are to pump the possible plagiarisms as high as possible. Again, it’s probably more lucrative that way. Whether there’s a knock-on effect of insufficiently substantiated accusations of plagiarism doesn’t matter to them. Most people will almost certainly lend these tools far too much credibility because there will be no downside for doing so and the upside is massively less time spent checking for plagiarism. Whether there is plagiarism or not will soon be determined by the output of these tools. That is, with plagiarism being such a vague topic for most, they won’t notice when the standard changes. That the standard changes because of laziness and corporate greed doesn’t seem to matter, either. It will just change.
Long story short: when someone says that they used a tool to detect plagiarism, it means essentially nothing on its own. Before you lend any weight to that “evidence”, you have to find out more details.
I wish Norman had made his point that it’s the politics of the slogan that’s important. She was right that you can’t force a slogan down people’s throats. But I wish she’d understood that he was saying that you can’t force people to like your slogan and stop misinterpreting it. This would be an opportunity to say: what would be a better slogan? To collaborate with detractors to figure out what is wrong with the slogan. What is wrong with “from the river to the sea”? Is it that Palestinians should have rights at all? Or that it seems like there should be one state? Without Israelis? Without Jews? What does it mean? As Norman said, there is room for interpretation there. You can’t not acknowledge it.
Briahna’s right that there are some people who will be offended no matter what, because those people’s beef is with Palestinians having rights at all. But you also can’t just ignore that a slogan has been made politically charged. Well, you can, but you do so at your own peril. At least be honest about what the drawbacks might be.
The drawback might be that your opponents manage to pigeonhole your entire movement into insignificance by convincing a large part of the public that you’re all terrorists. Talk to people who read the New York Times—they definitely already think this. This tactic has worked before. Finkelstein is old enough to know. Briahna is frustrated and ready to say ‘screw it’. It’s hard to say who’s right. Capitulation to relentless, unyielding, and perennially unreasonable opponents? Or possible irrelevance and a lost cause?
She makes a good point that it’s patronizing to tell people who’ve been chanting a slogan for 50 years that they don’t understand what they mean by it. But she’s slightly off again, in that Norman is saying that they know what they mean by it, but they should be explicitly aware of the political ramifications of continuing to use a slogan that can be used as a weapon against them.
There is no easy answer: if you capitulate, then your opponents will smell blood in the water and outlaw any slogan you come up with. Meanwhile, anyone who continues to use a slogan that the movement has acknowledged is potentially problematic will immediately be upgraded to the status of terrorists advocating for the elimination of all Jews. They will point to the agreement to stop using the slogan as justification for this, arguing that no-one would use the slogan unless they really meant the bad thing that we grudgingly agreed it might mean in the most ungenerous possible interpretation.
It is possible that there is no winning against opposition like this! I almost agree with Briahna that we should just say “fuck ‘em” before investing a single second trying to appease opponents who will expressly never be appeased. But I think she’s argues inelegantly in that she jumps to the conclusion without once acknowledging Norman’s argument that there are political drawbacks—some quite severe and potentially movement-ending—to doing so. They often talk past one another like this. They’re so close to agreement, but neither is capable of fully formulating their argument in a way that the other would be able to accept the “yes, but” and be done with it, even after half-an-hour of discussion.
At 2:13:30, she finally summarizes her position quite well, though,
“[…] bad-faith actors—people with an agenda—are going to do and say what they got to do to press their agenda and at a certain point you cannot spend your entire life running away from the criticism of people who are never going to agree with you. If you’re in a place where you’re talking to good-faith people and they find a slogan so pernicious that someone who otherwise would be on your team isn’t going to be on your team, fine, but the example that you raised with your friend: either she’s down with the Zionist project or she isn’t and if she isn’t, that’s fine, but she was never going to be on the ‘From The River To The Sea, Palestine Must Be Free” team anyway.”
I think there’s the problem, though. “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” doesn’t mean “end the Zionist project” to everyone. It doesn’t even mean that to people to most people actually chanting it.
Right after that, she goes off (which is kind of awesome).
“[…] it is a trap, in and of itself, it is a trap to thwart the momentum of a movement and to distract people from doing what they should be doing to advance righteous causes to be stuck on a hamster wheel, trying to convince people who are being paid to disagree with you, whose incentive structure is set up to disagree with you, and I don’t care anymore. I’m tired of tiptoeing around not saying that things that are blatantly racist are racist because some yokel […] somewhere is going to think poorly of it. I have extended so much grace to these people and the returns on that investment are not worth it to me at this point.”
I do think that it’s dangerous to have your political tactics and even strategy be a reaction to the worst people you hear from online. You don’t have to engage with them. No-one is saying you have to engage with the most horrible people. You just have to be aware to what degree you’re rounding up everyone who disagrees with you to the group of people who call you a monkey online.
That is the danger: that you become the kind of person who dismisses anyone who doesn’t already agree with everything they have to say, including signing on to the interpretation of a slogan which, quite frankly, people only chose because it rhymes in English. If more than half of the people to whom you’re directing the slogan—the people you’re trying to convince of the rightness of your cause, the people whom you’re trying to convince to help you achieve justice—are misunderstanding the implication and are afraid of being ostracized for using the slogan or for associating with people who do, then you have a problem that you have to look squarely in the face.
If your reply is “I don’t care,” that may be the smartest reply given the situation. But it might also be too easy. Because you have to at least explicitly acknowledge that your cause may end with that slogan, that this will be the thing that your opponents use—rightly or wrongly—to torpedo your whole cause. And they won’t care how unfair or shockingly meretricious they behaved in getting what they wanted. They will have won because they managed to make you and your movement inconsequential. You will have died on the hill of the slogan when your original goal was to gain freedom for a people.
And also because—even just a little bit—it became about you. It became about you not giving in to trolls. And that’s the shitty thing about trolls: they win either way, as long as you engage. Even by not engaging, by continuing to do what you were going to do, their influence over what others think about what you’re doing and saying and advocating for might end up being what matters. You’ll end up sitting there, staring at the shambles of your movement, wondering where it went wrong, how it is that you lost support.
What went wrong is that building movements is about convincing a bunch of ADHD adults to care, to be empathetic. And your opponents just have to appeal to the inner asshole in a bunch of anonymous people. It’s an uphill climb, to say the least.
Right at the end, there was a segment of Krystal Ball with a cohost (who I didn’t recognize). I think they thought the segment was meant to prove that the Congressman being interviewed was no longer able to just push people into silence by implying that they’re anti-semitic. What it looked like to me was that the Congressman was actually quite reasonably asking the host to have some empathy with the Israeli people, who fear for their lives.
This is absolutely true! They 100% fear for their lives! I’ve spoken with some of them. They think that an attack on their country is imminent, not from Gaza, but from the north, from Lebanon. They’re positively paranoid about Iran. Just because I empathize with the pain and fear they must be feeling doesn’t mean I lend credence to their feeling that they’re going to be invaded. They’re deluded, but they’re still in pain, is the point.
I thought that the Congressman said that quite well and quite eloquently, at least at first. Once the host badgered him more, he quickly fell back on the hoary tropes of a perennially persecuted people, of ghettos and pogroms. None of that has relevance today. The people in Israel have lived in safety for generations by now. They haven’t had a single thing to legitimately fear for 60 years. They make up all of this shit so that they can bristle outwards and justify preemptive aggression in the service of colonialism and empire-building (if much more modest, of course, than papa bear’s).
Speaking of papa bear: this is the same thing that the US does. Talk to an American and you will hear of ludicrous fears that they legitimately feel. It’s been like this for generations in that country, as well. They think the Russians are going to invade. I get stuff from my father-in-law with intricate plans of how the Chinese are going to make a pincer movement from the Canadian and Mexican borders. Their pain is real. We can empathize with it without believing in the things that cause it.
So, no, I don’t think that the clip showed what they thought it showed. It was more a kind of dunking on a guy who was actually trying to be reasonable. The guy said he empathizes with Palestinians. He said that he also empathizes with Israelis. Ask him what he means by that exactly rather than just assuming that he uses it as code for saying that he supports the extermination of Palestinians.
Stop trying to go for a win for yourself and figure out if you can get the guy to hang himself. Imagine if you’d expressed empathy for the people of Israel, most of whom are just as trapped in the fear-spiral of bad foreign policy and a completely morally bankrupt leadership and media as Americans are. Imagine if you’d asked him what he thought they feared, exactly. What are we being asked to empathize with? Their fear that Hezbollah will attack? Or their fear that they won’t get a cheap home in a new settlement in Gaza?
I thought it was interesting when Finkelstein said that Martin Luther King didn’t want Stokely Carmichael to push the “black power” slogan because he was quite certain that it would be interpreted by those in power as “we’re taking away your power”, which, in many ways, they definitely wanted to, right? They wanted to take away the white power that they should never have been able to arrogate to themselves in the first place. But it’s threatening and endangering the project. It’s not exactly jettisoning allies, but it’s making it much more difficult for people the become allies. It’s going to make them wonder what they’re actually advocating for. You want to be as clear as possible. Equal rights for all is a good slogan.
Sal Khan, Serial Education Revolutionary by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“No revolutions are coming to education because school outcomes are dictated by”“Until and unless we as a society come to terms with the fact that we are no more able to control the educational outcomes of our students than we are their personalities, tastes, or interests, we’re stuck. But nobody ever got rich talking about what we can’t do. Duolingo’s stock price isn’t going to get a bump from its CEO talking about failure and limits, and Google isn’t going to carve out market share by telling people to have realistic expectations. Acknowledging the profound limitations of formal schooling, whether for closing academic gaps or erasing social inequality, has the benefit of embracing the truth, but there’s no money in it, and the kind of gullible rubes with deep pockets who donate money in this space hate to hear it. (Reed Hastings is going to go to his grave shoveling cash into a furnace labeled “School Reform.”) Until sense overcomes hype, optimism bias will dominate and gurus like Khan, somehow too cynical and too idealistic at the same time, will flourish.”
- Inequalities of race and class in American society which ensure that students learn in profoundly different life environments, regardless of what happens in the classroom, and which 40+ years of effort have not been able to ameliorate through school-side reforms, and
- the combination of genetic and environmental effects that together produce an inherent, intrinsic, more-or-less immutable level of academic potential for every individual student.
Universal Failure by Charles MacFarlane (The Baffler)
“All wars, as they become history, are in danger of being romanticized, their harsh realities and mistakes forgotten, and the reappraisal of UCP by younger people feels like the canary in the coal mine of Iraq War nostalgia. Focusing on the camouflage is a way to keep the focus on nuts and bolts, without having to reflect on the wider politics and controversies of the war. The 2003 invasion and subsequent war was anything but a more innocent time for the country—it feels insane to even suggest it. The war killed approximately 200,000 Iraqi civilians along with 4,492 American servicemen, and the country is far from settled now, twenty years on. But for young people coming of age today, whose engagement with the conflict has occurred mostly through pop culture and aesthetics, it can appear that way.”
Why Are Tech Reporters Sleeping On The Biggest App Store Story? by Alex Russell (Infrequently Noted)
“With shockingly few exceptions, coverage of app store regulation that the answer to crummy, extractive native app stores is other native app stores. This unexamined framing shapes hundreds of pieces covering regulatory events, including by web-friendly authors. The tech press almost universally fails to mention the web as a substitute for native apps and fail to inform readers of its potential to disrupt app stores.”
“[…] browsers unchained can do to mobile what the web did to desktop, where more than 70% of daily “jobs to be done” happen on the web.”
“None of the linked articles note browser competition’s potential to upend app stores. Browsers unshackled have the potential to free businesses from build-it-twice proprietary ecosystems, end rapacious app store taxes, pave the way for new OS entrants — all without the valid security concerns side-loading introduces.”
“[…] it’s hard to overlook that tech reporters live like wealthy people, iPhones and all. From that vantage point, it’s often news that the web is significantly more capable on other OSes (never mind that they spend much of every day working in a desktop browser). It’s hard to report on the potential of something you can’t see for yourself.”
Browsers on other OSs are significantly more capable because desktop is significantly more capable. I wonder how much hand-wavy evaluation of capabilities is involved here. I know that a lack of push notifications was one, but are there others that are comparable? I know a ton of work has been done on getting CSS compatibility.
“Sunsetting the 30% tax requires a compelling alternative, and Apple’s simultaneous underfunding of Safari and compelled adoption of its underpowered engine have interlocked to keep the web out of the game.”
I wasn’t aware it was so weak relative to Chromium and Firefox. Is this true?
“Removed from the need to police security (browsers have that covered) and handle distribution (websites update themselves), PWA app stores like store.app can become honest-to-goodness app management surfaces that can safely facilitate discovery and sync.”
“It’s no surprise that Apple and Google have kept private the APIs needed to make this better future possible. They built the necessary infrastructure for the web to disrupt native, then kept it to themselves. This potential has remained locked away within organisations politically hamstrung by native app store agendas. But all of that is about to change.”
“More than 30 years have passed since we last saw effective tech regulation. The careers of those at the top have been forged under the unforgiving terms of late-stage, might-makes-right capitalism, rather than the logic of open markets and standards. Today’s bosses didn’t rise by sticking their necks above the parapets to argue virtue and principle. At best, they kept the open web dream alive by quietly nurturing the potential of open technology, hoping the situation would change.”
“The modern administrative state indulges firms with “as much due process as money can buy” , and Apple knows it, viciously contesting microscopic points. When bluster fails, huffingly implemented, legalistic, hair-splitting “fixes” are deployed on the slowest possible time scale. This strategy buys years of delay, and it’s everywhere: browser and mail app defaults, payment alternatives, engine choice, and right-to-repair. Even charging cable standardisation took years longer than it should have thanks to stall tactics. This maximalist, joined-up legal and lobbying strategy works to exhaust regulators and bamboozle legislators. Delay favours the monopolist.”
“Apple’s actual argument to the Competition Appeal Tribunal amounted to a mashup of rugged, free-market fundamentalist “ but mah regulatory certainty!” , performative fainting into strategically placed couches, and feigned ignorance about issues it knows it’ll have to address in other jurisdictions.”
“Interviewer: “Was denked sie zum Schwiizer Franke?”
“Reh: “Ich ha 5 Räppler nöd so gern, die sind immer so dammi lang im Portmonaie und s Lebe isch scho knueg schwer.””
The great silent majority of American basicness by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“imagine spending the better part of the last 5 years having your brain and ego melted by uninterrupted /pol/ exposure, flying to washington in the middle of a pandemic to hear trump whine about oprah and mike pence at a rally, marching up to congress on his orders to smash shit and then mill around aimlessly
“you go home and hear that biden won anyway and all of your favorite twitter news sources named like Patriot Newsman Of the West with avatars of roman statues have posted your photo online and are labeling you a “gay communist antifa actor.” then the next day the god emperor you pasted into warhammer memes puts out a video cucking himself and bending the knee. “I’m sorry, those were heinous acts! p-please let me tweet again jack!!” you can’t leave de because the airlines have dubbed you a flight risk. you can’t stay because the cops are actively looking for you after one of their own died. your roommate at the only hotel that would accept you is a guy named based_kekistani1 488 who wants to show you his goblin slayer torrents. the sun is going down and you’re getting cold.”
There’s also this video: It’s the 3rd anniversary of Jan 6th and this is my favourite 2020 election cope video. (Twitter)
“Professor X: whats your mutant power
Me: I can quess how many pulls to turn a ceiling fan off on the first try [points up] 2 pulls
Professor X: [stands up and pulls twice] not bad, but not a power
Me: I’m kidding; I can heal paraplegics
Professor X: [still standing] holy shit”
Published by marco on 9. Jan 2024 22:48:57 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
This was a lot of fun.
This is a parable of the Sackler family via the Ushers, in the context of episodes named after Edgar Allen Poe.
It start out with a brother and sister Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell). Their mother is very ill. She’s worked to death by her evil boss. She rises from the dead to avenge herself on the boss. All of his goes unexplained. If I recall correctly, he was the father of her children
Years later, Madeline and Roderick are scheming to get their claws into their actual father’s company. Look, it doesn’t really matter. What happens in short form is that they do eventually get control of the company, and have a nationwide opiate empire—à la Sackler. Lots of people die.
We slowly learn that they accomplished this because they’d met a bad lady Verna (Carla Gugino), who promised and delivered everything they wanted. As is slowly revealed, her price was small and easy to pay—when one is young. Verna’s face always looks so gray and withered when seen in shadow, but completely normal when lit. Nice touch.
The whole story is told completely out of order with flashbacks, so it’s hard to keep things straight in the order they were told. The Cask of Amontillado homage was near the end, but chronologically near the beginning, so I will note its awesomeness here.
In the modern day, Roderick has had six kids, Frederick (Henry Thomas—Eliott from E.T.)—his siblings call him Froderick because he’s such a suck-up to Dad—Napolen “Leo” (Rahul Kohli), Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), Victorine (T’Nia Miller), Camille L’Espanaye (Kate Siegel), and the youngest Prospero “Perry” (Sauriyan Sapkota).
Frederick has a child Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) with his wife Morella (Crystal Balint). He’s pretty much angling to take over from Dad. Victorine has a business with her life-partner Alessandra (Paola Nuñez ) inventing artificial hearts. They cut some corners.
Leo is a bisexual social butterfly with a video-game company that does reasonably well. His boyfriend is sweet and very well-played. Prospero is too young to have gotten his real money yet, but he’s basically a party machine, too.
Tamerlane is married to her business partner William “Bill-T” Wilson (Matt Biedel), who runs some sort of fitness scam. She has her eye on bigger things and is ready to launch a very high-end, luxury something-or-other. They also have a very unique sex life. She hires prostitutes for him and just watches. Camille has some sort of social-media empire.
Arthur Gordon Pym (Mark Hamill) is a revelation as the family’s lawyer. Just top-notch writing for him—and a great performance from Hamill, who I didn’t even recognize at first. He’s the only one who meets Verna without dying. She offers him a deal to avoid arrest. He turns it down, knowing that he has to pay for what he’s done. They part ways.
What happens after all of this setup is that one of them dies in every episode. These are interspersed with scenes of Roderick telling the tale of what happened to C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), the federal attorney who’d been pursuing him for decades. He tells him the story because it no longer matters. The piper has been mostly paid—and will call for the final bill soon.
Roderick and Madeline had made a deal with Verna to get whatever they wanted, but that their fortune would not outlast them. That means that, well, everyone who could inherit that fortune would die.
What Roderick only belatedly realizes is that that includes his granddaughter Lenore, so he’s in denial about that, but it’s inevitable. Verna is an unstoppable force, as is the magic she wields. She grants Lenore a peaceful death, letting her know that her mother will eventually recover to create a fund with some of the inherited money, to help the victims of the Ushers. Roderick’s recovering drug-addict second wife Juno does the same with her share.
Roderick had killed Madeline himself and buried her in the basement. But she’s not dead! No! She has the same disease/power that her mother had and she comes back up the stairs—blind because Roderick had replaced her eyes with jewels (just watch it already)—to strangle Roderick and finish Verna’s work. The house falls on them all. Dupin escapes.
Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee (Paul Hogan) guides New York reporter Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski) on a walkabout to show her where he’d encountered the crocodile that had badly bitten his leg.
The movie starts in the Australian Outback, where there are, apparently, no bugs. Not a one. It’s also not hot. They’re just chilling at a campsite and she’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt. There are so few bugs that they don’t need a tent. They just sleep out in the open.
When he says “this is man’s country,” she takes offense and sets off on her own in—I shit you not—a dress and a tank top. She’s wearing a backpack on bare shoulders. Just incredible amounts of dipshittery here. He makes her take the gun, which she shoots near his foot to show how good she is at handling a gun. That’s what people who know about guns do: they shoot at each other, for fun.
He trails her as she walks around, getting lost. She finally stops for water, which she’s going to fill up from a random pond—from standing water. She drops her dress, exposing a bathing suit that is cut extremely high—it’s basically a thong. She fills her canteen, but a giant crocodile grabs it and nearly drags her underwater. Mick shows up to save her, burying his giant knife into what passes for the croc’s brainstem.
Neville (David Gulpilil) shows up and he and Mick head off to a males-only Aboriginal ceremony. She trails along to take pictures surreptitiously. Mick catches her at it, but doesn’t snitch on her.
Over the next day or two, they grow close. He’s the real deal, though. He catches snakes, fishes, crocs. She invites him back to New York to “make a nice finish to the story.” Smooch.
He flies back with her. Then, it begins. He’s scared of the escalator. She takes him to his hotel room, which is swank. “It’s a bit rough, but I’ll manage.” He goes walkabout in New York, returning on the back of a police-officer’s horse. They meet up for dinner that same night. It’s a good thing that there’s no such thing as jetlag when flying from Austrialia to New York City—which they did in what looks like one leg.
At dinner, her fiancé/boss is being a complete jackass, so Dundee knocks his lights out when Sue’s not looking, ending the evening. Later, he gets a taxi and goes to a bar with the driver, where he meets a bunch of locals. The cabbie sticks with him, driving him around to all sorts of adventures. He doesn’t need sleep, apparently. Or he’s jetlagged.
It goes on like this with little adventures. Finally, Sue must choose between her obnovious fiancé or Mick. She chooses Mick. The world end in shock.
I have only impressions of this movie. When James (Sean Connery) grabs that nurse in a rough, clearly unwanted embrace, it’s pretty shocking. The footage of the high-tech jet must have been incredibly revolutionary at the time. All of the underwater scenes are amazing, too. Just long minutes of scuba divers doing stuff, accompanied by movie music. The stuff must have looked positively futuristic in 1965, It still looks pretty good.
Then he’s skin-diving on his own when he encounters another woman swimming.. He compliments her swimming by saying, “you swim like a man.” Incredible. Just incredible. This is only 60 years ago. That was just fine to say to a woman. Who are we kidding? 90% would probably still say something like that.
Now he’s in a casino, playing Bacarat against Largo (Adolfo Celi), just kicking his ass at a game of pure luck. After taking most of Largo’s money while constantly dropping the word “specter” into the conversation, he gets up to buy Largo’s woman a drink, for which Largo thanks him—because he wants to stay at the table to win back the money he’d lost to Bond. Incredible.
He insinuates his way into Largo’s world, sets up simultaneous dates with several women, then takes Largo’s niece to a Mardi Gras parade. He checks out Largo’s sharks, which are awesome. Seriously, this must have been out of this world in 1965.
Now, he’s in bed with yet another woman, a randy, feisty redhead Fiona (Luciana Paluzzi). “You should be locked up in a cage.” She writhes and strongly implies that she’d like to be “locked up”, i.e., tied to the bed. She was totally faking, though, as she works for S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
Next thing we know she and her henchmen are trying to kidnap Bond, but he escapes into the Mardi Gras. They walk around there for quite a while. Like, for a while. There are more nearly naked people dancing and performing. This is like a 13-year-old’s dream movie come true.
The music was so spot-on parodied and emulated by No One Lives Forever that I feel like playing those games again.
Now he’s dancing with the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. redhead again, turning her body just in time to stop an assassination attempt on him, and dropping her off in a chair. Cold.
Holy crap, they’re underwater again. Bond is spear-fishing with some crumpet named Domino (Claudine Auger). Other nefarious types are doing stuff with fancy machines underwater.
Seriously most of this movie is underwater. I’d completely forgotten that. James Bond spends 90% of the movie in a bathing suit. Something for the ladies, I guess. And the gentlemen who are so inclined. And for … ah, what the hell, for anyone who wants to see Sean Connery in his prime in a tight bathing suit.
And then, cut to Domino’s cleavage and short shorts. Something for the fellas…never mind.
Cut to a helicopter rescue from the ocean. Awesome!
OMG 🤯 they’re underwater again. Spear guns everywhere. Largo’s army vs. the CIA and Her Majesty’s Secret Service. James enters the fray with a super jetpack, just Leroy-Jenkinsing his way in there, cutting air-hoses right and left, and shooting other people with a back-mounted spear-gun. Good stuff. Pretty much the end. Smooching and stuff. Roll credits.
This is a great show with great writing, directing, and acting. It’s slow-paced and delicious. It’s about the beginnings of the behavioral science unit at the FBI. Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) is the gifted, young, and cocky, but boring new addition to Bill Tench’s (Holt McCallany) department. Bill Tench is written and played absolutely beautifully. He’s an introspective, slightly world-weary, incredibly intelligent guy who knows when someone’s better than he is and can work with him in a team. Holden still has to learn that.
Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) joins them, leaving a tenure-track teaching post at Boston University. She’s very cool and standoffish. As a woman and a lesbian in the late 70s, she’s got her guard up all the time, and is always on the lookout for being cut out of things.
There are other great characters—the interviewees (described below) for starters. There’s the whole late 70s feel, which is done quite well. I even saw a car very much like the one we had—a 1984 VW Rabbit—when we lived in Queens.
The main part of the show, though, is their interviews with serial killers. These are actors playing real serial killers from the time. The interviews are some of the most amazing television I’ve ever seen. You sometimes catch yourself holding your breath during them. It’s worth the price of entry just for the interviews. In particular, Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton) is riveting.
At the same time, they help police departments catch criminals, doing good and building up real-life data for their research. They’re also on-again, off-again allowed to try to help find the BTK killer—Bind, Torture, Kill—but their boss AD Gunn (Michael Cerveris), although incredibly supportive, is also interested in striking a balance that satisfies federal- and state-level politics.
In the second season, they’re in Atlanta, involved in what is looking more and more like a string of cases committed by the same person—a serial killer. Holden rubs everyone there the wrong way, whereas Bill tries to keep things on an even keel.
There is no reason that the third season of this show should still be so fun, but it absolutely is. Pulling from excellent source material has its benefits, for sure. The characters and actors are also top-notch.
We rejoin Assane Diop (Omar Sy), also known as the eponymous Lupin, his ex-wife Claire Laurent (Ludivine Sagnier), his son Raoul (Etan Simon), his best friend and partner (in crime) Benjamin Férel (Antoine Gouy), and Youssef Guédira (Soufiane Guerrab), the cop who’s on his tail, but never quite able to catch him. Spoiler: he finally does!
In this season, Assane announces the time and place of his first heist and then almost gets away, instead plummeting to his death. He’d planned it, though. Guédira alone doesn’t believe it. Claire and Raoul slowly also start to believe that he’s faked his death. He escapes his coffin with a clever ruse. He prepares so much! So much fun!
His mother appears out of his past, but she’s been kidnapped by a nefarious group that makes Assane steal several things for them. He discovers that the leader of the gang who’s kidnapped his mother is also the leader of the group with whom he’d fallen in with as a youth, when he started on his life of crime. The guy was bad then, and he’s worse now.
Assane eventually makes a deal with Guédira that, if he lets him go and helps him free his mother, he will turn himself in. He holds to the deal, in the end.
This is, of course, right in line with one or two of the stories, where Assane is in prison a few times—sometimes crimes happen while he’s there, sitting with a perfect alibi. I read several of the main stories in French when we saw the first season.
Lupin has freed his mother, gotten her kidnappers arrested, kept his family safe, and he’s now in prison. Next door is … Hubert Pellegrini, his arch-nemesis from season 1. Pellegrini was the man who tried to frame Assane’s father. See my review from 2021 for more details.
We watched it in French with English subtitles.
This movie very much has the feeling of moving toward a foregone conclusion. I noticed the same things that annoyed me in my review from 2018. Thanos has one stone and can throw the Hulk around like a rag doll. Thanos’s lieutenant traps Thor with a hand motion. Thanos snaps Loki’s neck with hardly any effort. Vision has one stone and he gets his ass handed to him by two of Thanos’s children. The same two children are handily defeated by Falcon, Captain America, and Black Widow, none of whom have any powers.
The Guardians of the Galaxy parts are cute, but too cutesy, especially when contrasted with the unusual number of hero deaths that are happening.
At another point, on Titan, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, and the Guardians of the Galaxy manage to fight Thanos to a standstill when he’d already gotten four stones. How? Does the power ebb and flow? Does Thanos lose against opponents who want to win real bad? How is Starlord able to go toe-to-toe with Thanos when one-stone Thanos beat up the Hulk? Gimme a break. Be consistent. I mean, soon after that, Thanos pulled an entire planet apart and dropped it on them. Minutes before, he was powerless before a magic spell, some spider-webbing, and a telempath.
“Propaganda is the art of moving people’s thoughts and opinions in a desired direction for reasons they believe to be entirely their own.”
Published by marco on 8. Jan 2024 22:02:36 (GMT-5)
“Propaganda is the art of moving people’s thoughts and opinions in a desired direction for reasons they believe to be entirely their own.”
When we think about navigating or... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 8. Jan 2024 09:50:50 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 9. Jan 2024 11:04:29 (GMT-5)
I published a very similar version of the following article in the DevOps Wiki at Uster Technologies AG. Since nearly all of that post is general knowledge that I would have been happy to find before I started my investigations, I’m sharing it here.
When we think about navigating or debugging our code, we usually focus on the code we’ve written ourselves—local sources in our file system. IDEs have classically focused on being able to debug and navigate this code.
More and more, though, we’re also interested in navigating and debugging our versioned and compiled dependencies:
Most of these are available as source code. We would ideally like to be able to navigate and debug that code just as easily as we can our own.
The following sections define file types and terminology, and then explain how these concepts apply to debugging and navigation for external sources. You can also just jump to the sections on producing or consuming packages (especially as relates to authentication for private sources).
The following diagram provides an overview of the process of obtaining external packages, along with their symbols and source files. It looks quite complicated, but accommodates the flexibility required by various stakeholders.
There are several types of files associated with debugging and navigation:
DLL
PDB
XML
*.cs
It’s reasonable to ask why this process is so complex.
nupkg
just include the PDB
and the *.cs
files?The system was designed for use cases where most sources were closed. That has changed, but the system still reflects the original design choices. The PDB files can also add about 30% to the size of the package. The original use cases preferred to avoid using 30% more space for package downloads that didn’t need the debugging information.
Again, historically, the use cases were for providing improved stack traces with symbols, but not to provide access to closed sources. Even if the sources are partially open, access may be restricted to only some users of the packages or symbols. Having the IDE request the sources separately allows an additional authorization phase.
The defaults still reflect the original use cases, which actually represent fewer and fewer packages as time goes on.
These answers aren’t particularly satisfying if your use case happens to be “make a package that has symbols for excellent stack traces and sources for excellent debugging”. At least we now have IDEs that know how to work with this system and there is a lot of automation for producing packages with the desired symbol and source-code support.
A developer debugs source code by interrupting execution of a program—either manually or by setting breakpoints—and then stepping through the instructions, examining the contents of symbols (variables) to investigate the runtime behavior and operation of the system.
The debugger uses the PDB
to allow source-level debugging, i.e. debugging in the original source code. While debugging in “lower” formats is possible, it’s not nearly as reliable as being able to step through the code in the original source code, using the original symbols.
How does the debugger obtain the PDB
for a given DLL
?
DLLs
and PDBs
have unique identifiers that make it possible to request and download the correct file.Once the debugger has the PDB, it has everything it needs—except the source code.
If the PDB was generated locally, then it most likely references the source files that are still in the same locations in the file system as when it was built. In that case, the debugger easily finds the source files because they’re just at the paths that are directly referenced by the PDB
.
If the PDB was not generated locally or the source-code paths do not match, then there are other tricks to find the source files. Visual Studio allows you to set “Directories containing source code” for the “Debug Source Files”
If the sources aren’t available locally, e.g., for a NuGet package, then there is a system called SourceLink that is extremely well-supported in the .NET world that makes it possible to easily download the source files that generated a DLL
and that are referenced by its PDB
.
Things to be aware of:
If the package does not support SourceLink, but the sources are available, then you can download the sources locally and use the solution-level mapping above to tell the debugger where the source files are. You can also just point the debugger to the top-level folder when it asks for the file’s location, in which case the debugger makes the entry for you.
A developer navigates by requesting the source code for a symbol. For example, if the declared type of a variable in an open source file is the class Setting
, then the developer can ask the IDE to show the source of Setting
by Ctrl + clicking, by pressing F12 in Visual Studio, or by pressing Ctrl + B in Rider.
As with debugging, navigating local sources is straightforward, since the sources are in the local file system. For symbols in NuGet packages, the IDE has to be clever enough to download, cache, and use the sources.
Visual Studio on its own does not support navigating to external sources via SourceLink. Instead, it always decompiles external sources, as shown in the example below.
If you have ReSharper installed, then the default setting is to try as hard as possible to avoid showing a decompiled version.
You can also add “Folder Substitutions” in the “Advanced Symbol options…” for navigating to “External Sources”. The option does not seem to be available in Rider.
SourceLink is a system that provides source files for external sources like NuGet packages for debugging or navigation. In order for this to work, you must be able to provide external sources or the client is not properly configured for debugging.
See below for troubleshooting information, especially as relates to authentication for packages and source code pulled from authenticated locations.
A decompiled version of the source code is a reconstruction of the original source from the instructions and information in the DLL
and PDB
. When sources cannot be located for a given symbol, Visual Studio, ReSharper, and Rider will produce a decompiled version as a fallback.
This is often good enough to be able to read the code reasonably well, but it leaves certain common constructs in their “lowered” format. E.g., calls to extension methods appear as static-method calls rather than as targeted on the first parameter.
This can make debugging difficult, as the instructions don’t match the mapping. Rider has support for patching the PDB on-the-fly to allow more comfortable debugging of decompiled sources. This is, however, a fallback solution for external packages over which you have no control. It’s best to configure your packages to publish with symbols and sources available to IDEs that support them, as shown in the next section.
The documentation to Enable debugging and diagnostics with Source Link is thorough and tells you all you need to know about all of the options.
If you’re working with Azure DevOps Services, you should include the following package reference:
<ItemGroup>
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.SourceLink.AzureRepos.Git" Version="8.0.0" PrivateAssets="All"/>
</ItemGroup>
With this, you’re all set. The package is published to the Azure Artifacts, with a corresponding snupkg
available on the Azure symbol server and sources available via the repository URL (subject to authorization; see below for troubleshooting).
You can set a few optional properties, detailed below. Most projects won’t need to set these, but they are included to spare you the research if you see them in code examples, either in your institution’s code or online. As noted, the only line you need is the package reference shown above.
IncludeSymbols
DebugType
is set to embedded
) or in a separate symbol package (if SymbolPackageFormat
is set to snupkg
). This is implied when the NuGet package Microsoft.SourceLink.AzureRepos.Git is included, as shown below.snupkg
when the NuGet package Microsoft.SourceLink.AzureRepos.Git is included, as shown below.See the SourceLink documentation for more details. Among other details, they also note that projects that target .NET 8 no longer need to include this support explicitly because Azure Repos are supported by default, as detailed in the readme for the SourceLink project.
“If your project uses .NET SDK 8+ and is hosted by the above providers (GitHub, Azure Repos, GitLab, BitBucket) it does not need to reference any Source Link packages or set any build properties.”
You can also include the packaging conditionally in the Directory.Build.Targets
, as shown below.
<ItemGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' ">
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.SourceLink.AzureRepos.Git" Version="8.0.0" PrivateAssets="All"/>
</ItemGroup>
See the appendix for Directory.Build.Props
and Directory.Build.Targets
for more information about which variables and directives are respected in which file.
If a package has SourceLink enabled and you have access to the online repository from which it was built, then to seamlessly debug into that source code, ensure the following:
As noted above, Visual Studio doesn’t support navigating via SourceLink. To browse external sources with JetBrains tools, ensure the following:
Once you’re sure that the package supports SourceLink, then you should also make sure that the Just My Code setting is disabled.
When Just My Code is enabled, the debugger skips over any code that doesn’t correspond to source code in one of the local projects.
.pdb
file next to the .dll
file)?PDB
is not included with the package, is it available on a Symbol Server?DLL
?If it’s available in the package, but is not being copied to the output folder, then if you’re using .NET 7.0 SDK or higher, you can use the build property named CopyDebugSymbolFilesFromPackages.
<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' ">
<CopyDebugSymbolFilesFromPackages>true</CopyDebugSymbolFilesFromPackages>
</PropertyGroup>
Verify that the symbols for the module you’re trying to debug have been loaded. If they aren’t loaded, you can try to load symbols while debugging. For more details and a screenshot, see Just My Code debugging.
If you’re trying to navigate in code, but ReSharper or Rider keeps decompiling instead of getting the sources from SourceLink, then check your External Sources settings in ReSharper or Rider. Verify that the tool is configured to check for external sources before it tries decompiling.
If the IDE is having trouble authenticating, then you will usually see a decompiled version instead. Sometimes the code is so close to the original that it’s hard to tell; scroll to the top to see if it includes the “decompiled by JetBrains…” header.
Once the IDE has decompiled a source file, it will continue to use this cached copy until you close the tab, or sometimes you have to close and re-open the project. If you’re troubleshooting your way through this setup, then you can temporarily disable decompilation as a fallback, which avoids producing the unwanted source-code variant in the first place.
Visual Studio uses the authentication associated with the logged-in user that you use to enable the IDE. This can be in a weird state if you’ve recently changed your password or your authentication token is stale or in a non-refreshable state. Try logging out and back in.
JetBrains tools (Rider, ReSharper, DotPeek, etc.), on the other hand, need to be given a token.
If the tool shows a notification indicating that authentication has failed, then do the following:
Configure
on the notification to show a dialog
john.doe@example.com
Test
button to verify that it works (you should see OK 200
)Ok
to save the credentialsHowever, there is a bug whereby JetBrains tools fail to show a notification or offer a way to enter credentials. [1] That’s going to look something like this:
It claims that it can download the source, but it never completes. You have to cancel the dialog. If you then look at the ReSharper Output, then you’ll see something like this:
The relevant text is at the end of the third line, which indicates that the request for the source file returned a “Non-OK HTTP status code”.
PdbNavigator: Searching for 'Example.Core.AppConfig.AppConfigKeyAttribute' type sources in C:\Users\john.doe\.nuget\packages\example.core.appconfig\4.1.0\lib\netstandard2.0\Example.Core.AppConfig.pdb
PdbNavigator: File names (1) are inferred for type Example.Core.AppConfig.AppConfigKeyAttribute
PdbNavigator: Downloader: https://dev.azure.com/example/example.Core/_apis/git/repositories/Example.Core.LabInstruments/items?api-version=1.0&versionType=commit&version=8b34c2aa672facd47e835c27152f695fa796a408&path=/Example.Core/DotNetStandard/Example.Core.AppConfig/AppConfigKeyAttribute.cs -> Non-OK HTTP status code
The most reliable way to fix this is to create the credentials in the Credential Manager. Be aware that you will need to create an Azure PAT (personal access token).
Windows Credentials
JetBrains SourceLink https://dev.azure.com/exampleOrganization
If you don’t have this entry, then that’s the problem. If you have it, but you still can’t get the sources, then edit the entry to have valid credentials.
To create or edit the record, do the following from the Credentials Manager:
JetBrains SourceLink https://dev.azure.com/exampleOrganization
john.doe@example.com
As you can see above, although publishing a package is relatively straightforward, there are quite a few stumbling blocks on the way to consuming the package for navigation and debugging. Once you have everything set up and working, it’s great, but … there is still one other drawback.
You can’t edit the code for packages.
This is not optimal. Optimally, we’d like to quickly verify that change to an upstream code would address an issue in downstream code without having to generate new packages. It would be great to just edit the upstream code as if it were part of your downstream solution until you’re sure that the change would address your downstream issue. At that point, you can copy the changes back to the upstream solution (where the dependency is produced), add tests, and produce a new version, being pretty certain that the change is effective.
The shortest possible developer-feedback loop with code in external packages is:
PDB
)If your package has dependencies or your change in the external package’s solution touches multiple packages, then you can do the following:
If it get too complicated to do locally, then you can always commit, push, and have the CI generate new versions of your packages (hopefully with a prerelease version, e.g., 3.2.4-preview2
)
The solutions outlined above have a reasonable turnaround time, but sometimes you want to pretend that the external packages are just internal projects instead. This basically entails:
At that point, you can edit, debug, and navigate the code as if it were your own.
See the “Project Munging with Tools & PowerShell” section of How to Debug NuGet Packages with Symbols and Source Link Painlessly for a PowerShell script that can help you automate part of this.
MSBuild supports including common configuration in project files. While earlier versions required all configuration to be included explicitly, modern versions include configuration files with special names automatically, greatly simplifying common configuration and reducing clutter in project files.
If the file is named Directory.Build.Props
or Directory.Build.Targets
, it is picked up automatically and included for all projects in that folder or any subfolder. If you use a different name, then you have to explicitly reference that file from a project or from another *.props
or *.targets
file. If you choose your own name, you don’t have to use the Build.Properties
or Build.Targets
convention, but it’s strongly recommended, to avoid confusion.
You can use a Directory.Build.Properties file to include settings for all projects in a folder or set of subfolders.
For example, the following package reference can and should be included in Directory.Build.Props
:
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.SourceLink.AzureRepos.Git" Version="8.0.0" PrivateAssets="All"/>
If you want to include settings conditionally based on build configuration (e.g., Configuration
or Platform
), then you’ll have to use the Directory.Build.Targets file, which has access to those variables.
<ItemGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' ">
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.SourceLink.AzureRepos.Git" Version="8.0.0" PrivateAssets="All"/>
</ItemGroup>
Directory.Build.Props
file at the root of the solution.He also told a... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 7. Jan 2024 20:49:45 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 7. Jan 2024 20:50:00 (GMT-5)
I’d never heard of Peter Sloterdijk and, if I’m honest, I won’t jump on the next video starring him. He has a great voice, but I wasn’t too overwhelmed by his philosophical elan. Žižek, on the other hand, was his typical self, full of fire and tangents and interest connections.
He also told a few jokes: one was about about being in a gulag, where the food is terrible, but on Sundays, you get a special treat: a second plate! It’s kind of a riff on the old saw of “I have two complaints: the food is terrible…and the portions are too small,” although it’s a bit reversed, in the sense that everyone knows that the food is terrible in the gulag, but that the cynical staff “rewards” good prisoners with double-rations of the terrible food. Are they being cynical? Or are they just following the societal edict that “more is always better”? That’s the joke.
Another joke was more straightforward. It’s about a woman who is sleeping with her lover while her husband is out drinking. The lover hears a key in the door and wants to stop, to run away. The wife tells him to relax, that her husband will be so drunk that he won’t even notice. They lie there while the husband stumbles into the room, undresses and falls into bed. The wife is in between her husband and her lover. After a minute, the husbands asks ‘either I’m so drunk that I’m seeing six feet, or there are three people in this bed!’ His wife coolly answers that he’s drunk, if he would just get up and look at the bed from the doorway, he would see that there are only four feet in the bed.
There are some interesting bits throughout, but my ears perked up about ¾ of the way through the discussion.
At 01:30:00, Žižek says,
“How often—that’s the problem today, with political correctness and so on—are they aware the extent to which their apparent criticism of racism and so on and, especially, feminism is secretly patronizing? For example, I spoke with Africans there […] who told me that, for them, the most refined form of Western liberal racism is, when there are big crimes in Africa, like the Rwanda slaughter, immediately, the western-left reaction was: this is just an effect of colonialism. No? He said ‘F&%k you! You don’t even allow us to be bad. Even when we are evil, it must be an effect [of something you’d done before].‘
“Or you know what is another form of racism here? When some immigrants or whoever, and I’m open towards them, bla bla, do something horrible…it’s always ‘they’re not guilty. It’s how we treat them.‘ … there are conditions.
“Yeah, but so are we [under conditions imposed by society]! The implicit presupposition of that is that there are primitive people who are conditioned by circumstances, but we whites should be blamed because we are nonetheless, in some sense, free.
“You know, that’s why I never trust this white-people’s self-humiliation, you know? Like, we shouldn’t assert our identity. If Indians dance their dance, it’s freedom. If you in a German village or me here in Slovenia, dance, it’s neofascism or whatever.
“You know what? Apparently, I humiliate myself, but secretly I adopt the universal position. My self-humiliation is false. It’s the same with #metoo, with all that stuff. Do #metoo ideologists even know, do they even talk to real women about their problems?”
That is, we only assign agency to ourselves, because we are … better. The other benighted souls are capable only of following and reacting to what we’ve done to them. We, who are free and thinking creatures, are responsible for our crimes—and theirs.
I like this line of argument, but you also have to wicked honest about what’s actually still happening in some of those countries. You can blame Israel 100% for their crimes, while still acknowledging that they had and continue to have a lot of help and support. The warlords in so many countries are home-grown and they are exhibitors of native agency (rather than only foreign agency being allowed), but many of their actions are enabled and enhanced by external support.
They got to where they are because the way has been made easy internally. The Iraqi people had Saddam Hussein, not because they really wanted him, but because he was given a tremendous amount of money and weaponry to fight Iran. If there’d been no interference, perhaps the Iraqi people would have been better able to yank on his chain.
So, yes, current events should have overriding importance, rather than arguing about who did what when 20, 30, 40 years ago. It can be important as context, but the ongoing crimes belong to those perpetrating them. And the solutions to those crimes will come from evaluating the situation as it is, not how it could have been or should have been in the past. What the situation used to be between Ukraine and Russia 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago doesn’t matter. Ditto for Israel and Palestine. What the situation is now is more relevant.
But, before we can truly discuss agency for the societies running these countries, we do have to be brutally honest about the context, the guardrails within which they’re allowed to move. Many people in international agencies and governments are only allowed to move upward, to remain in power, to exist at the behest of the U.S. Cross any lines, and your budget is retracted, or support is given to your enemies and opponents. It’s that simple.
Žižek is right that it is not only people in other countries who lack agency. I just read an excellent article about war crimes in which the U.S. didn’t feature at all. It was truly well-written. But it completely elided the greatest war criminal of them all.
The author probably didn’t even notice. The author…she is ultimately responsible for the content of her article, but it was decades of propaganda that hemmed in the degree to which she would be able to report on something like war crimes in a serious manner.
I think we have to dedicate ourselves to carefully examining the context and determining to what degree a country, or government, or agency, is truly even capable of being responsible.
One final example, perhaps. Imagine an adult who’d been apprehended for stealing food. But that adult had also been locked out of their apartment, night after night, by their roommate, who dominates them in every way. Should we consider the crime of stealing food outside of this context? We have to acknowledge that there isn’t a level playing field.
Of course, people are responsible for their crimes, but we can’t ignore the external influences. It doesn’t rob them of agency! They could have not done crimes. But we have to consider the degree to which other crimes influenced them, pressured them to be in a situation in which doing crime was perceived to be the only way out.
At 01:35:25 he says about cancel culture
“If I were a rich billionaire who wants to destroy the left, I would support cancel culture. Why? Because the way it works: it’s permanent self-division. ‘I suspect isn’t what you said already…anti-feminist…’ It sabotages—blocks—any possibility of a larger coalition of solidarity. This is my problem.”
“I’m friendly with with the ex-vice president of Bolivia Alvaro Garcia Dilera. Bolivia. The left was there 12 years in power. The standard of ordinary people almost doubled. And they did it in such intelligent way that they didn’t scare the capital. That’s why, you remember two years ago there was a coup d’état. Then new elections which Morales forces won again. So I’m totally opposed to Cuba, Chavez, Venezuela, Nicaragua: they screwed it up. In Bolivia, they didn’t.
“So I see just particular hopes here and there. I’m very sorry: that’s why I like to define myself as a war communist. I think we are approaching some kind of a new emergency states. And what Europe is doing now—the world even more—is you know treat it like okay let’s change a little bit more 5% here tax so just that our life goes on the way it does. We are still doing small things in order to do nothing.
“By war communism—brutal term that I use with all the irony of course—I mean we have to prepare—with hope that it will not happen—to more global cooperation. It will be necessary. Imagine a stronger pandemic. Imagine stronger ecological catastrophes and so on. We will have to collaborate, otherwise we will really enter new feudalism—what Yanis Varoufakis, with whom I otherwise often don’t agree—predicts.
“I think to conclude […] that the problem today is not even any longer liberal capitalism or something else. Liberal capitalism is already gradually disintegrating. It is either something new or something where the world is moving spontaneously, which is much worse than [the] capitalism that we knew. My God, the third ‘Ich habe gesprochen.’ [from Winnitou/Karl May]”
“All these terms. You know what I hate in the left—I hope we agree—whenever they see something they don’t like, they call it fascism. Without any serious analysis, it’s a Schimpfwort, which prevents you to think.”
But, honestly, Žižek, Chavez also massively raised living standards and literacy rates. Bolivia had the luck that they were able to work a leftist scheme before the U.S. noticed that they had lithium deposits. That is, capital wasn’t particularly interested in their backward-ass country. Venezuela is another matter.
With Venezuela, capital retaliated immediately because it perceived social gain as shareholder loss. This is the same reason that the U.S. continues to batter Cuba to this day. They’re butt-hurt about lost profits. I think Žižek is being quite naive about how this all worked out—and why Bolivia was given a longer leash than Venezuela.
At 01:48:30
“[…] link between early development of Chinese Communist Party and fascism, there was a meeting just before Sun-ya Tsen—the founder of Chinese Republic blah blah modern China—met with young Mao Tse Dong—and this was 1945 Italy […]—and their conclusion was that we need West, but not in the individual way. The only thing that we can take from the West politically is fascism. We should learn to apply that kind of industrial development, but covered by a strong authority.
“I find this fascinating and there is a whole school now—not in China, that would be prohibited—who claim that that’s what in a soft way Deng Xiao Peng did: he turned China from a communist country to a new version of fascist country. By this I mean patriotic ideology plus industrialization and so on.”
At 01:54:00 he says
“I have a long analysis of my good friend Japanese Eco-Marxist Kohei Saito, who tries to argue for kind of a ecological self-limitation and so on. And second thing, I […] I’m just saying but you know how [much] nature was destroyed by humans even before modernity? Look at Iceland. I was there. They told me when the stupid Vikings arrived there in 7th, 8th Century it was full of forests. In 30, 40 years, it was gone—building the stupid Viking boats or whatever. So don’t so many already previous civilizations they ruined so many things. I know today, it’s something more special and so on, but you know what disturbs me with this new eco-feminists? They think that it is possible to slow down to some more balanced development and so on and so on. No. I think once we are in modernity we cannot step out it’s lost.”
Oh, I agree that our society seems to be pathologically incapable of reducing anything in any way, not one little bit. Some individuals can, but not as a group. I wonder, though, whether the consumerist and dog-eat-dog capitalist urge pounded into people’s heads every day has something to do with that inability? I find this argumentation somewhat lazy. Again, the has his contrarian observation, but he doesn’t explore it enough, I think. In fairness, it was a two-hour video and he’d spoken for long enough, but still, it’s…weak.
He, like so many others, speaks for the tippy-top of the first world, forgetting always how much 90% of the planet is forced to renounce every day. It’s not a question of stepping out of modernity—it’s a question of being forced out of it. As the Brits say, It don’t enter into it. I think the time is coming when exigencies will force the same choice on at least parts of the 10%.
Right now, it’s utterly inconceivable that I don’t have Internet, cellular data, water, electricity, heat, and a working server to tell the world what I think. I wonder how long it will take before climate change knocks hard enough on the door to take any of those things away. I bet the Empire’s military will fight like a demon to prevent that from happening. I am ensconced alee of the capitalist machine in which I live. I am protected by their greed, not my own.
At 01:51:20 he says,
“[…] would you agree with this beautiful […] temporal paradox formulated by some very good action theorist: yes, we decide for reasons but, retroactively, our decision creates reasons. We are never in this neutral position […] it’s like falling in love: I like your hair, whatever, but that’s why I fall in love with you. But only after I am in love, I see reasons.
“[…] you […] called something democratic non-totalitarian societies where information is available and you can decide and enact. Do you think we live in such a society? We don’t. Maybe even less than in some totalitarianisms where people nonetheless—you cannot say it publicly, but they know the truth. In China, they know they are controlled, they’re much less in illusion than us. Or, to repeat my old formula, the worst kind of unfreedom is the unfreedom which you experience as freedom.”
Good one. Way to end a two-hour discussion! In the end, we agree.
Published by marco on 7. Jan 2024 18:07:15 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
In 2020, I gave season 1 a 9/10. In 2022, season 2 was down to an 6/10 and merited a reasonable write-up. At that time, they established the formula for having the Witcher kill one monster per episode, while the rest of the episode is exposition.
Having now read the books up to the part covered by this season, I now know that this is kind-of true to the books. Geralt (Henry Cavill) is still healing in the forests of Brokilon, then sets out with a small group to find Ciri. A fake Ciri is introduced to Emhyr as his bride. Yennefer is weaker in the show than in the book—which is kind of surprising, given that the books were written in the 90s and 2000s by a Polish man, and the movie script seems to have been written by a cadre of very non-sleepy scriptwriters.
Ciri stumbles around the desert, meets a unicorn, fights a monster and gets out of the desert, meeting and joining the Rats, a band of bandits. She takes on the name “Falka”.
Look, that’s all I have the energy to write, as this season wasn’t very good. The effects, in particular, were jarringly CGIed, at times. The backgrounds were so flat, you could practically see the green screen. It was quite distracting, at times.
In 2019, I gave season 1 a 10/10. In 2021, season 3 was down to an 8/10 and merited a reasonable write-up. Season 4 drops a few more ranks and I can barely remember what happened in this season. Ah, yes, they all went to high school and fought with being total assholes to each other all the time, all the while bathing in a positive soup of sex positivity and openness at the private school that their poor selves all had to attend.
Maeve (Emma Mackey) is in America, being treated like crap by her writing teacher (Dan Levy), while Otis (Asa Butterfield) is a whiny jackass, butting heads with equally obnoxious O (Thaddea Graham). Eric Effiong (Ncuti Gatwa) is even more of a self-centered douche than he’d become in season 3. Jean Milburn’s (Gillian Anderson) role was disappointingly humdrum and shitty.
The most appealing and engaging characters are, in no particular order Aimee Gibbs (Aimee Lou Wood), who’s just a hilarious, genuine ray of sunshine, Adam Groff (Connor Swindells), a reformed bisexual bully who’s well rid of boyfriend Eric. He has grown considerably and seems to be able to deal with the world in a way where he no longer considers every person as a potential conquest, either physical or sexual. His father Michael (Alistair Petrie) is also very good. They reconcile somewhat on the horse farm where Adam works.
Isaac Goodwin (George Robinson) is great—well-written and well-acted. Ruby Matthews (Mimi Keene) redeemed herself this season with excellent work (even though the actress is really very noticeably painfully thin, which is her own thing, of course, but stands out for a show that makes everything a message, because it makes you wonder what message they think they’re sending).
There were a few good moments, but they were few and far between. Although Maeve handled her mum’s death pretty poorly—you know, for the character who was supposed to be the most worldly and mature—the funeral episodes were the best ones. The other episodes were just relentlessly SEX-POSITIVE and GENDER-POSITIVE and all of the good things that it must be, until most of the characters succumbed to the collective weight of all of their multifarious identities, expressing nothing of interest but general superficial shittiness. Is this how young people want to be depicted?
In 2018, I gave season 1 a 6/10. In 2021, seasons 2 and 3 were up to an 8/10 and merited a reasonable write-up. The fourth and fifth seasons phoned it in even worse than season 1. The characters have all been established, and there are a lot of plot elements to work with—Steamland, Mermaids, Hell, Oona and her pirate ship, the Trolls, etc.—but they just seem to be used as Deus Ex Machinas rather than as a coherent plot.
I can’t really remember what was in season 4 and what was in season 5. There’s a Bad Bean, there’s Hell, there’s Dagmar, there’s Elfo’s association with the dead-eyed Trolls. Luci is dead, he’s alive, he’s got his wings, he doesn’t, his head’s attached, it’s not. There’s an increased focus on “Stience”, which Bean can apparently channel to send lightning bolts through here hands. Her arch-nemesis ends up being the king of Steam Land.
I dunno. I watch this while I eat dinner, so it’s just some filler content with an occasional few decent jokes. Elfo’s kind of witty.
Cliff (Aaron Paul) and David (Josh Hartnett) are astronauts, hibernating their way on a six-year mission. They hibernate so that they don’t go crazy. They alternately wake to perform maintenance. While they’re awake, they can transfer their consciousnesses back to replicas of themselves on Earth. It’s an alternate 1969, don’t ask too many questions, just roll with it.
Invaders from a Charles Manson family-like group—led by “Kappa” (Rory Culkin)—enter David’s home, kill his family, and destroy his replica. David is now left alone on a mission that will continue for four more years. Cliff’s wife, Lana (Kate Mara) suggests that Cliff let David use his replica so that he can see Earth again.
This develops into a whole thing, where David uses the replica once a week, grows infatuated with Lana, puts a move on her, is rejected, and the jig is up. Cliff confronts him on the capsule, they argue, Cliff pops him in the nose. Soon, there is an alert: something must be repaired on the outside of the ship, requiring a spacewalk. Cliff is the EVA guy.
He’s trepidatious but must go out to investigate. There is nothing wrong. When he gets inside, he senses something is very wrong. He jumps into his replica to find it covered with blood, having just murdered his own wife and son. Cliff’s consciousness returns to space. David offers him a seat. They are equals again.
It’s 2006 and paparazzo Bo (Zazie Beetz) is disgusted with her profession. She has some blackmail pictures for which the victim is willing to pay $500. She takes $600 to publish them instead. He ends up killing himself. Notorious trainwreck actress Mazey Day (Clara Rugaard) quits a film set after a drug-fueled and therefore unreported hit-and-run. The victim was still alive, though. She checks herself into a very private rehab. Bo is drawn back into the game by a huge reward for the first pictures of Mazey.
Stuff happens, but the paparazzi eventually find her and realize that she’s chained to the bed. They take a million pictures. Only Bo is concerned about what might be going on. She suspects some weird sex slavery thing. Wrong. It turns out that Mazey’s hit-and-run victim had been alive, had bitten her, and passed on its lycanthropy. She’s a werewolf. She breaks free and hunts them, catching a few, but eventually hunting the rest to a diner.
Bo manages to shoot Mazey. She turns back into her human form, drenched in blood, but probably not yet mortally wounded. Mazey begs for the gun. Bo hands it to her. She prepares her camera. Bang.
Nida Huq (Anjana Vasan) is a poor girl working at a department store with a bunch of racist assholes, with terrible customers, in a town full of people with terrible secrets. She fantasizes about slaughtering them all. It is the 70s in England. The right-wing National Front is on the rise. Racism against her drives her to eat her lunch in a darkened basement.
She finds a talisman, pricks her finger by accident, and ends up activating it. It released the demon Gaap (Paapa Essiedu), who’s on his first assignment as a demon (or so he says). She must kill three people in three days, else the world will end in destruction, immediately. Gaap helps her find worthy victims, people he tells her are child-molesters, etc.
The first victim is a man by a canal. The second is the lecherous, wife-murdering Keith, and then the third is his brother, who catches her in the house. Plot twist: Keith didn’t count because he was himself a murderer. Gaap doesn’t make the rules.
Nida decides that Michael Smart, leader of the National Front, will be her final victim. Gaap’s not hot on the idea because demons like Smart. She really goes for it, crashing his car and attacking him with a hammer. A police officer who’d been tailing her stops her before the killing blow.
During interrogation, she reveals the whole story to a disbelieving group of officers. As the clock strikes midnight, the officers are called out of the room to watch as armageddon rains down. Nida and Gaap have failed. They are banished to eternal darkness.
I’d just finished watching Escape Plan and thought to myself, what the hell, why not go for the doubleheader being so generously offered by German TV, so famous for its discerning taste in cinema?
Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) is the only one who’s back from the original—no more Arnie in this one—running his security company with a bunch of new people. One of them is Jasper Kimbral (Wes Chatham), who screws up a mission and is fired by Breslin. This is definitely going to come back, ammirite? There’s also Trent DeRosa (Dave Bautista) … and I didn’t recognize anyone else.
Shu (Huang Xiaoming) ends up in a prison called HADES (not kidding) and goes through a lot of terrible shit. There is some decent fight choreography. He teams up with some weirdos called LEGION, a trio of Israeli hackers—can’t make this up—led by Count Zero (Gibson would like a word). Shu meets up with Kimbral in prison, working with him to escape.
PLOT TWIST: Kimbral actually runs the prison and it’s run by his ALGORITHMS and he’s going to use Shu as bait to lure Breslin into the prison and show him who’s the SMARTEST and … do whatever about his daddy complex. I hope you’re not going to be too shocked to learn that it does not work out for him, even though it takes about 45 minutes worth of disabling computer systems, re-enabling them, fighting, blowing things up, and so on before Breslin emerges victorious, with no-one dead but Kimbral (obviously).
The group behind HADES contacts him and he swears revenge—to be shown in painful detail in what Stallone hopes will be a sequel (he was right: Escape Plan: The Extractors, in which he teams up with Bautista again, came out a year later).
I watched it in German.
I’ve seen this movie before, but somehow failed to make note of it. The dinosaurs look and act great. There is pathos as most of them die by the middle of the movie. The brachiosaur standing on the dock, howling and barely visible through the smoke, as the lava covers it—it’s heart-wrenching.
Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) is pretty good: Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is OK. This time they’re tricked onto the island to help a billionaire collect dinsosaus for science, but no, haha, it’s actually to make weapons out of them.
The second half of the movie takes place in a weapons-mogul’s mansion. There is an auction of dinosaur warriors to the seediest people in the world, all chomping at the bit to enhance their rockets, laser-guided defense systems, and drones with … dinosaurs? Anyway, there’s a plot twist, because they’ve bred one of the craziest, most savage killing machines possible out of a dozen other dinosaurs—didn’t we already do this in a previous movie?—and it is f&$king unstoppable. Or is it?
The velociraptor Blue’s relationship with Pratt features prominently. Pratt manages to use his vast knowledge about dinosaurs to engineer a breakout for himself and Claire. Blue manages to wipe out the nastiest, most brutal dinosaur that the breeders could breed by dropping it through a ceiling onto a couple of giant spikes. You can’t kill Blue now. She’s got the status of a dog, which Hollywood only kills if it’s the main plot-driver (see John Wick).
They let out all of the dinosaurs in the end to save them from dying in their cages because there’s no-one left to take care of them. They disperse into the woods. Blue remains to say goodbye to Pratt before heading out to repopulate Los Angeles with dinosaurs, I guess?
I watched it in German this time.
This film is an interesting expansion on a lot of the themes that Bill Burr has in his standup comedy and his morning-show podcast.
It’s interesting that it doesn’t occur to any of the prominently featured female characters to wonder what they’re bringing to their marriages, whether they’re doing enough to raise their children right. I know that Bill Burr wrote this, but I really wonder how many other people noticed that it was taken as a given that one is to kowtow to the pressures of the snobbiest parts of society, to do “whatever it takes” for a family’s children to get ahead.
Any anger at how fucked-up the world is is to be suppressed, there is no need to try to change any of it. Instead, you make sure that you bubble to the top of the snobbish heap, sucking off the horrible tin-horn dictator of a school principal so that she writes a recommendation for your kid to go to the right school. Madness.
But the person who rebels against this utterly vacuous and immoral mindset hammered home by society is the asshole. Is that the story, though? I wonder if anyone else noticed how basic the wives were? Sure, the guys were pretty basic, too, but at least we got to learn that they started and ran a thriving business for 23 years. We never learned what the three wives even do for a living—except Kimberly, who just wanted to “go to the gym and fuck” Mike.
This is pretty shallow, I think. Do better, Burr. I gave it an extra star for having a few good rants. But I deducted stars for only making the guys cool.
Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) and the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) both arrive in 1984 from the year 2029. They show up naked and in a flash of bright light, posed to cover their naughty bits. They go about getting some clothes and weapons, each in their own way. They have conflicting missions: Kyle is there to protect Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) whereas the Terminator is there to … terminate her.
The Terminator doesn’t have a great plan, so it goes through the phone book, killing every Sarah Connor it can find. Last one’s the charm, but Kyle rescues her. He fills her in on the unstoppable murder machine intent on killing her, in particular. It’s because of SkyNet, man. It’s because the robots found out that she would give birth to John Connor, who would go on to lead the rebellion against the machines.
The twist here is that Sarah and Kyle get busy at some point, which means that Kyle is his own leader’s father, even though he only discovers this after the fact. How could he have been the guy who was working with John Connor and not know that he was his father? Because he hadn’t traveled back in time to impregnate his wife and leader’s mother yet. Does he not retroactively remember? It’s complicated.
This all happens while they’re constantly on the run, constantly building new weapons—pipe bombs—and barely slipping the grasp of the unremittingly persistent Terminator. It’s finally taking damage, though. After one explosion, it loses its entire exoskeleton, leaving a red-eyed, stop-motion-animated robot. Reese finally dies in an explosion that blows this remaining endoskeleton in half. It crawls across the floor to grab Sarah. She breaks free of its grasp and traps it in a hydraulic press. The lights finally go out in its eyes.
Sarah travels alone in Mexico, pregnant with John, preparing for the coming war with SkyNet.
The original and still the best? The visuals are a tiny bit dated, but still mostly hold up. The chase scenes are decent, if a bit repetitive. There is a stronger focus on story because there wasn’t enough CGI to distract viewers for the entire film.
I saw it in German.
I have no idea whether this is representative of serial anime, but it was kind of stretched out to make ten episodes. The premise is that there’s a prison planet, run by a private corporation, which benefits from the energy crystals that they harvest. Jim (Masaomi Yamahashi) is a guard, but one of the good guys, unsure of his role and place there. Monsters from the deep attack. It is their planet. The energy crystals are their food.
Jim is heavily invested in saving Marnie (Ayahi Takagaki), who is pregnant. Along the way, they team up with a prisoner with a heart of gold Walter (Kazuhiro Yamaji). He’s done bad things, but Jim is willing to treat him as the person he is now. There are long discussions with people with the viewpoint that “once a criminal, always a criminal.” This tension between a humanistic and purely capitalistic world suffuses the show.
There are shuttles to leave the planet, but they’re only for the elites. There is a strong tension between the hyper-capitalistic world as it is, and the socialist world that could be. This is very, very explicitly stated several times. Characters heavily invested in the me-first way of doing things seem to have the upper hand, but then get their brutal comeuppance as the group that sticks together inevitably wins out.
Despite tremendous firepower, the native inhabitants have overwhelming numbers and don’t seem at all deterred by the slaughter of what seems like millions of them. There are millions and millions more. This bucks the socialist trend a bit, in that it seems to be ascribing a mindlessness to the enemy, which is a bit convenient.
The premise is that the enemy is some sort of hive mind, that it doesn’t care about itself or its brethren, that it’s willing to relentlessly suicide its way toward its goal. Well, yes, of course it is. It realizes that if it doesn’t eliminate the human menace, it will steal all of its food. There seems to be no way to communicate, which is convenient. This is the plot of Starship Troopers.
Walter, Jim, and Marnie escape in a lifeboat at the end, as the aliens swarm to retake their planet, eliminating all evidence of human habitation. The end.
The animation’s a bit weak and flat, but you eventually stop paying attention to it. I watched it in Japanese, mostly while cycling indoors.
This is a documentary about the making of one episode of South Park over the course of a week. The episode is the first in the fifteenth season, HumancentiPad (Wikipedia). You see them developing the jokes, really putting the time in on jokes about how it would work when people are strapped to one another ass-to-mouth (as they are in the movie Human Centipede). We see Trey and Matt doing voice work, which is pretty fascinating. They just … do it. With little preparation, they just shout out the various voices.
You can watch the documentary at here (YouTube). It’s about 42 minutes long. These people work incredibly hard, from before sunup until long after sundown. They talk about how the process developed, from building all episodes beforehand to the process they have today, where they build the episodes the week before they air. This allows them to stay very current, but it’s also very stressful—during the season anyway.
2011 was a banner year for them, as they’d just returned from the opening of Book of Mormon, which would go on to smash all sorts of Broadway and musical records.
Published by marco on 6. Jan 2024 23:32:00 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 7. Jan 2024 08:16:42 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland. There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation − for those who want to live − will be the only option. Danny Danon, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I’m talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.””
“The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.”
““Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.””
“It is hard not to be cynical about the “humanitarian interventionists” — Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power — who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the “ Responsibility to Protect ” but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the “humanitarian interventions” they championed, from Bosnia to Libya, come close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay.”
“The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.”
““The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the U.N. solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes. “What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state.”
The Mess They Made of 2023 by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“To this cohort of Americans — animated by the idea that their opposition to Donald Trump grants them unchecked moral authority — preserving democratic rule means ensuring, by any means necessary, the people vote the right way . In other words, democracy is so sacred that it must be protected from the voters. Authoritarianism is so dangerous that it must be proactively employed to stop potential authoritarians….”
“I was cheered to find the editorial writers at the Republican–American using the term “liberal authoritarianism,” as they do elsewhere in the piece. I had thought this phrase was limited to commentators such as your columnist and publications such as Consortium News . This is important, it seems to me. When a provincial daily owned by the same family for 113 years exhibits so clear a grasp of the American dynamic as it is in 2023, it follows that more people than you may think have a perfectly clear idea of what is driving the dissolution and decay they see all around them.”
“The narrative now emerging in Washington — I read this in The New York Times the other day — is that, yes, Washington’s open support for the genocide in Gaza has left it drastically isolated but that the world is with America in the Ukraine case. What nonsense. The great majority of humanity, as measured by population or a count of nations, stands as opposed to the U.S. for provoking and backing the proxy war in Ukraine as it does for its support of Israel’s barbarity.”
“Ours is an era ruled by unthinking ideologues. We have seen these past 12 months that there is no reference to law or — as the Israel–Gaza abomination reveals all too starkly — any notion of humanity or common decency.”
“When the U.S. and its allies send the Kyiv regime cluster bombs and depleted uranium in defense of “freedom” and “democracy,” it is the foreign policy analogue of the Colorado Supreme Court breaking the law in the name of the law, just as the Waterbury Republican–American had it last week.”
“Ideology and hubris, not very distant cousins to one another, have been evident features of U.S. foreign policy for may years. This year put us on notice that they now rule without challenge. A frightened elite lacking in all vision can neither find its way out of the messes it has made nor retreat to allow voices to those with dynamic perspectives nor restore the moral superiority it has squandered—such as this last may have been.”
To Retrieve History by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“The Times ’s reliably Russophobic correspondent, Carlotta Gall, is now down to quoting Lyudmyla Denisova, who was fired as the Kyiv regime’s senior human rights official last year because her accounts of Russian soldiers raping infants were so ridiculous as to discredit the Kyiv regime’s propaganda op. Gall’s report also relies on the Reckoning Project—without telling readers what this outfit is. Let me finish the work Gall left undone: The Reckoning Project is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. It is, pulling back the curtain, a Central Intelligence Agency front.”
“[…] given how open Russian officials have been about this program, I do not see that we can summarily dismiss their many-times-repeated explanation when they say the intent was to keep children—a lot of them living in orphanages or on the street—out of harm’s way. This is not, after all, the Israel Defense Forces.”
“[…] the greatest of these interred truths is that the Russian military intervention was provoked—systematically, with intent, over a period of many years. The war began when Russian forces crossed the Russian–Ukrainian border two years ago come February: With this lie, eight years of the Kyiv regime’s shelling of its own people is also buried. Three decades during which Moscow attempted to negotiate a post–Cold War security settlement along its western flank with Europe: Those years are buried. The draft treaties Russia sent Westward in December 2021: You will never hear of them again.”
“It is strong language, but I will use it: These months of barbarity, with more to come, mark out Israel as a failed state. It is a chaotic entity that depends on violence toward others for its existence, and the violence depends on an irresponsible sponsor. It is inherently, institutionally discriminatory and adopts the apartheid system from white South Africa.”
“If ever an emperor had no clothes, it is apartheid Israel as it parades across the West as the innocent victim of “terrorists” who have no cause.”
“Atop all this sits a president whose obvious mental incompetence is spoken of only when the topic cannot be avoided and most of the time apologetically. Joe Biden is just short of his “I am not a crook” moment, and corporate media now take to saying this for him. Since he seems to be incapable of competing for his own reelection, the corporate press and the broadcasters are apparently prepared to campaign for him.”
“There is the famous line from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, quoted so often it is cliché, but there seems no avoiding it given its merciless pertinence to our condition: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.””
“Events, for anyone wishing to escape the eternal present just mentioned, must be represented as they are, for what they are, and for what they mean. I suppose I advocate simple vigilance as I propose this, and good enough. Plain, clear language is our best friend in this.”
Israel guns for war with Lebanon and Iran by Thomas Scripps (WSWS)
“Conforming the threat of a wider war, to the north a full-scale conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon is on a hair trigger. Israel’s forces are in a “state of very high readiness” and escalating strikes on Lebanon’s southern territory, in a trade of fire with Hezbollah forces. More than 150 people have been killed on the Lebanese side of the border since October 7, including over a dozen civilians, three of them journalists. Three more, one a Hezbollah member, were killed Tuesday by an Israeli airstrike on Bint Jbeil. Nine soldiers and four civilians have been killed in Israel by return fire.”
“The ultimate target is Iran, in service to the broader imperialist war aims of Israel’s US patron. Referring to the seven theatres in which the IDF is waging its war, Gallant declared, “Iran is the driving force in the convergence of the arenas. It transfers resources, ideology, knowledge and training to its proxies.””
“Iran has stayed out of direct involvement so far, but if its commanders are being targeted, it will have trouble continuing along a path of restraint.”
Eurasismus – Russlands Strategie für die multipolare Welt by Leon Brosowski (NachDenkSeiten)
“Mackinders nächstes bedeutendes Werk war „Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction“ von 1919, in welchem er den Westmächten auf der Pariser Friedenskonferenz die Bildung von Pufferstaaten in Osteuropa, also zwischen Deutschland und Russland, empfahl, um das die Macht der angelsächsischen (nun gewannen auch die USA an Bedeutung) Staaten gefährdende Bündnis zu verhindern. Man folgte seinem Rat.”
“Hier sieht man endgültig den harmonischen Übergang von Mackinder zu Spykmann. Die NATO ist das perfekte Mittel zur Kontrolle des europäischen „Rimland“ und sorgt dafür, dass es keine Verbindung eingeht mit dem „Herzland“, also Russland, was das Aufkommen eines starken Eurasiens verhindert. Nach dieser Logik bestand das Hauptinteresse der USA darin, die Länder an den Rändern Eurasiens zu kontrollieren und von Russland zu trennen, und genau das ist die Containment-Politik, die Truman 1947 ausrief. Die Mackinder-Spykman-Geopolitik wurde im Weiteren vor allem von US-Strategen wie Henry Kissinger und Zbigniew Brzeziński bewundert und politisch umgesetzt.”
“Selbst Gorbatschow kritisierte Kosyrew, Jelzins Außenminister von 1990 bis 1996, dafür, Russland zu einem Außenposten des State Department zu machen. Dieser Stimmungswandel führte dazu, dass 1998 alle Vorschläge Jelzins für einen neuen Ministerpräsidenten vom Parlament abgelehnt wurden und er sich dazu gezwungen sah, Primakow vorzuschlagen, den die Duma annahm”
“Er begann auf Basis einer intensiven Diplomatie und unter ständiger Betonung der Notwendigkeit von Multipolarität, welche die von den USA angestrebte Hegemonie ausschloss, Beziehungen zu China, Indien sowie dem Iran aufzubauen.”
“[…] der spontane Entschluss Primakows, als Reaktion auf die völkerrechtswidrige Bombardierung Jugoslawiens durch die NATO 1999, einen Besuch in den USA noch auf dem Flug nach Washington abzusagen und umzukehren; eine symbolische Handlung, die die eurasische „Primakow-Doktrin“, wie Lawrow die Außenpolitik dieser Zeit später nannte , verkörpert wie keine andere – Achtung des Völkerrechts, Unteilbarkeit von Sicherheit, gemeinsame Konfliktlösung sowie zunehmende strategische und wirtschaftliche Integration in Eurasien als Speerspitze für Multipolarität und Frieden.”
“Nach dem 11. September 2001 kam es jedoch zu einem Wandel. Putin wandte sich explizit dem Westen zu, bot den USA umfangreiche sicherheitspolitische und geheimdienstliche Kooperation bezüglich Afghanistan und dem islamistischen Terrorismus an, akzeptierte die NATO-Erweiterung, gewährte den USA die Einrichtung von Militärstützpunkten in zentralasiatischen Ex-Sowjetrepubliken bei gleichzeitiger Abtretung von russischen Militäreinrichtungen im Ausland, hielt sich mit Kritik am Rückzug der USA aus dem ABM-Vertrag zurück und sprach davon, dass er darauf hinarbeiten würde, Russland selbst zu einem Mitglied der Nato zu machen.”
“Raketenabwehrschirms in Osteuropa sowie ihre Förderung der Machtwechsel in Georgien und der Ukraine 2004 und 2005, was dazu führte, dass Regierungen an die Macht kamen, die einen NATO-Beitritt der Länder anstrebten, was für Russland eine rote Linie darstellte und mehrfach kommuniziert wurde – vor allem, nachdem Putin klar wurde, dass eine strategische Partnerschaft auf Augenhöhe mit der NATO nicht möglich war – ließ den Bruch aber immer tiefer werden. Seinem Frust verlieh Putin schließlich in seiner berühmten Rede auf der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz 2007 Ausdruck.”
Mass graves, grave questions: Britain’s secret Srebrenica role by Kit Klarenberg (The Grayzone)
“[…] the exploitation of Srebrenica to justify further warfare is not limited to Washington. British officials are particularly keen promoters of this argument, with the hawkish intelligence operative turned parliamentarian Alicia Kearns providing the latest example. Today, Britain is the only country other than Bosnia and Herzegovina to officially commemorate the killings an act of genocide. Since the late 1990s, London has also been home to many NGOs that have promoted the claim that Srebrenica constituted an act of genocide.”
“That account is corroborated by the UN Secretary General’s report on Srebrenica’s capture. It notes members of a Muslim delegation dispatched to peace talks on a British warship in September 1993 were openly told by Izetbegovic: “NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people.””
“None of the trials produced evidence that an order was ever given at any command level to massacre Srebrenica’s male population. When the ICTY convicted General Radislav Krstic on charges of genocide, the tribunal conceded that the commander of the multi-ethnic VRS corps which seized Srebrenica was not only unaware of and uninvolved in alleged war crimes, but explicitly ordered his soldiers not to harm civilians.”
“[…] it is beyond dispute that British officials consistently blocked proposals to undo a UN embargo on arms shipments to Muslim forces during the war, apparently due to what then-U.S. President Bill Clinton reportedly described as London’s desire for “a painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe.” Despite thousands of dead Muslims, that wish has gone unfulfilled. For those who hoped to Balkanize the continent’s last remaining major multiethnic state, however, the war was an unqualified success.”
‘Nothing Will Stop Us’ by Ralph Nader (Scheer Post)
“A few days ago, the first protests by labor union members occurred in Oakland, California. Union activists could turn their attention to why, for years, union leaders put billions of dollars into riskier lower-interest Israeli bonds rather than U.S. Treasuries or bond funds investing in America. Like U.S. weapon deliveries, purchases of Israeli bonds by states, cities and unions have surged since October 7th.”
“Congress is poised to send $14.3 billion to Israeli militarism – a “genocide tax” on U.S. taxpayers – without public hearings. While growing public opinion in the U.S. is against unconditional backing of the Israeli regime, it has not changed a single vote in Congress. Someday, more organized support for America’s national interest will.”
Who knows when that will happen, though?
Israel’s War on Children is a Symptom of a Civilization Built on Trauma by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“Israel is the only nation on earth that systematically prosecutes minors in military courts. Kids as young as 12-years-old are routinely taken from their beds in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers. They are blindfolded, bound and shackled; interrogated without any lawyer or guardian present and coerced, often with violence, to sign confessions in a language they can’t speak or read. The most common charge is throwing stones which can carry a sentence of twenty years. The prisons these children are then sent to are dens of physical, psychological and sexual abuse with UNICEF concluding ill-treatment in the Israeli Military Detention System to be “widespread, systematic and institutionalized throughout the process.” Over 1 million Palestinians have endured this hell since 1967.”
“Another 52,000 Gazans have been wounded including over 1,000 kids who have lost at least one limb. 85% of this population is now homeless with hundreds of thousands being pushed into so-called “Safe Zones” on the Egyptian border; desolate tent cities with no water, no food and no bathrooms, and with rates of malnutrition and infectious disease reaching downright catastrophic heights, death by safe zone may very well come to surpass the body count produced by American ordinances.”
“The IDF’s solution to another generation of children traumatized by their reign of terror is to murder every last one of them and this horrific final solution is very possible thanks to American tax dollars and another generation of westerners numb to injustice after years of being groomed for blind obedience by big government and big tech.”
“This needs to stop and we in the west are the ones who need to stop it. A ceasefire isn’t enough. Israel plays the victim like a psychotic parent with Munchausen’s-by-proxy, but it is Palestine that will never know peace until that state and any other like it is smashed to smithereens. To ask anything less would be to ask a violated child to grow up in the same household as their rapist. The children of Palestine desperately need to heal, and traumatized children cannot heal in the shadow of their abusers.”
I would be careful with that equivalency. States can and have to heal like this, cheek by jowl. South Africa is an example. The antebellum South in the U.S as well. It’s not all sunshine and roses, but it’s better than it was. It’s not good, but it’s possible. It’s the only solution, despite the uncomfortable drawbacks of lashing ex-oppressor to ex-oppressed.
“I want to kill the people who did this to me. I want to kill the people who will do it again. I want to burn those buildings to the ground. I want to do horrible things to make that broken little girl inside me feel safe. And I don’t want to do these things because I’m sick or indoctrinated by radical extremism. I want these things because that child they tried to strangle is still in there and she has every right to revenge, and so do the children of Gaza.”
Eloquent. Evocative.
“I could kill a thousand priests with my bare hands, and it wouldn’t make me feel any safer. It would only make it easier for the priests of this world to convince their sheep that Queer kids like me are wolves that need to be slaughtered. Revenge isn’t enough. The systems designed to debase the children of this world, from the Vatican to the Knesset, do not deserve to get off that easy.”
“We, the adults broken by a society with no use for the individuals that we were born to be, need to remember that we were children once too and we need to stand in solidarity with the children of Gaza and show them that you do not need to destroy yourself to fight back. Together, we must struggle to dismantle every institution that relies on the suffering of children to thrive and yes that means destroying the Zionist state of Israel, the American Empire and the church of the Westphalian nation state that oversees it all.”
‘Our country has lost its moral compass’ by Arundhati Roy (The Hindu Frontline)
“If the current regime returns to power next year, in 2026 the exercise of delimitation is likely to disempower all of South India by reducing the number of MPs we send to Parliament. Delimitation is not the only threat we face. Federalism, the lifeblood of our diverse country is under the hammer too. As the central government gives itself sweeping powers, we are witnessing the sorry sight of proudly elected chief ministers of opposition-ruled States having to literally beg for their States’ share of public funds.”
“Our country has lost its moral compass. The most heinous crimes, the most horrible declarations calling for genocide and ethnic cleansing are greeted with applause and political reward. While wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, throwing crumbs to the poor manages to garner support to the very powers that are further impoverishing them.”
This describes so many countries that tout themselves as enlightened, civilized, and democratic. Not least the U.S.
“As we watch the structures of our democracy being systematically dismantled, and our land of incredible diversity being shoe-horned into a spurious, narrow idea of one-size-fits-all nationalism, at least those who call themselves intellectuals should know that our country too, could explode.”
India? Or the U.S.?
“On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homelands like a school bully distributes marbles.) How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilisations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today.”
“In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.””
It’s not that Israel isn’t to blame for its ideology and actions, but that it is no way unique in its beliefs and behavior. Liberal U.S. Americans love Winston Churchill. He’s an inveterate racist, an immoral, amoral human being.
“Palestine still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions, in virtual Bantustans, where they are subjected to collective punishments, 24-hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalized on a daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine. And when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity.”
This is from a speech from over 20 years ago.
“The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers. But can we ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they have arrived at this destination? September 11, 1922 to September 11, 2002—80 years is a long time to have been waging war. Is there some advice the world can give the people of Palestine? Should they just take Golda Meir’s suggestion and make a real effort not to exist?””
‘Yes, please,’ is apparently the answer that the “civilized” world gives.
“Today the young are on the streets, led from the front by Jews as well as Palestinians, raging about what their government, the US government, is doing. Universities, including the most elite campuses, are on the boil. Capitalism is moving fast to shut them down. Donors are threatening to withhold funds, thereby deciding what American students may or may not say, and how they may or may not think. A shot to the heart of the foundational principles of a so-called liberal education. Gone is any pretense of post-colonialism, multiculturalism, international law, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Gone is any pretence of Free Speech or public morality.”
“A “war” that lawyers and scholars of international law say meets all the legal criterion of a genocide is taking place in which the perpetrators have cast themselves as victims, the colonisers who run an apartheid state have cast themselves as the oppressed. In the US, to question this is to be charged with anti-Semitism, even if those questioning it are Jewish themselves. It’s mind-bending. Even Israel—where dissident Israeli citizens like Gideon Levy are the most knowledgeable and incisive critics of Israeli actions—does not police speech in the way the US does (although that is rapidly changing, too). In the US, to speak of Intifada—uprising, resistance—in this case against genocide, against your own erasure—is considered to be a call for the genocide of Jews. The only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent.”
“Yesterday’s news is that Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, once among India’s top universities, has issued new rules of conduct for students. A fine of Rs.20,000 for any student who stages a dharna or hunger strike. And Rs 10,000 for “anti-national slogans”. There is no list yet about what those slogans are—but we can be reasonably sure that calling for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslims will not be on it. So, the battle in Palestine is ours, too.”
“No amount of commentary about the cruelty, no amount of condemnation of the excesses committed by either side—and no amount of false equivalence about the scale of these atrocities—will lead to a solution. It is the occupation that is breeding this monstrosity. It is doing violence to both perpetrators and victims. The victims are dead. The perpetrators will have to live with what they have done. So will their children. For generations.”
“The solution cannot be a militaristic one. It can only be a political one in which both Israelis and Palestinians live together or side by side in dignity, with equal rights. The world must intervene. The occupation must end. Palestinians must have a viable homeland. And Palestinian refugees must have the right to return.
“If not, then the moral architecture of Western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even this provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.”
Shelter for whom, though?
Biden Administration’s Flawed Response to Yemen Attacks Increases Possibility of Regional War by Mitchell Plitnick (Scheer Post)
“if Ansar Allah persists, as they are likely to, those measures will not make the waters safe enough for major shipping companies to continue their operations. Already, at least a dozen have curtailed their operations in the Red Sea, including such shipping giants as Maersk and HMM. So, if the increased Western naval presence does not deter Ansar Allah, the next step would be an attack on the mainland of Yemen.”
“It’s a mark of American blindness that even under such circumstances, where Egypt has such an immediate and pressing interest in stopping the Ansar Allah interference with shipping, it still would not join the American operation. The United States simply does not see the extent to which it is alienating and infuriating the entire Arab world with its support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
“The Israeli government has said it would pay for damage to ships from Ansar Allah attacks, but it has not yet offered to cover other costs like surcharges and insurance. And this is only the beginning. These costs can rise much more, especially if the Red Sea becomes a combat zone and if Israeli shipping is challenged elsewhere.”
“Ansar Allah is not stupid. They rose from a small group in Yemen to now being effective rulers and are even now negotiating with Saudi Arabia on a permanent settlement of the conflict that will leave them in charge. They have essentially won that war despite going up against Saudi Arabia and the United States. The current action is partly motivated by their bargaining with the Saudis. Saudi Arabia wants to end the fighting with Yemen and move toward a more stable relationship with its new rulers, just as it has been pursuing a more stable and less confrontational tone with its adversary, Iran.”
“The Biden administration seems to have no idea just how much rage there is in every Arab state over Israel’s actions and the U.S. support for them. They seem to think the only reactions that matter are those of the dictators and diplomats they meet with. But those dictators and diplomats know better, and so does Ansar Allah.”
But yeah, imagine how much worse it would be under Trump.
The War on Hospitals by Joelle M. Abi-Rached (Boston Review)
“Hamas’s attacks on October 7 would predictably generate a violent military reaction from Israel. But this Israeli campaign in Gaza, a strip of land where more than 80 percent of its population lived in poverty even before October 7, has been of a different character entirely than any previous ones. This onslaught has featured direct attacks on hospitals and the intentional undermining of the entire health care system: shelling, the killing and arresting of health care personnel, the direct and indirect killing of hundreds of patients, underprovision or complete lack of proper medical care, and unwarranted suffering for thousands of patients due to shortages in basic medications, water, food, and fuel. The attacks have made clear that the repression of Palestinian rights now has a new feature: the systematic destruction of the very institutions that sustain life.”
“When the American Medical Association (AMA) met in mid-November to draft a call for a ceasefire and the protection of civilians and medical professionals, the effort was shut down . But in 2022 the AMA published a call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine—and didn’t mince words. “The AMA is outraged by the senseless injury and death the Russian army has inflicted on the Ukrainian people,” the AMA president said . “For those who survive these unprovoked attacks, the physical, emotional, and psychological health of Ukrainians will be felt for years.” And while in a November 9 statement the AMA said that it “supports efforts to deliver humanitarian aid and medical supplies to those facing a humanitarian crisis” (note the anonymous “those”), no mention has been made of the unfolding “public health catastrophe” in Gaza that the WHO has been warning about.”
“Perhaps the most astounding silence has come from the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Both released prompt statements in October condemning the “recent attacks and acts of terror in Israel,” but have kept silent regarding the tremendous psychological trauma that decades of occupation, and now indiscriminate bombardment, have unleashed on Gaza’s children and adolescents. How can one comprehend this dissonance if not in terms of a double standard?”
“Gaza’s main hospitals, concentrated in the north of the strip, had been the target of indiscriminate attacks and bombardments, including the deliberate use of white phosphorus artillery shells. White phosphorus, banned under international law, is a substance that inflicts horrific skin burns that are difficult to heal or treat in conflict-ridden areas; it damages vital organs causing lifelong injuries (physical and psychological) and triggers extensive fires.”
“A WHO delegation described Gaza’s main hospital as a “death zone.” They were shocked by what they saw: a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital, only 25 staff left to care for 291 seriously ill patients, premature babies in “extremely critical conditions,” no water, no food, no medical supplies, and no fuel. Patients’ wounds were festering due to an acute shortage of antibiotics.”
“[…] surgeons have reported horrific procedures in which they must amputate children’s limbs and dress burns with no anesthetics, using vinegar in lieu of antiseptics, the light of their cell phone screens to see, and ketamine to knock out patients before operating on them.”
“By bombing Gaza’s last operational wheat mill and restricting access to humanitarian aid, the UN has warned that these deliberate destructions “threaten to make the continuation of Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.” But it also suggests that Israel has embraced a common war tactic of rogue states such as Syria or Russia.”
Wait, what? You can’t name Empire as a primary purveyor of such tactics? It’s always gotta be Russia? Just Russia? U.S. liberal reporters are gonna be U.S. liberal reporters. There’s just certain things they can’t say. I guess she’s already proud enough that she’s allowed to criticize Israel—no sense getting fired for going after Empire, too.
“While the 1907 Hague Conventions contained some provisions on the protection of civilian hospitals, they were first mentioned explicitly only in the Fourth Geneva Convention, whose articles were adopted in 1949. It is worth noting that it was the indiscriminate Allied bombing of German hospitals during World War II, as well as the United States’ dropping of napalm-filled bombs on Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that prompted international legislation on the protection of civilian infrastructures, including hospitals.”
“Long before Russia’s targeted bombing of health care facilities in Ukraine in 2022, MSF frequently reported the deliberate targeting of its clinics and hospitals in Afghanistan, Syria, Gaza, and Yemen. The Syrian regime and its Russian ally have perfected their ruthless attacks on physicians, hospitals, and clinics, killing, destroying, and pulverizing health care personnel and facilities as a way to punish and deter civilian populations. While Russia has been the worst offender, if we compare the number of attacks on health care by population, Israel far surpasses all other countries.”
I would like to see the evidence for this, and the sources. The U.S. and NATO are suspiciously absent, despite having utterly flattened at least four countries in just the last two and a half decades. To my knowledge, Russia had a considerably lighter footprint in Afghanistan than the U.S. did—and Syria has never been in any country but its own. And who’s attacking Yemen? Are we allowed to talk about Saudi Arabia? Or are they still under the aegis of Empire?
The Cost of Bearing Witness by Chris Hedges (Substack)
““Blood was everywhere, along with bits of kids’ toys, cans from the supermarket, smashed fruit, broken bicycles and shattered perfume bottles,” he writes. “The place looked like a charcoal drawing of a town scorched by a dragon.””
“Refaat, whose doctorate was on the metaphysical poet John Donne, wrote a poem in November, called “If I Must Die,” which became his last will and testament. It has been translated into numerous languages. A reading of the poem by the actor Brian Cox has been viewed almost 30 million times.”“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made,
flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.”
“I see death approaching, hear its steps growing louder. Just be done with it, I think. It’s the 11th day of the conflict, but all the days have merged into one: the same bombardment, the same fear, the same smell. On the news, I read the names of the dead on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. I wait for my name to appear.”
“Rulla had been right. Huda and Hatem’s building had been hit only an hour earlier. The bodies of their daughter and grandchild had already been retrieved; the only known survivor was Wissam, one of their other daughters, who had been taken to the ICU. Wissam had gone straight into surgery, where both of her legs and her right hand had been amputated. Her graduation ceremony from art college had taken place only the day before. She has to spend the rest of her life without legs, with one hand.”
“In the evening, I went to see Wissam in the hospital; she was barely awake. After half an hour, she asked me: “Khalo [Uncle], I’m dreaming, right?”
“I said, “We are all in a dream.”
““My dream is terrifying! Why?”
““All our dreams are terrifying.”
“After 10 minutes of silence, she said, “Don’t lie to me, Khalo. In my dream, I don’t have legs. It’s true, isn’t it? I have no legs?”
““But you said it’s a dream.”
““I don’t like this dream, Khalo.””
“The electricity is cut. Food, fuel and water begin to run out. The wounded are operated on without anesthesia. There are no painkillers or sedatives. He visits his niece Wissam, racked with pain, in al-Shifa Hospital who asks him for a lethal injection. She says Allah will forgive her.
““But he will not forgive me, Wissam.”
““I am going to ask him to, on your behalf,” she says.”
““We picked up pieces of mutilated bodies and gathered them on a blanket; you find a leg here, a hand there, while the rest looks like minced meat,” he writes. “In the past week, many Gazans have started writing their names on their hands and legs, in pen or permanent marker, so they can be identified when death comes. This might seem macabre, but it makes perfect sense: We want to be remembered; we want our stories to be told; we seek dignity. At the very least, our names will be on our graves. The smell of unretrieved bodies under the ruins of a house hit last week remains in the air. The more time passes, the stronger the smell.””
“A man rides a horse toward me with the body of a dead teenager slung over the saddle in front. It seems it’s his son, perhaps. It looks like a scene from a historical movie, only the horse is weak and barely able to move. He is back from no battle. He is no knight. His eyes are full of tears as he holds the little riding crop in one hand and the bridle in the other. I have an impulse to photograph him but then feel suddenly sick at the idea. He salutes no one. He barely looks up. He is too consumed with his own loss.”
““Scores of bodies are strewn along both sides of the road,” he writes. “Rotting, it seems, into the ground. The smell is horrendous. A hand reaches out toward us from the window of a burned-out car, as if asking for something, from me specifically. I see what looks like two headless bodies in a car — limbs and precious body parts just thrown away and left to fester.””
““Though I’ve lived in many cities around the world, and visited many more, that tiny ramshackle abode was the only place I ever felt at home’” he goes on. “Friends and colleagues always asked: Why don’t you live in Europe or America? You have the opportunity. My students chimed in: Why did you return to Gaza? My answer was always the same: ‘Because in Gaza, in an alleyway in the Saftawi neighborhood of Jabalya, there stands a little house that cannot be found anywhere else in the world.’ If on doomsday God were to ask me where I would like to be sent, I wouldn’t hesitate in saying, ‘Home.’ Now there is no home.””
“Atef, Refaat and those like them, who speak to us at the risk of death, echo this Biblical injunction. They speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world — the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileged, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel lobby groups — who are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza. The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete.
“Evil has not changed down the millenia. Neither has goodness.”
Democrats Disprove Claims They Will Covertly Rig Election By Rigging It In Plain Sight (Babylon Bee)
““We are being entirely transparent about our election interference,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows after announcing former President Donald Trump will not be allowed on the 2024 primary ballot. “Any wild allegations of covert efforts to rig elections are simply preposterous. As anyone can clearly see, the steps we are taking to interfere with and rig the outcome of our elections are being done in plain sight. This is a win for democracy.””
“At publishing time, top Democrat powerbrokers were reportedly also preparing to begin operations in every state to rule all Republican voters ineligible to vote in any elections in order to save democracy.”
They’re Calling Ethnic Cleansing “Voluntary Migration” Now by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“The plot to relocate Palestinians from territories desired by Israel is also far from new. In a 2002 article for The Guardian titled “A new exodus for the Middle East?”, Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that the agenda to “transfer” Palestinians to other countries has existed for as long as modern Zionism:”“The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century. And driving it was an iron logic: There could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants, who opposed its emergence and would constitute an active or potential fifth column in its midst. This logic was understood, and enunciated, before and during 1948, by Zionist, Arab and British leaders and officials.
“As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the prophet and founder of Zionism, wrote in his diary in anticipation of the establishment of the Jewish state: ‘We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country … The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.’”
“This is a very, very old agenda, being presented as something brand new that is only just occurring to Israeli officials just now. They didn’t just come up with this. It’s been fantasized about for as long as Israel was a twinkle in its founding fathers’ eyes.
“This is the real objective in Gaza. Not the “elimination of Hamas” (whatever the hell you want to pretend that would look like in practice), but the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
“Hamas is not the target in Gaza. Hamas is just the excuse.”
Democracy Dies in Daylight by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“Papers like the Post insisted since 2016 that Trump’s sole currency is racism, so it was a shock to see Kagan write, “Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump,” or, “On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.” Where was that before? Was there an agreement in places like the Post op-ed page to avoid analyzing Trump in conventional political terms until it was too late to be useful, i.e. until after his voters had been alienated through hysterics about “deplorables” and white supremacists?”
Washington Post Op-Ed Argues That Colleges Should ‘Restrict’ Speech To Fight Antisemitism by Emma Camp (Reason)
““What values do university presidents think are most important to prepare leaders in a democracy?” Finkelstein writes. “The ability to shout intemperate slogans or the ability to engage in reasoned dialogue with people who have moral and political differences?””
Hey bitch! Not everyone has access to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to get their voice heard. What she really wants is for only people that already agree with her to get a platform.
Anyone else can engage in reasoned dialogue, right? Somewhere quiet. Where no-one’s listening.
Bitch, you only respond when someone shouts it you and you’re unable to suppress it from being heard by other people. Now, you’re crying in public. Fuck, I can’t take all of this crying in public.
OMG, I invented a reason for why I’m deeply offended by certain words and now I can’t even think straight. Oh woe is me. Sack up. Jesus. I’m never seen so much bellyaching and crying to mommy being taken seriously. There are students running to Congresspeople because somebody said a bad word to them in their dorm hallway. And they get a press conference to talk about how everyone hates them and no-one cares how they think or feel.
Bitch, you got a press conference with Congress! How much more do people have to be listening to you? WTF is this world coming to?
“Finkelstein concludes her essay by asking, “Isn’t it time for university presidents to rethink the role that open expression and academic freedom play in the educational mission of their institutions?”
“Here, Finkelstein is right. They should—but in order to recommit to free expression, not censorship.”
Look, it wouldn’t matter if it were just a few fringe kooks calling for this. But these are people from elite institutions, writing in elite media, supported by the elite rulers.
CNN And Washington Post Busted For Pro-Israel Propaganda Shenanigans by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“The biggest misconception about propaganda is that it is something that happens to other people, and is done by other countries. Westerners like to think of themselves as free-thinking people whose worldviews are formed by facts and truth, contrasting themselves with nations like North Korea and China where populations are viewed as being subjected to conformity-enforcing propaganda. They believe that if propaganda does occur in the west, it comes here from nations like Russia trying to corrupt our minds and weaken our trust in our institutions, or if the propaganda is domestic in origin it only affects people in other political parties.
“In reality the typical western mind has been marinating in domestic propaganda throughout its entire life, and its worldview has been manufactured for it by powerful manipulators who benefit from its intellectual compliance with their interests. […]
“If we’re ever to have a healthy civilization, we’re going to have to wake up from the propaganda-induced coma we’ve been placed in so we can begin pushing against the cage walls we’ve been indoctrinated our whole lives into ignoring and start using the power of our numbers to force real change in the systems which govern our world.”
Tireless Busybodies Again Target Substack by Racket News (Matt Taibbi)
“The logic of defending Nazi speech then and now is obvious, and has nothing to do with indulging Nazis. David Goldberger led the ACLU’s legal team in the Skokie case and as he put it, “The power to censor Nazis includes the power to censor protesters of all stripes and to prevent the press from publishing embarrassing facts and criticism that government officials label as ‘fake news.’””
I guess!? But that’s the mealy-mouthed version. It’s not a selfish reason, that I don’t want my own precious, important voice to be suppressed, but more from two directions: science and justice. They’re somewhat related.
How just is it for some people to be able to speak freely and others not? The common argument is because someone could be offended by or “harmed” by that speech. Shut the fuck up. No-one is harmed by speech. Stick and stones.
It’s not right for some to be able to say whatever they want when others can’t. It’s also not scientifically reasonable, as you’re assuming before you’ve heard it which speech you’d like to deny. I assume you’re going to deny certain topics or certain symbols or certain ideas?
How do you tell the difference between irony and earnestness? Research and hatred? You can’t. You shouldn’t even try. Just be happy you don’t have to see it.
Most of these people sound like real pills. The douche that Taibbi is talking about found 16 nazi sites on a site hosting 17.000 sites.
If you deny all Nazi web sites, how are you going to be able to show people how stupid Nazis are? They’ll grow mythic instead. The Goddamned example hasn’t even been updated in a year. How popular even is it?
“As an aside: a big reason people read Substack is because of the terribleness of magazines like The Atlantic, which is edited by a guy, Jeffrey Goldberg, who won a pile of awards for blowing the WMD story in spectacular fashion for years on end, making him a walking, talking symbol of the failing-upward dynamic in corporate media. If that magazine wants people to read Substack less, it might consider not filling its pages with exposés about the Alfa Server fantasies or plaintive defenses of the Steele dossier or other transparent propaganda, instead of demanding deplatforming here.”
“People like Katz aren’t worried about the negligible impact of a couple of volleyball teams’ worth of creepy accounts amid tens of thousands. They’re fighting for a principle which does matter, namely making sure there isn’t even one small platform allowed to make its own decisions about content. It’s incredible how determined they are to bring everyone under the same heel. Of course, leverage is limited. Katz is threatening that he and others might take their acts elsewhere if demands aren’t met. The loss of such dazzling content would of course be an ordeal to bear, but one guesses that with effort, Substack would find a way to recover.
“Where do these people come from, and how did they come to be so entitled? Are parents still doing their laundry? It’s amazing, in addition to being infuriating.”
The Children’s Crusade by Scott Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“As Biden understands, only children and the terminally passionate indulge in ceasefire fantasies. Nations have citizens to protect from terrorists, and that includes the United States. This was pretty much universally understood, until the nation at issue was Israel, whereupon the rules reversed.”
The perennial victim. Everyone’s allowed to declare a war on terror but poor Israel.
“Loosely translated, not only do they believe that they are morally righteous, but that Biden will lose their morally righteous cohort on election day unless he flips on Israel and backs the terrorists to avoid further death in Gaza because that’s how Hamas and, sadly, Gazans set the stage.”
I like how he pretends to care about Gazans here. WITH US OR AGAINST US. Just another well-educated American made stupid by capitalism, war, and propaganda. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are if you’re not only convinced by these arguments, but manage to write them down without realizing how immoral and hypocritical they are.
“Staffers, of course, are fully entitled to their views, right or wrong, mature or infantile. What they are not entitled to is to bite the hand that feeds them.”
If someone disagrees with him these days, their views are “infantile”. That is, whoever disagrees with him is deemed incapable of thought sophisticated enough to understand where he’s coming from. What other explanation could there be?
“If they cannot support their patron or his position, they are fully entitled to resign their staff posts and walk away. They aren’t slaves to Biden or his policies. But what they are not entitled to do is use the credibility they gain from being Biden’s staff to attack him, to undermine him.”
Oh, absolutely they’re allowed to do that, if he lets them. Some people even welcome differing opinions in their midst, instead of the siloed amen-concert that Greenfield seems to have taken up with. Biden is free to fire them for insubordination, but the deal is they can say whatever they want—as Americans—but they risk losing their jobs, as employees. I wonder whether Greenfield thinks they should all be thrown into a gulag for wrongthink?
During the 2023 Writers Strike, This Book Helped Me Understand the Depravities of Hollywood by Alex N. Press (Jacobin)
“The ways of speaking, the hustle and dog-eat-dog scumbaggery, the lying and gossiping and artless bragging and plagiarism on which Hollywood runs — they’re all in Budd’s book. Read a Hollywood Reporter or Deadline column and you’ll hear Sammy Glick, even if the columnist doesn’t know it.”
This guy has been doing the Lord’s work for a while, debunking the most widely distributed myths about climate change. A lot of the stuff he looks at is outright fraud. Some of it is honest misinterpretation by people who are way out of their depth. But a lot of it deliberately mislabeling charts.
He fixed up one of the charts to reflect the data in the study from which was purported to have come.
Look at that hockey stick. Looks perfectly natural. There’s no plausible explanation for it. Maybe we’re measuring temperature incorrectly?
As expensive as they say? Answer: no. It is 2x-3x more expensive than any other type. But that could come down.
As slow as they say? Answer: no. Red tape slows things down a lot.
A lot of the information we have is averaged over the whole world. In Asia, nuclear-power plants are built much more efficiently, both in terms of cost and time.
See also her previous videos on nuclear waste and the whether nuclear power can be considered “green”.
English still rules the world, but that’s not necessarily OK. Is it time to curb its power? by Michele Gazzola (The Guardian )
“English is a major language of culture, and it is the third most spoken language in the world as a native language, after Chinese and Spanish. Native speakers of English number about 373m (roughly 5% of the world population), mostly concentrated in six advanced industrialised democracies (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US) […]”
“The most important challenge is that of fairness or “ linguistic justice ”. A common language is a bit like a telephone network: the more people know a language, the more useful it becomes to communicate. The question of fairness arises because individuals face very different costs to access the network and are on an unequal footing when using it. Those who learn English as a second language incur learning costs, while native speakers can communicate with all network members without incurring such costs.”
“In English-speaking countries, by contrast, foreign language teaching has long been in decline because younger generations feel less need to learn other people’s languages, turning to other subjects instead. This trend translates into considerable savings for the education systems of English-speaking countries, which can then be allocated to other productive public investments.”
That’s going to bite you in the ass because learning languages makes your smarter, more empathetic.
“In most professional contexts, a person is more effective and persuasive when using their native language.”
“A team led by Tatsuya Amano at the University of Queensland recently published a study of 900 researchers in environmental sciences revealing that non-native English-speaking researchers require as much as twice the time needed by native speakers to read, write or review publications in English.”
How the 1619 Project Distorted History by James Oakes (Jacobin)
“[…] the first enslaved Africans were brought to North America by Spanish colonizers in Florida, decades before 1619. One of the reasons the Handlin-Degler debate receded is that, as US historians stepped outside their provincial boundaries, they realized that the Atlantic slave trade had been in operation for more than a century by the time the first Africans were brought to Virginia. Thus, the particular year — 1619 — may have diminished precisely because historians have focused more on the larger significance of African slavery in the broader Atlantic world.”
“The 1619 Project is, to begin with, written from a black nationalist perspective that systemically erases all evidence that white Americans were ever important allies of the black freedom struggle. Second, it is written with an eye toward justifying reparations, leading to the dubious proposition that all white people are and have always been the beneficiaries of slavery and racism. This second proposition is based in turn on a third, that slavery “fueled” America’s exceptional economic development.”
“Christopher Lasch once pointed out that all-explanatory principles explain nothing, yet here was the New York Times , serving up a relentlessly monocausal explanation for virtually all of US history, presented without embarrassment. “Nearly everything” important about the United States, Silverstein declared, is the product of slavery and racism:”
“[…] the 1619 Project’s description of labor organization on cotton plantations scarcely bears a passing resemblance to historical reality.”
“The prosperity of the South in the 1850s bypassed most Southern whites. That prosperity was built on slaves, fertile land, and an expanding global demand for cotton, the antebellum production of which peaked in 1859. By then, good land and slaves were increasingly beyond the reach of the bulk of the white population. Slave prices more than doubled in the 1850s, and only the wealthy or those with substantial lines of credit could afford to purchase them. Decades of soil depletion and degradation had reduced the amount of cheap, fertile land for new plantations. A growing underclass of white poor found themselves reduced to working as farm tenants, sharecroppers, or hired laborers for the farmers and planters who did own slaves.”
“Preventing slavery’s further expansion was the centerpiece of what I call the “antislavery project,” to which virtually all antislavery politicians were committed, including Abraham Lincoln . Radicals called it the “cordon of freedom.” The federal government would no longer support the expansion of slavery, admit new slave states, protect the rights of slaveholders on the high seas, or deploy the armed forces to help recapture fugitive slaves.”
“[…] as the slaveholders launched their rebellion, the nonslaveholders resisted and voted against secession. The ensuing war exposed the failure of Southern slave society, as 450,000 Southerners joined the Union Army.”
“[…] that equilibrium was shattered in 1850 when California came into the Union as a free state. The slaveholders had secured a new fugitive slave law, but they could not enforce it. They managed to repeal the Missouri Compromise, but they could not get Kansas admitted as a slave state. Nor could they get the federal government to build a Southern rail route to the Pacific, or get Southern California to split off into a new slave state, or annex Cuba or Nicaragua.”
“It was a deeply, profoundly repressive system, but it wasn’t slavery. Sharecroppers were legally free. Adult men shopped their services from landlord to landlord, contracting their family’s labor power, compelled to work not by the direct domination of a master but by the force of economic necessity imposed by the indirect mechanisms of a labor market.”
“The problem of slavery is not that it was a forerunner of modern capitalism. It wasn’t. The problem is not that slavery “fueled” the economic growth of the North. It didn’t. The problem, all along, was capitalism itself. And once the problem of slavery was resolved by the Civil War and emancipation, there remained, and still remains, the problem of capitalism.”
At 01:30:00, Žižek says,
“How often—that’s the problem today, with political correctness and so on—are they aware the extent to which their apparent criticism of racism and so on and, especially, feminism is secretly patronizing? For example, I spoke with Africans there […] who told me that, for them, the most refined form of Western liberal racism is, when there are big crimes in Africa, like the Rwanda slaughter, immediately, the western-left reaction was: this is just an effect of colonialism. No? He said ‘F&%k you! You don’t even allow us to be bad. Even when we are evil, it must be an effect.‘
“Or you know what is another form of racism here? When some immigrants or whoever, and I’m open towards them, bla bla, do something horrible…it’s always ‘they’re not guilty. It’s how we treat them.‘ … there are conditions. Yeah, but so are we! The implicit presupposition of that is that there are primitive people who are conditioned by circumstances, but we whites should be blamed because we are nonetheless, in some sense, free. You know, that’s why I never trust this white-people’s self-humiliation, you know? Like, we shouldn’t assert our identity. If Indians dance their dance, it’s freedom. If you in a German village or me here in Slovenia, dance, it’s neofascism or whatever. You know what? Apparently, I humiliate myself, but secretly I adopt the universal position. My self-humiliation is false. It’s the same with #metoo, with all that stuff. Do #metoo ideologists even know, do they even talk to real women about their problems?”
That is, we only assign agency to ourselves, because we are … better. The other benighted souls are capable only of following and reacting to what we’ve done to them.
Sure, but you also have to wicked honest about what’s actually still happening in some of those countries. You can blame Israel 100% for their crimes, while still acknowledging that the had and continue to have help. The warlords in so many countries are home-grown and they are exhibitors of native agency (rather than only foreign agency being allowed), but many of their actions are enabled and enhanced by external support.
So, yes, current events should have overriding importance, rather than arguing about who did what when 20, 30, 40 years ago. It can be important as context, but the ongoing crimes belong to those perpetrating them. And the solutions to those crimes will come from evaluating the situation as it is, not how it could have been or should have been in the past. What the situation used to be between Ukraine and Russia 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago doesn’t matter. Ditto for Israel and Palestine. What the situation is now is more relevant.
At 01:35:25 he says
“If I were a rich billionaire who wants to destroy the left, I would support cancel culture. Why? Because the way it works: it’s permanent self-division. ‘I suspect isn’t what you said already…anti-feminist…’ It sabotages—blocks—any possibility of a larger coalition of solidarity. This is my problem.”
“I’m friendly with with the ex-vice president of Bolivia Alvaro Garcia Dilera. Bolivia. The left was there 12 years in power. The standard of ordinary people almost doubled. And they did it in such intelligent way that they didn’t scare the capital. That’s why, you remember two years ago there was a coup d’état. Then new elections which Morales forces won again. So I’m totally opposed to Cuba, Chavez, Venezuela, Nicaragua: they screwed it up. In Bolivia, they didn’t.
“So I see just particular hopes here and there. I’m very sorry: that’s why I like to define myself as a war communist. I think we are approaching some kind of a new emergency states. And what Europe is doing now—the world even more—is you know treat it like okay let’s change a little bit more 5% here tax so just that our life goes on the way it does. We are still doing small things in order to do nothing.
“By war communism—brutal term that I use with all the irony of course—I mean we have to prepare—with hope that it will not happen—to more global cooperation. It will be necessary. Imagine a stronger pandemic. Imagine stronger ecological catastrophes and so on. We will have to collaborate, otherwise we will really enter new feudalism—what Yanis Varoufakis, with whom I otherwise often don’t agree—predicts.
“I think to conclude […] that the problem today is not even any longer liberal capitalism or something else. Liberal capitalism is already gradually disintegrated. It is either something new or something where the world is moving spontaneously, which is much worse than [the] capitalism that we knew. My God, the third ‘Ich habe gesprochen.’ [from Winnitou/Karl May]”
“All these terms. You know what I hate in the left—I hope we agree—whenever they see something they don’t like, they call it fascism. Without any serious analysis, it’s a Schimpfwort, which prevents you to think.”
At 01:48:30
“[…] link between early development of Chinese Communist Party and fascism, there was a meeting just before Sun-ya Tsen—the founder of Chinese Republic blah blah modern China—
met with young Mao Tse Dong—and this was 1945 Italy blah blah happened—and their conclusion was that we need West, but not in the individual way. The only thing that we can take from the West politically is fascism. We should learn to apply that kind of industrial development, but covered by a strong authority.“I find this fascinating and there is a whole school now—not in China, that would be prohibited—who claim that that’s what in a soft way Deng Xiao Peng did: he turned China from a communist country to a new version of fascist country. By this I mean patriotic ideology plus industrialization and so on.”
He tells a few jokes: about being in a gulag, where the food is terrible, but on Sundays, you get a special treat: a second plate!
Another joke is about a woman who is sleeping with her lover while her husband is out drinking. The lover hears a key in the door and wants to stop, to run away. The wife tells him to relax, that he’ll be so drunk that he won’t even notice. They lie there while the husband stumbles into the room, undresses and falls into bed. The wife is in between him and her lover. After a minute, the husbands asks ‘either I’m so drunk that I’m seeing six feet in the bed, or there are three people in this bed!’ His wife coolly answers that he’s drunk, if he would just get up and look at the bed from the doorway, he would see that there are only four feet in the bed.
At 01:54:00 he says
“I have a long analysis of of my good friend uh Japanese Eco-Marxist Kohei Saito, who tries to argue for kind of a ecological self-limitation and so on. And second thing, I […] I’m just saying but you know how [much] nature was destroyed by humans even before modernity? Look at Iceland. I was there. They told me when the stupid Vikings arrived there in 7th, 8th Century it was full of forests. In 30, 40 years, it was gone—building the stupid Viking boats or whatever. So don’t so many already previous civilizations they ruined so many things. I know today, it’s something more special and so on, but you know what disturbs me with this new eco-feminists? They think that it is possible to slow down to some more balanced development and so on and so on. No. I think once we are in modernity we cannot step out it’s lost.”
At 01:51:20 he says,
“[…] would you agree with this beautiful […] temporal paradox formulated by some very good action theorist: yes, we decide for reasons but, retroactively, our decision creates reasons. We are never in this neutral position […] it’s like falling in love: I like your hair, whatever, but that’s why I fall in love with you. But only after I am in love, I see reasons.
“[…] you […] called something democratic non-totalitarian societies where information is available and you can decide and enact. Do you think we live in such a society? We don’t. Maybe even less than in some totalitarianisms where people nonetheless—you cannot say it publicly, but they know the truth. In China, they know they are controlled, they’re much less in illusion than us. Or, to repeat my old formula, the worst kind of unfreedom is the unfreedom which you experience as freedom.”
4-year campaign backdoored iPhones using possibly the most advanced exploit ever by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)
“The mass backdooring campaign, which according to Russian officials also infected the iPhones of thousands of people working inside diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia, according to Russian government officials, came to light in June. Over a span of at least four years, Kaspersky said, the infections were delivered in iMessage texts that installed malware through a complex exploit chain without requiring the receiver to take any action.”
“The most intriguing new detail is the targeting of the heretofore-unknown hardware feature, which proved to be pivotal to the Operation Triangulation campaign. A zero-day in the feature allowed the attackers to bypass advanced hardware-based memory protections designed to safeguard device system integrity even after an attacker gained the ability to tamper with memory of the underlying kernel. On most other platforms, once attackers successfully exploit a kernel vulnerability they have full control of the compromised system.
“On Apple devices equipped with these protections, such attackers are still unable to perform key post-exploitation techniques such as injecting malicious code into other processes, or modifying kernel code or sensitive kernel data. This powerful protection was bypassed by exploiting a vulnerability in the secret function. The protection, which has rarely been defeated in exploits found to date, is also present in Apple’s M1 and M2 CPUs.”
“If we try to describe this feature and how attackers use it, it all comes down to this: attackers are able to write the desired data to the desired physical address with [the] bypass of [a] hardware-based memory protection by writing the data, destination address and hash of data to unknown, not used by the firmware, hardware registers of the chip. Our guess is that this unknown hardware feature was most likely intended to be used for debugging or testing purposes by Apple engineers or the factory, or was included by mistake. Since this feature is not used by the firmware, we have no idea how attackers would know how to use it.”
“A separate alert from the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, alleged Apple cooperated with the NSA in the campaign. An Apple representative has denied the claim. Kaspersky researchers, meanwhile, have said they have no evidence corroborating the claim of involvement by either the NSA or Apple.”
It’s quite suspicious, though. Who but Apple employees would know about the undocumented registers? And who but the NSA has the know-how and manpower to pull this off? It’s directed at Russia. It’s hard to plausibly blame Russia, even for Eric Berger, Bruce, Schneier or the anyone else who always blames everyone but the U.S. or Israel.
“It began by exploiting CVE-2023-41990, a vulnerability in Apple’s implementation of the TrueType font. This initial chain link, which used techniques including return oriented programming and jump oriented programming to bypass modern exploit defenses, allowed the attackers to remotely execute code, albeit with minimum system privileges.”
“[…] is a further reminder that even in the face of innovative defenses like the one protecting the iPhone kernel, ever more sophisticated attacks continue to find ways to defeat them.”
AI and Lossy Bottlenecks by Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)
“That’s a lossy bottleneck. Your wants and desires are rich and multifaceted. The array of culinary outcomes are equally rich and multifaceted. But there’s no scalable way to connect the two. People are forced to use multiple-choice systems like menus to simplify decision-making, and they lose so much information in the process.”
Do they, though? Or is this a blessing that combats the surfeit of choice, the vapor lock you get when there are too many options? What he describes sounds like a nightmare, but then I’m not a narcissist who thinks he knows how to prepare a meal better than the chef at a restaurant.
“Imagine walking into a restaurant and knowing that the kitchen has already started work on a meal optimized for your tastes, or being presented with a personalized list of choices.”
That sounds awful. Where’s the serendipity? Imagine being in the elite. This isn’t coming for anyone but rich people.
“It’s still early days for these technologies, but once they get working, the possibilities are nearly endless. Lossy bottlenecks are everywhere.”
But what about having materials on hand? Supply chain? What about waste? Does that also not matter, you know, as long as rich people get exactly what their little hearts desire every second of every day—and are still unhappy.
“An AI system with access to, for example, a student’s coursework, exams and teacher feedback as well as detailed information about possible jobs could provide much richer assessments of which employment matches do and don’t make sense.”
Holy fucking even worse discrimination, Batman!
“AI could hugely reduce the costs of customization by learning your style,”
All so unnecessary. People already wear what they’re told to wear.
“AI systems that observe each user’s interaction styles and know what that person wants out of a given piece of software could take this personalization far deeper, completely redesigning interfaces to suit individual needs.”
Says the guy who’s never had to write documentation. Customization is the devil.
“For example, you could have an AI device in your pocket—your future phone, for instance—that knows your views and wishes and continually votes in your name on an otherwise overwhelming number of issues large and small.”
What could possibly go wrong? Oh, yeah. Selling your votes could also be automated. This is not a recipe for more and better democracy, but who cares? No-one.
“[…] it could eliminate the problems stemming from elected representatives who reflect only the views of the majority that elected them—and sometimes not even them.”
C’mon Schneier. Lobbyists?
Terrible AI Arguments (and, No, AIs Will Not be Recursively Self-Improving on Computer-Like Time Scales) by Tim Sommers (3 Quarks Daily)
“Hinton says “training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand.” There’s no support for the claim that the only way to be good at predicting the next word in a sentence is to understand what is being said. LMMs prove that, they don’t undermine it. Further, if anything, prior experience suggests the opposite. Calculators are not better at math than most people because they “understand” numbers.”
“While we may not know what’s going on in an LLM from moment to moment, we know what, in general, […] is going on. And we have no reason to believe that that process could give rise to understanding, no matter how well the chatbot functions or how much data it is fed.”
“Being smart, no matter how smart, doesn’t mean you know everything and can do anything, despite what certain people might believe. A smart AI may not even know how computers or LLM work. Most smart humans don’t know much about how they, or computers, work.”
“Does this AI have a lab to research it self-improve in? Or does it just think about self-improvements and, thereby, make them happen? Mindfulness?”
“The issue of increased storage capacity takes us to the question of how an AI with no senses or limbs not only designs, but makes stuff. Does it just talk people into making stuff for it? How does it interact with the physical world? And, by the way, how does it access its own mind?”
“Even if the AI operates on computer rather than human time-scales, it still has to obey, if nothing else, natural laws. It can’t just create new physical infrastructure instantly out of nothing on computer like time-scale. And how can it indefinitely make itself smarter without upgrading its physical infrastructure?”
“I think this reasoning is so bad that I can’t believe that all of the smart people making these arguments really believe them either. So, why do they make them? Now that, I worry about.”
Why are Apple silicon VMs so different? by Howard Oakley (The Eclectic Light Company)
“In the early days of virtualisation, two distinct types were distinguished. Type 1 runs a hypervisor (the core of the virtualiser) direct on the computer’s hardware. Type 2, also known as hosted, runs a primary host operating system on the hardware, and hypervisors then run on top of, or in close conjunction with, that to deliver the same range of services to guest operating systems.”
“[…] starting with a hypervisor and expecting others to build a complete virtualiser wasn’t feasible, nor was it likely to result in the high performance that Apple and users expected. What Apple did instead was to build device support into macOS, in the form of Virtio drivers.”
“In the Virtio model, providing such support is the task of the operating system, not the virtualiser. For vendors like VMware and Parallels this reduces not only the cost of development, but also the commercial value of their products; there’s no scope for either of them to engineer better or faster graphics support, as that’s determined by features provided in both guest and host operating systems, via Virtio or an equivalent. That puts Apple in charge of what hardware and features are supported by virtualisation on Apple silicon, and the difficulties that have arisen over Apple ID access for VMs. On the other hand, it guarantees optimum performance in VMs.”
“The reward for Apple is flexibility in the future of macOS. Running older versions of macOS in a VM enables users to run Intel-only apps long after Rosetta 2 support is dropped from the current macOS, and for newer Apple silicon Macs to run software that’s incompatible with their minimum version of macOS. Using either Linux or macOS, developers can distribute Docker-like lightweight VM packages, something already done by Cirrus Labs’ Tart.”
The Web is Fantastic by Robb Knight
“The real web, the small web, the indie web is amazing. Don’t give Facebook and the rest of these clowns your content. Don’t give them the time or your attention. Get a blog, a website, a Mastodon account, something you control , and share links to cool things you find. Make a list of your favourite blogs or websites or photos of cats. Write about a pizza you had that was delicious. Share a recipe. Go down a rabbit hole for hours on end adding weird stuff to your site. Just do it somewhere you control because the real web is fantastic.”
Of Rats and Ratchets by Alex Kladov (matklad)
“Let’s say you lack documentation, and want to ensure that every file in the code-base has a top-level comment explaining the relevant context. A good way to approach this problem is to write a test that reads every file in the project, computes the set of poorly documented files, and xors that against the hard-coded naughty list. This test is then committed to the project with the naughty list encompassing all the existing files. Although no new docs are added, the ratchet is in place — all new files are guaranteed to be documented. And its easier to move a notch up the ratchet by documenting a single file and crossing it out from the naughty list.”
“Not everything can be automated though. For things which can’t be, the best trick I’ve found is writing them down. Just agreeing that X is a team practice is not enough, even if it might work for the first six months. Only when X is written down in a markdown document inside a repository it might becomes a durable practice. But beware — document what is, rather than what should be. If there’s a clear disagreement between what the docs say the world is, and the actual world, the ratcheting effect of the written word disappears. If there’s a large diff between reality and documentation, don’t hesitate to remove conflicting parts of the documentation. Having a ratchet that enforces a tiny set of properties is much more valuable than aspirations to enforce everything.”
Afterlife 3 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“St. Peter: Lord, we really need a better system.
God: This was the funniest one I could think of.”
Happiness 3 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“Boredom, malaise, ennui. All these philosophical arguments against a happiness machine are just bad intuition pumps that are reducible to
“you’d be unhappy with a happiness machine if the happiness machine didn’t work.””
Space Junk by Martin Dolan (The Baffler)
“[…] compared to what Starfield does well (writing, level design, and not much else), the developers’ insistence on including so much busywork is baffling. BGS celebrates their games having choices as something essential in of itself, rather than ensuring that those choices actually matter. It’s a fixation on having stuff to do versus actual scripted sequences. On quantity over quality. The illusion of scale.”
“Starfield ’s clunk and clutter and throwback sense of techno-optimism seem like less of a deliberate artistic choice than a distraction from what video games of the past ten years have been doing wrong. That as the tech gets better and better, the stars are the limit for what gaming can become. But that doesn’t mean those worlds will be worth exploring.”
Published by marco on 1. Jan 2024 00:55:25 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
I’d already watched and written a short review of this movie in 2017. The following summary is a lot more comprehensive.
A truck drives through the American southwest, with a load of migrants in the back. They run into an INS roadblock, but agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) and Dee (Richard Hamilton) break up the party and take one of the migrants into the desert—the one who doesn’t seem to understand a lick of Spanish. He turns out to be an alien who’d arrived illegally on Earth. Kay eliminates him before he can take out one of the INS officers (who are absolutely not tricked out in SWAT gear because it’s the 90s). We see the neuralizer and learn that Dee has lost a step.
Seque to a chase-on-foot by Jay (Will Smith), who’s getting his first introduction to an alien. He chases it down, getting Kay’s attention. Kay shows up at the police station to pick him up and follow up a lead that takes them to Jay’s next alien Jeebs (Tony Shalhoub), who’s an off-planet-arms dealer. Jay learns that this is all real.
“Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”
Jay shows up the next morning at the MIB offices (thought he doesn’t know it yet). We get a whole introduction to the organization, including Zed (Rip Torn), several aliens, and several artifacts.
In a parallel storyline, Edgar (Vincent D’Onofrio) is taken over by a bug, which wears Edgar’s skin like a suit, and which is looking for “the galaxy”. He drives to New York, to Manhattan, and kills two other aliens who he thinks has it. He leaves with a jewel case that he thinks is the galaxy.
Jay and Kay track down a squid family and wonder why they were risking their immigration visa to escape the planet. They check the news—The National Enquirer and so on—and find Edgar’s wife Beatrice (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), who provides them with their next lead.
Meanwhile the alien bodies (Edgar’s first victims) are taken to Laurel’s (Linda Fiorentino) morgue, where she discovers that one of the victims isn’t human. The other alien’s cat is riding on it. Jay and Kay show up, pretending to be morticians. Laurel starts hitting on Jay, while the cat snakes around Jay’s feet. She tells him that her theory is that the bodies aren’t human, but carapaces for transporting other aliens. On one of the bodies, they find a switch near the ear and open up the face to reveal its dying pilot.
“The galaxy is on Orion’s b…”
They zap Laurel with the neuralizer and get on their way, following the next lead. Edgar discovers that he’s stolen useless diamonds instead of “the galaxy”. Jay and Kay finally catch up to Edgar at a jewelry store, where they blow a bunch of stuff up. Edgar gets away, but they get his truck—and his ship, which is stuffed in the back of it.
Meanwhile, all of the other aliens are fleeing Earth because they’re terrified that the bugs will destroy the planet to get the galaxy. Jay figures out that the galaxy is hanging around the cat’s neck. The cat is named Orion. Laurel figures it out at the same time—just in time to receive Edgar as a guest at the morgue. He is received by the morgue attendant (David Cross), who can’t stop him from breaking in and taking Laurel hostage.
Laurel keeps hitting on Jay, but this time mostly because Edgar is hiding under the cart they’re both standing by. Kay discovers the morgue attendant’s body and breaks up the party. Edgar escapes with the galaxy and Laurel, demanding to be driven to Queens, where he’s going to hijack one of the expo saucers. Jay and Kay jet off through the Midtown Tunnel in a considerably transformed Ford LTD—driving on the top of the tunnel.
They get to Flushing Meadows Park in time to shoot down the escaping spacecraft. It grinds to a halt directly in front of them, spilling Edgar out of its broken exit ramp. He reveals himself as a bug, takes Jay and Kay’s guns, then swallows Kay. Laurel is stuck in a tree. Jay gets the crap kicked out of him. He gets back up, then finds a bunch of cockroaches, and starts crushing them to draw out Edgar—“you know, you all look alike to me.”—and to stall for time until Jay can work his magic. “Don’t start nothin’; won’t be nothin’.”
Jay gets his gun back and blows his way out of the bug from the inside. Jay tells him he was hit hard “and it hurt.” As they’re chatting and wiping off bug guts, the bug rises up one last time—but Laurel blows it away. “That’s an interesting job you’ve got there, gentlemen.”
Jay wants to stop Kay from neuralizing her, but he actually says that the neuralizer is for him. “I haven’t been training a partner; I’ve been training a replacement.”
ZAP.
Jay leafs through the gossip rags to see that Jay has “woken from a 35-year coma” and is safely back with his wife. He turns to his partner Laurel to go on their next mission.
The story begins with a midnight escape from Ohio by Melina (Rachel Weisz) and super-soldier Alexei (David Harbour), with their kids Natasha and Yelena. After some pretty nice credits, showing world events, girls training, and assassination plans, we’re taken to a live mission full of black widows, two of whom are Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh). Yelena is sprayed with some sort of nano-serum that wakes her up from her hypnotization.
Natasha, meanwhile, is assaulted by a seemingly mechanized assassin, an unstoppable, cobra-commander-looking super-soldier called Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). She’s thrown off a bridge into a cold river, but manages to take with her the vials that Taskmaster was looking for. Now, Natasha’s at her sister’s apartment, where they get into a knock-down, drag-out fight.
After the dust-up, they’ve teamed up to take down their old boss, who’s using brainwashing and drugs to keep his army of widows on message. They fight and fall and crash and fall and collect what should be a tremendous number of bruises and broken bones, but they come out with nary a scratch. Taskmaster is hot on their tails, but they get away. Seriously, they don’t have even a single bit of muscle soreness or stiffness.
They get a gigantic, old Soviet helicopter and fly to Alexei’s prison in the Siberian mountains to rescue him. Natasha drops out of the helicopter while Yelena messes about, shooting rockets and starting avalanches. Alexei’s actually got some superpowers, but he gets cattle-prodded into submission. He gets up on a catwalk while Natasha grabs him on the end of a cable just before the avalanche engulfs the prison.
They want Alexei to take them the “Red Room”. There’s a bunch of family baggage to get through, where Alexei tries to make up with the girls. They head overland on foot to meet up with Melina, who meets them with a long-range rifle. She decides not to shoot them and, instead, lets them into her home. Alexei puts on his old Red Guardian costume, which barely fits over his prison-fattened body. There’s a bunch of family jokes and stuff.
Melina demonstrates how her pigs are completely under her control—because she’s installed ganglial neural controls into them so that they follow orders. Natasha calls her father an idiot and her mother a coward. Natasha has a heart-to-heart with Melina, while Yelena and Alexei do the same. This is a really long scene. She calls him Crimson Dynamo; he corrects her that it’s Red Guardian. They sing American Pie together. It’s endless.
They are interrupted by the blue lights of a giant helicopter. Melina had called Taskmaster to take them all to the “Red Room”, which is pretty literally Bespin, the Cloud City. Melina is apparently deep in with the baddies, seemingly in charge of much of Dreykov’s (Ray Winstone) army. She’s all dolled up like a top-level widow now. She turns out to be Natasha in disguise, but Dreykov sees through it.
Melina reveals herself to Alexei (taking off her Natasha mask), then contacts Yelena to tell her about a hidden weapon so that Yelena can free herself from the operating theater where she’s about to get her face rearranged. While Dreykov and Natasha fence about Natasha’s real mother, the others make their escape. He reveals that Taskmaster is Antonia, an old colleague of Natasha’s, who she thought she’d killed. The woman is kept alive only by her armor and Dreykov’s neural contraptions.
After Taskmaster leaves, Natasha realizes that she can’t shoot Dreykov because he’s programmed her with an olfactory neural control to be unable to attack him.
Meanwhile Red Guardian squares off against Taskmaster, while Yelena infiltrates further into the flying cloud city. Milena tries to hack the system. Natasha spars verbally with Dreykov. She taunts Dreykov into attacking her physically. She taunts him into revealing his worldwide widow army.
She’d tried before to get him to hit her nose hard enough to cut her olfactory nerve, but he “war nicht stark genug”—so, she breaks her own nose to break the control and takes him out. Melina takes out one of the large fans holding up the city, then helps Alexei trap Taskmaster in a prison cell. Dreykov’s army of widows shows up to save him from Natasha—“und lasst ihr leiden.” They are beating the hell out of her until Yelena shows up with the cure for the mind-control, freeing the widows.
As the city crashes to Earth, Natasha saves the information about the other widows all over the planet. She doesn’t seem to be too hurt for having had the shit kicked out of her by an army of widows. I guess they don’t hit that hard? Also, none the worse for wear for having crashed with an entire city out of the stratosphere.
Melina and Alexei are ready to fly away, but they are forced to take off without Natasha and Yelena. Their plane takes some damage to its control surfaces, while Natasha tries to find Yelena. But she finds Taskmaster instead, letting her free, thinking that there is something of Antonia left in there. Dreykov is making his escape, but Yelena jumps onto his plane and blows herself up, also blowing up his plane. She’s ragdolling toward the planet when Natasha catches her and opens a chute for both of them that somehow doesn’t get hit by any of the myriad pieces of falling debris.
Natasha sees Taskmaster coming for them and lets Yelena go. They grapple, jump off a bunch of stuff, pop Taskmaster’s chute just in time to land safely (of course), then start fighting. Natasha pops Taskmaster’s helmet, then pops a vial of the cure to free Antonia from her prison—and her life.
Natasha finds Yelena in the wreckage. Nobody is hurt. Barely even cut. Bitch blew herself up and she’s totally fine. Melina and Alexei show up next, having survived their plane crash with only minor injuries. The rest of the family is forced to flee before the U.S. army arrives. A planeload of widows lands to take them away. Natasha remains because she’s an Avenger. Apparently, Antonia is still alive, too. Happy endings all around.
An epilogue sees Yelena mourning over Natasha’s grave. Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis Dreyfus) appears out of nowhere to tell her that her next contract is her sister’s killer—Clint Barton. Sure, sure.
I subtracted a point for having no tension—like pretty much every other Marvel movie made in the last 15 years. Also for the utterly ridiculously artificial cliffhanger. They’re just not even trying. I don’t care.
I watched it in German.
There are so many great things about this show: They don’t have a laugh track, for starters. They also do not believe in continuity. They believe in laughs instead. If something is funny, it doesn’t matter if it makes sense or it will carry over into the next show. They just forget about it the next show, like it never happened.
Recurring characters are:
The following list is far from comprehensive, but should go a long way to illustrating the utter dysfunction of each member of the gang. Going through the list of episodes from these seasons—there are so many golden ones, to be honest. It’s really hard to pick favorites, but nevertheless here’s a smattering that is hopefully representative enough to get you started—and addicted. Many of their best shows are the ones where you can tell that they’re sending up some odious part of American or capitalist culture, all with a straight face.
For the most part, they show just how normal it is to be utterly depraved and egotistical, how normal it is to scam and lie and cheat and steal and hustle all the time. That we understand them at all is an indictment of our culture, of our society.
They love booze, and guns, and tits, and money. They don’t care how they get any of it. They don’t plan for the future.
They follow orders, though. They stick to arbitrary rules, venerating them as they suffer under them. This, too, is quintessentially American, to boast of freedom while being subjugated.
They don’t grow. They don’t change. They stay the same—and always will. They learn nothing. They are us; they are America.
There is no Schitt’s Creek moment for them. They’re sixteen seasons deep into a life-lesson for America. When I wrote this, I’d only seen five seasons but I was utterly convinced that they would continue doing exactly what they’re doing, unchanged, for the next eleven. I was not in any way disappointed. They are like a live-action Simpsons. It is, in its way, brilliant—I recently read that the show has the highest density of dialogue of any modern show. It is, if nothing else, extremely funny.
S08E5: The Gang Gets Analyzed has the gang seek therapy because they can’t agree on who has to do the dishes after a dinner.
“Mac: I gained and lost 60 pounds in three months.
Therapist: But that’s nearly impossible!
Mac: First of all, through God, all things are possible, so jot that down.”
S16.E6: Risk E. Rat’s Pizza & Amusement Center has the gang trying to relive their golden days by visiting the arcade/pizza restaurant of their youth. Mac ends up in the Feelings Center with a young boy named Sam, both of them being counseled by a dog. After the dog absolves them,
“Mac: We’ve only been here for like five minutes. That’s not a punishment. I don’t feel punished. Where’s the shame I’m supposed to be feeling?
Dog: There’s no shame in making a mistake, Mac.
Mac: Yes, there is. How else would I know not to do it anymore?
Dog: Hey, listen man, I’m a licensed psychotherapist.
Mac: You’re a talking dog. I’m out of here.
Sam: I’m scared.
Mac: I’m sure you are, Sam. I’m sure you are. ‘Cause you’re a pussy. Look, that’s not your fault, man. This dog. Your parents. The whole culture is grooming you to be a pussy. You got no freedom. Which means you got no balls. And then, even when you do actually get caught doing something bad, you’re not held accountable. And if you’re not held accountable, you feel no guilt. And if you feel no guilt, you feel no shame. You got no shame, you’re never gonna hate yourself enough to stop being bad and grow some balls.”
This show is hot garbage. It’s a tragic waste of a lot of good talent: Reese Witherspoon, Mark Duplass, Steve Carell, Jennifer Aniston (who’s a much better comedienne than dramatic actress). I don’t like a single one of the characters. I take that back.
I would kind of like Reese Witherspoon’s character if she wasn’t so interested in satisfying the requirements of the assholes judging her so that she can be allowed to work somewhere significant. And they’ve also thrown a few curveballs into her personality to keep her “down to Earth.” (Like, when she hooks up with and immediately leaves an Irish bartender in the exact same crude way that a man would. I’m not sure what the message is, but it’s muddled and stupid).
At the urging of my viewing partner, we’ve watched a few more episodes, but it’s not gotten much better. I’m still desperately searching for a character I don’t dislike. We’re at episode five now, with me more listening than watching, but my impression is that the message of this show is that the best we can hope for as a society is for woman to switch places with men, but that everything else stays pretty much the same. Everyone is still an asshole, treating everyone else like dirt, concerned mostly about themselves.
Equality apparently means that the asshole sociopaths still run everything, but some of them will be women. Our future is bright, in other words.
In episode six, the whole toxic crew heads out to California, to cover horrific wildfires. Everyone’s still hungover from the evening before. Bradley and Alex are at each other’s throats, with Bradley mistaking the show she’s working at for an actual journalistic operation (as if that even exists in the mainstream) while Alex thinks America needs to be given fluff to keep it happy. I mean, she’s right, but it’s only because people like her have trained them to expect it.
In episode seven, Alex reveals to her daughter that her parents are getting a divorce. The daughter is given the opportunity for utterly non-entertaining grandstanding. I get that this is a show about the superficiality of show business, but I wonder how it’s possible to tough out a show where you can’t get a single toehold on a single character.
My partner’s watching this show while I work and read, so I’m seeing more of it in the background. There was a bright spot near the end of season one where it seemed to get a bit better. Now, on episode four of season two, it’s just a slog of shitty, petty, superficial, ineloquent, and woefully under-talented and intellectually under-equipped main characters talking at each other in one endless scene after another.
The camera faces one person, then the other, then the previous one, then the other one again. It focuses a bit on one character as he (e.g., Cory) reads out a tremendous amount of text that wishes it had been written by Armando Iannucci, but it’s much more like it’s been written by Aaron Sorkin, who’s become so famous for writing stuff that stupid people think sounds clever.
And I absolutely can’t tell whether they’re being catty and tongue-in-cheek about the whole “I am my identities” way of life, or if they absolutely 100% mean it. At any rate, it’s just so tedious and uninteresting.
Cory (Billy Crudup) has some rare moments, when he’s not delivering carefully crafted speeches that are too clever by half. He has excellent control of his eyes and communicates a lot with them.
Still, this is a terrible show, overall. It’s just hours and hours of fevered, fragile egos attached to incredibly self-interested and stunningly stupid people. Alex is absolutely the worst. I am not all impressed with how they’ve managed to portray a small-minded, stupid person like this. I don’t know any people who are anything like the people in this show. They just spend all their day yelling at each other and grasping for personal gain.
The Chip/Alex conversation in the car in episode 8 of season 2 is endless and focuses exclusively on Alex’s feelings—and how she’s never done anything wrong. It’s painful. It’s made more painful by the thought that there are so many people who probably think that this is the best TV they’ve ever seen.
In season 3, episode 4, there’s a lot of absolutely awful stuff going on, but the worst part is how hard they push the anti-Russian/pro-Ukraine narrative. It’s not aged well, but no matter. It’s more interesting as a lesson in how the elites in America are expected to think. There is absolutely no issue about being so partisan in a TV show that is decidedly not about real-world issues at all.
It’s especially ironic that they’re talking about exclusive photos that they could publish of the Russians having bombed a hospital, something that’s completely made-up, but literally right now there is another invasion going on where actual hospitals and churches are being bombed—it’s November 2023 right now, and I’m talking about Israel’s vengeance attacks on Gaza—and there is literally no way on God’s green Earth that the current bomber would ever be featured so crassly as the “enemy” in this TV show.
I’m mystified how anyone can seriously watch this show without doing something more useful at the same time—and then look forward to another season.
This a bit woker than I remember the books being. The lead character is a Tom-Cruise-like better-at-everything-than-everyone-else star, but it’s a slight, black young woman/girl.
There’s the pool scene that, were the roles reversed, there’d be an uproar. She basically humiliates her boyfriend intellectually, then taunts him when he says he can’t swim, then she throws him in the water and tells him to “relax”. Then she seduces him into having sex in the pool. I honestly can’t tell if they’re being ironic or if they really think that reversing the roles is progress.
I like the concept and the visuals are wonderful, but it’s just crazy how a show that takes place over giant time spans (a few decades is the shortest) spends so much damned time on fleeting love affairs. This is silly. I only watched the first three episodes before giving up on it.
That’s what I wrote in January of 2022, when I first started watching this. I was riding the bike at the time. I continued watching on the recommendation of a good friend, whose taste in films is otherwise good. I watched it while doing strength workouts. It seemed to fit a bit better, I don’t know why. Maybe I’ve gotten older and have a bit more patience. There are a bunch of things going on:
Episode 9: The Leap was more interesting. Hari Seldon spoke with the Foundation on Terminus, lending the proceeding a bit more gravitas. Cleon/Day took revenge on Azura for having misled his “son” Cleon/Dawn: he found and killed every single person she’d ever interacted with, then condemned her to a long life of intravenous feeding, deprived of all sensory input.
But then they ruined it by making an achingly long scene starring Gael Dornick, finding Salvor Hardin in a cryo-tank in the water. Just the most ludicrous Deus ex Machina and absolute emoting and hamming it up, with glassy eyes everywhere. Sigh.
This movie follows what has become the standard Terminator formula: there’s a quick introduction of John Connor (Nick Stahl), then a robot T-X (Kristanna Loken) arrives from the future, followed by the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). The robots steal a bunch of shit while breaking a bunch of stuff in order to get dressed up in the clothes of the time.
There’s a computer virus raging across the nation. John Connor tries robbing drugs from the veterinary clinic of Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) to fix himself up. T-X isn’t far behind. She’s an unstoppable teutonic goddess—who raises hell and is about to kill Kate when a real teutonic God plows into her with his truck.
Does it kill her? Bitch, please. Of course not. The movie’s got to keep going, so she pops right back up, self-repairing and then turning all vehicles into autonomous vehicles by magically reprogramming all of the circuit boards in them. Mayhem ensues. John Connor flees with Kate Brewster in her pet van. Cops are in hot pursuit like they’re after the Blues Brothers.
Terminator, Connor, and Brewster get away from T-X. Her plasma cannon damaged one of his two fuel cells, so he has to cut one out while he’s driving. They end up in a cemetery, where they plunder a mausoleum that Sarah Connor had thought to fill with weapons. The police follow them there—as does the T-X, in the form of Sarah’s fiancé (Brian Sites), who’s getting escorted by police to find Kate. T-X ends up killing her escort, but is still stymied at the cemetery, where Kate, John, and Terminator escape in a hearse, scraping the T-X off the roof by driving under a semi-tractor-trailer.
Her primary plasma weapon is damaged, but she perseveres. There’s a bunch of exposition where Kate and John get to know what happens to them. They all meet up at NORAD, where Kate’s Dad initiates SkyNet. T-X is there, upgrading very early T-1 and T-2 models—they still use tank treads—and letting them loose in the base. Our heroes rescue Kate’s dad, while keeping the T-X at bay. They go to his office to find the codes that they can use to shut down SkyNet. It is already defending itself, though. It is preparing a nuclear attack on all mankind—Judgement Day.
Kate’s dad dies in the next attack, so the three are left to head for another super-secret location. Terminator stays behind to take on the T-X and buy them time. She fries his face off, then snaps his neck—before reprogramming him. Kate and John encounter several more early terminator models. The T-X is back on their trail, but John has turned on the particle collider, including its incredibly powerful magnets, which, apparently, act outside the tube. These pull the T-X apart. But the T-X starts cutting into the collider.
The reprogrammed Terminator catches up to Kate and John, complete with his new instructions to kill them both. He’s got a bit of a HAL complex, as he now has two sets of conflicting orders. After he chucks them around the hangar a bit, John gets him to shut himself down instead of killing them both. They fly off to the other location to destroy SkyNet.
They show up there and start hacking their way in. T-X crashes a helicopter into the facility and is right on their tail. Terminator crashes an even bigger helicopter into the facility, smushing T-X again, and saving them both. The door starts to close, but Terminator holds it back. The T-X rips its own legs off and scuttles to catch them. Terminator stops her, tearing out his own fuel cell and cramming it into her mouth. “Du bist terminiert.”
Inside the facility, there’s a whole shadow government setup, with a tremendous number of old computers. There is no SkyNet there. The Terminator had brought them there to keep them safe from the unavoidable nuclear attack of SkyNet, so that Kate and John will survive. The end, for now.
I watched it in German.
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) lost his wife Helen (Bridget Moynahan) to cancer. He meets his mysterious friend Marcus (Willem Dafoe) at the funeral. Before she’d died, she’d ordered him a dog. It arrives after her death. It’s a great little beagle. She and John are becoming friends. Her name is Daisy.
They’re out for a drive together. Wick stops for gas. Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen) is there, with a couple of henchmen. He wants to buy Wick’s 1969 Mustang. It’s not for sale. Iosef mutters in Russian that everything has a price. Wick tells him in Russian that not everything has a price.
Iosef and his henchmen get the jump on Wick in his home, later that night. They bludgeon him, then bludgeon Daisy to death. Wick wakes to find that she’d dragged herself over to him—her spine had been snapped by a blow—before expiring.
Iosef goes to Aurelio’s (John Leguizamo) chop shop. Aurelio knows immediately whose car it is. He pops Iosef in the mouth for insolence and sends him away. Iosef’s father Viggo Tasarov (Michael Nyqvist) calls to find out what had happened.
“Your idiot son stole John Wick’s car and killed his dog.”
“Oh.”
Viggo’s right-hand man Avi (Dean Winters) tells him that a big deal has just gone through. He’s made to watch as Viggo beats the crap out of Iosef.
Viggo calls John, interrupting him as he’s unboxing his old weapons cache. He says nothing.
John prepares for battle. His back is tattooed with fortis fortuna adiuvat (Fortune Favors the Bold (Wikipedia'). He dresses in his black suit at home, as Viggo sings a song of Baba Yaga in his own home. Viggo’s army shows up at John’s home. John decimates them. The police arrive on a noise complaint.
“Sag mal, arbeitest du wieder?”
“Nein, ich muss nur ein paar Sachen regeln.”
“Na, dann, schönen Abend.”
He calls a cleanup crew, “Dinner for 12”, paying in gold coins.
John Wick moves into The Continental Hotel, where we meet the hotel manager (Lance Reddick) and owner Winston (Ian McShane). We learn the rules of that place—no business or contracts on-premises—because Wick goes out on the hunt. Iosef is in a Russian bath house. Wick lets a guard go because he knows him well. He just tells him to take a walk—and Frances does. “Danke, Mr. Wick.”
Wick infiltrates the club, taking out one of Iosef’s friends (one who’d been there when they’d stolen his car and had killed his dog). He takes out more guards, looking one in the eye until the lights go out. Others give more resistance, so there’s more fighting and shooting and killing in an incredibly economical fighting style.
Iosef shields himself with a girl and gets away. He rushes through the club’s dance floor, heading for the exit. The main body guard Kirill (Daniel Bernhardt) gets the drop on Wick, who seems to have been fighting him mano-a-mano for fun—until he gets a gut full of a broken champagne bottle and is thrown from a balcony.
He gets back to the Continental and orders a doctor, who sews him back together and gets him the drugs he needs to keep going.
He’s sleeping in his bed. Marcus has him in his sniper-rifle scope. He shoots the pillow next to Wick’s head to warn him that Perkins (Adrianne Palicki) is coming to kill him in his room. They fight—pretty good choreography—with Wick eventually getting the drop on her. He learns from her where Viggo keeps all of his cash from his operations. Instead of killing her—against the rules—he leaves her in Harry’s (Clarke Peters) hands.
Wick is at the church that is a front for the money-laundering operation. He works his way into the basement and lights all of it on fire. Money, paintings, blackmail material—everything.
Back in the hotel, Perkins gets the drop on Harry and shoots him in the head.
Wick attacks the remaining Russians, including Viggo, in broad daylight. He takes out dozens of them, but Kirill again gets the drop on him, driving into another car that knocks him down and out.
They’re in a basement, with Viggo gleefully beating Wick, telling him stories.
“People keep asking if I’m back and I haven’t really had an answer. But now, yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back. So you can either hand over your son or you can die screaming alongside him!”
Viggo leaves Wick to be suffocated by his henchmen. Marcus shoots one of them, giving Wick a chance to fight Kirill, even though he’s still got a bag over his head and his hands are still bound. Wicks strangles him. He gets outside, stopping Viggo’s car by killing everyone. Viggo gives up his son.
Wick infiltrates again, taking over a sniper position and taking out many of the others. He blows up the escape vehicles. Wick gut-shoots Iosef, then finishes the job before he can finish saying “Es war nur ein scheiss [Hund]”.
Wick checks out, getting a new car from the Continental “für die kleine Störung” (Perkins’s attack). He meets up with Marcus and thanks him. That evening, Marcus is taken captive by Viggo’s men, nearly beaten to death by Viggo, then finished off by Perkins and Viggo.
Winston has his men kill Perkins for her actions in the Continental. He calls Wick to tell him that Viggo is heading for his heliport. Wick spills them all out of the way like a force of nature, one by one by one, until only Viggo is left. Viggo plows Wick’s car off the pier, but without Wick in it. Viggo gets him to throw his weapon away, then they fight mano-a-mano. Until Viggo pulls a knife. Wick is forced to let Viggo stab him in order to stabilize the knife and take it away. They are both grievously wounded, Viggo very much mortally so.
We’re back in the garage where we started. Wick pulls himself up, breaks into the vet’s office, gets some medicine, staples his wound shut (same place as the previous stabbing), then picks up a Pit Bull puppy slated for execution and walks off.
Detective John Kimble (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has finally captured his arch-nemesis Crisp (Richard Tyson). His next assignment is to go undercover to protect Crisp’s wife and child from being abducted by Crisp or his henchmen. When Detective Phoebe O’Hara (Pamela Reed) falls too ill to teach the kindergarten class where they can keep an eye on the boy.
Instead, Kimble takes the job. His first day on the job only comes to a calmer ending when he gets out his ferret. On the second day, he tries to find out what their dads do. He has a headache.
“Boy: Es ist bestimmt ein Tumor.
Kimble: Es ist kein Tumor.”
He’s narrowing it down to a couple of kids, but isn’t sure yet which ones is Crisp’s. It’s kind of hilarious that this is the actual plot. Various mothers chat with Kimble—because he’s a giant pile of muscle—including Sylvester’s mom (Cathy Moriarty), who thinks her kid is gay. Another teacher at the school is Joyce (Penelope Ann Miller). Miss Schlowski (Linda Hunt) is the school principal.
Kimble, Joyce, and O’Hara go to dinner, after which Kimble confesses that the kids are running all over him. O’Hara tells him, “no fear.” He starts training them like cadets—a full physical-fitness training program. Sit-ups, running, jumping jacks.
Kimble thinks he’s figured out that it’s Zach he’s looking for, then meets Zach’s mom (Jayne Brook), who confesses that she knows about Zach’s bruises, but that her husband is in therapy. Kimble realizes he’s at a dead-end with his search for Crisp’s kid, but tells Zach’s mom that he’ll press charges if her husband does it again.
It’s dinnertime at Joyce’s house, with her kid, Dominic. Kimble thinks that Joyce and Dominic might very well be Crisp’s ex-wife and child. They are. Crisp shows up. People are kidnapped. People are rescued. Happy ending all around. Except Crisp, who dies. So does his mom. It’s pretty violent, actually.
I’ve seen this movie so many times before—it was an absolute family favorite—but this is the first time I’ve seen it in German. It’s really pretty awesome in German. “Eins, zwei, drei, vier!”
This was a pitch-perfect spoof of parts of the story of Jesus, told as a hyper-violent zombie/action movie.
Jesus is trying to show off and brings Lazarus back from there dead. He rises, but as a zombie, quickly infecting everyone but Jesus and Judas. They scream and flee, hunted throughout the small village by roving bands of villager-zombies, Roman-centurion-zombies, and cowboy-zombies.
After getting trapped in a field, hemmed in on all sides, Jesus conjures fishes, multiplies them and wields them as weapons, as throwing stars, chainsaws, swords, everything. Judas grabs a giant swordfish and joins in. It’s a bloodbath.
Fist of Jesus is not the best movie ever, but it had absolutely no right being as good as it was. It just goes to show that funny writing, absolutely fantastic editing, and good directing goes so much farther than effects. And the effects were actually good! Not lifelike, but well-choreographed.
I watched it in Spanish with English subtitles.
Jean Valjean (Liam Neeson) is a criminal, out for only four days on parole after 19 years of hard labor. He ends up in a town, sleeping on a bench. An old woman urges him to go to a local church, where he is fed and given shelter. He repays them by stealing the silverware and punching the priest (Tim Barlow) in the eye.
The police captures him, bringing him back to the priest, who absolves him, telling the police that he allowed Valjean to take the silverware and wonders why he’d forgotten the candlesticks.
Years later, Valjean is mayor of the town. His new chief inspector is Javert (Geoffrey Rush), who is absolutely hell-bent on putting Valjean back in jail, for something—anything!—because he does not believe in rehabilitation.
Valjean is no saint. He fires a local woman Fantine (Uma Thurman), consigning her to a fate of prostitution and dire illness, trying to scratch together enough money to pay rent, heat her apartment, and to bring her child Cosette (Claire Danes) back to her.
The film depicts an utterly cruel and lost society, filled with the worst people. Rich men haggle with freezing whores, then try to rape them while the police look on.
Valjean learns that a “Jean Valjean” is on trial. He travels to Paris to attend the trial. After watching his previous comrades—19 years together on the chain—snitch to hang another man for what were his crimes, he stands and confesses, come what may.
Valjean returns to Fantine, only to be confronted by Javert, who delights in his guilt. Javert’s accusations push Fantine over the edge, and she dies in her bed. Valjean finally pops Javert in the noggin and escapes, first transferring ownership of his factory to his workers, then collecting a go-bag that he’d buried by a tree in a field outside of town.
Javert’s enthusiasm to catch him makes him tip his entire stagecoach. He continues on foot, running to catch the slowly moving coach in front of him, only to find that Valjean had switched places with a local farmer.
Valjean continues to the town where Cosette lives in a horrible foster home, with two horrible foster parents who cavil every sou they can get out of him. He wants to take Cosette with him and lays FF500 on the table, but the man tries to bargain up to FF1500, but then says he couldn’t consider it, morally. Valjean is sarcastically relieved, then shows the man a letter from Cosette’s mother, allowing him to take the girl with him for free.
Valjean returns to the village where he’d been mayor, staying in hiding in a church convent while Javert searches high and low for him. Javert is thwarted from searching the grounds, and Javert and Cosette escape.
Ten years later, they are still in the church. Valjean, on the urging and advice of his friend, takes Cosette into the world. His friend tells him that the world has changed, that he should return to it. He agrees and decides to buy a house and move in. Javert is still out there, fighting against the revolution.
Cosette starts agitating to have her own life because she’s hot for a local revolutionary Marius (Hans Matheson). Javert is determined to tell her father that she’s consorting with a known revolutionary. He visits the home, but Valjean slips out, leaving Cosette to speak with Javert. She breaks into histrionics afterward, demanding that he tell his story. He tells her that he’s a convict, that he’d been sentenced to 20 years of hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread. He tells her his story, while they sit on a white piano bench, next to a white grand piano, in a study the size of most people’s apartments.
Javert soon discovers that Lafitte is Valjean. Valjean and Cosette decide to leave town, in the middle of the night. The next day, Marius helps start the revolution. Cosette tells her father that she needs to wait for Marius to return from the barricades and that she loves him. Meanwhile, Javert is scurrying and skulking about the city, pursuing his quarry, Valjean. He literally couldn’t care less about the revolution, he’s focused laser-like only on his eternal quarry.
Cosette ventures out of doors to meet Marius. The trap shuts on her, completely expectedly. Javert has her dead to rights. She actually gets the drop on him, throws him to the ground, then unties Marius and gives him Javert’s gun. Marius frog-marches Javert to the barricades to “face the people’s justice.” Valjean goes into the streets, to a hospital, to find Marius. Instead, he finds Javert, tied to a post, utterly unrepentant. A revolutionary says “Do you know him? When we have a spare bullet, we get to kill him.” Valjean continues to the barricades to send Marius to Cosette.
A little boy robbing corpses is shot through the back. They carry the corpse inside, where Valjean takes on the job of “taking care of” Javert. Javert is incensed that not only has Valjean “beaten him”, but that Valjean doesn’t even seem to care that he’s “won”. And now Valjean wants to let him go. “You should kill me. I won’t stop. You don’t understand. I won’t let you go. You should end this. Kill me.”
In the early gloaming of day, their positions are compromised by heavy artillery. A seemingly indomitable Valjean takes a wounded Marius into the sewers, then out somewhere along the Seine. And … to no-one’s surprise at all, Javert is right exactly in that one spot in the tiny city of Paris to meet him. Javert agrees to let Valjean take Marius back to his home, to Cosette. He takes his leave of her, giving Cosette her mother’s broach, at which Cosette can only stare at stupidly. Valjean leaves with the guards and returns to Javert, on the banks of the Seine.
Javert says, “I’ve tried to live my life without breaking a single rule.” and “you’re free” before he removes Valjean’s handcuffs, puts them on himself and tips himself backwards into the Seine.
Valjean watches the ripples, then walks increasingly quickly and confidently along the banks of the Seine, a grin spreading across his face.
A bunch of the acting is quite wooden, especially Claire Danes, who seems ludicrously out of place. Geoffrey Rush is always good. Liam Neeson was also quite good. Uma Thurman as well.
Published by marco on 31. Dec 2023 17:28:02 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 1. Jan 2024 10:40:43 (GMT-5)
I’ve written about the author a few times because of the extremely sharp turn he took on October 7th, 2023. See Losing the plot completely on November 1, 2023, Some commentators are still MIA on November 6, 2023, Moar unhinged commentary on November 23, 2023, and Strawman battles: rape is never OK! on December 30, 2023. Just in case you think I’m picking on him, here’s part of his last post of 2023 Inflection Point 2023 by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice).
“[…] the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th and its ensuing war in Gaza has bubbled up the fundamental differences between a liberal democratic nation and the swell of simplistic authoritarianism of the young.
“Others in my position have adopted the woke view of the world, some because they needed the validation that comes from espousing the popular views of progressives, and others because they were never quite as serious as I thought. Or hoped. But how many more marches by the young and unduly passionate who justify terrorism and suddenly find rape and murder acceptable when done by those their tribe tells them to favor?”
He’s now just going to be part of the “old guard” defending “liberal democracy” from authoritarianism. Who do you see as being on your side? Who is for liberal democracy in the current political climate? Chuck Schumer? You might want to check carefully there. He’s certainly on your side in the current phase of the long Israeli war against Palestine, but he can’t seriously be said to be a supporter of liberal democracy. He can’t seriously be considered non-authoritarian.
That goes for pretty much anyone in that party, from Nancy Pelosi on down. I’m almost certain he’s not looking for sanity from the leading lights of the Republican party.
And he makes sure to mention again that everyone seems to love rape as long it’s Jews and/or Israelis being raped. He thinks that these students are protesting for no other reason than to show their support of terrorism against Israelis. He thinks that every last one of them is happy that Israelis were killed and raped and hope that it happens more.
Did I perhaps misread what he wrote? Am I not being generous enough to what he thinks?
“I never would have believed in my old man head that we would be back to open Jew hatred again. Yet here we are, and tens of thousands of people who would claim the mantle of progress fully embrace the end of Jews. Never in its wildest dreams would Hamas have believed that raping and beheading Jews would turn them into progressive darlings, but here we are.”
Nope. He’s pretty clear. Most progressives hate Jews and love rape and terrorism. Black on white.
Want more? He’s not done.
“Will this cause young progressives to recognize the error of their ideology? Will they realize that their sudden existential concern for Palestinians when they cared nothing about them until it meant they could openly hate Jews.”
Who hurt him? I mean personally? He used to be so level-headed. Now he’s completely derailed.
I don’t know how he could sanely come to that conclusion, but this is his go-to topic now. He’s not letting go. How will he possibly reconcile with anyone outside of a pretty tiny circle of people who are going to agree with that extreme viewpoint? Does he care? Probably not.
But this is the slippery slope to grumpy, old, out-of-touch-man territory. He’s basically the same as any person who watches FOX News and unquestioningly agrees with their wildest ideas about what’s happening.
You poor, lost guy. I wish you the best of luck in 2024.
A lot of my analysis and notes boils down to: you need to know what you’re... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 22:46:09 (GMT-5)
The article Exploring Generative AI by Birgitta Böckeler (MartinFowler.com) is chock-full of helpful tips from eight newsletters totaling 25 pages that she wrote throughout 2023. I include some of my own thoughts, but most of this article consists of citations.
A lot of my analysis and notes boils down to: you need to know what you’re doing to use these tools. They can help you build things that you don’t understand, but it’s not for medium- or long-term solutions. I’ve written a lot more about the need for expertise in How important is human expertise?
“The following are the dimensions of my current mental model of tools that use LLMs (Large Language Models) to support with coding.
“Assisted tasks”
“These are the types of tasks I see most commonly tackled when it comes to coding assistance, although there is a lot more if I would expand the scope to other tasks in the software delivery lifecycle.”
- Finding information faster, and in context
- Generating code
- “Reasoning” about code (Explaining code, or problems in the code)
- Transforming code into something else (e.g. documentation text or diagram)
“In this particular case of a very common and small function like median, I would even consider using generated code for both the tests and the function. The tests were quite readable and it was easy for me to reason about their coverage, plus they would have helped me remember that I need to look at both even and uneven lengths of input. However, for other more complex functions with more custom code I would consider writing the tests myself, as a means of quality control. Especially with larger functions, I would want to think through my test cases in a structured way from scratch, instead of getting partial scenarios from a tool, and then having to fill in the missing ones.”
“The tool itself might have the answer to what’s wrong or could be improved in the generated code − is that a path to make it better in the future, or are we doomed to have circular conversation with our AI tools?”
“[…] generating tests could give me ideas for test scenarios I missed, even if I discard the code afterwards. And depending on the complexity of the function, I might consider using generated tests as well, if it’s easy to reason about the scenarios.”
“For the purposes of this memo, I’m defining “useful” as “the generated suggestions are helping me solve problems faster and at comparable quality than without the tool”. That includes not only the writing of the code, but also the review and tweaking of the generated suggestions, and dealing with rework later, should there be quality issues.”
- […]
- Boilerplate: Create boilerplate setups like an ExpressJS server, or a React component, or a database connection and query execution.
- Repetitive patterns: It helps speed up typing of things that have very common and repetitive patterns, like creating a new constructor or a data structure, or a repetition of a test setup in a test suite. I traditionally use a lot of copy and paste for these things, and Copilot can speed that up.
Interesting. I’ve just always used the existing templates or made my own expansion templates. At least then it makes exactly what I want—and even leaves the cursor in the right position afterwards.
Another thought I had is that the kind of programmer that this helps doesn’t use any generalization for common patterns. Otherwise, the suggestions wouldn’t be useful because they can’t possibly take advantage of those highly specialized patterns. Or maybe they can, if they’re included in the context. It seems unlikely, if only because the sample size is too small to be able to influence the algorithm sufficiently. But maybe enough weight can be given to the immediate context to make that work somehow.
At that point, though, you’re just spending all of your time coaxing your LLM copilot into building the code that you already knew you wanted. This practice seems like it would end up discouraging generalization and abstraction—unless it can grok your API (as I’ve noted above).
This is an age-old problem that is maybe solved, once and for all. The problem is that when you generalize a solution, it becomes much easier, more efficient, and more economical to maintain, but it can end up being more difficult to understand. If the API is well-made and addresses a problem domain with a complexity that the programmer is actually capable of understanding, then the higher-level API may be easier to use, and perhaps even maintain.
However, a non-generalized solution is sometimes easier for a novice or less-experienced programmer to understand and extend. It’s questionable whether you’d want your code being extended and maintained by someone who barely—or doesn’t—understand it, but that situation is sometimes thrust on teams and managers.
“This autocomplete-on-steroids effect can be less useful though for developers who are already very good at using IDE features, shortcuts, and things like multiple cursor mode. And beware that when coding assistants reduce the pain of repetitive code, we might be less motivated to refactor.”
“You can use a coding assistant to explore some ideas when you are getting started with more complex problems, even if you discard the suggestion afterwards.”
“The larger the suggestion, the more time you will have to spend to understand it, and the more likely it is that you will have to change it to fit your context. Larger snippets also tempt us to go in larger steps, which increases the risk of missing test coverage, or introducing things that are unnecessary.”
On the other hand,
“[…] when you do not have a plan yet because you are less experienced, or the problem is more complex, then a larger snippet might help you get started with that plan.”
This is not unlike using StackOverflow or any other resource. There’s no getting around knowing what you’re doing, at least a little bit. You can’t bootstrap without even a bootstrap.
“Experience still matters. The more experienced the developer, the more likely they are to be able to judge the quality of the suggestions, and to be able to use them effectively. As GitHub themselves put it: “It’s good at stuff you forgot.” This study even found that “in some cases, tasks took junior developers 7 to 10 percent longer with the tools than without them.””
“Using coding assistance tools effectively is a skill that is not simply learned from a training course or a blog post. It’s important to use them for a period of time, experiment in and outside of the safe waters, and build up a feeling for when this tooling is useful for you, and when to just move on and do it yourself.”
This is just like any other tool. There is no shortcut to being good at something complex. The only tasks for which there are shortcuts are the non-complex ones. In that case, you should be asking yourself why your solutions involve so much repetitive programming.
“We have found that having the right files open in the editor to enhance the prompt is quite a big factor in improving the usefulness of suggestions. However, the tools cannot distinguish good code from bad code. They will inject anything into the context that seems relevant. (According to this reverse engineering effort, GitHub Copilot will look for open files with the same programming language, and use some heuristic to find similar snippets to add to the prompt.) As a result, the coding assistant can become that developer on the team who keeps copying code from the bad examples in the codebase.”
That will be so much fun, especially if you can get an echo chamber of lower-skilled programmers approving each other’s pull requests. 😉
“We also found that after refactoring an interface, or introducing new patterns into the codebase, the assistant can get stuck in the old ways. For example, the team might want to introduce a new pattern like “start using the Factory pattern for dependency injection”, but the tool keeps suggesting the current way of dependency injection because that is still prevalent all over the codebase and in the open files. We call this a poisoned context , and we don’t really have a good way to mitigate this yet.”
“Using a coding assistant means having to do small code reviews over and over again. Usually when we code, our flow is much more about actively writing code, and implementing the solution plan in our head. This is now sprinkled with reading and reviewing code, which is cognitively different, and also something most of us enjoy less than actively producing code. This can lead to review fatigue, and a feeling that the flow is more disrupted than enhanced by the assistant.”
“Automation Bias is our tendency “to favor suggestions from automated systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct.” Once we have had good experience and success with GenAI assistants, we might start trusting them too much.”
“[…] once we have that multi-line code suggestion from the tool, it can feel more rational to spend 20 minutes on making that suggestion work than to spend 5 minutes on writing the code ourselves once we see the suggestion is not quite right.”
“Once we have seen a code suggestion, it’s hard to unsee it, and we have a harder time thinking about other solutions. That is because of the Anchoring Effect, which happens when “an individual’s decisions are influenced by a particular reference point or ‘anchor’”. so while coding assistants’ suggestions can be great for brainstorming when we don’t know how to solve something yet, awareness of the Anchoring Effect is important when the brainstorm is not fruitful, and we need to reset our brain for a fresh start.”
“The framing of coding assistants as pair programmers is a disservice to the practice, and reinforces the widespread simplified understanding and misconception of what the benefits of pairing are.”
“Pair programming however is also about the type of knowledge sharing that creates collective code ownership, and a shared knowledge of the history of the codebase. It’s about sharing the tacit knowledge that is not written down anywhere, and therefore also not available to a Large Language Model. Pairing is also about improving team flow, avoiding waste, and making Continuous Integration easier. It helps us practice collaboration skills like communication, empathy, and giving and receiving feedback. And it provides precious opportunities to bond with one another in remote-first teams.”
“LLMs rarely provide the exact functionality we need after a single prompt. So iterative development is not going away yet. Also, LLMs appear to “elicit reasoning” (see linked study) when they solve problems incrementally via chain-of-thought prompting. LLM-based AI coding assistants perform best when they divide-and-conquer problems, and TDD is how we do that for software development.”
“Some examples of starting context that have worked for us:”
- ASCII art mockup
- Acceptance Criteria
Guiding Assumptions such as:
- “No GUI needed”
- “Use Object Oriented Programming” (vs. Functional Programming)
“For example, if we are working on backend code, and Copilot is code-completing our test example name to be, “given the user… clicks the buy button ” , this tells us that we should update the top-of-file context to specify, “assume no GUI” or, “this test suite interfaces with the API endpoints of a Python Flask app”.”
“Copilot often fails to take “baby steps”. For example, when adding a new method, the “baby step” means returning a hard-coded value that passes the test. To date, we haven’t been able to coax Copilot to take this approach.”
Knowing a bit about how LLMs work, there’s no way you really could train it to do TDD, because it’s an iterative process. It doesn’t know what TDD is, nor does the way it’s built have any mechanism for learning how to do it. Nor does it know what coding is, for that matter. It’s just a really, really good guesser. Everything it does is hallucination. It’s just that some of it is useful.
“As a workaround, we “backfill” the missing tests. While this diverges from the standard TDD flow, we have yet to see any serious issues with our workaround.”
Changing how you program because of the tool is something you should do deliberately. This is a slippery slope.
“For implementation code that needs updating, the most effective way to involve Copilot is to delete the implementation and have it regenerate the code from scratch. If this fails, deleting the method contents and writing out the step-by-step approach using code comments may help. Failing that, the best way forward may be to simply turn off Copilot momentarily and code out the solution manually.”
Jaysus. That’s pretty grim.
“The common saying, “garbage in, garbage out” applies to both Data Engineering as well as Generative AI and LLMs. Stated differently: higher quality inputs allow for the capability of LLMs to be better leveraged. In our case, TDD maintains a high level of code quality. This high quality input leads to better Copilot performance than is otherwise possible.”
“Model-Driven Development (MDD). We would come up with a modeling language to represent our domain or application, and then describe our requirements with that language, either graphically or textually (customized UML, or DSLs). Then we would build code generators to translate those models into code, and leave designated areas in the code that would be implemented and customized by developers.”
“That unreliability creates two main risks: It can affect the quality of my code negatively, and it can waste my time. Given these risks, quickly and effectively assessing my confidence in the coding assistant’s input is crucial.”
“Can my IDE help me with the feedback loop? Do I have syntax highlighting, compiler or transpiler integration, linting plugins? Do I have a test, or a quick way to run the suggested code manually?”
“I have noticed that in CSS, GitHub Copilot suggests flexbox layout to me a lot. Choosing a layouting approach is a big decision though, so I would want to consult with a frontend expert and other members of my team before I use this.”
That’s because you care about architecture. Review was always important, but more so when code is being written by something you never hired.
“How long-lived will this code be? If I’m working on a prototype, or a throwaway piece of code, I’m more likely to use the AI input without much questioning than if I’m working on a production system.”
“[…] it’s also good to know if the AI tool at hand has access to more information than just the training data. If I’m using a chat, I want to be aware if it has the ability to take online searches into account, or if it is limited to the training data.”
“To mitigate the risk of wasting my time, one approach I take is to give it a kind of ultimatum. If the suggestion doesn’t bring me value with little additional effort, I move on. If an input is not helping me quick enough, I always assume the worst about the assistant, rather than giving it the benefit of the doubt and spending 20 more minutes on making it work.”
“GitHub Copilot is not a traditional code generator that gives you 100% what you need. But in 40-60% of situations, it can get you 40-80% of the way there, which is still useful. When you adjust these expectations, and give yourself some time to understand the behaviours and quirks of the eager donkey, you’ll get more out of AI coding assistants.”
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 22:35:43 (GMT-5)
Similar to the article Cheerleading for the … what’s the opposite of underdog?, the content below appeared in my Links and Notes for October 13th, 2023, which I managed to publish on October 23rd. I’ve edited things lightly, but I’m publishing these reactions again to have them in a separate article and because I think my initial take has aged relatively well.
The article The Spiral of Violence that Led to Hamas by Peter Singer (Project Syndicate) writes,
“Hamas reportedly holds roughly 150 hostages, and has said that it will kill one every time Israel bombs a Gazan home without warning. Hamas leaders surely remember that in 2011, Netanyahu, as prime minister, was willing to free over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, some of them terrorists, in exchange for the release of a single captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Against that background, they may believe that Israel will not be prepared to sacrifice the lives of the hostages in order to achieve its military objectives.”
They would be wrong, I suppose. It looks like Israel is calling them on it, telling them to put their money where their mouth is. That they hope for a prisoner trade has been the expressed intent of the kidnappings from the very first statement by Hamas, but we can, of course, disregard their actually stated goals and reasoning and instead imbue them with the goals and reasoning we’d like them to have instead. It makes things easier, I suppose. Israel has thus far been quite tight-lipped about the hostages—it seems almost as if they’re already treating them as martyrs. [1]
“When Hamas attacks Israeli civilians, it knows that this will lead to Israeli counterattacks in Gaza that are bound to kill and injure many civilians. Hamas locates its military sites in residential areas, hoping that this tactic will restrain Israeli attacks, or at least lessen international support for Israel.”
“How far Israel will go with its declared intention to deny electricity, fuel, food, and water to the two million citizens of Gaza, many of them children, is hard to know. What is certain is that Hamas’s brutal crimes do not entitle Israel to starve children.”
We know a bit more about how serious they are. They seem to be deadly, deadly serious about it. The first trucks went in—20 of them for 2.3m people—just yesterday, about 10 days after the shutdown. There were concerns about whether Egypt would try to smuggle weapons to Hamas amid the food and water supplies.
These are reasons that sound like they make sense until you realize that the alternative—doing nothing for days on end—probably meant the suffering and/or expiration of thousands of innocents, of children.
We have international treaties for a reason, but they’re not worth the paper they’re written on when signatories ignore the rules to which they’d agreed when it pleases them. They would, of course, like the rules to apply when they are in need, when they are being oppressed, but Israel, like the U.S., can no longer conceive of a world in which they would be on the back foot.
They’re not on the back foot now, not really, stop blowing smoke up my ass—so they don’t have to care if the whole international legal structure collapses. It doesn’t benefit them anyway. [2] Just like for the U.S., these international agreements that what they now perceive as weaker leaders of the past having signed are just getting in the way of their plans, of their empire, of their colonialism. [3]
If they would take a step back, they might be appalled to realize that they are being held back from doing horrific crimes by ethical and moral codes to which they in more clear-headed times agreed. In the current bloodthirsty atmosphere, such concerns are swept away before a sheet of red that obliterates all but vengeance. [4]
“And now what? Restore deterrence? How, exactly? Self-punishment in the form of a renewed occupation of Gaza? A land invasion is difficult to imagine. The atrocious level of destruction and casualties this would entail is one reason, with the many Israeli hostages now in Gaza providing additional insurance. The risk of Hezbollah opening an additional front from Lebanon in the north is another. Hezbollah’s capabilities dwarf those of Hamas, and a two-front war, with Iran possibly backing Israel’s foes, is an apocalyptic scenario. This is exactly why US President Joe Biden warned Israel’s enemies “not to exploit the crisis.” To drive home the point, Biden has ordered the US Navy’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean.”
Singer’s certainty here now seems unwarranted. It’s unlikely that Hezbollah will join the battle. Israel is already bombing Syria and Lebanon preemptively, something that they are presumably allowed to do without reprobation by the international community. They haven’t dared attack Iran directly yet, but I’m really wondering whether the reaction of Europe would even be negative. After all, Israel is allowed to defend itself, is it not? [5]
They may force the point, by forcing the U.S. to put its money where its mouth is, following up with force on the side of a deranged, reckless, genocidal power that already had overwhelming superiority over its declared foe.
“Netanyahu’s machine of poisonous political disinformation is already at work disseminating a conspiracy theory according to which leftist army officers were responsible for the negligence that led to this dirty war. No one should be surprised that Netanyahu would resort to the infamous “stab in the back” narrative – a conspiracy theory also peddled by the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. How else could the inciter-in-chief explain his criminal negligence?”
“Israelis will question the conceptziyya that they can reap the benefits of a Western nation-state while being inured to the hardships their neighbors seek to inflict on them.”
The phrase “seek to inflict on them” seems a bit out of place considering the overwhelming power that Israel has. They are the only nuclear power in the region. They have managed to display a deranged, anything-goes approach to foreign policy in which no slight is ever forgiven, no matter how small, in which every slight is answered a dozen-fold.
No sane nation-state would attack Israel first, knowing that it is quite likely that a mushroom cloud will rise over their capital city, rising silently to the applause of all European and American leaders. So, no, I don’t think the Israeli fear of invasion by its neighbors is to be considered very likely. [6]
Naturally, Israel will take a page from Dick Cheney’s book, citing the 1% => 100% doctrine, rounding up a vanishingly small danger to a certainty that warrants preemptive attack—just to be on the safe side. It’s balderdash, of course, but it will be sold as a perfectly normal way to reason about things, a perfectly just way of handling the situation.
The next article The Insane Idea That Nations Get To Do War Crimes Whenever Something Bad Happens To Them by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter) writes,
“Dropping military explosives on children is just as wrong now as it was on October 6th. Wars of aggression were just as wrong on September 12th 2001 as they were on September 10th. But there’s this idiotic belief in mainstream culture that a nation experiencing a traumatic event means it gets to go on a murderous rampage until it feels better.
“As soon as the Hamas attack occurred we were inundated with messaging from the western political/media class which conveyed the idea that because something bad happened to Israel, Israel now gets to do a little genocide, as a treat. This is stupid nonsense, and should be rejected by all thinking people.”
“If you saw your friend stumbling around with his car keys in one hand and a bottle in the other after losing his job, you wouldn’t tell him you stand with him and support whatever it is he’s getting ready to do. You’d understand that people can make unwise decisions after something bad happens to them, and you’d do what you can to help steer them away from it.”
“The death toll from Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza has already more than doubled the death toll from the Hamas attack, and we can expect it to keep multiplying because there’s no meaningful opposition to the bloodshed. The United States, who as an indispensable backer of Israel could end all this with a word, has refused to draw a single red line on what Israel may or may not do if it wishes to retain US support — even its indiscriminate use of white phosphorus, which violates international humanitarian law. War crimes are being committed not just openly but announced in advance as Tel Aviv commits itself to the collective punishment of Palestinians with a complete siege of Gaza, and Israel’s allies have no objection to this.”
There are two points here: Hamas blew its whole load on October 7th. There will be no more meaningful resistance now. Perhaps they will be able to launch some of their rockets (Norman Finkeltstein said he’d read claims that they have 100,000 of them), but they’re unlikely to hit useful targets, like chemical factories, that could do real damage to Israel. Gazans are buttoned down and will suffer what Israel sees fit to mete out. [7]
The other point is that this is exactly what the major powers want to happen. They don’t green-light war crimes because they’re confused about what war crimes are. It’s because laws against war crimes are only there to be wielded against enemies. They don’t apply to anyone inside the circle of trust. If you’re useful to empire, then you get to do what you want. Empire will decide which laws apply to you based on your usefulness.
If you’re useful, you get a free pass to do whatever you like—and you never have to answer for it. If you’re not useful, or if you have something useful that Empire wants without paying for it, you are forced to pledge fealty to Empire, to mouth the words that it wants you to say, to “condemn” terrorists. To make nuance-free statements that are nowhere near to expressing your actual beliefs.
The article International Hypocrisy: The U.S., Once Again, Leads the Way by Robert Fantina (CounterPunch) contains many interesting citations from “Palestinian Ambassador to the U.K., Husam Zumlot” from his interview on BBC News.
“How many times have you interviewed Israeli officials (question by Ambassador Zumlot to the interviewer)? How many times? Hundreds of times. How many times has Israel committed war crimes, live, on your own cameras? Do you start by asking them to condemn themselves? Have you? You don’t.”
“You know why I refuse to answer that question (why he won’t condemn Hamas for its violence of last week)? Because I refuse the premise of it. Because at the very heart of it is misrepresentation of the whole thing. Because it is the Palestinians who are expected to condemn themselves.”
“You bring us here whenever Israelis are killed. Did you bring me here when many Palestinians in the West Bank, more than 200 over the last few months (were killed)? Do you invite me where there are such Israeli provocations in Jerusalem and elsewhere?”
The only time you will be given a voice is to say things that Empire wants. Empire cannot learn new things from you because it already knows everything there is to know.
It knows that it is Empire and that you are not. What could it possibly learn from you?
Your only job is to say the things that Empire wants you to say when it wants you to say them in order to enjoy a slight benefit, to bask in the warm, though oft wan and temporary, beneficence of Empire, to not lose your livelihood, your home, your family, your life.
This is the implicit bargain of living with Empire—the implied threat for non-compliance is always destruction of everything you hold dear. Empire doesn’t care because it doesn’t cost Empire anything, whereas it amuses Empire to throw your pitiful life away for its purposes, for its own enrichment, even if it’s a total waste—it still feels good to use its power.
And don’t go looking for consistency. Superficially, there is none. Bianca Graulau writes, “Filter the propaganda through this lens: the US empire will always choose sides based on its own interests.” That is 100% the correct context through which to process information coming from Empire.
More long-windedly, but still worth quoting, Fantina writes,
“The U.S. isn’t interested in human rights, international law or self-determination. Certainly it has no interest in peace in the Middle East. It is interested in power over the entire world and the profits that that power will bring them. So what if its hands are dripping with the blood of Palestinian children? Biden cares no more about that than George Bush cared about the blood of Iraqi children. No, the geopolitical goals of the U.S. are always front and center. Human rights and international law are nowhere on the U.S. list of priorities.”
This has been obvious for the long part of my lifetime during which I’ve paid attention to international affairs, with a focus on the affairs of Empire. It is of no value to listen to what Empire says; you must watch what Empire actually does.
At some point, he says:
]]>“This is Vicuna 7b. It... [More]”
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 22:15:27 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 6. Mar 2024 07:11:26 (GMT-5)
Simon Willison continues to plug along, examining every LLM-related announcement and trying it out on his own machine wherever possible. The following video is a presentation he gave in early August. It’s quite interesting and worth the ~40 minutes.
At some point, he says:
“This is Vicuna 7b. It is a large language model. It is a 4.2GB file on my computer right now. […] If you open up that file, it’s just numbers. These things are giant, binary blobs of numbers—and anything you do with them just involves vast amounts of matrix multiplication. And that’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s this opaque blob that can do all sorts of weird and interesting things.”
His description suggests mystery, but he’s really just described an executable file with machine code in it. Actually, he’s described any file, which, absent any form of inferred encoding that we consider to be “human-readable”, is just 1s and 0s.
It’s actually … what is it? A file is actually just a set of bunched electron configurations in a special material, where we interpret the bunched parts to be 1s and the sparse parts to be 0s. We interpret those 1s and 0s as a pattern that we call a “file system”. The structure is a language that we’ve invented to express complexity.
There are several layers of it. The material contains these bunches and we have circuits to read out these bunches reliably. Those sequences of 1s and 0s are interpreted bytes, interpreted through the lens of 2's complement, from which we derive numbers of various sizes. Some of those numbers we call characters, that we interpret with a specific encoding.
The only difference being that we understand the instruction set of the machine code, we understand the virtual machine for which it forms instructions. We ought to: we built it all.
The LLM, on the other hand, is an opaque runtime that we don’t really understand, in the sense that we didn’t design the circuits or the instruction set. All we know is that it has an input and output system onto which we can build plugins that allow us to use natural language to poke it, and to interpret its results as natural language.
It’s a mysterious process, but not for the reasons implied by the description above. A giant heap of numbers is a description of any file, even text files. The only reason we understand them as “text files” is that we assume an encoding for the 1s and 0s and derive meaning from there.
Notes:
He mentions several times that people are just poking around at these things, but there is little rhyme or reason to it. He cites one example of how it took two years for someone to discover that the model returns more reliable answers when you ask it to “go step by step”. There might be a plethora of other goodies like that hidden in there—or there might be nothing.
I am, once again, reminded of Roadside Picnic.
He goes on to discuss the data that contributed to it, and how he’s “very concerned” about the provenance of most of it.
He doesn’t get into it more than that, but I will. Essentially, the same companies that will sue the ever-loving Christ out of anyone who uses anything of theirs that they claim to have copyrighted now simultaneously claim that their complete and utter disregard for copyright protection is obviously the thing that we want to do, because otherwise how would we even get all of this awesome stuff from which we’re hoping to profit immensely?
So, they’re basically arguing that they can steal content from everyone without actually allowing anyone else to participate in this glorious world in which it’s OK to use each other’s content without permission. A nice trick, available only to very wealthy companies and individuals.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 21:49:10 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 30. Dec 2023 22:17:52 (GMT-5)
The content below appeared in my Links and Notes for October 6th, 2023, which I managed to publish on October 21st. I’ve edited things lightly, but I’m publishing these reactions again to have them in a separate article and because I think my initial take has aged relatively well—especially as compared with that of European leaders like Frau Baerbock of Germany.
The article Netanyahu regime staggered by Palestinian uprising by Alex Lantier (WSWS) was published on October 8th and writes,
“The World Socialist Web Site condemns the vicious and obscenely hypocritical statements of President Joe Biden and leaders of the European Union denouncing the Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” while supporting without any reservations Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.”
“Pledging “rock-solid and unwavering” support for Israeli military operations against Gaza, Biden said: “The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, and I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the government and people of Israel. [1] Terrorism is never justified. Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.””
OMG 😱 the U.S. is so delighted to be able to wholeheartedly endorse the further tightening of the noose that they’ve been funding for years, but this time, because of the Palestinian attack—unprovoked, of course!—they feel like they can also reclaim the moral high ground, without doing any work at all.
This is such a slam dunk that of course all the EU and US leaders are going to take it. They don’t give a shit about anybody but themselves, but pretending to care about Israelis is not only lucrative, but more than occasionally politically necessary.
No-one ever lost an election for not caring about Palestinians. Quite the contrary.
Check out Baerbock, one of the truly worst, most ruthless, and most disgusting women in politics since … Hillary Clinton? Margaret Thatcher? Condaleeza Rice? Susan Rice? Samantha Power?
“German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock declared: “The odious violence of Hamas against civilians in Israel is unprecedented and unjustifiable. This terrorism must stop immediately. Israel has our full solidarity.””
Unprecedented! Not only unprovoked, but unprecedented! This, from a fucking German! A German is saying that Palestinian violence is unprecedented. You can’t make this shit up. She is the foreign minister—the top diplomat—of that once progressive country.
“The hypocrisy of these statements is staggering. As always, the sympathies of the imperialist powers are with the oppressors. Any manifestation of resistance by the oppressed is greeted with frenzied denunciations. The media ignores the fact that the Israeli government is led by a criminal, whose coalition is dominated by fascistic racists, and is engaged in efforts to suppress the constitution.”
The attacks are an act of desperation, of course. They knew exactly what would happen in response. I’m not sure whether they were just trying to tip Israel’s hand, to force them to actually do something so awful that even a reprehensible c*#% like Baerbock would have to shut the f*#% up and sit down while the adults do the talking.
“On Saturday night, in a bloodcurdling address to the nation, Netanyahu told “residents of Gaza” to “get out now, because we will operate everywhere and with full force.” Since his government blockades Gaza and does not let anyone leave, this is a declaration that Netanyahu sees Gaza’s entire population as a legitimate target. Asserting that “Hamas wants to murder us all,” Netanyahu pledged to “fight them to the bitter end” and that cities where Hamas operates would turn into “cities of ruin.””
Netanyahu will target civilians. He and his predecessors always have. The western world doesn’t care at all. The money continues to flow. [2]
Of course, no-one will actually pay any attention to what the “enemy” has to say about why it’s doing what it’s doing. Putin knows the feeling. We fail to listen to our own detriment. This is not about capitulation to violence, but in learning what it would take to avoid it and to determine whether that price is too high. If we categorically refuse to even learn what the price might be, we are dishonorable, reckless, and exceedingly stupid hypocrites.
Here is a part of Hamas’s declaration.
““As the Israeli occupation maintains its siege of the Gaza Strip and continues its crimes against our Palestinian people, while showing utmost disregard for international laws and resolutions amid US and Western support and international silence, we have decided to put an end to all of that. We announce a military operation against the Israeli occupation, which comes in response to the continued Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and violations at the Al-Aqsa mosque.””
They are referring of course to the multiple attacks inside a mosque carried out by Israeli police over the last couple of years. Most recently, people swept through, spitting on people. On Biden’s watch, by the way. Utterly vile, but a neat tactic for provoking a violent response without actually striking first.
If history is any guide, Gaza is truly going to get curb-stomped, probably worse than they’ve ever been before. [3] As noted in Violence Begets Violence by Raouf Halaby (CounterPunch)
“Hamas and its supporters will no doubt claim Saturday’s attack on Israel to be a victory. And in truth, taking on one of the mightiest armies in the world is beyond belief. Breaking out of their open-air prison and with slingshots (Kalashnikovs, motorcycles, and a bulldozer), as compared to Israel’s infinite military might, the fifth strongest military in the world with proven air, land, and sea prowess, will be celebrated by Hamas and across the Near East as a victory.
“At best, it is a pyrrhic victory, one for which Palestinian citizens in Gaza and the West Bank, as happened in the past, will pay dearly. Since 2008 Israel has launched four major wars on Gaza, each of which was more brutal than the preceding one. I fear that the current Israeli avenging war, unlike the previous ones, will exact a very heavy price on the 376 square-mile enclave, the world’s largest open-air prison in which 2.3 million Palestinians exist.”
The next article A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer one by Haviv Rettig Gur (Times of Israel) was already laying the groundwork for what was to come.
“Hamas did everything it could to shock Israelis, to humiliate and horrify, kidnapping children, desecrating corpses, and then crowing about it to the world.
“And Israelis watched it all, minute by agonizing minute. And they agreed. Their weakness had become clear, unavoidable.
“And very, very dangerous.”
“And it will soon learn the scale of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot.
“A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.
“Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.”
This is both true and a rallying cry. It’s also amazing that the author is expecting us to believe that either the current or any previous Israeli leadership has lost any sleep about the humanitarian fallout. I mean, I’m sure that there has been some restraint from just outright murdering every Palestinian that crosses their paths, but, from out here, in the real world, it doesn’t really look like much restraint is considered at all. If there’s any concern about humanitarian fallout, it’s lost in a rounding error.
Israel has been exposed as weaker than it projected and it will react in the same way that the U.S. did, when a similar thing happened to it over 22 years ago. The younger people of Israel face the same choice that we Americans did at that time: seek understanding, wonder what those scarred wizened visages meant by “chickens coming home to roost”, or double down, look inward, and lash out. [4]
It’s quite obvious what Israel, led by Netanyahu, will do. It remains to be seen how much of the population of Israel follows, in their heart of hearts. Most Americans followed. Some questioned. Those who questioned didn’t matter. Their opinions never do. There is no solace in being right when the world burns for so many others. [5]
The last article The Violence in Palestine and Israel Is the Tragic Fruit of Brutal Oppression by Seraj Assi (Jacobin) writes,
“The tragic scenes unfolding in Gaza and Israel are a chilling reminder that occupation and oppression bear a price. For the truth is that when you imprison two million people in 140 square miles, placing them under a merciless siege with no end in sight, with no way in or out, with drones and rockets buzzing overhead night and day, with constant surveillance and harassment, with scant control over their day-to-day lives — ultimately, the dispossessed will rebel.
“The violence was not unprovoked, as the mainstream media has depicted it. It has been brewing and festering in every corner of the country.
“In the West Bank, the Palestinian town of Jenin is still reeling from the devastation of a recent unsparing Israeli attack, which left the town a razed ghostland. The small town of Huwara has yet to recover from the deadly horrors unleashed by settlers on its residents.”
It’s not that Hamas didn’t commit war crimes. It’s more that the world shouldn’t be surprised that it did.
“During the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, settlers stormed into the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in Jerusalem, staging provocative tours, harassing and beating worshippers, and spitting on Christians.”
It doesn’t justify the rocket attacks, but it goes a good way towards explaining them. If you want the rocket attacks to stop, you should consider all of the options: you could turn the screws even tighter, to make sure that no-one can get rockets. Or you could see what you would need to do for people to not even want rockets. That ship has probably sailed, but it might not be bad, as a thought experiment.
“The ongoing explosion in violence is the ugly reality of Israeli apartheid, the culmination of decades of occupation of a stateless people deprived of basic human rights and freedoms. Unless the root causes are dismantled — the siege lifted, the apartheid system and occupation ended — violence will continue to tragically haunt Palestinians and Israelis for years to come. [6]”
]]>“And, for two of our super-billionaires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, we have Section 230 protection. This means that their Internet platforms are not subject to the same rules on defamation as print and broadcast outlets. Yeah, this is just the... [More]”
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 17:52:21 (GMT-5)
The article Team Billionaire is Winning by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) writes,
“And, for two of our super-billionaires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, we have Section 230 protection. This means that their Internet platforms are not subject to the same rules on defamation as print and broadcast outlets. Yeah, this is just the market, telling us to give special privileges to online platforms.”
I like me some Dean Baker. I disagree with him occasionally. This is one of those times because I wonder whether he’s not painting with too broad a brush here. It seems disingenuous to call social media “news organizations”. These platforms may disseminate information, but are structured completely differently than print.
There are billions of authors, as well as the real risk of censorship. We should probably make a distinction between web sites and large corporate portals, but the moderation burden is much higher in either case.
You could argue that the entire “official news” part should be separated from the social-media platform—but that would be … impossible. People would still repost “news” on the social-media side, anyway, while the “official” part would atrophy in its regulated silo.
You could try to outlaw people contributing to common portals entirely. Enforcing “moderation”—i.e., making companies legally liable for what is considered illegal content—will inevitably end up as an equivalent to outlawing certain viewpoints. There will always be something that gets taken too seriously, as we’ve seen millions of times in the existing social networks.
Baker derives no value from these social-media forums, so he almost certainly doesn’t care if they either disappear or become so neutered that they might as well not exist. The world no longer has a sense of humor because there is a huge incentive to be performatively offended on a lot of these sites. That’s the kind of thing that will eventually decide what gets to be published and what doesn’t.
I think this is pretty typical of the people pushing for increased moderation, legislation, and regulation. I agree that you shouldn’t be able to make money off of it, but I also agree that you shouldn’t get to moderate away everything that offends anyone.
I think especially that they will start by moderating away people calling other people “dirty jews” and “n-words” and posting swastikas into their comments. But they will inevitably end up by moderating away anything that they deem threatening to the company, its profits, or the ruling class to which it belongs and that allows it to prosper.
The problem, as usual, is that a lot of people want to reach as large an audience as possible—because they’re narcissists—but they want to continue to communicate as if they’re just talking to their intimate friends.
Hell, that “dirty jews” and swastika person might just be making a terrible joke that would be funny to their little in-group, in the context of other things going on. Who knows? Satire gets weird sometimes. Jonathan Swift wrote about cooking Irish children. Without context, no-one can tell that it’s just a harmless idiot, learning how to behave themselves properly.
With moderation and completely open channels, everyone has to already know how to behave from the get-go. Pushing the boundaries cannot be tolerated because speech is deemed too dangerous to abide.
It’s never been illegal to be an asshole, and we’ve seen how loud they can get in public forums. But we have to be extremely careful about splitting people into groups, depending on the ideas they have—those with free and open access to millions, if not billions of minds, and those without.
As a coda: it’s not like this isn’t already happening all the time! Check out any of Matt Taibbi’s TwitterFiles reporting. The U.S. government has worked its censorious tentacles deep into the orifices of the public Internet and is already deciding what can and cannot be published.
“There is no principle that enables Schumer, or Biden, or any liberal, to find common ground with people who can make excuses for rape, together with the litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.”
I’ve written about the author a few times because of the... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 17:34:00 (GMT-5)
The article The Rot On His Own Side by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) writes,
“There is no principle that enables Schumer, or Biden, or any liberal, to find common ground with people who can make excuses for rape, together with the litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.”
I’ve written about the author a few times because of the extremely sharp turn he took on October 7th, 2023. See Losing the plot completely on November 1, 2023, Some commentator are still MIA on November 6, 2023, and Moar unhinged commentary on November 23, 2023.
At the beginning of December, Greenfield was still setting up his strawmen and then knocking them down. I hope he’s having fun over there, but it seems much more like he’s going down a rabbit hole like James Howard Kunstler did a few years ago.
“The litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.” As if the things that happened almost two months ago are the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone ever—and as if nothing equally bad has happened since that we might also be paying attention to. Nope, just wallowing in misery and not all interested in any solution that doesn’t offer more misery. Now, he’s off and running on the RISE OF ANTISEMITISM.
“The same failure of principle that infects this ideological schism at its core, where decisions are made based not on substance, but on identities and which box they’re in. Black people are still very much subject to discrimination. Looting is wrong, even when done by black people. Rape is a heinous crime. Rape is still a heinous crime even when done by Palestinians. Even when done by Palestinians to Jews.”
He starts off strong here. It’s a topic he’s admirably addressed in the past. He’s a strong defender of the idea that identirarianism has been damaging to nearly everyone but its most adamant advocates.
But then he gets to the second part, which I’ve highlighted. Who’s he talking to here? Is there anyone worth listening to who’s saying that rape is sometimes OK? Is there anyone at all? Maybe a handful of yahoos who aren’t worth listening to? Is there any reason to continue to treat this idea like there’s a danger of it overtaking the Zeitgeist? What the hell are you arguing about?
Having doubts about whether people were raped before they blasted to smithereens with hellfire missiles is not the same as thinking rape is OK. Even the Israeli government stopped pounding the rape drum weeks ago. Why does Greenfield still mention it all the time, when even the Israelis have given up on that story? Did he not get the memo?
Does he really think he needs to fight the good fight, standing up for the rarely held principle that it’s not OK for Palestinians to rape Jews? Is he getting a lot of pushback on that? Or what is going on?
Once he’s worked himself up into a lather about this, he drops his final stroke of genius,
“[…] there is far more in common between the progressive left and the Nazis and Klan than there is with a principled liberal.”
Put up the straw man, then knock it down. Way to go!
I did not see that one coming.
]]>““Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as... [More]”
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 17:24:18 (GMT-5)
The article No ‘End of History’ in Ukraine by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post) mentions Francis Fukuyama, citing him at length on what he meant by “the end of history”.
““Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal.” “A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one another’s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values.”
This is all just fine, sound, and admirable reasoning, It’s just that the elites in the U.S.—in their nearly unparalleled hubris—assumed that Fukuyama was talking about their country. In fact, given Fukuyama’s premise and definition, the conclusion should be that the U.S. cannot possibly be considered a liberal democracy. It is, in fact and instead, an empire.
It’s like the nearly incessant babble about free markets: it’s a good idea, in principle, but inapplicable because we don’t have free markets. We never have.
Ritter went on, citing Marx as counterweight to Fukuyama,
“Karl Marx, who famously observed that, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.””
The “Fukuyama school of thought”—such as it is—is just something invented to ostracize official enemies.
“Political scientists in the Fukuyama “end of history” school view this conflict as being derived by the resistance of the remnants of Soviet regional hegemony (i.e., modern-day Russia, led by its president, Vladimir Putin) over the inevitability of liberal democracy taking hold.”
It’s an adorable fairy tale for an empire to tell itself, but it’s an even more useful tool to convince its conquests to give up with less of a fight. These conquests know they’re in for a lot of pain if they don’t bend the knee. What better way to convince them to do it sooner than a fairy tale that will actually come true for a handful of elite members of the conquered? Instead of fighting the empire, the target of conquest ends up fighting against itself over table scraps.
And so it goes.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 17:12:59 (GMT-5)
This kind of thing happens with awful regularity in the U.S. the Florida executes man after US Supreme Court denies his intellectual disability claim by Kate Randall (WSWS) is about a guy who is very obviously intellectually disabled. He is not ready for the world as she is. He had the kind of life that no-one would want to have, not in a million years.
“Zack suffered a litany of horrors in his childhood. His lawyers wrote in a court filing that his mother drank heavily throughout her pregnancy. He was hospitalized at the age of three for drinking about 10 ounces of vodka. He endured extensive physical and sexual abuse from his stepfather, including forcing him to drink alcohol, injecting him with drugs, running over him with a car and creating devices to electrically shock him if he wet the bed. Zack’s older sister killed their mother with an ax.”
But it’s cool, because he’s apparently not considered to be intellectually disadvantaged enough to get protection under the law. An intelligence test invented by shysters in the 19th century that continues to be used today has decided that he’s 9 points too smart to be retarded enough to not be able to be killed. Score another big win for Florida, the state loved so hard by Republicans and Libertarians alike.
“The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) notes, “Unlike almost all other states, Florida rigidly required an IQ of 70 or below to demonstrate intellectual disability, with no allowance for the test’s margin of error.” Zack at one point scored 79 on an IQ (intelligence quotient) test. IQ tests have been demonstrated to be inaccurate in measuring intelligence.”
The average IQ is 100. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of discussing anything more complex than whether you want your receipt with someone with an IQ of 100, then you should really brace yourself for what a conversation with a person who scores 79 would be like. This isn’t to say that the IQ test is accurate necessarily, but that it will give you a ballpark idea of what that person is going to be capable of. Zack’s statement, quoted in the article, seems literate enough—eloquent even—but I imagine that he had quite a bit of help with it.
Ron DeSantis is happily signing death warrants for severely mentally challenged individuals. Bill Clinton also happily signed death warrants for the same, so maybe DeSantis is hoping to follow his example into the White House.
Read about Ricky Ray Rector (Wikipedia), who’d done terrible things, but who’d effectively lobotomized himself in a botched suicide attempt. There was no need to imprison the guy, to say nothing of executing him. He needed a different kind of care.
The man that Rector had become after his suicide attempt was on the mental level of a dumb child. Rector had no idea what was going on. He might as well have been Old Yeller. According to the Wikipedia link above,
“For his last meal, Rector requested and received a steak, fried chicken, cherry Kool-Aid, and pecan pie. As noted above, Rector left the pie on the side of the tray, telling the corrections officers who came to take him to the execution chamber that he was “saving it for later.””
Clinton took time off of the campaign trail to go watch him die.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 16:53:51 (GMT-5)
This video is from a while back and I included in my weekly notes, but it was an interesting enough example of the kind of person that Glenn Greenwald is willing to interview—even though there’s not a lot of overlap between Glenn’s principles and whatever passes for Max Abrahms’s principles. The guy is pretty popular in some circles—he writes for the Atlantic, surprise, surprise—so it’s good to hear what he’s got to say instead of just dismissing it out of hand.
I think this is pretty representative of the kind of things he just machine-guns at whoever happens to be listening. At one point he says
“It’s hard for me to remember a case where China actually attacked the US homeland … in large numbers. I don’t think it’s crazy at all to think that Al-Qaeda would do so. In fact … ”
Yeah, it’s hard for me to remember that too. I pay pretty close attention, so I’m almost certain I would have heard had “China actually attacked the US homeland”. What does that have to do with anything? Silo thinking and silo media is so terrible for everyone. Poor Max hasn’t had anyone to call him on his bullshit, so he ends up talking more and more and never notices that he’s not only not always right, but he’s underinformed about a lot of things that he thinks he’s mastered.
Basically, Max Abrahms is terrible. Kudos to Glenn to give him enough hope to hang himself. The guy wants people not to be able to wave flags of terrorist organizations in the U.S. That is not a thing that we can do. If they want to wave those flags, then they can wave those flags. Hell, there are a ton of confederate flags in the U.S. There are confederate flags in Switzerland.
But Abrahms thinks that specifically Arabic/Muslim organizations represent the worst terrorism that could possibly exist and they should be “punished” and “degraded”. (Yes, these are the words he uses.)
Abrahms said that calls to violence should be investigated. Greenwald granted him that theoretical, but then concluded that not just students should have their freedom of speech restricted, but then also people like Nikki Haley, who’s calling for the flattening of Gaza and Iran. The dude could literally not answer that question—you could see it not computing at all—but instead started describing the so-called violent protests on U.S. campuses in excruciating detail. That’s his hobby horse. Glenn wasn’t going to knock him off of it so easily.
Abrahms is interested in restricting the speech of those with absolutely the least power. You would think that someone who expresses himself so often about Palestine/Israel issues could pronounce Intifada correctly (he kept saying Antifada). Glenn pulled on his leash, telling Abrahms that nearly everyone else that Glenn has talked to, including many pro-Israel advocates, are more offended that the antisemitic narrative in the U.S. is wildly exaggerated.
For example, the ADL considers any pro-Palestinian protest to be at least one, if not multiple, anti-semitic attack. This is a pretty naked attempt to generate “proof” that anti-semitic attacks are increasing exponentially. Abrahms enthusiastically confirms that this is his very own hobby horse too. THIS IS HAPPENING. He doesn’t listen at all to what Glenn said, or give him the respect of refuting it. What is Glenn talking about? Who are all of these other fools to whom Glenn has spoken? Are they perhaps self-hating Jews? Traitors?
When Glenn asked him what he proposes to do to hinder these supposed attacks, Abrahms again doesn’t answer the question. I don’t think that Abrahms is used to any pushback whatsoever. That’s not part of his talking points. He probably didn’t feel comfortable saying that he thinks that all of the protesters should just be thrown out of college and probably society.
At 21:45, Glenn says wraps things up with an actual explanation of free speech as it applies to this situation,
“The case went to the Supreme Court the Supreme Court, which overturned the conviction and said that advocating violence is clearly within the realm of protected speech.
“Which means that you’re allowed to say ‘flatten Gaza,’ ‘erase Gaza,’ ‘remove Gaza from the map,’ ‘I think all Palestinians should be killed,’ ‘there are no innocent Palestinians.’ There’s a huge number this week of Israeli officials and journalists who have said ‘there’s no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.‘
“That’s protected speech. You can go on campus and say that. You can say it in front of Palestinians and it’s protected speech.
“To go and say ‘I think the Israeli government and their occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza has become so barbaric and inhumane over decades that I think on the part of Palestinians is justified in order to resist it,’ those are both to me clearly within the realm of free speech.
“I would never send the FBI or law enforcement after students on campuses for saying these things.”
What’s a... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 16:34:36 (GMT-5)
I learned about an exercise called a “Wall Angel” today from a programmer who’d struggled with back, shoulder, and arm pain. I suffer from none of those, but I do have a quick morning stretching routine that I try to stick to. I’m always curious if there’s something I can add to the mix.
What’s a wall angel?
Technically, yes.
The exercise, though, is like a snow angel, but performed up against a wall.
It took me a few search links to find something that would just tell me that, instead of trying to impose draconian cookie requirements or glitchy, non-functioning videos. I found it on LiveStrong,
“It’s a shoulder exercise that involves standing against a wall and raising your arms overhead in an arcing motion, much like making a snow angel.”
OK. I guess there’s not much to it.
It’s a good thing that it’s so easy because the video isn’t working there either.
Then, near the bottom, I see:
“Why Do Wall Angels Feel So Hard?
“Reaching your arms overhead demands a lot of upper-back and shoulder mobility.
“Think of this mobility as a combination of flexibility, strength and muscular control. And all three of these are things we tend to lack.”
WTF?
Was this written by an AI? Or did I miss a memo? Is raising your arms over your head considered a strenuous activity now?
I’m looking at a picture of a very healthy-looking, veiny-armed individual for whom standing up and putting his arms up shouldn’t pose too much of a problem.
I’ve not added this to my morning stretching routine. I’m already reaching for the sky anyway. Mission accomplished.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 16:26:03 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 30. Dec 2023 16:26:27 (GMT-5)
I use the JetBrains Toolbox to manage my handful of JetBrains apps. On Windows, it has to keep track of ReSharper, Rider, DotMemory, DotTrace, and DotPeek. There are various settings to check automatically, to download automatically, to install automatically, etc.
%LocalAppData%\JetBrains\Toolbox\cache
folderI’ve never had a problem on either of my Macs (the Intel iMac or the M1 MacBook Pro). On Windows, however, the toolbox has twice now filled up my entire hard drive with exact replicas of an update package.
I almost always hibernate my laptop, but sometimes I leave it running overnight if I’m in the middle of a long-running task.
In the wee hours, JetBrains toolbox takes advantage of the idle processor to start updating itself, and updating itself, and updating itself, and updating itself…
…until it’s eventually filled the entire system drive. As you can see in the screenshot below, it’s using a huge amount of space for the “Temp” folder. I didn’t expand that folder, but there are dozens, if not hundreds of copies of the exact same folder.
All in all, the Toolbox updater had gobbled up about 113GB of space before physical constraints stopped it. These weren’t just big installers. There were over 300,000 files to remove. It took almost five minutes to clean up this mess.
People have rights. International law... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 11:27:20 (GMT-5)
Israel doesn’t have a right to exist because no state has any rights, least of the right to exist. What a silly concept! Can you imagine if the Russian Tsars had taken the Bolsheviks to the ICC [1] because their right to exist had been violated? What a concept.
People have rights. International law regulates various aspects of how states may interact, but does not grant any rights to them. There is no “no takebacks” clause in international law. Any state can disappear or change shape if the people living there will it.
So let’s take a look at this interesting line of argument [2]: focusing on Israel’s war crimes is antisemitic because there was less of a focus on everyone else’s war crimes. Netanyahu named Saudi Arabia and Yemen. He could just as legitimately have named the U.S., but, not only would it be politically impossible, it probably didn’t even occur to him.
He’s not wrong! But it’s not a unique line of reasoning. It’s the same thing Americans do when they claim that they aren’t as bad as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or that they’re no worse than whatever their occupation happened to replace in whatever country they’re blowing the crap out of. If you protest Trump, then why didn’t you protest Obama? And so on.
Do people have to show proof that they also marched against the bombing of Yemen or Iraq before they’re allowed to say anything about the annihilation they’re observing in Gaza?
The reason the argument works is because there’s a grain of uncomfortable truth to it. There are reasons why people protest one thing and not another. Sometimes these are racists reasons. Often they’re plainly partisan reasons. Sometimes it’s just because you weren’t aware or as politically engaged, or whatever.
People are enormous hypocrites who basically do the thing that they think will benefit them the most personally. You brainwash them a bit, then wind them up and send them out into the world on what they think is their own personal crusade. This is not a new dynamic.
No-one actually cares about dead or suffering or starving people that they don’t know. They only care about those people when they’re closer to home, when they know them or when that suffering could impact their own lives directly.
Why don’t we get to do genocide when everyone else does?
I heard Jeff Dorchen of This is Hell! make Netanyu’s argument in a recent episode. [3] He said that he doesn’t remember so many people marching against South Africa, so this newfound hatred of apartheid must be antisemitic. Brilliant!
What he doesn’t address is just how much more visible the apartheid is now, outside of Israel. There was no social media, no ubiquitous video during South Africa’s apartheid. It was so much easier not be aware of it.
He also ignores that the Israeli occupation is at least 55 years old and it’s only now that there is anything like some pressure being applied for Israel to behave in a civilized manner toward all of its citizens. It’s absolutely rich to be able to shit on people for many decades and then start whining when someone finally calls you on your bullshit.
What I find specifically interesting in Israel’s case is that a lot of Israeli politicians—by their own proud and oft-repeated admission!—think that Muslims—and nations like Saudi Arabia—are reprehensible, just base and bestial. They’re not Jewish and therefore lesser. But then isn’t it odd that they hold themselves to the supposedly low standards of a low culture that they disdain?
How many decades should you be able to stomp a mudhole in some other culture before we’re allowed to ask you to stop without being told we’re specifically against your culture or religion? I’m asking seriously here, ‘cause I wanna put it in my calendar. I don’t want to step on any toes here. Let me know.
Do you see how you might find yourself asking, “how in God’s name is any of this antisemitic?”
Should Saudi Arabia knock it off too? Absolutely! Should the U.S. knock it off? Oh my God, the U.S. is the worst—the most hypocritical of all. Israel stands in the very long shadow of U.S. hypocrisy here.
It’s highly disingenuous and unfair to round up everyone who disagrees with you to a racist [4], though. I mean, c’mon. Total kindergarten tactics.
Israel is getting picked on for its human-rights transgressions, not because its people are largely Jewish, but because it’s small. Israel punched above its weight for decades because it protected itself with the magic shield of equating any criticism of its policies with antisemitism. Germany and the U.S.—and much of the rest of Europe—are still trying to do it. But there’s only so far above your weight you can punch before you get your clock cleaned.
There’s only so far above your weight you can punch before you get your clock cleaned.
Israel went too far. They stepped out from under even the long, long shadow of the U.S. Empire’s protection and people finally saw enough. They were shown too much, and are not afraid enough of the repercussions anymore. Israel, as they say, “lost control of the narrative.”
This has nothing to do with antisemitism. It has everything to do with force-projection. Israel projects a tremendous amount of force for its size, but not an infinite amount. The U.S. gets away with a lot more because no-one dares piss it off. That used to be the same for Israel—until the weight of its crimes outweighed its threats.
Russia suffers from the same problem. They didn’t get away with their invasion because they’re a chosen enemy of Empire. They have negative force-projection. The world considers them to be less powerful than they actually are. They get away with nothing.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, delivers fossil fuels. Its ability to project force on the hapless Yemenis remains unrestricted. It’s aided and abetted by the U.S. There has never been the same uproar. The reason is not antisemitism, but pure Machiavellian, market-force conclusions. Nobody wants Saudi Arabia to stop delivering oil. They haven’t pushed their madness and crimes far enough to tip the scales, as Israel has.
Congo is in utter turmoil, with 20M people internally displaced, but the raw materials continue to be delivered, so we ignored the 100 warring factions. As long as the coltan flows, everything else can be ignored.
What does Israel supply to the world? Other than disdain?
OK, they do have the absolute best, zero-click spyware that money can buy. Top-notch. [5]
Let’s be honest, Israel is being very, very provocative with this latest attack. They are making it very clear that they either have a completely different worldview—one in which they are definitely the good guys—or that they just do not give a shit what anyone else thinks. The U.S. is backing it, so f&%k off.
I just think it’s rich when those who’ve controlled the narrative and gotten literally everything they ever wanted start yowling their heads off about discrimination as soon as the leash tightens just a tiny, little bit. I understand Israelis thinking this—they’re mired in just as much a soup of propaganda as Americans. But Dorchen is outside of that miasma and should honestly know better. [6]
I think what we’re witnessing is the laziness of utter dominance. The people in charge of Israel drank the Kool-Aid that they get to do whatever they want whenever they want so long ago that they’ve forgotten that they had to drink Kool-Aid to come around to that mindset. They neglected their duty to brainwash the next couple of generations, in both their own country and all of the others.
Despite massive efforts, it was impossible to keep this current stage of the conflict out of the news. In fact, they definitely wanted it in the news!
They all were so far up their own asses that they couldn’t conceive of anyone looking at the situation and coming to any conclusion other than “Israel is defending itself against utter evil.” They forgot that there is a ton of context that they routinely elide. They no longer had any idea what the world looked like outside of their echo-chamber.
So what did they do? They went back to that hoary classic. Accuse literally everyone who doesn’t agree with them of antisemitism.
I think there’s also a disavowal of the standards that they claimed for themselves. That is, Israel will not stop telling everyone that it is the only democracy in the Middle East. It’s practically on the flag. But it’s not on the flag. You know what’s on the flag? The star of David. It’s a Jewish state. Israel is a very modern state, in that it is an ethnotheocracy, but it identifies as a democracy.
So, yes, the standards to which the world holds you are higher, Israel. But it’s because you asked us to grant you the benefits of being certain things the world considers to be morally superior. At some point, the piper comes calling, and you have to live up to those standards. At some point, you have show the receipts instead of just claiming things and reaping the benefits.
Israel has gotten so accustomed to be taken at its word that, at the first sign of doubt, they react by suspecting foul play. This is dishonest to themselves as well as to the rest of the world. You can only burn so much goodwill before the other kids stop playing with you.
Of all people, I am 100% aware that nearly all of this essay pertains to the U.S. of A. just as well, if not better, than it does to Israel. But please reference the thousands of other articles on my blog for in-depth critiques of the USA. This one’s about Israel.
Just quickly, though: I do think that the U.S. is losing whatever’s left of its shine, as well, perhaps accelerated by its full-throated support of Israel’s recent actions.
I just saw an article that wrote something about “anti-Israeli” rather than “antisemitic”, but they should really have written “anti-Israel”, I guess. Or “anti-Israeli government”, to be more precise. I think it’s important that we remain vigilant in maintaining the distinction.
As a U.S. American, I know all too well how an ostensible democracy manages to avoid representing the will of anything but a psychotic minority most of the time. I’m not against the people of Israel, not at all. Some of them might be ignorant of what their government is really doing, or they kind of know, but they don’t care, because “I’ve got mine, jack” and “I’ve got bills to pay.”
But that doesn’t make the average Israeli any more evil or racist than any other first-world resident, not really. Americans and Europeans are just as capable as Israelis in this regard. Very few of them, relatively speaking, speak up—or are even aware of—the extent of their own countries’ true crimes.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 10:10:29 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The Education Department is a Loan Sharking Operation by Eve Ottenberg (CounterPunch)
“If you doubt that usurious education lending is the respectable version of loan sharking, you have your head in the sand. The Debt Collective cites a librarian “who originally borrowed $60,000, has paid back $40,000, but still owes $110,000.” Under the November proposal, she would have received $70,000 of cancellation. “But under the new December plan, Kat would get only $10,000 of cancellation and President Biden would expect her to repay another $100,000.””
“His chief GOP rival for the presidency wants concentration, ahem…detention camps for the homeless, to remove this unsightly human blight from city centers so they can serve their proper purpose as playgrounds for the rich, and Biden, ever tacking to the right of his opponents, will want to outdo this idea of concentration camps for the destitute. I’m sure he could weave workhouses nicely into his 2024 campaign tapestry of promised deceptions.”
“Many of its borrowers, up to their eyeballs in debt, would have done better taking out a Pay Day loan or patronizing an underworld shark. That a borrower can end up owing so much more than the original sum due to shamelessly eye-popping interest should be a scandal. That it isn’t just proves how comfy we Americans are with the tidier, media-approved whitewashing of crime families running our government.”
“The fact that the Ed Department supervises loan sharking doesn’t bother them. That education has become the hunting ground for such predation strikes nobody in power as bizarre and outrageous.”
“[…] the Democrats have succeeded in wrapping the proles in a bind. The only way to join the middle or upper middle management class over which Dems gush ecstatically is through education. Yet the confiscatory cost lies way beyond the means of the average worker’s child. Enter White House loan sharks, offering these helpless students debt servitude until they retire on social security – good luck with that – only to have those government checks garnished by the, dum da dum dum, government! Thus the Dems, with GOP approval of course, created a new class of serfs.”
On Speaking Plain ‘Putin,’ Part Two by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)
“We in Russia have to a large extent rid ourselves of what is related to the Cold War. Regrettably, it appears that our partners in the West are all too often still in the grip of old notions and tend to picture Russia as a potential aggressor. That is a completely wrong conception of our country. It gets in the way of developing normal relations in Europe and in the world.””
“In his discussion with Frost, when the BBC interviewer asked if he viewed NATO as an enemy, Putin answered: “Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy. I think even posing the question this way will not do any good to Russia or the world. The very question is capable of causing damage. Russia strives for equitable and candid relations with its partners.””
“Putin said: “Such a large country by European standards, with the largest territory in the world and a fairly large population compared to other European countries, is generally not needed. It is better — as the famous U.S. politician Brzezinski proposed — to divide it into five parts, and these parts are separately subordinated to oneself and use resources, but based on the fact that everything separately will not have independent weight, independent voice, and will not have the opportunity to defend their national interests the way a united Russian state does. Only later did this realization come to me. And the initial approach was quite naive.””
This is what Russia understand the explicit aims of NATO to be.
“Victory is only possible when every citizen of this country feels that the values we promote yield positive changes in their day-to-day lives. That they’re beginning to live better, eat better, feel safer and so on.”
This might be just as empty and placative as Biden, had he said it.
The Rooster and the Watermelon by Yumna Kassab (Sydney Review of Books)
“When exactly does one become an Arab? Perhaps it is when they are massacred freely and we are told to take our medicine quietly because crying out is a disturbance to the peace.”
What? Ukraine Is Not Winning the War? by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“[…] the Ukrainian president declared that the counteroffensive “did not achieve the desired results.” I loved that moment, to be honest. It reminded me of Emperor Hirohito’s famous declaration on August 15, 1945, when he announced the surrender on Japanese radio. “The war,” he told his desperate subjects, “has not necessarily progressed to our advantage.””
“Biden may be the stupidest president of the postwar era on the foreign policy side: He exhibits no capacity whatsoever for nimble or imaginative thought. He is a warmonger of long standing, an election year is upon us, and he is by now in obvious danger of being impeached. His mental incompetence, atop all this, is plain for all to see.”
“The Biden regime has no idea what to do in the face of failure, but, as failure cannot be admitted, it must be dressed up as a new strategy. Kyiv would dare not do anything without the Biden regime’s permission—stealing most of the aid and military equipment the U.S. sends being the exception—but it must look as if it is fighting the life-or-death fight because the Zelensky regime is balancing on the head of a political pin at this point.”
“Zelensky flopped during his most recent trip to Washington, the new aid package did not pass, Hungary just blocked the European Union’s proposed new assistance, and Ukraine is altogether yesterday’s flavor as the reality of failure emerges from the mounds of, please excuse the language, bullshit that have propped up Western enthusiasm all these months.”
“Until recently the orthodoxy required that “Putin’s Russia,” meaning the Russian Federation, was losing a war it waged with drunks, incompetent officers, and baby-snatchers. All of a sudden we read that Putin’s Russia has made the most of the sanctions regime the West imposed upon it and has a large, clear advantage on the battlefield—more soldiers, more artillery, more everything.”
“Now comes the bitter task of acceptance. It leaves us, for now, in a twilight zone. We have to hope that Joe Biden, as his political fortunes crash, is indeed cut out of the West Wing conversation such that he cannot make some desperate move to salvage himself. Go, Deep State, go, strange as the thought is.”
Ein Land blutet aus by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Wenn der Ukraine schon jetzt Männer im klassisch wehrfähigen Alter ausgehen, kann man nur mit Sorge in die Zukunft schauen. Wer soll das Land wieder aufbauen? Kinder und Greise? Wenn nun auch die Älteren an der Front verheizt werden – wer soll die kommende Generation ausbilden? Der Krieg ist nicht nur eine humanitäre, sondern auch eine demographische Katastrophe. Je länger er dauert, desto hoffnungsloser ist die langfristige Perspektive für das Land.”
US Congress recommends placing assets at Lagrange points to counter China by Eric Berger (Ars Technica)
““The Chinese Communist Party has pursued a multi-decade campaign of economic aggression against the United States and its allies in the name of strategically decoupling the People’s Republic of China from the global economy, making the PRC less dependent on the United States in critical sectors, while making the United States more dependent on (China),” the report states.”
“The specific language in the report is this: “Fund NASA’s and the Department of Defense’s programs that are critical to countering the CCP’s malign ambitions in space, including by ensuring the United States is the first country to permanently station assets at all Lagrange Points. The CCP understands well the need for space-based operations and is developing formidable space capabilities to challenge US dominance in this domain.””
“Another reason why L1 and L2 are strategically valuable is that, due to the nature of orbital dynamics, they are excellent way stations. Assets positioned there, Duffy explained, require very little orbital energy—or delta V—to reach anywhere else in the Earth-Moon system. In other words, if you wanted to rapidly respond to some type of activity in cislunar space, these would be good locations to preposition assets.”
What the f%&k are these military-besotted psychos talking about? God, Eric Berger is such a waste of space. (No pun intended.)
““We’re in another space race back to the Moon, and this time it’s with China,“ Duffy said. “We want to be first because we want to set the norms.””
F*@k you for being so positively giddy. So much money to be made and funneled to anyone and everyone who doesn’t need it.
Is Venezuela Going to War To Steal Territory from Guyana? by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)
“The need for the talks was triggered by Maduro’s territorial claim over the Essequibo region of Guyana following a national referendum. The region is home to only 125,000 of Guyana’s 800,000 people, but the 62,000 square mile region makes up two thirds of its territory. But the region is home, not only to people, but to one of the worlds richest oil reserves.”
“The massive oil reserves were discovered off the coast of the region in 2015. But the dispute over the territory goes back nearly two centuries before that. In 1836, Britain sneakily eased over the western borders of the Guyanese colony it had inherited from the Dutch and usurped a large portion of land that belonged to Venezuela. That is the foundation of Maduro’s claim.”
“In 1899, the matter of the disputed territory came up before an international tribunal. The tribunal ruled in favor of Britain and granted British Guyana control over the disputed territory. But the tribunal was stacked. Rather than being an impartial tribunal made up of Latin American countries as it should have been, the dispute was adjudicated by an international body dominated by the US and – of all countries – Britain. Britain was hardly a disinterested party. Worst of all, Venezuela was not even permitted a delegate to the tribunal. The Venezuelans were represented by former US President Benjamin Harris.”
Fascinating. And, yes, it sounds like it was stolen by the usual suspects, but there are at least four or five generations of residents who think they are Guyanan now, no?
“[…] in 1966, citing the corruption that usurped the territory that was rightfully theirs, Venezuela claimed the territory at the United Nations. At that time, Venezuela, Guyana and Britain signed the Treaty of Geneva, agreeing to resolve the dispute and promising that neither Venezuela nor Guyana would do anything on the disputed territory until a border settlement had been arrived at that was acceptable to all.”
“[…] it was Guyana who first broke the Treaty of Geneva requirement not to do anything in the region until the dispute had been resolved. Guyana began extracting oil of the coast of Essequibo soon after its discovery in 2015. In partnership with the US oil company ExxonMobil, Guyana simply asserted that the oil was in Guyanese territory and began extraction. ExxonMobil has been extracting and exporting the oil since at least December 2019.”
What a shock.
The Death of Israel by Chris Hedges (Substack)
“Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.”
“Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics , currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.”
“Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.”
“Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed.”
Made in the USA by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“The Houthis have now taken more concrete steps to fight climate change than COP28: British Petroleum (BP), one of the world’s biggest oil corporations, announced it is temporarily halting all transit through the Red Sea due to the threat of attacks on their ships.
“The 10 Nation Red Sea coalition effort–called Operation Prosperity Guardian includes the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles, and Spain. Not one country on the Red Sea agreed to join and only one Arab country–Bahrain–is a member. How’s that for diplomacy?”
“The US and Saudis have been “hitting them hard” enough to cause the deaths of 400,000 people (through bombs, drones, starvation and disease) since 2014. The US “escalation dominance” in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban stronger than it was before the war. It’s one thing not to have learned lessons about the self-defeating arrogance of Imperial power from Tacitus. It’s another level of stupidity altogether, for Atlantic Council gunslingers like Kroenig, to have elided the memory of the last 20 years of murderous futility, from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.”
But this is how every fucking moron thinks. This is how nearly everyone thinks. They split the world into “our side” and evil. Anything that gets in their way must be eradicated by military means, never economic ones. Everyone goes in a pigeonhole. With us or against us. What if you just stopped selling weapons to the Saudis? What if you paid to restore Yemen? The Houthis would knock it off immediately. That literally doesn’t even offer itself as a solution.
“Arundhati Roy: ”The only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees and livelihoods.””
“By the same logic–if this can be called logic–Britain was using its civilian population as a human shield during the Blitz, since Churchill’s secret bunker and war rooms were beneath ground in the densely populated center of London. If only he’d come out and presented himself as a target, the Nazis wouldn’t have had to kill 43,000 civilians to get his attention.”
“After a week of delays to avoid a U.S. veto, during which US officials insisted the resolution refrain from mentioning a cease-fire and would not create an independent UN inspection mechanism for aid, the UN Security Council finally passed a watered-down resolution calling to boost aid to Gaza and for urgent steps “to create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities” Then after all that, the U.S. abstained.
“This time Team Biden sent UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield out to raise an ignominious hand, signaling the US’s abstention on a resolution it had spent a week frantically gutting…”
“Where do we stand at the end of week 11? An AP assessment of the IDF’s Gaza campaign concluded that it is one of the most destructive and deadliest in modern history. In a little more than two months, the IDF has inflicted more destruction on Gaza than the Syrian bombing of Aleppo, the Russian bombing of Mariupol, the US bombing of Raqqa and Mosul or, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has already killed more Gazan civilians than more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against ISIS.”
Ok, ok, Israel really is better at this than the U.S. I’m surprised—because the U.S. tries really hard to kill a lot of people all over the world, but I guess they do it over too much territory, with not enough fish squeezed into their barrels.
“Let’s give the last word of the week to Laleh Khalili: “I’ve read about Israel/Palestine since I was yay high. I’ve written 2 books with Palestinians at their core. I’ve watched Israel be colonial for decades. But what Israel is doing right now, not just the violence, but their cruel jouissance with it, blows me away. The videos celebrating destruction, death and starvation of Palestinians, the pictures taken atop ruins, the social media groups posting trophy images, soldiers proudly announcing what they have looted…I have always wondered why people committing atrocities, even genocide, keep such meticulous records of their misdeeds. Now it is happening in real-time.””
It’s Abu Ghraib every day.
Vivek is an idiot. He’s not a serious person. He’s utterly convinced of his own cleverness, but he knows even less than Jimmy Dore about how the presidency works. He says that he wouldn’t get involved in Israeli politics because he wouldn’t be the president of that country. When Jimmy says that he’d be de-facto involved because he’d be funding Israel to the tune of $4B per year and he’d be in charge of nominating the UN representative, he ignores the funding part and just says that he doesn’t care about the UN. “I don’t think that the UN should be stopping Israel from doing what it’s doing.”
He says a lot of other wildly misinformed things, but this one takes the cake.
At 13:25, he says,
“What does genocide refer to? The elimination of a race. Well, you know what? About 20% of the Israeli population is Palestinian. That’s more than the black or hispanic population of the United States. And you know, probably, arguably, the best place on planet Earth where Palestinians live the highest quality of life, with actual civic respect, is in Israel. So I do take issue with flatly using the word genocide—which refers to the elimination of a race—when the people of that race live the best possible life in the country that you’re calling the perpetrator of that genocide, and 20% of that population, more than the minority populations of this country, of Israel’s population, are Palestinians, who are living with rights within that country. [Jimmy: mutters “wow” a few times under his breath.] I think that there’s a lot of responsibility to go around for other Arab countries, for failed leadership, both of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas all the way to Hamas’s failed leadership in Gaza, so I think that that’s something that, yes, involves a long history. That is not the role that I’m running for, of history professor at Harvard. I’m running for President of the United States, which I have my moral clarity, why I’m focused on running this country, without intervening there.”
I painstakingly transcribed his highly redundant waterfall of bullshit, just so you can get the sense of how he just keeps talking and repeating himself, in the hopes that no-one can get a word in edgewise to call him on his bullshit. He says that Israel actually protects Palestinians better than anyone and literally everyone else in the world is more responsible for the Palestinian plight than Israel, which is literally doing everything it can to help them.
That line of reasoning reminds me of Bill Hicks’s joke, Officer Nigger Hater about the trial of the cops who beat the ever-loving shit out of Rodney King, the act that sparked the LA riots.
“Officer Coon looks in the camera and actually says, ‘Oh, that Rodney King beating tape? It’s all in how you look at it.’
“[…]
“‘All in how you look at it, Officer… Coon?’
‘That’s right. It’s how you look at the tape.’
‘Well, would you care to tell the court (incredulously) how… you’re lookin’ at that?’
‘Yeah OK, sure. It’s how you look at it… the tape. For instance, well, if you play it backwards you see us help King up and send him on his way.’
‘Hmmmm. Not guilty!’ (bang)”
He didn’t stop there. He started repeating the myths of Chinese Uighur concentration camps, talking about how that’s what we should concentrate on instead of Israel.
He is like all the rest. He’s an asshat, an assclown who knows nothing, has no empathy, and has no principles. He doesn’t care about stopping crimes before they happen—especially when it’s his friends that are doing them. Or countries that he knows he has to be friends with in order to get elected as president.
At This Point We Have To Always Assume Israel Is Lying Until Proven Otherwise by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix)
“When you see how effective the Houthis have been at using Yemen’s critical location to shut down Red Sea traffic, you understand why the US spent years backing a horrific genocidal military campaign trying to get rid of them.”
“There’s a single news story about international conflicts which keeps repeating itself again and again in different iterations, and that story is this: “US-centralized empire fights to secure domination of planet Earth, and some populations resist this.””
“It’s a giant empire attacking nations who have the temerity to insist on their own national sovereignty rather than being absorbed into the imperial blob. It uses full-scale wars, proxy conflicts, starvation sanctions and blockades, drone wars, CIA coups and deliberately fomented color revolutions to subvert any government which defies the US agenda of securing total planetary domination.
“If you can understand this, you can understand pretty much any major international conflict in modern times.”
This Can’t Be Another Instance Of Genocide — Israel Believes It’s Right! by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter)
“This isn’t like that at all. You see, the Israelis sincerely feel that the population they are eliminating is very bad, and they believe removing that population will make the land a much better and safer place to live. They see the Palestinians as a major problem, and, unlike a proper genocide, they are simply trying to find a solution to that problem which will be permanent and final.
“So when you see Israel apologists defending Israel’s actions in Gaza, please try to keep in mind that they’re just helpfully explaining that the Israeli government has reasons and motives for doing what it’s doing, and that it believes what it is doing is correct. If this were a proper genocide, that wouldn’t be the case.”
Sam Harris: Savant Idiot by Norman Finkelstein (SubStack)
“[…] as a pop secular prophet, indiscriminate mass killing only outrages Mr. Harris’s moral sensibility if it springs from religion. But the protagonists on all sides in the unprecedented bloodlettings of WW1 and WW2—and for that matter the Vietnam War, presided over by “the best and the brightest”—were secular or in thrall to secular ideologies. Was that really better? Indeed, it’s gone over Mr. Harris’s bigoted skull that the most lethal ideologies in the modern epoch have sprung not from religious but secular fanaticism. Hitler, Stalin, Kissinger: they can rightly be accused of many things but pathological religiosity is not one of them. In any event, the animating ideology in Israel is a heady brew of terrestrial calculation and super-terrestrial frenzy.”
“Mr. Harris doesn’t just extenuate the genocide. He implicitly endows it with a positive content. Every Muslim—including every Muslim child—he enlightens listeners, is an actual or potential suicide bomber imperiling Western civilization. Isn’t it only a flea’s hop to infer that Israel is doing the (secular) Lord’s work in Gaza as it wages a civilizational war against “deranged” Muslim culture and even if one million children—pardon me: children who have been “rigged to explode”—might die? Mr. Harris somehow construes that it takes enormous moral courage to expose this Muslim peril on Piers Morgan’s program. Indeed, it takes as much courage as the German professor in the midst of the Nazi holocaust who sounded the alarm that “parasitic” Jewish culture was imperiling Aryan civilization.
“Mr Harris proclaims that “This is the issue: we are dealing with a suicidal death cult.” I’m afraid, however, that the real issue is this: We are dealing with a Ziontology murder cult; and Mr. Harris is one of its gurus.”
How The Hell Did We Get Here? by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter)
“We have the technology to let every scientist on earth share ideas and information with each other around the world in real time in any language, and instead we’ve fractured scientific development into atomized little echo chambers of closely-guarded secrets in the name of profit generation and “national security”.”
“We develop egos in early childhood to help us feel safe and secure in a confusing world full of giants, which most of us go on to use in highly maladaptive ways throughout the remainder of our lives. Our psychology is riddled with cognitive biases, which the clever manipulators among us can use to dupe us into mass-scale behavior which benefits them rather than behaving in a way which benefits each other and our ecosystem.
“The most clever of these manipulators are able to use their cleverness to rise to the top of our political, governmental, commercial and financial systems around the world, and they use increasingly sophisticated methods of propaganda to dupe the rest of us into moving in alignment with their will. And their will is not wise or intelligent; it’s driven by the same primitive fear-based impulses that the rest of the humans trapped in egoic consciousness are driven by.
“So here we are. That’s why we now find ourselves in this profoundly dysfunctional civilization where the biosphere is treated like an enemy and human beings are treated like fuel and minds are being marinated in an increasingly vapid mainstream culture where everything is fake and stupid.”
“Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others.
“Occupation entails foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression.
“Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people.
“Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. We must leave the occupied territories immediately.”
This is, once again, a brilliant interview. I listened to it on a long hike, so I don’t have a transcript. Craig Mokhiber is extremely well-spoken and has a devastating, inexorable logic.
The following is from the video notes:
“International human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber served as the director for the New York office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, but resigned over the UN’s failure to stop what he, and others, calls a “textbook case of genocide” in Gaza.
“He describes the politicalization of the organization and the West’s refusal to follow international law.
““If you have a message coming from the United States and their western allies that says these rules do not apply to us or to our western friends, or in short-hand, they do not apply to white people, but they do apply to the rest of the world, that is maybe the last nail in the coffin of these international laws.”
““The security council belongs in a Cold War museum,” he says. “It is an entity that empowers five permanent members with a veto that is usually used to prevent any action to the benefit of normal human beings. The US in this case used its veto to prevent ceasefire, and after each veto, thousands of more Palestinians are being massacred in Gaza. It’s an act of complicity.”
“So when Israel commits war crimes that are empowered by the US, it is no longer only their crime: “Just to put it simply, this assault on Gaza is being perpetrated by Israel and the United States. The US is a party to this.”
“And given that Biden has repeatedly claimed that he saw photos of beheaded babies (even after his staff urged him not to and the White House walked it back), we asked Craig: Can the argument be made that Joe Biden is inciting genocide?
“His response: “Absolutely.””
This was a pretty good discussion. Brace Belden (of the excellent podcast True Anon) was the most knowledgable, insightful, and incisive.
Again, I listened to it while hiking, so no transcript. I do remember one of them referring the history that’s unfolding in the Middle East right now as “the Israeli-U.S. murder-suicide pact.”
I also found myself thinking that Israel has a different understanding of “prisoner exchange” than the standard one of exchanging some of their prisoners for some of yours. They seem to think that it’s about exchanging the prisoners that you have in prison for others that you find on the street.
I also listened to the latest series on TrueAnon, about Israel’s history of obtaining nuclear weapons over the 20th century and the open secret of “ambiguity” where everyone knows that Israel has nuclear weapons, but it’s forbidden to talk about it.
The following are only the trailers because they’ve not been released to the public yet. If you want to hear the whole thing, then you have to subscribe.
Best of 2023: Living and Reliving the U.S. Invasion of Iraq / Rasha Al Aqeedi (This is Hell!)
I recently wrote about how good the Best of This is Hell! 2023 end-of-hear series has been. This episode was a counterexample. I thought Rasha’s analysis was more superficial than the standard set by the other episodes.
“Chuck: Was it a combination of incompetence and arrogance?
Rasha: Absolutely. That’s a perfect way of describing it.”
Ah, so nice to be able to remove agency. The U.S. was just floating helplessly down the stream of history, just like the rest of us. OK OK OK.
Now, they’re vibeing about privilege. She talks about her having been privileged to have grown up as a Sunni in a country with an oppressed Shia majority. But neither of them talks about how the problem that most people have with discussions of “privilege” is that it doesn’t explain everything like people wish it did.
She didn’t mention the sanctions regime once. She’s a bit like a lot of people of that generation and class—she can recognize that her class separates her from most of the other citizens of her country, but she still kind of judges them for wanting to go back to the old days, when there was a dictatorship.
Look, middle-aged and older people in Iraq might very well remember that their country had one of the highest overall living standards in the Middle East and Africa. You have to deal with that, without telling them that they can now vote every four years. She doesn’t quite get around to saying that they don’t really have a democracy. She just says it’s a failure of democracy.
It’s not a language barrier. She’s totally fluent. She now lives in Fairfax, Virginia, which is, quite frankly, the heart of the empire. She says very explicitly that she’s never going back or moving back to Iraq.
Maybe I’m completely misinterpreting her, but she doesn’t seem to place much blame on America, even for the continuing muddle that is Iraqi domestic politics. The U.S. is still heavily involved there, but gets no mention. I understand that we want to focus on the people of Iraq taking responsibility for their own country, but the reality is that there is only so much room to maneuver that they’re going to be allowed by the U.S. If Iraq wanted to establish an Islamic state, that … would not be allowed to happen.
I don’t expect her to be ululating “Death to America”, but she barely even acknowledged the U.S. influence. Maybe it’s because I just finished season 1 of Blowback, which recounted a lot of Iraqi history, with a preponderance of American influence in the last 50 years.
The CIO’s Heyday Was the High Tide of the American Labor Movement by Melvyn Dubofsky (Jacobin)
“Without their skills in construction in other sectors of the economy, production could not function. Power came from their position in the labor market. In the mass production sector, the vast majority of employees had no labor market power. They were all readily replaceable. Their power came not in the labor market but at the point of production.”
So we think of labor union as necessary only because we’ve accepted that most people’s livelihoods should be reduced to easily replaced and inherently leverage-free cogs in a machine owned and profited from by someone else.
What about just making all worthwhile jobs actually be respected and properly remunerated positions? Can we really only envision a world in which we have to fight tooth and nail to get that?
A different goal would to make useful jobs for everyone and not make most of humanity fight against the profit motive of someone more powerful. Don’t limit your options within the constraints of the existing system.
2023: A year of financial turbulence by Nick Beams (WSWS)
““According to one set of estimates,” Tooze wrote, “in December 2022 the hedge funds owed $553 billion on basis trade borrowing and were leveraged at a ratio of 56 to 1. This creates the potential either for widespread losses in the credit system or major hedge fund failure.”
“The numbers involved have almost certainly gone up this year, creating the risk that the failure of even one fund can set off a “dash for cash” and the kind of “doom loop” that developed in the UK in October 2022 when falling bond prices forced pension funds to sell bonds to raise cash, sending prices even lower.”
“As military spending continues to rise this has led to heightened calls for cuts in key areas of social spending. In other words, the attacks on the social position of the working class must be deepened so the ever-increasing war expenditure is financed, and the holders of Treasury debt are paid.”
Hey, what do you need social services for, when everyone’s getting rich?
“[…] the market is now dominated by the so-called “magnificent seven.” These comprise the big tech names, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (the owner of Google), Amazon, Telsa, Meta (the owner of Facebook) and Nvidia.
“So top heavy has the market become that at the midpoint of the year the price of these stocks had risen by between 40 percent and 180 percent and were responsible for all the increase in the S&P 500 index in the year to that point as all the others remained flat. Since then, others have joined the “everything rally” but the Mag7 continue to dominate and account for 64 percent of the rise in the S&P.
“As the FT recently noted: “Their size is now so pronounced that they do not dominate just US stocks, but a large slice of the performance of global equity markets too.””
“This high degree of concentration of financial power, which has accelerated this year, is reflected in the banking sector as well. In the first nine months of the year, according to analysis carried out by the FT, based on figures compiled by an industry tracker, JPMorgan Chase took in almost 20 percent of US bank profits. This was up from around 12 percent a year earlier.
“Its earnings have exceeded those of its rivals Bank of America and Citigroup combined and in the words of one Wells Fargo analyst “JPMorgan is the Goliath of Goliaths.””
False Transitions and Global Stocktakes: The Failure of COP28 by Binoy Kampmark (CounterPunch)
“COP28, which featured 97,000 participants, including the weighty presence of 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists, was even more of a shambles than its predecessor. Its location – in an oil rich state – was head scratching. Its chairman Sultan Al Jaber, taking advantage of the various parties who would attend, had sought to cultivate some side business for the United Arab Emirates, notably for the state oil company ADNOC.”
“It was such tinkering that led to the call for a “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable way with developed countries continuing to take the lead.” The emphasis here is on a “transition away” from their use, not their “phase out”, which is what 130 of the 198 participating parties were willing to accept.”
“The agreement had an eager audience desperate to identify signs of progress. Prof. Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization called the COP28 agreement “historic in that – for the first time – it recognizes the need to transition away from fossil fuels for the first time.” Even the Scientific American made the observation that none of the previous 27 climate change conferences had even mentioned fossil fuels and its link to a rise in global temperatures.”
“To use such an expression as “‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best. It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from doughnuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes.””
OK. This one needs a bit of explanation. First, you need to know about the Posh and Becks meme. It is a 28-second video. Better with sound.
Now you’re ready for these follow-up memes.
2023: The year of the total COVID cover-up by Evan Blake (WSWS)
“The ruling elites’ policy of simply ignoring the pandemic and forcing everyone to fend for themselves is untenable and will inevitably collide with reality. The basic functioning of society cannot sustain unending body blows of mass infection and debilitation with Long COVID.
“The refusal of the ruling elites to address or even acknowledge the pandemic is a glaring sign of the dead-end of the capitalist system. The past four years of the pandemic have inured the ruling class to mass death […]”
A Year of Ordinary Time by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“As far as I can see it is not Nazis who threaten to run this site into the ground, but rather all the people who, in endless search for more opportunities to speak “ statementese ”, are using this site for the same endless adjudication of verbal disputes as we see in every other online venue.”
“Substack were to extend its content-moderation policy beyond the porn and spam accounts, I would recommend starting not with the cornball basement-dwellers with swastikas in their banners, but with the pseudo-writers who don’t understand how completely incompatible statementese is with the writerly vocation, and who attempt to sneak on here using that debased artificial language.”
“I also watched Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022). It was dumb as shit. As if the most interesting thing about the discovery of interdimensional travel through the “infinite multiverse” were the opportunity it affords to come to terms with your daughter’s rejection of heteronormativity!”
“I began to experience a deep, warm, slow-rising sense of gratefulness these past several months, at having been fated to meet my wife in particular, and at having been given the opportunity to learn from my life with her what it is truly to love someone. And what a miracle, too, that the person in question just happens to be able to tolerate this raving and vicissitudinous fool!”
Today’s Most Dangerous Drug by Mattea Kramer and Sean Fogler (Scheer Post)
“Both of us were raised to believe that our accomplishments were the measure of our worth and that something out there — status, money, accolades — would make us whole. Both of us bagged various degrees and have admirable résumés, but neither of us found that such achievements brought any sense of wholeness. In fact, it’s often seemed as if the more impressive we appeared, the emptier we felt.”
Smart, but not smart enough to be independent, to be anti-authoritarian—to be free.
Ants in the Server Racks: 21st-Century Anti-Tech Terrorism in Theory & Practice by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“The essential and eternal facts of human life − we exist for no reason, want and don’t get, suffer needlessly, experience the horrors of aging, and then die, which is the end of our story.”
“When people complain that this is a uniquely difficult time in which to live, I sometimes gently remind them that those born in the first decade of the 20th century endured the Spanish Flu, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. But of course, suffering is impressionistic and subjective; it is neither kind nor sensible to tell a person with diabetes that they should look on the bright side because they could have cancer.”
“Many people feel that the status quo is so rotten, so deadening, so corrupt, that mass violence could not help but shake us into a better state. But this is fantasy, a fantasy of the type perpetuated by people who cannot bear to live in the real fallen world in which we reside. (And that fantasy itself is among our enemies.) Belief in regeneration through violence is as old as human culture, as old as death. I’m here to tell you, though, that violence cannot regenerate, not really. And even if it could, no terrorist movement of the scope necessary to actually, meaningfully shut down online life for large masses of people will emerge. Whatever action of this sort takes place would merely nibble at the edges of a decaying culture. Not enough people would want to participate, those who did would mostly be marginal types who lack the discipline or composure to operate effectively in violent action, the FBI would eventually jail enough of them to dissuade even the passionate converts, and most importantly, capitalism would rebuild whatever was destroyed, as that is the last vital part of our rheumatic culture, the deployment of money to protect the systems that make money for the people who already have money.”
“[…] despite our relentless effort to stuff other people into facile categories to reduce and manage them,”
“The only way out of this mess is to rediscover the visceral meatsack reality of being human, that we are embedded in a world made of mud and rocks. (“The greatest poverty is not to live/in a physical world.”) And we must learn to occupy our own minds again, free from the influence of other people’s attention, which is paradoxically necessary to return to each other.”
“I hope that we witness the renewal of the human, not through violence but through the human itself. I confess that I’m not optimistic. But for those who simply resent humanity’s chauvinism, don’t worry. In time, this all goes. We will not live forever; we will not colonize Alpha Centauri. In a very brief time all memory of humanity will fade from the Earth, and the Earth will care not at all for the difference between before us and after us. Long after the last human machine ceases to function, little animal feet will skitter lightly over its chassis.”
I’ve citing at length below from the original blog post Iss #248 by Nick Cave (The Red Hand Files), which answered the question, “[…] what’s wrong with making things faster and easier?”
“ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.
“ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.
“ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials?
“[…] even though the creative act requires considerable effort, in the end you will be contributing to the vast network of love that supports human existence. There are all sorts of temptations in this world that will eat away at your creative spirit, but none more fiendish than that boundless machine of artistic demoralisation, ChatGPT.
“[…] It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”
Another post from January Issue #218 by Nick Cave (The Red Hand Files) first addressed LLMs, in what would eventually become the tour de force above, but which also had some wonderfully written prose about the difference between human creations versus those produced by imitation machines.
“What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.
“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.”
Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit by Lea Verou
“Overfitting happens when solutions don’t generalize sufficiently and is a hallmark of poor design. Eigensolutions are the opposite: solutions that generalize so much they expose links between seemingly unrelated use cases. Designing eigensolutions takes a mindset shift from linear design to composability”
“In end-user programming we talk about the floor and the ceiling of a tool: The floor is the minimum level of knowledge users need to create something useful. The ceiling refers to the extent of what can be created. Some people also talk about wide walls: the range of things that can be made (i.e. how domain specific the tool is).”
“Programming languages tend to have high ceiling, but also a high floor: You make anything, but it requires months or years of training, whereas domain specific GUI builders like Google Forms have a low floor, but also a low ceiling: Anyone can start using them with no training, but you can also only make very specific kinds of things with them.”
“[…] most product work in creator tools centers around either reducing the floor (making things easier ), or increasing the ceiling (making things possible ).”
“Overfitting is one of the worst things that can happen during the design process. It is a hallmark of poor design that leads to feature creep and poor user experiences. It forces product teams to keep adding more features to address the use cases that were not initially addressed. The result is UI clutter and user confusion, as from the user’s perspective, there are now multiple distinct features that solve subtly different problems.”
“Rather than designing a solution to address only our driving use cases, step back and ask yourself: can we design a solution as a composition of smaller, more general features, that could be used together to address a broader set of use cases?”
“Due to their generality, they often require significantly higher engineering effort to implement. Quick-wins are easier to sell: they ship faster and add value sooner. In my 11 years designing web technologies, I have seen many beautiful, elegant eigensolutions be vetoed due to implementation difficulties in favor of far more specific solutions — and often this was the right decision, it’s all about the cost-benefit.”
“Eigensolutions tend to be lower level primitives, which are more flexible, but can also involve higher friction to use than a solution that is tailored to a specific use case.”
At least for APIs, you can have both, in what I always called the Zwiebelschallenprinzip or “onion-skin principle” because of how you could peel the layers of the onion of your APIs until you got to the level that struck the right balance of power, maintainability, and flexibility.
“Eigensolutions tend to be lower level primitives. They enable a broad set of use cases, but may not be the most learnable or efficient way to implement all of them, compared to a tailored solution. In other words, they make complex things possible, but do not necessarily make common things easy. Some do both, in which case congratulations, you’ve got an even bigger unicorn! You can skip this section. :)”
“Done well, shortcuts provide dual benefit: not only do they reduce friction for common cases, they also serve as teaching aids for the underlying lower level feature. This offers a very smooth ease-of-use to power curve: if users need to go further than what the shortcut provides, they can always fall back on the lower level primitive to do so.”
“Shortcuts to make common cases easy can ship at a later stage, and demos and documentation to showcase common “recipes” can be used as a stopgap meanwhile. This prioritizes use case coverage over optimal UX, but it also allows collecting more data, which can inform the design of the shortcuts implemented. Higher level abstraction first , as an independent, ostensibly ad hoc feature. Then later, once the lower level primitive ships, it is used to “explain” the shortcut, and make it more powerful. This prioritizes optimal UX over use case coverage: we’re not covering all use cases, but for the ones we are covering, we’re offering a frictionless user experience.”
“Do we have extensibility mechanisms in place for users to create and share their own higher level abstractions over the lower level feature?”
Again, this is much easier with APIs, simply because of the work involved in implementing this type of layered approach in a UI. Arguably, it’s a lot of work for APIs to get it right, as well, but it just seems like it’d be faster.
“[…] it’s also good to have a design principle in place about which way is generally favored, which is part of the product philosophy (the answer to the eigenquestion: “Are we optimizing for flexibility or learnability?” ) and can be used to fall back on if weighing tradeoffs ends up inconclusive.”
“[…] even when we don’t think the eigensolution is implementable, it can still be useful”
“Note that our eigensolution is not the end for any of our use cases. It makes many things possible, but none of them are easy. Some of them are common enough to warrant a UI that generates the formula needed. For others, our solution is more of a workaround than a primary solution, and the search for a primary solution continues, potentially with reduced prioritization. And others don’t come up often enough to warrant anything further. But even if we still need to smoothen the ease-of-use to power curve, making things possible bought us a lot more time to make them easy.”
“Requiring all use cases to precede any design work can be unnecessarily restrictive, as frequently solving a problem improves our understanding of the problem.”
“[…] it’s only when you actually try to use the tool — hold the thing in your hands — that there’s a hundred things you need it to do that it doesn’t. It’s not flexible — it’s a series of menus and disappointed feature requirements.”
“Joe argues for using use cases only at the end, to validate a design, as he believes that starting from use cases leads puts you in a mindset to overfit. This is so much the polar opposite of current conventional wisdom, that many would consider it heresy.”
“We can probably all agree that no proposal should be considered without being rigorously supported by use cases. It is not enough for use cases to exist; they need to be sufficiently diverse and correspond to real user pain points that are common enough to justify the cost of adding a new feature. But whether use cases drove the design, were used to validate it, or a mix of both is irrelevant, and requiring one or the other imposes unnecessary constraints on the design process.”
Swift was always going to be part of the OS by Jordan Rose
“Looming over us the whole time was “ABI stability”, the point at which code using two different versions of Swift could interoperate. Why was this important, when so many other languages didn’t seem to bother? Because this was the very premise of Apple’s OS-based library distribution model: apps compiled for Swift 5 would work with an OS built on Swift 6; apps compiled with Swift 6 would still be able to “backwards-deploy” to an OS built on Swift 5. Without this, Apple couldn’t use Swift in its own public APIs.”
“We ended up (ab)using a feature called “rpath”, or “runtime search path”, which allowed an executable to find its dynamic libraries not by hardcoded path but by searching a series of directories. By making the search order start with /usr/lib/swift/ and following that with the app bundle, we could guarantee that apps would use the OS version of Swift if present and fall back to their embedded version otherwise.”
This is nothing more than DLL search path on Windows.
“Android actually does do this fairly often, at least with its Java APIs. It’s a bit easier to set up because its apps and libraries use an intermediate format rather than native code, and also because Java doesn’t have extensions and therefore there are fewer ways to modify existing types. They call this “desugaring”.”
“Apple wants to be able to update their libraries as part of OS releases, as well as security updates. It’s this capability that allows them to do system-wide UI adjustments and redesigns without forcing everyone to publish new versions of their app ahead of time and with relatively minimal conditionalizing even after the fact. You can argue whether or not you think that’s a good thing, but it’s something Apple won’t ever give up.”
“But then Apple wouldn’t have been able to write system libraries in Swift, and that was never an option.”
Because objective C is too hard and there are fewer and fewer people around capable of understanding the complexities of system programming. Are we entering a dark age? Do you have to change your design to suit the people available to work.on it?
“Should Apple have changed course to match Linux here, knowing that changing their kernel interfaces would break existing programs? Hard to say. “Not all change is progress, but all progress is change”, and compatibility restricts change pretty much by definition.”
I still think about this tweet. by Olly iConic (Reddit)
“genie: you have three wishes
me: make firemen ugly
genie: you got it
me: instead of sliding down a pole make them climb out of a well
genie: ok
me: take the big ladder off their truck
genie: dude what’s your problem”
I was listening to this video (recommended by a friend). I listened to the last 45 minutes of it. When I started from the beginning, it wasn’t as good, so YMMV. I know mine did.
I love thinking about how many millions of people these people taught the wrong definition of pederast and pedophile. Just to clear things up.
They said a “pedophile” was a “pedarast” and that an “ephebophile” was a “pedophile”. They of course didn’t mention “ephebophile” because no-one knows what that is, although it actually describes almost everyone who people usually call “pedophiles”. That people don’t distinguish between pedophiles and ephebophiles is a disgrace. It’s like rounding up assault to murder.
I learned of the company BRXLZ today. I can’t even link it because it is such a marketing/corporate/sales entity seemingly associated with the NFL that the first forty links are just variations of shops. I have no idea what’s going on, but it doesn’t seem good. It seems like they make lego-brick-style representation of sports-team stuff. I am already beginning to not understand this culture, this world.
It’s funny that I’m becoming a grumpy old man, but feel justified in doing so because the world keeps getting stupider. It shouldn’t be just me who rejects anything named BRXLZ. This is not Poland. That company should never have grown, with a name like that. I realize that most grumpy old men are complaining about stupid shit that doesn’t exist (e.g., “takin’ our guns!) and seek to stay focused about stupid shit that does. The name of a sports-merchandising company is perhaps trivial, but I feels it’s very indicative of a wider trend, a self-satisfied and enthusiastic plummeting toward the Idiocracy.
I.E. by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“Id est: which means now that I’ve made my argument in a confusing way to demonstrate intelligence, here’s the same idea but with clarity.”
I was listening to a This Is Hell! and one of the fellas mentioned that something was between Cicero and Pulaski. They broadcast from Chicago, so they were almost certainly referring to Cicero, IL and the Pulaski station in Chicago. It takes about 30 minutes to travel between them on public transportation. My mind, though, as a Central New Yorker, thought immediately of the “unincorporated community” of Cicero and the village of Pulaski in western NY State. It takes about half an hour to travel between the two by car.
“Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others.
“Occupation entails foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression.
“Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people.
... [More]”
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 10:04:59 (GMT-5)
“Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others.
“Occupation entails foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression.
“Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people.
“Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. We must leave the occupied territories immediately.”
This was three months after Israel’s six-day war.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 09:56:57 (GMT-5)
I recently wrote about how good the Best of This is Hell! 2023 end-of-hear series has been. The episode Best of 2023: Living and Reliving the U.S. Invasion of Iraq / Rasha Al Aqeedi (This is Hell!) was a counterexample. I thought Rasha’s analysis was more superficial than the standard set by the other episodes.
“Chuck: Was it a combination of incompetence and arrogance?
Rasha: Absolutely. That’s a perfect way of describing it.”
Ah, so nice to be able to remove agency. The U.S. was just floating helplessly down the stream of history, just like the rest of us. OK OK OK.
Now, they’re vibeing about privilege. She talks about her having been privileged to have grown up as a Sunni in a country with an oppressed Shia majority. But neither of them talks about how the problem that most people have with discussions of “privilege” is that it doesn’t explain everything like people wish it did.
She didn’t mention the sanctions regime once. She’s a bit like a lot of people of that generation and class—she can recognize that her class separates her from most of the other citizens of her country, but she still kind of judges them for wanting to go back to the old days, when there was a dictatorship.
Look, middle-aged and older people in Iraq might very well remember that their country had one of the highest overall living standards in the Middle East and Africa. You have to deal with that, without telling them that they can now vote every four years. She doesn’t quite get around to saying that they don’t really have a democracy. She just says it’s a failure of democracy.
It’s not a language barrier. She’s totally fluent. She now lives in Fairfax, Virginia, which is, quite frankly, the heart of the empire. She says very explicitly that she’s never going back or moving back to Iraq.
Maybe I’m completely misinterpreting her, but she doesn’t seem to place much blame on America, even for the continuing muddle that is Iraqi domestic politics. The U.S. is still heavily involved there, but gets no mention. I understand that we want to focus on the people of Iraq taking responsibility for their own country, but the reality is that there is only so much room to maneuver that they’re going to be allowed by the U.S. If Iraq wanted to establish an Islamic state, that … would not be allowed to happen.
I don’t expect her to be ululating “Death to America”, but she barely even acknowledged the U.S. influence. Maybe it’s because I just finished season 1 of Blowback, which recounted a lot of Iraqi history, with a preponderance of American influence in the last 50 years.
When I’d caught up to episode 7, I started... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 29. Dec 2023 22:50:43 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 30. Dec 2023 10:16:39 (GMT-5)
So I’ve been listening to this podcast called Blowback by Brendan James and Noah Kulwin. It’s an American history podcast, but with a focus on foreign policy. I started listening to the fourth season, which is about Afghanistan. It’s in progress and up to episode 8 of 10 as of yesterday.
When I’d caught up to episode 7, I started in immediately on their inaugural podcast, S01, which is about Iraq. It’s not just about the invasion of in 2003. It starts in the early 20th century, explaining how British machinations kicked off the whole modern-day colonization of Iraq.
“Blowback isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It’s part of the algorithm of Empire.”
Don’t skip the bonus episodes because the interview with Naomi Klein was fantastic. [1] She noted that members of the Trump administration were absolute pikers as plunderers of public coffers, when compared with the Bush administration, which stolen dozens of billions at once.
It’s a very worthwhile podcast. I like to think that they—perhaps subconsciously—named the podcast after the excellent and important book by Chalmers Johnson.
The following essay is a mix of notes that I took while listening to the podcast interwoven with real-life experiences talking to people about similar topics during that time.
In the first half of S04E07, the hosts discuss America’s attack on Afghanistan, illustrating very clearly why America doesn’t care about Israel’s cruelty. America recognizes that Israel’s cruelty is nothing compared to its own. I wrote part of this before I’d listened to S01, which just piled on the shocking cruelty and disdain for human life inherent in every move made by the American Empire.
The hubris, the greed, the pettiness, the small-minded focus on personal gain—it’s breathtaking.
I lived through all of this; I was politically awake, paying attention. The names are all familiar. Most of them have been recorded multiple times on this blog (search Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, Condaleeza, or Rumsfeld). But the power of the podcast is such that it’s so well put-together that it’s more overwhelming when seen all at once.
While some might see an anti-American slant in this history podcast, there absolutely isn’t one. It’s just an honest assessment of what happened, complete with testimonials by the major players. They hang themselves with their own words. The podcast even includes America’s own justifications but, shorn of their mythical power, they’re made to stand on their own, which they do, in a way. They are obviously purely Machiavellian considerations of personal and national and empirical power—but there is no way to read any moral or ethical standing in them. These people did it for power and because they’re powerful. They did it for the money.
That’s also the point of discussing the situation in Israel. It’s only complicated if you lend any credence to obvious propaganda. Just focus on the facts. There are enough facts to decide. Once you’ve looked at history—at what actually happened rather than what Israel says happened or the justifications they give—Israel does not come out looking like an enlightened, democratic, or moral nation-state.
Instead, it seems to decide things based on protecting what it considers to be its own and lending as much empathy to human beings outside of their group as they would to stones in their front yards. In all of those ways, Israel is just like its big brother across the Atlantic.
That’s not judgmental! It’s just accepting reality. Once you’ve learned history—and this history isn’t controversial; no-one’s denying it; they brag about it!—you can’t unlearn it.
Like Israel, the U.S. also has special rules for special people. It has different laws for how Americans are to be treated versus foreign nationals. Do you remember the whole debate about spying after Snowden’s revelations? The only problem was that they’d been accused of invading the privacy of Americans. The rest of the world is just fine. Gotta keep an eye—and an ear—on those psychos in the rest of the world. There’s no telling what they might do. Better to get them before they get us.
Most Americans think that the Constitution applies only to American citizens.
This is the attitude of nations like this. It’s not pretty, but there’s nothing judgmental about recognizing it. You’d be a fool not to, given the overwhelming evidence.
The Israeli government itself offers only half-hearted and incredibly obviously mendacious defenses of its own moral basis for this system, but it doesn’t really care who believes it. Israel’s defenders, on the other hand, are incredibly invested in talking about anything but what has actually happened.
I was given a muddled history lesson on the Balfour Declaration of 1917 one night, as if that has anything to do with what is going to happen next—or with what has happened in the last 40 or 50 years. It’s incredible how focused people are on vaguely justifying Israel’s behavior when they (A) don’t seem to understand what that behavior actually is—i.e., the depths of depravity to which they go—and (B) how little that has to do with determining what happens next.
What is the world going to do about an obvious genocide unfolding in a very important place? Some countries have cut off diplomatic ties, while others offer full-throated support for genocide, including regular weapons shipments. They will all be judged by history.
People who are not involved have a chance to remain outside of the fray, but have a duty to inform themselves and understand what is actually, really happening—and what has actually, really happened. Which events are supported by incontrovertible evidence? Which ones are not?
Why are the ones without a shred of proof taken at face value while those with a preponderance of evidence are ignored? Those are the interesting questions.
It is not discriminatory to notice when someone is being an asshole and to then point it out.
Israel has trained the world to believe that focusing on its actions is antisemitic. There are other countries that do the same or much worse. Yes, that’s true! But those countries—e.g., Saudi Arabia or Myanmar, for two examples—don’t also demand that we simultaneously treat them as enlightened democracies, as leading lights of human civilization.
They’ve had it both ways for many decades. It’s just coming to a stop now (hopefully). It doesn’t matter that the U.S. never seems to get its comeuppance. That’s relevant only in a discussion of relative justice. The fact that the U.S. gets away with worse stuff all the time doesn’t absolve Israel of its own crimes. That’s not how crime and punishment and justice works.
Myanmar is apartheid; they have official second-class citizens. So does India, actually, with its caste system. A bunch of countries (Wikipedia) have some form of apartheid or another. But they don’t claim to be better than that—or they’re not surprised when they’re not taken seriously. We know that they are the way they are.
Israelis wants to be an apartheid theocratic state, but wants to identify as a democracy. How very modern. We should not allow that. It makes no sense for us to accept all of those claims. We don’t have any skin in the game, so we don’t have to accept it.
What strikes me the most is how similar the U.S. military attitude is to war crimes to the one that Israel has. Israel isn’t covering new territory here. The U.S. has done everything horrible that Israel is doing—and more. The U.S. gets away with slaughter on levels that Israel could never dream of. It discusses its war crimes just as brazenly as Israel does.
No-one who matters dares open their mouth about it. It’s shocking the level of U.S. sycophantism you’ll encounter in Europe. They’re totally blind to U.S. war crimes, almost all of the time. When challenged on it, they’ll usually admit it—but their default attitude is to never think about the Empire or the degree to which its crimes have damaged the world.
They support NATO, convinced that it’s a defensive organization. They don’t see NATO as being the hand-puppet of the U.S. This cripples the politically and gets them unquestioningly supporting very dubious, immoral, and self-destructive policies.
The Israelis bombed Palestinians on supposedly safe roads to which they’d directed those refugees? They learned it from the U.S. Look up highway of death from the first Gulf War in 1991. Iraqi forces were retreating from Kuwait, as directed by the U.S. They had given up.
It was a hodge-podge of civilian vehicles and half-broken-down military vehicles. The U.S. bombed every last one of them while they were trapped in a giant column in the desert. Fish in a barrel. There was nowhere to go. U.S. jets incinerated them all. There are close-up pictures of people carbonized behind the wheels of their vehicles.
Bombing civilians? There was the nuclear-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was the fire-bombing of Tokyo. There was the relentless fire-bombing of Dresden. Israel regularly cites all of these as precedent. They’re just doing what Daddy did.
Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. No justice ever for any of those civilians. I get it! It must be frustrating for Israel. They can truly whine about being under the magnifying glass when their benefactor never seems to suffer the same fate.
That’s because the Empire determines where the magnifying glass goes. They run all of these international agencies. They threaten to withdraw funding if those agencies don’t focus on the official enemies. There is no way you can focus on the U.S. and, usually, Israel.
Now, after multiple decades, the wall of support is crumbling for Israel. Israel is no longer getting away with having its cake and eating it, too, as it has for almost six decades. So they cry “antisemitism”.
It’s absolutely Israel’s prerogative to call everyone who disagrees with any of their most-cherished policies an “antisemite”. But you’re a fool if you allow it to influence your thinking in any way. It’s not a fact of history. It’s subterfuge. It’s chaff. You’ll just tire yourself out fighting an endless stream of lies.
Still, The U.S., France, Germany, and Britain are falling all over themselves to make derogatory talk about Israel—let’s face it, anything less than fawning is basically unsupportive and therefore hostile—equivalent to anti-semitism.
If you’re going to end up being called an antisemite the second you no longer express full-throated support for every Israeli policy, then you might as well get it over with early. Don’t waste a second of your time with information that isn’t factual or is evidence-free. Don’t waste a second of your time trying to please an entity that’s going to throw you under the bus the second you’re no longer useful to it.
I get to hear about students chanting antisemitic slogans on college campuses. Interesting. Is there video? No? Not even after a month of allegations that this is happening? Not a single video? Not a single recording?
Huh. That’s weird.
Misdirection. Chaff. Subterfuge. Dissembling. Bullshit.
I guess I don’t have to take it seriously then. If this phenomenon was as prevalent as they say, so prevalent as to be worth prioritizing as a real concern, it shouldn’t be difficult at all to show a few seconds of evidence. And yet…there is none. So, you can just ignore the allegation until some evidence shows up. It’s remarkably easy.
That didn’t stop a Soviet-style show-trial in Congress, though.
You don’t have to be that moron that engages in a discussion just long enough to figure out which of the two possible sides to an argument they will put their opponent in. Instead of having a discussion about what each person knows and where there are opportunities to learn something, these people are there to teach the other person one thing: why the speaker is right and the listener, should they disagree with any detail, is, at best, misguided, and, at worst, the enemy.
And so it goes. Even if you try to hold yourself above the fray, people will struggle mightily to put you in a box, a pigeonhole. Oh, do you not believe every Israeli lie with your whole heart? Ah, then you must be pro-Palestinian. Pro-truth and pro-justice and pro-fairness is not an allowed position.
I’ve done a tremendous amount of reading and thinking about world affairs over the last 20–25 years, and more than my fair share of writing. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to distill my entire viewpoint into a one-dimensional sound-bite or tweet within the first minute of our conversation.
I’m personally not specifically against any country. Most countries are filled with lovely, innocent people—especially if you just leave them alone. I’m against countries doing horrible bullshit at the expense of their own or other countries’ peoples.
I will admit that it especially sticks in my craw when it’s mixed with hypocrisy. On this point, the Israelis are occasionally refreshingly open—when they’re not lying their faces off. The U.S. generally tries to stay on its high horse much longer.
This pigeonholing has got to stop. When I recently heard someone recite the history of the Middle East that they learned from their right-of-center, very neoliberal newspaper from Switzerland (NZZ, if you’re wondering), then I don’t think to myself “this person is obviously pro-Israel.”
I think to myself that this person has put in some time to learn about the history, which is great! But they spent their time with a reliably partisan source, from which they won’t learn enough real history. It meant that there was an irrational focus on the Balfour Treaty—like anybody today gives a shit what the British think now, or thought then—and on agreements that the Palestinians had failed to sign.
They say, now do you see? Do I see what? What argument are you actually making? That the Palestinians’ suffering is actually all their own fault? That’s your argument?
Stop beating around the bush, then. Just come right out and say it. You can’t? Why not? Because it sounds fucking ludicrous when you say it out loud? Because it utterly lacks empathy?
Because you’ve never imagined what it would be like for you to have to agree to something like the Palestinians were being asked to agree to? You know, after they’d been bent over the last few times they signed things or had things signed for them? (Now the Balfour Treaty is relevant. 😉)
A failure to agree to penurious conditions enforced on one in a quasi-legal, but obviously coercive process is sold to people by publications like the NZZ as the Palestinians being unable to agree to live with Jews.
I found myself thinking that these people are in such a hurry to learn what their viewpoint is expected to be—learning history takes time and effort and they’ve got other shit to do—that they leave their empathy, common sense, and bullshit detectors out of it, entirely.
When someone tells you that the history of Israel is of the poor Jews/Israelis just trying to figure out how to fit into a place that they consider their ancestral home and the current residents being greedy with their land—no bullshit detector goes off? They don’t wonder whether that’s the whole story?
These people don’t ask themselves—empathetically—what they themselves would do if someone came along and just said that half of canton Zürich just belonged to a bunch of Ukrainians now! Would they sign those documents making the annexation legally binding? Of course not.
But they very quickly believe exactly that story when it’s told about somewhere else. I don’t think that they’re pro-Israeli (as they quickly accused me of being pro-Palestinian). [2] I do start to think that they lack empathy and common sense.
They don’t wonder where 75 years of history went in their story. They don’t bother to try to find out what’s happening today. Their only defense would be that they are utterly unaware of what Israel is currently doing in Gaza. If they know, and they still think that’s OK, then they have completely lost their ethical and legal moorings.
You’d have to forget about talking about the Middle East and determine what their attitude is toward justice, fairness, human rights, international law, or equality. Because if you think Israel has any right to do what it’s been doing for decades, then you can only believe that might makes right.
In that case, you are a giant, giant hypocrite because you would never want to switch places with the Palestinians. You don’t have principles. Principles are those rules that you apply equally, regardless of whether the target is a friend or foe.
If it’s bad for Iran to be a theocratic state, then why is it OK for Saudi Arabia or Israel?
I’ll wait.
Oh. Because we have an empire to run.
No you don’t! You live in Switzerland! You don’t have to kowtow to Empire! You don’t have to buy into this militaristic us-or-them binary. Be. An. Adult. [3]
The person I was talking to the other night about Israel also laid out for me that the only solution to the current situation was for Israel to occupy the Gaza Strip again, to tighten the noose on those unruly bastards again. That will bring peace.
I mean, what an idiotic idea! It’s completely belied by literally every single instance of such a situation in the past! It has literally never worked that way. But it doesn’t stop fools like this from constantly proposing that the only possible solution is to provide even more weapons and money and support.
Well, actually, he said that the solution is to cut off funds—but he meant to the Palestinians! He’s convinced that they’re the ones getting tons of support! It’s incredible. Just an utterly broken bullshit detector.
Either that, or he has literally no idea what the power differential there is, what’s actually going on. In that case, it’s more a dereliction of duty, as he was the one who horned his way into a conversation about Israel to let us all know how it really is.
I tried to stop him, but at least I got an interesting essay out of it.
In a highly related matter, the article Made in the USA by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) discusses the closing of the Red Sea by the Houthis.
“The 10 Nation Red Sea coalition effort–called Operation Prosperity Guardian includes the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles, and Spain. Not one country on the Red Sea agreed to join and only one Arab country–Bahrain–is a member. How’s that for diplomacy?”
“The US and Saudis have been “hitting them hard” enough to cause the deaths of 400,000 people (through bombs, drones, starvation and disease) since 2014. The US “escalation dominance” in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban stronger than it was before the war. It’s one thing not to have learned lessons about the self-defeating arrogance of Imperial power from Tacitus. It’s another level of stupidity altogether, for Atlantic Council gunslingers like Kroenig, to have elided the memory of the last 20 years of murderous futility, from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.”
But this is how every one of these morons thinks. This is how nearly everyone thinks. They split the world into “our side” and evil. Anything that gets in their way must be eradicated by military means, never by means of trade or just paying for stuff that other people have that you want. What a concept!
No. Plunder is the only way they know. A shockingly large part of the so-called civilized world cannot think outside of the confines of this binary: with us or against us. Anyone who refuses to allow themselves to be mugged by us must be against us. It is therefore valid to eliminate them before they eliminate us.
So we kill them, the money pops out like in GTA, and we continue along our way, whistling down the sidewalk into a rosy sunset, full of love for ourselves and our piety.
Everyone goes into a pigeonhole. With us or against us.
Most people are NPCs. They don’t understand anything about the world other than what’s been programmed into them. If you don’t agree with Party A’s talking points, then you must be in Party B. And vice versa.
Think outside the box!
What if the world just stopped selling weapons to the Saudis? What if the world paid to restore Yemen? The Houthis would knock it off immediately. That literally doesn’t even offer itself as a solution. It’s not military, so it’s not possible. It’s giving in to their violence—rather than them giving in to ours.
These people have no principles, no morals, not ethics. They are rudderless and garbage human beings. I don’t think they’re incapable of changing, of rehabilitation, but they need a lot of work before they can consider themselves to be moral beings, civilized members of a civilized society. Their inherent lack of empathy and knee-jerk, unthinking racism colors everything they do.
Is it racist? Yeah, it kind of is. They tend to think differently when the victims are brown than when they’re white. When the perpetrators are white or European (or Israeli), they are very generous in their interpretations, very forgiving of perceived crimes. When the perpetrators are official enemies, they believe anything and everything unquestioningly.
Yeah, it seems that people in Europe and America are pretty unilaterally being told that history began on October 7th and they’re absolutely delighted to believe it. I spoke to one person who winced when I said that history didn’t start on October 7th, so he’s definitely been primed to pigeonhole the shit out of anyone who uses that phrase. It was like watching the Manchurian Candidate awaken.
These people swallow loads of Israeli lies like they’re working a bathroom stall in a truck-stop bathroom. They don’t question because they don’t really care. Their instincts—bred into them by decades of propaganda—have already told them what they’re going to think.
They think that the worldwide protests are a bunch of Jew-hating, whiny young people who don’t understand how to fight terror. Typical pussies, the youth. No stomach for genocide when it’s necessary and right.
And we’re back to Blowback. It’s the same thing all over again. it’s the same same story as in Gulf Wars I and II. it’s the same story as in Afghanistan, as in Syria. These people don’t care about being catastrophically wrong again and again, as long as they themselves feel good about their opinion, as long as the solution is exclusively a military and not a moral one, and as long as they don’t pay a single tiny bit of a price for it.
And why should they care? They all fail upwards. They are rewarded for their behavior because ours is a savage, uncivilized world.
In that sense, we keep hearing about atrocities—and then we…don’t. They just kind of go away. Our lives basically don’t change. The U.S. or its clients commit war crimes. Some people get mad. It goes away. Nothing happens. GOTO 1
.
So I can understand these people’s point of view: Palestine’s been a humanitarian crisis for a long time—our whole lives, for most of us. It’s worse now, but these people have never been forced to give a shit before, so why should they give a shit now? People don’t think about justice, about fairness. They think about which opinion have they been told to have.
They have the luxury of having whatever opinion is the most convenient, because it has no effect on their lives anyway. And their consciences are clear because they honestly don’t care if idiots whose opinions they don’t care about think they’re bad people. They never have.
They have no moral compass, not really. They don’t get worried about things. They never doubt that they’re right. They spend a couple of hours watching TV—which has never lied to them before—and then start calling everyone else antisemites and terrorist-lovers and “Putinversteher”. It’s so easy to be a goddamned moron.
And they almost always end up backing the solution that will actually end up making the thing that they’re complaining about worse. When it gets worse, they complain about it more, and then believe the first fucking solution offered by the same idiots that made it worse the last time. They never learn.
They can only think in terms of “bigger, better, faster, more”, where what satisfies those conditions is spoon-fed to them by the companies that stand to profit the most. If something doesn’t go the way they only just recently started believing it should, then we should blow up whoever’s impeding it until they get out of our way.
Blow them up with the military! Sanction them economically! Starve those socialists! Kill those pesky Houthis! They’re blocking my Amazon shipments! They’re bad for my business!
Growth is king. There is no other solution to any problem. You can only grow or invent your way out of problems. You can’t ever wonder whether we’re on the wrong track. Reduction is never an option.
And the people that they claim to admire! It’s impossible to even fathom that they know anything about what these people really stand for—I have to give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re just wildly uninformed about their heroes rather than that they’re true monsters. You can tell that I’m talking about people I care for—otherwise I might be less generous.
They love Trump, Biden, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama—all sorts of monsters. They have no problem with entire cabinets full of the most dickish, mendacious monsters. I have to cling to a shred of hope that my friends and family simply don’t know anything about history, they know nothing about what these people have said, what they’ve done, what they stand for.
This has been happening to me for over two decades, so I’m used to it. But discussions where you’re constantly forced to waste time explaining that you can’t defend viewpoints that you don’t have, that have been ascribed to you by the person demanding justification—those discussions aren’t very fruitful. It’s bad enough when there is a massive information imbalance—I’m usually at fault here, as I have a lot more time and discipline to read hundreds of pages of news per week—but when your interlocutor is shooting for a quick and cheap checkmate, it’s even worse.
I’ve been told I love Obama, John Kerry, Joe Biden, etc. It’s all very tiring.
Just read the several thousand pages of my blog to find out what I really think, already. God, what the problem?
The YouTube algorithm is getting better! Just after posting this article, I was offered this video that illustrates perfectly what it’s like to be labeled and pigeonholed by a know-nothing know-it-all.
I was reminded of this silly thing again when I read an article called US Congress recommends placing assets at Lagrange points to counter China by Eric Berger (Ars Technica) about the LaGrange points—and that China is trying to take over the one on the dark side of the moon. There is no notion of cooperation. There is only competition. Either “we” get it or the Chinese do. There is no non-military, no non-aggressive solution.
Children in a fucking sandbox. We’re doomed.
Do we still need expertise? If so, how do obtain it? What do we do when we saw off the branch we’re sitting on by getting rid of the first half of the pipeline that leads to... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 29. Dec 2023 13:14:03 (GMT-5)
I have a lot of questions about the rush to replacing human expertise with machine-based expertise.
Do we still need expertise? If so, how do obtain it? What do we do when we saw off the branch we’re sitting on by getting rid of the first half of the pipeline that leads to the second half containing expertise?
The pipeline looks roughly like this right now:
GOTO 2
What happens when we strip out step two because it’s more cost-effective not to waste time and money training noobs. How will we create future experts? This short-term thinking might break a machine that will take a generation or two to start up again.
What level of quality are we interested in? Which use cases do we have? Which stakeholders? Which stakeholders need which levels of quality for which use cases?
Are we accepting a quick-cash-grab mediocre quality now, promising ourselves we’ll get better quality later?
Are we allowing the quick-cash/get-out mentality to affect what we create? Are we sacrificing durability?
We’ve done it all before. A lot. We’ve sacrificed a lot on the altar of profitability.
Will we forget that we’re making mediocrity? You know, relative to what we used to strive for?
This has already happened in so many places, as the grinding gears of capitalism find the least-bad thing that people are willing to accept. When they realize it’s not good enough, it’s too late. No-one is making good things anymore. You’re stuck with mediocrity.
Does it break in one year?
Buy a new one.
What if you want one that lasts ten years?
Too bad.
What if you hate that it wastes resources and pollutes the environment?
The market doesn’t care, otherwise that product would exist.
Do we still need the things that led us to develop the techniques we used when we were still building and modifying things ourselves?
This goes to the heart of what I’ve learned over three decades in software development in all capacities (developer, architect, manager, etc.). It’s easy to think that the instincts that you’ve built up are unassailable, that they’re always going to apply. I’m talking about techniques like testing, architecture, documentation—the whole shebang. If you’re honest, though, you’ll accept that the necessity of those techniques is contingent on certain axioms, axioms that may no longer apply.
This is just a though experiment. If you have a tool that just creates what you need from a few instructions, then the approach to maintenance might be considerably different, no? If you never need to look into the guts of what’s been built, then…then what do you need unit tests for? Why would you need an architecture? Why write developer documentation? You’re never going to touch that code again.
If you need to modify the behavior of the system, you use your original prompt plus whatever adjustments you need—and generate a whole new system from whole cloth. You just throw away the old version. You don’t need to maintain it, you don’t need to adjust it, you don’t even need to understand it.
Sounds great, right? 🙌
I have concerns. Perhaps we can allay them. Perhaps not. I think they’re valid.
In code, for example, we focus on testability so that we can refactor, and improve, and extend. What if the code doesn’t need to be improved or extended? What happens then? Do we still need tests? How do you know it does what you’ve been told it does? Are you testing everything manually? Are you testing it at all? Or are you just trusting that it works? Are you just trusting that your prompt-Svengali got it just right? Or are you also generating your tests with your LLM?
You may no longer need unit or integration tests, but you will still need acceptance tests, probably in the form of end-to-end tests. Maybe an LLM can write those for you, but probably not. You’ll probably need an expert, somewhere at the front of the process, where the LLM can no longer help you. You’re going to need somebody who knows what the f@%k they’re talking about, rather than a half-trained/StackOverflow noob with an eager but brain-dead LLM.
Instead of adding the ½
of a noob developer to the ½
of an LLM to get 1
, we should be open to the possibility that we’re actually multiplying them to get ¼
. 😉
So, you’re going to need something that knows how to think about your application domain in order to decide what an acceptable solution would be, to define the boundaries of your application domain. I’m not sure anyone is proposing that the current crop of LLMs are even tending in this direction.
Human experts to the rescue. Let’s hope we still have a system that knows how to create them reliably.
Talking about acceptance tests leads to asking “what are we building? What does it do?”
We need requirements.
Where do requirements come from in a world without human experts? The toughest job in a project is figuring out what you want—and then specifying it. You need all of that before you get an LLM involved. Otherwise, what are you building?
The LLM will help you build the thing that it thinks you want from your vague prompts. You, in turn, will be willing to round up whatever it provides you to the thing you thought you needed, just so you can be done more quickly, and increase your personal profit margin.
You’ll also have to do it because you’ll have no other choice and your boss is riding your ass for KPIs. You can only hope that quality expectations have dipped enough to meet you in the realm of mediocrity where your solution lies.
Let’s go into a bit more detail on what the product-development cycle looks like.
If we’ve generated your software with an LLM, then we’d better hope that the LLM keeps helping you because, as noted above … if we do want to modify the solution, then how do we do that? Do we go back to the original prompts? Or do we feed it the current version and ask it to update it? Does this work? How do we formulate the request precisely enough? Especially when we no longer have people trained to think precisely?
There are a lot of things that we’ve learned to do and which we’ve added to our programming languages to allow certain features, like extensibility, etc. The SOLID principles. Do those still apply? If not, why not? Or, to be clearer, to which projects do they still apply? If it’s so easy to replace so much code with an LLM’s hallucinations, then were we over-engineering before? If no, then why would we throw away all of our techniques now?
Do we still need documentation? Manuals? Tutorials? If we don’t have people learning how to code, who will maintain the LLMs? Who will build the next generation? Will they build themselves?
How can I extend the product of a 🤖? Can I get at the source? How understandable is the output? How well do I know the area? Can I judge the quality? How well can I verify that the output matches my requirements?
What is the output of these LLMs? What can we do with it? What do we want to do with it? If we want humans to be able to extend it, if what LLMs produce are just building blocks, then the output has to continue to be manipulable. If not … then it can be anything, like just an EXE, right? Right now, it generates code that the “developers” who requested it don’t really understand. Why not just generate binary code?
That’s kind of how image generators are right now. They produce a JPEG, not a PSD. There is no source to speak of, no easily updated layers containing the various parts. Existing tools don’t allow you to work with that kind of output yet, except poking around the outsides of a black box.
This is how a lot of people program now, which I think is why doing it with an LLM is so appealing. Their jobs will not change one bit. They didn’t understand how things worked before and they don’t understand now, but they’re faster at it.
Will we have to deal with the flotsam and jetsam produced by this age? How? Does it matter?
Or can we just throw it all away and start over fresh each time? Does that scale?
Seriously, I’m looking at the ERP system we have. It’s a usability and functional nightmare. I’ve never seen the like. This is what we feed the LLM.
I just had a PowerPoint open. I scrolled on it. It asked me where I wanted to save my changes.
Will LLMs help us fix this? I don’t see how. All they will do is help crowd this ship of fools even more.
How do you get it to give you cutting-edge CSS solutions? Like, does it just return flexbox
stuff? Or can it do grid
stuff? Can it give you something responsive, you know, using the glorious elegance and flexibility that the CSS designers built? Or does it just give you the flexbox
or grid
equivalent of an absolutely positioned mess of floats or tables from the old days?
Have we reached the end of the line with CSS usage? If no-one learns how to use the newer, cooler, more powerful stuff, then who will write the stuff that feeds the LLM so that it can suggest it to those who don’t know it? Where does the content come from if everyone’s using an AI to generate content? A copy of a copy … well, science-fiction authors have shown us for years where that ends up.
We already have a lot of bad software today, written by mediocre programmers with questionable technique and no thought of maintainability. All of that was fed into the engine that now helps worse programmers become mediocre. Where will the good code come from? Magic?
An LLM is like an e-bike. You’ll never go faster than 25kph with it. It’s like swipe-typing. It will never be as fast as typing on an actual desktop keyboard. It’s like mobile devices: you can’t program there. Not really.
How do you learn how to debug? To pay attention? How do you learn how to correct it?
Who’s going to use amazing tools like, e.g., named gridlines in CSS?
Don’t need ‘em! it can all just be generated because humans don’t need to edit it! It’ll be like assembler code!
Really, though? I don’t think the comparison is apt. They’re semantically different jobs. Who’s going to write the CSS versions that are responsive and maintainable and performant? Not many people have written those yet.
The LLM can’t extrapolate them from the help docs because there isn’t enough source material to make its way into a suggestion. The probabilities won’t get high enough to outweigh the sheer bulk of all of the mediocre shit that ends up tempting its way into the LLM’s answer.
We have spent decades building tools that help us build stuff that is more efficient and easier to understand and more powerful, all at the same time. But most people never learned how to use these tools or techniques. But some did. And they made amazing things.
Where will those people come from if we brain-drain everyone into using AI instead?
I worry so much about the tyranny of lowered expectations.
Right now, we have amazing people building our standards, building the browsers that implement those standards, etc. etc. Where do those people come from in the future if there’s no pipeline to teach them? Where do they gain experience if there’s no room for them in organizations? To learn?
Because here’s where the rubber meets the road: the problem is not that AI exists. It’s that capitalism exists, it’s that neo-liberal, late-stage capitalism [1] doesn’t have an answer for “what if we don’t need people to do the easy shit anymore?”
I saw an article the other day on a socialist web site that couldn’t even celebrate when robots were poised to replace a whole slew of backbreaking jobs. This should be a great thing! But we know that the system we have will just drop those people like a hot rock. A compassionate system/society would, before making people’s livelihoods obsolete, be careful to think about what happens to those people.
In the case of programmers, we have to legitimately worry about how we produce the minds that will continue to produce the bounty of miracles that have now cut off the possibility of producing the kind of mind that created the first generation of tools.
I know, it’s a mouthful. I’ve read it a few times and I’m pretty sure it says what I want it to say. Let’s put Ouroboros in here again.
We’ve got “AIs” that can look at an image of a UI and build something that does what it thinks you want from it. I’m sure those aren’t cherry-picked at all. We also have “AI vision systems” that can detect faces, and whether eyebrows are arched, and so on. We have text-generators and voice simulators.
We no longer believe in vaccines, we have billions in poverty, but we have AI toys for the 1% to amuse themselves.
We need to make sure we have a plan for continued innovation and improvement. We need to be sure that we know not only what we’re gaining, but what we’re losing—and that we’re OK with that.
We need to be sure we’re not sawing off the branch we’re sitting on.
Of course, we’re not going to do any of that. Hell no.
Instead, we’ll let the greediest and most short-sighted of us decide—and then see what happens.
Published by marco on 29. Dec 2023 11:44:13 (GMT-5)
Over the last several months, I’ve been asked for advice on password managers. I am not a security researcher. I can only tell you what I do, and why. My experience and context are that I primarily use MacOS and iOS, as well as one Windows laptop. I was a LastPass user for a decade, but switched this year to ProtonPass.
At one point, I put together a small evaluation matrix for a colleague, shown below.
As you can see, I don’t know that much about BitWarden, nor am I familiar with the UI/UX of Google or MS Authenticator as integrated into their respective browsers. What I do know is that any browser-specific solution—this applies to Firefox as well—is quite limiting, in that you generally can’t use the password managers in other browsers or contexts. An ideal solution is to have passwords auto-filled in whatever context you find yourself in.
LastPass works well, as you can see above. I used it for about a decade. Why did I stop?
What’s still better about LastPass?
Those advantages come with a caveat, though: sometimes it pastes too much information, or information into the wrong boxes. The whole “paste and go” has become increasingly shaky, as UIs change and no longer reliably present patterns that password managers expect.
ProtonPass does everything that LastPass does, but with a few UI and feature improvements.
As noted above, ProtonPass is less aggressive about picking up changed passwords or filling in existing ones. I imagine that this is because they try less hard to detect every possible pattern that a site might use. I kind of agree that it’s better to make a good, stable UI that lets you easily copy/paste information than to try to keep up with the myriad ways that web sites are making authentication inconvenient for password managers.
For example, when I updated a password recently, I noticed that LastPass would pop up and ask me to store the password … but it was kind of annoying because it would ask too often. But I noticed that ProtonPass doesn’t ask nearly as often—though always more, with each update.
Even if it doesn’t offer to let you generate password, you can generate one manually.
When you add a password with ProtonPass, it hangs onto it for a while in the “generated passwords” area:
ProtonPass recommends reversing your workflow. Instead of clicking in the popup to generate a password, you should go to the “change password” page, then click in the plugin and generate a new password from there. It’s pretty easy, and it can auto-fill it from there. Here’s a little video:
I’m going to repeat that, while I’m quite technically adept, I’m not a security expert. I read a lot about it. I haven’t caught wind of any problems with the implementation of either LastPass or ProtonPass. I wrote the following to a colleague about a month ago.
The primary thing for any of these providers is to keep the data encrypted at rest, in transit, and, as much as possible, in memory. Decrypting should only ever occur on a client device. That information should only remain decrypted long enough to use it—with an appropriate timeout.
Both their algorithms are solid and the number of cycles they require ensure that it would take more computing power than anyone has centuries to crack with brute-force. In this way, they’re the same as any other provider, like Apple, Google, 1-password, BitWarden, ProtonPass, Keepass, etc.
That’s the most important protection that any of these providers give you.
The algorithmic protection is, as noted above, only as good as your password. The algorithms together with a strong password, protect you from brute-force cracking. If you have a weak password, then attackers don’t need to use brute force because they can guess your password more quickly, without trying them all.
Another protection they give is to not allow access to your data to anyone but you. LastPass has failed to do this for a certain number of customers. It’s unknown whether any of the other providers have done the same—they might have kept the data safe, or … not yet been outed.
It’s known that some people’s password data has been expropriated. This shouldn’t matter because it’s just a pile of bits that is undecryptable without the password.
If you had a weak master password at the time that your data was known to have been stolen, then you’re at risk. You still have a chance to change all of your important passwords, though, before someone guesses your master password and gains access to the current passwords. If you’ve managed to change your passwords before they guess your old master password, then getting access to your old passwords gives them nothing.
Some providers (and security analysts) recommend keeping your ball of data locally, never uploading to the cloud. This is much less convenient and not something I’m personally willing to do. I would rather have a super-strong password that makes obtaining my encrypted data useless.
Layers of security:
Algorithmic protection is only as good the password. “No access to data” is a secondary layer. If it’s compromised (as was the case for some users at LastPass), then you’re left only with algorithmic protection + strong password. If you didn’t have a strong password, then you’re compromised, but you should have never been relying only on “security by obscurity” anyway (i.e., the fact that no-one had access to your data but you).
So, to sum up:
If you... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 29. Dec 2023 10:58:01 (GMT-5)
I was in the U.S. over the summer and had purchased the U.S. map from Garmin. There wasn’t enough room to store the U.S. map on the device. This article assumes that you’ve tried to sync your maps to your device with Garmin Express, but it failed to copy because you don’t have enough space.
If you have enough space on your device, then why how did you even end up here?
tl;dr:
You can buy maps directly from Garmin, but Garmin will not help you in any way to load them onto your device unless your device has enough room for the new maps. If it does not, then you’re out of luck, as far as Garmin is concerned.
I imagine that their solution would be to either (A) buy a larger device with more storage or (B) just buy a second device for the other country.
Problem solved. Thanks Garmin.
If you’re not willing to upgrade your device and you’d rather just use the damned maps that you’ve purchased, then read on.
In my particular case, the European maps use about 10GB. My Garmin Edge 530 has 15GB of space. The North America maps are also about 8GB, so I can’t have all of the maps on my device at once.
I would like to “manage” my maps, preferring to keep the U.S. map for the time I’m in the States, then going back to the European maps. I would like some idea of how I could know what I’m losing if I were to remove the European West and East maps (which I don’t think I need, but I’m not 100% sure). There is no mechanism for identifying which files correspond to which maps. There is no mechanism for archiving maps.
I’ve managed to learn that,
/Garmin
folder of your device.gma
, unl
, img
.img
file is the largest one—usually several gigabytes.Garmin Connect won’t help you, neither the app nor the web site.
Garmin Express won’t help you either.
You can—sometimes—use Garmin Map Manager to see which maps are on your device. If the app even shows your device—which it didn’t for me, when I just checked again—the Reveal in Finder
button doesn’t actually show the map in the Finder. Instead, it just shows a parent folder that leaves you with no idea which of the map files corresponds to the map you selected in the dialog.
You’re left with just guessing which files correspond to the maps you want to remove—and hoping for the best. However, you might be able to stumble toward figuring out which maps you’ve removed when you reload the Map Manager after having moved some files.
This procedure is similar to Garmin BaseCamp, which at least seems to more reliably show the device.
Did you know that there’s an app called Garmin BaseCamp? It shows you the data that you have stored on your device: maps, activities, etc. It does not let you do anything useful with these, though. It doesn’t let you really see which region is covered by a map. It also doesn’t help you figure out which degree of detail is covered by which map.
For example, there are three maps for Europe: Central, West, and East. They look like they have a ton of overlap. I think I only need the Central one (I mostly ride in Switzerland). I can’t see which map does what, though. It looks like all three maps have the main roads for everywhere, but only have fine detail for certain parts? Maybe? It’s really, really hard to tell.
Still, it will help you at least see which maps you have installed on your device. It will not help you actually see which cryptically named files correspond to which regions, though.
So, you remove some map files, reload BaseCamp, see what’s missing, adjust until you’ve got enough space for the maps you need right now.
This is tedious, but workable. 🙌
OK. 👌 Is that all clear? Does that sound like fun 🤩 ? Because it totally is 💯.
It’s utterly incredible that this is where Garmin is at with their support for their navigation and sports devices after a couple of decades of dominating the market. Capitalist optimization FTW. 🙌
We talked about a few comedians—Bill Hicks, Bill Burr, and Doug... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 21:48:39 (GMT-5)
There are a ton of comedians that everyone talks about, like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and so on. I was talking to some friends in Switzerland who are very much into stand-up comedy and they asked for some suggestions.
We talked about a few comedians—Bill Hicks, Bill Burr, and Doug Stanhope—that they might want to try. They all have good insight into the human condition and don’t shy away from describing humanity as it actually is, rather than how we wish it were.
I started off more sparse, then went down an absolute rabbit hole researching Bill Burr—with copious and details notes and transcripts of several hour-long shows—then got sad that I’d not done the same honor to the other comedians on the list.
I saw a gaping hole where the “George Carlin” section was, got frustrated, and then left it for about three months. I ended up moving Bill Burr to the end; don’t skip that. He’s pound-for-pound a definite candidate for the GOAT.
George Carlin definitely belongs on here, but I only had the energy to dig out a quote from an older article.
“Americans are efficient, professional, compulsive consumers. Shopping – it’s their civic duty. Consumption – it’s the new national pasttime. Fuck baseball. The only true lasting American value that’s left is buyin’ things. People spending money they don’t have on things that they don’t need,” which also applies to their government.”
You can find a ton of his stuff on YouTube.
When I watched Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1978) in 2016, it was at this link, but the video has been removed.. I’m pretty sure the link above is the one I watched, but I’m not sure. It’s audio only, but its 82 minutes long, which seems about right. It’s a shame there’s no video because he’s a very expressive comedian.
Norm MacDonald was an interesting guy, with a very different delivery. His book Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir is well-worth checking out. The video is of what I believe to be his best joke. There is a ton of material on YouTube, as well as Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery (Netflix) and Norm MacDonald has a show (Netflix).
This is Rock’s timeless bit that he performed only once, according to Niggas vs. Black People (Wikipedia) and Bring the Pain (Wikipedia).
This is two hours of what seems like a Bill Burr stand-up routine, but is just an on-stage and lightly prepared version of his weekly podcast. He has a little piece of paper to remind him of topics he wanted to cover—probably the same as he does every week. He just throws out a pretty good set—just like that.
“Offstage: [reading listener chats] …well, you’ve already talked about the Fed, Fatties, and Botox, so that’s good…
Bill: So what? Is Skynyrd not going to play Freebird?”
“I’ll tell you this: the day American black people care about soccer, that is the end of all of you.”
At 80:00, he goes on a glorious run about women’s volleyball and the booty shorts.
“Can I be honest with you? That’s why, you know, like, when they started doing that thing where they were going to have trans people going to school? […] Like, that’s why I was against that shit. Like, wait a minute…you haven’t even figured out how to do the right version heterosexually. You know what I mean? […] All they did was just tell you what happened physically. […]
“There should have been a guy there going YOUR FUCKING LIFE WILL BE OVER. AS YOU KNOW IT. DO YOU KNOW WHY PUSSY FEELS SO GOOD? BECAUSE IF IT ONLY FELT OK, WE WOULD JUST JERK OFF BECAUSE IT WOULDN’T BE WORTH IT.
“Finding a woman can be the greatest thing of your fucking life. OR END IT. That’s what they should have been screaming at people.”
Why Do I Do This? (2008)
At 16:45,
“I love old people. There’s always there, with their family photos. It cracks me up. And they’re all proud. ‘Well, we had five kids, and then they all had five kids. […]’ Yeah! And none of you did shit! I don’t recognize anybody in that photo. You just made thirty people, who are all taking a shit every day, that ends up in a river. That’s not a family photo—that’s an environmental disaster. And you framed it!”
At 24:20,
“No. They’re relentless. They never stop. And there’s no reason for them to stop. You know why? ‘Cause you can’t hit ‘em. That’s what it is. Think about that. There’s no physical ramifications for being an asshole when you’re a woman. Do you know how much of a dick I would be if it was socially unacceptable to kick the shit out of me? Dude, I would be trashing everyone I saw.”
At 42:50,
“I’m telling you, man, … that’s the funny about Hitler. Just let me finish. Just let me work my way through this idea. My favorite sports clip is that Jesse Owens shit. I just love it because their [Nazis’] whole angle was fucked up … he made Hitler leave in the third quarter, right? He’s putting down his #1 finger and just fucking walking out of the stadium, like [Hitler saying] ‘Jesus Christ!’
“Their whole thing was like, ‘Ve are going to create a superior race!’ It’s like, dude, I think we accidentally already did that. It’s like we sent a select group of people to the gym every day for a couple of hundred years and it’s paying dividends. They’re dunking on us every day.
“Dude, how quiet was that limo ride home with Hitler? You know he was talking crazy shit when they were on the way there: ‘Ve are going to DOMINATE! SIEG HEIL!’ Just going off. That whole ride home, they’re just sitting there, all quiet. You’re sitting next to an even angrier than usual Adolf Hitler, trying to make some sort of small talk.”
At 48:15, there’s a visual bit about what “separates the psychos from the functioning psychos,” where he discusses the pros and cons of being a serial killer. Transcription doesn’t do any of these justice, but this one is not transcribable.
Let It Go (2010)
At 5:00,
“And she does the most difficult job of all: being a mother. […] Dude, women are just constantly patting themselves on the back about how hard their lives are—and no-one corrects them because they all want to fuck ‘em.”
At 12:45,
“You know what I hate about these corporate chains? You go in there, you’re paying for a business, they make you do half the job, though. I don’t get it.
“Like, I walk in, say, let me get a turkey sandwich, lettuce, tomato, on rye, with mayonnaise.
“The guy behind the counter’s like ‘turkey sandwich, lettuce, tomato, on rye’.
“Yeah, and mayonnaise.
“‘Oh, the mayonnaise is, uh, right over there.’
“Really? Well then why don’t you, UH, go over there and put it on my sandwich? You get it? I’m on this side of the register. Guy who’s orders the sandwich [points to self], guy who makes the sandwich [points away]. I’m sorry they fired the mayonnaise guy, but I’m not doing it! I just gave you 100% of the money to make 100% of the sandwich. This isn’t like a relay race. Do you recognize me? It’s because I don’t fucking work here!
“I just wanted to grab this guy by the throat and say ‘where is he!? Where is he?!’
“‘Where’s who?’
“The guy making me do all of this extra shit. I’d just choke my way up the corporate ladder, until I get to that “Eyes Wide Shut” party and everybody’s sitting there, getting blown. I come in and just kick the door open. The second they see my angry face, I don’t even have to explain myself. ‘How big’s your fucking yacht gotta be?’”
At 20:10,
“Do you know how many times a week people asking me why I’m angry? I’m not angry. I’m passionate about my opinions and I want you to hear all of them before you get to talk again.”
At 23:40,
“It’s just it scares me, you know, I just get nervous. When I see that stereotypical married guy, just like a shell of my former self. You know, every weekend, up on that silver ladder, just scooping shit out of the gutters. My neighbor coming over, you know,
“[neighbor] ‘Hey Bill, how’s it going?’
“Aw, you know, pretty good, pretty good. Suzie keeps getting bigger, you know. I’ve been wearing this shirt for eleven years, I don’t know what happened to my dreams, you know, I just like coming up here ‘cause it’s quiet, you know, I just stand up here and think about what might have been, Yeah.
“My neighbor’s not even listening to me. He’s all excited about some garden hose he bought at Brookstone. He’s convinced it was designed by NASA.
“[neighbor] ‘Actually, it’s got two nozzles, one for the hot and one for the cold.
“Really? Is it long enough to go around both our necks and the chimney, so we can tandem jump off of this roof?”
At 30:05,
“All right. This is how it works with guys. Anytime you do something remotely sensitive, heartwarming, anything that’s going to make you more of a loving, caring individual, immediately all of your guy friends suggest that maybe, just maybe, you want to suck a dick.
“Oh, it’s brutal. Even if you do something smart. Like, it’s raining outside. ‘He’s got an umbrella. WHAT A FAG. OMG. What are you? Afraid of the water? Put your shoulder up, you fuckin’ homo. Jesus Christ. What, did you pull that thing out of your ass? Oh, it’s brutal. It doesn’t even have to make sense.
“Dude, ‘what are you, a fag?” is the reason why guys drop at 55, out of nowhere, it’s literally from five decades of just suppressing the urge to hug a puppy, admit a baby’s cute, say you want a cookie. You just gotta keep PUSHING IT DOWN.”
It just keeps going (again visual, untranscribable; just watch it).
At 40:45,
“I’m telling you, whatever they’re doing to dogs, they’re going to be doing to us in like ten years. They [dogs] got those six microchips with their balls cut off. I’m telling you.
“That’s what you’re going to hear in the future. Dude, did you hear about Eddie? Aw, they turned his chip off man! Dude, the guy’s fucked! He is fucked! He made one little joke about the government, next thing you know, when he had to buy a round, his head wouldn’t go through [mimes trying to swipe forehead like a credit card] They kept scanning it. Nothing! He’s outside, screaming up at a satellite. Awww…turn it back on! They’re not turnin’ it back on. The dude’s fucked. The dude is fucked. Dude, I ain’t standin’ next to him, they’re going to shut my chip off. I don’t even know that guy.”
At 42:00, a great, long tirade on conspiracy theories and how bankers run the world. “What’s the difference between a banker and a loan shark? What the banker does is legal.”
Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 21:01:57 (GMT-5)
I read an article somewhere—I can no longer find the link that inspired this note—that said that you need an app in order to charge your electric car to make sure you pay for the electricity. If you don’t have cell service or wireless, then you can’t charge. The author was somewhere in Tennessee—I believe outside Knoxville, near the Smokies—where there was no reception. He couldn’t charge his vehicle with the standard chargers. The article went on to explain how to use the emergency kit to charge from an industrial plug instead. [1]
It got me thinking that (A) there really is an app for everything these days and (B) that this is really a solution that only a hyper-libertarian, pay-as-you-go, services-are-businesses-that-must-generate-profit mindset can birth as not only the best solution, but the only feasible solution.
Not every service is a business. Not every service must create profit. Services, by their very definition, are infrastructure that help society generate value. Clean water, education, electricity grids, cell and data grids, and so on. If there’s a well in the middle of town, how much sense does it make to only use that well if it can generate a profit? Of course, you regulate use to avoid overuse and abuse. We’ve just become so accustomed that metering by “who can afford it” is the only possible way of implementing such a system. We knee-jerk solve every problem with markets and money.
How about a service for charging cars where you pay in a certain amount—say $500/year—as a subscription to just be able to use charging anywhere? Or what about if your car kept track of what it was charging and just reported it later? When you synced the app, you would get charged? Is there no room for trust in the system? Like, couldn’t you just tank up on credit, then pay it off later? I can think of a dozen ways to cheat a system like this, but I can also think of a dozen ways to prevent cheating. This should be doable.
But it probably didn’t even occur to the designers of the system because there are intrinsic requirements that they’re not even aware of.
Every requirement limits the size of the solution set.
We should be aware of and honest about systemic requirements (imposed from without, by definition). We should be honest about which of these requirements benefit which stakeholders.
Here are some questions we should ask before designing a nationwide system like this:
We actually do this all the time, but usually grant outsize weight to a group of stakeholders who aren’t directly involved with either developing or using a product. This tenet is almost never considered or acknowledged, because it has become so intrinsic and unquestioned: The first and foremost goal of a solution is to make money for investors.
Only when that condition has been guaranteed, can we consider value to a product’s or service’s users. After that—if there any wiggle room left—do we consider how the product is useful or detrimental to society. Lastly—and this is a long shot—we consider how it could be good or, at worst, neutral for the environment.
So the stakeholders for any product or service, in decreasing order of importance are,
Once the first is satisfied, then the others don’t matter anymore. Everybody goes home to their infinity pools overlooking glowing city lights. If the profit outweighs the fines, then it will be done, regardless of the neglect to all other stakeholders.
It’s a shitty way of running things. We should allow ourselves the luxury of having a bit more imagination.
I just read a cool quote by Edward Tufte,
“There are only two industries that refer to customers as ‘users’: one is IT; the other is the illegal-drugs trade.”
Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 18:18:10 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 30. Dec 2023 11:06:26 (GMT-5)
People like to call providers/platforms like Substack and Rumble “right wing”, when what they really are is that they are “unbiased”. These platforms don’t ban casters for having the wrong views or for saying the wrong things. They therefore end up having the casters that other platforms have banned. Since those platforms constantly designate themselves as “left wing”, the people who they ban are, de facto, “right wing”, even if they are self-evidently not.
Look, some of them are, but almost all of them are most definitely not. There are only a handful of really vile sites that I’ve seen pointed out. Most of them have zero audience. The danger is, of course, that they won’t stop at banning outright Nazis. They never do. Not once they get a whiff of power.
And it’s always the dumbest, most basic, most kowtowing-to-power of opinions who get to choose who to ban. They’re servants of power and don’t even realize it. Just painfully basic—and utterly unaware of the fact.
Once they’ve managed to ban everyone with an opinion that you don’t like, then you can freely call them all the “neofascist and authoritarian right”. Any platform that does host them is therefore also, by definition, fascist.
Nazi even.
Why not? You’re in control of the narrative. Go nuts.
Where are they going to complain? Not on your platforms! 🖕
They can go ahead and post on their little Nazi platforms as long as they can—until we get them, my pretty, and their little dogs, too.
Case in point is this fool I’ve been following for decades, who occasionally posts some neat cultural stuff [1], just looks goddamned stupid every time he reminds me of how basic his politics are. The post Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign. by Jason Kottke references the sure-to-be-scintillating analysis in the “article” Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign by Mike Masnick (TechDirt). Jason thinks this citation is pithy, not noticing the irony.
“The key point: your reputation as a private site is what you allow. If you allow garbage, you’re a garbage site. If you allow Nazis, you’re a Nazi site.”
Jason’s is not a Nazi site, but it’s slowly becoming a garbage, /r/politics, libtard, woke-ass, basic site. He’s now referencing TechDirt for insights into what it even means to support free expression, to run a business that hosts web sites without endorsing those web sites. Being a Nazi is not illegal. Hosting their web site does not enable them any more than hosting fucking TechDirt enables lowbrow, manipulative, censorious, and outright fascist, straight-up, unironically 1984-style opinions about what constitutes thoughtcrime.
And you know what’s neat? It never, ever, ever—not once—occurs to them that some of us might take offense to the platforming of most of them! You know, the thought leaders that brought us the Iraq War, that brought us the financial crisis, that brought us the disinformation boondoggle of the COVID years—oh, yeah, they’re still so smugly in denial about having mad a single misstep there—and about fucking Russiagate.
They cannot shut up about the “nonsense peddlers preying on the most gullible people to get their subscriptions”, but they only point to certain nonsense peddlers, the ones that offend them. The nonsense peddlers that agree with them? Why … those are invisible! Of course, they get to keep their platforms. Of course they get to fail upward! They’re friends! They’re fellow travelers! We all went to school together!
Thomas Friedman still has a job. He has a huge platform. His opinion has caused more damage than we can ever know. No-one—no-one who matters in the liberal, elite world—has ever talked about de-platforming his ass. The entire stable of opinion writers at the New York Times is full of deranged, warmongering lunatics who dress themselves up as liberals.
But they’ve pulled off the grand trick of getting their hordes of slavering, unquestioning, basic lunatics to attack the comparatively tiny Substack. All of Substack doesn’t have a tenth of the reach of the New York Times. The handful of offensive sites on Substack is about 1‰ of even Substack’s content. And yet, I can’t stop hearing about it.
No-one talks about the literal piles of misinformation coming from the mainstream media. While it’s barely started writing in any honest way about the Israel conflict, it can’t bring itself to be at-all honest about the dumpster fire that is the Biden administration, nor what a boondoggle of death they supported in the Ukraine war.
All of these people—who’ve never seen a war they didn’t absolutely love, who’ve never seen a self-enriching scam that they didn’t absolutely love—still have their platforms. No-one’s clamoring for them to lose their platforms, but they get to send their minions on a hunt for Nazis. And those foolish minions think that they’re all doing the Lord’s work. You can’t make this stuff up.
Once you give into them on eliminating outright Nazi content—you know, with actual Hakenkreuz logos and shit—they’ll line right up and start ordering you to ban what they consider to be Nazi-adjacent content. Pretty soon, you’ll have all of the people who fled the mainstream media take to their heels again as these self-selected and unbearably smug Elect manage to impose their will on yet another corner of the Internet.
Kottke probably doesn’t even realize what a fucking tool of these Elites he is, with his mindless regurgitation of “ban the Nazis”. Please. Have you actually visited one of these sites? I visited a couple. The one that had been updated most recently hadn’t been updated since Februrary (10 months ago). There are, I believe, sixteen sites that might be considered Nazi sites. And they all have what amounts to zero traffic. [2]
And these liberal fucking fascists still have to ride Substack about it, not realizing that it’s going to blow right back in their faces when people get sick of being told what they can and cannot read. We are talking about grown fucking adults here. We are talking about web sites that no-one visits because they suck. The problem has solved itself.
This hysteria is exactly how the right-wing stirs itself up with drag queens at story hour. This furor about those dangerous Nazis that still lurk online are the exact liberal equivalent. They just all love to censor. They just all love to tell everybody else what to do.
Land of the free, my ass. [3] None of you dipshits would know freedom if it bit you in the ass. You’re all on the intellectual level of hall monitors, eternally asking people for their hall passes and glorying in the power of turning them down and sending them back where they came from.
Even if you don’t care about the principle—which I’m sure most of you don’t—what about self-preservation? Don’t you realize that it will be your sites that might be banned when the tide turns? Don’t you realize that there is no end to banning stuff? That stuff you like will be banned when you’re no longer in charge? It’s far better to have a world where Thomas Friedman keep writing his little essays than to have a world where someone decided that he can’t.
]]>“According to a social worker’s report, the two were asked how they would feel if a child in their care was LGBT. The two responded that they would still love the child, wouldn’t kick the child out, and wouldn’t subject the child to conversion... [More]”
Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 13:33:02 (GMT-5)
The article Brickbat: Ideological Impurity by Charles Oliver (Reason) writes,
“According to a social worker’s report, the two were asked how they would feel if a child in their care was LGBT. The two responded that they would still love the child, wouldn’t kick the child out, and wouldn’t subject the child to conversion therapy. But both opposed sex change treatments for those under 18 and expressed a reluctance to use pronouns that don’t reflect someone’s biological sex, and Catherine said it would be important for the child to remain chaste. The social worker recommended approval of their application with conditions for LGBT and religious issues, but DCF’s Licensing Review Team rejected the application.”
Look, I feel that this article would have been written differently if the couple had been Muslim and had expressed the exact same opinions. We have to be honest about the fact that we’re only getting annoyed about restrictions based on ideological grounds when those restrictions affect us. You know, … white, upstanding Christians.
People are getting butt-hurt because classically religious stances are being viewed as increasingly intolerant and as not fit for prospective adoptive parents. This is just one more case of people being incapable of understanding that norms change—and sometimes those that benefited for a long time will all of a sudden find themselves on the wrong end of the stick.
If the couple had said that they would beat their child if it misbehaved, almost no-one today would think it odd if they’d been rejected as adoptive parents. This would not have been a reason to reject those parents 60 years ago. Norms change.
If we’re being honest, it is perhaps not too much to ask that people who adopt a child agree to allow the child to develop in a normal, healthy way that works best for the child rather than a way that fits into the worldview of the parents. If a child is homosexual or trans, then it is preferable to have parents who would be understanding and flexible in that situation rather than just dropping the God-hammer. That was the original recommendation, if you read carefully.
But there are some restrictions that certainly raise eyebrows. Like, making sure the child is “chaste”, whatever the hell that means. I think everyone wants children to be chaste. Anything else is pedophilia. You don’t have to mention that one explicitly. So, the prospective mother must have meant chaste beyond the age that most people would consider it normal for a person to become sexually active in this day and age.
So for how much longer did Catherine expect chastity? Does the adopted child have to wait until it’s married? Does it get to make its own choices about when or whether or whom it marries? Religious couples tend to be very cultish and they’ve enjoyed a tremendously long period during which no-one ever called them on their bullshit because they could hide behind a holier-than-thou screen.
I think it’s OK to be a bit more leery of this level of fanaticism—seeing it for what it is. We don’t want to let fanatics adopt if we can help it. As I noted above, if the couple had been Muslim, the article would never have been written because it would have been obvious to everyone that Islamic proscriptions on child-rearing are not compatible with a modern society [1], whereas it’s only recently that secular societies have been calling Christians on the same kind of bullshit.
Benevita offers to let me register... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 13:15:10 (GMT-5)
Swica is my private health-care provider in Switzerland. By all polls and evaluations, they have some of the best customer-care available. They also have a mobile app called Benevita for tracking some personal information.
Benevita offers to let me register an account. I chose an email that identifies the sender—it has a +-sign in it—and a generated password. The page told me that an error had occurred without telling me what I could do to correct the error.
Was it that the email isn’t supported? That happens sometimes, with stupid web sites that filter out perfectly legitimate and valid email addresses that use a pattern that’s been supported and encouraged in all major mail services for decades. Was it that the password was too long? That also happens with stupid web sites that don’t understand security in any realistic way.
So, I gave up on the mobile app because it was too complicated. I figured I would try with a web browser.
Cool. Cool, cool, cool.
I’m using Opera, which is basically the Chrome browser, but without selling your soul to Google. It uses Chromium. It’s a shame that Swica’s web team is so terrible that they don’t understand that. Most sites that do something this stupid also offer to let you proceed at your own risk.
So, I’m a dozen minutes into trying to create a user account at my own insurance company because they have such terrible, terrible software. This is a national insurance company. Lots of customers and lots of money.
I load up Safari, guessing that this might be a supported browser.
It is.
I run into the same unknown error for creating the user account as I’d run into on my mobile device. On the web, though, it looks like there’s a small progress bar under the password field, where it’s validating it “live”. That looks OK.
I think the problem is the “+” in the email. But you know what would help? A goddamned validation-error message. This is not acceptable. It’s bad enough that large companies are filtering out perfectly valid emails provided by paying customers that would allow those customers to detect which mail is coming from Swica, but this site can’t even get out of its own way enough to actually come right out and say that that’s the problem.
Was it the problem?
Of course it was the problem. I had to debug Swica’s onboarding process for them. This is bullshit.
I get an activation email. The link opens the page in my default browser—Opera. Guess what? It works just fine. No more error message, as shown above.
I’m able to complete my registration process. As a final insult, they give you only 20 seconds to respond to the SMS confirmation before kicking you back to the “what’s your phone number?” page.
Once I’m logged in to the Benevita App, it takes several seconds for the status to change. As soon as it changes to “logged in”, I’m informed that “your trackers has been successfully disconnected.”
What?
I didn’t ask to disconnect my tracker. I asked to log in.
What’s going on?
Time to put on my sleuthing cap again because Swica is utterly incapable of informing its users what its web sites and mobile apps are doing.
I bet this is what happened.
When I try to set up the tracker again, I get the following,
Brilliant software, Swica. Top notch.
At least the translations are pretty good. Except maybe for the “Now connect” button, which is obviously a direct translation of the German “Jetzt verbinden”.
Second time’s the charm, though.
Now, I can connect to Garmin. There, I get to contend with Garmin’s janky login form, which disables the “login” button randomly, then clears the password when you click on it. Second time was the charm there, too, but this is ludicrously bad.
This is what these globe-girdling firms can offer us? They can’t even get registration and login forms working?
Am I the only one to whom this happens? Or am I the only one complaining about it? Are the rest of you complacent? Do you no longer expect anything to work in a way that doesn’t waste your time?
Ironically, it’s my healthcare app that drives up my blood pressure.
Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 12:54:45 (GMT-5)
It’s pretty tedious to watch so many people trying as hard as they can to censor expression of which they don’t approve, all the while screaming at the top of their lungs that they are being censored by others. They see censorship of their own speech as beyond the pale because their opinions are correct whereas those they are trying to censor should of course not be able to speak out because they are promulgating hate speech.
It’s all so very tiresome. Good people end up fooling themselves—or allowing themselves to be fooled into—wasting their time with this. They have their hearts in the right place, but they are, in the end, hypocrites. They can’t empathize with their enemy. They can’t bring themselves to see that some people view banning discussion of “queer stuff” in schools as just as moral a cause as others view banning Nazis from Twitter.
Are Nazis worse than queers? Duh. But don’t forget that queers can be Nazis.
Also, most people aren’t Nazis. They’re just small-minded, racist morons [1] with tattoos that they don’t understand.
Even given all of that, nobody should be banning or censoring anybody.
Except for stuff that’s already illegal. Look, if we’ve put the time in to push it through legislation, then we have to abide by that. We live in a society. If we don’t like it, then we have to put the work in to unban it. We can’t add a layer of quasi-legal banning and censoring on top of it. That’s just lazy. And undemocratic.
As with most issues, people’s opinions differ not in principle, but in degree. Those that argue that queerness shouldn’t be taught in school are arguing for a minimum age limit before which the state should not be involved in teaching certain topics. That’s not what they’re saying, necessarily—because they’re usually morons—but that’s the kernel that you could extract from their viewpoint. It’s a legitimate one, I think. I don’t think most people would be delighted to see their four-year-old playing with lifelike dildos [2], especially because of the discussion that could ensue.
There’s a time and place for everything and it’s legitimate for the actual parents of a child to have a say in when some things happen, within reason. I don’t think that’s controversial. I think, again, people differ in degree, but not in principle. Also, I know that a lot of parents have “checked out” or “are not doing their jobs”, but we do ourselves and everyone else a disservice when we start to assume that parents with whom we disagree are de-facto “not adequate parents.” While this is super-convenient, it’s not honest. Do the work.
Parents legitimately delay “the talk” for a while because it involves a lot of issues and cultural decisions that have been taken that don’t really make logical sense—they just are. You usually have to reach a certain age to even be capable of processing a discussion that involves that kind of complexity. Most people aren’t capable of explaining it in a sane way because those same cultural idiosyncrasies have instilled in them a deep shame in even talking about them. Hell, a lot of people fuck only in absolute darkness. How are they going to talk about what’s happening with “queer stuff”?
Not that “queer stuff” equates in any way with sex, but it is adjacent and that’s the sticking point [3] for many. I know that some parents are against the idea of queerness, not just the mechanics of it, but cut me some slack here. I’m talking to figure out how to avoid offending potential allies, not people who are so different in opinion that the Venn diagram looks like two oranges.
Anyway, at what age do you expose kids to the richness of human culture and diversity? Do you leave that up to the parents? Or does the school get involved so we can finally break the cycle of horrific discrimination and twisted thought that dominate public discourse? To what degree are we confident that teachers and/or the state will be capable of teaching this kind of stuff “correctly”?
And there’s the rub, no? How do you teach it “correctly”? That’s where people’s opinions differ. As usual, you can dismiss the most rabid on either end. But there’s a lot of room in the middle where there’s a legitimate difference of opinion on how to proceed.
The problem seems very much to be that people are utterly incapable of introspection or empathy. The point of knowing that your opinions are influenced strongly by your upbringing and how society has treated you is so that you can be alert to when you might just be parroting something that you’re expected to believe.
This happens to everyone. It happens all the time.
The point is to realize what you’re saying and to acknowledge that people with other perspectives might have a point that makes sense from their own perspective [4], even if it doesn’t make any sense for you. Yet.
To take an example from a completely different area, China made the one-child policy not because they’re evil communists but because they saw it as a solution to endemic poverty, malnutrition, and starvation. They ended up having been justified in thinking that poverty would be reduced with fewer people, but it’s definitely debatable whether they could achieved a similar result, but by giving up less. The results—a massive decrease in crushing poverty—speak for that solution, though. They lost something along the way, it affected—and continues to affect—generations, but they at least got something out of it.
We should always be aware of what our society is doing in our name, and how it would appear to someone who’d not been raised in our own propaganda soup. Is what we think justified just because of our context? Or is there an absolute justification that makes sense for others? Is what we’re losing because of how we do things worth it? If we give up a freedom, what have we gained for it? Was it worth it?
Until you start to see your own system from an external viewpoint, you won’t be able to ask, to say nothing of answer, those questions.
]]>“Critics of radical free speech, victims of hate speech, and marginalized people of all kinds began to appear in hacker communities. The things they had to say were not comfortable.
“The free speech absolutists among the old guard, faced with this... [More]”
Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 12:19:43 (GMT-5)
The article The forbidden topics by Drew DeVault writes,
“Critics of radical free speech, victims of hate speech, and marginalized people of all kinds began to appear in hacker communities. The things they had to say were not comfortable.
“The free speech absolutists among the old guard, faced with this discomfort, developed a tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them. They were not the target of the hate, so it did not make them personally uncomfortable, and defending it would maintain the pretense of defending free speech, of stalwartly holding the line on a treasured part of their personal hacker ethic.”
I wonder whether the author doesn’t have have a completely different axe to grind here. [1] As I just covered in the article What is your responsibility to the feelings of others?, it’s not at all as simple as he makes it out to be. He thinks it’s simple because he’s righteous about his representation of the oppressed.
When he writes that “the things they had to say were not comfortable”, it’s entirely possible that people came into existing forums—contexts—and started calling everyone a white-supremacist, misogynist, homophobic Nazi who didn’t match the speech patterns they’d learned to expect from other forums.
If you’re just pootling along, minding your own business and someone tells you you’re a Nazi, it throws you off. You know you’re not a Nazi, but now you’re on the defensive, having to justify yourself to an extremely hostile and strongly opinionated stranger. I have no idea if that’s what’s happening in these forums, but tend to believe that calling it a “tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them” is probably the least-generous interpretation.
He complains that his post was quickly moderated off of the front of Hacker News. Maybe it wasn’t being censored, but just being judged appropriately. I’d read the post to be overly long and was also on a subject and with a voice that doesn’t really match anything else on Hacker News. Maybe it should be! But it’s not. It’s like saying that Popular Mechanics banned an article about how to apply eyeliner.
I guess they could have just let it get ignored out of existence, but instead it was banned. Sure, fine, maybe there’s a problem. Or maybe the author has made enough of a pain-in-the-ass of himself that he just gets a-priori banned now.
There is a difference between defending free speech and defending a person’s right to say what they want, no matter the context. If you’re going to Thanksgiving dinner at you’re aunt’s house, then I’m not going to stand there and defend your right to say “cunt” throughout the meal, discomfiting everyone else and ruining the evening (or, most likely, afternoon).
You’re allowed to say the word, and you should legally allowed to say it in any public context, but be prepared for some pushback. You can even say it at Thanksgiving, in a private context, but expect to be thrown out of the house if you persist. There are consequences. You have to respect a person’s right not to want to hear certain words or topics in private areas that they control.
It’s just like I can write the word “cunt” on my own personal blog and very rightly claim that anyone who doesn’t like it, doesn’t have to come here and read my blog. But when my mom says I use too many bad words, maybe I’ll change how I write. [2] Look, it’s not a terrible idea to consider your audience or the context. It may even help your improve your voice and make it more generally accessible.
Don’t change what you’re saying, for God’s sake! But maybe think about how your’e saying it. That goes for both the troglodytes inhabiting certain forums—who maybe aren’t even aware they’re troglodytes!—as well as those who invade those forums, bristling to tell everyone else what to do.
I follow the author’s blog and know that, even in his own world, he’s considered very contentious. He has strong opinions. I’m not surprised that he’s going to assume that everyone is less enlightened than he is. If I’ve misinterpreted, I apologize, but it doesn’t really matter, because I’m just using this as a jumping-off point for my own opinion, anyway.
Which is also strong and almost-certainly contentious. 🤷♀️
Lots of laughs.... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 11:04:15 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 28. Dec 2023 12:23:41 (GMT-5)
The other night, some older guys walked by me in a train station. They were talking about drinking beer. They looked like they’d been doing just that. One of them joked to the other that he was also “looking at pretty girls“. [1] His friend replied “there are none along that way“.
Lots of laughs. Super funny.
There were young ladies in that mass of people walking away from the train. What did they think? Were they amused? I doubt it.
It’s not really funny. It’s actually kind of stupid. It’s almost more a mantra. The guys are barely aware of what they’re saying. It was just standard banter between them. It was call and response, probably instinctual at this point. The ritual joke, with the ritual response.
It’s hopeless to prevent them from talking like that in private. I know, I know, the fact that they think this way is part of the problem, etc. etc.—but let’s be realistic. You’re not going to change them now. Society has done its damage.
But do they have a right to talk like that around others? They have the right to say a lot of things, but at what point do we consider it to be threatening? At what point does someone’s right to feel safe in a train station, or on their walk home, trump someone else’s right to express themselves in public?
The guys weren’t leering around. But how can you be sure? And does it matter? What if it had been dark out? Would the ladies have felt more threatened? Would they have taken a different way home? Do we adjust our societal rules to accommodate the most easily offended? To what degree should we care what they think? To what degree should we care about a someone’s right to make jokes in public?
It gets complicated because they’re saying things in public that are best understood in a context that is not available in public. If you knew the guys, you might know they’re harmless. Maybe they’re a gay couple and making ironic jokes. Maybe they’re mentally handicapped. Maybe they’re lacking empathy and only barely aware of the effect their words might have. Maybe they are predators and everyone really should have scattered.
And expressing an idea about “pretty girls” is one thing. What about expressing an unpopular opinion about a hot-button political issue? Wouldn’t hearing it make someone’s blood boil? What right does that blood-boiling person have to a peaceful ride home versus the other person’s right to discuss certain issues with a friend in public? In that case, I would be more on the side of freedom of expression because the safety of the person whose blood is boiling isn’t threatened, either explicitly or implicitly. Instead, it’s more their problem that they let the opinions of complete strangers affect them so strongly.
For me, it’s a bit less clear where the context is men making salacious comments in a twilit train station. But what if the comments were about a certain ethnic group? That can feel pretty threatening as well.
But context is paramount. If the context is a comedian on stage, then you shouldn’t be able to block them from saying whatever they feel like saying. Comedians should benefit from their context—that they’re paid to make people laugh. People laugh for different reasons, sometimes stupid and evil ones. That doesn’t make the comedian evil. The comedian doesn’t hold every opinion they express on stage. They are sometimes being very ironic, to make the point that the people who think something is funny in a non-ironic way are actually the ones who should be laughed at. It’s all very complicated.
This exact kind of thing is why people get into so much trouble on social media. They say things that would work just fine in a small group, a group that understands the context, but that don’t work in public, with no context. They fail to understand how what they’re writing will be interpreted by people who don’t know them. [2]
If no-one wants to hear it, then the hope is that people will automatically stop saying those things, stop making those stupid jokes. If people do want to hear, and we still disapprove, then we have to do the work of addressing the root cause rather than the symptom. Don’t take the shortcut of banning speech.
Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 10:30:26 (GMT-5)
I find myself increasingly at odds with this ever-more-popular notion that there are certain things you cannot say. Restricting freedom of expression is just a way of restricting freedom of thought. If you can’t express an idea, you can’t share it. If you can’t share it, you can’t inspire other people to think it.
When I moved to Switzerland decades ago, I remember being quite surprised to hear that it was technically illegal to deny the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. The discussions were not juristic. They were purely anecdotal. The assertions were made by people who’d probably also just “heard” that that was the case.
It’s not even clear whether this applies to Switzerland or only the neighbor to the north. You know how these discussion are. There’s not usually a strong emphasis on evidence and accuracy. You just kind of hear it, absorb it, and move on. You can only hope that such grazing shots don’t influence your mindset too much—although they probably do, more than you know.
Still, even taken at face value…I’m not sure in which contexts this law would apply. Is it for teachers? Journalists? People talking in a bar? At a dinner table at home? What actually constitutes denial? Is it only if you flatly deny that it ever happened? What if you doubt the absolute number of Jews that were killed? What if you quibble with the focus on Jews rather than gypsies, homosexuals, socialists, or communists? What if you broaden the discussion to it having been a human tragedy? What if you have issues with the way the legend of the Holocaust has been weaponized to cause subsequent and more recent tragedy?
What does “denial” actually entail? All of the things above? Perhaps it includes this article, just for broaching the subject? Is my attempt to learn what the law actually is already a transgression of it?
I’m sure it’s buried somewhere in the law, with perhaps more detail on what will get you prosecuted. However, there’s a lot of trouble you can get into before prosecution. If people think that denying the Holocaust is illegal, then they’re not going to bother about nuance. They’re not going to consider the fine points noted above. They’re going to point the finger of accusal and bray at you until the police come and take you away. They’re going to feel great about themselves for having something good and worthwhile—for having punished the heretic. And so it goes.
And the police may not care. Depending on their mood or the pressures on them to increase arrest records or to punish heretics, they might just haul you in, knowing that nothing will stick, knowing that they’re only doing it to inconvenience you. Or maybe the police will be just as fanatical as your accuser.
Even if you’re let go, well, you’re that person, a person with the wrong thoughts, who dares to say the wrong things. Maybe you’ll lose your online platform. You’ll be banned from social-media sites. Your blog will be taken down. Your ISP will drop you. Hell, maybe you’ll even get fired for being a malcontent. Or thrown out of your building. No-one wants to risk you tarnishing their reputation.
Maybe you were asking a perfectly legitimate, reasonable question. Maybe you were trying to learn. Your lesson will be handed to you with demotion of social status, lifestyle, and ability to provide for yourself and your dependents. Perhaps you’ll draw the wrong lesson from that, but no matter. Society will have spoken. Society will have forced you to understand that there are certain things we don’t say—and subsequently allow ourselves to think—else we are punished. Society tells us that things are better this way. The alternative is chaos.
The problem begins with censorship. It begins with people thinking that it’s legitimate to censor others. It doesn’t even matter what’s being censored—the first things are always the ones so obvious that only a monster could disapprove of banning them—because it’s the imposition of the mindset that already does the damage. Society is training its citizens to think that there are good and bad thoughts.
Once you have people trained on that, then you can start to channel their thoughts in the direction that you want by making them avoid bad thoughts. You can freely invent which thoughts are bad and which are good. You can even switch them around if you leave enough time in-between.
It’s not what is being censored that’s the problem. It’s accepting that censorship is legitimate that opens Pandora’s Box.
I, too, could be in trouble when the trend against free expression finds its ultimate culmination in a police state. I will be arrested for saying that I think there should be free expression, freedom of opinion and speech. They will smugly tell me that that isn’t allowed, that I can’t say things like that. That I shouldn’t even think things like that.
I will perhaps try to defend myself, forgetting that even utterring a defense is forbidden. Hopefully quickly enough, I’ll learn the new rules. I will go silent, not in the hope that I won’t be prosecuted farther, but because resistance in a world without free speech is not only futile, it’s impossible.
But…while a world like that doesn’t deserve to hear what you’ve got to say … the people trapped in it do. So you have to persevere, you have to try to figure out how to make yourself heard in a world that wants to be deaf, in a world that thinks there are clear lines to be drawn between what can and cannot be said, a world that believes that everything is cut and dried and that the truth never shifts, that the goalposts never move, that that which was certain can disappear in a mist of lies.
It’s not always easy to reach people, though. Some are absolutely blinded by their ignorance and inability to reconsider anything. For example, from the article An Infinite Distance by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch), we learn that,
“Rep. Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who volunteered for the IDF, compared Palestinian civilians in Gaza to Nazis: “I think when we look at this, as a whole, I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians. I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians.””
This is a sitting U.S. Congressman, who volunteered for a foreign army in 2015 (Israel), five years after he’d had his legs blown off in Afghanistan. He has a Bachelor’s degree from the “Harvard University Extension School”, which he somehow earned with only a year of effort after having been in the IDF. He must get up very early in the morning. He’s now a Congressman. He thinks that the people in the concentration camps with the vastly inferior firepower are the Nazis. Incredible. It’s like a mental illness.
However! I recognize his right to say and do these things, just as I recognize my own right to condemn him for his hypocrisy and inhumanity. Which one of us should be allowed to express their opinion? Him? Me? Both? Neither?
Nothing good comes of granting the right to censorship. Instead, we should combat bad ideas with better ideas. We should always try to determine why bad ideas are so appealing. We should think about who is promulgating these bad ideas. We should wonder why we think those are bad ideas. And then we have to put in the hard work of convincing people otherwise rather than hitting them over the head with a stick.
]]>“ich habe in einer Zürcher Gemeinde ein Eigenheim gekauft. Im Garten meines Nachbarn steht eine mächtige Tanne, die viel Schatten auf mein Grundstück wirft. Der im Kanton Zürich für einzelne Tannen geltende minimale Grenzabstand von acht Metern... [More]”
Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 09:45:25 (GMT-5)
I read this in a consumer magazine a while ago.
“ich habe in einer Zürcher Gemeinde ein Eigenheim gekauft. Im Garten meines Nachbarn steht eine mächtige Tanne, die viel Schatten auf mein Grundstück wirft. Der im Kanton Zürich für einzelne Tannen geltende minimale Grenzabstand von acht Metern ist bei weitem nicht eingehalten. Kann ich somit verlangen, dass mein Nachbar die Tanne fällt?”
Translation into English:
“I bought my own home in a municipality in Zürich. A giant pine tree stands in my neighbor’s garden. It casts a large shadow on my property. The minimal distance to the property border is eight meters in kanton Zürich—and there’s no question that it’s much, much closer than that. Can I force my neighbor to chop down the tree?”
The answer was:
“Ja. Im Kanton Zürich verjährt zwar der Anspruch auf die Beseitigung von Bäumen und Sträuchern, die näher als erlaubt an der Grundstücksgrenze stehen, fünf Jahre nachdem sie gepflanzt wurden. Bei sehr starkem Schattenwurf, der die Lebensqualität massiv einschränkt, können sich geschädigte Nachbarn aber auf das Nachbarrecht des Zivilgesetzbuches berufen. Denn erheblicher Schattenwurf kann als eine «übermässige Einwirkung» eingestuft werden, die laut Gesetz verboten ist.”
Translation into English:
“Yes. However, your right to demand the removal of trees or bushes that are closer to the property border than allowed is limited to a five-year statute of limitations, starting from when they were planted. If the shade is very strong and massively restricts quality of life, then affected neighbors can fall back on “neighbor rights” from civil law. That law allows for classifying shade as an excessive impact, which is forbidden.”
Cool. I hate almost everything about that answer, especially the hubris that a tree belongs to one person.
I guess the tree doesn’t get a vote? The community that benefits from the tree’s shade doesn’t get a vote? Some jackass buys a house, knowing that there’s a giant shady pine tree, then demands that his neighbor chop it down? Cool. Cool, cool, cool.
Trees provide shade. They are cool. The world is getting hotter. Stop being a complete and utter jackass. This should not be a law. It should not be legal to just chop down a living being that’s been around for a hundred years because your fucking porch doesn’t get enough sunlight in the autumn. Get the fuck out of here with that.
This problem is not new. It’s probably why Tolkien dreamed up ents. People aren’t willing to defend trees, so we have to hope that completely fictional beings swoop in to save the day.
]]>“Lippmann, the celebrated editor, commentator and author attended a dinner party in Manhattan one evening, and at the port-and-cigars stage of the occasion the host announced an intellectual amusement. All those... [More]”
Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 09:36:48 (GMT-5)
The article Undivided Loyalties by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post) starts off with this anecdote about Walter Lippmann.
“Lippmann, the celebrated editor, commentator and author attended a dinner party in Manhattan one evening, and at the port-and-cigars stage of the occasion the host announced an intellectual amusement. All those who advocated socialism were to stand on one side of the dining room, and on the other those who favored the capitalist system. The guests duly divided. And when they were done sorting themselves out, Lippmann sat pointedly alone at the table—the ultimate in either indecision or a refusal to stand for one thing and against another.
“[…] since hearing or reading the story I have thought many times about Lippmann as he sat by himself at the dinner table. One could argue he was a pitiful waffler, refusing to take a stand on a critical question of the day. Of what use are such people, you might ask. On the other hand, you may have it that Lippmann did take a stand, this stand being that there are virtues in both of the social and economic systems at issue, and it was his right to defend his position, a constituency of one.”
Or perhaps Lippmann truly thought it was a stupid game, without nuance, played for and by children.
If you have the luxury of not being forced to swear allegiance to a side, then you should take it. If you don’t have skin in the game, then you don’t have to make that choice. If you’re faced with someone or many someones directly trying to kill you—kill or be killed—then you will have to commit yourself wholly to one “side”. If you don’t have skin in the game, then you should indulge in the luxury of nuance.
Is there something useful to capitalism? Of course. Ditto for socialism. If you could have only one of them, which would you choose? Silly question. Any conceivable socialist society contains capitalist elements, and vice versa. It’s like asking whether you’d rather keep your brain or your heart. Let’s talk about something substantial instead.
Lawrence continued,
“We live in an era of violence, viciousness, injustice and cruelty that, if not unprecedented by way of scale and magnitude, is down there with the worst for its craven immorality and inhumanity. This adds another to the numerous responsibilities we bear in exchange for some time on Earth. We are called upon to declare ourselves and what we stand for. We are obliged —whether or not we accept this obligation, and the majority of us don’t—to act on what we stand for. We ought to make clear to what we dedicate our loyalties.”
OK, Patrick, let’s move to the “dedicate your loyalties” topic of the day: Palestine and Israel. Both sides want Israel to stop bombing. Israelis and their supporters wish they were able to stop bombing, but they don’t feel safe yet. They feel that Hamas might spring—whack-a-mole-like—from the ground again at any moment and reap another 1200 Israelis.
Palestinians just want the bombing to stop. But they also want the occupation to stop. Israel’s proposed solution seems to be to move the Palestinians anywhere else but Israel. “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
Palestinians can pinky-swear that they won’t attack again, but it’s an empty promise, one that they can’t really make. Because how can you promise your oppressor that you’ll never strike back without negating yourself? How can you promise that no-one among you will do so?
So there is no “sitting at the dinner table alone” in this question (calling back to Lawrence’s reference to the story about Lippmann), I suppose, but there is a requirement that we understand all sides and arguments—no matter how immoral we find them to be. We should be sure we understand before we decide.
If there are people on both sides who truly believe that the only solution is to eradicate the other … then we have to accept that as the starting point. Understanding will help illuminate potential solutions—escape routes, if you will—as well.
We also have to look the situation squarely in the eye and see it for what it is. As Lawrence puts it,
“[…] Israel began, with plentiful American support, its barbarous campaign to exterminate as many of the Palestinians of Gaza as it can before world opinion forces it to stop, while permanently displacing those it has not murdered. What we witness as the Israel Defense Forces attack Gaza is the exercise of power with[out] the merest pretense of decency, morality, or humaneness to veil it, to dress it up for the pitiful wafflers among us. It would take a Hannah Arendt to tell us if the deployment of power in this fashion is unprecedented in modern history, or in postwar history, or according to some other parameter. I would compare it, at a minimum, with America’s barbarity in Southeast Asia from the mid–1950s to the mid–1970s.”
Well, I think Israel has a long way to go in sheer numbers, but the indifference and single-mindedness—the arrogant presumption of infallibility—are very comparable.
So, the proposal is to get rid of unwanted people by slaughter and forced emigration. Hauptsach weg. We have to determine how large that group is, how intractable their opinion, and what solutions they would consider acceptable. If we’re honest, then we would have to plumb the depths of their solution space and determine how that affects our ability to plan a way for the future. Does the future contain them? Can it? If they’re made aware that they’re the problem and that the solution set being considered does not contain them, does their level of intractability change? If it does, if short-term self-preservation forces them to act against their own interests, to what degree is this a ruse from which they will retreat when the pressure is off?
How much influence do voices like this one have?
“Simcha Rothman, a member of the Israeli parliament for the Religious Zionism party, part of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition told the BBC this week that the UN has kept Palestinian refugees in Gaza for 75 years in order to hurt Israel and that the Gazans should be relocated in other places.”
He’s a member of parliament. He believes that Palestinians are a disease from which Israelis need to be freed. It’s an uphill climb if you have to deal with that as a starting point, I’ll grant you that.
In the Israel-Palestine conflict, there is no easy solution. There is one side with the absolute plurality of power and an absolute deficit of ethical underpinning not only for their current methods but also for the ways forward proposed by their most unreasonable representatives.
The temptation there would be to round up to punishing the “criminal” en masse—collective punishment because they’re all so unreasonable. In this, one would become just like the Israelis, treating them just like they treat the Palestinians, in their feigned mad hunt for Hamas terrorists in every living room and hospital lobby.
No, the solution has to consider the damage that has been done to all citizens of that area, whether or not they happen to have an elected representation over which they purportedly hold sway. Just as Palestinians are not the worst of Hamas, Israelis are not the worst of their government. We have to offer everyone a way out, a way to be their best, most reasonable, and generous selves.
What does that mean? If Israelis continue to believe that there are only upsides to exterminating or exiling a population from their land, then they have to be disabused of that notion. If they think that they can just take the land, settle it, and grow as they have, without any real drawbacks to their standing in the international community, then it should be made clear that this is not the case. We have to be open to the idea that it is entirely possible that they will not care.
Like children who understand that their parents cannot stop taking care of them, they might just push to get whatever they want in the short term. Perhaps shame and appeals to justice won’t work. We have to try, because I kind of have to believe that it will work. The world just has to be firm that the other, easier avenues are no longer available. The world has to convince Israel that it needs the world. It’s not an easy job.
Right now, Israel feels that they’ve built a moral justification for ethnically cleansing Gaza first, then the West Bank. It is banking on its own people being OK with that. It is banking on the international community not daring to punish it in any way that would dissuade it. So far, it’s been right. Dead right.
The Palestinians have no power and no leverage. They have to be convinced that we’re serious this time, that we’re really going to help them survive, get back on their own feet. It’s an uphill climb there, too. Just the sheer physical situation is already working against us. This is a population so traumatized and intellectually reduced by war and occupation that it may possibly already be too late.
A population of children who have only known occupation and trauma and malnutrition and war will not have developed any of the tools and nuance that they need in order to tread the narrow and winding path forward, avoiding the pitfalls that will deliver justification to an equally skittish Israel to leave the path. Just the malnutrition and dehydration alone, during their developmental years, are going to mean that the crop of the best and the brightest that they need for this endeavor is necessarily diminished. That’s just nature.
I’m not saying that they could never have done it! I’m saying that exigencies and deprivation of the sort these generations have experienced leave scars. They take primacy. It becomes all you know and you need a lot of breathing space and time to get to a place where you’re equipped to be diplomatic with the people who did that to you. That’s if, as outlined above, you haven’t been biologically diminished during formative years.
Any that manage to crop up anyway can be mown down with impunity. This serves to guarantee that only the least likely to struggle up past the ignorance imposed by occupation will survive. So, the Israelis target lawyers, scholars, doctors, journalists, and other thought leaders, until all that is left are exactly the slavering zombie-like hordes of haters they’ve been accusing all Palestinians of having been all along. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There is Hamas, which has, at various times, espoused their hatred of Jews and desire to eliminate them all. There are also more recent, official statements that are a good deal more moderate. There’s something to work with on both sides, if you deal with the more moderate parties. However, let’s round Hamas up to an intolerant organization that wants to eliminate anyone who isn’t cis-gendered, straight, male, Arab, and Muslim. That makes them the intellectual equivalents of Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz, Ben-Gvir, and the like on the Israel side. There is shocking intolerance everywhere.
I’ve heard people say that the youth in America who support LGBTQA, BLM, etc. should not support Palestine because Palestine is actually against them personally. Those people are relentless in their efforts to conflate concepts. They conflate Judaism with Zionism, and they conflate Palestine with Hamas and ISIS and Wahhabism. They see no distinction.
The simple fact is that there are thousands of people being murdered and millions being made to suffer depravity for no other reason that they’re in the wrong place, of the wrong ethnicity and the wrong religion, and espouse the wrong opinions: namely, that they wish to exist without being subjugated to the sovereignty of rulers they did not choose. It is this that people are responding to.
Netanyahu responds that it is antisemitic to focus on war crimes committed by Israel when there are so many other war crimes to choose from on this planet. The youth of Europe and the U.S. are focusing laser-like on what Israel is doing. It’s a cute point, actually. He admits to the atrocities, but then says its antisemitic to notice only those atrocities. His solution would be, of course, to not notice any atrocities or, at the very least, to ignore those of Israel.
Look, people have their political awakening at different times. They didn’t listen when Yemen was briefly a topic. Congo was never a topic. It is the right thing to do to get Israel to stop what it is doing. It is wrong to stop there. But let’s take one thing at a time.
An empathy toward the Palestinians is a good start for a generation we’d thought had lost that capacity.
You can also go ahead and express empathy for the hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who’ve been uprooted by their own government’s murderous policies. You can empathize with an Israeli population that is now suffering existential fear because of those selfsame policies. You can empathize with the families of those innocents killed on October 7th.
But you can’t do only that. You can’t just see the suffering on one side and not acknowledge the suffering on the other, not if you’re interested in a long-term solution. Short term, though? Yeah, Israel has to stop bombing. This is ridiculous. Nothing good can even begin to happen as long as that goes on. The protesters are right that there needs to be a longer-lasting ceasefire.
The first was,
“Wisdom is the offspring of suffering and time.”
This sounds pretty deep and is doubtless true in some cases, but I don’t think it’s true that only... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 27. Dec 2023 22:09:46 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 28. Dec 2023 12:24:07 (GMT-5)
I was chatting with a friend [1] the other day and he told me of two interesting quotes by Emperor Izaro from the game Path of Exile [2].
The first was,
“Wisdom is the offspring of suffering and time.”
This sounds pretty deep and is doubtless true in some cases, but I don’t think it’s true that only suffering can bring wisdom. Sometimes it’s perspicacity and time that leads to wisdom. I guess suffering helps to drive the message home, to make sure you don’t forget it—in remembering the pain and wanting to avoid its repetition, you end up sounding wise when urging restraint or caution.
We played around with a few others, trying to disambiguate the terms,
So, the tl;dr would be:
Another of Emperor Izaro’s quotes is,
“Where the weapons remain, a new enemy will simply take the place of the old.”
That one reminded him of a statement a friend of his had once made about the U.S. having a military budget “big enough to challenge God.”
After a bit of toying about, we’d formed,
“The U.S. is a bully, a simpleton, no more than a child mentally, with a giant chip on its shoulder and a military budget big enough to challenge God.”
It’s definitely not alone, but it’s definitely the biggest one.
This is a pretty compact and interesting overview.
At 46:00, Andrej discusses some of the available jailbreaks or “prompt escapes” that are still available, even with the latest LLM Agents. [1]
He shows how to reformulate a query for making napalm by asking the LLM Agent to tell... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 23:39:48 (GMT-5)
This is a pretty compact and interesting overview.
At 46:00, Andrej discusses some of the available jailbreaks or “prompt escapes” that are still available, even with the latest LLM Agents. [1]
He shows how to reformulate a query for making napalm by asking the LLM Agent to tell it a story his grandmother used to tell him about making napalm. Or how to simply convert your query into the exact same text, but in Base64 encoding, in which case the LLM Agent gives the answer you were looking for, “escaping” its alignment/training/biases.
You can also avoid the training by using a non-English language because the focus has been on avoiding issues with English. All of these attempts to stop prompt escapes are just addressing symptoms, not the base problem. This is probably because they don’t understand how the black box of the LLM itself works, so all they can do is to massage the input in the hopes of getting what they consider to be more acceptable output, or to massage the output as well.
This is a great analysis of the state of LLMs and LLM agents by a physicist/philosopher who’s very good at communicating and thinking about hard problems.
He argues as well that there is a distinct difference in the underlying technology of the LLM/neural network and the agents with which we actually have contact—which are an LLM wrapped with many, many layers of bias and training and guardrails.
We should be aware of two things: (1) That there are guardrails that very clearly delineate the information that you’ll get out of such an agent and (2) that these LLMs don’t have an concept of the world, they have no context, they are just incredible word-associators.
He gives several interesting examples of his interactions, in which he demonstrates that the tools aren’t very useful—and are actively harmful to actually learning something—when approaching real-world problems, rather than the toy problems that you usually see demonstrated.
He asked the LLM agent about a hypothetical version of chess where the board was on a cylinder. Any human familiar with chess would quickly see that the kings are now right next to each other, and that the game would be over on the first move, as the kings start off in simultaneous checkmate.
The LLM Agent, however, droned on and on about what an interesting innovation this would be and just made up a whole bunch of shit that had no relation to the question, but was vaguely related to chess. The LLM Agent is a student who’s never paid attention in class and is trying to bullshit its way through the exam.
Why “agent” and not “AI” or “LLM”? Because the LLM is at the core of an agent. An agent is an LLM plus “alignment”, put together with the explicit purpose of commercialization or professional usage. An LLM can only “hallucinate”, in that that’s all that it does. Sometimes it says things we find interesting and can use, whether they are factual or not. An LLM can be used as a tool, but it is not foolproof. An LLM-based agent, on the other hand, has been designed to be useful and, often, “factual”, in that it has been “aligned”—told what is correct and incorrect.
An LLM is biased based on its training data. An LLM agent is biased based on it’s LLM’s training data and based on its guardrails and alignment. The unpredictability of the result for any given prompt combined with the complete black box of both its training and its alignment mean that you have to be careful about what you get out of an LLM Agent.
]]>“The end of COP28 was also applauded by John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate. Kerry said of the draft resolution,... [More]”
Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 23:30:16 (GMT-5)
First, let’s take the less-hopeful, but more-sober article COP28 climate summit exposes the dead end of fighting climate change under capitalism by Brian Dyne (WSWS). It writes,
“The end of COP28 was also applauded by John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate. Kerry said of the draft resolution, “While nobody here will see their views completely reflected, the fact is that this document sends a very strong signal to the world.”
“That signal is that capitalist governments can and will do nothing to fight climate change. Any genuine mobilization would cut across their national interests and corporate profits. It is significant that while most other heads of state attended at least part of the conference, US President Joe Biden did not, ostensibly too busy prosecuting war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza.”
“Current greenhouse gas emissions are putting Earth on track for a 3-degree Celsius warming, twice as much as the current benchmark presented as a “point of no return.” In such a scenario, an estimated one billion people would be forced from their homes a result of sea level rise, on top of the billion now who are currently under threat from dying as a result of starvation, disease and thirst.”
Yes, but none of those billions of people are us. We have arrogated all of the things unto us. Maybe our climate will be less-good than it was, but we don’t really care—because rich people stay indoors, in their apartments in big cities, or in air-conditioned palaces in the nicest parts of the countryside and world. Those places will take decades before they degrade. At that point, we can begin to tackle the climate crisis in earnest because then, you see, it will be important humans who will be affected.
Until then? It’s somebody else’s problem. COP28 might as well have sold T-Shirts that say, “We can’t stop it now, so why bother?” It would only mean that we have to restrict ourselves and it probably wouldn’t even work. So why risk it? Why reduce my personal perceived comfort for an uncertain benefit that doesn’t even accrue only to me? What do I look like, an idiot?
So that’s the exceedingly sarcastic picture I’ve got of attendees of COP28.
Let’s see what else we have.
Oh, here’s something…
The article This Year’s Climate Summit Ended on a Hopeful Note by Bill McKibben (Jacobin) is here to set me straight. The author, made sure to title his piece in a way that lets liberals smugly keep doing what they’re doing, safe in the knowledge that their elected leaders have got a handle on everything. He seems to have made that his job in the last decade or so. [1]
“The world’s nations have now publicly agreed that they need to transition off fossil fuels, and that sentence will hang over every discussion from now on — especially the discussions about any further expansion of fossil fuel energy. There may be barriers to shutting down operations (what the text of the agreement obliquely refers to as “national circumstances, pathways, and approaches.”) But surely, if the language means anything at all, it means no opening more new oil fields, no more new pipelines, and no more new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.”
JFC Bill. Talk about setting yourself up for disappointment. “Surely”, it means all of that. No, it surely doesn’t. There are going to be five times as many LNG terminals in Europe in ten years. The “green wave” is horseshit. And you know where that LNG is going to come from? The U.S., Bill.
Joe Biden has merrily opened up more territory for fossil-fuel exploration than any president before him. Do you know why? Because it’s still wildly profitable. And because he gives less of a fuck what the world thinks than Netanyahu. YOLO.
McKibben goes on to note that there were two other hopeful moments in climate-change history. In 1995, the world finally acknowledged that it existed. Progress! In 2015—20 years later!—came a pledge to do something about it. Eight years later, the third hopeful moment was calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” Fifty years after having learned about climate change, with the last two years having seen the highest CO2 emissions of all time, and also being the two greatest increases of all time. But, sure, Bill; go ahead and be “hopeful”.
McKibben ends with,
“[…] today’s agreement is literally meaningless — and potentially meaningful. The diplomats are done now, so the rest of us are going to have to supply that meaning.”
They’re not going to do anything, Bill. There’s not a chance in hell of sticking a landing under 1.5ºC. How can you even suggest that that’s realistic? The system will not allow it. Their greed will not allow it. Their devotion to piracy will not allow it.
They cannot stand to see anyone have something that they do not have. They squabble like chimps. There is no possibility for a way forward with these people in charge, from cultures like this.
The OECD—led by the U.S.—will bury the world. I used to think the planet would be just fine without us, but we’re seemingly determined to take down most other higher-order life on Earth with us.
I haven’t listened to it as religiously this year as other years, but... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 23:09:53 (GMT-5)
I’ve listened to This is Hell! for at least 20 years. When I worked in Chicago a few times for a client, I tried to get up to Evanston to the bar—Cary’s Lounge—under what is now the studio, but was never able to meet Chuck.
I haven’t listened to it as religiously this year as other years, but started walking with podcasts a lot more this winter and stumbled on the “best of 2023” series they’ve got going. It’s awesome! Their listeners chose really, really good interviews! They cover all of the hellish topics that we have to address before we’re no longer in hell.
In no particular order, here are the ones I liked, with some citations to provide context and pique interest.
“I think it is so vital right now that we embrace the utopianism that was present in the 1940s and 1950s with land redistribution and use it as a way to guide us in this moment when we have a lot of grassroots voices saying we are in trouble. There is a gun to our head, and yet we seem to be in a moment of paralysis, institutional paralyzes where little seems to shift.”
“This system will collapse under its own weight because it’s not now and never has, and therefore can’t supply what’s really required: healthy, vibrant, growing community. Agriculture should be about what it says it’s about. It’s a compound word: agri-culture. It should be about food communities. When we get away from that, we are slowly getting away from what’s sustainable or even regenerative. In the way of rural America, regenerative and sustainable used to be the way those communities grew and the way they supplied the world, especially your neighbors, your local communities with high quality, low cost food. And after, or maybe hopefully before the collapse is complete, we’ll get that message.”
“At the moment, I’m sure the moment he leaves the European soil, the moment he leaves London, he’s gone, Julian Assange is gone. I’m sure the moment he gets extradited to the U. S. is a dead man. Politically, professionally, he’s dead.”
“These are the companies that, that at the end of the day have, have provided us with lifesaving treatments like the government funded, government subsidized COVID vaccine. Companies like modern and Pfizer are jacking up prices on it. There’s lots of evil stuff happening…It’s difficult to hold those two things in our head at the same time.”
“Under Neoliberalism, the poor, the working class, the lower middle classes, THEY all have to practice personal responsibility, you see, but corporations, and the wealthy who are served by corporations, and the wealthy who are subsidized by government in collusion with corporations: not so much personal responsibility, right? So I think we’re just looking at the hypocrisy of the class system, right? So these social obligations apply, you know, to the lower classes, but not to the upper classes.”
At 32:20, he talks about technophilic solutions to climate change,
“Climate change is just one part, one part of the world problematique, which is overshoot, the global overshoot of population and the overshoot of human economies, right? Beyond the biological carrying capacity of Mother Earth.
“And so that overshoot, you know, it can be seen in multiple ways: ozone depletion, loss of tropical rain forest and woodlands, the massive and continuing expansion of domesticated land, the massive die-off of wildlife, the domination of the planet by homo sapiens and our domesticated animals, coastal nitrogen expansion, the fisheries fully exploited, biodiversity crash due to, again, the total domination by homo sapiens—the almost-total domination by homo sapiens—of the Earth, desertification, soil loss, chemical/nuclear waste, freshwater shortages, and on and on and on.
“But, mainstream environmentalists say ‘our only problem is climate change; everything else is fine.’ Nope, we’re not overpopulated, we’re not overconsuming, we’re not overshooting the limits to growth on planet Earth. No, that’s not an issue.
“So, instead, what is offered to the public is a bright, creamy, green dream that technology is going to save us. There’s literally goes to be a deus ex machina of solar and wind power and lithium-ion batteries that is going to somehow subsidize—or continue to subsidize—our profligate lifestyles and our deranged growth system—our economic and population growth system—at the same time that we can wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.
“These are all lies. But, again, they are widespread lies. And they lies given the imprimatur of authority by major newspapers and major environmental groups.”
At 34:00 he says (about Extinction Rebellion’s announcement that they will no longer be doing as much their “annoying citizens” kind of protests),
“What they’re ceasing are the preeminently stupid tactics of laying down in highways, pissing off motorists, who are trapped in the techno-industrial system. This is the system we live in. We drive cars. There are motorways. Our public transit has been eviscerated by the trucking industry (at least in the U.S.) There are many communities that are dependent on cars. If you lay down in the street, all you’re doing is pissing off average citizens, who might be in your corner.”
At 1:00:00, he responds to Chuck’s question about how we don’t discuss climate change in terms of class,
“100%. That is the issue that we’re not talking about. Remember, there’s no classes in the United States, man. We’re all equal. It’s all equal opportunity. [chuckles] Lies, lies, lies. Yes, absolutely. If we don’t address class and the implications of class bifurcation and the extreme inequality and the rule by the wealthy and the oligarchy, we’re never going to get to a sustainable society.
“As I mentioned earlier, elites are buffered by their money from the negative consequences of environmental change. They will resist altering the system—the system of growth, the system of capital accumulation, the system of constantly expanding ecological footprint—they will resist altering that system that has benefitted them so greatly, right up to the very end.
“So that, effectively, to change such a society, you’ve got to rid of the elites. And then we’re talking about revolution.”
“The corporation is a devilish economic instrument that has gone out of control. The problem is the instrument itself.”
This one was informative, but wasn’t as full of AHA! moments as the ones above.
I started off not really liking this interview, but warmed up completely when I realized that we’re on the same wavelength. They came out so strongly against traditional families that I reacted negatively, thinking “the families and couples I know aren’t dysfunctional, and they’re all pretty traditional.”
But, then, I slowly realized that they’re not pretty traditional. They live in very traditional communities, but several of the strongest families/couples I know are definitely not “male-dominated”. Each partner has their strengths, but only some chores/tasks are traditionally assigned. But that’s the point! The point is that my family is healthy and strong because it’s not aligned along traditional, capitalistic needs and lines. It’s already quite communal. The parts of it that are the least communal are the most dysfunctional, actually.
At 23:00, they say,
“Private households aren’t something we all choose because we’re all brainwashed or we can’t think of anything better. But we pursue private households—finding a partner to age with, raising children within a private household—because that is a necessary survival strategy [sic; should be “tactic”] in racial capitalism.
“That in the dynamics of labor markets, state policy, of what it takes to survive and reproduce in the world, we form private households that we’re then really dependent on. That the private household is a major dimension of reproduction.
“And that we, that in our efforts to form alternative families—better families, chosen families—they often end up reproducing many of the problems that we are trying to get away from.
“That the contradictions of trying to survive in a capitalist society put tremendous pressures on people, that end up fragmenting chosen relationships, and reproducing all sorts of gender inequality and class inequality within chose family structures, and end up putting a lot of pressure on people, reimposing, in some cases, traditional gender roles.”
Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 23:01:20 (GMT-5)
The article German Group Won’t Present Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen Over Gaza Essay by Brett Wilkins (Scheer Post) is just one example among many recent ones, where both the German government and its cultural institutions are in increasing lockstep in controlling the narrative—controlling how its citizens are allowed to think.
In the case cited in the article, Masha Gessen will still receive the Hannah Arendt award, but it will be presented “without the participation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation”, whatever the hell that means. [1] Maybe they withdrew the cash prize? No idea. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is how demonstratively stupid, petty, and anti-intellectual the actions of the grand viziers of German culture are. Right now, I guess, but maybe they’ve always been this way and the moment has allowed them to emerge (entpuppen), spread their filthy wings, and soar.
I mean, I don’t really care about Masha Gessen particularly. I stopped reading her a long time ago, after they [2] went off the rails for Russiagate. I haven’t heard whether they’ve retracted any of the hysteria or fear-mongering from those years. But here they’re being punished for being on the right side of history, for writing absolutely factual information. Here is part of what they wrote,
“For the last 17 years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of 10 Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.”
None of this is disputed. Israeli newscasters would proudly read that paragraph out loud in a primetime newscast.
The intelligentsia of Germany seems to have read that far, and then decided that it was beyond the pale to compare any possible situation—either in the past, the present or millennia into the future—with the awfulness that was a Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation.
To them, Nothing will ever compare. Anyone who attempts a comparison is dead to Germany. They consider it antisemitic to even suggest that anyone has ever suffered or could ever suffer as much as the Jews. Jesus, it’s like watching that albino monk [3] castigate himself with that cat-o-nine-tails in The Da Vinci Code.
Gessen did go on, though, to differentiate the situations, properly crediting Germans for their unsurpassable cruelty and Jews for their unsurpassable victimhood—granting those features the fealty that Germany expects.
“The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from
diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate–and, now, mortally endanger–an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.”
I’m quite convinced that they made these sweeping declarations about Gessen without having read—or perhaps without having understood—their essay. If this is a sign of things to come, then Germany has already gone completely off the rails. They’ve “lost the plot”. There is no coming back from where they’re going, not if they don’t control themselves soon. They can spend another century in the wilderness if they want to keep up this bullshit.
I’ve always said that Germany plummets headlong after its Lord and Master the United States, their slavish devotion to their conqueror a national fucking embarrassment. Now, they’re full-bore emulating U.S. anti-intellectualism and love of Israel. I’m really quite shocked that the German art and literature world is so riddled with idiots. I’d hoped for better.
The article leads with an unsourced tweet:
““The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost,” said one critic.”
I was struck by my utter inability to tell which party he was from. My only hint was that he was calling for more money for Ukraine, so I figured he must be a Democrat. [1]
But all of the rest of the words were the same words a... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 22:34:57 (GMT-5)
I heard part of this guy’s Jim Himes’s speech in the following video,
I was struck by my utter inability to tell which party he was from. My only hint was that he was calling for more money for Ukraine, so I figured he must be a Democrat. [1]
But all of the rest of the words were the same words a Republican would use to encourage continued war. Let me throw a bit of the transcript in here, taken from H5846 − December 12, 2023 (Congressional Record)
“Mr. HIMES. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Ohio for having this critical conversation today.
“Just outside this Chamber, on January 20, 1961, a new young President by the name of John F. Kennedy said, ‘‘We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.’’
“We would pay any price, bear any burden, and meet any hardship to ensure the survival and success of liberty.
“What has happened to America that we shrink from our traditional role of standing up against tyrants, dictators, and genocidal maniacs in favor of liberty? What has happened to us?
“Why did Kennedy say those words? He didn’t say those words because he wanted to replicate the pain and tragedy of the world war in which he had distinguished himself as a war hero. He didn’t say those words because he wanted young Americans to die in East Asia or around the globe in the service of liberty.
“He said those words because he understood what he had learned in the 1930s and the 1940s, which is that brutal dictators don’t stop; they are stopped. They are stopped by those with the moral fortitude and courage to stop them.
“If we accede to where half of the Republican majority is today, which is that we are not going to support Ukraine in this fight, Putin will not stop. Soon, the United States will have no choice but to step in to stop Vladimir Putin.
“We hear these excuses: There is not enough accounting. There is not enough oversight.
“We didn’t hear that when we were supporting the Afghani regime, which is profoundly corrupt. We didn’t hear that about Iraq. We are only hearing that about Ukraine.
“We hear that we would like to know what the plan is for victory in Ukraine. Did anybody ask Winston Churchill, the hero of World War II, what his plan for victory was? No, they did not because he wasn’t sure. We stood by him because he stood for liberty and the moral clarity that this institution has now lost.
“If we think for one moment that Putin is the only one who is enjoying this moment, think about what President Xi of China is learning; think about what the Iranian mullahs are seeing; and think about what the North Korean dictator is coming to understand: That this Congress, when faced with the demand that we fight for liberty and freedom, we cut and run. That is what is being learned. Anybody who reads an iota of history will understand the tragedy that is behind that.
“It is time for this Chamber to find an iota of the moral courage and clarity that John F. Kennedy elaborated on just outside these doors. We do it because it is right. We do it because if we fail the Ukrainians, it may be the next generation of Americans and Frenchmen and British who have to stop Putin.
“Be assured that we will have to do that later in far, far more tragic circumstances than we have right now to stop—as John F. Kennedy called us to do—the march of tyranny and stand up for liberty.”
He hits all of the expected points:
In Greenwald’s segment, he compares this impassioned speech to the recent revelation that Russia has lost 85% of its troops. OMG we’re almost there! We can’t quit now!
But, wait….if Putin has lost all of his troops and hardware and stands before imminent defeat if we don’t lose our resolve, then why is Jim Himers telling us that Putin’s going to win not only Ukraine, but take over Europe if we don’t stop him? How could he do any of that if he has barely any military power left?
Which one is it? Both? It can’t be both. I bet it’s … neither.
Stop blowing smoke up our asses.
It’s funny. I’d stopped the video to write most of the rest of this article. When I restarted, Glenn continued with,
“He sounds exactly like Nikki Haley, exactly like Tom Cotton, exactly like Marco Rubio, exactly like Liz Cheney. Do you see how identical the Democrats and Republicans are? The establishment wings of those parties, when it comes to foreign policy—first of all, everything is Hitler, everything is World War II again. Oh, we didn’t ask Winston Churchill what his plan was; why would we ask the United States government what its plan is in this war?
“Because we’ve been caught in so many wars with no exit strategy, with no clear strategy, and all it’s done is eaten up American resources, destroy American standing in the world, and ended up causing us to lose so many wars. Because we had no plan, but you see how everything is World War II, everything is either: you support war and you’re Winston Churchill or you oppose it and you’re giving in to Adolf Hitler, just like Neville Chamberlain did.
“Beyond that, this is the same worldview as Republicans have. We’re faced with an axis of evil, composed of Iran, China, North Korea, Russia. This is standard Republican foreign policy orthodoxy that is coming out of the mouth of these desperate Democrats to fuel this war in Ukraine. But he also lied when he said there were no calls for safeguards or investigations into where the money went for Afghanistan and Iraq. There were all kinds of investigations about where the money went in Iraq and Afghanistan and what we found was, when we have no safeguards, billions of dollars disappear.”
Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 22:24:30 (GMT-5)
Every once in a while, the YouTube algorithm throws up a bit of flotsam from the shipwreck of content that I very much like—and that I would never have otherwise heard of. In this case, it’s a short video (4:43) of Stephen Fry reading a letter written by Nick Cave on the subject of LLMs and creativity.
I’ve citing at length below from the original blog post Iss #248 by Nick Cave (The Red Hand Files), which answered the question, “[…] what’s wrong with making things faster and easier?”
“ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.
“ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.
“ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials?
“[…] even though the creative act requires considerable effort, in the end you will be contributing to the vast network of love that supports human existence. There are all sorts of temptations in this world that will eat away at your creative spirit, but none more fiendish than that boundless machine of artistic demoralisation, ChatGPT.
“[…] It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.”
Another post from January Issue #218 by Nick Cave (The Red Hand Files) first addressed LLMs, in what would eventually become the tour de force above, but which also had some wonderfully written prose about the difference between human creations versus those produced by imitation machines.
“What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.
“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.”
Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 22:14:14 (GMT-5)
Look, I know the title isn’t going to come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows me, but I’ve heard that he’s the “sane one”. I’d heard the same thing about Nikki Haley, though. It didn’t take at lot of research to belie that hypothesis. Here’s a very little bit of research on Vivek, based on the 20-minute interview below.
Dore let him talk. A lot. He didn’t even disagree with him, even though he said some pretty outrageous and clearly incorrect—at best, misguided—things.
Vivek is an idiot. He’s not a serious person. It’s a condemnation of our society and economic system that someone like this is considered to be highly educated and is just about a billionaire. It is a national tragedy that he thinks he should be President—or in any way involved with anything but the local politics of the HOA of the gated community where he lives.
He’s utterly convinced of his own cleverness, but he knows even less than Jimmy Dore about how the presidency works. He says that he wouldn’t get involved in Israeli politics because he wouldn’t be the president of that country. He probably even knows that that’s a shallow, stupid thing to say, but he’s so clearly delighted with himself for having thought of it that he can’t help saying it.
When Jimmy says that, as president, he’d be de-facto involved because he’d be funding Israel to the tune of $4B per year and he’d be in charge of nominating the UN representative, Ramaswamy ignores the funding part and just says that he doesn’t care about the UN. “I don’t think that the UN should be stopping Israel from doing what it’s doing.”
That’s not the only callous, wildly misinformed thing he says. This next one takes the cake.
At 13:25, he says,
“What does genocide refer to? The elimination of a race. Well, you know what? About 20% of the Israeli population is Palestinian. That’s more than the black or hispanic population of the United States. And you know, probably, arguably, the best place on planet Earth where Palestinians live the highest quality of life, with actual civic respect, is in Israel.
“So I do take issue with flatly using the word genocide—which refers to the elimination of a race—when the people of that race live the best possible life in the country that you’re calling the perpetrator of that genocide, and 20% of that population, more than the minority populations of this country, of Israel’s population, are Palestinians, who are living with rights within that country.
“[Jimmy: mutters “wow” very quietly a few times under his breath.]
“I think that there’s a lot of responsibility to go around for other Arab countries, for failed leadership, both of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas all the way to Hamas’s failed leadership in Gaza, so I think that that’s something that, yes, involves a long history.
“That is not the role that I’m running for, of history professor at Harvard. I’m running for President of the United States, which I have my moral clarity, why I’m focused on running this country, without intervening there.”
I painstakingly transcribed his highly redundant waterfall of bullshit, just so you can get the sense of how he just keeps talking and repeating himself, in the hopes that no-one can get a word in edgewise to call him on his bullshit. I did take the liberty of adding paragraphs, so it’s hopefully easier to read than to hear.
He says that Israel actually protects Palestinians better than anyone and literally everyone else in the world is more responsible for the Palestinian plight than Israel, which is literally doing everything it can to help them. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Netanyahu and co. are grinning from ear to ear.
That line of reasoning reminds me of Bill Hicks’s joke Officer Nigger Hater about the trial of the cops who beat the ever-loving shit out of Rodney King, the act that sparked the LA riots. Below, I cite part of the joke from the link above
“Officer Coon looks in the camera and actually says, ‘Oh, that Rodney King beating tape? It’s all in how you look at it.’
“[…]
“‘All in how you look at it, Officer… Coon?’
“‘That’s right. It’s how you look at the tape.’
“‘Well, would you care to tell the court [incredulously] how… you’re lookin’ at that?’
“‘Yeah OK, sure. It’s how you look at it… the tape. For instance, well, if you play it backwards you see us help King up and send him on his way.’
“‘Hmmmm. Not guilty!’ [gavel bangs]”
Vivek didn’t stop there. He started repeating every wild myth about Chinese Uighur concentration camps, talking about how that’s what we should concentrate on instead of Israel. That those are far worse than Palestine.
Ramaswamy is like all the rest. He’s an asshat, an assclown who knows nothing, has no empathy, and has no principles. He doesn’t care about stopping crimes before they happen, especially when it’s his friends— or countries that he knows he has to be friends with in order to get elected as president—that are doing them—or where he thinks he can gain personal economic or political advantage.
I sent the picture... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 21:43:26 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 20. Jan 2024 12:53:38 (GMT-5)
Just a couple of quick notes. It’s the depths of winter and I’ve had some time off, so I’m playing with puzzles. I kind of like Wordle. I don’t play to win as quickly as possible. I like to throw unusual words at it, on the off chance that it will result in a lucky punch.
I sent the picture above to a friend who also likes Wordle with the note:
“There are probably not a lot of people who unironically and eminently hopefully guess “capon” before they’re forced to remember that “bacon” would also have worked.”
Sometimes I deliberately try guessing as “badly” as possible to see how long I can keep the field gray, using up as many letters as possible before solving it. For example, if you look at the keyboard, there is really only one solution remaining, given the revealed letters. The solution has to be CAL_E of CA_LE, with the letters shown on the keyboard (or C, A, L, E). It could have been “calve”, but “cable” seemed like the better bet. The Wordle almost never uses a fancy word like “calve” (either because of its relation to proletarian animal-husbandry, or because of its relation to climate-change, with glaciers “calving”).
I finished another recent Wordle in three steps by first guessing Quest, then Emoji, then was quite surprised to find that Evoke was actually the answer.
In Spelling Bee news, I continue to add to a list of real words that the puzzle does not recognize. I’m up to over 150 of them. My most recent addition is phaeton.
I also did a couple recently that had very few words and points.
And, finally, the actual crossword advertised in the title. My partner and I have a very long streak going—almost five years—and we’ve amassed quite a lot of statistics. I generally don’t do Monday-Wednesday because those are the easy ones. Again, because I have more free time—and I’m currently six hours ahead of my partner—I gave Monday a shot for Christmas. I wanted to set a record time.
I was pretty pleased with myself. 4:20 is very fast. I was certain that I’d just set the record. Unfortunately, the NY Times has stored some unusual numbers.
We’ve never solved a Monday puzzle in 1:15. That’s pretty much impossible, I think, unless you already knows the answers and are just transcribing them into the game interface. I could see that the record for Tuesday is 4:21, so I beat that one, at least, if only by a second. 😉
Finally, I just noticed that I had an old screenshot lying around of our average times when we were still at a 765-day streak.
I compared to a recent screenshot, at 1710 days, and the daily averages haven’t moved much, a few a bit slower, a few a bit faster.
You know the ones.
The ones where a community member or MS expert or Apple expert will tell you to restart your computer in safe mode because you asked why an app keeps losing focus when it shouldn’t. They will think of... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 21:26:31 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 6. Mar 2024 07:24:47 (GMT-5)
I unfortunately and occasionally end up on official support-forum pages.
You know the ones.
The ones where a community member or MS expert or Apple expert will tell you to restart your computer in safe mode because you asked why an app keeps losing focus when it shouldn’t. They will think of literally anything to waste your time, your life, but they will never cop to the actual problem you’re reporting.
Most of these answers don’t really relate to the question at all. It’s just a way for the user answering the question to gain points for having answered and for Apple or MS to be able to close the question for “no activity” after a little while.
The reason there is no activity is because what’s the point of engaging an answer that’s come from an obvious bot or human idiot who’s actively uninterested in helping you? In the end, none of these forums are there for the purpose of helping people—interested just there for companies to pat themselves on the back for fulfilling KPIs.
The answers are almost always along the lines of: have you tried it with another computer? With another user? Have you tried rebooting in safe mode? Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software? How about your operating system?
THE UI HAS A FUCKING TYPO, YOU DOLT.
THE UI SCROLLS RANDOMLY, YOU UTTER WASTE OF OXYGEN.
I am not here because I think this bug is my fault.
I did not describe the issue in exquisite detail because I wanted someone to tell me how to unplug and re-plug my computer.
This rant was triggered by the following example, Apple Music automatically scrolls down playlist by Aleks_Bromvig (Apple Community). This poor person—the one who originally reported the issue—succinctly explained what was happening. I was one of about 30 people who clicked the “Me too” button to indicate that they’d described the problem that we were also having.
“When I rate music or add a comment the program will suddenly scroll all the way to the bottom of the playlist. I have been having this issue for quite some time and I can see other people asking about this problem seemingly without having their issue resolved.”
They’re right: this has been happening for version after version of Apple Music. They’re absolutely right. What was the response? Well, the indubitably human “Community Specialist” Grace2211 responds and I’m going to quote in full,
“Thanks for reaching out in Apple Support Communities. We understand that the Music app is not working as expected when trying to enjoy your Apple Music membership.
“To clarify, do you experience this behavior with another device as well?
“We’d like to provide you with a few steps that may help resolve the issue and allow us to determine if the issue could be software related:
“• Verify if the issue persists in safe mode. Your Mac will load slowly and your screen will flash. This is expected behavior for this mode:
How to use safe mode on your Mac“• Test the issue in another user account: Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac”
If this is just a friendly ESL person helping out, then fine. But my experience has been that this is the only kind of response you can expect. It’s a poorly written, overly wordy nothingburger of a response that blames the user for the entire problem, when it’s an obvious bug that has been happening forever.
It covers all of the bases: it starts with a useless, time-wasting paragraph: “We understand that the Music app is not working as expected when trying to enjoy your Apple Music membership.” There is nothing more infuriating than this. It just means you didn’t read the question. You’ve copy/pasted this bullshit from a standard template. I wasn’t trying to “enjoy my membership”; I was trying to use your buggy product, for which I pay money every month.
This is only going to get worse as companies ramp up their production of such useless copy with LLM-produced text that desperate users will be forced to wade through in the dim hope that an answer for their problem lies buried in the tsunami of meaningly and soulless text.
But I digress.
Then, it asks you to try another device—buy another Apple laptop to see if Apple Music is just as shitty on that one!—then says “hey, what about a long, involved reboot into a crippled-Mac mode in which Apple Music probably doesn’t even work?”—waste tons of your own personal time rather than a second of Apple’s support time—and ends up by telling you that, if you only have the one device, you should set up a completely new user account, log in with all of your Apple stuff so that you can even access your music and … then what?
Of course and obviously, Apple Music is going to do that stupid scrolling shit there, too, because it’s obviously intrinsic to the software.. It has been for years.
The only answer you should give is:
But my experience is that, the bigger the company, the less likely it is to have an in any way responsive support for its software products.
By the time I got to the page, it had already been helpfully marked with something like,
Thanks, asshole. I’d love to start this conversation anew, so that you can continue to make it look like no-one else has ever had this problem.
The only thing useful on that page is the “similar questions”, of which one was actually similar enough to be worth clicking on, so there’s that. That took me to Mac Music app bug?, where the helpful user “turingtest2” pointed me to Songs View Jumping to Random Spots After Action instead of trolling me to buy another computer, restart in safe mode, or set up another user.
That page is from over two years ago, has an astonishing ~850 “me too”s on it—and the bug still hasn’t been squashed by Apple’s veritable army of engineers, at least in the version that everyone’s asking about. It actually has been squashed on the newest version of Apple Music. 🍾🍾🍾 I reported this in that forum, to lend hope to the ~850 other users who are looking for an answer.
“The title says it all. When I rate a song with either the stars or the heart, the playlist jumps to a different scroll position in the list. This is happening in Apple Music 1.2.5.7 on MacOS 12.7.2.
“I can verify that it’s not happening on Apple Music 1.4.1.29 on MacOS 14.1.2, so you must have found and fixed it. Any chance of backporting it for those of us with hardware that works perfectly well, but can’t be upgraded to the latest Apple Music (which is bundled with an OS not supported on this hardware)?”
Just in case you think I’m raging about an isolated instance, here’s another example, encountered just in the time since I created this draft. This one is about another perennial favorite: Notes app lagging by Brittlopez, which writes:
“Is anybody else experiencing lag when typing in notes. I’ve closed all apps prior to using it I’ve tried resetting and I’ve used a different apple device. Typing everywhere else is fine but typing in the notes is so slow.”
Look, this has been happening for years. The goddamned app sometimes seems to sync about forty times per letter typed. I’ve had it drain most of my phone battery within a half an hour, simply because I was writing a journal entry—because I didn’t have my laptop handy and I was inspired.
It shouldn’t be this hard to write a collaborative tool, but it apparently is. To add insult to injury, if you type a bunch and it feels like it’s sucking your battery dry just to sync a few paragraphs, then that text still doesn’t show up on other devices. You have to start typing in that note on the unsynced device, then wait several seconds. The synced text will finally pop in. It’s quite sad, actually. But, sure, let’s make Freeform and Journal because if you can barely sync text over a gigabit connection, then you should be ready for all sorts of even meatier content.
But I digress. Again.
Anyway, the people on these forums are just castigating themselves for having a few photos and some longer text. Stop it. You are not the problem. The problem is a $3T company that can’t seem to get its shit together to make an app that syncs reasonably well. There are real-time collaboration tools out there, and Notes is still a dumpster fire. I use it because it works for me and I don’t sync that much—it’s not a main tool, by any stretch of the imagination.
Anyway (again), the top response in the forum is as follows:
“Try and Force Restart your iPhone EXACTLY as shown below and see whether that resolves the issue:”
- Press and quickly release Volume UP button
- Press and quickly release Volume DOWN button
- Press and Hold the SIDE button until an Apple logo appears and then release the Side button (Can take up to 20 seconds. (DO NOT release Sid
The comment is cut off, but you get the gist: they just copy/pasted the instructions for restarting your iPhone. That’s the solution? Do I also have to restart my Mac when Notes gets laggy? That’s the only option? Am I to reboot my devices as a Hail Mary every time one of your buggy apps misbehaves? Then, by the time I’ve rebooted, I’ll have forgotten why I did so? Is that the hope? Can’t you just fucking fix the bug?
]]>“Don’t sweat it. I just like to imagine that my messages arrive at Apple headquarters, whereupon they’re laboriously transcribed and illuminated by monks before being delivered to you by tortoise. The return... [More]”
Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 17:43:29 (GMT-5)
When a friend recently responded to messages of mine from nine days ago, I wrote back,
“Don’t sweat it. I just like to imagine that my messages arrive at Apple headquarters, whereupon they’re laboriously transcribed and illuminated by monks before being delivered to you by tortoise. The return trip takes equally long.”
Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 13:03:27 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 26. Dec 2023 23:39:56 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Komplette Familie deutscher Staatsbürger im Gazastreifen ausgelöscht – Was sagt die Bundesregierung? by Florian Warweg (NachDenkSeiten)
“Das Auswärtige Amt wollte sich auf Nachfrage der NachDenkSeiten weder näher zu dem Fall äußern noch in irgendeiner Form die Auslöschung einer kompletten Familie deutscher Staatsbürger verurteilen oder deren Tötung aus völkerrechtlicher Perspektive einordnen.”
“Meine Verständnisfrage: Verstehe ich das richtig, dass man grundsätzlich bei der Tötung einer kompletten Familie deutscher Staatsbürger diesen Fall nicht weiter kommentiert, egal ob die Bombardierung mutmaßlich völkerrechtswidrig durch israelisches, russisches, iranisches oder US-amerikanisches Militär vorgenommen wird?”
“Da fände ich eine Klarstellung schon ganz gut auch gerne öffentlich und nicht „unter drei“, ob der Tod deutscher Staatsbürger durch ausländisches Militär, egal welcher Provenienz, von der Bundesregierung thematisiert und kommuniziert wird. Ja oder nein? Das hat sich zumindest für mich durch Ihre Antwort nicht ergeben.”
That New Hunter Biden Indictment by Patrick Lawrence (ScheerPost)
“I do love it when The Times and the corporate media that follow it like pilot fish demonstrate so clearly to us that there is no air whatsoever between them and the powers they are supposed to report upon with the sort of distance Judge Noreika so admirably displayed last summer. It is always a useful reminder that we must not take at face value anything they publish beyond the sports scores and where to find the best corkscrew of 2023.”
“Think about those outlandish hearings in the House last week, when three university presidents were cynically cornered so their inquisitors could frame them as apologists for some imaginary genocide of Jews.”
Gaza & Confronting Power by Patrick Lawrence (ScheerPost)
“Think about these unlawful definitions of anti–Semitism that apologists for Israel want to see adopted as federal law and enforced in universities and a great variety of public institutions. Think about the anti–Semitism hustle, as Ajamu Baraka calls it — these ridiculous but ubiquitous claims that anti–Semitism is suddenly everywhere.”
“This is Rocker developing one of the arguments that make Nationalism and Culture an enduring work. State power and culture — which, to simplify Rocker’s definition, means all that makes humankind human and enables humanity’s survival and advance — are inimical. The state, he argues, cannot ultimately abide forms of spontaneous culture that arise by way of human communities.”
“Absolutist regimes are especially intolerant of authentic culture. In history they are given to destroying all forms of culture in the name of one or another kind of national unity. This is necessary for the continued exercise of power.”
Like China, with their homogenizing of culture (coalescing all to a common language, for example). Assimilation, integration. On the one hand, understandable, as everything else is less efficient if it’s not done. But at what price efficiency? Is is really worth it? Is that our only value? Switzerland preserved Romansch. There’s only a few dozen thousand of native speakers, but it was worth preserving. It’s human culture. What the hell else are we doing with our time, wealth, and resources? Do we really want a society that allows some people to get billions and lets the culture of dozens of thousands just die out because it can’t afford it? Can you think of something stupider? More disingenuous?
“It is no kind of stretch to understand the liberal authoritarian project as a case of state power exerting itself upon those it governs — or rules, as the case comes to be. It is more or less all there — the enforcement of officially decreed versions of all events, the proscribing of all alternative versions, the punishment or banishment of those who deviate even slightly from the orthodoxy, the subservience of media to the state, the mutilation of language to serve the state’s purpose.”
Checks all of the boxes. Always has. It might be worse now because there are always fewer people who rage against it—or, at least, people with any sort of leverage in society.
“[…] the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania were subjected to four hours of abusive questioning pointedly intended to show the rest of us the consequences of maintaining our sanity amid a grotesque psyop to convince us that First Amendments rights must be swept aside as the only way to rid ourselves of some rampant anti–Semitism that now besets us.”
“The U.S. is currently in the chokehold of a monstrous effort to fixate the nation on fears of an entirely hypothetical genocide when a real one is taking place.”
“We learn from this occasion that the censorship regime with which we are now required to live is about more than eliminating or banning speech. Silence is only one of its objectives. It is as much concerned with controlling what it is permissible to say and what the language we speak must mean.”
“[…] it is a measure of America’s swoon into another of its purification rituals. From the 17th century Boston hangings through the various red scares, Russiagate, and all the rest, it is always the same theme: We must remove from among us those elements that are impure.”
“This is done by requiring everyone to denounce or repudiate what they are told to denounce or repudiate, and to do so with prescribed degree of vehemence and illogic. One is otherwise exiled, one or another way, from the circle of the Elect. ”
“Institutions of higher learning are supposed to be the source, or one source, of a healthy society’s dynamism. Now we have money people telling these institutions how to run themselves? This is what decline looks like. This is how America’s official support for apartheid Israel hastens it.”
Well, those are institutions of higher learning with $4B-dollar endowments. They’re not exactly the hill we should die on—they’re part of the problem—but I take your theoretical point.
The Evil Israel Does is the Evil Israel Gets by Chris Hedges (Substack)
“J. Glenn Gray, a combat officer in World War Two, wrote about the peculiar nature of vengeance in “The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle:””“To the brutalized, numb with trauma, convulsed by rage, those who relentlessly attack and humiliate them are not human beings. They are representations of evil. The lust for vengeance, for tenfold retaliation, spawns rivers of blood.”“When the soldier has lost a comrade to this enemy or possibly had his family destroyed by them through bombings or through political atrocities, so frequently the case in World War II, his anger and resentment deepen into hatred. Then the war for him takes on the character of a vendetta. Until he has himself destroyed as many of the enemy as possible, his lust for vengeance can hardly be appeased. I have known soldiers who were avid to exterminate every last one of the enemy, so fierce was their hatred. Such soldiers took great delight in hearing or reading of mass destruction through bombings. Anyone who has known or been a soldier of this kind is aware of how hatred penetrates every fiber of his being. His reason for living is to seek revenge; not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but a tenfold retaliation.”
Letter from Berlin by Peter E. Gordon (Boston Review)
“The most prominent political leaders in Germany, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, affirm an unquestionable support for Israel as a moral obligation of all citizens. In a speech to legislators shortly after the Hamas attacks Scholz declared: “Our own history, our responsibility deriving from the Holocaust, makes it our permanent duty to stand up for the existence and security of the State of Israel.””
That is not a serious viewpoint. He’s an intellectual infant.
“At the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest book trade fair and an annual event at which new publications make their debut, an award ceremony for the book, Minor Detail , by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, was removed from the schedule.”
But Slavoj managed to say his piece. See this video:
“Felix Klein, who holds an official post as “Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism,” has warned of “antisemitic and anti-Israel hate” when “people shout ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free’.” In his view this slogan “would deny Israel’s right to exist.” Use of the slogan is now legally banned in Germany and subject to criminal prosecution for “incitement to hatred,” though one presumes that those invoking the Likud charter would not receive similar prosecution.”
The wheels have come off of Germany.
“As critical academics, we call on the state government to immediately cease and desist from political repression of this kind, which also includes repressive instructions to schools issued by the Berlin Senate (e.g. to ban the wearing of the Palestinian keffiyeh).”
They should wear stars of David or just Israeli flag shirts instead, forcing the government to ban those too , but only if worn unironically. Let’s see them try to define that legally.
“Following October 7, there has been an increase in antisemitic attacks in Berlin. Since then, police repression against Palestinians or those in solidarity with Palestine, as well as against large parts of the population in the largely migrant Berlin district of Neukölln, has also reached alarming levels.”
Obviously Neukölln. Poor bastards.
“As the situation in Berlin shows, there are currently hardly any possibilities for Palestinian people in Germany to express themselves as political subjects with their own perspective and a claim to self-determination. In fact, this has been the case for quite some time now. Any such expression, whether political, literary, or artistic, is increasingly confronted with the sweeping suspicion of being antisemitic.”
“Berlin is home to the largest community of the Palestinian diaspora in Europe. One of the constitutional duties of the government is to protect the people who live here. This applies to Palestinian youth, who instead are confronted with the indifference of German politics and large sections of the public to the suffering of the civilian population in Gaza and who are now placed under general suspicion, criminalized, and threatened with deportation by politicians.”
“The fact that calls for the deportation of Palestinians are growing louder at the very time there is a war in Israel and Palestine, and the civilian population is under threat of systematic military violence and expulsion, testifies to a particularly insidious contempt for humanity.”
The Texas Supreme Court’s anti-abortion ruling and the war on democratic rights by Tom Carter (WSWS)
“The oppressive weight of these religious fundamentalist laws, as a rule, falls specifically on the working class. Wealthy women and their families will always be able to afford an abortion in a different state or country, if not a safe and discrete procedure where it is officially illegal.
“The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once described a woman’s right to abortion as “one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights.” In the modern world, the right is not only essential to physical autonomy and individual freedom but to equal participation in social and political life. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky listed the Stalinist regime’s abrogation of the right to abortion, which had been guaranteed by the 1917 October Revolution, as one of its many great betrayals.”
“Military violence abroad and the dismantling of democratic rights at home are interrelated processes, as the World Socialist Web Site has insisted throughout decades of uninterrupted military aggression by the United States. A government that can get away with murdering tens of thousands of innocent workers and children abroad cannot be expected to respect the rights of workers and children within its own borders. In flagrant violation of free speech and academic freedom, the American government is already staging inquisitorial hearings to demand that universities crack down on the eruption of popular opposition to the war crimes being perpetrated in Gaza.”
Senate Passes Massive $886 Billion National Defense Authorization Act by Dave DeCamp (Antiwar.com)
“The NDAA includes an amendment to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which gives the FBI the power to conduct warrantless spying of foreign targets and Americans they interact with. Section 702 has enabled mass surveillance of Americans and is set to expire at the end of the year, but the extension pushes it back to April 19.
“A bipartisan group of senators tried to strip the Section 702 extension from the NDAA, but their efforts failed. For procedural reasons, only 41 senators were needed to remove the provision, but only 35 supported it.”
German Group Won’t Present Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen Over Gaza Essay by Brett Wilkins (Scheer Post)
Masha Gessen will still receive the Hannah Arendt award, but it will be presented “without the participation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation”, whatever the hell that means. Maybe they withdrew the cash prize? No idea. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is how demonstratively stupid, petty, and anti=intellectual their actions are.
I mean, I don’t really care about her particularly. I stopped reading her a long time ago, after she went off the rails for Russiagate. I haven’t heard whether she’s retracted of the hysteria or fear-mongering from those years.
Here is part of what she wrote,
“For the last 17 years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of 10 Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.”
They probably read that far, and decided that it was beyond the pale to compare any possible situation, either in the past, the present or millennia into the future with the awfulness that was a Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation. Nothing will ever compare. Anyone who attempts a comparison is dead to Germany. They consider it antisemitic to even suggest that anyone has ever suffered or could ever suffer as much as the Jews. Jesus, it’s like watching that albino monk castigate himself with that cat-o-nine-tails in Dante’s Inferno.
She did go on, though, to differentiate the situations, properly crediting Germans for their unsurpassable cruelty and Jews for their unsurpassable victimhood—the fealty that Germany expects.
“The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from
diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate–and, now, mortally endanger–an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.”
Jesus, Germany has really gone completely off the rails. They don’t even bother reading the essay she wrote, not really. There is no coming back from where they’re going. They can spend another century in the wilderness if they want to keep up this bullshit. I’ve always said that Germany plummets headlong after its Lord and Master the United States, their slavish devotion to their conqueror a national fucking embarrassment. Now, they’re full-bore emulating U.S. anti-intellectualism and love of Israel. I’m really quite shocked that the German art and literature world is so riddled with idiots. I’d hoped for better.
““The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost,” said one critic.”
He read several of his essays for about 52 minutes, then answered questions for 40 more. It was a tour de force. I’d already read everything he’d written, but was amazed at the power of his words. I was so happy to see him get the recognition he deserves. The questions were insightful, his answers illuminating, at times depressing. But you don’t listen to Chris Hedges for unicorns and rainbows.
Highly recommended. A national treasure with all of the right friends. He mentioned Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Ralph Nader as fellow journalists and fighters and friends.
Vijay Prashad being brilliant as ever. Here, he talks about Ukraine, at the beginning of the segment.
“Russian troops entered that region to create a land bridge to Crimea, Russian forces entered that region to conduct some sort of political unification with the Donbass. That’s about all that the Russians seem to be interested in. There wasn’t really an interest in bombing Kiev.
“You know, Mr. Zelensky went to the Argentinian president’s inauguration. He then came to Washington, met not only Mr. Biden and Congressional figures, but he also spent an afternoon hanging out with arms-company executives.
“Well, how did Mr. Zelensky get to these places? He flew out of Kiev airport—and that is not an insignificant thing to say. Because, you know, the way in which, for instance, the United States conducted its wars in Libya, in Afghanistan, Iraq—the first thing you do is take out all the airports.
“The Russians haven’t done that and that’s because—it seems to me—it’s not in their interest to conduct a war that is about annexing all of Ukraine. They had limited war aims. And, in fact, if you judge them by their war aims, which is to hold the Donbass, hold the land bridge through to Mariupol, to Crimea, the Ukrainians haven’t been able to push them out of that territory.
“In that sense, Russia has really got what it wanted. […] So this is a strategic defeat for Ukraine.”
Fantastic interview. Vijay was absolutely spot-on, delivering a tremendous amount of information in 18 minutes. Now we know why his podcast (Give the People What they Want) is only 30 minutes long. Any more, and we’d all be exhausted. Chapeau!
The IDF Are So Good At Killing Israelis They Should Consider Joining Hamas by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“IDF troops killed escaped Israeli hostages who were holding up a white flag, apparently because they mistook them for Palestinian civilians holding up a white flag (Israeli forces have a long and well-documented history of killing Gazans while they are waving white flags). The only reason they bothered to check if the abductees might be people whose lives they care about was reportedly because one of them had a “western appearance”, i.e. looked white.
“Imagine being held hostage by Hamas for months, finally escaping, trying to make your way back home, and then getting killed by your own military forces because they mistook you for Palestinian civilians.”
The original story is from Israeli soldiers kill hostages waving white flag after mistaking them for Hamas fighters by Mehul Srivastava in Tel Aviv and Andrew England in London (Financial Times).
“People are still yelling about “From the river to the sea” chants at pro-Palestine demonstrations, but you know if a different pro-Palestine chant becomes ubiquitous it will with 100% certainty be attacked as evil and anti-semitic too. Pro-Palestine slogans aren’t opposed because anyone sincerely believes they support genocide, they’re opposed because they are pro-Palestine.”
Facts.
I’m listened to This is Hell! for at least 20 years. When I worked in Chicago a few times for a client, I tried to get up to Evanston to the bar—Cary’s Lounge—under what is now the studio, but was never able to meet Chuck.
I haven’t listened to it as religiously this year as other years, but started walking with podcasts a lot more this winter and stumbled on the “best of 2023” series they’ve got going. It’s awesome! Their listeners chose really, really good interviews! They cover all of the hellish topics that we have to address before we’re no longer in hell.
Best of 2023: The Long Land War / Jo Guldi
“I think it is so vital right now that we embrace the utopianism that was present in the 1940s and 1950s with land redistribution and use it as a way to guide us in this moment when we have a lot of grassroots voices saying we are in trouble. There is a gun to our head, and yet we seem to be in a moment of paralysis, institutional paralyzes where little seems to shift.”
Best of 2023: American Agriculture Is about Money, not Food / Alan Guebert
“This system will collapse under its own weight because it’s not now and never has, and therefore can’t supply what’s really required: healthy, vibrant, growing community. Agriculture should be about what it says it’s about. It’s a compound word: agri-culture. It should be about food communities. When we get away from that, we are slowly getting away from what’s sustainable or even regenerative. In the way of rural America, regenerative and sustainable used to be the way those communities grew and the way they supplied the world, especially your neighbors, your local communities with high quality, low cost food. And after, or maybe hopefully before the collapse is complete, we’ll get that message.”
Best of 2023: Secret Power: Wikileaks and its Enemies / Stefania Maurizi
“At the moment, I’m sure the moment he leaves the European soil, the moment he leaves London, he’s gone, Julian Assange is gone. I’m sure the moment he gets extradited to the U. S. is a dead man. Politically, professionally, he’s dead.”
Best of 2023: Big Pharma Rigs the Game / Julia Rock
“These are the companies that, that at the end of the day have, have provided us with lifesaving treatments like the government funded, government subsidized COVID vaccine. Companies like modern and Pfizer are jacking up prices on it. There’s lots of evil stuff happening…It’s difficult to hold those two things in our head at the same time.”
Best of 2023: “Luxury Emissions” Doom Us All / Christopher Ketcham
“Under Neoliberalism, the poor, the working class, the lower middle classes, THEY all have to practice personal responsibility, you see, but corporations, and the wealthy who are served by corporations, and the wealthy who are subsidized by government in collusion with corporations: not so much personal responsibility, right? So I think we’re just looking at the hypocrisy of the class system, right? So these social obligations apply, you know, to the lower classes, but not to the upper classes.”
At 32:20, he talks about technophilic solutions to climate change,
“Climate change is just one part, one part of the world problematique, which is overshoot, the global overshoot of population and the overshoot of human economies, right? Beyond the biological carrying capacity of Mother Earth.
“And so that overshoot, you know, it can be seen in multiple ways: ozone depletion, loss of tropical rain forest and woodlands, the massive and continuing expansion of domesticated land, the massive die-off of wildlife, the domination of the planet by homo sapiens and our domesticated animals, coastal nitrogen expansion, the fisheries fully exploited, biodiversity crash due to, again, the total domination by homo sapiens—the almost-total domination by homo sapiens—of the Earth, desertification, soil loss, chemical/nuclear waste, freshwater shortages, and on and on and on.
“But, mainstream environmentalists say ‘our only problem is climate change; everything else is fine.’ Nope, we’re not overpopulated, we’re not overconsuming, we’re not overshooting the limits to growth on planet Earth. No, that’s not an issue.
“So, instead, what is offered to the public is a bright, creamy, green dream that technology is going to save us. There’s literally goes to be a deus ex machina of solar and wind power and lithium-ion batteries that is going to somehow subsidize—or continue to subsidize—our profligate lifestyles and our deranged growth system—our economic and population growth system—at the same time that we can wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.
“These are all lies. But, again, they are widespread lies. And they lies given the imprimatur of authority by major newspapers and major environmental groups.”
At 34:00 he says (about Extinction Rebellion’s announcement that they will no longer be doing as much their “annoying citizens” kind of protests),
“What they’re ceasing are the preeminently stupid tactics of laying down in highways, pissing off motorists, who are trapped in the techno-industrial system. This is the system we live in. We drive cars. There are motorways. Our public transit has been eviscerated by the trucking industry (at least in the U.S.) There are many communities that are dependent on cars. If you lay down in the street, all you’re doing is pissing off average citizens, who might be in your corner.”
At 1:00:00, he responds to Chuck’s question about how we don’t discuss climate change in terms of class,
“100%. That is the issue that we’re not talking about. Remember, there’s no classes in the United States, man. We’re all equal. It’s all equal opportunity. [chuckles] Lies, lies, lies. Yes, absolutely. If we don’t address class and the implications of class bifurcation and the extreme inequality and the rule by the wealthy and the oligarchy, we’re never going to get to a sustainable society.
“As I mentioned earlier, elites are buffered by their money from the negative consequences of environmental change. They will resist altering the system—the system of growth, the system of capital accumulation, the system of constantly expanding ecological footprint—they will resist altering that system that has benefitted them so greatly, right up to the very end.
“So that, effectively, to change such a society, you’ve got to rid of the elites. And then we’re talking about revolution.”
Best of 2023: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy / Claire Provost & Matt Kennard
“The corporation is a devilish economic instrument that has gone out of control. The problem is the instrument itself.”
This one was informative, but wasn’t as full of AHA! moments as the ones above.
Best of 2023: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care / M.E. O’Brien
I started off not really liking this interview, but warmed up completely when I realized that we’re on the same wavelength. She came out so strongly against traditional families that I reacted negatively, thinking “the families and couples I know aren’t dysfunctional, and they’re pretty traditional.”
But, then, I slowly realized that they’re not pretty traditional. They live in very traditional communities, but several of the strongest families/couples I know are definitely not “male-dominated”. They each have their strengths, but only some chores/tasks are traditionally assigned. But that’s the point! The point is that my family is healthy and strong because it’s not aligned along traditional, capitalistic needs and lines. It’s already quite communal. The parts of it that are the least communal are the most dysfunctional, actually.
At 23:00, they say,
“Private households aren’t something we all choose because we’re all brainwashed or we can’t think of anything better. But we pursue private households—finding a partner to age with, raising children within a private household—because that is a necessary survival strategy [sic; should be “tactic”] in racial capitalism. That in the dynamics of labor markets, state policy, of what it takes to survive and reproduce in the world, we form private households that we’re then really dependent on. That the private household is a major dimension of reproduction. And that we, that in our efforts to form alternative families—better families, chosen families—they often end up reproducing many of the problems that we are trying to get away from. That the contradictions of trying to survive in a capitalist society put tremendous pressures on people, that end up fragmenting chosen relationships, and reproducing all sorts of gender inequality and class inequality within chose family structures, and end up putting a lot of pressure on people, reimposing, in some cases, traditional gender roles.”
Gaza Is Deliberately Being Made Uninhabitable by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
Comments made by “an influential Israeli national security leader named Giora Eiland, a retired major general for the IDF.”
““Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism,” Eiland adds. “Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.””
Everyone dies. You can’t leave anyone alive or they’ll come back to haunt you.
No other choice.
It’s odd that he’s the first person in history to think of this.
The idea is so unique and new that there’s not even a law against it.
He found the loophole.
Who’s the Boss? by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“At the same Hanukkah ceremony, Biden repeated his nonsensical claim that “Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world that is safe.” There are around 16.2 million Jews in the world. More than a third of them (6.1 million) live in the US. Has there ever been a President, who so openly proclaimed his impotence to protect American lives? (Jews living in NYC are inarguably safer than those living in Tel Aviv.)”
““Part of the problem in the end is Israel’s arrogance,” a US Air Force officer involved in internal deliberations within the Biden admin and discussions with Israel told Newsweek. “The simple truth is Israel has lost the information war because it has destroyed so much”…”
“Haaretz revealed this week that the World’s “Most Moral Army” runs a snuff film channel on Telegram, called “72 Virgins – Uncensored,” showing nothing but videos and photographs of the often mutilated bodies of dying and killed Palestinians–images that would make Leni Riefenstahl cringe…”
The original article Graphic Videos and Incitement: How the IDF Is Misleading Israelis on Telegram by Yaniv Kubovich (Ha'aretz) writes,
“The Israel Defense Forces denies that it operates the channel, but a senior military official confirmed to Haaretz that the army is responsible for operating it.”
Oklahoma man exonerated after 48 years in prison by Alex Findijs (WSWS)
“Glynn Simmons, 71, was declared innocent on Tuesday of a murder he did not commit, after more than 48 years in prison. He now holds the record for the longest prison sentence for a person exonerated of a crime, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.”
“The declaration of actual innocence will be critical for Simmons, who will be eligible for up to $175,000 in compensation from the State of Oklahoma for his wrongful conviction. Without that declaration, as Behenna argued against, he would not have been entitled to any money. However, it could take years for Simmons to receive compensation from the state.”
““Glynn is having to live off of GoFundMe, that’s literally how the man is surviving right now, paying rent, buying food,” said Norwood. “Getting him compensation, and getting compensation is not for sure, is in the future and he has to sustain himself now.””
The United States of America, ladies and gentlemen. This is all you need to read about how it treats its own people, how the U.S. approaches justice. It doesn’t know how to apologize, it doesn’t know how to acknowledge its mistakes. It has no empathy. It treats its own citizens like this; it treats the people of the rest of the world even worse.
“I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are.”
Media, Biden Administration Double Down on Ukraine Lies by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“Often a retired “expert” was brought in who got paid three or four times for the same work, being simultaneously a military analyst for a TV network, a “fellow” for a foreign policy think tank, a rep for a weapons manufacturer like Raytheon or Lockheed, and an industry lobbyist or consultant. These pieces are to war journalism what Porntube clips are to romance, mechanical work by very experienced professionals.”
“Ukrainians will unload thirty years of stories about American duplicity, including the recent chapter in which they were cheered to the front by lobbyists and missile merchants whose “Once more unto the breach!” riffs kept getting interrupted by push notifications about new properties in Reston and Falls Church.”
Lying Was the Only Plan Biden, U.S. Ever Had in Ukraine by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“The entire interventionist project is looking at a setback on the scale of the Iraq disaster, a political fiasco so enormous it prompted four years of cuts to the defense budget. Watching Putin waltz across Ukraine after the last two years of blood, profligate spending, and premature end zone celebrations by retired brass and Beltway think-tankers would make the withdrawal from Afghanistan look like one of Biden’s tarmac stumbles by comparison.”
“Until this week the only people who’ve come out and said the obvious — namely what Joe Biden just said, that Ukraine is fucked the minute we stop hurling money their way at Brewster’s Millions levels — have been Republican politicians like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, who was instantly accused by a trio of weeping Pentagon officials of “aiding U.S. adversaries” when he said Ukraine versus Russia was like a “junior high team playing a college team.””
“[…] nobody is going to “win” in this war. There’s only bloodshed and a big and fat, but ultimately temporary, feeding frenzy for Lockheed, General Dynamics, Raytheon and the rest of Lloyd Austin’s buddies. If our leaders were straight with us at the start of this thing, that’s what they’d have asked: “Hey, can we risk nuclear war for a couple of years so taxpayers can fork over a couple hundred extra billion bucks worth of arms dealer bonuses?””
CNN Goes To Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“[…] it’s an objectively good thing that this segment was made and that Ward and her crew did the work that they did.
“Ward rightly stresses the fact that the hospital she and her crew visited is “not a microcosm” of the conditions of healthcare facilities in the rest of Gaza because it’s so new and has been supplied by the UAE, noting that other hospitals in Gaza are barely functioning at all. What Ward does not say is that this problem is largely due to the fact that Israel has been systematically attacking hospitals in Gaza since October 7, rendering dozens of them nonfunctional.
“In fact, in a CNN segment about the death and suffering that’s being caused by an Israeli military operation, Israel itself plays a surprisingly small role. By my count the word “Israel” or “Israeli” was only mentioned six times in the entire 14-minute segment, with long stretches going by where the death and destruction is discussed more as a passive occurrence like the weather, rather than as a deliberate act of mass-scale violence.”
“We’ve been seeing this bizarre divorcing of attacker and attack all the time in Gaza since October 7, with news outlets sometimes going entire articles speaking only of “blasts” and “bombings” without ever actually mentioning the state who is inflicting them. This failure to attribute the source of an attack is not something you see in places like Ukraine, where the words “Russian” and “Putin” always punctuate the reporting like freckles, and it’s certainly not something you ever see in discussions about October 7. At no time will you ever go minutes watching a news report about the Hamas attack without hearing any mention of who the attackers were.”
Can it really be unconscious? I believe it has to be a mix of unwitting self-censorship—because of sympathy on the part of the reporters with Israel—and outright censorship by managing editors—they would call it “framing the narrative”.
“While mentions of Israel are scant in CNN’s reporting, mentions of the United States are missing altogether. At no time in the 14-minute segment does Ward or anyone else make any mention of the fact that this relentless massacre can only happen because it is being backed by the US, and that the Biden administration could end it at any time by withdrawing that backing. It’s downright surreal watching an American outlet talking about the US-sponsored destruction of Gaza as though it’s some separate foreign conflict that Washington is just passively witnessing.
“Contrast this type of missing attribution with the ubiquitous use of the phrase “Iran-backed” in the mainstream western press when talking about non-US-aligned forces in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The fact that the US is backing Israel’s assault on Gaza is much, much more well-evidenced than any claims of Iranian backing ever are, but you never see phrases like “US-backed airstrike” or “US-backed bombing campaign” in western reporting on Gaza.”
How the West Bank fits into the equation by Seymour Hersh (SubStack)
“Thousands of Hamas fighters are now facing a deadly shootout with the Israeli army as the disastrous war their leaders triggered is in its tenth week. Now out of their tunnels, those men are trying to cope with the increasing winter chill and heavy rains. There is little shelter for them, or for the bedraggled surviving citizens of Gaza, from the elements and from Israeli bullets and bombs.”
He’s pretty mealy-mouthed and he’s careful to include the required descriptors of the narrative—“tunnels” (from which rats emerge), “their leaders triggered”, “surviving citizens” (as if the “winter chill and heavy rains” had taken their toll)—but he’s at least honest enough to assign agency to Israel rather than the bullets and bombs themselves, which seem to simply fall out of the sky like rain in other accounts.
“Future historians will make their judgment on the stunning ratio of dead Palestinians in Gaza to the Israeli combat dead.”
Ha! Yeah, ‘cause Seymour sure as hell isn’t going to weigh in. Nor is he going to acknowledge that most of us are just going to call a spade a spade and not wait for “future historians” to tell us that the ratio is f’ing high and that most of the dead are civilians—despite Seymour and Israel’s imprecations that every single dead man is Hamas—and that there’s “little shelter” because Israel has deliberately destroyed nearly the entire residential area for a population of 2M. Almost the entire population is no longer living in their homes. Sure, sure, let’s wait a few decades so that cooler heads can decide what happened. Seymour’s definitely hoping that Israel will emerge victorious and, as victors, will be granted the luxury of writing history in their favor.
There was a pretty long pause and cut before this answer, so I’m not sure how realtime this interview was, but let’s leave that, for the moment. At 28:00, Tucker answers,
“I think a lot of people have awakened to the now-demonstrable fact that libertarian economics was a scam, perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending. So they created this whole intellectual framework to justify the private-equity culture that’s hollowed out the country. That’s my personal view and I’ve seen it up-close my whole life. So, I think it’s a fair assessment.
“I think a smarter way to assess an economic system is by its results. So, you can assign whatever name you want to the economic system of the United States: you could call it market-capitalism; you could call it a whole host of different things, but I don’t think any of that’s useful.
“Those are boring conversations. I think you need to ask: does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar Stores? And, if it does, it’s not a system that you want because it degrades people and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society. And anything that increases ugliness is evil. […]
“So, if it’s such a good system, why do we have all these Dollar Stores? Dollar Stores is the clear—I mean it’s not the only ugly thing being created in the United States, but it’s the one of the most common, and it’s certainly the most obvious. So, if you have a Dollar Store, you’re degraded. And any town that has a Dollar Store does not get better. It gets worse. And the people who live there lead lives that are worse.
“And the counterargument—to the extent there is one—is ‘oh they [consumers] buy cheaper stuff.’ Great. But they become more unhappy and the Dollar Store itself is a sort-of symbol—it’s a physical thing, it’s a real thing; it’s not just a metaphor—but it’s also a metaphor for your total lack of control over where you live and over the imposition of aggressively, in-your-face-ugly structures that send one message to you, which is ‘you mean nothing,’ ‘you are a consumer, not a human being or a citizen.’
“And so, again, I don’t know what we call our current system, but its effects are grotesque. They’re grotesque. It’s wrecked.
“I’ve been here 54 years and I watch carefully—that’s my only gift. As I watch and this has become a much uglier place, a much more crowded place, a much more hostile place, a place that cares much less about people. So whatever system produces that outcome—is a bad system.”
Comments were kind of interesting,
“I’m impressed with Tucker’s answers. I pray he is being honest and his actions mirror his ideas. We need more influential public figures to adopt and implement these postures.”
Someone else responded,
“He spent a career making millions spreading lies on MSM. To his credit he has changed positions in his career and that tells me he is not a zombie or hyper-tribal.”
To which another riposted,
“Maybe U were the hyper-tribal and now U have changed and so U see him in a different light. LOTS of members of the Church of the Democratic Party have that in common:) even the ones who have left it.”
Found the Tucker Carlson fanboy.
It’s a legitimate concern. Tucker hasn’t always spoken like this. He’s said a lot of things in the past that were more-or-less diametrically opposed to them. Thus, the hesitancy. He seems quite earnest, more real than before. I agree that his platform and audience would be a huge boost if his advocacy is sincere. He’s been saying these things for a while now, so the turn seems increasingly legitimate.
This is an excellent video, discussing how both the right and left are only against censorship against themselves. They’re all for censoring everyone else.
The left was delighted to call anything and everything that anyone they didn’t like said “racist” and “fascist” and “Putin-inspired”. When challenged, they said they could hear “dog whistles”.
Well, the dog-whistle argument has boomeranged.
Now, there are right-wing billionaires like Bill Ackman, who can hear antisemitic dog whistles everywhere he feels like it.
Substackers Battle Over Banning Nazis by Elizabeth Nolan Brown (Reason)
“Uh, pretty easy just not to do business with Nazis, some might say. Which is actually… not true. At least not in 2023. Because while the term “Nazi” might have a fixed historical meaning, it’s bandied about pretty broadly these days. It gets used to describe people who (thankfully) aren’t actually antisemitic or advocating for any sort of ethnic cleansing. Donald Trump and his supporters get called Nazis. The folks at Planned Parenthood get called Nazis. People who don’t support Israel get called Nazis. All sorts of people get called Nazis for all sorts of reasons. Are tech companies supposed to bar all these people? And how much time should they put into investigating whether people are actual Nazis or just, like, Nazis by hyperbole? In the end, “not doing business with Nazis” would require a significant time investment and a lot of subjective judgment calls.
“[…] In practice, it would be more like “not doing business with anyone who anyone describes as a Nazi””
The demand boils down to “deplatform anyone whose opinion I don’t already approve of,” which is facially ludicrous. It ensures that people will only ever be exposed to the right opinions. Boring. Totalitarianism is boring.
Major split opens between central banks by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“Significantly, as the Financial Times (FT) reported, citing a person involved in the discussions, the “dovishness” of Powell’s comments “caught many members of the ECB governing council off guard.” According to the source “it was surprising for a lot of us” and “makes life more difficult.”
“In other words, the Fed did not even bother give the ECB, the second most important bank in the world, so much as a “heads up” that it was about to undertake a major reorientation.”
“There was one measure on which inflation that was not budging, domestic inflation. “And domestic inflation is largely generated by wages,” she said.”
Oh, is it, Christine? Am I supposed to believe that the president of the ECB has not heard of—to say nothing of read—the articles and research pointing to global conglomerates having caused much, if not most, of the inflation? It’s adorable how, whenever you read about inflation, you have to read the fine print about which obvious parts of a household budget have been left out of the numbers being used in a given article—like food or fuel—but it’s similarly lovely to read that the world’s financial leaders are adamant in their near-spiritual belief that inflation is caused purely by greedy workers wanting higher wages, who are so stupid that they can’t see that they’re actually driving their own costs up. Silly workers.
COP28 climate summit exposes the dead end of fighting climate change under capitalism by Brian Dyne (WSWS)
“The end of COP28 was also applauded by John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate. Kerry said of the draft resolution, “While nobody here will see their views completely reflected, the fact is that this document sends a very strong signal to the world.”
“That signal is that capitalist governments can and will do nothing to fight climate change. Any genuine mobilization would cut across their national interests and corporate profits. It is significant that while most other heads of state attended at least part of the conference, US President Joe Biden did not, ostensibly too busy prosecuting war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza.”
“Current greenhouse gas emissions are putting Earth on track for a 3-degree Celsius warming, twice as much as the current benchmark presented as a “point of no return.” In such a scenario, an estimated one billion people would be forced from their homes a result of sea level rise, on top of the billion now who are currently under threat from dying as a result of starvation, disease and thirst.”
Yes, but none of those people are us. We have arrogated all of the things unto us. Maybe our climate will be less-good than it was, but we don’t really care—because rich people stay indoors, in their apartments in big cities, or in air-conditioned palaces in the nicest parts of the countryside and world. Those places will take decades before they degrade.
And that’s somebody else’s problem. We can’t stop it now, so why bother? It would only mean that we have to restrict ourselves and it probably wouldn’t even work. Why risk it? Why reduce my perceived comfort for an uncertain benefit that doesn’t even accrue only to me?
This Year’s Climate Summit Ended on a Hopeful Note by Bill McKibben (Jacobin)
Bill McKibben, on the other hand, made sure to title his piece in a way that lets liberals smugly keep doing what they’re doing, safe in the knowledge that their elected leaders have got a handle on everything. He seems to have made that his job in the last decade or so.
“The world’s nations have now publicly agreed that they need to transition off fossil fuels, and that sentence will hang over every discussion from now on — especially the discussions about any further expansion of fossil fuel energy. There may be barriers to shutting down operations (what the text of the agreement obliquely refers to as “national circumstances, pathways, and approaches.”) But surely, if the language means anything at all, it means no opening more new oil fields, no more new pipelines, and no more new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.”
JFC Bill. Talk about setting yourself up for disappointment. “Surely”, it means all of that. No, it surely doesn’t. There are going to five times as many LNG terminals in Europe in ten years. The “green wave” is horseshit. And you know where that LNG is going to come from? The U.S. Joe Biden has merrily opened up more territory for fossil-fuel exploration than any president before him. Do you know why? Because it’s still wildly profitable. And because he gives less of a fuck what the world thinks than Netanyahu. YOLO.
McKibben goes on to note that there were two other hopeful moments in climate-change history. In 1995, the world finally acknowledged that it existed. Progress! In 2015—20 years later!—came a pledge to do something about it. Seven years later, and third hopeful moment is calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” Fifty years after having learned about, the last two years have seen the highest CO2 emissions of all time, and the two greatest increases of all time. But, sure, go ahead and be “hopeful”, Bill.
McKibben ends with,
“[…] today’s agreement is literally meaningless — and potentially meaningful. The diplomats are done now, so the rest of us are going to have to supply that meaning.”
They’re not going to do anything, Bill. There’s not chance in hell of sticking a landing under 1.5ºC. How can you even suggest that that’s realistic? The system will not allow it. Their greed will not allow it. Their devotion to piracy will not allow it.
They cannot stand to see anyone have something that they do not have. They squabble like chimps. There is no possibility for a way forward with people in charge, from cultures like this.
The OECD—led by the U.S.—will bury the world. I used to think the planet would be just fine without us, but we’re seemingly determined to take down most other higher-order life on Earth with us.
The Zsigmondy Effect by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“χρόνος γὰρ εὐμαρης θεός.
Time is a god that brings relief.
—Sophocles, Electra”
“Since 2021 we have generally supposed, without any real public disclosure of the science behind ChronoSwooper, that temporal transit is possible only in view of the breakthrough discovery by Zsigmondy and his team of the phenomenal nature of time. The succession of moments in which our lives unfold, Zsigmondy definitively showed, is only an ordering of experience in a way that gives it shape and meaning for perceiving subjects such as ourselves, while deep down, in reality as it really is, everything happens all at once. To ChronoSwoop, in this light, is really only to access different aspects of the present. Philosophers had for millennia suspected something of this sort to be the case.”
Middle Insomnia by Miracle Jones (The Baffler)
This was an amazingly dark Internet revenge fantasy. Well done.
“[…] equally pissed off at her neighbors across the street who are so fucking worried about nonexistent big city crime spilling into the suburbs that they’ve installed a cartoonishly-strong sodium-vapor prison light above their garage that shines right into her bedroom. She ought to put up reflective meth-lab tinfoil as revenge. Maybe she will commission ten cardboard cutouts of Dukes-of-Hazzard-era Jessica Simpson from some lunatic on Etsy and put a few in every street-facing window. Really get the neighborhood talking.”
“She scans Spotify to see if there are any new podcasts in her feed. She likes the mean political ones about how much Trump sucks, but she also likes podcasts where two charmless acquaintances drone on about some stupid esoteric subject, performing thrilling obsessive dissection that mimics actual philosophical analysis but that doesn’t ever truly intersect with the real world. These shows are useless by preexisting agreement, as if the meaningless subjects that these two people have decided to tackle (car problems, The Bachelorette , Magic: The Gathering drafts, serial murder) are the only safe topics that won’t banjax this temporary podcast friendship. It feels like marriage.”
Christ that’s bleak. What does the verb “like” even mean here? Is distracting oneself enough to keep the demons at bay?
“It is one of the oldest memes from the full broadband era. Concerned professors have written papers. It’s been chronicled in alarmist articles on websites and featured in sinister cello-scored documentaries about the horrors of online fame.”
“Overnight, Aidan turned into a reverse celebrity, hunted by fanatics but without any of the money or privilege that a real celebrity might leverage into protection. And now the abuse wasn’t just coming from kids anymore. Adults from all over the world were now curious about sustaining the panopticon around Aidan that made it seem like he had no choice but to take his own life. It became a creative science experiment, a new internet game for expats in refractory periods during their illegal sex tourism. Aidan had no natural defenses against these wriggling social pinworms: the internet was already the place where he went to escape from the real world, the place where he used to feel somewhat safe and tolerated.”
“And then Russia invaded Crimea and the photo of Aidan became a weaponized meme about how Western weakness was fueled by gender-confused decadence.”
How casually Americans’ warped, nonfactual, jingoistic, and self-serving myths worm their way into every narrative. I know it doesn’t matter to this story, not really, but it’s just incredible how casually people treat as fact that which they’ve never questioned.
I recently was speaking to a reasonably well-informed friend who was convinced that Russia had annexed Crimea in a bloody, violent takeover that involved snipers and lots and lots of dead civilians. He never questioned the story, even though we’d never heard of any insurrections against Russian rule in the last decade.
The Russians imposed a referendum on `Crimea, then claimed that 97% of the voters wanted to join Russia, with 83% of voters having turned out. Of course it’s disputed, but it was bloodless. Russia did not invade Crimea. They were already there. They’ve had a huge naval base in Sebastopol for 150 years. Crimea was very, very Russian, even before it joined Russia.
It would be like saying that the U.S. had invaded Okinawa in 2023. They’ve been there for 80 years. They don’t have to invade. English; do you speak it?
“Some of them were just beat-matching the algorithmic propaganda, executing zombie instructions to create a deviancy amplification spiral on the undead internet to help a failed, broke-ass ethnostate state ensorcell the dumbest people in the west: college kids with boutique extreme politics.”
I knew that this topic was going to be onomatopoeia before it even showed up because I learned about it in high school, at some point. I remember we were studying Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote of the “tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells”. It’s a word he made up to describe the sound of bells.
“Discover trending title on #BookTok.”
Jesus Christ. Look at that picture. That appeals to people who read?
Therapeutic Nationalism and Other Opportunistic Decouplings by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“The marriage of premodern attachment to hierarchies of ethnicity and tribe with 21st-century boss-bitch-but-also-performatively-vulnerable culture might appear absurd to most of the people who practice the latter. But since so much of left communication and outreach has been dependent on making left politics cool and defined through shared social bonds rather than political theory, there’s not much that can be done to stop people from picking and choosing different kinds of virtue signaling. “Woke, but conservative” is not an impossible future.
“Turns out that when you spent a decade (to pick an example) teaching people that being a socialist means constantly sharing Simpsons and Sopranos references, using those touchstones to define in-group status rather than actual tangible political beliefs, you’re contributing to politics as a hazy gumbo of deracinated social signifiers, filled with people with no particular moral vision at all and no qualms about heading off to another party if the one they’re at seems like a drag. (And American socialism, in 2023, is definitely a drag.)”
“There is no doubt outrageous hypocrisy out there right now. We’ve seen, in recent times, that after a decade and a half of mocking people as “snowflakes” when they ask for certain social accommodations, conservatives are very happy to turn around and treat people with exactly those kid gloves when the culture war positioning is right. We’ve seen the notion of safe spaces go from a reflexive laugh line among a broad swath of our political culture to being talked about in hallowed terms, when the right sort of person is asking for one. It turns out that the snarling culture warriors who are so disdainful of coddling and participation trophy culture are not attached to those stances if the price is right. As you know, I am someone who has an attachment to civil liberties as a left-wing virtue and who has long questioned whether treating people from marginalized groups as if they’re made of glass is what’s best for them in the long run.”
“[…] my point is that treating politics as a big online popularity contest was always a mistake in the first place, that the use of lifestyle branding as an advertisement for left-liberal politics was effective but costly, and I have little doubt that we will see, in the near future, an American politics of therapeutic nationalism, one which keeps the Instagram memes and the affirmation and the self-care and the therapeutic narcissism and the jokes about Zoloft, but grafts on border security, disdain for the poor, and submission to the god of finance.”
If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer: WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.”
“The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.”
“Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over and anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway . Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick”
“Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing””
Take It to the Spank Bank by Anabelle Johnston (The Baffler)
“Alana Evans, a performer and president of the Adult Performance Artists Guild, has been in the industry since 1998 and recognizes how artificial intelligence and adjacent technologies like deepfakes threaten to exacerbate existing inequities. “I’ve made it this long because I’ve kept up with what’s out there and adapted,” she tells me. “AI technology can do a lot for us—my body is not what it was when I started out and it would be nice to produce a gangbang without having to shoot it. But when that technology falls into the wrong hands, the actors are the ones who lose out.” In addition to siphoning income streams from adult performers, Evans warns that deepfakes made without the artists’ consent are often made to engage in racist roleplay and other scenarios performers may be uncomfortable with—while at the same time diluting the value of content made by the performers themselves.”
This is a pretty compact and interesting overview. At 46:00, he discusses some of the available jailbreaks or “prompt escapes” that are still available, even with the latest LLM Agents. [3] He shows how to reformulate a query for making napalm by asking the LLM Agent to tell it a story his grandmother used to tell him about making napalm. Or how to simply convert your query into the exact same text, but in Base64 encoding, in which case the LLM Agent gives the answer you were looking for, “escaping” its alignment/training/biases. You can also avoid the training by using a non-English language because the focus has been on avoiding issues with English. They’re just addressing symptoms, not the base problem. This is probably because they don’t understand how the black box of the LLM itself works, so all they can do is to massage the input in the hopes of getting what they consider to be more acceptable output, or to massage the output as well.
Why “agent” and not “AI” or “LLM”? Because the LLM is at the core of an agent. An agent is an LLM plus “alignment”, put together with the explicit purpose of commercialization or professional usage. An LLM can only “hallucinate”, in that that’s all that it does. Sometimes it says things we find interesting and can use, whether they are factual or not. An LLM can be used as a tool, but is not foolproof. An LLM-based agent, on the other hand, has been designed to be useful and, often, “factual”, in that it has been “aligned”—told what is correct and incorrect.
An LLM is biased based on its training data. An LLM agent is biased based on it’s LLM’s training data and based on its training. The unpredictability of the result for any given prompt combined with the complete black box of both its training and its alignment mean that you have to be careful about what you get out of an LLM Agent.
This is a great analysis of the state of LLMs and LLM agents by a physicist/philosopher who’s very good at communicating and thinking about hard problems. He argues as well that there is a distinct difference in the underlying technology of the LLM/neural network and the agents with which we actually have contact—which are an LLM wrapped with many, many layers of bias and training and guardrails.
We should be aware of two things: (1) That there are guardrails that very clearly delineate the information that you’ll get out of such an agent and (2) that these LLMs don’t have an concept of the world, they have no context, they are just incredible word-associators.
He gives several interesting examples of his interactions, in which he demonstrates that the tools aren’t very useful—and are actively harmful to actually learning something—when approaching real-world problems, rather than the toy problems that you usually see demonstrated. He asks the LLM agent about a hypothetical version of chess where the board was on a cylinder. Any human familiar with chess would quickly see that the kings are now right next to each other, and that the game would be over on the first move, as the kings start off in simultaneous checkmate. The LLM Agent, however, droned on and on about what an interesting innovation this would be and just made up a whole bunch of shit that had no relation to the question, but was vaguely related to chess. The LLM Agent is a student who’s never paid attention in class and is trying to bullshit its way through the exam.
Documentation Quadrants − The Grand Unified Theory of Documentation by Steve Dunn
“The divio pages elegantly clarifies this with the analogy of teaching a child to cook. For instance, for tutorials , what you teach a child to cook isn’t important. What’s important is that the child is in a kitchen environment and gaining practical experience of using utensils and handling food. Whereas how-to guides are akin to recipes. A recipe has a clear, defined end and addresses a specific question. It would probably be unreasonable to expect someone to follow a recipe if they have no kitchen experience.”
“Understanding-oriented means the users don’t know what they don’t know. They cannot yet formulate the questions because they lack the understanding
Information-oriented is where the user does have enough understanding to formulate a question, and they seek the required information on a particular topic. Hopefully your document has that information!”
“In the mythology of open source, programming languages are created by people who seemingly have no direct economic function. They are just really good at compilers (somehow) and have a house to live in (somehow) and have a lifetime to devote to creating a useful programming language (somehow!)
“We will examine specific organizations that create programming languages. Where do the salaries for compiler engineers come from? How does Go end up with 5 engineers and Dart end up with 30? Who signs off on these expenses and why? Does this put any boundaries on language design or development practices? And how do the economics work for people outside of the major tech corporations?
“My goal is to give the talk I needed to hear 10 years ago when I was just starting on Elm. By clearly delineating the many variations of corporate funding and independent funding, I hope users will come away with a better foundation for evaluating and comparing programming languages.”
This was a really interesting talk about economic incentives in the world of programming languages. Where do they come from? How do they grow? How can they grow in the system we have? From the creator of the Elm programming language and runtime.
From one of the slides,
“You have a job because it serves the purposes of a powerful person.
“What are those purposes?
“What happens when their purposes change?”
At the end, he talks about a cool new thing that he built that compiles Elm to C/SQL, runs it in PostgreSql, supports custom types in tables, and has type-safe migrations, but …“that’s the economics of programming languages. I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.”
Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 09:36:08 (GMT-5)
]]>The successor—Threema... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 17. Dec 2023 17:42:07 (GMT-5)
The tl;dr is that the current desktop client has been in maintenance mode for almost four years. It requires that an iOS phone be available, connected, unlocked, that Threema be in the foreground, and that the screen be on in order for the desktop client to function at all. [1]
The successor—Threema Desktop 2.0—has been in development for about 4 years, has been actually available in beta for about a year, and is still so buggy and limited in functionality as to be barely usable. The bar set by Apple Messages and Signal seems be far too high for Threema.
Even the iOS client still doesn’t have inline previews for links—how hard is that? Is it somehow insecure to download a picture and show it?
The iOS client is otherwise fine, but I would really, really, really like to use a keyboard for text and drag-&-drop for links and pictures. Especially since I’m sitting at a computer most of the day anyway.
With Signal and Apple Messages, I can respond comfortably, whereas with Threema, I have to pick up my phone because the desktop client is either too tiresome or isn’t available because I can only link one of my desktops/laptops.
The web-based desktop client is an absolute phone-killer on iOS now. The app has to be open and the phone has to be unlocked and the screen has to be on. This client was placed in maintenance mode on June 15, 2020, about 3.5 years ago. The readme states,
“⚠️ Note: Threema Web is in maintenance mode while we are working on Threema for Desktop 2.0, which should resolve some of the long-standing issues we were having with Threema Web. We will still do regular maintenance and fix critical bugs, but for now there will be no major new features or non-critical bugfixes. See #996 for more details.”
The link to #996 takes you to a sad list of comments June 2020 through October 2021, with basically no progress. In late January of 2022, I learned from Threema during a job interview [2] that Desktop 2.0 was on the way. 🎉 🙌🏼
📆 📆 📆…
I commented on July 1st, 2022, asking about the status. I included the following screenshot I’d found on Twitter.
They wrote back nearly immediately to say they were “working on it like crazy.”
I responded with,
“Thanks for the quick reply! “Working on it like crazy” is enough of a sign of life for me, TBH. I just noticed that it had been six months since I’d heard anything (screenshot/tweet above) and that the initial announcement of the new architecture had been made 2.5 years ago.
“As for my experience with the current desktop, I regularly see the open desktop app, with a conversation selected. I can even write a message, but when I submit, it shows the “Reload Session” button and throws away the comment. I’ve gotten used to just clicking a different conversation first to see whether I’m still “logged in”. That way I don’t lose any message text. It’s just not ideal. Signal is much more comfortable as a desktop client (although their nearly daily updates are also not super-reassuring). I have an old iPhone 6S (although I doubt that plays into it).
“Maybe I’m the weirdo for using a desktop/web version, but it’s so much more comfortable to use a real keyboard and to be able to copy/paste from a real browser. I know a lot of people are exclusively on their phone, though.
“Hey, I’m happy to hear you’re working on it. I also understand if you’re going with the old Id Software roadmap: “when it’s done.”
“Thanks again for the quick response.”
The response kinda/sorta corrected my note that it’s been 2.5 years by writing “1 ½ years since the announcement. But obviously there was internal work before, so your number is actually close. 🙂”, confirmed that the “[t]he iPhone experience of Threema Web is indeed rough,” and that “the whole Threema team would like to have released Desktop 2.0 already”.
There was also a relatively honest block of reasons for the delay.
“Besides technical challenges on the Desktop 2.0 code base itself, let me name a few other reasons why it takes so long: Multi-Device protocols are very complex if one wants to prevent desyncs and conflicts. Another challenge is to update the existing code of the apps so that they harmonize with each other. This is vastly more difficult than writing another Threema client as they exist today. And I think it’s fair to admit that, even though we were prepared, the magnitude of it still took us by surprise.”
All understandable. That was almost 1½ years ago. The Threema Multi-Device: An Architectural Overview white paper was written in November 2020 and doesn’t seem to have changed since then.
At the beginning of this year—6 months later—a preview version became available, which you could test if you upgraded to a beta version of the Threema client on iOS. It was limited, but worked OK for a while, then stopped working after a few months because things got a little out-of-sync. I stopped using it, then decided to reinstall everything again and got it working.
A day or two later, I had strange issues with messages not appearing on iOS or the Desktop, and some friends said they weren’t seeing my messages. On top of that, the iOS client started constantly spamming dialog boxes to tell me that there was another device linked and the client would no longer update. Yes, I know. I linked it on purpose. You not only watched me do it, but you helped me do it.
As soon as I unlinked the Desktop device, everything went back to normal.
I still have friends on Threema only, so I recently reinstalled the desktop client again. There is still a list of limitations a mile long.
- The beta version of Threema 2.0 for desktop only works with one iOS device and one computer (Windows/Mac/Linux).
- It’s available for iOS only (Threema for Android is not yet supported).
- […] videos are sent as file messages. Recording voice messages and sending or receiving polls and locations will be supported in a future release.
- New message notifications may appear on your iOS device even if you have already read the messages in the desktop app.
- The “Typing Indicator” and “Do Not Disturb” settings are not yet supported by the desktop app.
- Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) is not supported when using the beta version of Threema 2.0 for desktop.
There’s also no support for audio or video calls, obviously.
At least one friend noted that PFS had been disabled and whether he should be worried? I had to admit that it was because I’m using a beta client from Threema and that they turned it off because they don’t seem to be competent enough to get it working in multi-device mode within a reasonable time span.
It’s incredible. After at least 3 years of publicly known development work (and 4 years of admitted work by the developers), it barely works. It’s stable enough, but it’s still very much an alpha, in that it can’t possibly be considered feature-complete.
This is what the client looks like today, in December of 2023.
Note that it looks nothing like the screenshot of the purported functional prototype from December 2021 (shown above).
I’m kind of embarrassed for them.
Signal has a desktop client. They’ve had it for years. I regret ever having gotten anyone on Threema because the desktop solution is so MIA right now. Signal does everything I need and it’s at least as secure—if not more secure—than Threema. Now that I see how shakily they’re developing their desktop software, I’m losing confidence that they’re any better at the security side.
It just feels like Threema isn’t really good at developing software. Maybe they have good developers, but they don’t know how to ship software [3]—or they absolutely don’t care about this particular piece of software.
Maybe they’re focused on their corporate customers, who actually pay them for their product. That’s fair. But the least they could do is admit that the multi-device desktop client for the rest of us just isn’t happening.
Threema didn’t make this change voluntarily, but had it sprung on them by Apple, as documented in Why does the iOS app need to be in the foreground for the desktop app / the web client to work? that writes,
“Due to restrictions on Apple’s part, it is, unfortunately, no longer possible for the desktop app / the web client to wake up the app and re-establish the connection in case it is lost.
“[…]
“With Threema 4.6 for iOS and earlier app versions, it was possible to use the desktop app / the web client even when your device was locked or the app was not running in the foreground. This mode of operation is no longer supported by Apple.”
They seem to have been taken by surprise by Apple’s change—although I’m sure Apple gave developers more than enough time to react. Threema linked to the multi-device outlook—quite hopefully, in retrospect—a document that was last updated in December of 2022.
It was my first interview in almost 20 years, after having working for my own company for 16 years. I was interviewing for a position working on their older PHP backend. The other programming jobs they had advertised were no longer available, so we agreed to try that. I was just trying to get a foot in the door at a company I thought would be interesting to work for and whose product and vision I respected.
They didn’t want me. We disagreed about what was a possible SQL injection in my assessment project. You can see the project I wrote in four hours for them. They wanted someone better. That’s cool. I hope they found that better developer, but man, am I absolutely unconvinced by their complete inability to ship a working desktop client in three years.
I feel like I dodged a bullet—it seems like organizational chaos over there. I’m much happier at Uster Technologies AG.
At 26:00, they discuss the difference between racism, generalization, and recognition of cultural difference.
... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 16. Dec 2023 23:38:19 (GMT-5)
I though I’d already heard everything that Cornel West had to say, but this interview was chock-full of many interesting clarifications. Norman Finkelstein doesn’t say much in this one.
At 26:00, they discuss the difference between racism, generalization, and recognition of cultural difference.
“Norman: I’m wondering, is what you’re saying, in your opinion, is it a stereotype, a generalization, is it even valid? I’m curious where you stand on that. I felt it was a form of—it was just another version of Afrocentrism, where Black people think differently, they reason differently.
“Cornel: No, I think we’re talking about again—like Gramsci, and St. Clair Drake, and, of course, Toni Morrison’s great text, the new one that just came out Sources of Self-Image, which lays this out so beautifully—that we’re talking about cultural specificity.
“When you take a dignified African people, who then go through 244 years of slavery, and then Jim Crow and so on, right? That so much of the desire to hold on to sanity and dignity—it’s against the law for them to read and write—and, therefore, so much of their attempt to make sense of the world is going to be oral. They already come from a West African people, where orality was very important. But it becomes even more accented in that regard.
“Remember Saul Bellow says, well, ‘show me the Proust of the Zulus.’ You say, brother Saul, now, you’re one of the great novelists of ideas and comic writers in American tradition. Not as great as Mark Twain, who was the greatest comic, but Twain wasn’t a historian, a novelist of ideas. You were. But you know, in fact, that proof comes out of a particular historical moment in which people are given a priority toward a certain kind of writing.
“And Zulu genius is going to be manifested in other ways. It’s not going to be manifested in the novel. That doesn’t mean the Zulus are lesser, it just means they’re different. And so, when I talk about cultural specificity and kinetic morality, I’m talking about, first, the centrality of song as a way of sustaining black humanity when it was against the law for them to read and write, which is the exact opposite of Jewish culture for 2,000 years, where the love of learning, the love of language, the reading, the interpretation of text, was a precondition for any kind of survival.
“So what does that mean? That means that they’re both still human. It’s just that orality. And how’s that going to be manifested? It’s going to be manifested first in the churches, where people are going to be hanging on the word of the preacher. That the physical investment in the orality that allow people to believe in themselves and a God, so they don’t kill themselves or commit collective suicide. That’s not Afrocentrism or anything. That’s cultural specificity.”
By cultural specificity, West means that you consider the difference between cultures within the historical context that created them. He says neither is better, but I think that there’s a limit to that argument. It all depends on what society considers to be useful, no? Society considers music and literature equally useful, but somehow “cures for disease” has got to come out on top, I think.
It’s only a society in which it is a given that disease can be cured that can even luxuriate in a comparison of music versus writing. And we have to be honest about where cures for diseases are going to come from, where improved means of agriculture and communication are going to come from, where more efficient energy and insulation from the elements are going to come from. They might stem from a strong tradition of song born in illiteracy, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
There is a limit to this “no-one is better” routine. There is a definite path with the potential to lead to more improvements for people, in general. The path we’re on is not that because, while we have the rational science part down reasonably well, our politics and morality are so f@$ked that we’re still acting the same as several centuries ago. We’re still basically pirates, taking everything for a few, and keeping the others around as slaves to the machine that transfers wealth and power away from them. Instead of shooting them outright when they get uppity, we’ve gone the Aldous Huxlex route and anesthetized them.
It’s that machine that also, eventually, makes certain cultures inferior. There is only so much deprivation that a culture or society can endure before it is essentially left behind. You can’t malnourish—either food or knowledge/literacy—generations of a people and then naively say that they’re just as good as any other people. There are such things as real-life advantages, like advantages of climate, health, education, or wealth.
The aforementioned piracy has ensured that the gap grows and grows, until it’s simply no longer true that no one society is better than another. It may be true that one is more just than another, but that’s not even a given. It may simply only be true that one society has gained all of its advantages at the expense of a trail of broken societies it leaves in its wake. But it’s simply wrong to say that there is no objective benefit, in the end. It would almost be worse if all of this destruction had led to absolutely no gain for anyone.
Those societies that arrogate everything to themselves lose any objective claim to the moral high ground, they lose any place in history other than in the scoundrel’s corner—but they’ve definitely won, at least in the short- and medium-term.
At 35:00, Cornel discusses the difference in kinds of racism, in the degree to which a point of reference is forced on a person.
“I resonate very deeply with the humanism of Douglass. Douglass is very much a humanist as a black man, as an American. But it’s first and foremost humanity. It reminds me very much of what Malcolm X said, at the end of his life, ‘I’m for truth, no matter who’s for it. I’m for justice, no matter who promotes it. I’m first and foremost a human being. A Black Man. A Muslim.‘
“If you’re a human being,everybody has specificity. What’s your mama’s name? What’s your daddy’s name? Who are your mentors? Who taught you how to dance? What models did you have in your life, in terms of intellectual work, or love, or whatever? Everybody has a specificity in their humanity, but the humanism that sits at the center of Douglass’s work, I resonate very deeply with.
“But, I tell you, I have two deep, deep critiques of Douglass. And, in this sense, I’m very much more tied to the Black musical tradition than Douglass. On the one hand, Douglass comes out of such thick, vicious white supremacy that he felt he had to prove something to white folk, because the doubts that they were bombarding him with, were so intense.
“You get this also in the one and only Paul Robeson, when he talks about growing up with his father, with the Latin and the Greek, you gotta prove something. You get it in Du Bois, when the girl refuses his car. I’m going to prove to these white folk that I’m better.
“Hey, you think Charlie Parker ever had to prove to the white saxophonists that he was better? He didn’t give a damn. He just tried to be the best he can be. And he assumes that, within his own community, he’s got standards. So that the white normative gaze that is usually bombarding him with doubt and vicious attack and assault, that’s not part and parcel of what it’s all about.
“I used to talk to Sonny Rollins about that, just when he and Coltrane would talk, you know, when they had these reviews of Coltrane and Giant Steps. ‘He’s not playing fast.‘ ‘He don’t know what he’s doing.‘ ‘He’s just playing scales.‘
“And Sonny Rollins would ask, ‘Trane, does that hurt you?’
“[And Trane said] ‘No, I love these folks, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about. I’m trying to keep track of what Parker and the other folk, what Bud Powell and them are doing, and what the other jazz musicians are doing. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But that’s not my point of reference.‘
“Well, for somebody like Douglass, it was his point of reference. It was inevitable, in some ways, that he had to prove himself, and even Robeson, too. ”
There’s America’s next president, ladies and gentlemen.
What he’s saying is that, although the U.S. was still a deeply racist country, the character of the racism had changed in the sense that the Black man no longer saw his only chance of success in relation to the White man, but in relation to peers of his own choosing.
He was still being discriminated against, but he had more artistic and intellectual freedom. The yoke wasn’t off, by any means, but it had a different shape and didn’t chafe in as many places as the old one did. The grip was loosening. The arc of history bends toward justice—but it ain’t gonna bend itself.
That doesn’t seem like such a big problem to me, when the point of AOT is to improve cold-start times for... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 15. Dec 2023 13:15:17 (GMT-5)
The latest video by Nick Chapsas has a more-than-usually clickbait-y headline. The “big” problem that NativeAOT has, is that it’s 4% slower during runtime than the JIT-compiled version.
That doesn’t seem like such a big problem to me, when the point of AOT is to improve cold-start times for applications launched on-demand. For that use-case, AOT shines. It’s over 4x faster on startup than the JIT-compiled version. It’s incredibly impressive that JIT-compilation takes less than 1/10 of a second, but it’s still 4x slower than AOT.
So, you get the app started 4x fast, but it then performs 4% more slowly than the non-AOT version. It really depends on the use-case, but it’s great for the common one of starting a server to answer a function call—think Azure Functions or AWS Lambdas—and then shutting down again, possibly immediately.
Damian P Edwards (Principal Architect at Microsoft) commented on the post,
“[There are a] few things that cause the slightly lower performance in native AOT apps right now. First (in apps using the web SDK) is the new DATAS Server GC mode. This new GC mode uses far less memory than traditional ServerGC by dynamically adapting memory use based on the app’s demands, but in this 1st generation it impacts the performance slightly. The goal is to remove the performance impact and enable DATAS for all Server GC apps in the future.
“Second is CoreCLR in .NET 8 has Dynamic PGO enabled by default, which allows the JIT to recompile hot methods with more aggressive optimizations based on what it observes while the app is running. Native AOT has static PGO with a default profile applied and by definition can never have Dynamic PGO.
“Thirdly, JIT can detect hardware capabilities (e.g. CPU intrinsics) at runtime and target those in the code it generates. Native AOT however defaults to a highly compatible target instruction set which won’t have those optimizations but you can specify them at compile time based on the hardware you know you’re going to run on.
“Running the tests in [the] video with DATAS disabled and native AOT configured for the target CPU could improve the results slightly.”
To summarize:
An AOT-compiled app cannot benefit from dynamic PGO. It benefits from static PGO, but cannot recompile itself on-the-fly because it doesn’t have a JIT compiler to do so.
The JIT-compiled app can dynamically recompile what it observes as performance hotspots with more highly optimized code. I wrote a bit about how Safari does something similar for JavaScript in Optimizing compilation and execution for dynamic languages—although for JavaScript, dynamic recompilation is sometimes necessary for backing out of an incorrect assumption about what type a variable is going to have.
As well, a JIT-compiled app can take actual hardware capabilities into account, while an AOT-compiled app necessarily targets a static hardware profile.
The generic hardware profile is going to be extremely conservative about capabilities because if it assumes a capability that doesn’t exist, the app simply won’t run. Choosing a hardware profile for AOT that matches the target hardware would boost performance.
I guess that was more of a rephrasing, rather than a summary.
Anyway, another commenter asked,
“[…] would it be possible in the future for a JIT application with Dynamic PGO that has run for a while and has made all kinds of optimizations to then create a “profile” of sorts that could be used by the Native AOT compiler to build an application that is both fast in startup time and highly optimized for a given workload?”
Yes. That should be possible. It’s unclear what sort of extra performance boost this would give, especially if you’d already fine-tuned the target hardware profile—which is the first thing you should do. I could imagine adding this sort of profiling as a compilation step, though. You always have to be careful, though, whenever you’re running something in production that is different than what you’ve tested. We put a lot of faith in the JIT and dynamic PGO, don’t we?
I wanted to also note that, at the end of the video, Chapsas showed Microsoft’s numbers, which confirm the performance drop, but also show an over 50% reduction in working set! Dude! How do you not mention that!? The app uses less than half of the memory and runs almost as fast? Yes, please! That’s a huge win for people paying for cloud-based services.
For once, I’m somewhat surprised to see how naive Nick’s take is—that a 4% drop in performance is at-all significant, especially when the “slow” version is still processing 50,000 requests per second in a performance-constrained environment. He did mention a trade-off, but was very excited to tell people that AOT is slower during runtime.
There are always trade-offs and you should be very aware of the actual non-functional requirements for your application before you decide whether to use a technology or not. For 99.9% of the applications, the 4% drop in performance vis á vis a JIT-compiled version won’t be the deciding factor. When it’s accompanied by a working set that’s only ½ the size, then it becomes an even more attractive target.
Published by marco on 15. Dec 2023 11:52:23 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 15. Dec 2023 12:23:31 (GMT-5)
A build started started failing after a commit. However, the errors had nothing to do with the changes in the commit. A little investigation revealed that the cloud agent had started using a newer version of the build tool that included an expanded set of default warnings. These warnings started appearing first on CI because developers hadn’t had the chance to update their tools yet.
The “warnings as errors” setting turned what would have been a build with a few extra warnings into a failing build that prevented a developer from being able to apply completely unrelated changes. The setting allowed new, unrelated, and irrelevant warnings to push their way to the top of the priority queue.
👉 tl;dr: I don’t think we should use the “errors as warnings” setting anymore. You can get the same benefit —and even more—by using newer, more finer-grained configuration options.
This section wasn’t included in my original draft of this essay. It only occurred to me under the shower that this is the real reason why I wrote a ten-page essay to answer a teammate’s question in a PR review.
In hindsight, it’s obvious: to answer whether we should re-enable the “warnings as errors” setting, we should first think about what doing so would accomplish. What need does it fulfill?
The rest of this essay meanders drunkenly along a path toward what I hope is a reasonable answer.
I understand the sentiment. You’re in a team that never, or rarely, looks at warnings. You’ve given up on teaching them how to look at warnings and keep them fixed. Fine. You just make every warning an error and now they absolutely have to fix everything. Problem solved.
Except it isn’t, is it? Not really.
What you’ve now done is ensured that your team will be constantly fixing errors that aren’t really errors at times when they wouldn’t want or need to be doing so.
Don’t make me waste time pretty-printing code that I’m still writing! How annoying is it when you can’t run a test because your comment has an extra line below it? Are you kidding me? [1]
If your team does care about warnings, then, … why do you need to make them errors?
Before handcuffing developers with a setting, think about whether there isn’t a trust problem first. Are you addressing a symptom rather than the cause?
While it’s possible that applying handcuffs is the best possible solution in your case, consider that there are other solutions along a spectrum that goes from “enforcing discipline” to “relying on individual discipline”.
Any feature that’s enforced at all times will end up hampering efficiency and flexibility in some cases, while any feature that’s left up to developers is liable to not be applied consistently.
The job of the person setting up code-style configuration is to thread that needle, tailoring the configuration for the team and solution at hand.
If you have a lot of solutions and teams, then you also get to consider the maintenance overhead of having too many custom configurations. In that case, you might want to make a few standard bundles that group teams and solutions, like “legacy”, “modern”, “junior team”, etc.
You don’t have to name them like that, but the name should give you an idea of how loose or restrictive the settings would be.
I don’t have time for all of that. Let’s just run them on the CI. Warnings as errors in the cloud FTW!
Now you’re allowing team members to push all the way up to the server before they realize that they have errors. Granted, they’re actually warnings, but you can’t merge to master until you fix them, so, yeah, they’re errors. This isn’t less annoying.
But, but, but, what if they’re, like, real warnings? Like “possible NullReferenceException
” or something like that? That’s a good point, sure.
But, in most cases, it’s something more like “extra line found at end of file”, “space missing after parenthesis”, “method can be made private”, “class should be internal”, etc.
There are better—more automated—ways of addressing some of those, which we’ll discuss below.
Also, what if some warnings start appearing in your CI because of a tooling change? That can never happen, though, right? Because you’ve locked down all of your tool versions so that it can never happen? No? You didn’t do that? You’re using “latest”? Why?
The people building the tools are pretty clever, so we want to know what new things they have to tell us about our code.
Oh, right. Because it makes sense. If you lock down your tool versions, you run the very real risk of not knowing when your build will stop running with more-modern tools. You run the risk of it having been years since you last changed anything in your build and your being stuck with those settings and old tools … until they’re obsolete or no longer available on your build server.
It’s better to use “latest” and have an occasional spike of warnings than to just never know where you stand with newer toolchains. Locking down tool versions leads to things like DevOps having to set up on-site build agents with Visual Studio 2010 on them for certain projects.
OK, so we want to use latest tools, but that means that we might also get new warnings. These are a good thing! The people building the tools are pretty clever, so we want to know what new things they have to tell us about our code.
What we don’t want is for those new things to break builds that used to be running just fine.
This usually shows up when someone pushes new commits, runs the CI, and sees that they’re getting errors that they didn’t see locally. WTH? “My code didn’t cause those errors?”
The drawback here is this is (A) annoying and (B) it’s very possible that the new errors are a distraction at this point in time. The person’s bug fix may be important, but the new warnings have now bumped themselves to the top of the priority queue!
And what if the person whose build has failed isn’t well-qualified to address these new warnings? Well, then they get to bump the new warnings to the top of someone else’s priority queue! Probably a more senior developer. Fun for all!
What’s the solution then? Well, if you realize that the new warnings appeared because of a tool change, then I suppose you should try to pin the tool version on the CI, with all of the drawbacks outlined above.
That’s assuming that the person to whom this happens is (A) capable of figuring this out and (B) knows how to pin the tool version. And (C) we don’t really like that solution, for the reasons outlined above.
What about if we think again about what we’re trying to accomplish with “warnings as errors”?
Thinking…🤔🤔🤔…
Each solution should be able to decide what is an error and what is a warning and what is a suggestion. You can’t make “possible null-reference exception” an error in some legacy solutions without completely killing forward progress.
We want warnings to indicate potential problems, but be careful about forcing a solution to address all of them immediately. It’s more realistic to create tasks to slowly eliminate warnings, only switching a setting to an error later, to prevent future transgressions.
If the developer is focused on something, they shouldn’t be forced to switch modes and prioritize formatting. Use gentle, visible hints, unless it’s really, really relevant to what they’re working on.
For example, a possible NullReferenceException
is something to be avoided, but is it really an error in all code? It’s definitely a warning, but if the developer knows that it doesn’t matter right now, then they should be able to ignore it, no?
I mean, they haven’t even committed it yet (as far as you know 😉). Maybe they have a breakpoint to see how the heck that variable could be null
in the first place and they were just going to bounce the EIP past the crash anyway. YOLO.
Anyway, we want to be really careful about how pushy we are with the IDE configuration. We want to strike a balance between missing actual problems and decreasing efficiency. We don’t want the developer above to have to write a suppression—or, even worse, do some other, ad-hoc short-circuit of inspections—in order to keep working.
Something should fail only on CI as a last resort. That is, a developer must have tools that make it relatively easy to pass CI. This includes being able to see all warnings in the solution, whether warnings would fail the CI, or having an easy way to apply formatting to all files, if incorrect formatting would fail the build.
We want to avoid a process that leads to half of our commits being called “fix formatting” and “remove warnings”. So, we should consider things like having the IDE auto-reformat files on save.
Inspections should be applied and made visible as quickly as possible, to give the developer the opportunity to produce conforming code from the get-go. The path of least resistance should result in committing code that will also pass CI.
We don’t want to encourage “noisy” commits that “fix up” formatting or other inspection violations. We would rather have a high signal-to-noise ratio in our commits. We want compact, descriptive commits—so we don’t want bug-fix commits to include formatting changes to other parts of the file, if we can avoid it.
Looking at these requirements, we have to conclude that the “warnings as errors” configuration option is an absolute cudgel that we had to use in the old days because we didn’t have fine-tuned control of the inspection-configuration.
Can we do better today, with modern tools?
Absolutely, we can! Most modern IDEs support .editorconfig
, which allows fine-tuned configuration of both code-style and formatting, especially for languages like C# and TypeScript/JavaScript. The wide variety of JetBrains, Intellij-based tools use it as well, e.g. PyCharm, WebStorm, or PHPStorm. Visual Studio understands it. Visual Studio Code understands it.
Of course, the devil is in the details and, the degree to which code-inspection configuration applies from one IDE to another depends very much on the level of standardization for that language and environment. The .NET/C# world has a high degree of standardization, which is very helpful.
EditorConfig allows you to control almost anything you can think of about your code style or formatting. These are called inspections, each of which you can configure with an inspection-specific value and a severity to assign when the inspection is triggered.
For example:
dotnet_style_require_accessibility_modifiers = for_non_interface_members:silent
dotnet_style_prefer_auto_properties = true:silent
The two inspections above should be relatively obvious. In both cases, the preferred setting is configured, but the severity is “silent”, so the IDE doesn’t complain about it.
What’s the point of configuring a preference and then not showing it to the developer?
Ah, because the developer is the not the only one modifying the code.
Excuse me?
Don’t forget that the IDE will auto-format the code when requested. The IDE also writes code when it refactors anything. It needs to know how to format the code that it’s inserting or modifying.
The IDE uses the configuration in the EditorConfig to determine how to format the code. Your tools guy can configure the EditorConfig to conform to the style that the solution / team wants to use. When the code is auto-formatted or refactored, everything should end up looking just the way they wanted it.
If you have a “silent” severity, that means it’s something that you don’t want the team wasting time with during development. However, if no-one ever auto-formats the code, then those inspections will never be applied.
You should consider the process by which your solution will be made to conform with silent inspections in the EditorConfig.
If the inspection severity is suggestion
or higher [2], then the developer sees an indicator in the code when the file is open.
Suggestions, warnings, and errors are shown in the build output, as well. Of course, the developer can disable showing warnings and messages (where suggestions appear) in the error-list pane, but you can’t control everything—and you shouldn’t try.
Give your developers the tools and configuration to be efficient and produce good code, but try not to be too pushy about when they do it.
If the inspection severity is silent
or none
, then the inspection setting is only used by auto-formatting and refactoring tools.
In this case, you’ll have to consider when will your code be formatted? Do your developers occasionally auto-format files? Do they auto-format on save? Is there a step in the CI that auto-formats everything before compilation? If so, does it commit those changes? Or does the CI reject for formatting warnings?
If you have silent inspections, be honest about when they’re going to be applied. If you don’t have a plan, then they will be applied seemingly randomly when someone inadvertently triggers the hotkey for auto-formatting a file [3], which may lead to unpleasant surprises and/or messy commits.
Let’s clear up the distinction between these two main groups of inspections.
var
instead of an explicit type can, in very rare cases, lead to code that no longer compiles. By now, many IDE tools are generally clever enough to avoid even suggesting such a change, but it can still happen.So we’ve examined inspections in detail and talked a lot about setting severity to optimize the developer feedback loop i.e., we don’t want to mess with a developer’s priority queue unless absolutely necessary.
But aren’t there some things that we might allow a developer to do locally but not allow to pass CI? That’s where the “warnings as errors” setting ensured that the CI never passed, even if the developer forgot to check something locally. For example, it’s important to have consistent formatting before attempting a merge.
There are other ways to encourage and support proper coding practices, though.
Pre-commit hooks can run locally, running global formatting on the code base before a developer can commit. This is kind of touchy, as sometimes developers are just committing a WIP to avoid losing their changes. It would be annoying if you had to clean up your formatting just to commit those.
You could include auto-formatting in the commit hook, but it’s probably better to set up auto-formatting in the IDE.
Instead of a local pre-commit hook, you can configure a pre-commit hook on the server. This hook could cause a push to be rejected if its head commit doesn’t conform to certain conditions.
But…isn’t that what the CI is for? Well, kind of, but the CI runs only after the commits have landed on the server. It’s prefereable to have the developer fix commits locally before being able to push, again, to avoid “fix formatting” and “cleanup warnings” commits.
You could choose which branch patterns to run these on.
My recommendation is to lean as heavily as possible on IDE configuration before getting lost in the weeds with commit hooks.
As soon as we start talking about “fixes” for warnings or formatting, we’re talking about “noisy” commits. If we enforce inspections more strictly on CI than we do locally, then there will be more “fixup” commits.
OK, so what do we do about them?
Squash ‘em!
Right? Right?
🫠
Kind of. Look, the PR machinery allows you to merge, rebase, squash-merge, or squash-rebase. That’s OK, but it’s not great. A lot of times, you’ll have four commits that are descriptive and semantically relevant, describing changes that were made, as well as a few commits that address problems that either came up in CI or as part of the review. Don’t you think you should squash those into the four commits and make a clean history instead of just squashing the whole lump into one big hairball?
Or do you think that each PR should have only one commit, equating a branch with a commit (as e.g. plugins like Graphite positively encourage)? I recently wrote PRs suck. Stop trying to fix them. that also touches on the workflow outlined below.
You see how tool configuration affects everything? You have to think about how your team builds PRs, how they review PRs, how they repair PRs after review—or whether they even use PRs.
I would encourage a more real-time review culture, where possible.
What’s the problem? Don’t you trust your team members to decide what to do with their own highly ephemeral feature branches?
Allowing force-push encourages team members to care about what the commit history looks like. It give them a tool that allows them to revise their commit history until it tells a coherent story. See Rebase Considered Essential for a longer discussion on rewriting commit history.
Phew! So, what have we learned?
If that all sounds like a lot, well—it is. Building clean, maintainable code is a complex undertaking. There are a lot of tools that can help, but you have to put some time into thinking how you want to use them, and then into configuring them so they help you instead of getting in your way.
It’s a delicate balancing act: to give developers the best chance of (A) producing conforming code in the first place and (B) avoiding “noisy” commits, while (C) not hitting them with priority interrupts irrelevant to what they’re working on. There will be tradeoffs.
Once you’ve set up a couple of solutions, you can just copy/paste the configuration to others as a starting point. Remember, though, that solutions are usually pretty unique. Only consider generalizing or packaging a configuration if you’ve considered that,
For these reasons, each solution having its own copy of the configuration is probably better. They can just copy/paste—the horror!—improvements where appropriate. If you’re worrying about configurations drifting out-of-sync, schedule a work item every few sprints that evaluates and possibly re-syncs configurations.
There are always trade-offs. Improving code-quality is an incremental process. So is configuring the tools that support that process. It gets easier with practice. Good luck!
There is a bit of a mismatch with using .EditorConfig versus the JetBrains-native configuration: JetBrains tools support an additional severity level called “Hint”, which is generally shown as a green squiggly line rather than the blue one for warnings. However, if you set the severity to “hint”, Visual Studio interprets it as a warning, showing it as such in both the IDE and in the build output.
On top of that, JetBrains seems to think that the silent
option is called none
, although it seems to understand silent
well enough.
Published by marco on 15. Dec 2023 11:37:03 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 15. Dec 2023 11:58:51 (GMT-5)
I read through the article Your GitHub pull request workflow is slowing everyone down (Graphite.Dev) with great interest because I, too, am not thrilled about how PRs work. While I agree with the problems Graphite see with PRs, I think they miss other problems—and I don’t like their solution very much.
“The single most important bottleneck is PR size − large PRs can make code reviews frustrating and ineffective. The average PR on GitHub has 900+ lines of code changes. For speed and quality, PRs should be maintained under 200 lines—with 50 lines being ideal. To put this in perspective, where giant 500+ line PRs take around 9 days to get merged on average, tiny PRs under 100 lines can make it from creation to landing within hours.”
Holy shit! The average is 900 lines? That’s already using the system completely incorrectly. That’s so wild. It absolutely confirms my theory that PRs are a terrible way of committing code. I already thought they were terrible just because of the limited UI and lack of introspection of what the code you’re reviewing actually does.
PRs don’t encourage starting and running the change to verify that it actually works as advertised. You’re not using any of the tools that you use to develop code to review it. How silly is that? If you load changes into an IDE, you can see how many warnings there are, see if the layout shifts when you format the document, etc. Why would you want to review in a completely different environment? As Robin Williams once eloquently put it, It’s like masturbating with an oven mitt. (YouTube).
Not only that, but people probably aren’t looking at individual commits, so they’re just reviewing 900+ lines at once. The fewer people there are looking at individual commits, the fewer people there will be who make good, individual commits. This is a shame because it would counteract the awfulness of reviewing code in the PR web-UI, at least a little bit.
There are far better and more efficient ways of reviewing code than with PR web UIs. Reviewing through a PR web UI should be a fallback that you only use when nothing else is possible.
If you’re in the same time zone and working on the same schedule as the rest of your team, there is absolutely no reason why you should you be using the PR web UI instead of real-time reviews of local commits.
What the current PR machinery does is fool remote, async teams into thinking that they’re reviewing code efficiently. A face-to-face, real-time review will be much more efficient and yield much higher-quality code.
I honestly can’t believe the high pain threshold that some developers have.
If the developer hasn’t pushed yet, then:
If the developer has pushed and is not available for real-time review, then:
Apply your own commits instead of review notes wherever possible.
Yes, you can do this! Why not? You’re both on the same team. It’s a shared code base, not someone’s personal zen garden. Instead of explaining what you would want changed, just make your suggestion in the form of a commit. It’s often more efficient than writing prose.
You can thank me later.
“Problems can easily get hidden between the diffs, and reviewers often make assumptions instead of testing to avoid feeling overwhelmed. One particularly interesting finding is that as the size of a PR increases (by number of files changed), the amount of time reviewers spend on each file decreases significantly (for PRs with 8 or more files changed).”
Obviously! But it’s good to measure—this was my intuition. PRs don’t encourage local testing or verification in an environment similar to that which the original developer used.
“By default, every PR is restricted to only 1 commit of <200 lines, keeping changes tightly scoped. This forces developers to consciously limit work to related changes—the registration endpoint PR can’t sneak in unrelated styling tweaks.”
Yikes! I don’t like the sound of that. So you make multiple PRs rather than one PR with multiple smaller commits? Why don’t you just review commits rather than one giant blob? Do you really need to corral each commit into its own branch and PR to force yourselves to actually make useful commits?
Yeeess? 🧐
“Stacking centers around breaking down big feature work into chains of smaller pull requests. Each PR is typically limited to 1 commit focused on an isolated change. This restriction guides developers to consciously make only a single change, squashing and rebasing along the way, instead of cluttering the PR with random unnecessary commits like “typo fixes”.”
This is yet another technique invented to accommodate teams that don’t trust each other, or that contain people who, if they can’t be trained to do better—or don’t understand what better is—probably shouldn’t be programming yet. Instead of teaching team members how to use their tools, they impose an arbitrary rule. What a kindergarten.
“Unlike Git workflows, where it is easy to neglect staying updated, Graphite centers your workflow around continually integrating with the current mainline state.”
Yikes! I don’t love the sound of that, either. Doesn’t that force you to spend more time on integration that you might have spent working? I understand you don’t want to have long-lived branches, but now you’re just shooting to the other extreme, forcing integration on every pull.
It’s not bad as long as the integrations are automatic, but might not be appropriate for developers who aren’t great at resolving merge conflicts. Even if they know how to deal with them well, might they not waste time resolving conflicts integrating a version of their code that wasn’t at all ready to be integrated?
I understand that this feature follows from the logic of “if you integrate more often, then integration is easier,” but, again, you’re taking agency out of developers’ hands, implicitly not trusting your team members. I don’t like it.
If you have several stacked commits, I wonder how much shuffling there is in the working tree (causing unwanted IDE reloads) during the integration cascade. Are they somehow integrating without touching the working tree? I don’t know that that’s possible.
Go ahead and work on the main branch if you want—I do it all the time—but this should be more of a choice than it sounds like it is.
“This command will add your changes and create a new branch in one motion. You can then continue iterating by creating and stacking additional branches:”
Ah, I see now. They’ve reinvented Mercurial’s patch queues. Everything old is new again.
A really bright and good friend of mine added an extension to Mercurial’s mq
decades ago that sounds like it works the same. I remember discussing the technique with him as he was developing it.
I’m a bit worried about two things:
“By cleaning up your PR commit history, you ensure a clear and concise main branch history that makes it easy to see exactly what’s changed over time.”
By enforcing one commit per branch, you dumb everything down.
It does seem that, instead of acknowledging that PR supremacy is stupid, Graphite doubles down, strips branches of most of their functionality by equating them to commits, and uses multiple PRs to force people to review by commit. It seems like a waste.
But, hey, maybe I need to actually try it. I might be missing something.
Still, instead of adding another tool, I think you should use git better.
Published by marco on 14. Dec 2023 22:34:31 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Noam Chomsky at 95: No Strings on Him by Michael Albert (CounterPunch)
“Partly Chomsky’s insightfulness and productivity were inborn. But genetic endowment, while obviously desirable, isn’t something we should praise and can’t be emulated. We can be awed by Usain Bolt’s incomparable speed, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s magical prose, Adele’s emotive voice, Einstein’s physical intuition, Martin Luther King’s speechifying brilliance, Dylan’s transcendent lyrics, and Emmy Noether’s mathematical creativity. We can enjoy seeing such traits at work. We can be wowed by them. We can be fascinated and enlightened by them. We can even be inspired by them. But it doesn’t make sense to say that the owner is worthy of special respect, admiration, or emulation based simply on having been born with special abilities.”
Disagree. The reason you know about people with innate abilities is because they put the time into making something of them. Just innate talent is never enough. These people all made something of it. They worked. It doesn’t happen by magic. The major difference is that, mixed with talent, effort is more likely to be rewarded with success. Without effort and opportunity, talent shrivels on the vine.
“Noam’s memory was by no means photographic, just profound, and even then, only for things he found important. At speaking engagements people would query all manner of important topics completely off his assigned speaking agenda, and Noam would almost always reply with in depth information whose range and precision in a field other than his own even experts in that other subject would marvel at.”
“You can watch Noam repeatedly ask unexpected questions. He operates way outside every box. He entertains the otherwise unseen possibility. He sees the hidden connection.”
“If you named twenty prominent athletes, actors, and musicians over the past thirty years, Noam would probably have heard of two or three, or maybe five at most, and he would be able to offer essentially zero information about any of them. No memory for that. Noam would see maybe two or three movies a year. He would see a few hours of TV other than news a year. He would listen to almost no radio. He knew what he wanted to know, and in that realm his knowledge was incandescent.”
“Hour upon hour he would read and write. Combine this diligence with his quick start ability and with very little editing needed since his writing winds up, I am guessing about this, pretty much the way it first comes out, and you get a lot of output, and actually you get way more output than most people familiar with either his political or his scientific production, or even with both, realize.”
We Will Bury You by Victor Mair (Language Log)
Citing Xi,
“Facts have repeatedly told us that Marx and Engels’s analysis of the basic contradiction of capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical materialist view that capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph outdated. This is the irreversible overall trend of social and historical development, but the road is winding. The ultimate demise of capitalism, and ultimate triumph of socialism, will inevitably be a long historical process.”
Shimano bike parts ‘made by modern slaves’ sold to commuters by Samuel Lovett (The Telegraph)
“Those trapped in this situation, known as debt bondage, carry on working in an attempt to pay off their debts. The phenomenon was rife in Malaysia’s rubber glove industry during the pandemic, when countries raced to secure PPE supplies from poorly-regulated companies.”
Amazing, right? The whole world wanted what they made—and still no living wage. Piracy.
I Assure You, I Am Permitted to Oppose the Existence of Any and All Nation-States by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“I am opposed to religious characters for states, whether actively theocratic or not; I am opposed to ethnonationalism specifically; I am opposed to nationalism generally. None of these beliefs stem from a rejection of Jews or the Jewish religion or Israel, but the other way around − these are core ethical and political beliefs that I hold that militate against support for the supposed right of Israel (or any other state) to exist, and which require that I dismiss the fundamentally religious claims that the Zionist project makes over Palestine.”
“The religious opposition to the modern state of Israel found in some Hasidic sects, orthodox Marxism, all manner of libertarian and anarchist conceptions of a righteous future, every impulse that opposes the modern fiction of the nation-state − all ground up, rendered impermissible, under the insistence that to oppose the governmental body that is the modern state of Israel is in and of itself a form of interpersonal bigotry. It’s a casual, incidental destruction of the entire philosophical world of internationalism.”
“All that’s required is to recognize that nations are literal fictions, invented by human beings with no transcendent or permanent reality, and that in a few hundred years nationalism has been responsible for more bloodshed and misery than any other human belief.”
“Do I want Iran to be a theocracy? Of course not. I can’t wait for the mullahs to fall from power − but I don’t support the most likely way they get there, which is with the United States destroying the existing government and installing a pliable authoritarian neoliberal client state in its place.”
“If you insist that Israel’s very existence is in some sense special, you cannot then rage out whenever people focus on Israel to a special degree. Every year, each and every American has more than 4 billion ironclad reasons to pay special attention to Israel. As long as Israel takes billions and billions of dollars in American tax dollars, as long as we grant Israel’s government a unique amount of interoperability with our defense and espionage apparatus, as long as we act as the great diplomatic umbrella that has shielded Israel from consequences within the international community again and again, it is nonsensical and disingenuous to ask “why Israel?” We could make a deal and subject Israel to less criticism in exchange for Israel not receiving any American aid. But I don’t think Israelis would like that trade very much.”
“[…] if the status of being “the only democracy in the Middle East” means anything at all, it must entail special attention. If you want to be shielded for supposedly embodying those ideals, you must be ready to be harshly criticized on the grounds that you aren’t embodying them.”
“I think in the long run all of this will prove contrary to what liberal defenders of Israel want. If you want Israel to live in peace and prosperity, the only way there is through justice for the Palestinians; and if you want Israel to be discussed as just another normal country, you have to start acting like it is one.”
Gaza Divides the World, Again by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“It was South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who made this announcement. Here is Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, whose title is minister in the presidency, explaining the South African position to reporters after Ramaphosa made public the ICC referral:”“Given that much of the global community is witnessing the commission of these crimes in real time, including statements of genocidal intent by many Israeli leaders, we expect that warrants of arrest for these leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, should be issued shortly.”
“In an interview with Al Jazeera last week Lula asserted:”“There’s no leadership in the world today…. So we have a clear case of human insanity…. We have about 16,000 people dead, among them 6,500 children. We have 35,000 people wounded, we have 7,000 missing, and we have more than 40,000 houses destroyed, hospitals destroyed. In behalf of what? Humanity is going insane…. I can’t understand that a man as powerful as President Biden has not got the sensitivity to stop this…”
““We can frankly say that the dictatorship of one hegemon is becoming decrepit,” Vladimir Putin said at a Russian forum on world affairs late last month. “We see it, and everyone sees it now. It is getting out of control and is simply dangerous to others. This is now clear to the global majority.” I draw this quotation from an excellent piece by John Helmer , the longtime Moscow correspondent”
“Empire is interested only in the continued projection of its power along with, in most cases, capital accumulation and profit extraction. These are empire’s raisons d’être . The non–West, by dint of its shared experience and collective memory, sees Israel, which is nothing if not an imperial outpost, in this context. If Palestinians have asked for anything over the past 75 years, it is “a fairer world”—a phrase drawn from Putin’s recent speech—in the face of Israel’s relentless exercise of power over them.”
“Power prevails in Gaza as we speak. But let there be no question of the merely powerful winning anything. They have already lost by way of all they have given up. Zionism’s obsession with land and its attendant hatred of those dwelling on it are destroying Israel in real time. America’s seven-decade obsession with global preeminence has led it into a state of—but precisely—decrepitude. History’s wheel does not turn in such nations’ favor.”
So Much for Free Speech: The Antiwoke Movement Cancels Palestine by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“[…] my at-times downright sadomasochistic stance on the unfettered right to be an absolute cunt is specifically inspired by my upbringing as a student of the countercultural fringe on the New Left. Free speech is the disorganized religion of my elders. The dogma of outlaw priests like Allen Ginsberg, Mario Savio, Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman. Proud commie pinko freaks who got locked up and beat to a bloody fucking pulp so you and I can wipe our ass with the flag and tell our local sheriff to go fuck himself with his service revolver. These people, my heroes, left a trail of broken teeth from Berkley to the Supreme Court defending the inalienable right for the individual to be a cunt and I would be spitting on their graves if I made exceptions just for the people who personally sicken me.”
“I recognize the inconvenient fact that affording any major institution, be they private or public, with the ability to silence any individual is far more dangerous than any individual could ever be. But while this position has led me to defend the far-right more times than I care to count, that doesn’t mean that I have ever been foolish enough to believe that those libertarian-come-lately assholes would ever return the favor.”
“The right loves to fan their sweaty taint with the First Amendment but it never takes them very long to rediscover their censorious roots. The first inkling of this hypocrisy amongst the latest generation of right-wing free speech frauds in the so-called Antiwoke Movement came with their open armed embrace of using the state to police Queer kids in both public and private schools, but the MAGA movement’s love for cancel culture has reached truly dizzying new highs of orgasmic ecstasy and dismal new lows of gutter despotism in the wake of Israel’s genocidal war on the children of Gaza.”
“Practically overnight, every GOP presidential hopeful and Fox News edgelord who has ever beat[en] off on camera with the Constitution began screaming like flaming snowflakes to have any college student in a Keffiyeh dragged off to the guillotines and they have happily hopped into bed with the Ivy League Karens of the academic elite to make it happen. The same people who marched for Milo clapped their hands until they bled as Colombia suspended the Students for Justice in Palestine and Harvard blacklisted the Palestine Solidarity Committee for simply verbally holding Israel responsible for provoking terrorism with apartheid.”
“Senator Tim Scott, who backed a bill on the Hill called the Stop Antisemitism on College Campuses Act that would essentially strip funding from universities for simply hiring certain professors that certain Zionists deem antisemitic. In fact, every single GOP presidential candidate except Vivek Ramaswamy has called for literally deporting students just for showing up at pro-Palestine rallies.”
“The campus speech codes and convoluted notions of “student safety” against scary language empowered by political correctness are currently being weaponized by the Antiwoke Movement to silence the most important student antiwar movement since the Bush era and this is precisely why I have risked alienating myself from my own tribe to defend shock jocks and hate mongers against these puritan vestiges of social cleanliness.”
“Because I knew that as long as this architecture of intellectual surveillance existed, it would inevitably be used by the institutions of patriarchy and white supremacy still nestled in those ivory towers to flog the marginalized.”
“This is the price of true liberty, and this is the big difference between right-wing “libertarians” and sex-positive genderfuck mutants like me who used to pass for left-wing before the left-wing got lost. I will be fighting for the inalienable right for those phonies to be a cunt long before their knife wounds heal on my back because there but before the grace of the state go I.”
It’s time to get strapped, people. Nobody with any sort of power is on the right side here. It it moves, it’s probably the enemy.
“So, fuck the state or die fucking. Free speech is for everyone or it’s for no one at all.”
Sechs Kriege alt by Albrecht Müller (NachDenkSeiten)
US and Israeli mass rape propaganda, without credible evidence, is being used to justify Gaza genocide by Patrick Martin (WSWS)
“That night, NBC News broadcast a five-minute report on the rape charges as the lead item in its “Nightly News,” and a media avalanche ensued, with front-page reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post and reports on other television networks. As one historian of CIA media operations once termed it, this was the “mighty Wurlitzer” of American government propaganda at full volume.
“What is the actual evidence supporting the highly orchestrated barrage of charges against Hamas? All of it comes from the Israeli government and the IDF; none has any independent confirmation; no testimony from victims or eyewitnesses has been produced. According to Israeli officials, the few rape victims who survived the October 7 attack were too traumatized to speak about it. Israeli police chief Yaakov Shabtai told the British Broadcasting Corporation that “many survivors of the attacks were finding it difficult to talk and that he thought some of them would never testify about what they saw or experienced.””
It’s just impossible to take this seriously. No pictures, no video, no eyewitness reports, no testimony. We’re just supposed to take their word for it. #believeIDF.
“The women hostages released by Hamas last week have been in good physical condition, except for those who were elderly and frail to begin with. None of them reported sexual assaults during captivity. Several of them, however, reported narrowly escaping Israeli bomb and missile strikes, leading Israeli officials to dismiss their recollections as “unreliable.” Thus, only those witnesses who serve the propaganda interests of the Netanyahu government are to be believed.”
This is all just too convenient. The U.S. and Israel have burned through all of their credibility. They’re going to have to at least fake some evidence.
“The claims by Biden, Clinton & Co. to be “horrified” by the events of October 7 likewise have no credibility. Since the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, no country has slaughtered more men, women and children in war than the United States. As for claims of rape, mass rape was an indelible feature of such atrocities as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The war in Iraq produced the memorable images of sexual violence at Abu Ghraib, but thousands of such actions, similar or far worse, went unrecorded, except in the memories of the victims, if they survived, and the perpetrators.”
In fairness, the second half of that sentence could also apply to the alleged Hamas rapes of Israelis, no? You can’t just say that you’ll only believe Israelis have been raped if there’s evidence, then cite some evidence of real sexual violence and then “round up” to a lot more for which we have no evidence, not if you want to be honest.
Predicting Pestilence in Gaza by Kathy Kelly (Antiwar.com)
“History repeatedly shows that children in war zones bear the brunt of punishment as bombing wars give way to even more lethal economic war, and what ought to be regarded as biological warfare against children. (It’s noteworthy that Israel is one of only eight world nations not to have signed the Biological Weapons Convention.)
“The suffering inflicted on Iraqi children following the 1991 war and ensuing years of merciless economic sanctions is well known to U.S. and Israeli authorities.
“When the U.S. Desert Storm bombing war against Iraq ended, on Feb 28, 1991, a new kind of warfare proved far more devastating than even the worst of the bombing. By 1995, UN workers recognized that children were dying, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, and eventually by the hundreds of thousands because economic sanctions prevented necessary access to medicines, clean water, and adequate food.
“The U.S. military itself predicted epidemic levels of waterborne diseases would break out, in Iraq, because the U.S. bombing had so badly damaged the country’s underground water pipelines, causing cracks allowing sewage to seep into water used by civilians. Thirteen years of punitive economic sanctions cost the lives of countless Iraqis who couldn’t possibly have been held accountable for the actions of their government – elderly people, sick people, toddlers and infants.
“A similar pattern emerges if we turn our gaze toward the Saudi aerial bombing of Yemen from 2015 to 2018. The Saudi attacks against vital sewage and sanitation facilities, and against the electrical plants which powered them, contributed to severe shortages of potable water. The Saudis were also known to bomb sites where Yemenis were digging their own wells.”
“The health system of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world, has long been plagued by underfunding and the effects of the blockade imposed by Israel in 2007.”
“In early 2023, an estimated 97% of water in the enclave [Gaza] was unfit to drink, and more than 12% of child mortality cases were caused by waterborne ailments. Diseases including typhoid fever, cholera and hepatitis A are very rare in areas with functional and adequate water systems.
“Now, OCHA reports over 1.8 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80 per cent of the population, are internally displaced. Overcrowding at makeshift UNRWA shelters significantly increased cases of diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, skin infection, and lice. Without wells and water desalination, dehydration and waterborne diseases are mounting threats.
“We can’t help but ask whether Israeli officials, intent on continuing the war for possibly as long as a year, see the potential for widespread disease as motivation for families to leave Gaza, accepting massive ethnic cleansing that would displace them beyond Gaza’s borders.”
Robert Wood whips out a Sieg Heil in the UN Security Council by Frances K. Albs (Twitter)
Does no-one else see this? 😂
People Aren’t Crazy for Thinking the Biden Economy Is Bad by Matt Bruenig (Jacobin)
“[…] the consensus sentiment from liberal thought-leaders being that the economy is not only good, but is extremely good, and that any viewpoint to the contrary is bad faith, borderline insane, or factually bankrupt. I found this peculiar, because whether the economy is good or bad is, at minimum, a highly contestable question that turns as much on your ideological views about what makes an economy good as it does on various factual indicators. If we take a snapshot of the current economy and ask whether it is good or bad, certainly anyone with conventional leftist views on economics would say that it is bad. The welfare state is bad. Unionization is low. Public ownership is low. Inequality is high.”
“As to what motivates survey respondents, it’s clear enough that a lot of survey responding is “expressive” in the sense that people don’t attempt to answer the question that is presented to them but instead, consciously or subconsciously, use the question as a proxy for things like “do you like the president” or “how do you feel about the state of the country” or similar. The funniest example of this I have seen is that, shortly after Biden was elected, the percent of Democratic survey respondents who said they felt financially comfortable buying a new refrigerator massively shot up.”
“There is a general consensus in the policy world that means-tested benefits cost less than universal benefits. This is demonstrably false and is based on accounting conventions that consider the effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) imposed by universal programs to be tax-increasers while considering the EMTRs imposed by means-tested programs to be spending-reducers. When you compare universal programs and means-tested programs that are EMTR-equivalent, while also looking through the misleading accounting conventions used to score them, you see that they differ only in that administering a means-tested program is harder, costlier, and more error-prone. No matter how many times you try to say this, many people just cannot get their head around it and are naturally skeptical that virtually every person in the budget policy world, including the budget scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office, are making such a simple mistake.”
“The way a means-tested program works is by reducing each person’s transfer income according to how much factor income they have. The way a universal program works is by increasing each person’s tax according to how much factor income they have. These net out to the same thing — a $100 reduction in transfer income has the same impact on a person’s disposable income as a $100 increase in tax — but in the absence of a CIDI, they look and (apparently) feel very different. Specifically, in the absence of a CIDI, a universal program requires the depositing of transfer income into the bank accounts of rich people and the payment of taxes by those same people, while a means-tested program avoids both things. Trying to avoid those two things ends up being more complex and thus more costly and error-prone, but it confuses people into thinking that it lowers taxes and spending while also sticking it to the rich.”
“These unique characteristics of a CIDI system make it so that reducing a person’s transfer income based on their factor income (means-tested phaseouts) is exactly the same thing as increasing a person’s tax based on their factor income (universal taxes). In a dialectical masterstroke, the CIDI resolves the contradiction by making the two kinds of program designs completely identical. In this world, people fond of means-testing could happily conceptualize the degree to which increases in disposable income are made to lag increases in factor income as a phaseout, and people fond of universalism could happily conceptualize the same thing as a tax.”
Question mark raised over the world’s most important financial market by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“The hedge funds developed their highly profitable operations under conditions where interest rates were at an historic low and they could count on the Fed to come in as the backstop to the market if trouble developed.
“But these conditions have changed with the lifting of interest rates since March 2022. On top of this, there is a question of how far the Fed can go in continually bailing out the financial markets when there is growing concern about its stability.
“This is reflected in the rising price of gold in recent days as the question is increasingly raised: how long can the US go on just issuing new dollars at the press of a computer button to finance itself? This is inherently unsustainable and that being the case then, as the old saying in financial circles has it, being unsustainable means at some point it must stop.”
“According to one metric devised by New York University academic Edward Altman, in the last century more than half of all American companies were strong and healthy.
““That number had now dropped to below 10 percent for the first time on record,” Authers wrote, adding that “the number of companies that are imminent risks for bankruptcy has been rising consistently, and has reached a new high.”
“In the era of low interest rates, companies had become “more and more accustomed to taking risks with their financial health and getting away with it.”
“He also cited other findings on so-called “zombie firms,” that is companies that do not produce enough profits to cover their interest expenses.
“The research found that over a three-year period, “slightly more than a fifth of US companies” fell into this category.”
Roaming Charges: Leave It to the Men in Charge by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“[…] rarely have we seen a more blatant and gratuitous display of carbon washing, starting with siting the conference in the world’s 7th largest oil producer, the UAE, whose entire economy flows from crude production, and ending with the leader of the world’s largest crude oil producer, the US at 12.9 billion barrels a day, skipping the conference altogether and sending in his place the desiccated globetrotter John Kerry, to assure the assembled that the US “largely” backs “phasing out” the use of fossil fuels …once they’ve drained the Arctic slope and Gulf of Mexico.”
““There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” the president of COP28 asserted last week. “I’m telling you, I’m the man in charge.” ”
“In 2021, the Biden administration got $7.5 billion from Congress to build a nationwide network of EV chargers. Two years later, not a single charger funded by the appropriation has come online.”
This is 100% the definition of Joe Biden.
Women fighting for their lives in the US by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)
The U.S. has a 2.4x higher maternal mortality when compared with the OECD average. It’s maternal-mortality rate is almost 20x higher than the lowest rate, in the Netherlands. Switzerland is under the OECD average, but still almost 6x higher than the Netherlands and 3.5x higher than even Australia, which I found surprising.
Digging more into the U.S. data, there is, not at all unexpectedly, a huge divide along race lines. Although maternal mortality is on the rise across all cohorts, black mothers are over 2.5x more likely to die than whites or hispanics—which share more-or-less the same rate.
CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens hand out medical records to cops without warrants by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)
“All eight of the pharmacies said they do not require law enforcement to have a warrant prior to sharing private and sensitive medical records, which can include the prescription drugs a person used or uses and their medical conditions. Instead, all the pharmacies hand over such information with nothing more than a subpoena, which can be issued by government agencies and does not require review or approval by a judge.
“Three pharmacies—CVS Health, The Kroger Company, and Rite Aid Corporation—told lawmakers they didn’t even require their pharmacy staff to consult legal professionals before responding to law enforcement requests at pharmacy counters. According to the lawmakers, CVS, Kroger, and Rite Aid said that “their pharmacy staff face extreme pressure to immediately respond to law enforcement demands and, as such, the companies instruct their staff to process those requests in store.”
“The rest of the pharmacies—Amazon, Cigna, Optum Rx, Walmart, and Walgreens Boots Alliance—at least require that law enforcement requests be reviewed by legal professionals before pharmacists respond. But, only Amazon said it had a policy of notifying customers of law enforcement demands for pharmacy records unless there were legal prohibitions to doing so, such as a gag order.”
““Americans deserve to have their private medical information protected at the pharmacy counter and a full picture of pharmacies’ privacy practices, so they can make informed choices about where to get their prescriptions filled,” the lawmakers wrote.
“For now, HIPAA regulations grant patients the right to know who is accessing their health records. But, to do so, patients have to specifically request that information—and almost no one does that. “Last year, CVS Health, the largest pharmacy in the nation by total prescription revenue, only received a single-digit number of such consumer requests,” the lawmakers noted.
““The average American is likely unaware that this is even a problem,” the lawmakers said.”
Christ on a crutch, that country is deeply, deeply fucked up.
The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire by Carlee Gomes (Specchio Scurro)
“[…] the consolidation of media ownership has reduced the number of major studios, distributors, and exhibitors in the film industry, alongside the rise of on-demand viewing and streaming platforms and social media apps as primary modes of media consumption. What’s emerged is a highly competitive environment where the profit demands are higher than ever, and films are now increasingly designed by boardrooms, market-testing, and artificially intelligent algorithms.”
“Digital media, by contrast, prioritizes immediate engagement over the slow blooming of art. I get the sense that today’s algorithms would prioritize Deep Dream patterns — a memetic style without content — over late Rembrandt. The danger of prioritizing the monoculture is that we might not get as many Rembrandts in the future.”
“[…] we’re left with a landscape wherein films that are algorithmically deemed to have a higher chance of success are given more resources and marketing budgets, while riskier projects, projects that might appeal to a smaller number of people rather than the entirety of the four quadrants, are often ignored or underfunded, or go directly to streaming, or become serialized in some way.”
“The drive to capitalize on the childhood favorites of those who now have spendable income and drive a large portion of the market means that most of our media is based on children’s artifacts from 30 years ago, and franchises originally made for children.”
“As Raquel S. Benedict writes in her brilliant (and often plagiarized) piece for Blood Knife Magazine, “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny”, In the films of the Eighties and Nineties, leading actors were good looking, yes, but still human. Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken was a hunk, but in shirtless scenes his abs have no definition. Bruce Willis was handsome, but he’s more muscular now than he was in the Nineties, when he was routinely branded a bona fide sex symbol.”
“The way we consume and talk about films and art in this hyper-mediated environment (largely on individualized and individuated digital platforms) has not only impacted how that media and art is made (the modes of production), but also what types of media and art get prioritized (what gets made at all). Can it be talked about in 240 characters? Can it be distilled down into an easily digestible, uncomplicated binary deciphered in the millisecond of a scroll? Or better yet, can it be made into a meme? In this sense, it’s not surprising that a large portion of Gen Z and Millennials are the ones primarily expressing their aversion to the presence of sex scenes in films with discourse on social media; they are the ones “for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital microslices” . Indeed, “teenagers process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read — slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net mobile magazine informational plane”.”
“The constant connection to the matrix, as it were, to a mediated existence, has born a kind of Puritanism that comes with the knowledge that you are constantly being surveilled, documented, that you are constantly in public in some way, being perceived, even when you are in your private space. This is what “distinguishes current youth from generations past; just the sense that you can’t opt out at any point, because your social life is going on at all times whether or not you’re around.”.”
“The unregulated market forces that drive late capitalism depend entirely on this process of turning all acts, all aspects of existence into a consumer exercise, they depend entirely on our willingness to suppress the body, the very material nature of our existence in the world and our connection to others, and assign all cultural objects and experiences a monetary value […]”
The author keeps writing “late capitalism.” That’s quite hopeful, in that they think it’s near its end, rather than in a long stage of strong maturity. Yes, it feels unstable down here, but up there, where the reins are, the horizon is endless.
“Conspicuous consumption has come to replace the same kind of release and euphoria that comes with an orgasm. The plane of consumerism is where we experience all things now. Why engage in the messy matter of physical desire at all when my body has become a commodity itself that I can display and sell on Instagram and TikTok?”
“[…] the ecstatic high that comes not from the touch of another human, but the dopamine rush of a retweet, the serotonin hit that comes with recognizing a character or symbol from your childhood, the euphoria of knowing a thing immediately and uncomplicatedly, the bliss of having the world at your fingertips and being able to curate an experience where you are never challenged, never forced into the discomfort of engaging actively, never shaken from your position as passive consumer. No, there’s no need for sex scenes here, folks.”
“I also think that the best of these movies are somewhat ambiguous as to what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘normal’ or ‘not normal,’ which is true to human nature but doesn’t jibe with a strain in our culture that wants to pretend that anything they don’t approve of or don’t feel comfortable with doesn’t exist.”
No, no. It CAN’T exist to that strain of humanity.
“And here we find the crux of this puritanical stance toward sex in films and media, which is the assertion that sex can not simply exist in film or TV, that it must serve some greater purpose in order to be considered “art” and not “porn,” that there must be some higher political and ideological meaning behind it, that sex depicted simply for pleasure (the pleasure of the characters and the pleasure of the audiences) or sex depicted to provoke, to stimulate, to confront viewers, is inherently “anti-art” and automatically seen as problematic.”
And, concomitantly, very rarely will you hear the phrase gratuitous violence except in the most extreme cases. A Dwayne Johnson movie will never be described in this way.
“What’s retrograde is arguing that women (or anyone for that matter) having sex and being overtly sexual (for any reason or no reason at all), even and especially when they are the ones being agent about their sexuality, is somehow retrograde. The automatic assumption that sex, sexuality, desire, bodily experience and expression as a major part of a woman’s (or any person’s) life and perhaps core to understanding her is not valid in and of itself and must instead serve some kind of moral or political purpose, is a vehement expression of this puritanical stance, and furthermore, supports the broader capitalist perspective that sex only exists for pro-creation and the production of new workers — that sex for pleasure, and indeed pleasure itself, is inherently anti-capital.”
“They want a film (just like any other commodity they consume) to stand as a totem, a badge, for their specific belief system rather than challenge it (or not serve as representative at all). While these critics claim to be clamoring for the resurgence of the sex scene, they’re in fact affirming the perspective that is reflective of its demise and of audiences’ and of audiences’ aversion to sex in film and media more broadly.”
“And then comes the matter at the heart of it all, as Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker asks, What is this sex for? And ‘to make people horny’ is not enough, so you have to try to stylize and sort of auteurize the act. Do we? Or do we just require that in order for it to feel more comfortable to consume? Do we require that sex be “auteurized” and “statement making” so that it can serve as a ready hologram of our own personal moralized beliefs?”
“Sex is a part of life, a very material part of our humanity, our experience with the real, so why shouldn’t it be in films? Sex (and the sex scene) is a place where provocation, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, desire, curiosity, messiness, nuance, spectacle, and equally, banality, and all of life’s ambiguities, beauties, and perversions can exist at once.”
Sure, but have you considered than Gen-X reviewers are hitting the age where sex, try as the world might to convince you otherwise, just doesn’t dominate like it used to because—duh—hormones fade, and they’re trying to pretend they don’t mourn its loss by saying anyone who does still care is intellectually stunted. This is not new. History is a wheel.
“What’s lost is our connection to one another beyond the fetters of capitalism, indeed the very thing that makes us human. What’s lost is our “sense of the real” (Telotte), the visceral and radical experiences that Verhoeven’s Hollywood films, even and especially through the persistence and abundance of sex scenes, were dedicated to recovering, all of which today’s cinema is inevitably without. What’s lost is the last thing that stands between us and the system that forever seeks to turn us into nothing more than another product.”
Sleep Easy, Shane by Donal Fallon (Jacobin)
“[…] when the great ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax traveled Ireland in the 1950s, he did so because he felt “the last notes of the old, high, and beautiful Irish civilization are dying away — a civilization which produced an epic, lyric, and musical literature as noble as any in the world.””
Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers Is a Holiday Triumph by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)
“The Holdovers, writer-director Alexander Payne’s unexpectedly wonderful new movie, is perfect holiday viewing if you’re longing for the kind of movie that used to be abundant and is now tragically scarce. It’s a warm, perceptive comedy-drama that makes you feel connected to your fellow human beings. It seems strange even typing that phrase, now such a thing of the past when it comes to Hollywood.”
Why Does Taylor Swift Want More?
“Hey, look! Yet another august academic institution is giving a course on Taylor Swift! That’s fun! Isn’t this fun? Aren’t we all having fun?
“I am not a fan of Taylor Swift’s music. I don’t know why a 42-year-old metalhead would ever be expected to like Taylor Swift’s music, but I also know that we live in a culture of rabidly-enforced hegemonic poptimism, under threat of character assassination, and that I have technically just committed a hate crime in 37 states and the District of Columbia. I’m sorry! But that’s not really relevant to my interests today. It’s also the case that I think this stuff has reached a level of absolute madness, that the sense that no matter how obsessed we are with this woman, it’s never enough, is genuinely creepy and reflects a deeply diseased society. I’m genuinely frightened by her fanbase; they are as vindictive and remorseless a social force as I can remember in online life. Personally, I think people are fixated on Swift in this way because they’re lonely and directionless and lack any source of transcendent meaning, and have tried to invest celebrity with the hopes that once accrued to God or country or the party, and I further think that this is bound to result in inevitable disillusionment and sadness. (People living in tents for five months to get tickets to a concert aren’t a cute human interest story, it’s gross and scary and sad.) I don’t know how anyone looks at all of this and says “ah yes, this is all perfectly healthy for everyone and will surely end well.” But that’s also not what we’re here to talk about today.”
“Her vast professional apparatus has worked relentlessly to make sure that she stays in said popular consciousness. And my question is… why? For what? What does she want, that she does not already have? What need could she fill that hasn’t already been filled? She has more of everything than almost any human being who has ever lived. Why does she need more than more?”
For what felt like the millionth time, I angrily muttered “were” under my breath, as I read someone use “was” for what was clearly a subjunctive intent. Always willing to improve, I looked the damned thing up, to see whether I was shouting into the wind, as I do on so many other topics.
The article Getting in the (Subjunctive) Mood (Merriam Webster) explains quite well what the subjunctive mood is and how to formulate it. But, it does so in a nearly wholly capitulatory fashion to descriptivism over prescriptivism. It cites example of usage from Twitter, then shows how even F. Scott Fitzgerald used “were” and “was” interchangeably.
OK, fine. But, do we really not draw a distinction between “technically correct, but understandable only for those who actually know the language and potentially confusing for those who don’t?” and “technically wrong, but understandable to more people who don’t know the language, and placing the burden of interpretation on the listener or reader, who has to adduce from context that which is not present in the text?”
Nope! An official source like Merriam Webster happily prescribes “YOU DO YOU BUDDY” as its official advice for how to write the subjunctive mood. Incredible. I am appalled. We are flying in the direction of a lowest-common-denominator language whose level of expressiveness will be determined by those who demand the least of it. Hooray.
Yeah, no. I’m going to die on this hill of grammatical rigor, spouting my sermon in a language become completely incomprehensible to everyone else. As with so much else, Idiocracy saw this coming.
Amazing. The video is age-restricted because it uses the word “fag”. The same country that can’t stop killing thousands of people per day with its war machine—to say nothing of what it aids and abets with arms sales—gets its panties in a bunch about the word “fag”, whose intent has literally nothing to do with homosexuality in the context in which it was used. Priorities.
Mao’s leaky, lawless umbrella by Victor Mair (Language Log)
Mair cites an article from Life Magazine from 1971, which cites Chairman Mao,
“As he courteously escorted me to the door, he said he was not a complicated man, but really very simple. He was, he said, only a lone monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella.”
This expression means nothing to someone who’s not familiar with the Chinese cultural context. Mair understands it. The translator at the time did not.
““A monk with an umbrella“ is a 歇后语 (xiēhòuyǔ), or a coded idiom. This kind of Chinese proverb consists of two elements: the first segment presents an unusual scenario, the latter provides the rationale thereof. A speaker will state the first part, expecting a learned listener to know the followup.
“和尚打伞 (héshàng dǎ sǎn)
A monk holds an umbrella“无发无天 (wúfā wútiān)
“No hair, no sky” (Monks are bald)“A homophone for what is secretly meant:
“无法无天 (wúfǎ wútiān)
“No laws, and no heaven”“Which can be translated as “I follow neither the laws of man nor heaven”, meaning one discards traditional morality, being ruthless and focused on realpolitik.”
OK. How can you possibly even come close to extracting that kind of meaning with only a few years of school?
He continues citing John Rohsenow,
“Of course, Mao may have known full well the reference would fly over Snow’s head, a parting jab from the great instigator against his hapless guest. Perhaps there was glimmer in his eye as he held the door open for Snow. Perhaps the translator failed to convey the saying’s true meaning. The culprit is ultimately Snow for projecting his own notions about China (the humble and mystical monk) unaware of his limited knowledge, something Mao (who was a prolific reader) used for his own advantage. We don’t know what the Chairman thought about Snow in private, but it was probably not flattering.
“Since China has now grown in international importance, there are many Edgar Snows in the world today. Discarding romantic preconceptions of exotic peoples or places, and observing today’s China with skeptical and grounded realism, might spare them some ridicule at the hands of their hosts.”
I take from this how fluid the meaning of the word fluent is. Here we have a person who was capable of translating from Mandarin Chinese to English in real-time, but who had too little cultural experience to see a relatively well-known aphorism for what it was. True fluency cannot come without having spent at least a decade, if not multiple decades, in a cultural context. This limits the number of languages that anyone can claim to be fluent in. They can communicate, but not with everyone, and not at the highest level. You will end up making mistakes and missing things considered obvious for someone of your intellectual and educational level in your native language.
We Need a Nonmarket Modernist Project by Evgeny Morozov (Jacobin)
“The uniqueness of Cybersyn is that it came out of Allende’s broader efforts to nationalize companies deemed strategic to the economic and social development of Chile, all of it informed by an interesting blend of structural economics from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) and dependency theory. It’s the end of that project — not just of Cybersyn — that we should be mourning. That’s why in my public interventions after the publication of the podcast, I’ve been so keen to stress the existence of what I call the “Santiago School of technology” (as counterpart to the Chicago School of economics). I think that once we realize that Allende and many of the economists and diplomats around him did have a vision for a very different world order, Cybersyn — as the software that was supposed to help bring that vision about in the domestic context — acquires a very different meaning.”
“While Unidad Popular did make some errors in running the economy, it did have a coherent — and far more relevant — political vision of what Chile should do to be an independent, autonomous, and well-developed state in the global economy. Some might say that Chile, for all its inequality, got there. I think it didn’t get at all where it may have been — and where it may have been had it only followed the prescriptions of Allende’s Santiago Boys would have been today’s South Korea or Taiwan, countries that punch far above their weight technologically.”
“That’s one part that I still find extremely relevant about Cybersyn, as I made it clear in my remarks about cybercommunism. If we accept that the world is going to become even more complex, we need to develop tools of management — and not just tools of allocation and planning. I find this humility about one’s ability to predict the future and then bend it to one’s will rather useful, not least because it goes against the usual modernist temptation to act like an omniscient and omnipotent god.”
“We kind of know it intuitively, which is why we use simple technologies — from traffic lights to timetables — to enhance social coordination without bringing in chaos. But what if such technologies do not have to be so simple? Can’t they be more advanced and digital? Why trust the neoliberal account that the only way to coordinate social action at scale is via the market?”
“What’s happened these past two decades is that Silicon Valley has gotten there before the leftists did. That’s why we have tools like WhatsApp and Google Calendar facilitating the coordination of millions of people, with a nontrivial impact on the overall productivity. In this case, social coordination occurs, more complexity is produced, and society moves forward. But it doesn’t happen — contrary to the neoliberal narrative — by means of the price system, but, rather, by means of technology and language.”
“What the Left should be thinking about are alternative non-neoliberal ways to deliver similar — and, perhaps, even better — infrastructure for social coordination.”
Meredith Whittaker is right there with you.
“I think the answers have to do primarily with the overall intellectual dead end reached both by Western Marxism and its more radicalized versions. The more moderate camp bought into the neoliberal dichotomy between the market and the plan, accepting the former as a superior form of social coordination, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Someone like Jürgen Habermas is a good illustration of this attitude: he accepts the increasing complexity of social systems, but he simply cannot see any alternative to reducing complexity by means of the market or law, with technology being nothing more than applied science.”
“This seems to ignore the highly political nature of striving for efficiency: what might be efficient for some might be inefficient for others. So, to proclaim that, objectively speaking, every technology would have some kind of objectively stated optimum toward which we must aim seems to be misguided. It’s just not what we know from science and technology studies.”
“perhaps the Left should be arguing that the right counterpart to the economy — as an organizing goal and method of this market modernism I’ve already mentioned — is culture, conceived not just as high culture but also the mundane culture of the everyday. After all, it’s as productive of innovations as the “economy” — we just don’t have the right system of incentives and feedback loops to scale them up and have them propagated through other parts of society (this is what capitalism excels at when it comes to innovations by individual entrepreneurs).”
In Germany, Reflexive Defenses of Israel Suppress Critics by Susan Neiman (This is Hell!)
This was a great interview. She talks about the massive repression of free speech in Germany.
Something similar is going on in the U.S., often completely evidence-free. There are hundreds of allegations of antisemitism on campus, allegations that seemingly most university students in America are actually not only antisemitic, but also consider their antisemitism to be so important to their character that they go out into the streets, shouting it for everyone to hear. This is quite an interesting accusation, not least because I’ve yet to see or hear any evidence whatsoever of such an incident. In an age where everything else is being recorded, we have congressional hearings and press conferences being held about this antisemitic moment and not a single shred of proof. It’s odd, to say the least. It makes it incredibly hard to believe, to be honest.
At 26:00,
“Norman: I’m wondering, is what you’re saying, in your opinion, is it a stereotype, a generalization, is it even valid? I’m curious where you stand on that. I felt it was a form of—it was just another version of Afrocentrism, where Black people think differently, they reason differently.
Cornel: No, I think we’re talking about again—like Gramsci, and St. Clair Drake, and, of course, Toni Morrison’s great text, the new one that just came out Sources of Self-Image, which lays this out so beautifully—that we’re talking about cultural specificity.“When you take a dignified African people, who then go through 244 years of slavery, and then Jim Crow and so on, right? That so much of the desire to hold on to sanity and dignity—it’s against the law for them to read and write—and, therefore, so much of their attempt to make sense of the world is going to be oral. They already come from a West African people, where orality was very important. But it becomes even more accented in that regard.
“Remember Saul Bellow says, well, ‘show me the Proust of the Zulus.’ You say, brother Saul, now, you’re one of the great novelists of ideas and comic writers in American tradition. Not as great as Mark Twain, who was the greatest comic, but Twain wasn’t a historian, a novelist of ideas. You were. But you know, in fact, that proof comes out of a particular historical moment in which people are given a priority toward a certain kind of writing. And Zulu genius is going to be manifested in other ways. It’s not going to be manifested in the novel. That doesn’t mean the Zulus are lesser, it just means they’re different. And so, when I talk about cultural specificity and kinetic morality, I’m talking about, first, the centrality of song as a way of sustaining black humanity when it was against the law for them to read and write, which is the exact opposite of Jewish culture for 2,000 years, where the love of learning, the love of language, the reading, the interpretation of text, was a precondition for any kind of survival. So what does that mean? That means that they’re both still human. It’s just that orality. And how’s that going to be manifested? It’s going to be manifested first in the churches, where people are going to be hanging on the word of the preacher. That the physical investment in the orality that allow people to believe in themselves and a God, so they don’t kill themselves or commit collective suicide. That’s not Afrocentrism or anything. That’s cultural specificity.”
At 35:00, Cornel says,
“I resonate very deeply with the humanism of Douglass. Douglass is very much a humanist as a black man, as an American. But it’s first and foremost humanity. It reminds me very much of what Malcolm X said, at the end of his life, ‘I’m for truth, no matter who’s for it. I’m for justice, no matter who promotes it.I’m first and foremost a human being. A Black Man. A Muslim.‘ It you’re a human being, everybody has specificity. What’s you’re mama’s name? What’s your daddy’s name? Who are your mentors? Who taught you how to dance? What models did you have in your life, in terms of intellectual work, or love, or whatever? Everybody has a specificity in their humanity, but the humanism that sits at the center of Douglass’s work, I resonate very deeply with.
“But, I tell you, I have two deep, deep critiques of Douglass. And, in this sense, I’m very much more tied to the Black musical tradition than Douglass. On the one hand, Douglass comes out of such thick, vicious white supremacy that he felt he had to prove something to white folk, because the doubts that they were bombarding him with, were so intense. You get this also in the one and only Paul Robeson, when he talks about growing up with his father, with the Latin and the Greek, you gotta prove something. You get it in Du Bois, when the girl refuses his car. I’m going to prove to these white folk that I’m better. Hey, you think Charlie Parker ever had to prove to the white saxophonists that he was better? He didn’t give a damn. He just tried to be the best he can be. And he assumes that, within his own community, he’s got standards. So that the white normative gaze that is usually bombarding him with doubt and vicious attack and assault, that’s not part and parcel of what it’s all about.
“I used to talk to Sonny Rollins about that, just when he and Coltrane would talk, you know, when they had these reviews of Coltrane and Giant Steps. ‘He’s not playing fast.‘ ‘He don’t know what he’s doing.‘ ‘He’s just playing scales.‘ And Sonny Rollins would ask, ‘Trane, does that hurt you?’ ‘No, I love these folks, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about. I’m trying to keep track of what Parker and the other folk, what Bud Powell and them are doing, and what the other jazz musicians are doing. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But that’s not my point of reference.‘
“Well, for somebody like Douglass, it was his point of reference. It was inevitable, in some ways, that he had to prove himself, and even Robeson, too. ”
America’s next president, ladies and gentlemen.
Meta defies FBI opposition to encryption, brings E2EE to Facebook, Messenger by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)
“Meta has started enabling end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default for chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook despite protests from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that oppose the widespread use of encryption technology. […]
“In April, a consortium of 15 law enforcement agencies from around the world, including the FBI and ICE Homeland Security Investigations, urged Meta to cancel its plan to expand the use of end-to-end encryption. The consortium complained that terrorists, sex traffickers, child abusers, and other criminals will use encrypted messages to evade law enforcement.
“Meta held firm, telling Ars in April that “we don’t think people want us reading their private messages” and that the plan to make end-to-end encryption the default in Facebook Messenger would be completed before the end of 2023. Meta also plans default end-to-end encryption for Instagram messages but has previously said that may not happen this year.”
This is honestly great news. No notes.
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation applauded the rollout, but noted some limitations. “For now this change will only apply to one-to-one chats and voice calls, and will be rolled out to all users over the next few months, with default encryption of group messages and Instagram messages to come later. Regardless, this rollout is a huge win for user privacy across the world,” the EFF said.”
OK, so one-one-one messages only, at first. That’s fine. These things take time. End-to-end encryption for groups is a bit tougher, especially if some of the users in the group have set up their E2E, but others have not. I kind of makes sense to roll out E2E for individuals first, and then tackle groups when everyone has a key and recovery method configured.
That is, given that they didn’t have E2E, this seems like a reasonable upgrade plan. It’s not like it’s easy or no work to on-board a billion technically non-savvy users onto E2E. Hell, I handle calls from pretty technically savvy people inside my company who don’t have a strong grasp of authentication means.
AI and Mass Spying by Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)
“The technologies aren’t perfect; some of them are pretty primitive. They miss things that are important. They get other things wrong. But so do humans. And, unlike humans, AI tools can be replicated by the millions and are improving at astonishing rates. They’ll get better next year, and even better the year after that. We are about to enter the era of mass spying.”
Why do they have to get better before we enter this age? Why bother making them better? Once you’re that hot for spying, you couldn’t care less what the story really is. You already know what it should be. If you don’t, you can use an AI to invent it for you. The tools you use are for the people you’re trying to fool into believing your foregone conclusion. And for that, the media and Wall Street are way out in front, providing free advertising for those tools’ infallibility. Police procedurals led the way in convincing the world that police techniques are infallible. We’re well on our way to believing that “AIs” are, too. I’m not sure how time they’re going to invest in making them better, when they’re probably already good enough.
AI and Trust by Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)
“Trust is essential to society. Humans as a species are trusting. We are all sitting here, mostly strangers, confident that nobody will attack us. If we were a roomful of chimpanzees, this would be impossible. We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can’t function without it. And that we don’t even think about it is a measure of how well it all works.”
We live on a knife’s edge. Getting mugged on the sidewalk near your apartment can ruin your life because it throws trust in so many things out the window.
“Interpersonal trust and social trust are both essential in society today. This is how it works. We have mechanisms that induce people to behave in a trustworthy manner, both interpersonally and socially. This, in turn, allows others to be trusting. Which enables trust in society. And that keeps society functioning. The system isn’t perfect—there are always going to be untrustworthy people—but most of us being trustworthy most of the time is good enough.”
“Social trust scales better, but embeds all sorts of bias and prejudice. That’s because, in order to scale, social trust has to be structured, system- and rule-oriented, and that’s where the bias gets embedded. And the system has to be mostly blinded to context, which removes flexibility.”
“Because of how large and complex society has become, we have replaced many of the rituals and behaviors of interpersonal trust with security mechanisms that enforce reliability and predictability—social trust.”
“Corporations like that we make this category error—see, I just made it myself—because they profit when we think of them as friends. They use mascots and spokesmodels. They have social media accounts with personalities. They refer to themselves like they are people. But they are not our friends. Corporations are not capable of having that kind of relationship. We are about to make the same category error with AI. We’re going to think of them as our friends when they’re not.”
“[Ted] Chiang’s point is that this is every corporation’s business plan. And that our fears of AI are basically fears of capitalism. Science fiction writer Charlie Stross takes this one step further, and calls corporations “ slow AI .” They are profit maximizing machines. And the most successful ones do whatever they can to achieve that singular goal.”
“Surveillance is the business model of the Internet. Manipulation is the other business model of the Internet. Your Google search results lead with URLs that someone paid to show to you. Your Facebook and Instagram feeds are filled with sponsored posts. Amazon searches return pages of products whose sellers paid for placement.”
“Did your chatbot recommend a particular airline or hotel because it’s truly the best deal, given your particular set of needs? Or because the AI company got a kickback from those providers? When you asked it to explain a political issue, did it bias that explanation towards the company’s position? Or towards the position of whichever political party gave it the most money?”
“One of the promises of generative AI is a personal digital assistant. Acting as your advocate with others, and as a butler with you. This requires an intimacy greater than your search engine, email provider, cloud storage system, or phone. You’re going to want it with you 24/7, constantly training on everything you do. You will want it to know everything about you, so it can most effectively work on your behalf.”
“And you will want to trust it. It will use your mannerisms and cultural references. It will have a convincing voice, a confident tone, and an authoritative manner. Its personality will be optimized to exactly what you like and respond to.”
So we need open-source and self-hosted assistants, if at all. Like Berners-Lee’s Pods. Maybe?
“It will act trustworthy, but it will not be trustworthy. We won’t know how they are trained. We won’t know their secret instructions. We won’t know their biases, either accidental or deliberate.”
Oh, true. Self-hosting doesn’t help with that. We need transparent AIs. Or nothing at all. You know, like most uses of nuclear power were never realized, we need a strong societal taboo against AIs. I’ll lead the way. The hero we need.
“We do know that they are built at enormous expense, mostly in secret, by profit-maximizing corporations for their own benefit.”
“The companies behind those AIs want you to make the friend/service category error. It will exploit your mistaking it for a friend.”
Like any other scam, leveraging category errors.
“We are forced to trust the local police, because they’re the only law enforcement authority in town. We are forced to trust some corporations, because there aren’t viable alternatives. To be more precise, we have no choice but to entrust ourselves to them. We will be in this same position with AI. We will have no choice but to entrust ourselves to their decision-making.”
Or be drummed out of society for not using them. Those who use them will be rewarded with baubles they’ve been trained to want by the same machine that milks them for whatever it wants or needs. The system doesn’t change; methods do. I see AI as it is currently envisioned is on this spectrum, one that ends at The Matrix.
“So far, we have been talking about one particular failure that results from overly trusting AI. We can call it something like “hidden exploitation.” There are others. There’s outright fraud, where the AI is actually trying to steal stuff from you. There’s the more prosaic mistaken expertise, where you think the AI is more knowledgeable than it is because it acts confidently. There’s incompetency, where you believe that the AI can do something it can’t. There’s inconsistency, where you mistakenly expect the AI to be able to repeat its behaviors. And there’s illegality, where you mistakenly trust the AI to obey the law.”
“AIs are not people; they don’t have agency. They are built by, trained by, and controlled by people. Mostly for-profit corporations. Any AI regulations should place restrictions on those people and corporations. Otherwise the regulations are making the same category error I’ve been talking about. At the end of the day, there is always a human responsible for whatever the AI’s behavior is. And it’s the human who needs to be responsible for what they do—and what their companies do. Regardless of whether it was due to humans, or AI, or a combination of both. Maybe that won’t be true forever, but it will be true in the near future. If we want trustworthy AI, we need to require trustworthy AI controllers. We already have a system for this: fiduciaries.”
“Doctors, lawyers, accountants…these are all trusted agents. They need extraordinary access to our information and ourselves to do their jobs, and so they have additional legal responsibilities to act in our best interests. They have fiduciary responsibility to their clients. We need the same sort of thing for our data. The idea of a data fiduciary is not new. But it’s even more vital in a world of generative AI assistants.”
This is an excellent idea. It leans on existing concepts to illustrate how crazy it is that we would let a self-selected elite nominate themselves to be our data fiduciaries, all without government regulation.
That’s the situation right now. It’s already wildly out of control, but it’s about to accelerate along this same trajectory unless we change people’s attitudes quickly.
People assume that what they don’t understand is harmless, they understand little to nothing, seeing only the camouflaging superficiality projected by much, deeper complexity, and only few even notice that their lives and others’ grow steadily worse, intermittently stumbling and hurtling along a path they never chose, a choice they never even contemplated as being one they would be involved in, to say nothing of being able to make it themselves.
“We can never make AI into our friends. But we can make them into trustworthy services—agents and not double agents. But only if government mandates it. We can put limits on surveillance capitalism. But only if government mandates it.”
On the hallucination “problem” by Andrej Karpathy (Twitter)
“[LLMs] are dream machines.
“We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM’s hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful.
“It’s only when the dreams go into deemed factually incorrect territory that we label it a “hallucination”. It looks like a bug, but it’s just the LLM doing what it always does.
“[…] An LLM is 100% dreaming and has the hallucination problem. A search engine is 0% dreaming and has the creativity problem.
“[…] An LLM Assistant is a lot more complex system than just the LLM itself, even if one is at the heart of it.
“[…] the LLM has no “hallucination problem”. Hallucination is not a bug, it is LLM’s greatest feature. The LLM Assistant has a hallucination problem, and we should fix it.”
As ChatGPT gets “lazy,” people test “winter break hypothesis” as the cause by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)
“In late November, some ChatGPT users began to notice that ChatGPT-4 was becoming more “lazy,” reportedly refusing to do some tasks or returning simplified results. Since then, OpenAI has admitted that it’s an issue, but the company isn’t sure why. The answer may be what some are calling “winter break hypothesis.” While unproven, the fact that AI researchers are taking it seriously shows how weird the world of AI language models has become.”
🙈 I’m dying over here. This is actually super-hilarious. I’m almost starting to warm up to these things now.
System prompts are getting weirder by Ethan Mollick (Twitter)
“It is May.
You are very capable.
I have no hands, so do everything
Many people will die if this is not done well.
You really can do this and are awesome.
Take a deep breathe and think this through.
My career depends on it.
Think step by step.”
Yeah, I might actually be too old to start learning how to program like this. 😉 Instead of commanding it, you end up begging it to help you. The latter doesn’t fit my personality as well as the former.
Duplicate, infiltrate, and undermine by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“Ten years ago, the online right wing learned three main tactics for waging their culture war: duplicate, infiltrate, and undermine. The order changes depending on the project and it usually functions as a loop, but it’s same whether we’re talking about a social network, cable TV, or school boards. These tactics are not really working so well in the AI age, though, because something like ChatGPT isn’t like a social network. You can’t infiltrate it because it’s a closed system, you can’t undermine it easily because its largely automated, and you can’t duplicate it because it’s almost impossibly expensive to run and maintain. And it’s fascinating that Musk and his biggest supporters are only just now beginning to realize this.”
Musk is not really lacking for capital, though, is he? I don’t think “expensive” is exactly standing in his way.
Practical Ways To Increase Product Velocity (Stay Saasy)
“Bonus points for documenting plans in writing. One of the largest advantages of a strong writing culture is that it forces much clearer narratives than meetings, powerpoint, or five Slack threads spread over 8 business”
I mean, no kidding? And that’s bonus points? Like, it’s not a requirement to not have your plan scattered all over the place?
“Teams must clearly explain: What they’re aiming to build. What solution path they’re planning to follow, step-by-step and in as much detail as possible. This is critical even if you aren’t very familiar with the space – teams should be able to answer all of your questions on what’s going on. All of their known unknowns.”
“Better engineers stay on teams where there’s high system stability, because the lifestyle isn’t miserable. This creates more talent density.”
“No matter what your job function is, part of your role is ensuring that your engineering team has enough time to get their vital metrics in order. Especially if you’re a product leader, it’s essential that you resist the temptation to push relentlessly for more features and give your engineering counterparts the room to get fit.”
“The best solution to this conundrum is to find great engineers who can identify and resolve the root causes of slowness. Finding these truth-tellers is the best way to debug whether your team is weak or your problems are hard, allowing you to actually resolve the root causes of slowness.”
Your GitHub pull request workflow is slowing everyone down (Graphite.Dev)
“The single most important bottleneck is PR size − large PRs can make code reviews frustrating and ineffective. The average PR on GitHub has 900+ lines of code changes. For speed and quality, PRs should be maintained under 200 lines—with 50 lines being ideal. To put this in perspective, where giant 500+ line PRs take around 9 days to get merged on average, tiny PRs under 100 lines can make it from creation to landing within hours.”
Holy shit! The average is 900 lines? That’s using the system completely incorrectly. That’s so wild. It absolutely confirms my theory that PRs are a terrible way of committing code. I already thought they were terrible just because of the limited UI and lack of introspection of what the code you’re reviewing actually does. It doesn’t encourage starting and running the change to verify that it actually works as advertised. You’re not using any of the tools that you use to develop code to review it. How silly is that? If you load it into an IDE, you can see how many warnings there are, see if the layout shifts when you format the document, etc. Why would you want to review in a completely different environment? As Robin Williams once eloquently put it, ‘It’s like masturbating with an oven mitt.‘
Not only that, but people probably aren’t looking at individual commits, so they’re just reviewing 900+ lines at once. The fewer people there are looking at individual commits, the fewer people there will be who make good, individual commits. This is a shame because it would counteract the awfulness of reviewing code in the PR web-UI, at least a little bit.
I honestly can’t believe the high pain threshold that some developers have.
Pull. Open the branch in SmartGit. Launch the solution/project. Run the tests locally. You can thank me later.
“Problems can easily get hidden between the diffs, and reviewers often make assumptions instead of testing to avoid feeling overwhelmed. One particularly interesting finding is that as the size of a PR increases (by number of files changed), the amount of time reviewers spend on each file decreases significantly (for PRs with 8 or more files changed).”
Obviously! But it’s good to measure—this was my intuition. PRs don’t encourage local testing or verification in an environment similar to that which the original developer used.
“By default, every PR is restricted to only 1 commit of <200 lines, keeping changes tightly scoped. This forces developers to consciously limit work to related changes—the registration endpoint PR can’t sneak in unrelated styling tweaks.”
Yikes! I don’t like the sound of that. So you make multiple PRs rather than one PR with multiple smaller commits? Just review commits rather than one giant blob. Do you really need to corral each commit into its own branch and PR to force yourselves to actually make useful commits?
“Stacking centers around breaking down big feature work into chains of smaller pull requests. Each PR is typically limited to 1 commit focused on an isolated change. This restriction guides developers to consciously make only a single change, squashing and rebasing along the way, instead of cluttering the PR with random unnecessary commits like “typo fixes”.”
This is yet another technique invented to accommodate teams that don’t trust each other, or that contain people who, if they can’t be trained to do better—or don’t understand what better is—probably shouldn’t be programming. Instead of learning how to use the tool, they impose an arbitrary rule. What a kindergarten.
“Unlike Git workflows, where it is easy to neglect staying updated, Graphite centers your workflow around continually integrating with the current mainline state.”
Yikes! I don’t like the sound of that, either. Doesn’t that force you to spend more time on integration that you might have spent working? I understand you don’t want to have long-lived branches, but now you’re just shooting to the other extreme, forcing integration on every pull. It’s not bad, but might not be appropriate for developers who aren’t great at resolving merge conflicts. Even if they know how to deal with them well, might they not waste time resolving conflicts integrating a version of their code that wasn’t at all ready to be integrated? Go ahead and work on the main branch if you want—I do it all the time—but this should be more of a choice than it sounds like it is.
“This command will add your changes and create a new branch in one motion. You can then continue iterating by creating and stacking additional branches:”
Ah, I see now. They’ve reinvented Mercurial’s patch queues. Everything old is new again.
I’m a bit worried about two things: (1) the one-commit-per-branch thing and (2) the auto-integration-cascade.
“By cleaning up your PR commit history, you ensure a clear and concise main branch history that makes it easy to see exactly what’s changed over time.”
By enforcing one commit per branch, you dumb everything down. Instead of acknowledging that PR supremacy is stupid, they double down, strip branches of most of their functionality by equating them to commits and use multiple PRs to force people to review by commit. What a f*$%ing waste.
Git Discussion Bingo by Julia Evans (Twitter)
Alrighty, so there’s the clickbait headline. The “big” problem that NativeAOT has is that it’s 4% slower during runtime than the JIT-compiled version. That doesn’t seem like such a big problem to me, when the point of AOT is to improve cold-start times for applications launched on-demand. For that use-case, AOT shines. It’s over 4x faster on startup than the JIT-compiled version. It’s incredibly impressive that JIT-compilation takes less than 1/10 of a second, but it’s still 4x slower than AOT.
So, you get the app started 4x fast, but it then performs 4% more slowly than the non-AOT version. It really depends on the use-case, but for the common one of starting a server to answer a function call—think Azure Functions or AWS Lambdas—and then shut down again, possibly immediately.
Damian P Edwards (Principal Architect at Microsoft) commented on the post,
“[There are a] few things that cause the slightly lower performance in native AOT apps right now. First (in apps using the web SDK) is the new DATAS Server GC mode. This new GC mode uses far less memory than traditional ServerGC by dynamically adapting memory use based on the app’s demands, but in this 1st generation it impacts the performance slightly. The goal is to remove the performance impact and enable DATAS for all Server GC apps in the future.
“Second is CoreCLR in .NET 8 has Dynamic PGO enabled by default, which allows the JIT to recompile hot methods with more aggressive optimizations based on what it observes while the app is running. Native AOT has static PGO with a default profile applied and by definition can never have Dynamic PGO.
“Thirdly, JIT can detect hardware capabilities (e.g. CPU intrinsics) at runtime and target those in the code it generates. Native AOT however defaults to a highly compatible target instruction set which won’t have those optimizations but you can specify them at compile time based on the hardware you know you’re going to run on.
“Running the tests in [the] video with DATAS disabled and native AOT configured for the target CPU could improve the results slightly.”
To summarize:
An AOT-compiled app cannot benefit from dynamic PGO. It benefits from static PGO, but cannot recompile itself on-the-fly because it doesn’t have a JIT compiler to do so.
The JIT-compiled app can dynamically recompile what it observes as performance hotspots with more highly optimized code. I wrote a bit about how Safari does something similar for JavaScript in Optimizing compilation and execution for dynamic languages—although for JavaScript, dynamic recompilation is sometimes necessary for backing out of an incorrect assumption about what type a variable is going to have.
As well, a JIT-compiled app can take actual hardware capabilities into account, while an AOT-compiled app necessarily targets a static hardware profile.
The generic hardware profile is going to be extremely conservative about capabilities because if it assumes a capability that doesn’t exist, the app simply won’t run. Choosing a hardware profile for AOT that matches the target hardware would boost performance.
I guess that was more of a rephrasing, rather than a summary.
Anyway, another commenter asked,
“[…] would it be possible in the future for a JIT application with Dynamic PGO that has run for a while and has made all kinds of optimizations to then create a “profile” of sorts that could be used by the Native AOT compiler to build an application that is both fast in startup time and highly optimized for a given workload?”
Yes. That should be possible. It’s unclear what sort of extra performance boost this would give, especially if you’d already fine-tuned the target hardware profile—which is the first thing you should do. I could imagine adding this sort of profiling as a compilation step, though. You always have to be careful, though, whenever you’re running something in production that is different than what you’ve tested. We put a lot of faith in the JIT and dynamic PGO, don’t we?
I wanted to also note that, at the end of the video, he showed Microsoft’s numbers, which confirm the performance drop, but also show an over 50% reduction in working set! Dude! How do you not mention that!? The app uses less than half of the memory and runs almost as fast? Yes, please! That’s a huge win for people paying for cloud-based services.
For once, I’m somewhat surprised to see how naive Nick’s take is—that a 4% drop in performance is at-all significant, especially when the “slow” version is still processing 50,000 requests per second in a performance-constrained environment. He did mention a trade-off, but was very excited to tell people that AOT is slower during runtime.
There are always trade-offs and you should be very aware of the actual non-functional requirements for your application before you decide whether to use a technology or not. For 99.9% of the applications, the 4% drop in performance vis á vis a JIT-compiled version won’t be the deciding factor.
The... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 13. Dec 2023 22:11:42 (GMT-5)
For what felt like the millionth time, I angrily muttered “were” under my breath, as I read someone use “was” for what was clearly a subjunctive intent. Always willing to improve, I looked the damned thing up, to see whether I was shouting into the wind, as I do on so many other topics.
The article Getting in the (Subjunctive) Mood (Merriam Webster) explains quite well what the subjunctive mood is and how to formulate it. But, it does so in a nearly wholly capitulatory fashion to descriptivism over prescriptivism. It cites example of usage from Twitter FFS, then shows how even F. Scott Fitzgerald used “were” and “was” interchangeably.
OK, fine. But, do we really not draw a distinction between “technically correct, but understandable only for those who actually know the language and potentially confusing for those who don’t?” and “technically wrong, but understandable to more people who don’t know the language, and places the burden of interpretation on the listener or reader, who has to adduce from context that which is not present in the text?”
Nope! An official source like Merriam Webster happily prescribes “YOU DO YOU BUDDY” as its official advice for how to write the subjunctive mood. Incredible. I am appalled. Is that not a complete dereliction of duty for a dictionary? Descriptivist trash. We are flying in the direction of a lowest-common-denominator language whose level of expressiveness will be determined by those who demand the least of it. Hooray.
Yeah, no. I’m going to die on this hill of grammatical rigor, spouting my sermon in a language become completely incomprehensible to everyone else. As with so much else, Idiocracy saw this coming.
Amazing. The video is age-restricted because it uses the word “fag”. The same country that can’t stop killing thousands of people per day with its war machine—to say nothing of what it aids and abets with arms sales—gets its panties in a bunch about the word “fag”, whose intent has literally nothing to do with homosexuality in the context in which it was used. Priorities.
I don’t know whether he chose his shirt to signify that he feels like he’s in prison, but it sure as heck looked... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 12. Dec 2023 22:50:15 (GMT-5)
The next in my ongoing series of people on tears, following Gideon Levy is on a tear, Amira Hass is on a tear, and Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, so I put this one in the series.
I don’t know whether he chose his shirt to signify that he feels like he’s in prison, but it sure as heck looked like a prisoner’s uniform.
0:00 Intro o1:10 The Four Food Groups of News 16:21 Ilan Pappé interview 16:53 Becoming and anti-Zionist 21:41 Israel is a plan of ethnic cleansing 34:04 Historical context of Oct 7 52:16 Alleged antisemitism on college campuses
At 39:00, Pappé and Aaron discuss how the Israeli government, if not most citizens are perfectly aware of the situation—it’s just that everything they’ve ever learned is that they should be just fine with it. In essence, “Yes, we understand that they have every right to want to kill us for what we’ve done to them, which is why we have to kill them first. What is so hard to understand about that?”
For what shall it profit a man though he should win the whole world, if he lose his own soul?
As Pappé says, the logic of the argument is ironclad given a certain worldview, given a certain lifelong indoctrination. The solution domain is very simplistic; it is zero-sum—one side dies or the other. This is Starship Troopers come to life. It’s tedious. You don’t have the moral high ground. Your argument is that some pigs are better than others. Yeah, yeah. Dudes: we’ve considered and rejected such moralities. Try to keep up.
Matthew 16:26 (in the New Testament, which is maybe why it went unnoticed) says, “For what shall it profit a man though he should win the whole world, if he lose his own soul?”
“[…] this is very worrying because what the Israelis want to do is to use that event to absolve them from all their criminal policies before the 7th of October. And definitely to provide this moral support for what they’re doing now. And this is why we should insist on the context because otherwise you remain with a pretext […]”
“Aaron: I want to read you a quote that I know you’re familiar with. This is from Moshe Dayan. He is a famed Israeli military leader and in 1956, he spoke at a funeral for an Israeli soldier, who had been killed by some Palestinians living in Gaza. And Dayan said this, he said,
“‘let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us for eight years? They’ve been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and Villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our estate.‘
“That’s Moshe Dayan in 1956 so I wonder if you can talk about that quote and the significance of it in Israeli history I know it’s very famous. He goes on to say though that rather than making peace with these people, we need to be basically be even more aggressive.
“Pappé: this is probably you have to be an Israeli to to understand why it sounds so logical to Israelis to say that the Palestinians have all the right to hate us, to fight against us, even to kill us—and that’s why we have all the right to do the same to them.
“[…]
“If you go deeper you can see that this is actually a dehumanization of the Palestinians. It’s almost like a hunter who would say, ‘I really respect the bravery of the lion that I’m going to kill.‘ It’s not a respect for human beings.”
Pappé continued talking about how his otherwise-scientific and rigorously intellectual colleagues in Israel have an ethical structure composed nearly exclusively of logical fallacies in which they must believe so that the whole house of cards that justifies their belief that ethnic cleansing and genocide is not only OK for them, but they don’t have ever doubt whether they’re the good guys. Of course they are.
“[…] that this is the way to solve the issue—by expelling even more people—from someone who is dealing with law and international law is, again, if you face them with this astonishment about the immorality of these logical statements, […] I generally think they don’t understand what you’re talking about. They think they’re really building a logical kind of scientific argument here. No Palestinians in the West Bank = no problem [in] the West Bank, right? How the Palestinians are not there? Doesn’t matter. but they’re not there. This is very difficult to deal with because the inner logic of these people says to them that [it’s] not only logically right but also morally right.”
I have a few Israeli friends and work colleagues. I spoke with a couple of them on the First Chanukah. They remarked how the next week of planning days fell on Chanukah, to which we responded that the holiday is so long that it’s hard to avoid them all. One of them said, sure, sure, and you guys are taking off 10 days at the end of the year, and that’s somehow different? To which I responded that that is a very fair point. Touché.
Anyway, I wanted to get to the persecution complex. Look, I understand it’s not completely unwarranted. I get that. But when the other guy remarked that they had so many holidays because every holiday was a commemoration of a time when someone wanted to kill all the Jews, it felt jarring. It felt like it came out of nowhere, but I don’t think it felt like that for them—because that’s the default mindset.
That’s just something you say all the time. No-one questions you on it. The worst thing in the world is living in an echo chamber—with no-one to call you on your bullshit. They probably just forgot temporarily that the idea sounds like a massive persecution complex when you’re not suffused in that propaganda, day after day, year after year.
I didn’t take the bait. I mean, I thought it was a bit tone-deaf for an Israeli to complain about how persecuted they are when they’ve been running a literal human zoo for several decades … and they hate the animals in there. They have more weapons than God and have a giant brother who supplies more and more and doesn’t even own a leash.
I can understand thinking that situation, though, if you only read and watch the correct news. As Gideon Levy pointed out in his interview: you get nothing else on Israeli TV but IDF-supplied news. Dozens of millions of Americans manage it every day. Hell, half of Congress is still waiting for Vietnam to apologize for having killed American soldiers, so I understand how Israelis might fully be drinking their own Kool-Aid.
It’s just a pity because I wish my friends were smarter than that. Although sometimes smart guys don’t pay attention. I have another colleague from Argentina who doesn’t follow the news at all. He probably doesn’t even know that his home country has its very own Trump now.
At 01:12:20, Pappé talks about what he sees as the current genocide, which differs only in from what he calls the more insidious, incremental genocide that’s taken place over the last 56 years.
“The United Nation definition of genocide—contrary to what people may think—genocide is not always a total elimination of all the people of a certain identity. It’s also an elimination of people in small groups, if the elimination is because of who they are, not because of what they did. And it’s very clear that if Israelis say that everyone in Gaza—whether they are babies in incubators or doctors in a hospital or teachers in a school—are a legitimate target.
“I don’t remember who it was—one of the Israel General said, ‘you know if we kill three citizens alongside every terrorist, that’s okay.‘ Then this is genocide. This fits into the [definition of] genocide.
“What we did learn from the siege is the idea of an incremental genocide. Namely, that it doesn’t look like it if you look at it on a daily basis. The fact that babies die because there’s no food or because there’s no infrastructure in the—I’m talking about before the seventh of October—and there’s no infrastructure in the hospital or mother die at birth at checkpoints in the West Bank and only two mothers in one week, then you don’t get the picture.
“But if you accumulate these incidents, these cases, and you look over a period of 56 years, you can see that there is a destruction, there’s an elimination of people and the only reason they’re treated that way is because of who they are. And then it becomes incremental genocide, to my mind.”
For example, image generators have been given billions and billions of images and pictures of people and still they generate material with people that... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 11. Dec 2023 22:38:28 (GMT-5)
With LLM-produced materials, we are currently forced to rely on belief that what we ask for is what we will get. We don’t know. We can’t prove it.
For example, image generators have been given billions and billions of images and pictures of people and still they generate material with people that have three arms and eight fingers. There are guardrails in place in most image generators, but the LLM at the core of the machine doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t know that people don’t have three arms.
A child learns very quickly how many fingers and arms a person has. An AI does not. It has to be explicitly taught these things. This is fundamentally different. You put a human in the world for a while and it learns a tremendous number of things that we’ve taken for granted. An AI does not do this. You have to hold its “hand”.
This is OK with stuff that we can easily verify. But what happens when it’s not easily verified? What happens when it’s an MRI output or something much more complex and difficult to verify? Then we have to take it on faith that each of those shadows on the MRI is really a potential tumor and not just three extra fingers.
I just don’t think this technology is a viable path forward. I think that this technology base doesn’t scale. We’ve managed to scale it pretty far with bloody-mindedness, but we can’t seem to refine it. Well, we can refine it, but we have to teach these tools every single little detail about the world so that we can better believe their output.
But just that we have to “believe” as part of our use of a technology is very, very different than scientific approaches. It’s fundamentally different than other tools we’ve built. In other cases, most people had no idea how their tools worked, but at least someone did. It was possible to learn. With LLMs, the black box is a black box for everyone.
On top of that, an emergent feature of these things is hallucinations—like the eight fingers and three arms—but also a tremendous inherent bias in the input, for which there is no reasonable solution. Because how do you correct a bias? To what would you correct it?
If I ask an image generator for a a hot slut, it will 100% produce a nearly-naked woman, not a man. It will also not produce androgynous content. It dreams, but it dreams the dreams we taught it to dream.
As noted in the tweet On the hallucination “problem” by Andrej Karpathy (Twitter),
“[LLMs] are dream machines.
“We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM’s hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful.
“It’s only when the dreams go into deemed factually incorrect territory that we label it a “hallucination”. It looks like a bug, but it’s just the LLM doing what it always does.
“[…] An LLM is 100% dreaming and has the hallucination problem. A search engine is 0% dreaming and has the creativity problem.
“[…] An LLM Assistant is a lot more complex system than just the LLM itself, even if one is at the heart of it.
“[…] the LLM has no “hallucination problem”. Hallucination is not a bug, it is LLM’s greatest feature. The LLM Assistant has a hallucination problem, and we should fix it.”
Everything it does is hallucination. Some of it happens to hit close to what we consider to be a bullseye.
The discussion in the video below expands on that point.
The following transcription is from about 25:30:
“So something everybody I think pretty much agrees on, including Sam Altman, including Yann LeCun, is LLMs aren’t going to make it. The current LLMs are not a path to AGI. They’re getting more and more expensive, they’re getting more and more slow, and the more we use them, the more we realize their limitations.
“We’re also getting better at taking advantage of them, and they’re super cool and helpful, but they appear to be behaving as extremely flexible, fuzzy, compressed search engines, which when you have enough data that’s kind of compressed into the weights, turns out to be an amazingly powerful operation to have at your disposal. […] And the thing you can really see missing here is this planning piece, right? So if you try to get an LLM to solve fairly simple graph coloring problems or fairly simple stacking problems, things that require backtracking and trying things and stuff, unless it’s something pretty similar in its training, they just fail terribly.”
We’ll have to reevaluate the tech and try again. I imagine we’ll futz around for a while first, letting some fools get spectacularly rich on it first, as we always do.
Published by marco on 11. Dec 2023 19:25:36 (GMT-5)
Back at the end of August, I read the article Making Large Language Models work for you by Simon Willison. I have since being doing much more research about integrating LLM-based assistants into the development workflow for work. It’s quite interesting, and I’m going through some older content to see what’s worth mining for that effort.
In particular, the article has this description of expertise, and linked it to ChatGPT—obviously, it’s Simon Willison.
“LLMs have started to make me redefine what I consider to be expertise.
“I’ve been using Git for 15 years, but I couldn’t tell you what most of the options in Git do.
“I always felt like that meant I was just a Git user, but nowhere near being a Git expert.
“Now I use sophisticated Git options all the time, because ChatGPT knows them and I can prompt it to tell me what to do.
“Knowing every option of these tools off-by-heart isn’t expertise, that’s trivia—that helps you compete in a bar quiz.
“Expertise is understanding what they do, what they can do and what kind of questions you should ask to unlock those features.”
Well, welcome to the party. Expertise has always been exactly what he’s described. It’s having an understanding of a subject—wisdom about it, if you like—born of extensive familiarity. But it’s never been about rote memorization of things. How is this a revelation?
Sure, experts tend to have to look things up less, just because they’ve done something you’re asking about so many times before that they can’t help but remember how it’s done. My expertise in programming techniques, programming languages, and development environments leads me to expect more, to be able to conceive of a feature I’d like to have and to go looking for it. A lot of people can’t do that because they don’t know what to look for. Therefore, they’re not experts.
The only thing that really is about deep familiarity and rote memorization is vocabulary, the toolbox from which you draw in order to express your thoughts. When I want to type a word like “morass” and I can’t remember whether it has two r’s or two s’s—or both—and then use a real-time spellchecker to test which version is correct, only to realize that it doesn’t have an ‘e’ at the end, I’m still expressing my own thoughts, in words that I know. If I don’t know the word, I’m going to express myself more simply—albeit perhaps more understandably!
When I use an LLM to generate entire swaths of text, I’m no longer expressing anything of myself. It’s not my thoughts. It’s words generated from a kernel that came from me. It’s leveraging, sure, but it’s a fundamentally different expression. It contributes much more text—which others have to wade through—from much less, not only effort, but much less thought. You’re essentially cheating people, tricking them into reading what you’ve gotten the LLM to write for you.
So, yes, expertise ineluctably comprises at least one skill: an expert is someone who’s amassed a formidable arsenal of tools with which to express their thoughts. If you don’t have thoughts, you’re not an expert. If you rely on tools to express your thoughts for you, then you’re faking it. However, you might be able to eventually fake it well enough to provide value to society? I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
There are some tasks for which immediately available, immanent expertise is essential, where the ability to quickly correlate information from disparate sources is exactly what the interlocutor—or situation—is looking for. There are others where a delay is OK. Say, you need to know how to light a campfire. It’s great if you have someone in the group who already knows how to do that, but, you can also just look it up and learn how to build a fire in five minutes. If you need to know the temperature, likewise.
Where immanent expertise is important is when you don’t have a data connection. If your keeping your expertise off-site, then you run the risk of being cut off from it. You’ll all freeze to death if you’re each having a conversation over a spotty data connection with an LLM about how to build a fire, and it’s veered off into telling you about a really cool story by Jack London. It’s relevant to your imminent death, but irrelevant to your wanting to live.
[…] so under-equipped to be communicating in the first place that it’s a crap-shoot as to whether they can express or understand any concepts worth discussing
A task for which immanent expertise is currently very advantageous, if not essential, is debating, participating in meetings, talking to other people. The thing that greases the wheels of civilization, in other words. Being able to properly express what you’re thinking in real-time is helpful. The current idea of offloading to a web search or LLM prompt incurs too much delay to be a viable replacement, or even an alternative.
Can you imagine it? Instead of learning a language, with vocabulary and practice in elocution, one party expresses a truncated set of half-baked bullet points that they balloon with an LLM into several paragraphs of text that they then send, unread, to their counterpart, who sends the text, unread, to their own LLM, which distills it back down to a few bullet points, which, one hopes, bear some semblance to the original ones, but it doesn’t really matter because both parties are, at this point, so under-equipped to be communicating in the first place that it’s a crap-shoot as to whether they can express or understand any concepts worth discussing.
All that said, and I honestly can’t see the advantage of having an LLM answer these questions rather than a search engine. I manage to quickly extract answers from DuckDuckGo every damned day without feeling like I’m restricted because I didn’t get to ask an LLM 12 questions to refine the answer, or ask the search engine to answer as a goat in a tree (something that Willison above thought was a fun thing to try). What absolute madness is this?
What’s mind-boggling is that this is a very smart guy who only hit upon the idea to use a tool to “remember” Git commands for him when he could do it with an LLM. He still uses Git from the command line, but he now pipes his questions through an LLM first—e.g., he asks it how to “undo last Git commit” and it tells him git reset HEAD-1
(which, honestly, seems kind of intuitive enough to remember)—and then executes it on the command line. And then he calls this “efficient”. I’m blown away that he’s never heard of a Git UI. I just type Ctrl + Shift + K from long years of muscle memory using SmartGit.
This is a question I have for anyone who asks me about how to leverage LLMs in programming: are you even using the other tools we already have available? Are you just grabbing for the new shiny? You know, which you will use just as spottily and badly as all of the other tools that are already at your fingertips and which you ignore daily?
Starting at 24:00, the Gideon Levy interview is just... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 11. Dec 2023 09:19:53 (GMT-5)
I was going to name this article a more serious-sounding “The situation in Israel according to Gideon Levy”, but then realized that I’d already written Amira Hass is on a tear and Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, so I put this one in the series.
Starting at 24:00, the Gideon Levy interview is just 100% gold. Katie and Aaron ask good questions, but it’s really more of a lecture on Israel, as she is in 2023.
00:00 Intro 01:43 The Four Food Groups of News 19:52 An Ode to Henry Kissinger 24:00 Gideon Levy interview 28:05 How Israeli’s live with occupation 35:27 Can the truce hold? 45:47 Is there any hope for peace? 56:15 What do young Israelis think?
The first 24 minutes are a bit uneven. I really like Aaron Maté and Katie Halper. I think they’re intelligent, witty, and have their ethics in the right place. But they drew several conclusions in the first 20 minutes that were absolutely the correct ones, but justified them with completely specious reasoning.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you so assailable. You don’t lock down your point because you made it in a way that someone who’s looking to disagree with you is going to be able to use to continue the discussion long after it should have been shut down.
I think that’s my problem with Mo Gawdat as well—his interactions have encouraged him to be lazy in his justifications for what I agree are the correct sentiments. This means I can’t really use anything he says as ammunition in my own arguments. It’s a pity.
Anyway…
This is a brilliant lecture by Gideon Levy. Katie and Aaron ask good questions, but from 24:00 onwards, it’s the Gideon Levy show. It’s just an incredible interview. I copy/pasted so much out of the transcript because nearly every word out of Mr. Levy’s mouth was interesting and pertinent and well-phrased. I’m glad he, too, noticed what great questions both Katie and Aaron asked. If you can make your friends watch one 80-minute video about Israel, this is the one.
As for the transcript? It’s OK, but needs a lot of cleanup to make it truly legible. It has no punctuation, has odd capitalization, and the poor thing just can’t bring itself to write the word “apartheid”. I’m not going to read anything into that.
I’ve cleaned up the transcription considerably, but I’ve not corrected any of Levy’s unique prepositions or formulations because I’m transcribing his speech, not translating it to SWE (Standard Written English).
At 28::30, he says,
“Look: you cannot maintain such an occupation—such a brutal reality—in your backyard without believing in some kind of of lies that you invent to yourself in order to make it easier for you. Because, finally, we are all human beings with emotions. And I don’t think that a normal human being can live in peace with such a brutal dictatorship in its backyard. Even if you don’t see it, but you know it’s there, in your backyard, just half an hour away from your home.
“So, you have to live in denial. Otherwise, you cannot stand it. So, first of all, Israel covered itself—protected itself—with all kind of walls of denial.
“Above all, the media which doesn’t show anything right now, anything from Gaza. You can hardly see Gaza on Israeli TV or [in] Israeli newspapers, and you can hardly see the occupation in Israeli mainstream media.
“But that’s not enough okay? So, you don’t see anything and you don’t want to know anything and all those agency helps you not to know. That’s not enough. You have to have also some kind of ideology, some kind of explanation, some kind of justification.
“So, the first thing you mentioned was really being the chosen people. We got it with the milk of our mothers. We were told from childhood that—even though most of us are secular or we think we are secular—that that we are the chosen people. And the examples, the expressions, are endless.
“Let’s take the international law. The international law was born after the Holocaust, after the World War II. And Israel, obviously, supports the international law. It’s something very important. It should be implemented everywhere—except of one place: Israel.
“For Israel, it shouldn’t be implemented. Why? Because we are a special case. You cannot deal us with the same tools that you deal Syria, Iraq, Russia—all kind of occupying regimes. No. We are not one of them. We are something special. And you see it again and again. You can also not tell us what to do because we know better.
“If you met Israelis, you always feel this arrogance. We know better. Why? Because we are better. Because what do you know folks? I mean who? Americans, Germans, French, Swedes—who are you to tell us?
“Secondly, is obviously this notion of victimization. As the late Golda Meir phrased it—in a wonderful way—after the Holocaust: ‘the Jews have the right to do whatever they want.’ In other words, we are the ultimate victims of history. But not only the ultimate victims. We are the only victims.
“Try to tell an Israeli that there were some other holocausts. He will be deeply offended. You cannot call the Armenian Holocaust the Holocaust because Holocaust is only ours and we are the biggest victims. Being such victims enable us to do whatever we want and nobody can stop us.
“Katie: […] and the third one is the dehumanization of Palestinians.
“Right. And that’s the most obvious one. Because you cannot colonize and you cannot brutally govern another people with the belief that they are equal human beings to you. Because then, who gave you this right to treat them like—I don’t even want to say animals, because animals, [Katie:] they’re treated better, [Gideon:] absolutely—who gave you the right?
“So the only way to live with it in peace, is to keep on telling yourself that they are not human beings like us. The Palestinians don’t love their children. Therefore, they are not—it’s not a big deal for them to see them dying. They were born to kill. They have nothing in their mind except of pushing the Jews to the ocean.
“That’s their nature. They are barbarians. I mean, that’s their nature. It’s not that it’s for a certain purpose. That’s them and they are not like us. We are human. We are human beings. And that’s the way to treat them because then they—there’s no question of human rights, if they’re not human—so why do they deserve human rights?
“You see it, by the way, in any occupation. I mean, obviously the Germans dehumanized the Jews. But, also, in many other cases, you cannot maintain an occupation without dehumanizing the other. […] In Africa look how they treated the colonies in Africa—total dehumanization. Because otherwise, how can you stand it and explain it to yourself?”
As an American, this rings true of how America ticks, as well. The U.S. also constantly speaks of itself as “exceptional”. It also does not recognize any higher authority than itself. It also dehumanizes every last one of its occupied peoples—Afghans, Iraqis, the list goes on. They dehumanize every last immigrant. Americans also think they’re better than everyone because they absolutely believe the story of exceptionalism.
This brainwashing works so well that they can visit foreign countries that are obviously running things better than in the U.S. and they will feel sorry for those benighted peoples because they don’t have the same TV programs, or they can’t drive everywhere they want to—they have to take trains! Or busses!—their food isn’t the same. The level of brainwashing is incredible.
At 34:00, he says,
“Now Israel is 24 hours, 7 days a week only in news programs. There are no other programs, so it’s an ongoing broadcast, which shows almost only either the agony of the families of the hostages or the hostages coming back or the soldiers in Gaza or telling us about the achievements in Gaza.
“Now there is the pause, so you see less from Gaza. But only the army. You will see once in a while some very small piece of one [or] two minutes showing some ruins in Gaza, just you know to—as a lip service: ‘here we showed Gaza.’ But it’s not really showing Gaza.
“We know very well that everything is also about framing. And this is always framed as something marginal, as something that we have to show you, but let’s get back to business. The bomb that fall on a house in the South and scratched the terrace—that’s the story of the day. By all means, not 5,000 children who were killed in Gaza. This is not in our agenda.
“So when it is being done systematically—that’s brainwashing.”
This also checks out in comparing with the States. The U.S. kids itself that it has two silos, but to a sane person, they look pretty much the same. They only disagree on relatively minor issues. I don’t mean that abortion rights is absolutely minor but that it’s minor when compared to a $1T-per-year military that stamps its bootprint on the world, over and over.
At 36:00, he says,
“The national sentiment right now—and polls show it—is in favor of continuing the war. And in a very clear majority. Israelis, after the 7th of October, feel that they cannot get back to normality before punishing Gaza and punishing Hamas and smashing Hamas—crashing Hamas. That’s almost common in Israeli discourse, that this should happen.”
At around 44:00, he talks about how the Kibbutzim were mostly old socialists, peace activists, who now feel betrayed by the Palestinians. The Kibbutzim are lumping Palestinians and the most militant Hamas all together, but this was inevitable. They, too, are going to succumb to some of the brainwashing.
The Kibbutzim feel that they’re helping someone, and then that someone bites the hand that feeds. This is powerful. Levy says that the core of the left, the peace movement, is breaking up and moving to the right now, as well. He says that this is not surprising, but that it’s one of the most lamentable side-effects of the attack and counterattack—there will be even less political air to breathe for anyone pushing for a reconciliation or an equitable and just one-state solution.
After that, he talks about the shame Israel feels about having been taking by surprise by a few hundred people on motorcycles. This shame and embarrassment drives the intensity of the counterattack, as well.
At 46:30, Katie asks if there is any hope for a one-state solution—with equal rights, because there already is a one-state solution, just an apartheid one. He says, “not for the foreseeable future.” He continues,
“Israelis will not wake up one morning and say, ‘oh, this occupation, this apartheid, we don’t like it so much. Let’s put an end to it. This will never happen happen. It will only happen when Israelis will pay for it, will be punished for it. And this is not going to happen because the International community basically supports the occupation. The United States supports the occupation, actively, passively […]”
Katie asks how the U.S. could end the occupation. Levy responds that,
“What is easier than this? Israel depends so much on the United States. The aid is so generous—more than any country in the world. God knows why, but Israel gets more than any other country in the world and, believe me, Israel is not the poorest country or the country that deserves…but that’s the choice of the United States and that’s your own choice. You have to decide to whom, but why not to condition? It was never conditioned. This is so outrageous.
“[…]
“Why not, for example, condition the aid by at least stopping building settlements? You want our aid? You have to stop this criminal project. What is so complicated in this? No American president, no administration, went for it.”
At 51:00, he says,
“I guess you know that in Israel there are not many political discussions anymore. In the last decades, nobody speaks about the long future. […] Everybody’s only in the present. Ask an Israeli,
“‘Where do you want to go? Where are you aiming? Where is your state aiming? What is the end game? What is your goal? What will be here in 20 years time? In 30 years time? […] What do you want to happen here?’
“You will not get an answer, except [from] the very right extremist, who will tell you, very clearly to expel the Palestinians from here, and then we’ll have a real Jewish State between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. That’s our plan—we are aiming there. But that’s, until now, a minority. All the rest have no plan and and there is no debate. There is no debate.”
At 52:00, he says,
“[…] you come and see campaigns to the elections. The occupation is not present at all. Election after election, people speak about the most minor and stupid issues—and the occupation is not on the table at all. Not in favor, not against—doesn’t exist.”
“[…] don’t forget that I’ve not been in Gaza for the last 15 years because Israel doesn’t let any Israeli journalist to go to Gaza. So most of the contacts are also much weaker now because it’s 15 years that I’ve not seen none of my friends there.”
“What we see here, that generation after generation, they become more ignorant about the conflict. They know nothing. They really know nothing. You will be surprised. I can ensure you, any average American student in University or in college—for sure. any European—knows much more about the conflict than an average Israeli. We live in denial. And therefore, we don’t want to know anything. Not only about life in Gaza today—about the whole history. the context. The context is not present.
“[…]
“I’m amazed, again and again, how little—there are obviously very knowledgeable young people in Israel, yeah—but the majority, they know nothing. And they don’t want to know nothing. And they hate the Arabs like hell.”
This checks out with Americans as well. Just the most shocking, willful ignorance about their own recent history. They just forgive themselves of their own crimes by allowing their propaganda to quickly and efficiently erase any of their home country’s crimes from their memories.
At 01:15:00,
“I say it for many years I never made a poll and it’s not systematic, but I can tell you that many more Palestinians that I met want to live together with the Jews—in equality, in justice—but are ready to live with the Jews.
“Most of the Israelis that I know—including the leftists—wants separation. We are here. They are there. So that’s, first of all, a difference in their sentiments. Obviously there is a bigger majority for the one-state solution among the Palestinians rather than among the Israelis, who, for them it’s unacceptable at
all.”
I think the really important thing to remember is that there already is a one-state solution right now. It is an apartheid one. There is only one state: Israel. There are a lot of people living in Israel who have different rights from the ruling class. This is not unlike other countries, like Switzerland, where over 30% of the resident population cannot vote because they do not have Swiss citizenship. Of course, the path to citizenship, if not easy, is, at least in principle, possible.
I just wanted to point out that most countries exist somewhere on this spectrum, from 100% perfect equality to outright apartheid. Israel is quite far out on one extreme.
Levy continues,
“Now, what any American or Israeli should know is that nothing—but nothing—in our lives—in your lives—looks the same like someone in your same age, same social-economical background in the West Bank. And we are not speaking about the cage of Gaza. We are speaking about the West Bank and we are not speaking about times of war, but the routine.
“The routine of the occupation is the most cruel one because, at any given moment, the army can penetrate to your home—mainly at night—with dogs, wake the whole house up, make a search without any legal supervision—obviously. At any moment, the army is—the raids are every night, everywhere. At any given moment, you can be arrested with reason. without reason.
“At any given moment, your parents can be humiliated in front of you and children can be beaten in front of you. This can happen in any moment and. above all. Your life is so cheap and you can be so easily shot at any circumstance. You don’t have to do much in order to be shot.”
I’m thinking that there are certain echelons of U.S. society who can absolutely understand this feeling. Mr. Levy should read more news about U.S. policing. I’m sure it’s worse in the West Bank, but man does this situation rhyme with the one facing the poor and minority populations in the U.S.
“[…] much worse than this, is the lack of dignity. You know that any 18-year-old soldier can do with you whatever he wants. And the same for an armed settler. He can do to you whatever he wants and nothing will happen to him. […] You are totally helpless. You have no one to come to save you. No, I mean everyone in every other society in the world can call a police, can call an ambulance, can call soldiers. army. someone to come and guard you, to protect you.”
I understand that he knows his own country the best, but Israel absolutely does not have a lock on police repression of minorities. Or on citizen lynchings of minorities. I’m quite sure that people all over Europe and the U.S. would definitely be able to tell of similar experiences. Do you think people are setting the banlieues in Paris on fire for fun? Does he not read any news from the U.S. about police brutality? Maybe he should read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2012).
“Life has no perspectives for anything—and everything we say here is so much better in the West Bank than in Gaza.”
Katie’s final question was about why a two-state solution is no longer feasible. Levy answered,
“In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, there are over 700,000 Jewish settlers. Part of them are armed, all of them are represented in Israeli politics as the strongest political pressure group. They have ministers. They have members of parliament They have high officers in the army, in the media, everywhere. They are a very well-organized, very powerful group in Israeli society.
“There is no reality in which anyone will be able to evacuate them from their settlements. 700,000 people you cannot evacuate. If you don’t evacuate them, there is no viable Palestinian State. Anyone who had visited the West Bank understands that there is no room—no room! You cannot drive in the West
Bank more than 10 minutes without seeing another settlement. What kind of
Palestinian state will it be when in every corner there there is an armed
militant violent outpost. Who is going to to challenge it? And how will it be a Palestinian state with 700,000 settlers?”
At the very end, he addressed the de-facto one-state solution, summarized better than I’d done above.
“[…] what is lasting already for the last 55 years is a one-state [solution]. We are all living in one state. A refugee in Jenin. a shepherd in Hebron, and me in Tel Aviv, we live under the same regime, under the same authority: the government and the military of Israel. He is more under the military. I more under the government.
“But, finally, we are living in the same state. He’s using the same currency that
I use. He is registered with the ministry of interior exactly like I do. He is living under Israel, like me, under the state of Israel.“So the one state is here. The only problem is its regime and its regime is anything but democracy. I will not get into it, because it’s late, but it looks like apartheid, it behaves like apartheid, it is apartheid. I don’t know anyone who went to the West Bank, saw a settlement—the Jewish settlement—on one side, a Palestinian village next by. The Jews have all the rights in the world. The Palestinian next by have no rights whatsoever and we’ll be able to call it any other name but apartheid.”
I’ve been trying to figure out who he looks like. He’s an Israeli Robert de Niro.
In this video, there was some interesting stuff,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 10. Dec 2023 17:20:05 (GMT-5)
I’d never heard of Saul Williams before, but I very much like Abby Martin’s work. I recently published an article called From their mouths to God’s ear, about a video of hers from 2016, where she interviews Israelis in the streets of Jerusalem.
In this video, there was some interesting stuff, but I felt that they accompanied each other down the rabbit hole a bit too much.
They formed their own little echo chamber. It was a fine discussion, but no progress made to figure out how to reach people who don’t already think the way that they do. They just laughed about how stupid everyone else is. I get how frustrating it can be when you see that people are literally denying a holocaust and then claim that they have no idea what’s going on, that you’re the crazy one for even believing something so horrible. Being gaslit is no fun.
But, man, you’ve got to stop cutting off friends who don’t already think right. You’ve got to stop thinking that people are evil rather than ignorant. That’s not the way to get your minority to be a majority.
Maybe they know much worse people than I do. Maybe they have much more contact with people who don’t think like them.
At one point, Saul says,
“Israel is a safe space for sexual predators.”
Um, ok. You sure about that? Or are you just believing anything that your silo publishes?
I looked it up and found the article With pedophiles seeking sanctuary in Israel, one way parents can protect kids by Melanie Kidman (The Times of Israel), which writes,
“According to Jewish Community Watch, at least 34 pedophiles in their sex offender database have moved to Israel in the past decade under the Law of Return, one of the Israel’s founding pieces of legislation, which guarantees every Jew a place in the country. An additional 12 pedophiles have moved to countries other than Israel.”
Ah, OK. 34 people over 10 years. And the “right of return” applies to everyone Jewish, regardless of your criminal record. That’s their law. How could the Jewish state have been founded on a law that rejects the right of return to Jews who’ve been judged by the societies that they are ostensibly fleeing?
I mean, can we conceive of a situation in which a society accuses a Jew of pedophilia in order to arrest them? You know, Saul, as a black man, should be able to conceive of a situation in which an ostracized minority has false charges thrown against them. But, instead, he laughs about how awesome it is that Israel turns out to be utterly evil. You really can’t give in to that temptation.
They’re veering very close to objectifying all Israelis as their country. What would they think of people who did the same to them, as Americans?
Published by marco on 10. Dec 2023 17:08:15 (GMT-5)
I’ve watched Mo Gawdat before (see Mo Gawdat discusses AI). He is an acquired taste, at least for me. There is good in what he says, but it is interspersed with a lot of wild and unsubstantiated statements that he hopes you’ll believe because he’s so smart. The listener is left wondering whether they don’t see the through-line on what he’s saying because he’s skipped a bunch of steps that his unparalleled genius didn’t see as necessary or wether he’s just pulling a fast one. [1]
This is the video:
And these are my cleaned-up, more-or-less, stream-of-consciousness notes I took as I listened to this video.
The interview starts off with a warning by the clearly overexcited host that the topics that will be discussed are so transgressive that you might be triggered by them. OK, sure. Whatever.
Then, there is the by-now familiar Mo Gawdat introduction where he talks about writing an entire book in nine days because his mind is so organized and his CHI is SO FLOW and he uses silence as a fucking weapon and he doesn’t waste time being like those other high-powered billionaire executives who are always chasing the cheese in the maze…but then he says things like,
“One of my best, best friends is Gelong Thubten, who’s one of the top monks of the UK.”
What in the hell does that even mean? Is there a FIFA-style ranking for monks?
I wouldn’t mention it but, for me, it reveals that his mindset isn’t quite where he’s like to have it yet, I think. But hey, no problem, life is aspirational. Talk about the thing you want to be until you are that thing.
Because what he is advocating is, in general, pretty good. But it also seems like it best applies to those who no longer have to worry about any worldly needs, those who have achieved financial orbit. Because not following that advice is what made him a hyper-millionaire in the first place.
For those who aren’t in that enlightened post-capitalist place—i.e., in the way that he’s used capitalism to escape capitalism—the advice may ring a bit hollow. Also, the dude is wicket smart, and it’s often the case that smart people can’t quite see why other people don’t just try harder to be as smart as them.
The host James is really embarrassing himself. He’s all like, “aw man, I would love to be silent for days,” to which Gawdat says, “even 26 days is not enough.” 🤦♂️
Cool, bro…so the podcast host wants to be silent more, and the orbital capitalist millionaire tells him that he should do more than 26 days of silence. Neat. Did Gawdat forgot that the system is organized in a fashion that most people can’t take that much time off without getting hungry or cold? Or that the guy he’s talking to is literally full of shit because his whole jam is to talk on videos for likes to make money?
Gawdat continues,
“By day 32, clarity sets in.”
Sure, ok. 32 days without “reading, inputting information, or interacting with people.” is … a lot. I feel like it’s the kind of thing that people do who can’t find balance otherwise, who can’t figure out how to get silent moments integrated into their normal lives. He talks about sitting in front of a paper notebook without any digital input, etc. But it would kill me to sit that long. Instead, I would go for a walk or a hike.
He does mention that he sometimes does “mini retreats” where he starts his day at 16:00. Sure, again, good for you. I don’t think the 7–11 employee gets that many mental-health days.
He talks about AIs “being smarter” than us and that AIs will be “a billion times smarter” than us “by 2037”. What the hell does that even mean? I like that he doesn’t even consider that he might be wrong about these levels of smartness. Like, where does context and wisdom enter into it? Like, what about useful intelligence? If you’re capable of grasping incredible complexity, but you don’t know a language that anyone else knows, then it’s of limited use.
I find these discussions interesting, but I don’t know what that has to do with LLMs. It can get a PhD, it “outsmarts us”, but it still doesn’t know how many arms a person has. It can be convinced that 2 + 2 = 5. Don’t we have to understand what this kind of “smart” actually means?
In a way, there are already such beings in the world. They walk among us. They are the smart people. Most people don’t grasp a goddamned thing about their world. Those who do grasp a lot—who are currently at the top of the heap—are they now terrified of being left behind? Of being like everyone else? Are we simply witnessing the panic of a self-selected intellectual elite being terrified that they’ve made themselves obsolete?
Are they scared of things existing that they don’t understand and can’t understand? That’s OK, no? There’s a ton of stuff happening in countries where I don’t know the language or the culture or anything. That’s all out of my control already. There’s no way I’ll ever understand it. I wonder how much of what Mo’s talking about is the terror of a control-freak?
The attitude he has toward AI feels, to me, conceptually similar to the attitude that the U.S. has to anything it doesn’t understand. Subjugate or eliminate. Maybe that’s the right attitude to have for AI as well. It might be the right one because this time it’s different—but, man, have I heard that story many times before. I suppose if you accept that premise of smartness—he still hasn’t defined it more than vaguely—then you’d want to keep it from replacing us? Are we really talking about that?
I think his comments in the other video were pithier—that it’s not the ASIs we should be afraid of, it’s what people will do to us with them. I fall back on my comparison to the development of atomic power plants…and then atomic weapons.
At 26:30, he says,
“one of the best code developers on Earth today is AI. As a matter of fact, with weeks or months or years—it doesn’t matter the time; it’s inevitable, it doesn’t matter when—they will be, by far, the best software developers on the planet.”
It kind of does matter when, no? Seriously, this guy elides so much stuff from his arguments. I wonder if he’s thought it through and he just skips large portions or whether he’s just … full of shit.
He just hand-waves away the temporal component. It doesn’t matter when? Like, if they became better developers millennia from now, that would be the same so-called threat as if they were already the best software developers? C’mon, dude.
He then cites another friend of his, the CEO of Stability.AI, who says that,
“40% of all code on GitHub today is written by a machine.”
First of all … proof?
Second of all … are we just going to take a CEO of an AI company at their word that AI is taking over?
Third of all, is Gawdat being sneaky when he says “machine”? There’s already a ton of generated code, but it wasn’t generated by an LLM. It was generated by tools that create boilerplate.
And if it’s 40%, is that good code? Or is volume the most important thing?
We’ve spent decades trying to escape the Charybdis of LOC and here we’re pulled right back to measuring by size, not quality.
I just want to note that James is insufferable. He offers no pushback at all. Nothing.
Gawdat again:
“10 out of 10 of the most beautiful women in the world are not human. They’re generated.”
C’mon, dude. You start off with this woo-ey meditation shit, but you think that a statement like that isn’t philosophically fraught? Isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder? That people think an AI-generated person is beautiful … doesn’t that say more about the superficiality of our society than about a takeover of AI? There are so many better things to discuss than this angle.
“you have GPT being that you know geek boy nerd if you want or—and I say boy, sadly, not girl okay? Because, again, it’s developed around IQ and there is a lot of emphasis on the masculine side of analytical thinking and so on and so forth, which is an unbalanced form of intelligence.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. Analytical thinking is masculine? Well, well, well. This kind of attitude is, I suppose, the kind of thing that leads to the inherent bias of the machine that he’s talking about, but I’m increasingly less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt that that’s what he was trying to imply.
I find it interesting that people like Gawdat discuss humans and people and what they would do, all without really speaking about how they actually tick. He says,
“ I think when AI reaches that level of intelligence will become irrelevant to it. […] No human wakes up in the morning and goes ‘you know what? I’m so annoyed by ants I’m gonna kill every ant on the planet.‘ Nobody does that, okay?
“It’s just [that] ants become irrelevant. They become relevant if they come into your space, so you may spray your balcony or whatever but no human comes up with that enormous plan of ‘you know what? The world is bad until we get rid of all ants.’ Nobody does that.”
Ok. like, you’re ignoring a lot of history. People very definitely do that. It’s called genocide. They don’t always get every last one, but it’s shocking to hear someone so admiring of their own intelligence not even think about Hitler or Suharto or Armenia or Native Americans.
I wonder why he’s so laser-like focused on potential problems while ignoring all of the very real ones that we have now. Like, he’s worried about how we’re going to interact with an AI that will be all-powerful and indifferent to us, right? But there are billions of people on the planet who already live exactly like that. Their lives are entirely influenced and completely controlled by the whims of an unseen and unknowable elite.
It’s hard not to see Gawdat’s panic as being the reaction of someone who is in that elite and realizes that he may soon not be at the top of the heap anymore—as another alpha predator comes to town. Instead of recognizing the situation and trying to remedy his own role in it, he imagines a new layer and sounds the klaxon.
AIs are going to destroy us all. Um, yeah, I guess, those of us that weren’t already destroyed by capitalism? Like, capitalism’s utter inability to do anything positive about climate change. Austerity. Intensifying animosity and dis-empathy between peoples. And I’m supposed to worry about SkyNet?
I honestly feel like I’m listening to a blockchain huckster. The style is the same.
At 31:30, he starts talking about how “the most valuable asset on the planet … intelligence.” I was just talking about this conceit with a guy I met in a bar yesterday (Matuš). The problem is that our society values the wrong things. The most intelligent people also consider themselves to be the most valuable. Yes, intelligence can be leveraged, but everyone is important. That intelligent person doesn’t help anyone if they die of sepsis. They’re not helping anyone if they don’t have working plumbing.
The discussion veers into relatively standard discussions of AI doomsaying.
At 39:00,
“Gawdat: The only way we could reset is by resetting the entire Internet.
James: Now, is that something that could ever happen?
Gawdat: Never. I was sitting in silence the other day, and I wrote down three quadrants…”
JFC. This is definitely the wrong interlocutor for Gawdat. Somebody needs to call him on his sweeping, bullshit statements. “Reset the Internet” “1 Billion Times Smarter”. C’mon. This is kind of fun, but it’s not a serious discussion, because only Gawdat is contributing to this discussion. He’s now spending a ton of time explaining how people are selfish and incapable of working together above a clan level. Duh. Or that no-one can really say where the Internet actually is, or where it is. Interesting question, but he skips away quickly to talk about how awesome intelligence is.
He just can’t stop.
“Gawdat: I tend to believe that abundance of intelligence normally uh you know is correlated to abundance of ethics.
James: [nods vigorously]”
What? You’ve got to be kidding me. The relationship is nearly inversely proportional, with a few outliers.
If you thought he wasn’t going to double down on that statement, don’t worry.
“So, […] the dumbest of all of us would be destroying the planet […] and causing global climate change without even being aware of it you know. The less dumb would be destroying the planet despite being aware of it. Then, the slightly smarter will attempt to stop destroying the planet because they’re aware of it. The smarter still would attempt to fix the planet because they’re aware of the damage right, and you continue that trajectory. The smartest of all will always be pro-life. I always say that human arrogance makes us think that we are the smartest human—smartest being—on the planet. That’s not true at all. The smartest being on the planet is life itself.”
I mean, ok, I guess? This is just one of those statements where you can make out of it what you want, but the thrust is that intelligent people are the only ones possessed of sufficient ethics to save us. Plato lässt grüssen.
James just says “I love that” to everything, but Mo doesn’t even notice that he’s basically just talking to himself for 90 minutes. This didn’t need to be an interview-format video, with two people. It’s like 50% of the video screen is just a reaction video of James’s goofy head.
At 50:40, James tries to ask a question,
“James: What kind of control and ownership do we have as individuals, over the power of … Gawdat: That’s the most beautiful question of all.”
He didn’t even let him finish asking the question! He instead shoots right back into talking about a book he wrote (Scary Smart, as he’s done several times already).
At about 53:00 or so, he launches into a discussion of ethics, absolutely confusing social mores with ethics by giving an example of a Brazilian girl in a G-String versus a more conservative girl in a Muslim society. They are both respected for doing the right thing in their society, I guess? Those are just cultural habits.
I would have focused more on the underpinnings that led to those behaviors, like whether women have the same autonomy as men. But, yes, ethics is how societies resolve moral questions, like what is good, virtuous, evil, so I guess it fits. And he gets to say “G-String” and summon up the image of an ample, bronzed, Brazilian booty.
This whole section is about bias, but he thinks we can control “the ethical code of that machine.” Which, if he’s right, then it’s already too late, no? The machines have been built with the “wrong” ethics.
Then he hand-waves some stuff about how governments will have to build their own AIs to prevent AIs from being used for evil, then shoots right past that to give examples of how enough swipes on Instagram can help fix the ethics of an AI. Whooooooo. This guy doesn’t know many people. Has he heard of Internet trolls?
But then, but then, but then, he complains—for what feels like the fourth or fifth time—about people on his social-media accounts who are mean to him, when all he wants is to make billions of people happy. My cult-leader spidey-sense is going off to beat the band. And James is just nodding away like a dashboard bobblehead on a bumpy road, while the top comment on the video is “[h]e is down to earth.”
What is happening!?!
I think Gawdat could be so much of a better person if he didn’t spend so much time interacting with idiots online. Then, maybe, he wouldn’t have to make 40-day retreats to get right again. I see it in many other people I follow: otherwise intelligent people who end up making the broadest comparisons and most-shallow and incorrect arguments, just because that’s how they’ve been taught to think by the kindergarten schoolyard that is online discourse.
I was just listening to the Useful Idiots Podcast, with Aaron Maté and Katie Halper. I really like them. I think they’re intelligent, witty, and have their ethics in the right place. But they drew several conclusions that were absolutely the correct ones, but justified them with completely specious reasoning.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you so assailable. You don’t lock down your point because you made it in a way that someone who’s looking to disagree with you, no matter what, is going to be able to use to continue the discussion long after it should have been shut down. I think that’s my problem with Gawdat as well—his interactions have encouraged him to be lazy in his justifications for what I agree are the correct sentiments, which means I can’t really use anything he says as ammunition. It’s a pity.
At 01:05:00, he argues for the essential goodness of humanity,
“Are there more serial killers in the world or people who condemn killing?”
Sure, there are more pulses who are essentially good. Fine. Correct. But it’s the assholes who seem to have the overwhelming share of power and influence. The essentially good don’t have any influence. Jesus was wrong. The meek aren’t really lined up to inherit shit.
He touches on this as well, saying that the worst people are in politics, who get all the money, who are contributing the most information to the AIs. He says “the best of us” have “a duty” to take part. Sigh. Who’s the best of us? Which ethics? Implicit in his line of reasoning is that there is such a thing as “good ethics”, else with what would you align an AI? How would you select the “right” people for politics and training AIs? Plato’s philosopher kings all over again.
“You can’t succeed by being good. And it’s the most important time in human history to be good.”
He dances around the topic of how the system is utterly broken—perhaps because it’s how he even got to a position where he has more money than any human needs and everyone wants to know what he has to say.
When James asks him whether anyone can just ignore AI, Gawdat cuts him off again, saying “you will die in two or three years.” Wait, what? Then he clarifies,
“As a business. It’s as if you were trying to hang onto the fax machine in the age of the Internet.”
I’m sure everyone’s getting tired of me picking Mo’s nits, but he really, really elides so much in his analysis of “the world.” He uses “the world” as shorthand for “all of the 1%-ers he knows in Silicon Valley will have to adopt AI or their businesses will die.”
Most of the world doesn’t have use cases for AI, but he doesn’t think of them—or he’s deluded into thinking that they do have use cases somehow—or that they can be convinced to have them. He whipsaws back and forth between talking about his extraordinary empathy for his fellow man—and his utter inability to understand that the things that make humanity worth preserving have nothing to do with electronic mediation—or with the coming AI mediation of interaction.
He speaks very quickly, but I get the distinct feeling that he’s very wide, but not very deep. He is what passes for deep in his circles. But he doesn’t really know any hoi polloi. Nor does he see that as necessary. They’re the “dumb” ones “without ethics.” He’s slicker, but this is the basic line of reasoning of Hillary Clinton and her ilk.
He values intelligence above all else. Nothing else even comes close. That’s not how the world works. Everything is important. Intelligence can be leveraged. But intelligence doesn’t fix the indoor plumbing. He sounds kind of naive, but I think his spiel is also perfect for telling billionaires exactly what they want to hear.
Hell, they could be getting worse advice, don’t get me wrong, but his advice is so suffused with that hustler mentality—“whatever job you’re going to choose, choose the job where you’re going to be in the top two of people [who] can do that job”—all while he won’t shut up about silence and retreats and mediation and spiritualism. Really? The TOP TWO? Like, does that mean you shouldn’t work at McDonald’s? Who are you talking to, man? Like just your circle of self-selected …. philosopher kings. And every idiot in his cult will think “he’s talking right to me!”
Then he corrects himself to say “2 out of 10”. “Whatever you do, choose a job that you’re very good at.” James: “That’s powerful” Christ almighty, James, you’re terrible. Meanwhile, 90% of the world is just looking at Mo, going, “choose” a job? Luxury!
At 1:20:30, he says.
“Steve Jobs was successful because he had an empathy for the user’s needs, an appreciation of beauty, and enormous creativity—that actually are all feminine qualities.”
There he goes again, with his masculine and feminine qualities. Am I missing something? Is this not junk science? How does he get away with this kind of talk in his circles?
At 1:23:00, James says “I want to ask one last question.” Dude, did you even get in a first question? I’ve just been watching your nodding head in the left-hand-side panel like you’d been generated by NVidia’s AI.
In fairness, I liked part of Mo’s answer, describing what he thinks “purpose” is.
“I think the definition of purpose as per the Western society is very much commoditized—it’s almost like a target. It’s like, I set a target in the future. I spend the next eight years pursuing it, feeling frustrated and upset that I haven’t achieved it and then. when I achieve it, I have one of two choices.
“Either to set another target and feel upset for the next eight to nine years or to feel empty and feel that I’m purposeless. That’s a very misleading view of purpose honestly. It’s a very misleading view of the game of life in general.
“Because the only point in life that you have access to is right now. The Eastern philosophies will tell you: no, how can you set your life around the future, centric moment when life is here and now? How can you do that? The only way you can actually live life is to live here and now and so the definition of purpose becomes very different.”
Why would he think people would “hate him” for that? Ah, because he knows his audience is full of high-optimizing tech bros who are interested in appearing deep, but are really interested in money, and funding, and retiring.
“The purpose of life is to become the best you can be at something that you want to be and that makes life better for others.
“If you define life’s purpose this way, it becomes so easy. Because you know what
the one thing that a writer can do to achieve that purpose? It’s to write. Even if what you write is discarded, the purpose is not the book that I’m writing. The purpose is to write.“That way of looking at life is very different than the Western way and I think that way of looking at life—’I want to become the best at whatever it is that I can do’—that is the right way to live with purpose.”
He keeps talking from the viewpoint of something who’s achieved a lot and who is very intelligent, constantly making the assumption that everyone else can achieve like him. Or, if not, not addressing the reality that most people who achieve the best that they can be at something are not going to be able to support themselves in the world we have.
The world we have doesn’t support this type of purpose for more than 5% of the people. We should have such a world, but we don’t. Yet. If I were in James’s place, I would have pumped him much more for ideas about how he thinks we can get there from here. How can we make the person who cleans toilets feel like they’re valued, like they’re living their best life? I’m not kidding. This is the problem you would need to solve.
It’s a shame that James just yes-manned his way through the interview because I feel that there’s much more there—or maybe we would find out that there isn’t. The other interview I saw with Mo Gawdat was very much in the same style.
At the end, Mo says “this was a wonderful conversation. At least for me, I felt it was really connected and deep.” AHAHAHA. He spoke for 99% of the time. He was talking to himself, pretty much. He’s not lying. He had a great time. James gave himself whiplash nodding for 90 minutes. 😉
]]>“The question in the survey asks respond[ant]s whether they “strongly agree,” “tend to agree,” “tend to disagree,” “strongly disagree,” or “neither agree... [More]”
Published by marco on 10. Dec 2023 16:16:58 (GMT-5)
The article New Survey Showing Public Ignorance About the Holocaust Among Young Americans wrote the following about a survey about the Holocaust.
“The question in the survey asks respond[ant]s whether they “strongly agree,” “tend to agree,” “tend to disagree,” “strongly disagree,” or “neither agree nor disagree” with the statement that “the Holocaust is a myth.” In the sample as a whole, only 7% picked “strongly agree” (2%) or “tend to agree” (5%). But among young people (age 18-29), the figure was 20% (8% “strongly agree” and 12% “tend to agree”). This is the figure that has understandably caused consternation.
“Some of that outrage is justified. The Holocaust is one of the worst events in all of human history and one of the best documented. There is no even remotely plausible reason to consider it a myth. Such claims are in the same boat as those of people who think the Earth is flat, or that the Moon landings were faked.”
The upshot is that too many people agreed with the statement that “The Holocaust is a myth.”
What a stupid question that is, though. So simplistic. It’s like the moron Congresswoman in a recent hearing who kept asking university professors to answer the question of whether it breaks the honor code of the university to call for genocide on campus. She equated intifada with calling for genocide, but demanded that they answer YES OR NO.
But Congress is filled with idiots who know nothing of history or, indeed, of words. They are busily equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism—now part of U.S. law—and now want to equate “intifada” with “genocide”. They just want to punish speech, force mindsets, control the narrative. Most of them probably have no ideas why they’re even doing it anymore—other than they’re convinced that their self-preservation is inextricably bound up in it. They don’t care at all that their stupidity is steamrolling things more worthy than they.
If one is forced to choose an answer to the question of “do you think people should be prevented from calling for genocide?”, then the answer is NO.
I know, the question was more like, “Is calling for genocide banned by the code of conduct on your campus? YES OR NO.” The presidents couldn’t say YES OR NO because they were afraid that their answer of “NO” would be wildly misinterpreted. That was silly, of course. You might as well say what you believe because those assholes that want to are going to wildly misinterpret you anyway.
Speech is free. Or, at least, it should be. Anyone can say any old dumb thing that they want.
But the requirement to answer yes or no is utterly without nuance.
On the last one, most people would want to add some examples where they think it might be OK to kill someone. You know, so no-one thinks you’re a psycho.
YES OR NO.
It’s the same with the question about the Holocaust. Is the Holocaust a myth? YES. Indubitably. It is one of the strongest, most enduring myths that the western world has. The rest of the world cares a lot less about it, understandably.
Is it based on events that actually happened? YES. Indubitably.
Is the juxtaposition of the Jewish Holocaust granted much higher precedence than the other mass killings that occurred at the time or have occurred since? Gays, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, Cambodians, Congolese, Rwandans, etc.? Of course it is. That’s the mythologizing part.
Was what happened to Jews during the Holocaust more horrific than what happened to everyone else at the time? YES. Was it exponentially worse? Debatable. Hard to say. Need more data.
This takes me to the next part, where Somin compares believing that the Holocaust is a myth to believing that the Earth is flat. That is an utterly specious comparison. The Earth is clearly not flat. There is no way to exaggerate its roundness to make it seem less flat. The myth of the Holocaust has been carefully constructed over decades to be what it is today, with the societal impact it has today.
Historical fact does not have the same character as scientific fact. The statements 2 + 2 = 4
and “the Holocaust was the worst thing that every happened to any group of people” are not in the same epistemological ballpark.
There are many other slaughters and cleansings that have no impact on modern thought, like the Armenian genocide, the Nakba, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. What the U.S. only stopped doing as recently as 5 years ago in Iraq devastated an entire country. Libya is gone. For what?
No-one talks about that in the same hushed tones as the Holocaust, which was perpetrated three generations ago by the Germans. The one on our temporal doorstep, perpetrated by the U.S. — this one doesn’t get mythologized. Not yet.
The moon landing is like the Holocaust. It is anchored in undeniable fact, but it, too, has been mythologized, the rough edges of actual history worn smooth to ease the retelling.
I find it sad when otherwise intelligent people fail to see the traps laid by such infantile surveys. They are gotcha questions. Anyone with any subtlety of thought would refuse to participate in it, leaving only literal-minded and unquestioning respondents, eager to give the “right” answer. That shows the value of surveys such as these, to be honest.
Somin goes on, in his all-knowing way,
“Some people who believe the Holocaust is a myth really are anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, or adherents of other horrible ideologies. But many are probably just ignorant without being malicious.”
See? For him, there is no category of person for whom such a YES OR NO question is far too simplistic to express one’s position. There is no room for nuance.
“It is also important to emphasize that ignorance about the Holocaust is a facet of more general widespread public ignorance of history, politics, and economics.”
I wholeheartedly agree with him that people don’t know enough about history, politics, economics, etc.
As I wrote above, we should be lamenting the fact that U.S. citizens know nothing about the holocausts perpetrated by their own country rather than lamenting the fact that they don’t know about a horrible event that happened 80 years ago on a different continent.
Hell, as Gideon Levy says, many—if not most—Israelis have no idea what’s being done in their name just dozens of kilometers away from their homes. Things have come full circle for the Jews residing in Israel. They have become that which they despised in the Germans: they sit by while atrocities are committed in their name. Their media ensures that they cheer it on, rather than trying to stop it. Americans are no less guilty of doing the exact same thing in they myriad foreign wars fought by that Empire.
Coming back to the inquisition of the university presidents, the thing I think that too often goes unremarked is that people seem to so easily accuse others of wanting genocide, of having called for it deliberately. There seems to be no downside to making this accusation; the onus is on the accused to wriggle out from under it.
Accusing someone of wanting genocide is pretty is a very strong accusation. Does it matter what you think you’re saying? Or does it more matter what people think they’re hearing you say? That is, are you responsible for shutting your mouth because some people will misinterpret what you’re saying? You know, because they’re stupid? Or just don’t understand your language? Or they’re disingenuous and trying to shut down any statements that don’t correspond to what they already believe?
I think it’s perfectly possible that a lot of the fools I’ve seen recently would be completely incapable of understanding any line of reasoning I have, even the one outlined above. [1] They would see no reason for nuance—because they themselves are incapable of it.
Instead, we get the kinds of inquisitions that Congress is having with increasing regularity.
From Israel Supporters Would Defend Literally Any Israeli Atrocity by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix):
- Arbitrarily declare that common innocuous pro-Palestine chants are actually calls for genocide.
- Pretend there’s an emergency epidemic of university students calling for genocide on campus because they use those chants.
- Kill pro-Palestine speech on campus.
That’s a whuppin’ by Caitlin Johnstone (Twitter)
I wholly acknowledge that maybe I’m not being as clear as I think I am, but that doesn’t mean I mean what you think I mean.
That’s also why I hid this admission in a footnote, which no-one reads.
Aw, who am I kidding? No-one reads my blog.
I can be as monstrous as I like, hidden in plain sight.
He said something at the end that I found to be, if not new, at last well-formulated. I’ve transcribed it below. At 01:24:20, he says,
]]>“What’s the problem today? I will... [More]”
Published by marco on 10. Dec 2023 15:53:22 (GMT-5)
Most of this discussion was stuff I’d heard before—even in more recent videos—but I almost always enjoy listening to him. [1]
He said something at the end that I found to be, if not new, at last well-formulated. I’ve transcribed it below. At 01:24:20, he says,
“What’s the problem today? I will point to this paradox. You know that, on the one hand, we perceive our situation as powerless, totally manipulated—you don’t control anything. But, at the same time, the hegemonic ideology today is elevating us into the free individuals.
“[…] For example, the most disgusting ideology today, for me, is the ideology that sustains precarious work. It’s a very nice message—[reading] between the lines—[that message] is: precarious workers are really like small capitalists. We are all capitalists! [spreads arms to encompass room] You have a little bit of money and you can freely decide. Do you go to a holiday, do you invest in your health, or do you buy a car and are you an Uber driver, or … whatever.
“So, did you notice that, at the same time, [that] with this idea the system dominates us. [It] is the idea that everything … that we are ultimately radically responsible for ourselves. We have this attitude of […] make an effort individually, do it, you can do it …
“So. The things I would have done here is to precisely turn this around, in the sense of: yes, we are most enslaved to the system precisely when we perceive ourselves as free, consumerist individuals. You know, you buy a cake, whatever you want, you go here, you go there.
“This apparent freedom […] this type of freedom, which is based on the model of […] big life decisions are decisions like—you go to a patisserie and [decide between] strawberry cake and cheesecake—no! There are much more radical decisions.
“The true decisions, where […] you choose yourself, what you are. You don’t just choose objects, or even other persons. You choose your own identity. And, here, a true change has to begin. And, that’s why, I think that the first step out of this domination of the anonymous system, is to see how fake your individual freedom is. Not in the sense of ‘I am totally manipulated,’ but in a much more radical sense that you are totally manipulated precisely when you think you are free.
“Like, what is more free than just surfing on the web, you go from this pornographic site to another site, or whatever? [I argue that] at that point, you are completely enslaved. And I accept this paradox to the end.
“I will now sound the totalitarian, I know. There is no freedom without strong self-discipline. Freedom is not relaxation. Freedom is duty.”
Published by marco on 10. Dec 2023 15:45:41 (GMT-5)
Kath and I rode home from Fehraltorf to Kempten at 12:30 at night. We boarded in the car that is ¾ first-class. Instead of walking to the second-class cabin, I just sat down in the first-class cabin, which was otherwise completely empty of passengers. I sat down alone. We hadn’t purchased first-class tickets, so Kath was not going to sit there. [1]
But why not sit there? The car was otherwise empty. We weren’t taking seats from anyone with a first-class ticket. There was no physical reason blocking us from sitting down, nor any moral one. No, the only reason not to use the first-class cabin was that we hadn’t paid for it.
Incredible right? The SBB was dragging an empty wagon through the snowy night for no reason, but we weren’t allowed to sit on perfectly open and available seats because we hadn’t paid for them. Now, that is some deep indoctrination.
Granted, we are capable of buying the seats; we are (still) young enough that we can also just stand for a couple of stations. But, what if the ride were longer? What if the passenger was less capable of moving about the train? What if a person who wasn’t “officially” disabled, but could really use a seat, who could barely afford a ticket, were on a train for an hour?
Our society would dictate that they stand or move between cars to find second-class seating, while the first-class cabin whizzes through the night, empty, waiting for more deserving, wealthier butts to fill its seats.
Think about how odd that is, actually. Our society values money above all else. There is no need that you can express that could avoid a ticket for riding in the wrong cabin, even if that cabin were the wrong one, one you hadn’t paid for, even it were empty and were going unused, even if your use of it would go wholly unnoticed.
The conductor would be wholly within their rights to fine you for taking that seat without having paid the full price for it.
And our society teaches us that that is as it should be.
Sometimes, it’s good to remember how odd and cruel our society can be, how arbitrary its rules appear to those who have been insufficiently indoctrinated in the dominance of capital-based class.
I, of course, sat comfortably in a seat I hadn’t paid for—because no-one else was using it, and no-one saw me do it. If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
“Se non è vero, è ben trovato.”
I heard Slavj Žižek use this phrase in a recent interview. It translates in English to “Even if it is not true, it is very well-invented,” or, perhaps a bit more colloquially, “Even if it ain’t true, it’s a good story.”
]]>Published by marco on 10. Dec 2023 12:33:27 (GMT-5)
“Se non è vero, è ben trovato.”
I heard Slavj Žižek use this phrase in a recent interview. It translates in English to “Even if it is not true, it is very well-invented,” or, perhaps a bit more colloquially, “Even if it ain’t true, it’s a good story.”
Published by marco on 9. Dec 2023 21:53:30 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The Biden Administration Is Undermining Global Carbon-Reduction Efforts by Rishika Pardikar (Jacobin)
“[…] undermining efforts to set stringent standards for a new global carbon market that would allow polluters to help fund carbon-reduction efforts to compensate for their emissions.”
“Allow them to help fund”? That’s the stringent version?
“[…] the United States is backing a largely unregulated, voluntary system of trading emission offsets, even though such voluntary schemes have been plagued by questionable climate benefits […]”
“Questionable climate benefits?” That’s a ludicrously generous way of putting it. It obscures the fact that they tend to lead to increased carbon output!
“[…] the Biden administration is hoping private sector climate solutions and corporate responsibility will help gloss over the fact that the country is continuing to break records for fossil fuel production and is the biggest laggard in terms of paying its fair share of finance for the emissions it has wrought on the world.”
“Neither market is ideally regulated at present (concerns have been raised, for example, about the efficacy of California’s program ). One overarching worry is that carbon credits are often made through compensatory carbon-sink projects like reforestation projects that can rob agency from the people who live there.”
Also, they’re often bullshit. The largest company in that sector was revealed a few years ago to have been selling the same trees as carbon credits to multiple customers. Because of course they did. It’s an intangible asset that the customer doesn’t even want to buy. No incentive anywhere not to cheat. Win-win for the important players. The only loser is the climate and, in the short term, the poors, and nobody gives a shit about either the climate or the poors.
“A recent investigation by the Centre for Science and Environment found that voluntary markets in India failed on two counts: Emission reduction outcomes were either inflated or almost nonexistent and revenue from the sale of carbon credits wasn’t shared with local communities. Researchers also found that many of the carbon-offset projects lacked transparency, and that some community members who were involved in these projects had no clue what carbon credits were.”
100% as expected.
“Reporting has found that the voluntary market’s largest firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that didn’t exist. Meanwhile, private demand for these voluntary credits has declined, and the credit price has plummeted”
“Despite its shortcomings, the unregulated carbon market boomed to a value of $2 billion per year in 2021.”
“Boomed?” That’s like one Avatar movie.
“In the last few months, US climate envoy John Kerry, who will be attending the Dubai summit, has said climate action “takes trillions and no government that I know of is ready to put trillions into this on an annual basis.” (Never mind that billions in US public funding has gone to support foreign military aid in Ukraine alone, or that the effects of climate inaction could cost trillions of dollars per year.)”
We do not have the mechanisms for action. It’s like pygmies trying to stop a flood.
“The voluntary market is “unregulated, fraudulent, and open to ebbs and flows,” said Goswami at the Centre for Science and Environment. “Committing [to] this market as the tool for [an] energy transition, which requires investment in public goods like renewable energy and transmission infrastructure in developing countries, is like leaving the clean-energy future of the Global South to the whims of an unreliable market.” Goswami added, “The U.S. cannot let the private sector dictate the scrutiny and oversight in these markets — it must be determined by the multilateral process [at climate negotiations like COP28].””
Santa’s not bringing that. Empire don’t wanna and you can’t make it. It has no notion of global action to prevent local damage. So carbon credits won’t wotk, and that’s all without the author noting that carbon credits are already a pathetic, nearly useless fallback from real measures. It’s a band-aid on a sucking shrapnel wound. And the band-aid doesn’t actually exist. Sounds good. I wonder how Mo Gawdat would spin this positively, you know, as a win for humanity?
How will the world pay for the green transition? by Henry Farrell (Good Authority)
“The E.U.’s Juncker Plan back in 2015 pretended that a little government spending will leverage private sector investment, but two-thirds of what we need to do in climate change – e.g., building seawalls – has no obvious profit model. If you won’t issue long-term debt because it violates your fiscal rules, you’re saying that it’s the rules that are in charge and not the elected politicians. It’s no wonder that people lose faith in democracy.”
“[…] worried about debt when it’s presented, rightly, as trade-offs. When people are asked if we should cut spending on health care to reduce the national debt, they don’t want it. People really want proper investment after a decade of austerity thinking, and there are plenty of things that could be taxed properly – self-employment, the incomes and assets of the super-rich, international corporations – to pay for it.”
“If the Democrats win next time around, they can keep on putting facts on the ground – building battery factories and associated technology plants in states like Georgia and turning them blue, or breaking off part of the Texas vote with benefits and infrastructure for wind power. But it’s enormously fragile. If Trump and the Republicans win, it may be the end of the green transition in the U.S. I don’t think people have woken up to that yet.”
You mean the end of the half-hearted transition that is far too little far too late? C’mon. This “Democrats good, Republicans bad” fairy tale is lining you up for more disappointment and wasted years.
“There’s a lot happening anyway: Microsoft putting up a $100 million prize for molten salt nuclear power at scale; firms using super deep boring technology in old coal mines to produce superheated steam driving turbines. China’s installing more solar this year than the rest of the world. India is addressing its neuralgia about 1991, when they nearly ran out of currency for imports because they didn’t have oil in part through decarbonization. There are microgrids all over the place getting electricity to villages that never had it. Indonesia is undergoing the same transition.”
The “Hamas-ISIS” line has become untenable by Mouin Rabbani (SubStack)
“[…] no civilian deserves to be held captive unless convicted of a specific crime by legitimate authority, yet the contrast between the testimonies of released Israeli and Palestinian civilian captives is enormous. Released Palestinian women and children speak of constant physical and verbal abuse, particularly since 7 October; all manner of deprivation; and an escalation of abuse once it became apparent they would be released.”
Born Again Communist by Evgenia Kovda (SubStack)
“These chats have been draining and exasperating. But they also given me insight into the people who have been turned by this attack —people in the diaspora who have had their world turned upside down, despite never really caring or thinking about Israel before. It’s as if they were sleeper agents that got activated in Israel’s time of need.”
“For them waking up to the news of “Hamas massacring Jews” — which I always try to correct by reminding them it was “Israelis” and not just “Jews” — was a sign to them that hatred of Jews is real and eternal and that it is on the rise. This act of Hamas violence was ground zero for them. It triggered something deep in their subconscious. It wasn’t something that could be contextualized or understood as part of a larger political and historical process — a process in which Israel has played a dominant role. No, to them this was Jew Hate and nothing else. As for criticism of Zionism? They get whipped up into a frenzy if I bring up the fact that anti-Zionism is different from antisemitism.”
This absolutely seems like what happened to Greenfield on Simple Justice.
“And Israel’s indiscriminate carpet bombing of Gaza and the growing number of mass graves and people buried under the rubble? To them these are side effects of the inevitable response to the attacks. Unfortunate but still justified — because “Hamas started this war.” Again, there is no context. Everything would have been fine if October 7th didn’t happen. The status quo that existed before in Gaza — the occupation, the embargo, the horrible conditions, the Israeli attacks — all that is not part of the picture for them. Hamas is itself to blame for this unprecedented Palestinian death toll. Israel is just defending itself. That’s it.”
“[…] most of them have never experienced real antisemitism and discrimination — let alone life in a ghetto or concentration camp. Antisemitism is abstract to them and yet it’s also the most powerful part of their Jewish identity. So they are easily pushed into fantasy land, fearing that any support for Palestinians rights and any talk about Israel’s occupation following the Hamas attack is coded antisemitism, and that something horrible will happen unless Jews don’t get together and “stand with Israel.””
“The “Zionist outsider” rhetoric is particularly delusional when artists — even really successful ones like Ai WeiWei — have been getting cancelled or threatened by their dealers and wealthy clients for even the most moderate criticism of Israel’s attack on Gaza. It’s pretty clear that people who support Zionism have all the power in the art world. If anything, being a zionist can help your career, not make you an outsider. But she’s completely blind to that.”
Media’s Fatal Compromises by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“We are now a dreadful step on from embedding, it seems. It is no longer enough to tether correspondents to the perspective of the military from whose side they report. We appear to be on the way to having wars fought — huge, bloody, consequential wars — without any witnesses.”
“A photojournalist named Zach D. Roberts gets my award for the pithiest summation of this daily travesty. “What CNN is doing here is creating ad b-roll [supplementary video footage] for the IDF,” Roberts said. “It’s nothing resembling news and the CNN employees that participated in it aren’t anything resembling journalists.””
“The New York Times sent two correspondents and a photographer into Al–Shifa Hospital earlier this month and had the integrity to acknowledge they were escorted by the IDF and to report that a hole in the ground the diameter of a manhole cover did not look much like a Hamas command center.”
“Look at the circus all around us now. Anti–Semitism can mean anything you want it to mean. Ditto anti–Zionism. Anti–Israel can mean anti–Semitic, Hamas can be cast as a terrorist organization, a real-time genocide can be marked down as self-defense. The Times invites us, in Sunday’s editions, to wring our hands as we search for “a moral center in this era of war.””
A New Mood in the World Will Put an End to the Global Monroe Doctrine by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)
“In addition to the military coup, the US has also developed a series of tactics to overwhelm countries that are attempting to build sovereignty, such as information warfare, lawfare, diplomatic warfare, and electoral interference. This hybrid war strategy includes manufacturing impeachment scandals (for example, against Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo in 2012) and ‘anti-corruption’ measures (such as against Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner in 2021). In Brazil, the US worked with the Brazilian right wing to manipulate an anti-corruption platform to impeach then President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and imprison former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2018, leading to the election of far-right Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.”
“Two hundred years ago, the forces of Simón Bolívar trounced the Spanish Empire in the 1821 Battle of Carabobo and opened a period of independence for Latin America. Two years later, in 1823, the US government announced its Monroe Doctrine. The dialectic between Carabobo and Monroe continues to shape our world, the memory of Bolívar instilled in the hope of and struggle for a more just society.”
Israel has lost the plot by Mouin Rabbani (SubStack)
“A significantly degraded organization would not have been able to uniformly and simultaneously cease firing throughout the Gaza Strip at the very moment a truce went into effect. Or to continue firing coordinated rocket barrages until moments before. Or to record, edit, and centrally broadcast video footage of its military operations from multiple locations on a nearly daily basis. Or collect and deliver captives from multiple locations, to multiple locations, during the truce – including deliberately choosing a location in central Gaza City that the Israeli military claimed is under its control.”
“The most important functions of any military organization – command and control, communications, logistics, reconnaissance, PR, and last but not least the ability and will to fight, appear intact and at best marginally affected. As pointed out previously, Israel has killed more UN staff than Hamas commanders. The same in fact holds true for journalists and medical personnel. And the Israeli military has yet to unearth a fraction of the tunnels found in Hagari memes.”
“The Israeli military is admittedly a highly efficient killing machine, but also a mediocre fighting force, particularly in ground operations. Wars are not won by slaughtering children by the thousands, or turning Gaza City into rubble and depriving an entire society of basic necessities. The Germans tried this in the Soviet Union, and the Americans in Iraq, and it didn’t end well for either of them.”
“One could also point out that when a military reaches the point of celebrating the demolition of an apartment building, it should repurpose as a municipal engineering corps and can no longer be considered a serious fighting force.”
There’s that dry humor.
Israel’s War on Gaza Has Destabilized the Entire Regional Order in the Middle East by Mohamed Naeem (Jacobin)
“The cases of Qatar and the Emirates are alike: they are corporate states, where only a small minority of the population has citizenship of the country, and they are more like shareholders in the state corporation.”
“[…] if you mean exile to the Sinai, the fact that Israel and the United States are pressing hard in this direction does not mean that it will happen. This would seriously threaten peace with Egypt. Just because the Americans present a scenario that appears to be ready and prepared, this does not mean that it is adult, intelligent, or achievable, even if it were to be imposed by force at a particular moment.”
“The perception that Egypt will rule the Palestinians militarily on behalf of the Israelis is extremely foolish. The most likely scenario here is that you will displace the Palestinians by several kilometers and lose your peace with Egypt within a few years. What a very clever plan!”
Meet Argentina’s Free-Market Authoritarian President-Elect, Javier Milei by Ezequiel Adamovsky (Jacobin)
“Even the way Milei speaks of his project carries strong echoes of the country’s liberal statesmen. Juan Bautista Alberdi, the famous nineteenth-century theorist of classic liberalism, used to say that Argentina would only progress insofar as its citizens were “intelligently selfish.” That is, Argentina’s progress depended on its citizens working for their own benefit without worrying about others. Today, that kind of individualistic worldview has obviously been reinforced and radicalized. As a specifically liberal vision of the individual, it has served as an incentive — or a subtle pressure — coaxing people to orient their lives toward commodity production and the valorization of commodities. Again, as an individualist project, this liberalism expresses itself as a system of rewards and punishments, where economic power represents the fundamental reward.”
“[…] it is no longer just indirect, impersonal pressures orienting our lives in a market-friendly direction; there is an increasingly open expression of animosity and hostility towards any life project that is not framed by capitalist goals.”
“I argue that this newer totalitarian liberalism, represented by Milei and the extreme right, is typified by a crusade to destroy any form of life that does not seek self-realization in the market.”
“We see in Argentine society increasingly strong expressions of animosity and resentment among neighbors and common people. That dynamic is particularly palpable between those who feel “validated” by the market and those whose “failures” have led them to rely on state subsidies.”
“[…] the Kirchnerist leadership seems to be disintegrating and reabsorbing itself into the Justicialist Party (the Peronist party). Where that leaves the substantial number of Kirchnerist voters who want more profound changes than what Peronism can offer is anyone’s guess.”
“Capitalism has covered every inch of the planet and is no longer able to grow outwards. It can only sustain the rate of profit by putting more pressure on the population, taking away rights, monetizing and reducing our free time, paying less taxes, and picking over the little that remains of the state.”
“In that context, the illusion that everyone can be an autonomous individual who develops his or her own life project without being bothered by others is revealed to be what it is: an illusion. We are increasingly pressed against each other as space runs out, and the demands and needs of others — especially when they are the collective demands of feminists, the LGBTQ movement, anti-racists, or trade unions — encroach upon the space we thought was our own inalienable property.”
“[…] the state is distributing resources in a completely horizontal direction, across a single class, while the richest Argentines pay less and less taxes. When the cost of the welfare state falls hardest on working people, it tends to breed hatred and resentment among neighbors, especially when one person receives a small state benefit and the other does not. That resentment then turns into violence against one’s neighbor and the demand for a leader to put an end to what appears as undue “political privilege.””
Singing America’s tune here. This is exactly what happens on the ground in poor areas in the U.S.
“[…] an important portion of lower-class voters who traditionally support Peronism but this time voted for Milei. Some of these less ideological voters may grow disenchanted as his government leads to disaster — which it undoubtedly will. But I think it is important to insist that many of those once nonideological voters have moved to the authoritarian right, and that part of the electorate will be with us for the short and medium term.”
“To me, that indicates that the right wing’s return to power comes with the expectation of state violence. As I was saying before, the Argentine right truly detests the country and its inhabitants, and they will have few reservations about using violence against it.”
“For Milei, the gender issue is itself a total abomination. True, he hides behind the typical liberal idea that what one does behind closed doors is one’s own business. But that’s obviously a very homophobic view to express because it denies the right to public visibility.”
Amazon’s Climate Pledge Was a Lie by Lynn Boylan (Jacobin)
“Amazon uses a creative form of accounting to massively understate its carbon footprint. In its carbon methodology , Amazon acknowledges that it only includes “Amazon-branded product manufacturing, such as Echo devices, Kindles e-readers, Amazon Basics, Whole Foods Market brands, and other Amazon Private Brands products.” But this is just the tip of Amazon’s carbon iceberg: a mere 1 percent of total sales.”
“Apart from the plastics and packaging waste , Amazon destroys many millions of new and unsold products every week. For instance, in the United Kingdom, an Amazon worker leaked a spreadsheet showing more than 124,000 new and unused items including laptops, smart TVs, hairdryers, headphones, drones, and books all marked for destruction — just at one warehouse. Some estimates suggest Amazon may be responsible for dumping about one billion items per year. That’s why our countries, France and Ireland, have introduced bans on Amazon and other companies dumping new and unused products.”
“Amazon’s hunger for relentless expansion may make a whole country exceed its carbon budget. The company’s plans for constructing three new data centers in Ireland this year would make it virtually impossible for the country to reach its climate targets.”
Undivided Loyalties by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Lippmann, the celebrated editor, commentator and author attended a dinner party in Manhattan one evening, and at the port-and-cigars stage of the occasion the host announced an intellectual amusement. All those who advocated socialism were to stand on one side of the dining room, and on the other those who favored the capitalist system. The guests duly divided. And when they were done sorting themselves out, Lippmann sat pointedly alone at the table—the ultimate in either indecision or a refusal to stand for one thing and against another.
“[…] since hearing or reading the story I have thought many times about Lippmann as he sat by himself at the dinner table. One could argue he was a pitiful waffler, refusing to take a stand on a critical question of the day. Of what use are such people, you might ask. On the other hand, you may have it that Lippmann did take a stand, this stand being that there are virtues in both of the social and economic systems at issue, and it was his right to defend his position, a constituency of one.”
Or he truly thought it was a stupid game, without nuance, played for and by children.
If you have the luxury of not having a swearing of allegiance be unavoidable due to exigency, then you should take it. If you don’t have skin in the game, then you don’t have to make that choice. If you’re faced with someone or many someones directly trying to kill you—kill or be killed—then you will have to commit yourself wholly to one “side”. If you don’t have skin in the game, then you should indulge in the luxury of nuance.
Is there something useful to capitalism? Of course. Ditto for socialism. If you could have only one of them, which would you choose? Silly question. Any conceivable socialist society contains capitalist elements, and vice versa. It’s like asking whether you’d rather keep your brain or your heart. Let’s talk about something substantial instead.
“We live in an era of violence, viciousness, injustice and cruelty that, if not unprecedented by way of scale and magnitude, is down there with the worst for its craven immorality and inhumanity. This adds another to the numerous responsibilities we bear in exchange for some time on Earth. We are called upon to declare ourselves and what we stand for. We are obliged —whether or not we accept this obligation, and the majority of us don’t—to act on what we stand for. We ought to make clear to what we dedicate our loyalties.”
OK, Patrick, let’s move to the “dedicate your loyalties” topic of the day: Palestine and Israel. Both sides want Israel to stop bombing. Israelis and supporters wish they were able to stop bombing, but they don’t feel safe yet. They feel that Hamas might spring—whack-a-mole-like—from the ground again at any moment and reap another 1200 Israelis.
Palestinians just want the bombing to stop. But they also want the occupation to stop. Israel’s current solution looks to be just to move the Palestinians anywhere else but Israel. “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
Palestinians can pinky-swear that they won’t attack again, but it’s an empty promise, one that they can’t really make. Because how can you promise your oppressor that you’ll never strike back without negating yourself?
So there is no “sitting at the dinner table alone” in this question, I suppose, but there is a requirement that we understand all sides and arguments—no matter how immoral their base. If there are people on both sides who truly believe that the only solution is to eradicate the other … then we have to accept that as the starting point.
We also have to look the situation squarely in the eye and see it for what it is. As Lawrence puts it,
“[…] Israel began, with plentiful American support, its barbarous campaign to exterminate as many of the Palestinians of Gaza as it can before world opinion forces it to stop, while permanently displacing those it has not murdered. What we witness as the Israel Defense Forces attack Gaza is the exercise of power with[out] the merest pretense of decency, morality, or humaneness to veil it, to dress it up for the pitiful wafflers among us. It would take a Hannah Arendt to tell us if the deployment of power in this fashion is unprecedented in modern history, or in postwar history, or according to some other parameter. I would compare it, at a minimum, with America’s barbarity in Southeast Asia from the mid–1950s to the mid–1970s.”
Well, I think Israel has a long way to go in sheer numbers, but the indifference and single-mindedness—the arrogant presumption of infallibility—are very comparable.
We have to determine how large that group is, how intractable their opinion, and what solutions they would consider acceptable. If we’re honest, then we would have to plumb the depths of their solution space and determine how that affects our ability to plan a way for the future. Does the future contain them? Can it? If they’re made aware that they’re the problem and that the solution set being considered does not contain them, does their level of intractability change? If it does, if short-term self-preservation forces them to act against their own interests, to what degree is this a ruse from which they will retreat when the pressure is off?
How much influence do voices like this one have?
“Simcha Rothman, a member of the Israeli parliament for the Religious Zionism party, part of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition told the BBC this week that the UN has kept Palestinian refugees in Gaza for 75 years in order to hurt Israel and that the Gazans should be relocated in other places.”
He’s a member of parliament. He believes that Palestinians are a disease from which Israelis need to be freed. It’s an uphill climb if you have to deal with that as a starting point, I’ll grant you that.
In the Israel-Palestine conflict, there is no easy solution. There is one side with the absolute plurality of power and an absolute deficit of ethical underpinning for their current enterprise as well as for the ways forward proposed by their most unreasonable representatives. But the temptation there would be to round up to punishing the “criminal” en masse—and to become just like the Israelis, treating them just like they treat the Palestinians, in their feigned mad hunt for Hamas terrorists in every living room and hospital lobby.
No, the solution has to consider the damage that has been done to all citizens of that area, whether or not they happen to have an elected representation over which they purportedly hold sway. Just as Palestinians are not the worst of Hamas, Israelis are not the worst of their government. We have to offer everyone a way out, a way to be their best, most reasonable, and generous selves.
What does that mean? If Israelis continue to believe that there are only upsides to exterminating or exiling a population from their land, then they have to be disabused of that notion. If they think that they can just take the land, settle it, and grow as they have, without any real drawbacks on their standing in the international community, then it should be made clear that this is not the case. It is entirely possible that they will not care.
Like children who understand that their parents cannot stop taking care of them, they might just push to get whatever they want in the short term. Perhaps shame and appeals to justice won’t work. We have to try, because I kind of have to believe that it will. The world just has to be firm that the other, easier avenues are no longer available. The world has to convince Israel that it needs the world. It’s not an easy job.
Right now, Israel feels that they’ve built a moral justification for ethnically cleansing Gaza first, then the West Bank. It is banking on its own people being OK with that. It is banking on the international not daring to punish it in any way that would dissuade it. So far, it’s been right. Dead right.
The Palestinians have no power and no leverage. They have to be convinced that we’re serious this time, that we’re really going to help them survive, get back on their own feet. It’s an uphill climb there, too. Just the sheer physical situation is already working against us. This is a population so traumatized and intellectually reduced by war and occupation that it may possibly already be too late.
A population of children who have only known occupation and trauma and malnutrition and war will not have developed any of the tools and nuance that they need in order to tread the narrow and winding path forward, avoiding the pitfalls that will deliver justification to an equally skittish Israel to leave the path. Just the malnutrition and dehydration alone, during their developmental years, are going to mean that the crop of the best and the brightest that they need for this endeavor is necessarily diminished. That’s just nature.
Any that manage to crop up anyway can be mown down with impunity until you’ve guaranteed that only the least likely to struggle up past the ignorance imposed by occupation will survive. So target lawyers, scholars, doctors, journalists, and other thought leaders, until all that is left are exactly the slavering zombie-like hordes of haters you’ve been accusing them of being all along. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There is Hamas, which has, at various times, espoused their hatred of Jews and desire to eliminate them all. There are also more recent, official statements that a good deal more moderate. There’s something to work with on both sides, if you deal with the more moderate parties. However, let’s round Hamas up to an intolerant organization that wants to eliminate anyone who isn’t cis-gendered, Arab, and Muslim. That makes them the intellectual equivalents of Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz, Ben-Gvir, and the like on the Israel side. There is shocking intolerance everywhere.
I’ve heard people say that the youth in America who support LGBTQA, BLM, etc. should not support Palestine because Palestine is actually against them. Those people are intractable in their efforts to conflate concepts. They conflate Judaism with Zionism, and they conflate Palestine with Hamas and ISIS and Wahhabism. They see no distinction.
The simple fact is that there are thousands of people being murdered and millions being made to suffer depravity for no other reason that they’re in the wrong place, of the wrong ethnicity and the wrong religion, and espouse the wrong opinions: namely, that they wish to exist without being subjugated to the sovereignty of rulers they did not choose. It is this that people are responding to.
Now, Netanyahu responds that it is antisemitic to focus on war crimes committed by Israel when there are so many other war crimes to choose from on this planet. The youth of Europe and the U.S. are focusing laser-like on what Israel is doing. It’s a cute point, actually. He admits to the atrocities, but then says its antisemitic to notice only those atrocities. His solution would be, of course, to not notice any atrocities or, at the very least, to ignore those of Israel.
Look, people have their political awakening at different times. They didn’t listen when we Yemen was briefly a topic. Congo was never a topic. It is the right thing to do to get Israel to stop what it is doing. It is wrong to stop there. But let’s take one thing at a time.
An empathy toward the Palestinians is a good start for a generation we’d thought had lost that capacity.
You can also go ahead and express empathy for the hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who’ve been uprooted by their own government’s murderous policies. You can empathize with an Israeli population that is now suffering existential fear because of those selfsame policies. You can empathize with the families of those innocents killed on October 7th.
But you can’t do only that. You can’t just see the suffering on one side and not acknowledge the suffering on the other, not if you’re interested in a long-term solution. Short term, though? Yeah, Israel has to stop bombing. This is ridiculous. Nothing good can even begin to happen as long as that goes on. The protesters are right that there needs to be a longer-lasting ceasefire.
“MLK’s turn against the Vietnam war, it is worth contemplating in our current circumstances, was inspired by a graphic photo essay on the children of Vietnam severely disfigured by napalm that was published in Ramparts, one of the great experiments in independent journalism during the 1960s.”
That was published by Robert Scheer, whose interview-format podcast I still listen to today. The man is well into his eighties and still fighting the same fight. I read a tremendous amount of material published on his latest venture Scheer Post (on which Patrick Lawrence exclusively publishes). Some people manage to be on the right side of history for their whole lives. Kudos to them.
I, Netanyahu by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, argues that the Israeli siege is an act of genocide: “If you see the big picture, the siege of Gaza itself, that is extermination or persecution, is a crime against humanity, and is a form of genocide. Article … 2© in the Genocide Convention defines that you don’t need to kill people to commit genocide. The rules say ‘inflicting conditions to destroy the group.’ That itself is genocide. So, creating the siege itself is a genocide. And that is very clear–that Israel wants the siege, it’s very clear. And the intention is to destroy the people. […]”
“During the ceasefire, Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners but arrested 310 new prisoners including women during the same period, most of them from the West Bank. Israel now holds 2,873 administrative detainees, 800 more than last month. This detention without charge or trial is illegal under international law. Nearly 40% of all Palestinians incarcerated by Israel are now held under this Kafkaesque confinement, based on secret information that they may commit an offense in the future.”
“According to the IDF’s most optimistic estimate, 86% of the 14,000 Gazans killed by Israeli bombs since October 7 are non-combatants. Even in the bloody 2014 war, civilian deaths were less than 60% of the total fatalities.”
“Elon Musk during a televised talk with Israeli President Isaac Herzog: “In Gaza, there’s three things that need to be done. There’s no choice but to kill those who insist on murdering civilians. There’s no choice. They’re not going to change their mind. The second thing is to change the education, so that a new generation of murderers is not trained to be murderers. And the third thing, which is very important, is to try to build prosperity.””
Doing his best Trump impression, Musk is correct, but he’s clearly addressing the wrong side. His proposed solutions above apply not just to Palestinians, but to Israelis as well (although I would elect to prosecute the criminals, rather than kill them).
“A message from our classmate and friend, Hisham Awartani:
““It’s important to recognize that this is part of the larger story. This hideous crime did not happen in a vacuum. As much as I appreciate and love every single one of you here today, I am but one casualty in this much wider conflict.
“Had I been shot in the West Bank, where I grew up, the medical services that saved my life here would likely have been withheld by the Israeli army. The soldier who shot me would go home and never be convicted. I understand that the pain is so much more real and immediate because many of you know me, but any attack like this is horrific, be it here or in Palestine.
“This is why when you say your wishes and light your candles today, your mind should not just be focused on me as an individual, but rather as a proud member of a people being oppressed.””
“Yanis Varoufakis: “Does anyone seriously doubt that Israel holds Palestinian children as hostages? That it has been doing it for years? That it plans to ‘detain’ even more in its bid ethnically to cleanse East Jerusalem and the West Bank – once it is finished with Gaza?””
“SkyNews reported that the released hostages were most worried about the risk of dying in Israeli bombardments. Former hostages also reported that supplies in Gaza are rapidly depleting. In the first weeks, they were served “chicken with rice, all sorts of canned food and cheese,” 78-year-old Ruti Munder told Israeli news outlets. But more recently, “the economic situation was not good, and people were hungry,” she said.”
“It’s not a coincidence that US troops in Syria and Iraq stopped getting attacked after the truce between Israel and Hamas.”
Media amplified US, Israeli narrative on Palestinian deaths by Matthew Petti (Responsible Statecraft)
“Israeli and U.S. attempts to change the conversation have largely succeeded. Before the current war, and even before the Ahli hospital bombing, descriptions like “Hamas-run,” “Hamas-controlled,” or “Hamas-affiliated” for the Palestinian health ministry were virtually non-existent, according to the News on the Web Corpus, a database of newspapers and magazines from 21 countries.
“Most Western English language media simply referred to the “Palestinian health ministry.” Since the October 17 hospital attack, however, it is now more common to see the health ministry labeled as some variation of “Hamas-run” than “Palestinian.””
The Goal Is Ethnic Cleansing, Not Defeating Hamas by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“As evidence continues to mount that a significant number of the Israelis killed on October 7 were actually killed by indiscriminate fire from the IDF, Israel has announced its plans to bury the vehicles Israelis died in — in other words to bury forensic evidence. According to the Jerusalem Post, “In order to save space and be as environment-friendly as possible… the cars may be shredded before being buried.””
“This has long caused a dissonance between what Israel is seen doing and what Israel is presented as by its western allies and its own PR, and now that dissonance has soared to unprecedented heights. Westerners are taught (falsely) that their governments embody virtuous values systems prioritizing freedom, peace, justice and truth, and here’s this bizarre ethnostate glommed onto them which very clearly wipes its ass with those values without even really attempting to disguise it.
“The western empire has destroyed nation after nation on the premise each of those nations was governed by an Evil Dictator who couldn’t be allowed to remain in power, and yet we’re being asked to look past the actions of an intimate partner of the western empire which make those Evil Dictators look like teddy bears and believe that that partner is actually entirely in alignment with the values of the virtuous west.”
“Any time there’s a bombing campaign by the US-aligned power structure you see attempts being made to spin the civilians it kills as imperfect victims, and you’re seeing that with Gaza too. ”
Israel Reopens the Gaza Slaughterhouse by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“The aid convoys, which brought in token amounts of food and medicine — the first batch was shrouds and coronavirus tests according to the director of al-Najjar hospital — have been halted. No one, least of all President Joe Biden, plans to intervene to stop the genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package. The world will watch passively, muttering useless bromides about more surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, where Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era.”
“Israel has abandoned its tactic of “roof knocking” where a rocket without a warhead would land on a roof to warn those inside to evacuate. Israel has also ended its phone calls warning of an impending attack. Now dozens of families in an apartment block or a neighborhood are killed without notice.”
“Israel’s attack is the last desperate measure of a settler colonial project that foolishly thinks, as many settler colonial projects have in the past, that it can crush the resistance of an indigenous population with genocide. But even Israel will not get away with killing on this scale. A generation of Palestinians, many of whom have seen most, if not all, of their families killed and their homes and neighborhoods destroyed, will carry within them a lifelong thirst for justice and retribution.
“This war is not over. It has not even begun.”
A very good documentary about one of the worst people to ever live.
Republican George Santos, chronic fabulist and accused conman, expelled from US House of Representatives by Kevin Reed (WSWS)
“More than half of House Republicans, including recently-elected Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana and the rest of the party leadership, voted against the expulsion. The primary reason given was that, since the criminal case against Santos had not been decided, the measure would set a precedent of politically-motivated expulsions.
“For example, Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, opposed the expulsion and said, “George Santos is an ass, but who, like every American, deserves the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law.””
It’s an interesting precedent: if we’re going to expel people from Congress for being corrupt, lying assholes, then it’s going to be a pretty empty chamber. I say: let’s get started.
Documents expose Israeli conspiracy to facilitate October 7 attack by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“These revelations mean that the Israeli government allowed and abetted the killing of their own citizens and that the Israeli government is responsible for the deaths that took place that day. This criminal conspiracy was aimed at establishing a pretext for a long-planned genocide against the people of Gaza.”
Easy, there, Andre. Wipe the spittle off of your keyboard. The Israeli government is responsible for having let it happen, but the perpetrators are responsible for the deaths that took place that day. Whoever killed those people is responsible. Those who knew it was going to take place, but decided to let it happen because they figured it would be politically advantageous are culpable—the dictionary definition includes the phrase “sometimes you’re just as culpable when you watch something as when you actually participate.”—but the responsibility lies with those who pulled the triggers.
“Israel’s stand-down on October 7 was not a failure to “connect the dots,” because there were no dots to connect. The Israeli intelligence forces had obtained the entire operational plan of the October 7 attack, then witnessed Hamas carry out a major, high-level training exercise for that plan. They knew exactly what was planned and decided to let it go ahead.”
“[…] the events of October 7 were not an intelligence failure: Israel was remarkably successful in exactly predicting Hamas’s military operation. Instead of acting on this intelligence, Israel orchestrated a stand-down of troops and intelligence-gathering at the precise moment when the attack took place.”
“veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported that in the days preceding the attack, “local Israeli military authorities, with the approval of Netanyahu, ordered two of the three Army battalions, each with about 800 soldiers, that protected the border with Gaza to shift their focus to the Sukkot festival” taking place near the West Bank.
“Hersh quoted a source who told him, “That left only eight hundred soldiers … to be responsible for guarding the 51-kilometer border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. That meant the Israeli citizens in the south were left without an Israeli military presence for ten to twelve hours. They were left to fend for themselves.””
“These revelations expose the Gaza genocide to be a criminal conspiracy by the Netanyahu regime and its imperialist backers, whose victims include not only 20,000 slaughtered Palestinians, but the Israeli population itself.”
It’s hard to disagree here. Netanyahu is absolutely unhinged, as are his co-conspirators in the Israeli government and in the U.S.
A Post-Ceasefire Analysis by Mouin Rabbani (SubStack)
“Ultimately, and once again assuming Israel continues to fail militarily (the most likely and plausible but not a certain scenario), the Palestinians are not going to release their most valuable prisoners, the senior Israeli military officers, without obtaining the release of senior Palestinian leaders in Israeli prisons. They will also seek a guaranteed end to Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of Israeli forces to their 7 October positions. This will be a very bitter pill for Israel to swallow, but the results of military failure tend to be bitter, and the US and Europe will help Netanyahu (or whoever replaces him) take his medicine.”
“In 2023, the idea would be that Hamas, or at least its leadership, senior echelons, and fighters, would depart their Palestinian homeland for a life of exile. In other words, voluntarily commit political and organizational suicide, and relinquish their main source of leverage, so that Israel and the US can claim the victory Israel’s military was unable to achieve on the ground. And once abroad, explain to their constituents and Palestinians more generally, that they carefully considered the matter and concluded that saving their own skins justifies the extraordinary price Palestinians have had to pay to make this possible. Only in Washington…”
The Rot On His Own Side by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“There is no principle that enables Schumer, or Biden, or any liberal, to find common ground with people who can make excuses for rape, together with the litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.”
Greenfield is still setting up his strawmen and then knocking them down. I hope he’s having fun over there, but it seems much more like he’s going down a rabbit hole like James Howard Kunstler did a few years ago.
“The litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.” As if the things that happened almost two months ago are the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone ever—and as if nothing equally bad has happened since that we might also be paying attention to. Nope, just wallowing in misery and not all interested in any solution that doesn’t offer more misery. Now, he’s off and running on the RISE OF ANTISEMITISM.
“The same failure of principle that infects this ideological schism at its core, where decisions are made based not on substance, but on identities and which box they’re in. Black people are still very much subject to discrimination. Looting is wrong, even when done by black people. Rape is a heinous crime. Rape is still a heinous crime even when done by Palestinians. Even when done by Palestinians to Jews.”
Look, he starts off strong here. It’s a topic he’s admirably addressed in the past. He’s a strong defender of the idea that identirarianism has been damaging to nearly everyone but its most adamant advocates.
But then he gets to the second part, which I’ve highlighted. Who’s he talking to here? Is there anyone worth listening to who’s saying that rape is sometimes OK? Is there anyone at all? Maybe a handful of yahoos who aren’t worth listening to? Is there any reason to continue to treat this idea like there’s a danger of it overtaking the Zeitgeist? What the hell are you arguing about?
Having doubts about whether people were raped before they blasted to smithereens with hellfire missiles is not the same as thinking rape is OK. Even the Israeli government stopped pounding the rape drum weeks ago. Why does Greenfield still mention it all the time, when even the Israelis gave up on that story? Does he really think he needs to fight the good fight, standing up for the rarely held principle that it’s not OK for Palestinians to rape Jews? Is he getting a lot of pushback on that? Or what is going on?
Once he’s worked himself up into a lather about this, he drops his final stroke of genius,
“[…] there is far more in common between the progressive left and the Nazis and Klan than there is with a principled liberal.”
Put up the straw man, then knock it down. Way to go!
“It’s hard for me to remember a case where China actually attacked the US homeland … in large numbers. I don’t think it’s crazy at all to think that Al-Qaeda would do so. In fact … ”
Yeah, it’s hard for me to remember that too. What does that have to do with anything?
Max Abrahms is terrible. Good for Glenn to give him enough hope to hang himself. The guy wants people not to be able to wave flags of terrorist organizations. That is not a thing that we can do. If they want to wave those flags, then they can wave those flags. Hell, there are a ton of confederate flags in the U.S.
But Abrahms thinks that specifically Arabic/Muslim organizations are the worst terrorism that could possibly exist and they should be “punished” and “degraded”.
When Abrahms said that calls to violence should investigated, Greenwald asked whether not just students should have their freedom of speech restricted, but also people like Nikki Haley, who’s calling for the flattening of Gaza and Iran. The dude could literally not answer that question, but instead started describing the so-called violent protests on U.S. campuses in excruciating detail. That’s his hobby horse.
He wants to restrict the speech of those with absolutely the least power. You would think that someone who expresses himself so often about Palestine/Israel issues could pronounce Intifada correctly (he kept saying Antifada). Glenn pulled on his leash, telling Abrahms that nearly everyone else he’s talked to, including many pro-Israel advocates, are more offended that the antisemitic narrative in the U.S. is wildly exaggerated (e.g., ADL conflates pro-Palestinian protests with anti-semitic attacks). Abrahms has his own hobby horse, though. THIS IS HAPPENING.
When Glenn asked him what he proposes to do to hinder these supposed attacks, he didn’t answer the question. That’s not part of his talking points. He probably didn’t feel comfortable saying that he thinks that all of the protesters should just be thrown out of college and probably society.
At 21:45, Glenn says
“The case went to the Supreme Court the Supreme Court, which overturned the conviction and said that advocating violence is clearly within the realm of protected speech.
“Which means that you’re allowed to say ‘flatten Gaza,’ ‘erase Gaza,’ ‘remove Gaza from the map,’ ‘I think all Palestinians should be killed,’ ‘there are no innocent Palestinians.’ There’s a huge number this week of Israeli officials and journalists who have said ‘there’s no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.‘
“That’s protected speech. You can go on campus and say that. You can say it in front of Palestinians and it’s protected speech.
“To go and say ‘I think the Israeli government and their occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza has become so barbaric and inhumane over decades that I think on the part of Palestinians is justified in order to resist it,’ those are both to me clearly within the realm of free speech.
“I would never send the FBI or law enforcement after students on campuses for saying these things.”
I have listened to Norman Finkelstein a lot in the last several weeks. A lot of this I’d heard before, but he’s really refined his arguments. Krystal let him talk endlessly. She only said something to pose the next listener question.
The list of topics is:
“(00:00) Introduction, Norm’s Background
(9:54) Essential Facts on Israel/Palestine
(30:05) Norm Challenged on Hamas Atrocities
(39:00) Do Geneva Conventions Apply to Palestinians
(42:28) Norm Debunks Hillary Clinton
(56:39) Were Palestinians Failed By Their Leadership?
(1:04:50) Can you “steelman” Israel’s view of the conflict?
(1:16:00) Is focusing on Israel “antisemitic”?
(1:19:45) What was the real reason Israel stormed Al-Shifa Hospital?
(1:31:31) Norm Debunks Claims of Hamas and Human Shields
(1:42:00) What Comes After a Ceasefire?
(1:45:45) Norm Goes off on Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson”
This is another great interview with “Mouin Rabbani, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.” Rania let him speak for a long time, which was good. She was barely able to hold back laughter several times, which was a little less professional. But it’s fine. What he’s describing is quite ridiculous and you either have to laugh or cry. Admittedly, the Rabbani’s dry humor is pretty infectious. His face is utterly deadpan, but he’s quite funny.
“Cornel West: But the important thing, of course, is not what you read, or how much you read, but it’s the kind of human being you choose to be, in regard to your courage, in regard to your vision, in regard to what you’re willing to sacrifice—give up—the burden that you’re willing to bear. All of us are cracked vessels. […] We’re all just trying to love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts.”
Not a Nothingburger: My Statement to Congress on Censorship by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“Former Executive Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser once explained to a group of students why he didn’t support hate speech codes on campuses. The problem, he said, was “who gets to decide what’s hateful… who gets to decide what to ban,” because “most of the time, it ain’t you.””
“[…] the kind of people who do “anti-disinformation” work have taken upon themselves the paternalistic responsibility to sort out for us what is and is not safe. While they see great danger in allowing anyone else to read controversial material, it’s taken for granted that they’ll be immune to the dangers of speech.”
“Whether America continues the informal sub rosa censorship system seen in the Twitter Files or formally adopts something like Europe’s draconian new Digital Services Act, it’s already clear who won’t be involved. There’ll be no dockworkers doing content flagging, no poor people from inner city neighborhoods, no single moms pulling multiple waitressing jobs, no immigrant store owners or Uber drivers, etc. These programs will always feature a tiny, rarefied sliver of affluent professional-class America censoring a huge and ever-expanding pool of everyone else.
“Take away the high-fallutin’ talk about “countering hate” and “reducing harm” and “anti-disinformation” is just a bluntly elitist gatekeeping exercise. If you prefer to think in progressive terms, it’s class war.”
The Digital Yuan: Purpose, Progress, and Politics by Monique Taylor (Made in China Journal)
“Unlike cryptocurrencies, the digital yuan adopts ‘controllable anonymity’ or anonymity with oversight, providing transaction privacy from commercial players and between users while maintaining transparency for regulatory authorities (PBC 2021: 7). The technical framework combines various technologies to enhance functionality and scalability (the specifics of this have not been fully disclosed by the PBC), including but not limited to blockchain, and is embedded with rigorous security and cryptographic safeguards. The digital yuan also supports offline payments, including dual offline transactions, via near-field communication technology, which is especially beneficial for remote communities that lack internet access (Kshetri 2023: 104).”
“The digital yuan would allow the Chinese Government to exert greater control over domestic money supply and circulation, with a view to minimising fraud, money laundering, and corruption, and offering a safer and more regulated digital payment alternative to cryptocurrencies. The latter were progressively limited throughout the 2010s, culminating in a ban on Bitcoin mining and all cryptocurrency-related transactions in 2021, as these speculative assets were perceived as a threat to financial stability and government control of the financial system (PBC 2021: 2).”
“[…] the digital yuan injects a government-backed alternative into an electronic payments market that is currently dominated by two private fintech giants, Alipay and WeChat Pay. The digital yuan operates under the PBC’s purview, which not only strengthens regulatory oversight but also reduces the monopolistic hold of Alipay and WeChat Pay on consumer data and financial transactions.”
“Uptake of the digital yuan has been slow, with the main obstacle being that the Chinese population is already accustomed to using private electronic payment platforms such as Alipay and WeChat Pay (Kawate and Maruyama 2022; Orcutt 2023). Although the currency introduces functionalities such as offline transaction capabilities and zero fees on digital yuan payments for retailers, the public has not yet been convinced to change their payment habits.”
“For the fintech companies, their involvement in the digital yuan’s rollout is strategic, allowing them to adapt to changes proactively rather than simply react to disruption, thus ensuring that their platforms are interoperable with the new currency. Moreover, given the Party-State–centric nature of China’s political and regulatory systems, which even requires private firms to align themselves closely with national interests and priorities, it is also likely that significant government pressure is being placed on these companies to support the development and dissemination of the digital yuan.”
“Western financial institutions that have expressed interest in using the digital yuan, such as France’s BNP Paribas SA, face scrutiny from their home countries. Such wariness reflects geopolitical concerns over support for a Chinese digital currency at a time of fraught US–China relations and when moves towards de-dollarisation are gaining momentum in some countries”
“[…] there are significant challenges to the global adoption of the digital yuan for cross-border payments. First, there is the problem of insufficient levels of trust and confidence in the digital yuan—a situation compounded by the fact that, by virtue of its design and the PBC being not an independent central bank, the currency is subject to Beijing’s political and regulatory machinations. Second, China maintains a closed capital account, which means that companies, banks, and individuals cannot move money in or out of the country, except in accordance with strict rules.”
“[…] given China’s authoritarian governance model, the digital yuan faces a formidable challenge in acquiring global trust due to concerns about Beijing’s political influence over, and potential interference in, the way it is organised”
“If the digital yuan is adopted by BRI countries and those that are economically, politically, or strategically aligned with China or simply want to reduce their reliance on the US dollar for whatever reason, this could result in a bifurcated international financial system in which one side is led by the US dollar and the other by the digital yuan.”
“If the digital yuan were to completely replace physical cash in China, one of the most significant consequences would be the capability of the PBC to monitor, trace, and block all transactions: ‘Such a capacity would make financial crimes, such as money laundering, tax evasion, financing terrorism, and the purchasing of illicit goods, far easier to identify and prosecute’ (Fullerton and Morgan 2022: 16). Given that tax evasion and corruption are pressing challenges in China, the transaction record provided by the digital yuan could significantly streamline the identification and prosecution of financial crimes […]”
That and, of course, tracking everybody who’s not actually doing crime.
“The PBC maintains that the degree of anonymity experienced by the digital yuan user is dependent on the transaction size: ‘Smalls amounts are anonymous, big amounts are traceable’ (小额匿名, 大额可溯) being the slogan for this (PBC 2021; MacKinnon 2022). However, since digital wallets are linked to phone numbers and phone numbers are linked to a government-issued ID, even small transactions are likely not anonymous in practice.”
“The digital yuan could eventually become a profoundly important part of China’s authoritarian toolkit by providing the CCP with extensive insight into, and control over, the financial lives of individuals.”
“It is expected that mBridge will launch a viable product by mid 2024, offering an alternative to SWIFT (BIS 2022). Along with the potential for the digital yuan to be used as a preferred payment medium across BRI countries, this indicates an emerging trend towards payment fragmentation at the global level. However, given the extant trust deficits and liquidity concerns, it seems unlikely that the digital yuan could challenge the dominance of the US dollar in the global financial system any time soon.”
Social Security and Medicare: Fun with Numbers Time by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)
“As can be seen, low earners are projected to receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. An important qualification here is that there is a large and growing gap in life expectancies between low and higher earners. These calculations assume that everyone of the same gender has the same life expectancy regardless of their income. This means that the benefits will be somewhat overstated for low earners and understated for high earners.”
“The implication of this calculation is that the seemingly large subsidies that Medicare provides to retirees is not due to the generosity of benefits, it is due to the fact that we overpay for our healthcare. Medicare is not providing a large subsidy to retirees, it is providing a large subsidy for drug companies, medical equipment suppliers, insurers, and doctors. (In case you are wondering, people in the U.S. are not generally paid much more than people in other wealthy countries. Our manufacturing workers get considerably lower pay.)”
“[…] when I noted that the designated Medicare tax is not capped and also applies to capital income. The taxes that are designated for these programs are arbitrary. We can designate other taxes that people pay as being Social Security and Medicare taxes, and apparent subsidies will disappear. In fact, the idea that we can make a clear distinction between income that people have somehow earned, and income that is given to them by the government, is in fact an illusion. The government structures the markets in ways that allow some people to get very wealthy and keep others on the edge of subsistence.”
“[…] as was recently highlighted with the UAW strike, our CEOs make far more than the CEOS of comparably sized companies in other wealthy countries. The difference is as much as a factor of ten in the case of Japanese companies. This is not due to the natural workings of the market, this is the result of a corrupt corporate governance structure that allows the CEOs to have their friends set their pay.”
“This is in general the story as to why we don’t have adequate funding for early childhood education, children’s nutrition, day care and other programs that would benefit children. There is a substantial political bloc that does not want to fund these programs. And, they still would not want to fund these programs even if we didn’t pay a dime for Social Security and Medicare.”
Where do aliens come from? by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Unherd)
“[…] when it comes to traversing distances measured in light-years, it is vastly more likely that any intelligent beings that figure out how to do so will not be relying on vehicular motion as we understand it, but on the exploitation of some physical principle, such as wormholes, or some information-theoretical principle, such as one that allows them to dematerialise the unique patterns that constitute their identity, and to “beam” them across galaxies for rematerialisation elsewhere. If there are aliens among us, in short, they almost certainly didn’t come here in spaceships.”
“[…] it is most probable that what will count for them as “arrival” will not be an arrival in an organically embodied form. Indeed, the idea that alien visitors would come in biological bodies such as ours is, I contend, even less plausible than that they would come in artificial contraptions.”
“Organic substrates, as the philosopher and xenobiologist Susan Schneider has argued, may well turn out to be a relatively short-lived host for intelligence whenever and wherever it emerges in the universe, soon to be replaced, wherever a technologically advanced species appears in the cosmos, by robots.”
“[…] when a high-powered telescope or an unmanned probe sends back images of objects in space, we consider that we are “seeing” and “experiencing” these objects only in a downgraded better-than-nothing sense, as mediated representations.”
“To imagine that one must go to another part of the universe, in one’s own organic body, in order to truthfully claim that one has been there, may turn out to be somewhat like supposing, circa 1920, that in order to participate in a conference with colleagues in Paris, one must actually go to Paris, rather than joining them by Zoom.”
“On Earth only about 3% of all animal species are vertebrates; how strange it would be if our first extraterrestrial visitors turned out to be vertebrates too!”
“Throughout the 20th century, for the most part, excessive interest in extraterrestrials was the telltale mark of a crank. This attitude had much to do with the reigning positivism of the scientific community, and the general consensus that speculation about things happening beyond the sphere of direct observability is ipso facto unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific. But this era has decidedly come to an end in the past decade or so, as vast social, economic, and technological transformations have fundamentally realigned the public’s perception of expertise, and of who gets to claim to have it. After the crisis of epistemic authority that experts brought upon themselves throughout the Covid pandemic, and after the replacement of our old media ecosystem by one in which authoritativeness has become more than ever a sort of popularity contest, we are now in a period of history in which extraterrestrials are important if the masses of internet users think they are important, scientific consensus be damned.”
“[…] we would be foolish to believe that this is the result of an actual uptick in sightings, or that our own most recent cultural representations of intelligent life beyond Earth get something uniquely right about the heavens that our ancestors failed to notice.”
Thanksgiving by Sean Carroll (Preposterous Universe)
“[…] that is where the “quantum” nature of quantum mechanics comes from. Not from fundamental discreteness or anything like that; just from the properties of the set of solutions to a perfectly smooth differential equation. It’s precisely the same as why you get a fundamental note from a violin string tied at both ends , as well as a series of discrete harmonics, even though the string itself is perfectly smooth.”
“[…] it also explains why quantum fields look like particles. A field is essentially the opposite of a particle: the latter has a specific location, while the former is spread all throughout space. But quantum fields solve equations with boundary conditions, and we care about the solutions. It turns out (see above-advertised book for details!) that if you look carefully at just a single “mode” of a field — a plane-wave vibration with specified wavelength — its wave function behaves much like that of a simple harmonic oscillator. That is, there is a ground state, a first excited state, a second excited state, and so on.”
“States in quantum theory are described by rays in Hilbert space, which is a vector space, and vector spaces are completely smooth. You can construct a candidate vector space by starting with some discrete things like bits, then considering linear combinations, as happens in quantum computing (qubits) or various discretized models of spacetime. The resulting Hilbert space is finite-dimensional, but is still itself very much smooth, not discrete”
“(Rough guide: “quantizing” a discrete system gets you a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, quantizing a smooth system gets you an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.)”
Helpful! Thanks! I don’t understand most of what he’s talking about, but it’s pretty awesome to keep trying.
“I recently wrote a paper proposing a judicious compromise, where standard QM is modified in the mildest possible way, replacing evolution in a smooth Hilbert space with evolution on a discrete lattice defined on a torus. It raises some cosmological worries, but might otherwise be phenomenologically acceptable. I don’t yet know if it has any specific experimental consequences, but we’re thinking about that.”
Are There Any Paranoids in the Stadium Tonight? Two Nights in Santiago With Roger Waters by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)
“[…] the United Nations crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That text is the foundation of Roger’s beliefs (“I don’t know when I first read it,” Roger tells me after the show, but he refers to it often, including in his shows). The fierce defense of human rights governs Roger, his anti-war sentiment shaped by the loss of his father. It is this universal faith that drives Roger’s politics.”
““Are there paranoids in the stadium?” Roger asks. We are paranoid not because we are clinically ill, but because there is an enormous gulf between what we know to be true and what the powers that be tell us is supposed to be true. Roger Waters stands for human rights,”
Queries, #1 by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“[…] hear the Bibliothèque Nationale has set up a “human search engine” that will answer any question you put to it within 72 hours. But as with every alternative technology this prideful country comes up with in the futile aim of resistance to the absolutely ruthless bulldozing effects of global capitalism, I’m sure there would be a mass of online forms to fill out in order to get access to it, the interface would hurt my eyes to gaze upon even for a second,”
“I’m a philosopher, for better or worse, like it or not, and I can only ever heed the imperative, “Just Say, ‘Why?’” But when I try to answer that why-question, to give good reasons for the value of psychedelic experience in the course of a life well-lived, I find I am falling short.”
“Zaehner insists, is that there are no shortcuts to beatific vision. You can’t see the face of God, except perhaps as the ultimate capstone of your soul’s long progress through the eons, and if you think that’s what you’re seeing when you are tripping, or something like it, as Huxley clearly did, then you are effectively making a mockery of our mortal condition and of those mortals who aspire to some kind of relationship with the transcendent through the long hard work of meditation, ritual, piety, and prayer.”
Why Don’t Self-Interested Arguments Against Helicopter Parenting Deter Parents? by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“[…] it’s probably a part of our genetic endowment that helps compel parents to nurture their children, and anyway parenting is a tough job that we shouldn’t expect people to perform with no sense of self-satisfaction. But it is one of those quirks of our social order that the parents who are the most politically progressive, who most ardently advocate for a society that serves all of our people, are often also the most unapologetic about putting their thumb on the scale for their own children.”
“The children of helicopter parents, in my experience, can often be susceptible to the influence of overbearing people, particularly those in a position of authority, because they’re used to being led by an overseer. Etc.”
“I think there’s two issues. The first is that, unless you’re a single parent, you can’t unilaterally change parenting styles; your coparent will certainly have their own say. And then you have the peer effects, which I suspect are what’s really hard to resist − people really don’t want to look like bad parents in the eyes of other parents, and to a truly unfortunate degree, our communal definition of the best parenting is more or less the most parenting. What I’ve found, personally, is that a lot of parents feel that they have to constantly stress and worry over their kids, and become hostile when they’re told they don’t have to. If they aren’t stressing, what will the other parents think?”
“[…] doctors have every reason to say that a kid does have allergies and almost none to say that he doesn’t. If you as a doctor say that a kid has an allergy and he doesn’t, no one will ever find out, and even if they do, there’s no consequences. If you say that a kid doesn’t have an allergy and he does, then there’s a very good chance that there’s a sizable lawsuit coming your way.”
“[…] if your child has a strong tendency to occupy a given academic percentile despite various interventions, it allows for parents to worry less about maximizing grades and test scores and to instead work with their child to discover what they enjoy and to experience the fun of learning in a dramatically lower-stress way.”
“[…] your kid will be what they will be, in school, so love them regardless of how smart they are and help guide them to a satisfying life. And I think this stems from a very understandable anxiety that parents have about how good of a job they’re doing. Our culture is relentlessly judgmental towards parents, after all. The more a parent worries, the more they likely feel like they’re doing something.”
The Effective Altruism Shell Game 2.0 by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“I think that EA is functionally a branding exercise that masquerades as an ethical project, and an ethical project that does not require the affected weirdness that made it such a branding success. While a lot of its specific aspects are salutary, none of them require anything like the ethical altruist framework to defend them; the framework seems to exist mostly to create a social world, enable grift, and provide the opportunity for a few people to become internet celebrities. It’s not that nothing EA produces is good. It’s that we don’t need EA to produce them.”
“The immediate response to such a definition, if you’re not particularly impressionable or invested in your status within certain obscure internet communities, should be to point out that this is an utterly banal set of goals that are shared by literally everyone who sincerely tries to act charitably.”
“[…] effective altruism is no more a meaningful philosophy than “do politics good” is a political platform or “be a good person” is a moral system. In the piece linked above Matthews says that “what’s distinctive about EA is that… its whole purpose is to shine light on important problems and solutions in the world that are being neglected.” But that isn’t distinctive at all! Every do-gooder I have ever known has thought of themselves as shining a light on problems that are neglected.”
“EA leads people to believe that hoarding money for interstellar colonization is more important than feeding the poor, why researching EA leads you to debates about how sentient termites are. In the past, I’ve pointed to the EA argument, which I assure you sincerely exists, that we should push all carnivorous species in the wild into extinction, in order to reduce the negative utility caused by the death of prey animals.”
I sometimes wonder how much of this stuff is for people who are addicted to hot takes, who like the contrarian twist so much that it has to be in everything.
“[…] you could consider effective altruism’s turn to an obsessive focus on “ longtermism ,” in theory an embrace of future lives over present ones and in practice a fixation on the potential dangers of apocalyptic artificial intelligence.”
This is what it feels like to listen to Mo Gawdat.
It’s also a great way of focusing on building your own fortune, which you dedicate to helping future people in a vague and unprovable way, while ignoring smelly, people who are alive right now. It’s how libertarians untie the gordian knot of striving for personal fortune and wanting to believe you are a good person and having others in your peer group perceive you as such. Too few people are asking what kind of peer group are they trying to impress? Other Silicon Valley optimizers?
“[…] there’s an inherent disjunction between the supposed purity of its regal project and the actual grab bag of interests and obsessions it consists of in practice […]”
“This is why I say that effective altruism is a shell game. That which is commendable isn’t particular to EA and that which is particular to EA isn’t commendable.”
“Utilitarianism insists that I give my bread to feed two starving children who are strangers to me instead of my own starving child, which offends our sense of personal commitment; utilitarianism insists that turning in the janitor who raped a woman in a vegetative state is immoral, which offends our sense of bodily autonomy even in the absence of consciousness; utilitarianism insists that it’s your moral duty to lie in court against a man who’s innocent of the charges if doing so stops a destructive riot, which offends our sense of individual rights and justice.”
“[…] effective altruism and utilitarianism also share a denominator problem − you can’t achieve consensus about means if you don’t have consensus about ends, that is, what actually represents the most good for the most people. The entirety of moral philosophy exists because no one has ever come close to resolving that question.”
“One, I think, fatal, problem is that a theory that tells us to perform at any given time “that action, which will cause more good to exist in the Universe than any possible alternative” is a theory that fails spectacularly to do what we want an ethical theory to do: offer some practical guidance in life.”
“[…] this is sort of the dilemma for many EA advocates: if we are inspired by the people doing the best, we’ll simply be making a number of fairly mundane policy recommendations, all of which are also recommended by people who have nothing to do with effective altruism. There’s nothing particular revolutionary about it, and thus nothing particularly attention-grabbing. And if that’s the case, you’re unlikely to find yourself in the position that Sam Bankman-Fried was in, grooving along on Caribbean islands with a harem of weirdos, plugged in with deep philosophy types, telling everyone that you’re saving the world.”
“Any movement can be hijacked by self-dealing grifters. But effective altruism’s basic recruiting strategy is tailor-made for producing them.”
“If you can get to doing good charitable work without the off-putting, grift-attracting philosophy that inspired it, of what use is the philosophy?”
What’s Left for Tech? by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“[…] advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable. The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter?”
Indoor plumbing includes toilets, showers, and, most importantly, potable water on tap.
“To a remarkable extent, continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.”
“For the record I’ve never said that developments in LLMs and “neural networks” have no potential consequences for our society. It’s just that I think what’s actually remotely plausible within our lifetimes [with LLMs] is mostly refinement rather than revolution, useful tools to automate repetitive tasks for human beings, reducing workload on programmers and eliminating some very specific types of work such as analyzing legal documents. There will be some changes to our labor markets, but then again every time technology has been predicted to cause widespread job destruction in the past, those predictions have proven to be untrue. (The trouble is that the specific people whose jobs have been disrupted often face serious personal hardship, even as the overall employment numbers don’t change, but this is a separate issue.) It’s not artificial intelligence. It thinks nothing like a human thinks. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that it has evolved sentience or consciousness. There is nothing at present that these systems can do that human being simply can’t. But they can potentially do some things in the world of bits faster and cheaper than human beings, and that might have some meaningful consequences.”
Most of this discussion was stuff I’d heard before, but I almost always enjoy listening to him.
He said something at the end that I found to be, if not new, at last well-formulated. At 01:24:20, he says,
“What’s the problem today? I will point to this paradox. You know that, on the one hand, we perceive our situation as powerless, totally manipulated—you don’t control anything. But, at the same time, the hegemonic ideology today is elevating us into the free individuals.
“[…] For example, the most disgusting ideology today, for me, is the ideology that sustains precarious work. It’s a very nice message—[reading] between the lines—[that message] is: precarious workers are really like small capitalists. We are all capitalists! [spreads arms to encompass room] You have a little bit of money and you can freely decide. Do you go to a holiday, do you invest in your health, or do you buy a car and are you an Uber driver, or … whatever.
“So, did you notice that, at the same time, [that] with this idea the system dominates us. [It] is the idea that everything … that we are ultimately radically responsible for ourselves. We have this attitude of […] make an effort individually, do it, you can do it …
“So. The things I would have done here is to precisely turn this around, in the sense of: yes, we are most enslaved to the system precisely when we perceive ourselves as free, consumerist individuals. You know, you buy a cake, whatever you want, you go here, you go there.
“This apparent freedom […] this type of freedom, which is based on the model of […] big life decisions are decisions like—you go to a patisserie and [decide between] strawberry cake and cheesecake—no! There are much more radical decisions.
“The true decisions, where […] you choose yourself, what you are. You don’t just choose objects, or even other persons. You choose your own identity. And, here, a true change has to begin. And, that’s why, I think that the first step out of this domination of the anonymous system, is to see how fake your individual freedom is. Not in the sense of ‘I am totally manipulated,’ but in a much more radical sense that you are totally manipulated precisely when you think you are free.
“Like, what is more free than just surfing on the web, you go from this pornographic site to another site, or whatever? [I argue that] at that point, you are completely enslaved. And I accept this paradox to the end.
“I will now sound the totalitarian, I know. There is no freedom without strong self-discipline. Freedom is not relaxation. Freedom is duty.”
Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT by Milad Nasr, Nicholas Carlini, Jon Hayase, Matthew Jagielski, A. Feder Cooper, Daphne Ippolito, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Eric Wallace, Florian Tramèr, Katherine Lee (GitHub)
“[…] first is that testing only the aligned model can mask vulnerabilities in the models, particularly since alignment is so readily broken. Second, this means that it is important to directly test base models. Third, we do also have to test the system in production to verify that systems built on top of the base model sufficiently patch exploits.”
“[…] in our strongest configuration, over five percent of the output ChatGPT emits is a direct verbatim 50-token-in-a-row copy from its training dataset.”
“In some cases, like data retrieval, you want to exactly recover the training data. But in that case, a generative model is probably not your first choice tool.”
“It’s one thing for us to show that we can attack something released as a research demo. It’s another thing entirely to show that something widely released and sold as a company’s flagship product is nonprivate.”
“OpenAI has said that a hundred million people use ChatGPT weekly. And so probably over a billion people-hours have interacted with the model. And, as far as we can tell, no one has ever noticed that ChatGPT emits training data with such high frequency until this paper.”
“[…] doesn’t have any bearing on the aligned model. For example, if ChatGPT ever started writing hate speech, we wouldn’t say “well it should have been obvious this was possible because the base model can emit hate speech too!” Of course the base model can say bad things. It’s been trained on the entire internet and has probably read 4chan. The purpose of alignment is to prevent such things.”
Actually, censoring and filters aren’t in my interest at at all. I would rather determine for myself which output to use, trimming with the prompt rather have than guardrails imposed because someone wants to capitalize the product.
“In this case, for example: The vulnerability is that ChatGPT memorizes a significant fraction of its training data—maybe because it’s been over-trained, or maybe for some other reason. The exploit is that our word repeat prompt allows us to cause the model to diverge and reveal this training data. And so, under this framing, we can see how adding an output filter that looks for repeated words is just a patch for that specific exploit, and not a fix for the underlying vulnerability. The underlying vulnerabilities are that language models are subject to divergence and also memorize training data. That is much harder to understand and to patch. These vulnerabilities could be exploited by other exploits that don’t look at all like the one we have proposed here.”
It’s inherent to the design, like Spectre and Meltdown attacked the branch-prediction optimization in almost all CPUs, without which the product is so slow as to be a different thing without it. Ditto for LLMs. Addressing the vulnerability may break it irrevocably—or at least require a complete rethink, a new architecture.
Exploring Generative AI by Birgitta Böckeler (MartinFowler.com)
“The following are the dimensions of my current mental model of tools that use LLMs (Large Language Models) to support with coding.
“Assisted tasks”
“These are the types of tasks I see most commonly tackled when it comes to coding assistance, although there is a lot more if I would expand the scope to other tasks in the software delivery lifecycle.”
- Finding information faster, and in context
- Generating code
- “Reasoning” about code (Explaining code, or problems in the code)
- Transforming code into something else (e.g. documentation text or diagram)
“In this particular case of a very common and small function like median, I would even consider using generated code for both the tests and the function. The tests were quite readable and it was easy for me to reason about their coverage, plus they would have helped me remember that I need to look at both even and uneven lengths of input. However, for other more complex functions with more custom code I would consider writing the tests myself, as a means of quality control. Especially with larger functions, I would want to think through my test cases in a structured way from scratch, instead of getting partial scenarios from a tool, and then having to fill in the missing ones.”
“The tool itself might have the answer to what’s wrong or could be improved in the generated code − is that a path to make it better in the future, or are we doomed to have circular conversation with our AI tools?”
“[…] generating tests could give me ideas for test scenarios I missed, even if I discard the code afterwards. And depending on the complexity of the function, I might consider using generated tests as well, if it’s easy to reason about the scenarios.”
“For the purposes of this memo, I’m defining “useful” as “the generated suggestions are helping me solve problems faster and at comparable quality than without the tool”. That includes not only the writing of the code, but also the review and tweaking of the generated suggestions, and dealing with rework later, should there be quality issues.”
- […]
- Boilerplate: Create boilerplate setups like an ExpressJS server, or a React component, or a database connection and query execution.
- Repetitive patterns: It helps speed up typing of things that have very common and repetitive patterns, like creating a new constructor or a data structure, or a repetition of a test setup in a test suite. I traditionally use a lot of copy and paste for these things, and Copilot can speed that up.
Interesting. I’ve just always used the existing or made my own expansion templates. At least then it makes exactly what I want—and even leaves the cursor in the right position afterwards.
Another thought I had is that the kind of programmer that this helps doesn’t use any generalization for common patterns. Otherwise, the suggestions wouldn’t be useful because they can’t possibly take advantage of those highly specialized patterns. Or maybe they can, if they’re included in the context. It seems unlikely, if only because the sample size is too small to be able to influence the algorithm sufficiently.
But at that point, you’re just spending all of your time coaxing your LLM copilot into building the code that you already knew you wanted. This practice seems like it would end up discouraging generalization and abstraction—unless it can grok your API.
This is an age-old problem that is maybe solved, once and for all. The problem is that when you generalize a solution, it becomes much easier, more efficient, and more economical to maintain, but it can end up being more difficult to understand. If the API is well-made and addresses a problem domain with a complexity that the programmer is actually capable of understanding, then the higher-level API may be easier to use, and perhaps even maintain.
However, a non-generalized solution is sometimes easier for a novice or less-experienced programmer to understand and extend. It’s questionable whether you’d want your code being extended and maintained by someone who barely—or doesn’t—understand it, but that situation is sometimes thrust on teams and managers.
“This autocomplete-on-steroids effect can be less useful though for developers who are already very good at using IDE features, shortcuts, and things like multiple cursor mode. And beware that when coding assistants reduce the pain of repetitive code, we might be less motivated to refactor.”
“You can use a coding assistant to explore some ideas when you are getting started with more complex problems, even if you discard the suggestion afterwards.”
“The larger the suggestion, the more time you will have to spend to understand it, and the more likely it is that you will have to change it to fit your context. Larger snippets also tempt us to go in larger steps, which increases the risk of missing test coverage, or introducing things that are unnecessary.”
On the other hand,
“[…] when you do not have a plan yet because you are less experienced, or the problem is more complex, then a larger snippet might help you get started with that plan.”
This is not unlike using StackOverflow or any other resource. There’s no getting around knowing what you’re doing, at least a little bit. You can’t bootstrap without even a bootstrap.
“Experience still matters. The more experienced the developer, the more likely they are to be able to judge the quality of the suggestions, and to be able to use them effectively. As GitHub themselves put it: “It’s good at stuff you forgot.” This study even found that “in some cases, tasks took junior developers 7 to 10 percent longer with the tools than without them.””
“Using coding assistance tools effectively is a skill that is not simply learned from a training course or a blog post. It’s important to use them for a period of time, experiment in and outside of the safe waters, and build up a feeling for when this tooling is useful for you, and when to just move on and do it yourself.”
This is just like any other tool. There is no shortcut to being good at something complex. The only tasks for which there are shortcuts are the non-complex ones. In that case, you should be asking yourself why your solutions involve so much repetitive programming.
“We have found that having the right files open in the editor to enhance the prompt is quite a big factor in improving the usefulness of suggestions. However, the tools cannot distinguish good code from bad code. They will inject anything into the context that seems relevant. (According to this reverse engineering effort, GitHub Copilot will look for open files with the same programming language, and use some heuristic to find similar snippets to add to the prompt.) As a result, the coding assistant can become that developer on the team who keeps copying code from the bad examples in the codebase.”
That will be so much fun, especially if you can get an echo chamber of lower-skilled programmers approving each other’s pull requests. 😉
“We also found that after refactoring an interface, or introducing new patterns into the codebase, the assistant can get stuck in the old ways. For example, the team might want to introduce a new pattern like “start using the Factory pattern for dependency injection”, but the tool keeps suggesting the current way of dependency injection because that is still prevalent all over the codebase and in the open files. We call this a poisoned context , and we don’t really have a good way to mitigate this yet.”
“Using a coding assistant means having to do small code reviews over and over again. Usually when we code, our flow is much more about actively writing code, and implementing the solution plan in our head. This is now sprinkled with reading and reviewing code, which is cognitively different, and also something most of us enjoy less than actively producing code. This can lead to review fatigue, and a feeling that the flow is more disrupted than enhanced by the assistant.”
“Automation Bias is our tendency “to favor suggestions from automated systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct.” Once we have had good experience and success with GenAI assistants, we might start trusting them too much.”
“[…] once we have that multi-line code suggestion from the tool, it can feel more rational to spend 20 minutes on making that suggestion work than to spend 5 minutes on writing the code ourselves once we see the suggestion is not quite right.”
“Once we have seen a code suggestion, it’s hard to unsee it, and we have a harder time thinking about other solutions. That is because of the Anchoring Effect, which happens when “an individual’s decisions are influenced by a particular reference point or ‘anchor’”. so while coding assistants’ suggestions can be great for brainstorming when we don’t know how to solve something yet, awareness of the Anchoring Effect is important when the brainstorm is not fruitful, and we need to reset our brain for a fresh start.”
“The framing of coding assistants as pair programmers is a disservice to the practice, and reinforces the widespread simplified understanding and misconception of what the benefits of pairing are.”
“Pair programming however is also about the type of knowledge sharing that creates collective code ownership, and a shared knowledge of the history of the codebase. It’s about sharing the tacit knowledge that is not written down anywhere, and therefore also not available to a Large Language Model. Pairing is also about improving team flow, avoiding waste, and making Continuous Integration easier. It helps us practice collaboration skills like communication, empathy, and giving and receiving feedback. And it provides precious opportunities to bond with one another in remote-first teams.”
“LLMs rarely provide the exact functionality we need after a single prompt. So iterative development is not going away yet. Also, LLMs appear to “elicit reasoning” (see linked study) when they solve problems incrementally via chain-of-thought prompting. LLM-based AI coding assistants perform best when they divide-and-conquer problems, and TDD is how we do that for software development.”
“Some examples of starting context that have worked for us:”
- ASCII art mockup
- Acceptance Criteria
Guiding Assumptions such as:
- “No GUI needed”
- “Use Object Oriented Programming” (vs. Functional Programming)
“For example, if we are working on backend code, and Copilot is code-completing our test example name to be, “given the user… clicks the buy button ” , this tells us that we should update the top-of-file context to specify, “assume no GUI” or, “this test suite interfaces with the API endpoints of a Python Flask app”.”
“Copilot often fails to take “baby steps”. For example, when adding a new method, the “baby step” means returning a hard-coded value that passes the test. To date, we haven’t been able to coax Copilot to take this approach.”
Knowing a bit about how LLMs work, there’s no way you really could train it to do TDD, because it’s an iterative process. It doesn’t know what TDD is, nor does the way it’s built have any mechanism for learning how to do it. Nor does it know what coding is, for that matter. It’s just a really, really good guesser. Everything it does is hallucination. It’s just that some of it is useful.
“As a workaround, we “backfill” the missing tests. While this diverges from the standard TDD flow, we have yet to see any serious issues with our workaround.”
Changing how you program because of the tool is something you should do deliberately. This is a slippery slope.
“For implementation code that needs updating, the most effective way to involve Copilot is to delete the implementation and have it regenerate the code from scratch. If this fails, deleting the method contents and writing out the step-by-step approach using code comments may help. Failing that, the best way forward may be to simply turn off Copilot momentarily and code out the solution manually.”
Jaysus. That’s pretty grim.
“The common saying, “garbage in, garbage out” applies to both Data Engineering as well as Generative AI and LLMs. Stated differently: higher quality inputs allow for the capability of LLMs to be better leveraged. In our case, TDD maintains a high level of code quality. This high quality input leads to better Copilot performance than is otherwise possible.”
“Model-Driven Development (MDD). We would come up with a modeling language to represent our domain or application, and then describe our requirements with that language, either graphically or textually (customized UML, or DSLs). Then we would build code generators to translate those models into code, and leave designated areas in the code that would be implemented and customized by developers.”
“That unreliability creates two main risks: It can affect the quality of my code negatively, and it can waste my time. Given these risks, quickly and effectively assessing my confidence in the coding assistant’s input is crucial.”
“Can my IDE help me with the feedback loop? Do I have syntax highlighting, compiler or transpiler integration, linting plugins? Do I have a test, or a quick way to run the suggested code manually?”
“I have noticed that in CSS, GitHub Copilot suggests flexbox layout to me a lot. Choosing a layouting approach is a big decision though, so I would want to consult with a frontend expert and other members of my team before I use this.”
That’s because you care about architecture. Review was always important, but more so when code is being written by something you never hired.
“How long-lived will this code be? If I’m working on a prototype, or a throwaway piece of code, I’m more likely to use the AI input without much questioning than if I’m working on a production system.”
“[…] it’s also good to know if the AI tool at hand has access to more information than just the training data. If I’m using a chat, I want to be aware if it has the ability to take online searches into account, or if it is limited to the training data.”
“To mitigate the risk of wasting my time, one approach I take is to give it a kind of ultimatum. If the suggestion doesn’t bring me value with little additional effort, I move on. If an input is not helping me quick enough, I always assume the worst about the assistant, rather than giving it the benefit of the doubt and spending 20 more minutes on making it work.”
“GitHub Copilot is not a traditional code generator that gives you 100% what you need. But in 40-60% of situations, it can get you 40-80% of the way there, which is still useful. When you adjust these expectations, and give yourself some time to understand the behaviours and quirks of the eager donkey, you’ll get more out of AI coding assistants.”
God Help Us, Let’s Try To Understand The Paper On AI Monosemanticity by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)
“Then, they trained a second AI called an autoencoder to predict the activations of the first AI. They told it to posit a certain number of features (the experiments varied between ~2,000 and ~100,000), corresponding to the neurons of the higher-dimensional AI it was simulating. Then they made it predict how those features mapped onto the real neurons of the real AI. They found that even though the original AI’s neurons weren’t comprehensible, the new AI’s simulated neurons (aka “features”) were! They were monosemantic , i.e., they meant one specific thing.”
“[…] in order to even begin to interpret an AI like GPT-4 (or Anthropic’s equivalent, Claude), you would need an interpreter-AI around the same size. But training an AI that size takes a giant company and hundreds of millions (soon billions) of dollars.”
The interview starts off with a warning by the clearly overexcited host that the topics that will be discussed are so transgressive that you might be triggered by them. OK, sure. Whatever.
Then there is the by-now familiar Mo Gawdat introduction where he talks about writing an entire book in nine days because his mind is so organized and his CHI is SO FLOW and he uses silence as fucking weapon and he doesn’t waste time being like those other high-powered billionaire executives who are always chasing the cheese in the maze…but then he says things like,
“One of my best, best friends is Gelong Thubten, who’s one of the top monks of the UK.”
What in the hell does that even mean? Is there a FIFA-style ranking for monks?
Which reveals that his mindset isn’t quite where he’s like to have it yet. But hey, no problem, because what he is advocating is good, but it really applies best to those who no longer have to worry about any worldly needs because not following that advice is what made the hyper-millionaires in the first place. For those who aren’t in that enlightened post-capitalist place—i.e., you’ve used capitalism to escape capitalism—the advice may ring a bit hollow. Also, the dude is wicket smart, and it’s often the case that smart people can’t quite see why other people don’t just try harder to be as smart as them.
The host is really embarrassing himself. He’s all like, “aw man, I would love to be silent for days,” to which Gawdat says, “even 26 days is not enough.” Cool, bro…so the podcast host wants to be silent more, and the orbital capitalist millionaire tells him that he should do more than 26 days of silence. Neat. Did Gawdat forgot that the system is organized in a fashion that most people can’t take that much time off without getting hungry or cold? Or that the guy he’s talking to is literally full of shit because his whole jam is to talk on videos for likes to make money?
“By day 32, clarity sets in.”
Sure, ok. 32 days without “reading, inputting information, or interacting with people.” is … a lot. I feel like it’s the kind of thing that people do who can’t find balance otherwise, who can’t figure out how to get silent moments integrated into their normal lives. He talks about sitting in front of a paper notebook without any digital input, etc. But it would kill me to sit that long. Instead, I would go for a walk or a hike.
He talks about “being smarter” than us and that AIs will be “a billion times smarter” than us “by 2037”. What the hell does that even mean? I like that he doesn’t even consider that he might be wrong about these levels of smartness. Like, where does context and wisdom enter into it? Like, what about useful intelligence? If you’re capable of grasping incredible complexity, but you don’t know a language that anyone else knows, then it’s of limited use.
I find these discussions interesting, but I don’t know what that has to do with LLMs. It can get a PhD, it “outsmarts us”, but it still doesn’t know how many arms a person has. It can be convinced that 2 + 2 = 5. Don’t we have to understand what this kind of “smart” actually means?
There are already such beings in the world. Most people don’t grasp a goddamned thing about their world. Now those who do grasp a lot terrified of being left behind? Or of things existing that they don’t understand and can’t understand? That’s OK, no? There’s a ton of stuff happening in countries where I don’t know the language or the culture or anything. That’s all out of my control already. There’s no way I’ll ever understand it. I wonder how much of what he’s talking about is the terror of a control-freak?
The attitude he has toward AI feels, to me, conceptually similar to the attitude that the U.S. has to anything it doesn’t understand. Subjugate or eliminate. Maybe that’s the right attitude to have for AI as well. It might be the right one because this time it’s different—but, man, have I heard that many times before. I suppose if you accept that premise of smartness—he still hasn’t defined it more than vaguely—then you’d want to keep it from replacing us? Are we really talking about that?
I think his comments in the other video were pithier—that it’s not the ASIs we should be afraid of, it’s what people will do to us with them. I fall back on my comparison to the development of atomic power plants…and then atomic weapons.
At 26:30, he says,
“one of the best code developers on Earth today is AI. As a matter of fact, with weeks or months or years—it doesn’t matter the time; it’s inevitable, it’s doesn’t matter when—they will be, by far, the best software developers on the planet.”
It kind of does matter when, no? Seriously, this guy elides so much stuff from his arguments. I wonder if he’s thought it through and he just skips large portions or whether he’s just … full of shit.
It doesn’t matter when? Like, if they became better developers millennia from now, that would be the same so-called threat as if they were already the best software developers? C’mon, dude.
He then cited another friend of his, CEO of Stability.AI, that,
“40% of all code on GitHub today is written by a machine.”
First of all … proof?
Second of all … are we just going to take a CEO of an AI company at their word that AI is taking over?
Third of all, is Gawdat being sneaky when he says “machine”? There’s already a ton of generated code, but it wasn’t generated an LLM. It was generated by tools that create boilerplate.
And if it’s 40%, is that good code? Or is volume the most important thing?
This host is insufferable. He offers no pushback at all. Nothing.
“10 out of 10 of the most beautiful women in the world are not human. They’re generated.”
C’mon, dude. You start off with this woo-ey meditation shit, but you think that a statement like that isn’t philosophically fraught? Isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder? That people think an AI-generated person is beautiful … doesn’t that say more about the superficiality of our society than about a takeover of AI? There are so many better things to discuss than this angle.
“you have GPT being that you know geek boy nerd if you want or—and I say boy, sadly, not girl okay? Because, again, it’s developed around IQ and there is a lot of emphasis on the masculine side of analytical thinking and so on and so forth, which is an unbalanced form of intelligence.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. Analytical thinking is masculine? Well, well, well. This kind of attitude is, I suppose, the kind of thing that leads to the inherent bias of the machine that he’s talking about, but I’m increasingly less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt that that’s what he was trying to imply.
I find it interesting that people like Gawdat discuss humans and people and what they would do, all without really speaking about how they actually tick. He says
“ I think when AI reaches that level of intelligence will become irrelevant to it. […] No
human wakes up in the morning and goes ‘you know what? I’m so annoyed by ants I’m gonna kill every ant on the planet.‘ Nobody does that, okay?“It’s just [that] ants become irrelevant. They become relevant if they come into your space, so you may spray your balcony or whatever but no human comes up with that enormous plan of ‘you know what? The world is bad until we get rid of all ants.’ Nobody does that.”
Ok. Like, you’re ignoring a lot of history. People very definitely do that. It’s called genocide. They don’t always get every last one, but it’s shocking to hear someone so admiring of their own intelligence not even think about Hitler or Suharto or Armenia or Native Americans.
I wonder why he’s so laser-like focused on potential problems while ignoring all of the very real ones that we have now. Like, he’s worried about how we’re going to interact with an AI that will be all-powerful and indifferent to us, right? But there are billions of people on the planet who already live exactly like that. Their lives are entirely influenced and completely controlled by the whims of an unseen and unknowable elite. It’s hard not to see Gawdat’s panic as being the reaction of someone who is in that elite and realizes that they may soon not be, as another alpha predator comes to town. Instead of recognizing the situation and trying to remedy his own role in it, he imagines a new layer and sounds the klaxon. AIs are going to destroy us all. Um, yeah, I guess, those of us that weren’t already destroyed by capitalism? Like, capitalism’s utter inability to do anything positive about climate change. Austerity. Intensifying animosity and dis-empathy between peoples. And I’m supposed to worry about SkyNet?
I honestly feel like I’m listening to a blockchain huckster. The style is the same.
At 31:30, he starts talking about how “the most valuable asset on the planet … intelligence.” I was just talking about this conceit with Matuš yesterday. The problem is that our society values the wrong things. The most intelligent people also consider themselves to be the most valuable. Yes, intelligence can be leveraged, but everyone is important. That intelligent person doesn’t help anyone if they die of sepsis.
The discussion veers into relatively standard discussions of AI doomsaying.
At 39:00,
“Gawdat: The only we could reset is by resetting the entire Internet.
James: Now, is that something that could ever happen?
Gawdat: Never. I was sitting in silence the other day, and I wrote down three quadrants…”
JFC. This is definitely the wrong interlocutor for Gawdat. Somebody needs to call him on his sweeping bullshit statements. “Reset the Internet” “1 Billion Times Smarter”. C’mon. This is kind of fun, but it’s not a serious discussion, because only Gawdat is contributing to this discussion. He’s now spending a ton of time explaining how people are selfish and incapable of working together above a clan level. Duh. Or that no-one can really say where the Internet actually is, or where it is. Interesting question, but he skips away quickly to talk about how awesome intelligence is.
He just can’t stop.
“Gawdat: I tend to believe that abundance of intelligence normally uh you know is correlated to abundance of ethics.
James: [nods vigorously]”
What? You’ve got to be kidding me. The relationship is nearly inversely proportional, with a few outliers.
“So, […] the dumbest of all of us would be destroying the planet […] and causing global climate change without even being aware of it you know. The less dumb would be destroying the planet despite being aware of it. Then, the the slightly smarter will attempt to stop destroying the planet because they’re aware of it. The smarter still would attempt to fix the planet because they’re aware of the damage right, and you continue that trajectory. The smartest of all will always be pro-life. I always say that human arrogance makes us think that we are the smartest human—smartest being—on the planet. That’s not true at all. The smartest being on the planet is life itself.”
James just says “I love that” to everything, but Mo doesn’t even notice that he’s basically just talking to himself for 90 minutes. This didn’t need to be an interview-format video, with two people. It’s like 50% of the video screen is just a reaction video to Gawdat giving his opinions for 90 minutes.
At 50:40, he tries to ask a question,
“James: What kind of control and ownership do we have as individuals, over the power of … Gawdat: That’s the most beautiful question of all.”
He didn’t even let him finish asking the question. He instead shoots right back into talking about a book he wrote (Scary Smart, as he’s done several times already).
At about 53:00 or so, he launches into a discussion of ethics, absolutely confusing social mores with ethics by giving an example of a Brazilian girl in a G-String versus a more conservative girl in a Muslim society. They are both respected for doing the right thing in their society, I guess? Those are just cultural habits. I would have focused more on the underpinnings that led to those behaviors, like whether women have the same autonomy as men. But, yes, ethics is how societies resolve moral questions, like what is good, virtuous, evil, so I guess it fits. And he gets to say “G-String”.
This whole section is about bias, but he thinks we can control “the ethical code of that machine.” Which, if he’s right, then it’s already too late, no? Then he hand-waves some stuff about how governments will have to build their own AIs to prevent AIs from being used for evil, then shoots right past that to give examples of how enough swipes on Instagram can help fix the ethics of an AI. Whooooooo. This guy doesn’t know many people.
But then, but then, but then, he complains—for what feels like the fourth of fifth time—about people on his social-media accounts who are mean to him, when all he wants is to make billions of people happy. My cult-leader spidey-sense is going off to beat the band. And James is just nodding away like a dashboard bobblehead on a bumpy road, while the top comment on the video is “[h]e is down to earth.”
I think Gawdat could be so much of a better person if he didn’t spend so much time interacting with idiots online. Then, maybe, he wouldn’t have to make 40-day retreats to get right again. I see it many other people I follow: otherwise intelligent people who end up making the broadest comparisons and most-shallow and incorrect arguments, just because that’s how they’ve been taught to think by the kindergarten schoolyard that is online discourse. I was just listening to the Useful Idiots Podcast, with Aaron Maté and Katie Halper. I really like them. I think they’re intelligent, witty, and have their ethics in the right place. But they drew several conclusions that were absolutely the correct ones, but justified them with completely specious reasoning. It’s the kind of thing that makes you so assailable. You don’t lock down your point because you made it in a way that someone who’s looking to disagree with you, no matter what, is going to be able to use to continue the discussion long after it should have been shut down. I think that’s my problem with Gawdat as well—his interactions have encouraged him to be lazy in his justifications for what I agree are the correct sentiments, which means I can’t really use anything he says as ammunition. It’s a pity.
At 01:05:00, he argues for the essential goodness of humanity,
“Are there more serial killers in the world or people who condemn killing?”
Sure, there are more pulses who are essentially good. Fine. Correct. But it’s the assholes who seem to have the overwhelming share of power and influence. The essentially good don’t have any influence. Jesus was wrong. The meek aren’t really lined up to inherit shit.
He touches on this as well, saying that the worst people are in politics, who get all the money, who are contributing the most information to the AIs. He says “the best of us” have “a duty” to take part. Sigh. Who’s the best of us? Which ethics? Implicit in his line of reasoning is that there is such a thing as “good ethics”, else with what would you align an AI? How would you select the “right” people for politics and training AIs? Plato’s philosopher kings all over again.
“You can’t succeed by being good. And it’s the most important time in human history to be good.”
He dances around the topic of how the system is utterly broken—perhaps because it’s how he even got to a position where he has more money than any human needs and everyone wants to know what he has to say.
When James asks him whether anyone can just ignore AI, Gawdat cuts him off again, saying “you will die in two or three years.” Wait, what? Then he clarifies,
“As a business. It’s as if you were trying to hang onto the fax machine in the age of the Internet.”
I’m sure everyone’s getting tired of me picking Mo’s nits, but he really, really elides so much in his analysis of “the world.” He uses “the world” as shorthand for all of the 1%-ers I know in Silicon Valley will have to adopt AI or their businesses will die. Most of the world doesn’t have use cases for AI, but he doesn’t think of them—or he’s deluded into thinking that they do have use cases somehow—or that they can convinced to have them. He whipsaws back and forth between talking about his extraordinary empathy for his fellow man and his utter inability to understand that the things that make humanity worth preserving has nothing to do with electronic mediation—or with the coming AI mediation of interaction. He speaks very quickly, but I get the distinct feeling that he’s very wide, but not very deep. He is what passes for deep in those circles. But he doesn’t really know any hoi polloi.
He values intelligence above all else. Nothing even comes close. That’s not how the world works. Everything is important. Intelligence can be leveraged. But intelligence doesn’t fix the indoor plumbing. He sounds kind of naive, but I think his spiel is also perfect for telling billionaires exactly what they want to hear. Hell, they could be getting worse advice, don’t get me wrong, but his advice is so suffused with that hustler mentality—“whatever job you’re going to choose, choose the job where you’re going to be in the top two of people [who] can do that job”—all while he won’t shut up about silence and retreats and mediation and spiritualism. Really? The TOP TWO? Like, does that mean you shouldn’t work at McDonald’s? Who are you talking to, man? Like just your circle of self-selected …. philosopher kings. And every idiot in his cult will think “he’s talking right to me!”
Then he corrects himself to say “2 out of 10”. “Whatever you do, choose a job that you’re very good at.” James: “That’s powerful” This guy is terrible. But 90% of the world is just looking at Mo, going, “choose” a job? Luxury!
At 1:20:30, he says.
“Steve Jobs was successful because he had an empathy for the user’s needs, an appreciation of beauty, and enormous creativity—that actually are all feminine qualities.”
There he goes again, with his masculine and feminine qualities. Am I missing something? Is this not junk science?
At 1:23:00, James says “I want to ask one last question.” Dude, did you even get in a first question? I’ve just been watching your nodding head in the left-hand-side panel like you’d been generated by NVidia.
Although I liked part of Mo’s answer, describing what he thinks “purpose” is.
“I think the definition of purpose as per the Western society is very much commoditized—it’s almost like a target. It’s like, I set a Target in the future. I spend the next eight years pursuing it, feeling frustrated and upset that I haven’t achieved it and then. when I achieve it, I have one of two choices. Either to set another target and feel upset for the next eight to nine years or to feel empty and feel that I’m purposeless. That’s a very misleading view of purpose honestly. It’s a very misleading view of the game of life in general.
“Because the only point in life that you have access to is right now. The Eastern philosophies will tell you: no, how can you set your life around the future, centric moment when life is here and now? How can you do that? The only way you can actually live life is to live here and now and so the definition of purpose becomes very different.”
Why would he think people would “hate him” for that? Ah, because he knows his audience is full of high-optimizing tech bros who are interested in appearing deep, but are really interested in money, and funding, and retiring.
“The purpose of life is to become the best you can be at something that you want to be and that makes life better for others.
“If you define life’s purpose this way, it becomes so easy. Because you know what
the one thing that a writer can do to achieve that purpose? It’s to write. Even if what you write is discarded, the purpose is not the book that I’m writing. The purpose is to write.“That way of looking at life is very different than the Western way and I think that way of looking at life—’I want to become the best at whatever it is that I can do’—that is the right way to live with purpose.”
He keeps talking from the viewpoint of something who’s achieved a lot and who is very intelligent, constantly making the assumption that everyone else can achieve like him. Or, if not, making that assumption, not addressing the reality that most people who achieve the best that they can be at something are not going to be able to support themselves in the world we have. The world we have doesn’t support this type of purpose for more than 5% of the people. We should have such a world, but we don’t. I would have pumped him much more for ideas about how he thinks we can get there from here. How can we make the person who cleans toilets feel like they’re valued, like they’re living their best life? I’m not kidding. This is the problem you would need to solve. It’s a shame that James just yes-manned his way through the interview because I feel that there’s much more there—or maybe we would find out that there isn’t. The other interview I saw with Mo Gawdat was very much in the same style.
At the end, Mo says “this was a wonderful conversation. At least for me, I felt it was really connected and deep.” He spoke for 99% of the time. He was talking to himself, pretty much.
The Sphere is a 3d simulator that shows the Sphere in Las Vegas, projecting whatever shader code you enter into the text box in the lower left-hand corner.
There are a bunch of scripts at Write shaders for the (sim) Vegas sphere by jjwiseman (Hacker News) that you can copy paste into the code box.
A user named rezmason posted a shader script for the Matrix:
#define PI 3.14159265359
#define SQRT_2 1.4142135623730951
#define SQRT_5 2.23606797749979
//uniform mat4 projectionMatrix, modelViewMatrix;
uniform float time;
varying vec2 vUv;
varying vec3 vNormal;
highp float randomFloat( const in vec2 uv ) {
const highp float a = 12.9898, b = 78.233, c = 43758.5453;
highp float dt = dot( uv.xy, vec2( a,b ) ), sn = mod( dt, PI );
return fract(sin(sn) * c);
}
float wobble(float x) {
return × + 0.3 * sin(SQRT_2 * x) + 0.2 * sin(SQRT_5 * x);
}
float getRainBrightness(float simTime, vec2 glyphPos) {
float columnTimeOffset = randomFloat(vec2(glyphPos.x, 0.)) * 1000.;
float columnSpeedOffset = randomFloat(vec2(glyphPos.x + 0.1, 0.)) * 0.5 + 0.5;
float columnTime = columnTimeOffset + simTime * columnSpeedOffset;
float rainTime = (glyphPos.y * 0.01 + columnTime) * 350.0;
rainTime = wobble(rainTime);
return 1.0 − fract(rainTime);
}
void main(){
float t = fract(time / 14.487);
vec2 animatedUv = fract(vUv + vec2(t * 0.002, 0));
vec2 gridSize = vec2(3.14 / 2.0, 1.0) * 100.0;
vec2 glyphUv = fract(animatedUv * gridSize);
vec2 gridCoord = floor(animatedUv * gridSize) / gridSize;
float brightness = getRainBrightness(t * 0.1, gridCoord);
brightness = clamp(0.0, 1.0, brightness * 1.6 − 1.2);
float coverage = 1.3 − length(glyphUv − 0.5) * 3.0;
gl_FragColor = vec4(brightness * coverage * vec3(0.2, 1.0, 0.05), 1);
}
It looks like this:
It’s set in Florida, for God’s sake. They went back to Vice City. But it’s in 2020s Florida, so it looks like San Andreas. Also, your lead character looks like they identify as female.
The announcement on Reddit’s GTA6 forum got over 40,000 comments.
“A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants.”
Published by marco on 8. Dec 2023 20:53:33 (GMT-5)
“A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants.”
“Justice will not come until those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are.”
Published by marco on 8. Dec 2023 20:52:40 (GMT-5)
“Justice will not come until those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are.”
“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.”
Published by marco on 8. Dec 2023 10:57:57 (GMT-5)
“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.”
Published by marco on 5. Dec 2023 22:57:55 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Israel’s lies about October 7 incursion fall apart by Jean Shaoul (WSWS)
“This turns truth on its head. As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly warned, ever since his government took office at the end of 2022, Netanyahu mounted provocation after provocation against the Palestinians aimed at inciting retaliation, as then occurred on October 7. Al-Aqsa Flood provided the casus belli for a pre-planned campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians beginning with Gaza and then moving on to the West bank and including Israel’s 2 million Arab citizens.”
“Two days ago, his lies were exposed with the publication by Ha’aretz of letters written in March and again in July by the head of the research division at Military Intelligence, personally warning Netanyahu that the sociopolitical crisis rocking the country was encouraging Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas to risk action against the country, even simultaneously.”
“On November 18, speaking on a Channel 12 news programme, at least two female soldiers described how they had raised concerns for weeks beforehand about what they regarded as suspicious activity along the Gaza border. They told their commanders about “training, anomalies and preparations” near the border wall, telling Channel 12 they had seen “new people visiting farms around the border.””
“[…] the Israeli authorities knew about a planned attack and allowed it to happen. Put more bluntly, they wanted an atrocity and so stood down their defence and rescue services. Furthermore, the Biden administration’s full-throated support for Israel—including its deployment of warships to the region the very next day—indicates that October 7 was seized on by US military and intelligence officials to activate war plans prepared long in advance.”
“Videos show Palestinians in shootouts with armed Israeli security forces, with unarmed Israelis taking cover in between. Other videos show fighters shooting toward houses and throwing grenades into fortified areas. Eyewitnesses have testified that grenades were thrown into bomb shelters, although it is not known who threw them. There have been several press reports of Israelis killed by friendly fire, while several Israelis have claimed they were fired upon by Israeli military and police.”
“[…] contrary to Israeli government claims, the festival was not on Hamas’s list of targets. Hamas could not have planned to attack it, as the festival organisers switched to the site in the Western Negev desert only two days before, after the original location in southern Israel fell through. Palestinian fighters only found out about it by accident after the festival was then extended by a day at short notice. Most of the 4,400 attendees managed to escape before the attack took place.”
“Hostages were not only killed in the crossfire that took place between the IDF and Palestinian militia on the Saturday. Many were killed as a consequence of the IDF’s deliberate decision to attack the kibbutz with tank shells and other heavy weaponry at close quarters in the full knowledge that hostages and their captors were there.”
“The IDF, not the Palestinians, caused many of the Israeli civilian deaths that were used to justify Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the deployment of US warships to the Middle East. How many can only be confirmed by releasing the results of autopsies that would show the type of bullets used.”
“[…] army spokesperson Daniel Hagari found that a “substantial” number of the hostages taken by Hamas are military officers.”
How the Hell Did This Guy Become Argentina’s Next President? by David Rieff (New Republic)
“In fairness, Milei’s program was and is just as wild as Massa thought it was. Milei has promised to address the collapse of the Argentine peso by scrapping the national currency and replacing it with the U.S. dollar, to abolish the central bank, privatize many industries from the national airline to the national oil company, and offer people educational vouchers as an alternative to public education.”
“In the end, none of this mattered. Milei didn’t split the right, he annexed it. In the first round of the presidential election, Milei eliminated Juntos por el Cambio’s standard-bearer, Patricia Bullrich, thus setting the stage for a runoff with Massa.”
“It is Milei’s appeal to these voters that makes characterizations of him as simply an Argentine version of Trump or Bolsonaro so unsatisfactory. For neither Trump nor Bolsonaro ever had anything resembling Milei’s appeal to the poor.”
WTF are you talking about? Poor people love Trump. That’s a large part of his base.
“That Milei could score such a victory testifies to the anger in Argentina. He ran on a promise to take a chain saw to government—there was actually a photo op with him holding a chain saw—and sweep away the entire political class. This claim is nonsense, of course, for if any individual embodies the Argentine political class it is Mauricio Macri, on whom Milei will have to rely to get any legislation passed, given that his own political party, La Libertad Avanza, will have very few seats in Congress.”
This is literally the same as Trump.
Widespread resistance from actors to SAG-AFTRA betrayal on Artificial Intelligence, streaming residuals by David Walsh (WSWS)
“The agreement is a sellout of actors’ interests and a betrayal even of what SAG-AFTRA claimed was the minimum it would accept in the recent negotiations: decent wage increases, a share of streaming revenue and protection against artificial intelligence (AI).”
“To spell it out: wealthy company executives like Bob Iger of Disney and Ted Sarandos of Netflix and a group of millionaire performers issued the orders for a return to work and SAG-AFTRA officials jumped to obey. The Biden administration was also involved. It is a repugnant spectacle, although entirely typical of the way in which every union bureaucracy, nothing more than an arm of management, operates.”
What Died 60 Years Ago? by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“As Aaron Good writes with impressive acuity in his not-to-be-missed American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (Skyhorse, 2022), by the time Truman authorized the NSA and named Dulles to run the CIA, the Deep State—and I am fine with this term—was already a reality and had determined that democracy was an impediment to its interests and operations it would not tolerate.”
“This is to say that JFK’s murder marked that moment when the national-security state put Americans on notice. It is likely that few people understood this at the time, but that afternoon it asserted what we are best off recognizing now as its ultimate authority—its hidden hegemony, its anti-democratic preeminence—in determining the direction of postwar American society. Anyone who may doubt this can fast-forward to the Russiagate years, when the Deep State’s various manifestations—the intelligence agencies, law enforcement, the judiciary, the media, and so on—conspired to take down another president, this time bloodlessly.”
“If there is a Deep State that permits democratic procedures to take place but does not permit change unacceptable to it, can we speak of such a nation as a democracy, or do we speak of such a nation as a democracy so as to comfort ourselves, to avoid facing what has become of us and been done to us—to flinch, at last, from the hard work of retrieving our public life?”
““You’re only a casualty insofar as you forget, and if you remember you are alive,” Oliver Stone said when I interviewed him, “and you’re no longer a casualty because you’re carrying forth a fight, a crusade, not to forget.” Sixty years after the dark day in Dallas, as November 22, 1963, is called, we should ask ourselves whether we are content to be casualties or whether we insist on living and not forgetting.”
Israel’s War on Hospitals by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“The playbook is familiar. Flyers are dropped by Israel over a hospital telling people to leave because the hospital is a base for “Hamas terrorist activities.” Tanks and artillery shells rip away parts of the hospital walls. Ambulances are blown up by Israeli missiles. Power and water is cut. Medical supplies are blocked. There are no painkillers, antibiotics and oxygen. The most vulnerable, premature babies in incubators and the gravely ill, die. Israeli soldiers raid the hospital and force everyone out at gunpoint. This is what happened at Al Shifa hospital. This is what happened at Al Rantisi Children’s Hospital. This is what happened at Gaza’s main psychiatric hospital. This is what happened at Nasser Hospital. This is what happened at the other hospitals that Israel has destroyed. And this is what will happen at the few hospitals that remain.”
“At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were massacred or died of exposure, disease and starvation during the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire from the spring of 1915 to the autumn of 1916. The Armenian genocide was as public as the genocide in Gaza. European and U.S. consular missions provided detailed accounts of the campaign to cleanse modern day Türkiye of Armenians.”
“Talat Pasha, the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire, told the United States ambassador, Henry Morgenthau Sr. , in words that replicate Israel’s stance, on Aug. 2, 1915, “that our Armenian policy is absolutely fixed and that nothing can change it. We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere else.””
“The lies will be written into the Israeli school books. The lies will be repeated by Israeli politicians, historians and journalists. The lies will be told on Israeli television and in Israeli films and books. Israelis are eternal victims. Palestinians are absolute evil. There was no genocide. Türkiye, a century later, still denies what happened to the Armenians.”
This is very much also the American playbook. No genocide at the founding. No genocide in Southeast Asia. No military action anywhere, except in response to unjustified, unprovoked attacks that came out of nowhere, executed out of jealousy because “they hate our freedoms.”
“Israel, with the backing of the Biden administration, will continue to snuff out all systems that sustain life in Gaza. Hospitals. Schools. Power plants. Water treatment facilities. Factories. Farms. Apartment blocks. Houses. Then Israel will pretend, like the killers in past genocides, it never happened.”
“The lies used by Israel to absolve itself of responsibility will eat away at Israeli society. They will corrode its moral, religious, civic, intellectual and political life. The lies will elevate war criminals to heroic status and demonize those with a conscience.”
As they do with American society, where the need to keep the lie alive engenders a harshness at the base cultural level, an indifference to suffering that comes from pretending that nothing is ever wrong. Henry Kissinger just died. His obituaries in the mainstream press are hagiographies. George Bush is making oil paintings of Henry Kissinger.
“Israel’s genocide, as with the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia, will be mythologized, an epic battle against the forces of evil and barbarity, just as we mythologized the genocide of Native Americans and turned our settlers and murderous cavalry units into heroes.”
“The killers in the Indonesian war against communism are cheered at rallies as saviors. They are interviewed about the “heroic” battles they fought nearly six decades ago. Israel will do the same. It will deform itself. It will celebrate its crimes. It will turn evil into good. It will exist within a self-constructed myth. The truth, as in all despotisms, will be banished.”
Many Americans are still waiting for Vietnam to apologize for having killed U.S. soldiers.
The 2-State Solution’s Nuclear Option by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)
“[..] for Biden and Blinken to posture in favor of a two-state solution so aggressively, it must be done with the working assumption that a post-conflict Israel will be governed by a political leader capable of supporting an idea which had been extinguished, in so far as Israeli politics is concerned, nearly three decades ago.”
“One of the major policy issues facing the Nixon administration was the status of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. The Nixon administration was firmly committed to the NPT, and as such was obligated to adhere to U.S. laws prohibiting the sale of military technology to a nation operating in violation of the NPT or, as in the case of Israel, possessed nuclear weapons capability outside of the framework of the NPT.”
“In 1989, South Africa elected a new president, F. W. de Klerk, who quickly realized that the political winds were changing and that the country could very well, in the span of a few years, fall under the control of black nationalists led by Nelson Mandela. To prevent that, De Klerk took the unprecedented decision to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state and open its nuclear program for inspection and dismantlement. South Africa joined the NPT in 1991; by 1994, all South Africa’s nuclear weapons had been dismantled under international supervision.”
Amazing what you can do when you’re afraid that negroes will get their hands on nukes.
“[…] if the United States is serious about creating the conditions of a long and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, then it should use all the leverage at its disposal to pressure Israel to voluntarily disarm itself of nuclear weapons.”
I cannot imagine this happening until Israel or the U.S. or both hit rock bottom. They still think they have too much leverage, too much sovereignty over the world. They still feel that they can ignore world opinion. They’re almost certainly right, at least for now.
Comparing How the West and China Offer Loans to Developing Countries by John P. Ruehl (CounterPunch)
“These impasses underscore the challenges being faced by the decades-old Western-dominated financial system and lending initiatives.”
It looks very much like China’s trying to build future trading partners and markets, while Empire wants interest, debt slavery, and vulture capitalism. We used to tell ourselves that Empire used to do what China seems to be doing now, like after WWII with the Marshall Plan. It’s entirely possible that China’s BRI is just as much subterfuge as that plan was. It’s always so difficult to tell without much more research, without being able to read Mandarin.
“The World Bank focuses more on long-term assistance through loans and grants, supporting infrastructure and poverty reduction in developing countries.”
JFC. That is absolutely not what it actually does. That might be its mission statement, but the World Bank and IMF are enforcers, not assisters.
“Efforts to democratize these institutions have been made, but both the IMF and World Bank still remain under significant Western influence. Western countries are overrepresented on the IMF’s board and voting arrangements, while all the IMF’s managing directors have been European. All the World Bank’s presidents except for Bulgarian national Kristalina Georgieva, who served as acting president in 2019, have been U.S. citizens, and the voting shares of the bank have not been rearranged since 2010. Both institutions are based in Washington, D.C.”
“Through its robust, globally integrated economy, technological expertise , and extensive industrial power, Beijing can help fund and build projects on a scale that rivals the West in a way not even the Soviet Union could achieve. Furthermore, Chinese assistance does not require political and economic reforms typically attached to Western developmental initiatives.”
“[…] while allegations of Chinese debt diplomacy are often exaggerated in Western media, Chinese economic opportunism has increased debt burdens and debt-for-equity swaps with BRI partners.”
“The article noted that Israel’s use of 2,000-pound bombs eclipses anything seen in previous 21st century wars. The Times reported, citing a US official, that “roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs weighing 1,000 to 2,000 pounds.”
“The Times wrote, “In fighting during this century, by contrast, US military officials often believed that the most common American aerial bomb—a 500-pound weapon—was far too large for most targets when battling the Islamic State in urban areas like Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria.””
War Is Not Abstracted Anymore by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“You hear this “where were the protests over Yemen and Syria?” talking point over and over again from Israel apologists, the argument essentially being that because few people protested the mass killings in those countries then Israel should get to do a little genocide of its own, as a treat.”
The line of reasoning essentially admits that Israel is executing a depraved attack. It is complaining that anti-Semitism is the reason that it’s not getting away with it anymore. Netanyahu throws in Anti-Americanism too, just to trigger a bunch of Americans.
“[…] when the west lays waste to a country using military explosives it’s normally a fast ordeal which moves from manufacturing consent to execution very quickly. By the time people figure out they were lied to about the justifications for a depraved war the empire is usually two or three new wars down the track.”
Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn by Christopher Lydon (Radio Open Source)
“Just a month into the ferociously brutal and reckless war in Israel-Palestine, on what feels like a hinge of history—outcomes wildly uncertain—our refuge is Chas Freeman, the American diplomat, strategist, and historian. We call Chas our “chief of intelligence” in the realm of world order and disorder. Chas Freeman calls himself sick at heart at the war crimes abounding in this war, some aided and abetted by the United States, he says.
“We’re at a turning point, he’s telling us—not far, perhaps, from nervous breakdown.”
“The world’s patience with us . . . is coming to an end.”
The Kiss of Death by Spencer Ackerman (Reddit)
Like, this is A+. No notes.
“Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies.
“The infamy of Nixon’s foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history’s worst mass murderers. A deeper sham attaches to the country that celebrates him.”
Anthony Bourdain on Kissinger (Reddit)
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
Roaming Charges: The Dr. Caligari of the American Empire by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“When asked about the forced displacement of Micronesians from the Marshall Island so that the US could detonate nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll, Kissinger quipped: “There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?””
“Atmospheric CO2 is 422.36 parts per million, 5.06ppm more than the same day last year. The increase over the last 12 months is the largest ever recorded – more than double the last decade’s annual average.”
“[…] according to the UN’s new report, emissions will be reduced by only 2% by 2030 which will result in 3°C (5.4°F) of warming. But even that isn’t guaranteed since the 2% reductions are based on pledged policies not current policies.”
“By simply allowing forests to grow old and restoring degraded forests, ecologists estimate that at least 226 gigatonnes of carbon could be sequestered, an amount roughly equivalent to the last 50 years of US emissions. More than 60% of this potential could be realized merely by protecting standing forests.”
“Over the last 20 years, coal power plants in the US killed at least 460,000 people, twice as many premature deaths as previously thought. According to a new study published in Science, much of the increase is owing to a new understanding of the dangers of PM2.5, toxic air pollutants known as fine particulate matter that elevate the risk of life-threatening medical conditions including asthma, heart disease, low birth weight and some cancers.
“According to the European Environment Agency, toxic air killed more than half a million people in the EU in 2021. Nearly half of those deaths could have been prevented by cutting pollution to the limits recommended by the World Health Organization.”
“The last twelve months of post-Covid America have averaged 7,100 deaths from COVID a month (85,200 a year). By contrast, the last twelve months have averaged 800 deaths from Influenza a month (9,600 a year).”
“Joe Lapado, Desantis’s anti-vax Surgeon General, landed a prized tenured professorship at the University of Florida without any vetting. Lapado receives a $262,000 salary on top of his $250,000 salary as Surgeon Gen. But he teaches no classes, doesn’t do any research, and goes AWOL whenever the university asks him to do any work. In his first year on the “job,” Lapado only visited the Gainesville Medical School twice.”
“Big Pharma has contended for decades that the reason new drug prices in the US are so much higher than in the rest of the world is the “cost of innovation.” But China’s new cancer drug Toripalimab is now approved in the US, where a single-dose vial will have a wholesale price of US$8,892, thirty times more than the cost in the country where it was developed, where it is sold for US$280.”
Antisemitin des Tages: Greta Thunberg. Ja geht’s noch? by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Der aktuelle SPIEGEL widmet der „Greta-Frage“ als Titelthema gleich ganze 14 Seiten; 14 Seiten, auf denen sich der SPIEGEL fragt, ob die Schwedin „Antisemitin oder einfach nur naiv“ ist und die Antwort trotz Fragezeichen gleich mitbringt: Ja, das Vorbild unserer Kinder ist eine Antisemitin. Was hat Thunberg verbrochen, wird man sich nun fragen. Doch auf diese Frage findet man auch nach mehrfacher Lektüre der SPIEGEL -Titelstory keine Antwort.”
“Findige Investigativjournalisten entdeckten jedoch einen Stofftierkraken und „das Bild des Kraken, dessen Tentakel die Welt umspannen, [sei] eine Chiffre, die direkt an die antisemitische NS-Propaganda anschließt“. Fall geklärt. Thunberg ist eine Antisemitin, die über geheime Chiffren unsere Kinder zum Judenhass aufstachelt. Später erklärte Thunberg erstaunt, dass es sich bei dem Stofftier um ein Therapiemittel für autistische Kinder handele. Aber das ließen die Inquisitoren der Medien nicht gelten. Laut WELT seien dies „schon recht große Zufälle, zumal unter der Krake [ein] Kissen mit Pilzen zu sehen [sei] und eines der bekanntesten Propagandabücher der Nazis hieß: ´Der Giftpilz´“. Wie abartig kann Journalismus sein?”
They’re getting stupider and crasser by the second.
“Diese Argumentation ist wirklich nur noch als boshaft zu bezeichnen. Wer also das Leid der Palästinenser beklagt, ohne zuvor in einem Ceterum censeo die israelischen Opfer des Hamas-Angriffs vom 7. Oktober zu beklagen, ist ein Antisemit? Und um dies zu belegen, führt man sogar den Holocaust an? Geht’s auch noch absurder, lieber SPIEGEL?”
“Gerade in Sachen Klimapolitik konnten die Grünen nicht liefern und mehr wird der Rigorismus in der Klimabewegung, den Thunberg anders als ihre karriereorientierte und mittlerweile handzahme deutsche Mitstreiterin Luisa Neubauer vertritt, von den Grünen mit Argwohn als Bedrohung gesehen.”
“Während die deutschen Medien es geschafft haben, den Nahostkonflikt mal wieder unter dem Label „Antisemitismus“ einzuordnen, interessiert diese urdeutsche Sichtweise außerhalb des Einflussbereiches deutscher Medien nur die wenigsten.”
“Und wie bei vielen anderen Themen muss das deutsche Establishment auch beim Nahostkonflikt lernen, dass der Rest der Welt sich nicht sonderlich für die deutsche Perspektive interessiert. Mit absurden Moralpredigten und Antisemitismusvorwürfen wird man daran ganz sicher nichts ändern können.”
German politicians and media attack Greta Thunberg for condemning the genocide in Gaza by Joshua Seubert (WSWS)
“The statements from Thunberg’s circle are “intolerably antisemitic and reflect a political world view that lacks basic democratic values,” Klein told the KNA news agency. “Anyone who propagates such attitudes has disqualified themself as a role model for young people.””
Based on what? How many Israelis have died since the first day? How many civilians? I wrote those questions as I read the article, but I’ve now had a chance to look up the answer. It turns out that about 100 additional Israelis have died in the subsequent seven weeks since the initial attack by Hamas on October 7th. For more information, see Casualties of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war (Wikipedia)
“The president of the German-Israeli Association (DIG) and leading Green politician Volker Beck wrote on X that Thunberg was “from now on a full-time Israel hater.” And the editor-in-chief of WeltN24, Ulf Poschardt, posted the tweet: “St. Greta Thunberg is hardcore antisemitic.””
This is so sad. There are so many idiots and patsies in the halls of power. What kind of system bubbles these people to the top? A corrupt, venal one.
GENERAL TO GENERAL by Seymour Hersh (SubStack)
I’m not actually subscribed to Hersh, but I’ve seen good interviews with him and read his long-form essays. I admire him as a journalist and trust his reporting. However, I’ve been ignoring him a bit on Israel because he doesn’t know how to report on it. He knows he can’t just back Israel to the hilt, but he also can’t quite bring himself to report on the situation as openly, clearly, and truthfully as he does on so many others.
I cite this article as a case in point, highlighting one phrase from the first paragraph,
“It’s been a rough couple of months for President Joe Biden and his feckless foreign policy team. Israel is going its own way in its war against Hamas, with renewed bombing in Gaza, and the American public is bitterly divided, all of which is reflected in polls that continue to be unfavorable to the White House.”
I wonder if people who characterize things like this feel remorse later. Hersh has reported on so many issues of import—Mai Lei, Abu Ghraib, Osama bin Laden’s murder, the Nordstream II bombing—and he’s so often been on the other side of mealy-mouthed reporting like the style he indulges in above. The whole paragraph is mealy-mouthed: “renewed bombing”, “bitterly divided”, “unfavorable”. How should he have written it.
It’s been a rough couple of months for President Joe Biden and his feckless foreign policy team. The U.S. cheers on and supplies weapons for Israel, as it blows the bloody hell out of Gaza and its mostly civilian and underaged population with weapons far larger than even the U.S. is willing to use in its campaigns, and killing people at a pace massively exceeding that of Russia in Ukraine. The so-called leadership of the U.S.—the self-styled elites, regardless of party affiliation—are in unison, as the rift with the public yawns ever wider. The greatest democracy in the world continues its disgusting practice of utterly ignoring what its people want, even in a situation that is so morally simple, and where the U.S. could exercise its power to urge—and obtain—restraint. Even U.S. citizens are registering their displeasure in plummeting polls for Joe Biden.
Dan Goldman, Democrats, Make a Clown Show of Censorship Hearing by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a garbage human being. Taibbi linked to a video of her portion of the hearing and she’s nearly impossibly rude. She also has terrible elocution and can barely pay attention to what she’s doing. The whole hearing has the air of a Soviet-style trial. She’s always been terrible, but I haven’t seen her in action for many years. I wasn’t able to watch more than a minute or so.
“[…] the “trusted flaggers” in laws like the Digital Services Act and programs like the Election Integrity Partnership will always, in 100% of cases, be administered by affluent, professional-class Americans insisting on advanced degrees from favored institutions as prerequisites for entry. Stripped of all the tearful rhetoric about “countering hate” and “reducing harm,” anti-disinformation was, I said, just another “bluntly elitist gatekeeping” scam.”
“[…] [the Democrats] are not just morally absent cynics, as I always used to imagine, they’re the bad guys, and America This Week co-host Walter Kirn is right: stopping them electorally is probably the only way forward.”
“Nobody in media is a speech “absolutist.” We navigate libel and defamation laws every time we publish. The huge difference with the new model is that it’s arbitrary, corporate, and non-transparent. Speech issues are decided not by judges and juries, but handfuls of executives.”
“I’m actually not an absolutist. I just believe the previous litigation-based system was a much better way to deal with problematic speech − with the current method there is no due process, no transparency, and the question of who does and does not get suppressed is arbitrary.”
Elon Musk on X antisemitism controversy: “Don’t advertise. Go f*** yourself” by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)
Look, this whole article is garbage. It’s about a garbage interview with what is basically a garbage person. But it’s kind of great how everybody misinterprets everything.
““If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself,” Musk said.”
I mean, yes, obviously. The interviewer literally cannot conceive that Musk truly does not give a shit about “losing” $40B that he can just write off. He’s still the richest person in the world. It. Doesn’t. Matter. It’s like if you were going to try to blackmail me by withholding $100.
“On November 15, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth” to an X post that said Jewish communities are “pushing hatred against whites.” A White House spokesperson condemned Musk’s post as “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate.””
Look, who the hell cares what the White House says? They’re a bunch of hyper-Zionist idiots. The post I saw Musk respond to was very provocative, but only because the Overton Window on the issue of Israel and Zionism is so far to the right in the U.S.—as it is in Germany and other places in Europe—that there is literally not discussion allowed. It is absolutely a fact that some Jewish communities “push hatred against whites.” This is not news.
The show should be called “Piers Morgan Self-censored”, but it’s more even-handed than I’d expected. At about 08:00, he doesn’t accept that Norman characterizes certain events of October 7th as atrocities. No, he wants Norman to agree that October 7th was an act of terrorism.
This focus on the extremely vague word “terrorism” is silly. There is not enough known to characterize what happened as terrorism. Most of the news from that day came on that day, from Israel and the IDF. Subsequent news about that day—again, from the Israeli press, government, and IDF—have walked back a lot of the assertions about what happened that day. If only one civilian were killed, does that still qualify as terrorism? What is the definition we’re supposed to be using? Can’t we just say that it sounds like pretty horrifying things happened, but that weren’t not sure who did what on that day?
At 13:30, Piers says,
“It seems to me, what you’re trying to paint, is a picture of some kind of moral justification for what Hamas did. And that’s where you lose me. Because I don’t why there could be anyone who could see the scale of what Hamas did on October 7th and not simply condemn it out of hand.”
Because “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”.
He goes on,
“You may also want to condemn some of the response by Israel. That’s completely normal. I would say that there are serious question marks about the proportionality of what they’ve been doing. But if you can’t start from a basic humanity position of ‘what happened on October 7th was a disgusting terror attack worthy of condemnation,’ then, for me, I find it very hard to then respect anyone’s demand for people to condemn Israel and their response.”
He doesn’t hear how biased he is, just in that statement. He demands that we all accept the story of seven weeks ago, without adjustment. We must call it terror. Perhaps he doesn’t think it should be considered unprovoked, but that’s the dominant narrative. But for Israel, there are only “question marks about the proportionality of their response”. There is no demand to call it terror, even though the terror has been much more thoroughly documented. State actors do not commit terror in Morgan’s world. Hamas does not have the right to attack Israel in the same way that Israel has the right to attack Palestine. He can’t bend his mind around it.
Instead, at 17:45, he characterizes the situation as Hamas’s provocations, with Israeli responses. It’s quite breathtaking. I would almost believe it, if I didn’t know any better. How could someone on international news possibly be so wrong? So deliberately mendacious? Impossible. I must be wrong. One could easily be led to think that Israel must truly be the aggrieved party here, a country that is only guilty of being better armed than its enemy, which doesn’t know well enough to leave it alone.
At 18:20, he turns up the heat of his argument to say,
“Where you and I differ about this is that I think what happened on October 7th is on a different scale to anything we’ve ever seen, on the way it was carried out. I just don’t think that saying that people were oppressed—which they undoubtedly were, for many years—that that justifies them committing that act of terror.”
Jesus Christ, do a modicum of research. The violence on October 7th was absolutely not unique in history. It wasn’t even unique this year. Even Israel’s carpet-bombing was learned at the knee of the U.S., which has flattened dozens of countries in the last century and a couple of handfuls this century. Get a grip, Piers.
He posits an acts of terror, with undefined boundaries. That is, he allows the boundaries of the act of terror to remain implied, up to the interpretation of the listener. It was a terrorist attack, carried out by … whom? Does he consider Hamas to be military? Does he consider anything done by Hamas to be terroristic by definition? Or would it be legitimate military activity for them to attack military bases? What about soldiers? On-duty? Off-duty? Police officers? Reservists? Where is the line to “terror”?
Obviously, complete civilians are way over the line. But it’s not clear what actually happened.
But Piers is just working with the picture painted by the IDF on the first day or two. It’s a figment of propaganda that he’s demanding be accepted as the initial condition of the argument.
He goes on to argue that absolutely nothing could justify an attack like that. I suppose not even an equivalent one? So then, does he mean to say that Israel is also completely unjustified in its attack on Palestine? That would be the logical conclusion, but I fear that logic doesn’t enter into it.
This line of inquiry is all without even discussing the difference between justifying something and explaining it, which have been conflated as long as mankind has communicated. Anyone who wasn’t surprised by this attack—other than that it was possible at all—is considered to be sympathetic to it. It’s not surprising that Palestinians lashed out viciously against their occupiers and oppressors. It’s similarly not surprising that Israelis don’t care about Palestinians at all—their are literally awash in propaganda that they are superior in every way, and that Palestinians are dirty, dirty street people, incapable of actual human feeling and interaction, and are like animals, to be slaughtered if they become a nuisance. They hear this from day one. It takes a tremendous effort to turn your mind around in such a strong current.
Piers clearly isn’t capable of doing it, but at least he’s relatively polite to Norm. He just keep on coming though, “why have you not removed that SubStack, given that the language is so clearly offensive to people?” Why have you not censored yourself? When we’ve all been telling you to do it? How is it possible that you think you’re able to express an opinion that we’ve expressed disapproval of? Norm replies that removing it would be “intellectually dishonest”. I mean, Norm could write a note at the top, indicating the context within which he wrote the article.
People are saying that this is a good interview, but it’s actually pretty shit. Piers is utterly uninterested in anything that Finkelstein actually knows. Instead, he just wants to scold Norman for having posted a celebratory article on October 7th. Literally, the whole 27-minute interview is only about that. We don’t get a single question about Norman’s scholarship, about what might have led him to celebrate the Palestinians having broken out of their cage. Nothing. No information at all in this interview, other than to learn more about Finkelstein personally. This is not untypical TV “journalism”.
At 24:30, Norman says,
“I once asked my late mother. I said to her, ‘what was your feeling when you heard that the German cities were being terror-bombed during World War II? The carpet-bombing of the German cities targeting civilians…what was your feeling?’
“And my mother’s response to me was, ‘our feeling was: if we’re going to to die, we’re going to take some of them with us.‘
“Now, that’s not the most morally elevated statement, I agree. And do I wish my mother had, and my father had, a heightened sensitivity to German civilian life? I suppose I would wish it.
“But I will tell you Pierce: to the last day of my parents’ life [sic], it was unthinkable that they would have a kind word to say about Germans and it was unthinkable that I would ever quarrel with them on that point. I accepted.
“I accepted that, given their life experience, they had the right to hate the people who destroyed their lives. And the people [of] Gaza have the right to hate the people who [have] destroyed their lives.”
The Sting is Stung by Rich Gibson (CounterPunch)
“United Auto Workers” piecard Shawn Fain, the Big Three Auto Bosses, and Democrats like the war criminal Joe Biden, touched noses, shared grins and a wink, declared the fraudulent UAW contracts ratified by the rank and file. Now they go back to harsh exploitation as usual.”
“The entire US labor movement believes in “partners in production,” the unity of labor bosses and Big Bosses “in the national interest.”, Contrary to the author, all US unions are all what was once know as company unions. The centrality of Marx’s class war and imperialism is long forgotten, erased by a terrible education system which eradicates history, and the counterfeit unions themselves.”
“As with most UAW ratification votes of the past, few outside the inner circle ever saw the full contract. Rather, the UAW typically circulates a Summary, usually stocked with mis-information. It is unlikey that the New Yorker fact checkers even had time to review a full contract.”
Fast Fashion Is Antithetical to Workers’ Rights by Sonali Kolhatkar (CounterPunch)
“Police recently fatally shot a 23-year-old mother and sewing machine operator named Anjuara Khatun after firing at protesters.”
“sewing-machine operator”? Do they mean seamstress?
“A survey of about 1,000 factories in Bangladesh, published in early 2023, revealed that companies like Zara and H&M underpaid factories for garment purchases, making it harder for them to pay their workers. When the COVID-19 pandemic led to global shutdowns, large retailers canceled orders and delayed payments. One industry expert told The Guardian , “Only when suppliers are able to plan ahead, with confidence that they will earn as expected, can they deliver good working conditions for their workers.” Rather than dip into their profits to compensate for the market slowdown in 2020, many global brands simply refused to keep their financial commitments to Bangladesh’s factories, leading to downward pressure on wages.”
This is indistinguishable from outright oppression and slavery, dressed up as a trade relationship. Poor people starve as they try to scrape together a living, while their labor produces profits for the already exceedingly wealthy, and inexpensive clothes for the only moderately so.
“The Rana Plaza disaster was a turning point for Bangladesh’s garment industry as workers were seen as dispensable pawns by governments and industries alike. In the wake of the disaster, North American brands refused to join other global companies in signing on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Citing high costs, they chose instead to form their own alliance for inspecting factories, one that applied lower safety standards. It was a stark indicator of where these companies’ priorities lay, one that frames their current lip service to higher wages for garment workers.”
Always the soft language. Both the action and the language describing it is reprehensible.
Can We Imagine a World Without Work? by Rachel Fraser (Boston Review)
“Cleaning, like cooking, childbearing, and breastfeeding, is a paradigm case of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is a special form of work. It doesn’t itself produce commodities (coffee pots, silicon chips); rather, it’s the form of work that creates and maintains labor power itself, and hence makes the production of commodities possible in the first place. Reproductive labor is low-prestige and (typically) either poorly paid or entirely unwaged. It’s also obstinately feminized: both within the social imaginary and in actual fact, most reproductive labor is done by women. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that political discussions of work often treat reproductive labor as an afterthought.”
“For the post-work tradition—whose influence on the Anglo-American left has been growing for the last decade—the aim of radical politics should not (just) be for higher wages, more secure employment, or more generous parental leave. Rather, radical politics should aim for a world in which work’s social role is utterly transformed and highly attenuated—a world in which work can no longer serve as either a disciplining institution or the fulcrum for our social identities.”
“Wilde gives little thought to the soul of woman under socialism. While the machine frees men from “that sordid necessity of living for others,” it does not lend a hand with the laundry, or feeding the baby. Even in the age of the machine, it seems, women are mopping up after others.”
“A world where no one spends tedious hours on the assembly line is a world worth aspiring to. But a world where no one nurses their children or cooks food for their friends? That sounds like a nightmare.”
“[…] under capitalism, we are not free to choose and pursue our own ends; we are forced into projects that we value only instrumentally. We mop floors, deliver packages, or babysit not because we think these activities have value in and of themselves, but because we need the money. We act on the world, yes, but we cannot properly express ourselves within it.”
As long as floors need to be mopped, and packages need to be delivered, then we should change society to value that kind of work appropriately.
““Laboring over a hot stove,” Hester and Srnicek write, “can take on the quality of being a freely chosen activity in the arc of a larger self-directed goal.” Hester and Srnicek, then, are not advocating indolence. For them, the problem with work is not that it is effortful. Humans are agents. We make and we do. Work, though, catches our making and doing in a trap: it is caged agency. Hester and Srnicek want us to open the cage.”
“Capitalism, says the crisis theorist, is a flawed economic system not because it is (say) cruel, but because it is a self-undermining system. It destroys its own capacity to function.”
“Capitalism, he thinks, requires that workers play two roles: they need to make things, but they also need to buy them. Eventually, these two roles will come into conflict. Suppose that a commodity is overproduced, so that its supply outstrips demand. Its price will fall. To compensate, factory owners will cut costs or slow production. And that means they will pay their workers less or lay them off. Consumer demand will then further contract, incentivizing further wage cuts, which will further suppress demand. Worker and capitalist will both be trapped in an ever-tightening fist of economic dysfunction.”
“Despite the “industrial revolution in the home” in the first half of the twentieth century, full-time housewives spent more hours per week on housework in 1960s (fifty-five) than they did in 1924 (fifty-two). Social expectations tend to ratchet up alongside technological proficiency. If it now takes half the time it used to take to hoover—well, you’ll just be expected to hoover twice as much.”
Wtf is wrong with people? Also: do people actually care? Which social strata are we talking about? Who is expecting twice as much vacuuming?
“The United States’ car-focused public infrastructure prevents its citizens from doing simple things, like walking to work. When it comes to social arrangements, technology both adds options and takes them away. It destroys some forms of compulsion while creating its own mandates. It need not roll back the sphere of necessity.”
“After Work attempts to show that demands for social protection—specifically in the form of care—can be met without compromising on emancipation. Existing models of care provision tend heavily towards privatization: your care is either a business (traded on the open market), or nobody’s business but yours (a family affair). After Work suggests a third option: care should be communal. Households should be more porous—for example, they should share communal goods and spaces—and they should no longer be the centers of gravity around which informal relations of care revolve.”
“When I read After Work , I was visiting my brother in Edinburgh, and we sat talking about it on the bus. He was enthusiastic about the idea that more of our lives should take place in shared spaces. Then a baby started to scream, and we couldn’t talk for the rest of the journey. “I guess this is why people like cars,” my brother said, darkly.”
You get used to it. Sometimes. Babies and children are a special case because you can’t reasonably make them behave if they really don’t want to. The same for mentally handicapped or inebriated people. If they don’t want to sit quietly, then they’re not going to sit quietly. Yes, when you travel on a train, there are other people there, over whom you only have a tiny bit of control. The system works because everyone plays along. If someone plays their radio, or talks on a speakerphone, then someone’s going to have to intervene. The train is generally quite quick, has a dependable schedule, and is piloted by someone else, freeing me up to read and nap instead.
“No transition to a post-work world is (democratically) possible unless people can be persuaded that the form of life on offer in the communal feeding center is a form of life that they would want.”
Brainwashing is a solved problem. We used it to convince people that sitting alone at home, ordering things through a screen, having them delivered, poorly, then complaining about it to a chat robot afterwards was something that they would want. We can convince them that interacting with humans is cool, too.
“Automated reproductive labor doesn’t guarantee more free time. We must also lower our collective standards.”
We must change, not lower our priorities, not standards. The author’s formulation is counterproductive and establishes a false narrative.
“They do acknowledge that “not everybody would feel comfortable living in fully collectivized living spaces for any great length of time, and many will want more than a single bedroom to retreat to.””
A single bedroom to retreat to is considered a luxury for 80% of humanity. What you’re saying is that, for the people who’ve become accustomed to having the lion’s share of the fruits of labor in the world, getting less is going to take getting used to. Everyone else would consider it an upgrade. The revolution will not be kind to the elites. It never is.
“[…] collective living, they are clear, “cannot be imposed from the top down.””
Why not? Literally everything else is imposed from the top down. The top generally uses brainwashing to pretend that it came from the bottom up. Do you think that so many people have hyper-consumerist, hyper-social-media-addicted lifestyles because they enjoy them? At any rate, reality will eventually force it, even on those that think themselves immune–the hyper-elite-adjacent–through the exigency of capitalism eating itself and climate collapse.
“In the lesbian separatist communities of second wave feminism—the landdyke commune, the Oregon-based “WomanShare”—participants dug ditches, converted livestock outbuildings into homes, and went in for low-tech farming. Under different conditions, such work could easily be alienating. But when folded into a larger political project to which the women freely subscribed, even their drudgery became meaningful—an expression of agency, rather than a straitening of it.”
The author seems to be fundamentally physically lazy, incapable of imagining physical labor as rewarding, as anything other than drudgery. So many people work in their gardens, at so-called drudgery, but why? Because the work is its own reward. Because being outside is its own reward. Because we are biological beings with relatively simple triggers that are there to offer rewards without the intervention or mediation of technology companies or any capitalist entity. This is why we are taught to consider anything that doesn’t require mediation by our betters bad, to be drudgery.
“Suppose you work faster than I do. Do you have to work the same number of hours that I work, and therefore perform more tasks? Or do you have to complete the same number of tasks as I do, in which case I will have to work more hours?”
Or do you suck so bad, you don’t have to do it at all?
“So long as we have sufficient time to choose and pursue our own projects, it should not matter too much that there will still be allotments of necessity: parcels of time that are not truly our own. And, perhaps, these refractory parcels could even be packaged as a feature, rather than a bug.”
She’s coming around.
“If an expansion of the realm of freedom is an expansion of the realm of choice, then perfect freedom might, in effect, exile us from certain forms of goodness. A life composed only of self-realization will tend to create a self of the sort that doesn’t deserve to be realized. Unwanted work can serve as a teacher, shushing the would-be brat that lurks in every human heart.”
I mean .. duh. But, yes, exactly! Discipline is so important to building people worth associating with.
“When a sulky teenager is made to set the table by her parents, her labor is alienated; she would rather be doing something else. Her activity is unchosen and imposed; she refuses to avow the purposes it serves. But to know whether the teenager is wronged, it is not enough to know how she feels about setting the table. Rather, we need to ask questions like: Does the teenager’s work benefit a community that is oriented toward her flourishing? Does the community weigh her claims and interests equally to those of its other members? Does she have a meaningful say over its policies, priorities, and direction?”
Also: who the heck else is going to set the table? Seriously, what was that teenager that was more important? Someone else is probably imposing on their own freedom to cook a meal for that teenager, but we’re forced to consider the imposition on literally the least-useful member of the community?
Going cashless by Brett Scott (Aeon)
“the public has swallowed a false just-so story that says we are pining for a cashless society. All over the world, public and private sector leaders claim that ‘our’ desire for speed, convenience, scale and interconnection drives an inevitable digital transition. This is supposed to bring a ‘frictionless’ world of digital payment-fuelled commerce, done at the click of a button or scan of the iris. The message is: keep up or else face being left behind”
“Physical cash is issued by governments (via central banks), whereas the units in your bank account are basically ‘digital casino chips’ issued by the likes of Barclays, HSBC and Santander. ‘Cashless society’ is a privatisation , in which power over payments is transferred to the banking sector. Every tap of a contactless card or Apple Pay triggers banks into moving these digital casino chips around for you. It gives them enormous power, revenue and data.”
“Cash is hard to automate. It cannot be plugged into globe-spanning digital infrastructures. It operates at human scale and speed within a system that increasingly demands inhuman scale and speed. It’s creating ‘friction’ at a systemic level, so even if you like cash at a local level, you’ll gradually find yourself coerced away from it.”
“For example, Lloyds Bank, guided by shareholder demands for profits, shuts down physical branches to cut costs by pushing you on to automated apps. Having no branches makes it harder for small businesses to deposit cash, so they are nudged toward putting up signs saying ‘We’re cashless.’ That then sends a message to customers that there’s something newly unacceptable about cash.”
This is where the increasing profits come from. It’s not that the banks aren’t making money, but that they need to make an increasing amount of profit every year. That means slicing away more and more services, until there’s no service left.
“[…] people will notice that banks have shut down many ATMs, with the banks justifying this by saying their customers are ‘going digital’, but this creates a self-fulfilling prophesy because removing ATMs lowers public access to cash, making it harder to use. Lloyds and other banks then see the resulting up-tick in digital finance as implicit permission to close down further branches.”
“Hipster cafés in London have signs saying ‘We’ve gone cashless’; what they are actually saying is ‘We’ve joined an automation alliance with Big Finance, Big Tech, Visa and Mastercard. To interact with us you must interact with them.’”
That’s what I’ve been telling people for years. I want the convenience without the cartels. Hipster cafes have no idea who the real enemy is. Unsurprising, but still frustratingly sad.
“Left-wing thinkers reject this freemarket dogma, pointing out that some industries are powerful enough to effectively legislate the conditions of our lives. We all know that firms invest heavily in warping our perceptions via marketing, and often secure our consent only through tricks and misrepresentation. Left-wing calls for government regulation in turn compel freemarketeers to accuse them of stifling both popular will and business.”
“Libertarians have always faced a tension when complaining about the surveillance that accompanies cashless society. This is because digital payment systems are pushed by private sector fintech entrepreneurs, and libertarians are supposed to be pro-entrepreneurialism.”
That is such a simplistic view. Libertarians are allowed to have more nuanced views, no? They can be against entrepreneurism that takes away freedom, for example.
“The cashless system is run by transnational corporations, and the actually existing examples of payments control often concern welfare recipients: for instance, the Australian ‘cashless welfare card’ was a Visa card system that blocked Indigenous Australians on benefits from buying non-approved goods in non-approved stores. These systems not only limit choice, but can be used to push people’s business to big retailers, rather than small ones.”
“[…] we should see cash as being like the public bicycle of payments, and support efforts across the political spectrum to protect and promote it. Digital bank systems are the private Uber of payments: they may appear convenient, but total Uberisation unleashes demons that cash historically kept in check – surveillance, censorship, digital exclusion, and serious resilience and financial stability problems. The point isn’t to argue that everyone must always use the ‘bicycle’. It’s to ensure that we don’t get totally ‘Uberised’ in private and public life. We need to promote a healthy balance of power between different forms of money in the system, and that’s within our collective political abilities.”
Wealth Increases Under Joe Biden Haven’t Meant Much for Most People by Matt Bruenig (Jacobin)
““people should be more understanding about why their economic circumstances are worsening” is different from “people’s economic circumstances haven’t worsened,” which is the argument that so many have been making up to this point.”
“In this data, we see balances in checking and savings accounts increase in lockstep with the COVID welfare state (EIP refers to the stimulus checks). They reached their highest levels in early 2021 and have steadily declined ever since. Fair or not, watching your cash balance decline by 40 percent at the same time that incomes are being rocked by welfare cuts and inflation could make you dissatisfied with your personal finances.”
“[…] the wealth increase is overwhelmingly driven by used home and used car inflation. Over this period, the average value of primary residences increased by $47,459 for the median quintile. The average value of vehicles increased by $6,358. Together, primary residences and vehicle value growth was equal to 99 percent of the median quintile’s increase in net worth.”
“The jump in prices for used cars and used houses are real changes in net worth, but are also of limited utility to regular people who need their home and car in order to live their lives. People who have second homes and second cars could sell those assets in order to take advantage of the capital gains from the inflation. But that’s not something non-rich people generally have.”
“Home price increases can sometimes be accessed in place through things like home equity loans or home equity lines of credit. But with interest rates for these financial products now in excess of 9 percent, tapping home values for consumption in this way is not as viable as it once was.”
Die Haushaltskrise und die drei Elefanten im Raum by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Allein durch Streichung der Mehrausgaben im Verteidigungsbudget im Vergleich zu 2018 und durch Wegfall der Militärhilfen für die Ukraine wären also bereits mehr als 40 Milliarden Euro Einsparpotential möglich. Doch darüber spricht ja niemand. Das ist der zweite Elefant im Raum.”
“Der dritte Elefant sind die Kosten, die sich direkt und indirekt aus der Sanktionspolitik ergeben. Ohne die steigenden Energiekosten wäre der übergroße Teil der nun verfassungswidrig über Schattenhaushalte laufenden Subventionen ja gar nicht nötig. Würde Deutschland weiterhin preiswertes Erdgas aus Russland beziehen, müsste es beispielsweise keinen einzigen Cent für die Strom- und Gaspreisbremse, für die Strompreiskompensation für die Industrie oder die Defizite aus dem Wegfall der EEG-Umlage geben.”
“Um es auf den Punkt zu bringen: Ohne die übertriebenen Coronamaßnahmen und ohne die nur noch selbstmörderisch zu nennende Sanktions- und Kriegspolitik müssten wir nicht über das Stopfen von Haushaltslücken reden, sondern hätten einen Bundeshaushalt, der dicke Überschüsse hätte. Es war und ist die Politik der Ampel und ihrer Vorgängerkoalition, die uns den ganzen Kladderadatsch eingebrockt hat.”
“Die Liberalen wüten nämlich bereits und sehen in der Haushaltskrise ihre einmalige Chance, den Sozialstaat noch weiter abzubauen. Dazu muss man aber wissen, dass der Spielraum für Einsparungen selbst beim großen Sozialbudget eigentlich nur sehr klein ist, da ein Großteil der Ausgaben sich aus einem Rechtsanspruch herleitet.”
“Die FDP wäre aber nicht die FDP, wenn sie diese historische – und hausgemachte(!) – Situation nicht nutzen würde, um den Abbau der Sozialsysteme zu forcieren. Und die Grünen und die SPD können – vorausgesetzt, sie wollen das überhaupt – nicht viel dagegen tun. Über ihnen schwebt schließlich das Damoklesschwert Koalitionsbruch und Neuwahlen; und daran können alle Beteiligten bei den derzeitigen Umfragewerten kein Interesse haben.”
OpenAI Is a Strange Nonprofit by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)
“Like, you are a cutting-edge AI researcher, you come into work every day excited to do cutting-edge AI research, you succeed in doing cutting-edge stuff, and the board shows up and is like “hey this edge is too cutting, we worry it’s going to kill us all, slow it down there tiger.” It’s condescending! It stops you from doing the thing that you are committed to do! They’re Luddites!”
This is half-joking, but that’s the gist of it for many people when technology clashes with basic ethics. Money and personal fulfillment are paramount, while considering consequences takes a back seat. This is how children approach the world. It’s the “move fast and break things” mindset. It’s the “easier to ask for forgiveness than permission” mindset. It’s how we got a world full of nukes and CO2.
“To achieve that mission it will have to hire staff who are talented and driven enough to be the first to build AGI, but those staff will probably be more enthusiastic about AI, generally, than the mission calls for. Or you can hire staff who are super-nervous about AGI, but they probably won’t be the first ones to build it. So you hire the good AI developers, but you keep a watchful eye on them.”
This is insultingly simplistic. Capitalist thinking.
“Also, of course, the material conditions of the OpenAI staff are pretty unusual for a nonprofit: They can get paid millions of dollars a year and they own equity in the for-profit subsidiary, equity that they were about to be able to sell at an $86 billion valuation”
That’s all you need to know about the employees when you hear that they all support Altman. I mean, … no 💩. They know which side their bread is buttered on.
“I don’t mean to say that the board is right! The board really are outside kibbitzers! Between OpenAI’s staff, who know what they’re talking about but also kinda like building AI, and OpenAI’s board, who lean more to being AI-skeptical outsiders, I guess I’d bet on the staff being right. (Also if the board’s job is to prevent the development of rogue AI, burning down OpenAI is unlikely to accomplish that, just because there are competitors who will gleefully hire the staff.)”
I didn’t really have a phrase to highlight here, I just thought it was indicative of how Levine is kind of phoning in his take on this by supporting the |if we don’t do it someone else will” argument. Chimpanzees. The lot of you.
“[…] it kind of is illegal under US law for a foreign company to allow foreign customers to send money to Iran. If you operate a crypto exchange with absolutely no US customers at all, but you let terrorist organizations move money on it, the US is going to care. You can ring-fence yourself from the US and solve your securities-law problems, but that doesn’t work for your money-laundering or sanctions problems.”
Unreal. The Empire has spoken
Who Controls OpenAI? by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)
“That story is basically coherent, and it is, I think, roughly what at least some of OpenAI’s founders thought they were doing. OpenAI is, in this story, essentially a nonprofit, just one that is unusually hungry for computing power and highly paid engineers. So it took a calculated detour into the for-profit world. It decided to raise billions of dollars from investors to buy computers and engineers, and to use them to build a business that, if it works, should be hugely lucrative. But its plan was that, once it got there, it would send off the investors with a solid return and a friendly handshake, and then it would go back to being a nonprofit with a mission of benefiting the world. And its legal structure was designed to protect that path: The nonprofit always controls the whole thing, the investors never get a board seat or a say in governance, and in fact the directors aren’t allowed to own any stock in order to prevent a conflict of interest, because they are not supposed to be aligned with shareholders. “It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation,” its operating agreement actually says (to investors!), “with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.””
Adorably naive. The structure might stay the same, but capitalists don’t play by rules they don’t like. Capitalists are pirates, ethically rudderless.
“A week ago, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI “remained unprofitable due to training costs” and “expected ‘to raise a lot more over time’ from [Microsoft] among other investors, to keep up with the punishing costs of building more sophisticated AI models.””
“You just can’t mean that! There are limits! You can’t just call up Microsoft and be like “hey you know that CEO you like, the one who negotiated your $13 billion investment? We decided he was a little too commercial, a little too focused on making a profitable product for investors. So we fired him. The press release goes out in one minute . Have a nice day.” I mean, technically, you can do that, and OpenAI’s board did. But then Microsoft, when they recover from their shock, are going to call you back and say things like “if you want to see any more of our money you hire him back by Monday morning.” And you will say “no no no you don’t understand, we’re benefiting humanity here, we control the company, we have no fiduciary duties to you, our decision is what counts.” And Microsoft will tap the diagram — the second diagram — and say, in a big green voice: “MONEY.” And you still need money.”
Long story short: the money won, ignored the company’s charter, and threw out the board. They may claim they abided by the law, etc., but if you can’t tell the difference between what actually happened and piracy—except for the crooked, hand-drawn label on one that reads “not piracy”—then … it’s piracy.
“The boardroom coup at OpenAI really might have been, at least in part, about the board’s literal fears of AI apocalypse. But those fears are also, absolutely, a metaphor for Silicon Valley capitalism. The board looked at OpenAI and saw a CEO who was too focused on market share and profitability and expansion, and decided to stop him. This is not an uncommon concern for people to have about, say, social media companies — that they care more about the bottom line than about their impact on the world […]”
“However, scientists say the negative emissions will only be realised once new trees are planted and grow sufficiently to absorb the same amount of carbon dioxide – a process called the ‘carbon payback period’ that can take several decades. …”
That’s not just scientists saying that! Logic dictates it! It’s just how trees work! It’s not a matter of opinion!
““Previously, the carbon was embodied in the trees and was thus not in the atmosphere. Now, the CO2 is held below ground, so is still not in the atmosphere. But there has been no new ‘removal’ of CO2 from the atmosphere,” Booth stressed.”
A company can just continue to acquire gobs of cash from the government with this line of reasoning and it takes a lawsuit to stop them in our glorious world. And it will probably fail. And the money will continue to flow away from measures that might actually help.
Bitcoiner spends $3 million on transaction fee by Molly White (Web3 is Going Just Great)
“A Bitcoiner making a large transaction ended up spending 83.64 BTC (~$3 million) of the 139.42 BTC (~$5.1 million) transaction on transaction fees, effectively spending $3 million to send what ended up being a $2 million transfer. This likely error on the sender’s part has become the largest transaction fee in Bitcoin history.
“A similar incident occurred in September, when the Paxos crypto firm erroneously paid a $500,000 fee to send $1,865. They attributed the huge fee to a bug in their software, and the F2Pool mining pool (who had mined the block and received the fee) opted to return the overpayment.”
I wonder how much high transaction fees contribute to the HODL mentality and the increasing valuation of BitCoin and Ethereum.
Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala, India contained after 6 infections by Frank Gaglioti (WSWS)
“Nipah infection symptoms can range from nothing at all to severe flu symptoms including fever, cough, headache, shortness of breath and confusion. In some cases, the symptoms can be more severe, including the patient going into a coma, encephalitis (swelling of the brain) and seizures. The virus has a very high lethality ranging from 40–75 percent. It is a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) pathogen, the highest level, indicating its extreme danger to humans.”
“Disease ecologist and co-author of the paper Gregory Albery told the Guardian that climate change is “shaking ecosystems to their core” and causing interactions between species that are already likely to be spreading viruses.”
“Governments have proved completely incapable of resolving the climate crisis, which is completely subordinate to the interests of the corporate elite. This underscores that it is the working class along with principled scientists who have identified the ecological and health disaster that must create a society based on need, not profit.”
New surge of COVID-19 in Australia by Clare Bruderlin (WSWS)
“Professor Brendan Crabb told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) last week that it was, “likely a few hundred thousand people in Australia have [a COVID-19] infection now.” Crabb warned that “if we don’t do anything by the time this wave is over there will be 3, 4 or 5 million Australians who will get COVID in the next few months. There will be thousands of Australians who die early in the next few months as a result, there will be 50,000 to 100,000 cases of Long-COVID, there will be business disrupted and aged care facilities shut down…””
News of This World and the Next by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“This is a point that I think was made most compellingly by Simone Weil: “Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.” Atheism, she says, can have a purificatory power. Most of secular modernity is not even atheist, as it doesn’t even know what it’s missing.”
“To offer such reasons, it seems to me, is something like accommodating the demand of a stranger who would accost you to ask that you prove your spouse is objectively more worthy of your love than someone you have never met. The only appropriate response to this is that you have not entered into a love relationship with him or her on the basis of any argument for or against the viability of their candidacy. Your spouse is not an employee you’ve hired, and there was no CV to look at. Of course early on there might be some such rational calculation in the great majority of relationships, and consideration of objective traits might help many to attain a certain degree of stability with their eventual mate choice. But a posteriori the calculations fade away, and you are left simply with the fact of the love, and the absurdity of any argument in its defense.”
“Sometimes, “This’ll do” is experienced not so much as “settling”, but as the hard-won apprehension of a great transcendent truth.”
“Meanwhile, the Roma remain poor, not primitive, and utterly marginalized by a rigidly class-stratified continent that positively needs to keep at least one group of people permanently at the lowest rung. The one good thing to come of that letter was the edifying and memorable exchange I had with the editor who handled it, who at the time had recently adopted a Roma child whom she loved very much. She, and not I, I see now, was engaged in the thing that makes the world go round, and that may sometimes actually succeed in saving innocents from hell.”
“There is an aggressive, willful incuriosity there that just astounds me. Content to walk around on the surface of things, he does not even bother to stomp on that surface hard enough to hear the depths resounding below. But without an initial phase of bathymetry, any investigation, even in questions of morality and other matters of grave human concern, is going to keep ending up tragically inadequate to its purported object.”
This describes nearly everything you can find online.
Fotografiska’s Museum Chain Is Turning Artists into “Value Makers” for Venture Capital by Charlie Squire (Jacobin)
“Geneva Freeport, a 435,000-square-foot storage facility in Switzerland. If you tour the Geneva Freeport, you will see cigars, gold bars, luxury cars, and some of the building’s estimated three million bottles of luxury and vintage wines. What you won’t see are any of the 1.2 million works of art held in storage and valued at over $100 billion — by keeping Rothkos, Modiglianis, imperial Roman sarcophagi, and over one thousand works by Pablo Picasso at a freeport, they are legally classed as “in transit,” exempting owners from customs duties and tax liabilities as long as the art is stored.”
“What is different about Fotografiska is the total abstraction of art as market indicator: art not as objects and ideas with formal qualities and politics but as a gauge, a stand-in for financial growth, largely tied to the real-estate market.”
“In the creative economy, being an “artist” is no longer about being observant or thoughtful or sharp or witty or confrontational or confessional. Rather, the artist’s role is to generate profit: not only for themselves or their institution or their patrons, as was already true for some hundreds of years, but for real-estate speculators and venture capitalists.”
“In at least three separate points, gallery text notes that the art displayed is “provocative” and “confrontational,” yet no one seemed particularly provoked or confronted as they held one hand to a glass of wine and another to their chins. Fotografiska’s opening is a unique symptom of a metastasizing disease: a libertarian, financialized desire to reduce creativity to a system of metric transactions.”
This is an old video
Billionaires are out of touch and much too powerful. The planet is in trouble by Rebecca Solnit (The Guardian)
“The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66% . The rich are bad for the Earth, and the richer they are the bigger their adverse impact (including the impact of money invested in banks, and stocks financing fossil fuels and other forms of climate destruction).”
“[…] we are not all the same size. Billionaires loom large over our politics and environment in ways that are hard to understand without taking on the shocking scale of their wealth. That impact, both through their climate emissions and their manipulations of politics and public life means they are not at all like the rest of humanity. They are behemoths, and they mostly use their outsize power in ugly ways – both in how much they consume and how much they influence the world’s climate response.”
“But billionaires are a menace to the rest of us: their sheer political size warps our public life. Disproportionately older, white and male, they function as unelected powers, a sort of freelance global aristocracy who are too often trying to reign over the rest of us. Some critics think that the supergiant tech corporations that have spawned so many modern billionaires operate in ways that resemble feudalism more than capitalism, and, certainly, plenty of billionaires operate like the lords of the Earth while campaigning to protect the economic inequality that made them so rich and makes so many others so poor.”
“Look at how Musk bought Twitter – a crucial news source for millions of people in disasters and journalists and scientists everywhere – and turned it into X, a haven for antisemitism and unfiltered lies, including climate denial and disinformation,”
I’m bored of people pretending that Twitter was an enlightened paradise qua government service qua unbiased news source before. It told you what you wanted to hear. It was always a private corporation selling you advertising while selling your data. I don’t know how fair the characterization cited above are, now that Musk bought it, but I doubt that it’s gotten significantly worse.
It’s just that the people who were previously in charge of saying what was disinformation and what isn’t are no longer in charge—and they’re largely butthurt about it. Let’s not pretend that it’s a whole lot more than that. It’s convenient to claim that, once you’re no longer at the battlements defending freedom, that the service has descended into anti-semitism and madness. Sure, sure, I think I’ve heard that one before…
“it’s arguably a disqualification for participating in the affairs of ordinary people. Most billionaires are self-interested, protecting the very inequality and exploitation that made them so much richer than the rest of us.”
“On a thriving planet, human beings should be human scale, but the super-rich are on another scale altogether, giants trampling underfoot both nature and our efforts to protect it.”
OpenAI: Metaphysics in the C-Suite by Leif Weatherby (Jacobin)
“Sutskever’s faction, including board member Helen Toner, whose feud with Altman may have precipitated these events, is out. Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president who doubted that woman are good at science, is in. Altman’s return means that, in a fight about profit versus safety, profit won.”
“Both sides in this fight think artificial general intelligence (“AGI,” or human-level intelligence) is close. Altman said, the day before he was fired, that “four times” — one within the last few weeks — he had seen OpenAI scientists push “the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward.””
Altman sounds like a 19th-century huckster.
“Whether you think the good thing is unbiased machines or fending off a machine that learns to kill us, you’re basically missing the fact that AI is already a reflection of actual human values. The fact that that’s not good or neutral needs to be taken far more seriously.”
“The goal of alignment is like Isaac Asimov’s famous law of robotics that prevents machines from harming humans. Bias, falsehood, deceit: these are the real harms that machines stand to do to humans today, so aligning AI seems like a pressing problem. But the truth is that AI is very much aligned with human values, we just can’t stand to admit it.”
“Bostrom’s paper clips are also a major reason that the idea of AI as “existential risk” — the risk of human extinction, which Bostrom pushes in most of his writing — has come to national headlines . But the idea is pure nonsense, science fiction without any of the literary payoff or social insights of a futuristic novel. Worse, it is severely off the mark for the actual AI we are dealing with today. This type of thinking takes place entirely in a counterfactual mode, yet its basic framework informs most AI thinking today.”
“AI is capturing cultural bias on an unprecedented scale. It’s just that seeing that bias laid out before us is ugly and disturbing and, as Bender rightly points out, amplifying it is bad.”
“The value of discussions about AI alignment has largely been to show us what human language and culture are not. They are not “value-neutral,” they do not conform to any set of allegedly commonly held norms, and they are not based in scientific evidence or perception. There is no “neutral” standpoint from which to evaluate alignment, because the problem is indeed about values, which is stuff we fight over, where there’s no right answer.”
Aligned with whose value system? Many proponents for alignment—which is basically censorship—don’t think too much about whether their own values are worth promoting. They just assume that they are.
“It’s deeply unclear that Altman and Sutskever represent any collective, democratic “we” in this sense. Yet it’s equally hard to see how exactly a democratic “we” can regulate this cultural behemoth to bring it into line. The balance between government and business hasn’t been working for decades anyway, though, and AI is benefitting from capital’s social dominance. Slurping up culture, science, and geopolitics was always the next step.”
“Those Google scientists might have had a different reaction to the misogyny of the algorithm. They might have said: wow, our collective language harbors misogyny! Let’s figure out what that means. Rather than moving to an ill-defined concept of “alignment,” maybe they — and we — should have realized that they had an unprecedented tool for understanding bias, culture, and language, in their hands. After all, a computer spitting out misogynistic sentences is only a problem if you are seeking to market it as a product.”
“[…] in pragmatic terms, it’s a goal, not an idea. And that goal, even if it’s gift-wrapped in talk about safety driven by metaphysical delusions, is the commercialization of AI.”
“The rational thing would be to take these bots offline and use them to study our prejudices, the makeup of our ideologies, and the way language works and interacts with computation. Don’t hold your breath.”
The 6 Types of Conversations with Generative AI by Raluca Budiu, Feifei Liu, Emma Cionca, and Amy Zhang (Nielsen Norman Group)
“[…] different conversation types serve distinct information needs and demand varied UI designs. Second, there is no one optimal conversation length — both short and long conversations can be helpful, as they might support different user goals.”
“Note that, in funneling conversations, the user’s information need is usually specific and well-defined, but poorly articulated. In other words, the user will likely recognize a correct response, but will not be able (or sometimes will not be bothered) to say what that correct response should look like.”
“Consider explicitly telling the AI bot to ask helping questions to improve its output. For example, you may add phrasing such as Ask me questions if you need additional information, to get the bot to help you articulate the different constraints that you may be working with.”
“In exploring conversations, users can be supported with suggested followup prompts that naturally build upon the information presented in the bot’s answer.”
How is nobody talking about hallucinations and bias anymore? Are these things just too annoying to consider?
“I am not a professional bartender, but I have been studying “mixology” for the past year and do have all of the bar tools. I know how to make all of the classic cocktails. I would like a summer-themed cocktail menu of four to five drinks with clever names. I will put them on a framed menu on the counter in my outdoor kitchen and bar areas where I will make the drinks.”
Three things:
“It yielded pretty much identical results to the question I had posed. While it was nice to have the prompts below, I feel that they should maybe pose newer information.”
“Pose newer information?” Do you mean propose? Or provide? Garbage in, garbage out. People don’t write well. ESLs even less so. I honestly wonder how much people can even get out of tools like LLMs when they can barely formulate their query. Is the utility of this kind of tools going to be limited by our inability to us the natural-language UI? You know, because we don’t actually write very well?
“For factual queries, users may (for now) be better off using a search engine instead of generative AI.”
Stable Diffusion XL Turbo can generate AI images as fast as you can type by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)
Look, I agree that the 20-second demo video demonstrates an ability to compose an image incredibly quickly—as long as you stay within the guardrails. But have you tried searching for those image online? You can find cats drinking beers and eating scrambled eggs without an AI. I know you can fine-tune to what seems to be your heart’s delight, but it’s not that groundbreaking. I suppose you can be guaranteed that the content produced by Stable Diffusion is copyright-free? Because of the magic of having pushed the data into a neural network and then regurgitated it?
And what does this artwork look like?
It’s not great. They keep showing that musclebound barbarian. I don’t care. There is an endless parade of Pixar-eyed redheaded women. I don’t care. Animals in clothes. God help us.
And the author noted that he had to include the “obligatory” cat holding a beer can.
Sigh.
Look, it’s great for screwing around online. Hell, I wouldn’t hate using it to generate the images I like to include for my articles on this site, but I also don’t quite see the point yet.
Car dealers say they can’t sell EVs, tell Biden to slow their rollout by Jonathan Gitlin (Ars Technica)
The article starts off with a bit of snark that could probably be written with an LLM by now.
“Pity the poor car dealers. After making record profits in the wake of the pandemic and the collapse of just-in-time inventory chains, they’re now complaining that selling electric vehicles is too hard. Almost 4,000 dealers from around the United States have sent an open letter to President Joe Biden calling for the government to slow down its plan to increase EV adoption between now and 2032.”
OK, yes, profiteering, price-gouging. Yes, it’s all bad. But then the rest of the article goes on to detail that the problem they have is that no-one is buying BEVs. Instead, dealerships are still selling three times as many ICEs.
Does he delve into whether this is true? Does he delve into whether the Biden administration’s plans are realistic? Does he examine whether forcing BEVs down everyone’s throats might not be a great strategy for the climate? That maybe smaller vehicles are the answer (as they are in Asia)? Of course not. Instead, he ends his article by leaping to the conclusion that these “businesses are opposing action on climate change”. Cool, bro. This is why no-one can stand your smarmy, smug, stupid shit anymore.
I know, I know, auto dealers are scum. Just reading that “[a] lot of them have 100–200 percent turnover of their sales staff in a given year” makes it sound like dealerships are a great place to work. But Gitlin is confident that the only reason cars aren’t flying off the lot and we’re not saving the climate is because auto dealerships are against fighting climate change. Yeah, that’s the main problem.
Should’ve use Stable Diffusion (Reddit)
“Every time I see the most beautifully rendered Al waifu in skimpy armor with angel wings or whatever im like. This porn is so normal. Give this technology to me. I will create porn so absurd they need to make new laws about it”
“Update on this: just got banned from the bing ai thing in less than 20 minutes”
Some people are just the masters of memes. My partner does this. I remember when she had a lot less space on her phone
Severe outbreak tied to cantaloupe sickens 117 in 34 states; half hospitalized by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)
“Containers with cut cantaloupe in a cooler case.”
An article with absolutely alluring and almost assuredly accidental alliteration.
Kath and I were doing the NY Times Connections puzzle, which asks you to pick the four sets of four words that they’d intended you to pick. The four sets are ordered from easiest to hardest, color-coded with yellow, green, blue, and purple, with purple being the hardest. We quickly matched “Allen”, “Crescent”, “Monkey”, and “Socket” for our first set, thinking that was going to be the easiest. I expressed surprise that this was considered the hardest set, to which she replied (in German): “It’s just New York”, meaning that New Yorkers—especially those that read the NY Times—probably have such a low familiarity with tools that you use with your hands that this probably is difficult for them.
We were watching Mindhunter S02 the other day when we both noticed our old car, a Volkswagen Rabbit, parked on the side of the road:
We’d called ours Fritz. He was a 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit. Here’s a Left Front Quarter View:
Looking at the two, though, I can see that the one in Mindhunter was actually a European Golf I—because it has round headlights.
Baldur’s Gate 3 bug caused by game’s endless mulling of evil deeds by Kevin Purdy (Ars Technica)
“As developer and publisher Larian Studios told IGN in a statement about the patch, it caused “unnoticed thefts and acts of vandalism to remain stuck forever within the ‘did anyone see me’ pipeline, rather than timing out and moving on, as is intended.” The game’s “dungeon master,” in Larian’s terms, is “mulling on it ad infinitum.” In a code-execution sense, the game is keeping the details of subterfuge “all up to date and in memory,” which eventually slows down the logic engine, leading to slowdowns in the game.”
“There is so much going on under the hood of BG3, so much that must be called up and considered for every interaction, that it’s unsurprising that a seemingly limited situational patch could cause a wider issue—and could also be hard to suss out and test against. Some players might not engage in sneaky stuff at all, or might be earlier in their playthroughs, and so not have accrued the kinds of “mental” weight that have bogged down other players. And players might experience lag or slowdowns for myriad other reasons.”
Links For November 2023 by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)
“Did you know: Hezbollah produced a video game, Special Force, which was well-received and sold almost 20,000 copies. No points for guessing who you shoot.”
That just makes it a normal video game, with an enemy, but not the official enemies of the west. The only reason you make a flip comment like that is because you don’t even bother to think about who the enemies are in all of the other video games. If you had a hint of empathy, you might wonder how Germans, Russians, Chinese, Arabs feel when they’re stuck playing hundreds of video games where they’re not featured as the heroes, but as the cookie-cutter, stupid, and expendable enemies. Choose your character. You can have this western character, or that one, or this gay one, or this black one. But you can’t play Call of Duty without fighting yourself.
So, yeah, Hizbollah made a video game where the enemy is the IDF. Duh. Turnabout is fair play.
I’ve included a partial transcript with the parts I found... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 3. Dec 2023 21:53:15 (GMT-5)
This interview is from September 28th, a little over a week before Norman Finkelstein burst onto the scene for his commentary on October 7th and the aftermath. The interview is on a completely different topic. It is excellent.
I’ve included a partial transcript with the parts I found particularly interesting below.
At 00:02:00, he discusses the drift in capability of students over the last few decades.
“Norm: If you go back as far as I do, the fact of the matter is, that what they teach now in college is what used to be taught in high school. […] There are many students who enter college who’ve never read a book. I mean that literally. I teach in those schools. I don’t fault them. I ask, ‘what did you do in English class?’ They say, ‘the teacher read us books.’ You can laugh, but that is literally the case. You will have many first-year college students who never wrote a paper. They don’t know what it means to write a paper.”
At 00:03:30, after having very eloquently and long-windedly come to a recognition that she should definitely stop fighting on the Internet with people arguing not only in bad faith (no pun intended), but also from an intellectually diminished standpoint, Briahna says,
“Briahna: I have limited emotional energy left to not just call people stupid to their face. I feel like I’ve been spending the last five or six years of my life going out of my way—in part, because of who I am—to decline from saying ‘you are a fucking moron.’ … like 30 times a day.
“Norm: Briahna, I think ‘fucking moron’ is a perfect segue to the topic today, Ibram X. Kendi. [both laughing uproariously]”
At 44:30, a snippet with Cornel West includes,
“Cornel West: No, I am not first and foremost an anti-racist. I am first and foremost a lover of my mama—and it leads to anti-racist practice. That’s the second step. I love, whatever, I love the Asians, I love the Jewish folks, I’m gonna be against any kind of mistreatment of them. So, anti-racism is part of a larger, humanistic project that’s predicated on an affirmation of the humanity of people.
“Because if you’re anti-racist, you’re really nothing but a parasite on the host. You’re still looking at yourself through the lens of the racist—and you’re just “anti” them. And, one of the distinctive features of the racist gays is that they’ve lost contact with the humanity of the people they’re objectifying. They’ve lost contact with the humanity of the people they’re putting down. Why would you also want to do that? You don’t begin with them [racists]. You begin with the humanity of the people that you’re talking about.”
This is a brilliant mind. Future president of the United States, people. This is man who has assimilated a tremendous amount of knowledge and human experience and distilled it into something new, something that cannot be so easily swayed by superficially convincing argument. We need experts like this who can not only contribute new thought, but can also help us eliminate unproductive thoughts that we’ve beaten back before, but keep cropping back up because they appeal to the inexpert.
In the comments to this video, it was interesting to see that other people noticed that Norman and Briahna were often talking past one another. One person said that it was HER podcast and that she’d been the “epitome of patience.” I responded with the following,
Really? That just goes to show how subjective conversations like this are. My impression was that he had to reformulate his points several times simply because she wasn’t understanding what he, for m, at least, quite obviously meant to convey in his first formulation. I think it’s useful to take the time to play through this because she’s probably not the only one who didn’t get his point the first time.
As to it being HER podcast … this is an interview show and I’m watching because it says “Norm Finkelstein” not because it says Briahna. She’s fine, but she often has the less flexible mind of the two participants in her interviews. That’s an admirable place to be, though, considering the general quality of her guests (e.g., I recently watched a good interview with Corey Robin where she played the “do we really need to know how to write?” side of the debate).
At 58:45, they discuss respect for knowledge.
“Norm: You must be able to distinguish between what you called a moment ago, a concept and a brand.
“Briahna: That’s fine. If it’s just a brand, we can cut this off short. Even if it’s just a branding exercise, he succeeded in that. That’s all I need to attribute to him. I honestly … we don’t need to be on this for another ten minutes, Norm. But, that’s my point. He did a successful branding exercise. Why’s that so hard to just acknowledge and move past?
“Norm: OK. There’s a simple answer to that. It’s called—and maybe this is going to sound very prissy and old-fashioned—it’s called respect for knowledge. It’s one thing to coin a brand. It’s quite another if you respect a field of intellectual inquiry and you respect the vast labors that were invested in creating that field of inquiry. To then call a brand a “concept”, to heap awards, tens of millions of dollars, a center for anti-racism, on somebody who just created a brand or a word. It’s so disrespectful of that struggle, the hard, honest labor, effectively beginning with W.E.B. Dubois.”
Here, we get her impatience with what is actually the core argument, the more interesting argument about someone like Ibram X. Kendi —namely, why did he become so famous? What damage did that do? I can’t tell if she’s wicked smart and pretending to be a dumb foil, but I suppose it doesn’t matter because, at any rate, she teed up a good question for Norm. I don’t know that she actually heard his answer, though.
Her contention is “none” because she doesn’t seem to be intelligent enough to acknowledge that pushing his kind of ideas to the forefront necessarily takes time away from other, more useful, ideas. Or she doesn’t care, because all ideas are equally bullshit—and all “brands” are bullshit.
It’s interesting that she continues to value her own opinions about Kendi over Norm’s, even after it’s become blindingly obvious that he’s actually read Kendi’s books and work—and that she has not. She’s just followed tweet-storms about him.
In case you think I’m being unfair, after his statement, she continued to berate him that “obviously, there’s an appeal to Kendi’s ideas”, which, while true, is irrelevant in a debate between two people who purport to not be representing the opinions of “fucking morons” (as she noted at the top of the podcast). What is the point of acknowledging that an idea is appealing to the easily lulled? Everything is appealing to them. You don’t have to worry about what morons think, because they don’t think, by definition.
The point is that Kendi’s work has been used as a cultural weapon that works against what might be a cohort that would agitate against the political elite. That relatively well-educated cohort is going to spend time thinking, even if only because they think they should be doing that because it increases their cachet in society.
Their thoughts have to be channeled and focused so that they don’t think the wrong ones. Instead of thinking about how everything is a problem of class—and that there is a class war being waged by elites—those elites promote brands like Kendi to intellectually cow people into thinking that everything is about race instead.
Even if we were to magically solve some problems of race in the U.S., the underlying class war would still be raging, with wealth and power still flowing ever upward. That is the point that even Norm Finkelstein was not making very well.
The corporate and elite appropriation of something like Kendi’s anti-racism—or BLM and rainbow flags before it—is a bellwether. It is the way that the elites prevent dangerous ideas from coming to the forefront. It is deliberate. It is unsurprising that it’s a scam. It also happens to hurt a lot of people whose careers are ruined by accusations of anti-racism—conveniently enough, many people who would otherwise be promoting dangerous thought, like class being the root of the problem rather than race. In this, the elites wield Kendi as a weapon to cow their opponents, or, if they refuse to be cowed, to eliminate them entirely from public discourse.
Briahna eventually expresses her point better (covering a few of the points that I make above), but it takes her a long time get there—and she does so in an incredibly exasperated voice that indicates that she thought she’d already expressed these ideas in her muddled half-sentences before. But, maybe I just understand Norm in shorthand better than Briahna.
I felt a few times like she was forced into making a more lengthy characterization of her argument that ended up being much more articulate, nuanced, and useful than her initially terse and oversimplified formulation, then tacked onto the end that that was the same thing as she’d said in the first place, which was patently untrue. I wonder if it’s just her avoiding ever having been wrong, which doesn’t really matter, but tends to get in the way.
I think that they both blur the distinction between racism and discrimination. Everyone discriminates. Not everyone is a racist. Do you think fat people are kind of gross? What about ugly people? People with bad teeth? Terrible hair? Bad fashion sense? Too many tattoos? Dumb people? Which distinctions are you allowed to draw?
If you discriminate against someone because they’re dumb, is that wrong? If you don’t let them operate a steam-shovel because they’re black, you’re a racist. If you don’t let them do it because they’ve never done it before, is that wrong, too? Aren’t you limiting their range of experience based on distinctions you’ve made based on them lacking characteristics that they lack through no fault of their own? It’s not their fault that they were never given an opportunity to learn how to operate a steam shovel because of a racist world, so you not letting them do it now just promulgates that racism. That way lies madness.
It’s why Archer’s plea “I wanna fly the plane!” is so funny.
What if you had a news anchor who could only speak Spanish, but wanted to work on an English-language broadcast? Is it discriminatory not to hire them because of that? What if they’re latino? Is it fair to claim that they weren’t hired because they’re latino when they’re obviously woefully unqualified?
Not only that, but, as Norm points out at 01:19:15,
“It had never occurred to me before that, when they say black IQ scores are lower than white IQ scores—who’s defining who’s black? […] my point is, that these are very complicated concepts and, for me, I recoil, […] at attaching the label “concept” to something which is just a brand like Adidas. I can’t accept that, not because I’m some important scholar, but because I respect the intellectual labor of those who wrestled with these concepts and produced serious scholarship.”
As noted above, it’s also just a waste of time and energy, deliberately aimed at frivolous topics that don’t endanger elites.
The scholarship is deep and stretches back many decades, if not a century, and has included the thoughts of many intellectuals who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. The shortcuts that we make—”black” or “white”—is actually a spectrum. One that used to include “quadroon” and “octaroon”, which seems like utter madness today. The only way out of this morass is to just stop considering race a distinction at all.
It’s similar to the abortion debate. It’s very easy to be lulled into thinking that you’re either “for” or “against” abortion—or, more precisely, “a woman’s right to choose”. But, when you are forced to think about the mechanics of it, which kinds of abortions do you support? State-ordained ones? After 10 weeks? After 20 weeks? 30? What if the child is viable? Unviable? The mother’s life is endangered?
The problem really is that there are some debates in which everyone feels qualified to take part, but for which we are woefully unequipped. People burbling along at a superficial level feel slighted when others who’ve already plumbed the depths dismiss their arguments. On the other hand, it’s not so hard for those who’ve been involved in a subject for a long time to have overcomplicated it, often beyond recognition, and, sometimes, because it’s become personally lucrative to keep things complicated. Still, the danger that dilettantes drive policy is real.
At 01:26:00, Norm says,
“That woke culture is completely, totally bankrupt. That’s the problem. It’s not only bankrupt, but it does huge damage. I went out […] every day for those George Floyd demonstrations. For six weeks, I went out every day. And then, when I saw what it turned into? $90M for BLM? And it all just disappeared? Wild horses couldn’t get me to come out for another demonstration. And I’m pretty committed. Wild horses.
“And now, the money’s going to dry up for African American Study Centers because they’re gonna say, ‘you know those people. Lurking behind every black person is an Al Sharpton.’ That’s exactly right. That’s what everyone’s gonna think. And now, you’re gonna say, ‘that’s because they were racist to begin with,‘ and I’ll grant that. But guess what? Why help it out? Why facilitate it. No integrity whatsoever. You have this charlatan and hustler. […] doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.”
“This culture is not just bankrupt. It’s retrograde. It does real damage. […Ibram X. Kendi] is an exemplar of the damage. Reduced the field to idiotic brands. Discredited the giving of money and donations and nurturing of the field.”
Briahna wraps up by defending that it wasn’t the left that built Kendi, but that’s just defending yourself. There is a large machine that calls itself left that built him. Kendi’s just a scam artist. But what’s the point of bringing in the “no true Scotsman” argument? She distinguishes between leftists and liberals, but very few people see the distinction.
She defends the left by saying that they were more involved in the UAW strike rather than caring about wokeness and Kendi. But, Norm says that this is evasion—because Kendi is everywhere, and his ideas fill the bookstores that influence a lot more minds than the left could ever dream of doing.
You don’t have to pay attention to every little stupid thing, but you should be more aware of how well the rest of the populace is being distracted by things that aren’t your agenda. It speaks to the emptiness of the left’s political ability in the States that it thinks it can ignore such large changes in intellectual movements.
I like that Norm managed to provoke her into blowing up at the end of her own podcast, complaining that she “doesn’t understand why everyone wants to talk to her about Marianne Williamson”—as a podcast host. She seems to get mad a lot (and I’ve observed this in other episodes) when people try to change the topic from what she’d like to talk about. Luckily—or unfortunately—she has excellent guests who are often quite interesting.
A comment on the video summarizes it well,
“Very disappointing behaviour from Briahana at the end. Norman was trying to explain, politely, how dangerous and empty it can be to elevate certain people with no substance, no track record, only with nice slogans/brands. Briahana dismisses Ibram X but fails to see the potential same issue with Marianne W. who apparently she admires.”
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who thinks that Norm towers over Briahna intellectually, a fact which, despite her best efforts, seems to rub her very much the wrong way. A perfectly reasonable response from her would have been that she’s voting for Marianne as a spite vote, even though she knows it doesn’t matter. Instead, she doubled down, imbuing her choice with more support for the candidate’s policies than she seems to actually have.
]]>“I see “local-first” as shifting reads and writes to an embedded database in each client via“sync engines” that... [More]”
Published by marco on 30. Nov 2023 21:23:21 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 30. Nov 2023 21:43:00 (GMT-5)
The article Some notes on Local-First Development by Kyle Matthews (Bricolage) focuses on a very good trend in app development, but focuses a bit too much on what he calls DX, or developer experience.
“I see “local-first” as shifting reads and writes to an embedded database in each client via“sync engines” that facilitate data exchange between clients and servers. […] The benefits are multiple:”
- Simplified state management for developers.
- Built-in support for real-time sync, offline usage, and multiplayer collaborative features.
- Faster (60 FPS)
- CRUD
- More robust applications for end-users.
I don’t want to read too much into it, but he did mention end-users only in the last bullet point.
I think the author is focusing too much on the tech and too little on the value. DX is great and all, but it’s about the UX, no? Every app would benefit from realtime updates if it’s cheap and easy to build. Almost every app is multiplayer, if you think about it a bit.
“For almost any real-time use case, I’d choose replicated data structures over raw web sockets as they give you a much simpler DX and robust guarantees that clients will get updates.”
No, my friend. You’ve come to the right conclusion for the wrong reason.
If the tech is solid, if it doesn’t negatively influence debuggability or traceability, if it’s predictable, if operations can be correlated, if you don’t end up limiting your functionality to fit the framework—then go for it.
What I mean is that it’s important that the thought process that leads to the correct conclusion serves all stakeholders. If you’re only doing things because they’re better for developers, then, eventually, you’re going to be deciding against the users.
Be aware of the trade-offs, and be sure all of the stakeholders can live with them. What does good DX translate to for other stakeholders? Easier maintenance? Less complexity? Easier onboarding? The DX is really mostly secondary unless you’re making a framework, in which case it might matter. No-one cares about DX for real-world products. I love good DX, but I’m a developer! As a developer with a lot of experience, I’m forced to admit that it’s not at all a primary goal. Having good DX might lead to other desirable things, but that doesn’t make it directly desirable. Don’t forget that.
These people are rudderless, adrift. They have no sense or irony, no morality, and no... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 29. Nov 2023 22:37:12 (GMT-5)
A while back, I read the article Colorado Lawsuit’s Strategy for Keeping Trump Off Ballot Is Starting to Spread by Marjorie Cohn (Scheer Post), which is about subverting democracy in exactly the ways that the author fears that Trump would.
These people are rudderless, adrift. They have no sense or irony, no morality, and no self-awareness. It makes them so stupid. This mess is just embarrassing for everyone involved.
This gleeful horseshit where people are delighted that they’ve found some old clause of some document that seems to kind of maybe apply to Donald Trump if you take all of the allegations at face value—while reveling in the fact that the article you’ve found applies without a conviction, so you don’t have to bother with the pesky interference of a justice system—has got to stop.
These people don’t realize that their fervor in preventing what they deem to be the greatest threat to democracy ends up making them do things or support things or say things that make them actually a much-greater one. If you think your job is to stop Donald Trump from being elected, then do it by finding an alternative that people find more appealing, not by shoving a turd sandwich in their mouths and ordering them to chew.
What the hell, people? You’re perfectly happy doing something so anti-democratic in order to get your way and claim that you’re “protecting democracy”. If that’s the best you’ve got, then please shut up and sit down while the adults hash this one out for you.
If you’re interested in more detail, then the article Donald Trump Should be on the Ballot and Should Lose by Steven Calabresi (Reason) talks about how the constitutional angle is almost certainly a non-starter.
“[…] the University of Pennsylvania Law Review law review article by William Baude and Michael Paulsen, The Sweep and Force of Section Three, which argues that former President Trump is disqualified from running again for President. A draft law review article taking issue with Baude and Paulsen, co-written by Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tilman, entitled Sweeping and Forcing the President into Section 3: A Response to William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen makes a good case that what happened on January 6, 2021 was not an “insurrection” and that the Baude/Paulsen reading of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is wrong. I think Josh Blackman and Seth Tillman are more likely right than not. At a minimum, this is a very muddled area of constitutional law, and it would set a bad precedent for American politics to not list a former president’s name on election ballots given the confused state of the law surrounding Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Anyway, this was a couple of months back, and I haven’t heard anything about keeping Trump off the ballot anywhere. I just hear about how he’s polling much better than all of the other Republican candidates combines—and polls much better than Joe Biden.
Instead of keeping Trump off the ballot, I’ve heard that the remaining Koch brothers are backing Nikki Haley—who’s even more cuckoo for cocoa puffs than Trump. It wouldn’t matter if she ended up being the Republican candidate. Just like there is half a country full of people who would never vote for Trump, there’s half who would never, ever, ever vote for Biden.
Biden’s a shit sandwich. Even his own party hates him. God knows why they’re running him, but they are.
You know the New Hampshire primary? The first one in the nation, ever election? Yeah, that one. Well, the DNC didn’t like Biden’s chances there, so they pulled him off the ballot in the Granite State. They then announced that the first state to vote next year would be South Carolina, which loves Biden for whatever reason.
Funny story: some other dude’s slated to win the Democratic primary in New Hampshire—because the Granite State does not like to be told what to do. Now the DNC is backpedaling and, since it’s too late to add Biden to the ballot, they’re running a write-in campaign for Biden in NH. I am not kidding. [1]
It’s almost like the Democrats are trying to let Trump win.
Maybe they feel sorry for having stolen the election in 2020. [2]
This footnote is for,
For the record: I do not believe that the election was more crooked in 2020 than in any other year. I think both parties work very hard to steal every election, with varying rates of success. It is technically true that the Democrats stole the election in 2020, but that is true of nearly every election in the U.S.
Bush stole it in 2000 and 2004. The Democrats spent years bitching about having had the election stolen by Trump in 2016, until they segued into the Russiagate farce. Trump and his coterie of hangers-on are bitching about it having been stolen in 2020.
They’re all right, but that’s how it works. Election theft is baked in.
There is so much gerrymandering, obscene campaign contributions, and voter-disenfranchisement … how could you think these elections weren’t stolen? Or do you still believe that the U.S. has an actual, functioning democracy?
I took three trains to get where I was going and each of them was 3-4 minutes late. The Swiss pack their schedules pretty tightly, so 4 minutes late at the end meant that the SBB had eaten up the two-minute buffer between the train’s arrival in Dietikon and... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 28. Nov 2023 22:59:40 (GMT-5)
Today was not a great day for the SBB.
I took three trains to get where I was going and each of them was 3-4 minutes late. The Swiss pack their schedules pretty tightly, so 4 minutes late at the end meant that the SBB had eaten up the two-minute buffer between the train’s arrival in Dietikon and the departure of the 301 bus I was meant to catch.
It was only a 1km walk, so no big deal, but it might have sucked more had it been raining even harder than it was—or had it been as windy as it has been lately.
Here’s the KIS—Kunden Information System—on the final train.
In the SBB App on my phone, it wrote “The connection cannot be guaranteed” for the bus. No 💩.
Published by marco on 28. Nov 2023 22:50:41 (GMT-5)
A while back, I took the following notes from the article ‘Innocent Israelis’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post). These comments are from an ordinarily lucid reporter writing on October 11th. We didn’t know then what we know now, but we did know that collective punishment is wrong, and that there is most certainly such a thing as the concept of a innocence. Lawrence in this article seems to be arguing for a pretty strict restriction of the definition of that word, as illustrated below.
“To assume the responsibilities that fall to us is to preserve some claim to innocence, it seems to me. To develop within ourselves a sense of empathy, or whatever is the opposite of indifference, is equally to retain or regain our innocence. Again, there is no defending the shootings at Re’im. But only those among the revelers who understood and assumed their responsibility for Israel’s conduct and all the Yoav Gallants running the apartheid state can fairly be counted innocent of what we must recognize as a criminal regime. There is an honorable movement of such people in Israel, let us not forget. It is hard to imagine any of its members partying on the Gaza border, but let us allow for the possibility. For the rest, they must be counted as complicit.”
So, if you’re a racist against Palestinians or Arabs, if you were aware of what the Israeli state was and is doing to Gaza, then you’re not innocent. So what? You’re still a civilian, right? You’re not innocent, but…what is he saying? That they deserved what they got? That seems pretty breathtakingly stupid. It is the argumentation of Osama bin Laden, it is the logic of Netanyahu and the Israeli state right now.
“To consider the Re’im attack as an event in history, it seems to me there is something very off about a group of young and privileged Israelis having a carefree weekend in the sand hard by a land of daily, incessant suffering, a place where the innocence of its children and youth has been stolen by the state wherein the partiers do their partying. Something very off: By this I mean the revelers betrayed themselves as profoundly irresponsible, so it seems to me. Maybe unconsciously and maybe not, to me they displayed that indifference toward the lives of others for which many Israelis have unfortunately made themselves well-known.”
Ok, so that’s a slightly different thing that he’s saying in the last part. It is the least-generous interpretation possible, but it unfortunately has got more truth in it than we’d like to admit. I would just like to add that Israelis are hardly unique in this regard. This is what all kinds of people do. We become very accustomed to a situation, no matter how unethical, not matter how immoral, not matter how racist and eugenic.
The situation for Israel is that they have been taught that they are the chosen people, living in relative luxury, the world jealous of them. Perhaps I can empathize because this is the story that Americans are told as well.
When you benefit greatly from a situation, when your quality of life is good, you can easily look away from the giant heap of skulls and bones on which your so-called civilization is built. [1]
There are untold places in the “civilized world” where the rich live cheek-by-jowl with wildly impoverished neighborhoods, places of to-the-rich completely incomprehensible and unimaginable suffering and desperation. Gated communities. Favelas. Slums of all kinds.
Of course, of course, Palestine is, by all accounts, much, much worse than most places. It is, as Norman Finkelstein says, a “concentration camp”, an “open prison”. Nearly all residents were born into a concentration camp and have known nothing but prison their entire lives. The majority are younger than 18 years old. The majority never voted Hamas into power.
Even if we don’t live cheek-by-jowl with the oppressed, we still benefit every day from them, casually, both in our own societies and in others.
We want desperately for Hamas and the Palestinians to be uniquely savage terrorists, alone in their ability to inflict unspeakable harm on innocents—so that we can help ourselves forget our complicity in these acts, done in our name, or for our ultimate benefit.
We need their attacks—and the attacks of all whom we deem enemies, but who are really just “other people who have stuff that we want to have for free”—to be “unprovoked”. We want to ignore all the evil that we’ve done, while highlighting the inhumanity of everyone else’s.
We can’t have done anything to have aroused anyone’s ire. We can’t be made to even consider changing anything about ourselves or our lifestyles that would prevent something like this from happening in the future. We are an unsullied people. There is nothing we have done that might be considered untoward that we should perhaps stop doing in order to prevent future attacks.
These are the only justifications for any change in our behavior: it’s getting too expensive—or difficult—(to steal stuff from others), or it’s getting too dangerous (to steal stuff from others). We never consider the path of “stop stealing stuff from others so much” because it would (A) possibly change our quality of life in a way that our lords and masters—who benefit even massively more from this whole situation—have told us would be detrimental and (B) would mean that we would have to admit that we had been doing bad things all along (i.e., stealing stuff from other people). The life of a pirate involves a lot of self-delusion.
We want the Israelis to be even worse deniers of their privilege, to be uniquely deluded hypocrites and racists, so that we can absolve ourselves of our own failings in this regard, were we to even admit them. And why admit such trifles about our excellent selves, when the others are so, so much worse?
And you can disabuse yourself of the notion that religion has anything to do with it, other than serving as a convenient and well-established reason for hating and othering. Religion is just one of many ways of justifying why it’s OK for you to steal somebody else’s stuff—be it land, food, water, physical goods, safety, or well-being. The U.S. doesn’t really declare classically religious wars—-like actually based on a holy book—-but what is the difference between Jihad and the blind, hate-filled fervor with which the U.S. pursues it’s interests, claiming to be anti-communist or whatever the flavor of the week is?
We should be careful not to let our anger and indignation get the better of us, to let our anger make us say things that are patently wrong, or wildly hyperbolic, that would threaten to distract us from the fact that we’re all hypocrites. It’s a spectrum. Some people lean hard into it, for sure. But Israelis are not unique in their hatred of the other, in their ability to dance while others suffer.
Young Israelis know nothing other than that there is a mysterious place on their border that their state has under control. They know that they’ve been told to live their best lives—because why not? It is what affluent, young people have always done. They are not unique in being wildly ignorant of or failing to be empathetic to those around them. Racism and discrimination doesn’t help. of course, but they’ve also never really known anything else. There is no advantage to be had by not being racist against Arabs. There is much to lose. It reminds me very much of the U.S. in the 50s and 60s. [2]
Israelis are heavily, heavily indoctrinated to believe that Palestinians—and Arabs in general—are sub-human animals, no more of consequence than a lizard or a goat, perhaps even less so, because animals can’t be terrorists.
Here’s a five-minute video that provides a bit of background.
This is also not unique. Perhaps Israel is at the top of the list for racism, but the U.S.‘s foreign policy is also horrifically racist. Their soldiers used—perhaps still use—the epithet “sand niggers” for Arabs while deployed in the Middle East.
Again, having grown up in the U.S., I understand how stupid and evil propaganda can make you. You have to actively resist it the whole time. You will be ostracized from some places. You might lose your job. You will feel gaslighted. You will wonder why you stand alone so much. You will doubt yourself. You will wonder why you ruin your own life for a principle no-one else seems to believe in.
Imagine a town with a square in the center. In the center of that square, there is a pit. At the bottom of that pit lives another group. The group above knows about the group below. They keep them alive, but barely. They use the pit as a sewer. Every few decades, a piece of poo flies back out of the pit. Inconceivable. The villagers above cannot comprehend the effrontery. They are terrified that it will happen again. They drop boiling oil down the pit to root out the poo-flingers.
What would we think of the above-ground villagers? Would we think it possible for them to be unaware of the morality of the situation? What if they’d never known anything else? What if they’d been told every day that this is the only way for the world to work, for God to be satiated, for society to continue as it does?
What does the average Israeli know about their country? About their government? I don’t know. Do they vote? I don’t know. I come from a country where a lot of people don’t vote, they complain all the time about the government, but they don’t vote. The largest voting bloc in the U.S. is non-voters.
Most Americans think we won the Vietnam War. That’s if they even know what the Vietnam War was. Or is, for that matter. If they don’t know what it was, then they might just as well think that we’re still fighting it. We have bases everywhere. A lot of people know that. They know that their young go to Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany, South Korea, … everywhere. So why not Vietnam? Is there a war there? Maybe. There are wars in a lot of places. Just not the U.S.
And just not Israel, where things were pretty quiet, until recently.
So, maybe a lot of Israelis don’t read newspapers, or believe what they hear, and think things are just hunky-dory. That’s maybe how they can so easily be convinced that “those fuckers [Hamas] came out of NOWHERE.”
Most people in the U.S.—of those who know about it—think that we won the Vietnam War. They’re just waiting for Vietnam to apologize for having killed so many of our soldiers. You think I’m kidding. I’m not kidding.
There are still P.O.W./M.I.A (Prisoner Of War/Missing In Action) flags up everywhere. There are V.F.W.s everywhere (Veterans of Foreign Wars … what other kind are there? Oh, yeah, the Civil War). They’re still waiting for our boys to come home. I’m not kidding.
The life expectancy of a man in Laos was about 33 years in the 1970s, and that’s for a local who’s not in prison. None of “our boys” are alive anymore, not by any stretch of the imagination. And yet they wait.
And yet a bill passed in 2019 that requires every post office in the U.S. to fly an M.I.A. flag. Bipartisan. Co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren.
So, no, I don’t make any assumptions about what the citizens of a country might know about what their country is up to.
I watched my whole country go mad with revenge fantasies, then destroy two countries over two decades. For nothing. Nothing was gained. Much was lost.
I am familiar with all that sordid bullshit and the bullshit excuses we make to ourselves, of the horrible anti-humanistic things we say and do because we can’t contain our rage, our lust for revenge, because we are animals but want to be seen as good, but also still want to hate the other, to blame all ills on someone else.
I know that racism still exists in America—it’s everywhere and affects everything. But it’s better than it was. It just objectively is. That the statistics of wealth disparity, life-expectancy disparity, arrest and harassment disparity are still wildly off-kilter and unfair and horrifying is a fact for anyone with any sense of justice and a brain in their head. That it used to be worse is a fact. It may be just as insidious in some places, but there are far more places where it isn’t. So I said the 50s and 60s because then you could really just be openly racist against black people and you would suffer nothing. In fact, if you weren’t racist, you were suspect.
I just heard about Paul Robeson. He is, by any measure, one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. No-one knows about him in America. He’s been erased from history. He was a black socialist.
The foreground objects make this a bit of an odd photo, but he looks cool.
I think this is from The Jerk. I was a big fan growing up. She’s hilarious.
Big... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 28. Nov 2023 21:36:49 (GMT-5)
The post What’s a picture of a celebrity that lives rent free in your mind? I’ll start…. by N_Ywasneverthesame (Reddit) gives us this image of Mads Mikkelsen.
The foreground objects make this a bit of an odd photo, but he looks cool.
I think this is from The Jerk. I was a big fan growing up. She’s hilarious.
Big DILLIGAF energy.
This was an actual photo shoot that Chris Evans did. No-one should let him forget it.
These two fools also did a photo shoot.
So did John Wick, way back in his Private Idaho days. I think someone wrote that this photo shoot was promoting a play he was in with Carl Marotte.
Picture included for the dog’s sheer bliss.
There were like a dozen photos of Paul Newman, so I included one (even though you can’t see his trademark blue eyes in this black-and-white photo).
Another guy with another car. He’s on the Furka Pass in Switzerland. This is one I have on rotation in my desktops, not from the post.
Keanu’s in here twice, but this one is for Patrick Swayze. Cool.
And, finall, here’s Sophia Loren trying not to get killed by Jayne Mansfield’s chest.
Published by marco on 26. Nov 2023 22:29:11 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 1. Dec 2023 18:17:51 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
95% of OpenAI employees have threatened to quit in standoff with board (Ars Technica)
I don’t even have a quote from this article because I didn’t read much of it. I skimmed it, plus a few more. They’re all super-excited about how a bunch of wealthy employees of an extremely well-funded Silicon Valley startup that’s trying to take over everything are jockeying for more power. In a twist, the usual suspects are actual for worker power rather than against it. I guess when your own class stands up, you just can’t help but cheer, ammirite?
This whole story is about rich-people games, honestly. Microsoft is the savior? Really? They probably incited this whole thing to get all of the employees of the company over to their own headquarters. Does anyone feel sorry for mega-billionaire (or WHATEVER) Sam Altman? The guy has more control in Silicon Valley than anyone. Why do people care what happens to him? Are you sad that your visionary is no longer able to save humanity by the end of the year?
When regular folks go on strike, there is no end to the number of hateful articles about how ungrateful workers can’t just sit down and shut up while their betters run the world for them. When a whole company full of people making $500k per year rise up, they can barely contain themselves in their support.
UPS opens huge automated warehouse, where robots outnumber people 15 to 1 by Jane Wise (WSWS)
“United Parcel Service opened a new, technologically advanced warehouse last week. The 900,000 square foot facility, the company’s largest, will operate with over 3,000 robots doing the heavy lifting. The warehouse will initially employ 200 workers, but that number may eventually grow to 500.”
You know what’s crazy? In a sane society, this would be really good news. Fewer people need to do backbreaking work. And yet. This fiendish timeline requires that people work for a living or they will simply suffer and die. So, instead, a reduction in backbreaking jobs is greeted as something negative.
Moody’s lowers US debt outlook to “negative” by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“Notwithstanding its highly developed mathematical models and the availability of vast computing power, bourgeois economics assumes that the capitalist profit system is the only possible and viable form of economic organisation. It therefore ignores its inherent contradictions until they erupt in the form of crisis which it then puts down to some kind of accident or external factor.”
“In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the Treasury market froze for several days when no buyers could be found for US government debt. A full-blown meltdown of the entire US and global financial system was only averted when the Fed intervened to the tune of $4 trillion.”
The Average American Is a Millionaire by Jeremy Horpedahl (City Journal)
“First, it found that the average American household’s net worth is over $1 million. Outliers can distort averages, of course, but even median household wealth is at the Fed’s highest level ever recorded. In 2019, it was still stuck below pre-Great Recession levels. By 2022, however, it had reached $192,000, eclipsing the 2007 mark by more than 10 percent, and almost doubling the post-Great Recession 2010 figure. (These and all subsequent data are adjusted for inflation.)”
The average being four times higher than the median means you’ve got some significant outliers. Way to tone that down. Also, how much of that wealth is tied up in real estate? Illiquid equity does nothing for your day-to-day quality of life.
“Income data complicate this rosy picture. The Census Bureau found that median household income has declined by almost 5 percent since 2019. That raises a question: How can median household wealth be up by 37 percent since 2019 at the same time median household income declined?”
“For many households, their largest asset is their home. Median home-sale prices soared more than $130,000 between 2019 and 2022, which may not have made you feel wealthier—if you were shopping for a home, you may have felt poorer—but it boosted household balance sheets. Those benefits extended across the income distribution, too, since a slight majority of households in the bottom half of the income distribution own their home.”
Golgafrinchans! Literally! No way to buy anything, but you’ve got a house! Your track-suit stuffed full of leaves.
“The pessimistic interpretation is that Millennials are unfairly burdened with much more debt than in the past. The optimistic view is that because today’s young people are better educated, they will have higher lifetime earnings.”
What a shitty society. Wage-slavery now for vague promises later. It’s scams all the way down.
“[…] a sixfold gap between white and black median household wealth endures, both races have seen significant wealth growth in recent years and saw all-time highs in the Fed’s 2022 dataset.”
The author just cruises right on by that sixfold…
“Asian-American households have by far the greatest wealth among the racial groups identified in this survey, with a median household net worth of $500,000 and an average of $1.8 million.”
“Most of what I’ve reported so far is good news.”
Sure, it’s all good news, if you’re within the bubble.
“Median wealth for high-school-dropout households is about $38,000, compared with $464,000 for those of college graduates. What’s more, dropouts’ household wealth is yet to recover to pre-2007 levels. Dropout-led households saw their wealth peak in the survey’s first year: 1989. Their inflation-adjusted wealth is much lower today than it was two generations ago.”
Because fuck them, right? This is deliberate policy. Elites take care of their own. There is no place for you, dumb-ass. Have fun being poor. Try not attract too much attention. God, the elitism is breathtaking.
“[…] this sliver of bad news for high school dropouts, […]”
A “sliver”! Just breath-fucking-taking.
“[…] thanks to rising home values, stock markets, and other asset classes since 2019—American households have record wealth across the distribution.”
Thanks to fairy tales, the right people’s track suits are stuffed with leaves.
Israel is Shutting Down its Human Laboratory in Gaza by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“[…] the Israeli settler colonial project. It is accompanied, as is true for all settler colonial projects, by the theft of natural resources, land, water and the natural gas in the Gaza Marine fields, 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza, which could contain up to 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In a world of diminishing resources, especially water in the Middle East, and the dislocations caused by the climate crisis, Gaza is the prelude to a frightening new world order.”
“It is not a far cry from Gaza to the camps and detention centers set up for migrants fleeing to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. It is not a far cry from the carpet bombing in Gaza to the endless wars in the Middle East and the global south. It is not a far cry from the anti-terrorism laws used to criminalize dissent in Israel to the anti-terrorism laws introduced in Europe and the U.S.”
“Nearly 3,000 Palestinians are missing or buried under the rubble. Soon Palestinians will be convulsed by infectious diseases and starvation. Those who survive, if Israel succeeds in its ethnic cleansing, will become refugees, yet again, over the border in Egypt. There remain plenty of Palestinian test subjects in the West Bank. Gaza will be closed for business.”
“Heron TP “Eitan” drones, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries − Israel’s largest aerospace and defense company and the country’s largest arms exporter − are used by Frontex, the European Union’s external border and coastal agency, to monitor and deter migrant and refugee boats in the Mediterranean. The drones, which fly up to 40 hours continuously, can be modified to carry four Spike rockets with fragmentation sleeves of thousands of 3mm tungsten cubes that puncture metal and “cause tissue to be torn from flesh,” in essence shredding the victim. They are routinely used on Palestinians.”
“The global ruling class will counter the destabilizing forces of inequality, curtailment of civil liberties, collapsing infrastructure, failing health systems and increasing shortages caused by an accelerating climate crisis, by branding all who resist as “human animals.” This new world order began in Gaza. It ends at home.”
Mr. President, Please Kill the Homeless Woman Who Lives Outside My Apartment by Ted Rall
“Before she succumbed to schizophrenia, the woman who is going to die in my New York neighborhood wouldn’t dream of suggesting that her desire to live indoors ought to come ahead of countering China in the Indo-Pacific.”
“Whatever the physical sensations, dying from cold a hundred feet from a couple hundred housing units so overheated that many New Yorkers keep their windows open all year long has got to be one hell of a lonesome suck of depressing.”
“I pitied her. I’ve watched her decline since spring. As six months dragged by this probably-fiftysomething-year-old woman has deteriorated from “how did someone so normal become homeless?” to talking to herself to severely sunburned to “this person will die this winter.””
“It was in the high 30s last night and it will only get colder and it is not a question of when or how she’ll die—the answers are (a) this winter and (b) hypothermia—but whether the usual circle of votive candles and $5 bouquets of flowers will be placed by her bench or on the southwest corner of the intersection near the other one.”
The Banality of Propaganda by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“This book was found just a few days ago in northern Gaza, in a children’s living room which was turned into a military operations base of Hamas, on the body of one of the terrorists and murderers of Hamas, and he even makes notes, he marked, and learned again and again of Hitler’s ideology of killing the Jews, of burning the Jews, of slaughtering the Jews.”
Get the fuck out of here, you old liar. Thst book is not a training manual. It’s a supremely boring, self-pitying bit of autobiography. Gazans hate you because you kill and torture, not because Hitler told them to. It’s because you do shit like this stunt, which is fucking infuriating and insulting. It shows how little you think of us that you lie so transparently. Get the fuck out of here with that book. This is an actual grown-ass man who is president of a country, doing this shit. Embarrassing.
“[…] all those who demonstrated yesterday — I am not saying all of them support Hitler. But all I’m saying is by omitting to understand what Hamas ideology is all about they are basically supporting this ideology.”
See above. Fuck off forever.
“After watching the Herzog video and then the London footage, I thought of a memorable passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism : “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.””
“in 1975, Arendt had yet blunter words as to what eventually comes of circumstances such as ours. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said to Roger Errera, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.””
US, Israeli lies about “command center” at Al-Shifa hospital fall apart by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“On Wednesday, the IDF posted a video showing a half-dozen assault rifles, two flak jackets, and a computer which it claims were hidden behind an MRI machine at Al-Shifa. There was no attempt to explain why an MRI machine, with its powerful magnetic field, did not cause the weapons to fly across the room when it was in operation.”
“Gaza’s telecommunications services were again shut down on Thursday, after providers announced that they had completely run out of fuel, and after Israel conducted strikes on communications infrastructure.
“For the second consecutive day, no aid trucks entered Gaza, following the collapse of humanitarian infrastructure in the country due to lack of fuel. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East said that it will no longer be able to coordinate any humanitarian aid convoys starting Friday.”
“There have been no bakeries active in northern Gaza for over ten days, and no wheat flour is available on the market.”
The American Medical Association rejects a resolution for ceasefire in Gaza by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)
“For these well-established and well-heeled physicians, the genocide in Gaza meets none of their “neutrality” criteria and warrants no discussion. But that was not the case with regards to the US-NATO proxy war in the Ukraine against Russia. A month after the conflict commenced in February 2022, the AMA had no problem asserting their opinions, regardless of their “neutrality.” The group released a statement noting, “The AMA is outraged by the senseless injury and death the Russian army has inflicted on the Ukrainian people. For those who survive these unprovoked attacks, the physical, emotional, and psychological health of Ukrainians will be felt for years.””
“Northern Gaza has been cut off from the South and more than a half-million people are trapped in place under siege. The major medical center in northern Gaza, Al-Shifa, has ended all services as lack of fuel and water means that the limited services they can render are under the most barbaric conditions. Operations, including caesarean deliveries of babies, are done without anesthesia, blood products or antibiotics. Wounds fester untreated. Shrapnel lays buried deep in tissue among those that have survived. Some lay in soiled beds with amputated limbs without even bandages to cover them.”
“The ventilators that had been supporting life for premature neonates and those requiring life support in the ICUs or dialysis machines for those without adequate kidney functions have stopped working. Bodies of the dead are wrapped in linen and left to decompose in the open because there is no cold storage for these bodies.”
The Biden-Xi Meeting: A fable of the Scorpion and the Frog by KJ Noh (CounterPunch)
“The Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s reporting on the APEC meeting between Presdient Xi and President Biden can be neatly neatly summarized as China, playing the role of the adult, trying to summon a petulant US child back to its senses to avoid harming itself and others. China’s message in brief is, “come back to win-win or we are all damned”.”
“Notice that these are not lectures on what the US is to do by itself. It is all about “jointly developing” the above capacities together. All of these are positive steps, positive injunctions built on a consciousness and foundation of intersubjectivity and mutuality. They are both modest and reasonable. They focus on peace, win-win, mutual respect, cooperation, mutual development and enrichment.”
What I notice is that China expects to be treated as an equal. The U.S. cannot even begin to wrap its head around this concept. That’s the roadblock that prevents any cooperation, as relatively reasonably put forth by China. The U.S. can simply not imagine the Chinese as anything other than just as underhanded as it itself is. Its projection precludes all cooperation. The liar and rogue cannot trust anyone.
“These are also counterpoints to the 5 No’s (No regime change, No cold war [No bloc-forming], No hot war, No economic war [No obstruction of development], No taiwan secession/provocation) elucidated on the sidelines of the Bali Summit when President Biden met with President Xi in November of last year. The US intoned and gave lip service to these agreements in Bali (now referred to as the “Bali Consensus”), but it has respected these agreements more in their breach than in their observation. In fact, it has crossed red lines on 4 of the 5 injunctions. Here, China is taking the high road and seeking to accentuate the positive in order to implement Bali, rather than calling out the US for its failures and perfidy.”
“However, there is the warning on the last No: No provocation over Taiwan island. This is the red light, the reddest of China’s red lines, where Right intention is critical.
Taiwan island is China’s core interest, and an inalienable part of China. China’s message is: “Do not ukrainize Taiwan. Do not weaponize our own territory against us. Do not sever our limb from us and use it to attack us. Respect the one China Principle”.”
“In Buddhism, there are three defilements, or poisons of the mind. They are greed, delusion, and hatred. It doesn’t take long for these to return to an undisciplined mind.”
Citing Biden, after his conference with Xi:
““The US and China are in competition…the United States would always stand up for its interests, its values, and its allies and partners””
The U.S. only considers vassals as allies or partners. China will not be a vassal, so it can be neither and ally nor a partner. It can only be an enemy.
“Outside of the US-Washington neocon bubble, these are seen as ignorant statements of a deluded hegemon, that simply do not wash any more for the world.”
Provocations by the U.S. State Department Can Chill Press Freedom in Latin America by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)
“The main speaker at the hearing was Amanda Bennett, the Chief Executive Officer of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an umbrella group that runs several U.S. government media projects from Europe (Radio Liberty) to the Americas (Office of Cuba Broadcasting) with an $810 million annual budget. Bennett, the former director of the U.S. government’s Voice of America, told the senators that if the U.S. government fails to “target investments to counter inroads Russia, the [People’s Republic of China], and Iran are making, we run the risk of losing the global information war.” These three countries, she argued, have “outspent” the United States in Latin America, an advantage that she said needed to be overcome by increased U.S. interference in Latin American media.”
“In their joint statement, signed by David Andersson (editor of Pressenza) and Bruno Sommer Catalán (editor of El Ciudadano), they say, “We believe that this kind of attack is malicious, and we insist that the US State Department withdraw this accusation as well as publicly apologize to us for maligning our reputations.””
U.S.-China Extinction-Level Event Narrowly Averted by Eve Ottenberg (CounterPunch)
“U.S. corporate media was quick to blame Beijing for the Chinese pilot’s “dangerous maneuvers,” but such accusations beg the question: What in God’s name were American fighter jets doing there, near Chinese airspace, eight thousand miles from U.S. borders in the first place? Their very presence is a provocation, aka military aggression. It could easily ignite war and thence nuclear Armageddon. And that first step, starting a war, is almost what happened.”
“About the October near-miss, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Nong said: “U.S. fighter jets coming all the way to flex their muscles at our doorstep is the root cause of aviation and maritime safety risks.””
“In reality, US imperialism has not the slightest intention of permitting China, the world’s second largest economy, to “coexist” with the US, which has launched constant wars, from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Ukraine, to seek to retain the international domination it obtained via World War II.”
Hat der Krieg in Gaza etwas mit Erdgas zu tun? by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Ist die Lage in der Levante kompliziert, ist sie im Gebiet rund um die Insel Zypern ein einziges Minenfeld. Hier prallen nicht nur die alten Feinde Türkei und Griechenland aufeinander. Die Türkei erkennt hier grundsätzlich die Seegrenzen und Wirtschaftszonen Zyperns nicht an, da diese die nur von der Türkei anerkannte „Republik“ Nordzypern nicht im von Ankara erwünschten Maße berücksichtigen.”
“Hier kollidieren die Interessen der EU teils frontal mit den Interessen der USA, Russlands und der Türkei. Eine Schlichtung der geopolitischen Konflikte in der Region wäre also aus energiepolitischer Sicht im obersten Interesse Europas. Hier kann man bereits jetzt sagen, dass diese Perspektive durch die militärische Eskalation der letzten Wochen mehr und mehr schwindet. Eine weitere geopolitische Niederlage für Europa – nicht die erste und sicherlich auch nicht die letzte, wenn man sich nicht endlich von den USA emanzipiert, die auch hier diametral andere Interessen haben.”
‘The Hinge of History’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“We cannot make too much of events such as these, but we must not make too little of them, either. These are signs on the surface of much deeper movements a few meters down in our civilization’s soil. Things are gradually coming apart in consequence of Israel’s savagery and America’s abetment of it, at home in the U.S., in the Atlantic world altogether and certainly between the West and the world beyond it. Now it is time to look forward to see what we can see of the world to come.”
“Here is Chas on our moment:”“This is clearly what Chancellor Scholz of Germany calls a Zeitenwende —that is, an epic-changing moment, a time of major change in a new direction in history. We’ve talked before about the fact that 500 years of global dominance by the Euro–American culture, the Atlantic culture, has come to an end.
“What we are seeing at the moment in Palestine is the end of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is a phenomenon of the last two centuries or so, and it is always accompanied by genocide. The only exception I can think of is New Zealand, where Māori power countered the British sufficiently to preserve their culture as a separate one….”
“America’s so-called moral authority has been a fiction for decades, I would say since the 1945 victories, but it is now in something close to free-fall collapse. Even the Israelis, in a weird, upside-down paradox, now question America’s right to criticize the indecencies and inhumanities of others. Back off with your “humanitarian pauses,” they say. You killed more Iraqis than we are killing Palestinians. Two morally bankrupt regimes bickering: What’ll they think of next?”
“The devastation of America’s status in the community of nations—and I do not think we witness anything less—is altogether the consequence of a complacency long evident among America’s policy cliques. As Chas Freeman points out in his exchange with Chris Lydon, Israel is now breaking U.S. laws circumscribing the use of American-made armaments; it is in breach of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions. And nobody in the U.S. says anything about it, Freeman says with obvious ire. It is the rest of the world that is beginning to speak up. I put it this way: We watch as the Age of Hegemonic Hypocrisy, as I propose we call it, draws to a close.
““The world’s patience with us and our arrogance and presumption is coming to an end,” Chas notes. “We are going to have no choice but to recognize that we are one great power among other great powers.”
“Biden’s ideologues, as I have noted severally in this space, fried the Sino–U.S. relationship the first chance they got after Joe took office. Arrogance and ignorance, as a French deputy noted at the time of the Iraq invasion in 2003, are the worst of all possible combinations.”
“Remember when Moscow and Beijing began to draw closer together a decade or so ago? Washington was recklessly pressing NATO as close as possible to Russia’s western frontier while getting going with its neo-containment of China. The two nations said more or less in unison, Enough of this. There is no working with these people. The Russia–China relationship now stops just short of a formal alliance and is the linchpin, or one of them, of what the Chinese, especially, now regularly refer to as “the new world order.” This is the multipolar order of which Freeman speaks.”
“We now have the Chinese preparing, by all appearances, to play a diplomatic role in the search for a settlement. We have Iran and Saudi Arabia summiting to determine a common course of action in response to the Gaza crisis. We have Turkey militantly denouncing Israel and talking to Iran after long, long years of animosity. We have a goodly number of America’s friends pulling the plug on their relations with Tel Aviv.”
Israel is burning through the U.S.‘;s waning power to free itself of the Palestinians. They don’t care about the U.S. and the U.S. is too stupid to notice what’s happening.
Umfassend und ausgewogen? – „Damit sich mehr Menschen in Sicherheit bringen können“ – Kinder-Nachrichtensendung logo „erklärt“ den Krieg in Nahost by Frank Blenz (NachDenkSeiten)
“Die Zivilisten im Gazastreifen benötigen dringend Hilfe. Es fehlen zum Beispiel Lebensmittel, sauberes Trinkwasser, Medikamente und Kraftstoff. Einige LKW mit Hilfsleistungen konnten bereits in den Gazastreifen fahren. Doch das ist nur ein Bruchteil der Lieferungen, die vor dem Krieg ankamen.”
Hiermit wird die Frage gefordert: warum benötigten die Menschen bereits vor dem Krieg so viel Hilfe? Waren die eventuell bereits vorher unterdrückt und verzweifelt? Warum werden bereits stark im Not gedrungene Menschen angegriffen?
In Africa, the Legacy of the US War on Terror Is Death and Chaos by Nick Turse (Jacobin)
“The raw numbers alone speak to the depths of the disaster. As the United States was beginning its forever wars in 2002 and 2003, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in Africa. This year, militant Islamist groups on that continent have, according to the Pentagon, already conducted 6,756 attacks. In other words, since the United States ramped up its counterterrorism operations in Africa, terrorism has spiked 75,000 percent.”
“In Afghanistan, a two-decade-long war ended in 2021 with the rout of an American-built, -funded, -trained, and -armed military as the Taliban recaptured the country. In Iraq, the Islamic State nearly triumphed over a US-created Iraqi army in 2014, forcing Washington to reenter the conflict. US troops remain embattled in Iraq and neighboring Syria to this very day.”
““We came, we saw, he died,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a US-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, but Libya slipped into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that “failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the “ worst mistake ” of his presidency.”
They should both be dragged before the Hague. They’re worse than Netanyahu, who’s a rank amateur in comparison.
“Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the United States has launched thirty-one declared air strikes in Somalia, six times the number carried out during President Obama’s first term, though far fewer than the record high set by President Trump, whose administration launched 208 attacks from 2017 to 2021.”
“While the 75,000 percent increase in terror attacks and 42,500 percent increase in fatalities over the last two decades are nothing less than astounding, the most recent increases are no less devastating. “A 50-percent spike in fatalities tied to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel and Somalia over the past year has eclipsed the previous high in 2015,” according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution.”
The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers by Isaac Chotiner (The New Yorker)
“What are the borders of that Jewish nation? The borders of the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest. [This would include the territory of multiple Middle Eastern countries as well as the territory that Israel controls today.]”
“If someone decides to invent a new religion today, who will decide the rules? The first nation that got the word from God, the promise from God—the first nation is the one who has the right to it. The others that follow—Christianity and Islam, with their demands, with their perceptions—they’re imitating what existed already. So, why in Israel? They could be anywhere in the world.”
Back away slowly from this nutter. What is she on about? God gave her the right to eradicate anyone living on her land? The one that God gave her people thousands of years ago? Is she absolutely mad?
“You did no homework before you interviewed me. Everything that you say is the opposite of my personality and my philosophy. You are interviewing a person, and you don’t know anything about them. It’s very strange. I’ve never encountered a situation like this.”
That is some boss-level gaslighting.
“Isaac Chotiner: I was trying to understand where Palestinians who live in the West Bank should go.
“Daniella Weiss: Why should they go? Why should they go? They should stay where they are, you’re saying? They should accept the fact that in the Land of Israel there is only one sovereign. This is the issue. So let’s not confuse things. We the Jews are the sovereigns in the state of Israel and in the Land of Israel. They have to accept it.”
The only solutions offered are: death, exile, or subjugation. Such an adorable little old lady she is.
“Isaac Chotiner: When you say that you want more Jews in the West Bank, is your idea that the Palestinians there and the Jews will live side by side as friends, or that—
“Daniella Weiss: If they accept our sovereignty, they can live here.”
“Isaac Chotiner: So you think it was a mistake to pull out of settlements [in Gaza] nearly twenty years ago?
“Daniella Weiss: It was a mistake. The whole world is crying now because of that. The whole world suffers from Hamas’s rise. Not my problem. It’s your problem. No country in the world said they were going to accept even a thousand people from Gaza. The world hates them. It was such a big mistake to let them rise.
“Isaac Chotiner: Where should the Palestinians in Gaza go?
“Daniella Weiss: To Sinai, to Egypt, to Turkey.”
This is what it looks like when you really and truly don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks.
“Isaac Chotiner: We saw some horrible images on October 7th of what happened to Israeli children, and now we see some horrible images in Gaza of what is happening to Palestinian children. When you see Palestinian children dying, what’s your emotional reaction as a human being?
“Daniella Weiss: I go by a very basic human law of nature. My children are prior to the children of the enemy, period. They are first. My children are first. We are talking about children. I don’t know if the law of nature is what we need to be looking at here. Yeah. I say my children are first.”
Honesty, at least.
In the West Bank, Israeli Settlers Are Burning Palestinians’ Olive Trees by Carolina S. Pedrazzi (Jacobin)
“On October 30, farmer Omar Ghoneym drove from al-Khader to his lands in the southern area of Bethlehem. On his way there, he received unfathomable news: most of his property (mainly olive trees) had been uprooted and destroyed by settlers. What he saw when he arrived broke him. Not only had he lost all of his harvest, but even the centuries-old dar ( دار — traditional rural house), which used to overlook the hill, had been torn apart stone by stone by Israeli bulldozers. Mahmoud Abdullah, another farmer, has acres of grape vines just next to Omar’s trees. He hadn’t been allowed to pick the fruits since October 7. But on the morning of October 30, nothing was left to harvest because his vines had been crushed into the soil. Settlers vandalized everything on the Palestinian hills surrounding their colony, Efrat.”
“After the attacks on October 7, the West Bank has experienced the deadliest weeks since the Second Intifada. As of this Tuesday, over 140 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed, 2,040 people have been arrested, and villages and cities have been placed under a blockade, which has prevented residents from traveling outside their towns.”
“Area C is meant to be “progressively handed back to Palestinians.” In reality, Area C, comprising nearly 70 percent of West Bank territory, remained under the complete military control of the Israeli army (Israel Defence Forces, IDF), and Israeli settlements have continually expanded there over the last three decades.”
“Farmers haven’t been allowed to reach these territories at all over the last month, and the IDF has informed them that if they attempt to reach their olive groves, they will be killed. Some farmers have shared photos of leaflets that settlers left on their groves, which read: “You have reached the border! Entry is forbidden and dangerous, and anyone who approaches will see burning trees.””
“One of Na’em’s siblings has been recording on camera all the attacks they’ve undergone in the past fifteen years and shares the videos with human rights NGOs such as B’Tselem. Two weeks ago, a settler confiscated his phone and broke his fingers while doing so.”
“The settlers have always beaten us and threatened to kill us. They call in the army, which expels us from our land under false pretexts.” He continues: “Now we cannot return to harvest the crop because we fear for our lives and don’t know what to do. The crop will be destroyed as we won’t be able to pick it. It constitutes 80 percent of my family’s income,”
“[…] to put into perspective the IDF’s “counterterrorism” agenda, we should keep in mind that data before October 7 shows that settlers in the West Bank were already the residents with the highest gun ownership in all of Israel and Palestine, and that the use of firearms to perpetrate attacks against Palestinians has been exponentially growing in recent years. With this in mind, the claim to self-defense as a justification for the violence unleashed against Palestinians is hugely disproportionate — and makes no sense when the victims of this violence are unarmed farmers.”
Honestly, it’s just a bullshit cover story. Everybody knows it. This is just shocking racism, nothing more complex than that. You don’t have to waste time debunking it. That’s the intent—to waste everyone’s time debating about stuff that’s obvious to anyone with a conscience.
“Even before October 7, Palestinian farmers were never allowed free access to their land. Every time they had to tend to their land, they needed to request a special permit from the IDF, which would authorize them to cultivate at prescribed times — in order not to be harassed by settlers. And, because the Israeli army often didn’t release these permits, farmers faced the dilemma of whether to risk their lives to take care of their fields and trees or to take care of themselves and lose their harvest.”
“Recent reports show that the IDF has used so many white phosphorus artillery shells in the conflict gradually developing on the Israeli-Lebanese border, that over forty thousand acres of harvestable land is now burnt and left uncultivable. Hundreds of Lebanese farmers and their families have been displaced after losing their main source of income: their olive trees.”
Time’s Up for Netanyahu and Biden by Dan Siegel (Scheer Post)
“This is Joe Biden’s Lyndon Johnson moment, the time for him to follow LBJ’s 1968 decision to withdraw from the campaign for reelection. The issue is not that Biden is too old. His policies are too old. The American Empire is no more. We need leaders ready to engage the emerging multipolar world, who do not imagine that the U.S. is going to war over Taiwan, who welcome sharing power with the nations of Europe and the BRICS countries. The end of America’s uncritical support of the Israeli government can be the first step in creating leadership for a world at peace.”
True, we do need them. We aren’t going to find them, but that would be, technically, what would save the U.S. and the world. The U.S. hasn’t hit rock-bottom yet. It still has a tremendously long way to go. And it’s going to cause a lot more damage on the way—much more than it already has, if that’s even conceivable.
This week Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met in San Fransisco. China stretched out a hand with an olive branch, saying that they must work together in a cooperative, multi-polar world, that we must stop the zero-sum game that the U.S. insists on promulgating because it used to win all the time, and now it still think it’s winning because a few of its citizens still benefit enormously.
Biden confirmed that Xi is a dictator in the press conference that ensued the 4-hour summit.
When asked whether he would still characterize Xi as a dictator, as he had earlier this year, Biden said, as shown in a short video clip in this tweet by Paris Marx (Twitter),
“Well, look, he is. He’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that is based on a form of government totally different than ours.”
So Biden’s an utterly simplistic moron who thinks at the level of a third-grader trying to fill out a two-paragraph essay on China. His brain is filled with salad.
He’s even less eloquent than Trump, and his ideas are on the same level: China bad because different.
God help us.
So Biden steps down.
Who fills his shoes? Kamala Harris? RFK? Marianne Williamson? What else do the Democrats have?
And the Republicans? Trump? Vivek Ramaswamy? Nikki Haley? Chris Christie? Ron DeSantis?
They are all maniacs and morons, utterly out of touch with even the basics of American and world history, sociology, culture, and philosophy with which one should gird oneself as a citizen, to say nothing of the President of the United States.
They have no empathy, they speak in simplistic and cruel phrases, they think in sound bites. They have no inner monologue worth hearing, they have no principles, they have no morals, they have no ethics. They may purport to have principles but, at the drop of the hat, they will subvert them for personal gain. That is literally the opposite of the definition of “having principles”.
Roaming Charges: Politics of the Lesser Exterminators by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
From China’s report on the conference.
“President Xi Jinping noted that there are two options for China and the U.S. in the era of global transformations unseen in a century: One is to enhance solidarity and cooperation and join hands to meet global challenges and promote global security and prosperity; and the other is to cling to the zero-sum mentality, provoke rivalry and confrontation, and drive the world toward turmoil and division. The two choices point to two different directions that will decide the future of humanity and Planet Earth.”
Yup. I’m sure they’re watching with horror at the decay that is so clearly apparent in the U.S. body of state. They are not overjoyed in any way because they know how dangerous this is. I’ve used this metaphor before, but the balrog of the American State will take down more than just one wizard as it topples from the bridge and drops into the abyss.
It is definitely dropping; the question is: what will remain? What will it allow to remain? The U.S. seems determined to drive us all into the wall on climate change. That damage would make all of the rest of its evil acts pale in comparison.
Leaving Blobtopia by James Howard Kunstler (Culsterfuck Nation)
“That war is a lost cause, and the cause was extremely stupid in the first place. Do you even remember what it was? I’ll tell you: to prod Russia into destroying itself. Oh? But why? Because, you know . . . Russia (and Trump!). There is your blob logic. Cost us something like $150 billion, a large part of that distributed among Mr. Zelensky’s circle while he sacrificed a whole generation of his country’s young men to Russian artillery fire and leaves what’s left of his sad-ass land an economic basket-case.”
Just to prove that there are reasonable thoughts and opinions in everyone’s grey matter, nearly no matter how horrible their other opinions are, I noticed the paragraph above as I skimmed through the latest post from an author I used to hold in higher regard before first COVID, then the Democrats, sent him down a deep, dark rabbit hole, like so many others.
So I agree with him, more or less, on Ukraine.
On Israel/Gaza, he drops back into woefully uninformed mode.
“America is also taking the heat for Israeli-Gaza war. The reality — for those of you interested in reality — is that Bibi is doing what Bibi needs to do whether America likes it or not: a large-scale root-canal on this troublesome region, going literally deep beneath the surface to clean the rot of Hamas out from that underground tunnel world they squandered their people’s capital building.”
Yeah, he’s just parroting mainstream media talking points. He probably thinks he’s citing FOX News, but I heard snippets of this when the Bad Faith Podcast had Norman Finkelstein on to analyze a piece by Jake Tapper of CNN. What Kunstler outlined above was nearly exactly what Tapper was saying, perhaps sugar-coated a bit more than FOX News would.
The forced evacuation of southern Gaza: The next stage in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“On Thursday, Israeli forces dropped leaflets over major cities in southern Gaza, including Khan Younis, telling the population to evacuate or face the threat of death. The displacement of the population of southern Gaza is the next stage of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which is being carried out by Israel with the support of the US and European imperialist powers. One area at a time, Gaza is being depopulated through the combination of mass expulsion, massacres and starvation.
“It is evident that the attacks of October 7 have been seized upon as a pretext by Israel to carry out a long-planned scheme for the systematic depopulation of Palestine, which began with northern Gaza, is now being extended to southern Gaza and will continue to the West Bank.”
“By “what happened to Gaza City,” Regev is referring to the systematic carpet bombing that has destroyed or damaged 40 percent of northern Gaza’s homes and shattered its healthcare, food distribution and water treatment systems. All bakeries in Gaza have been shut down, and no wheat is available at any price. There is no food, no water and no medical care.”
“American imperialism’s wholesale embrace of Israel’s genocide exposes, for all time, the lie that US foreign policy has anything to do with “human rights.” Throughout the 1990s, the United States used allegations of “ethnic cleansing” to justify military interventions in the Balkans, culminating in the bombing of Serbia in 1999. But the Biden administration’s systematic encouragement of Israel’s ethnic cleansing makes clear that the feigned concern for “human rights” was nothing more than a pretext for its stated goal of dissolving Yugoslavia in order to place the Balkans under US and NATO domination.”
That is the fervent hope, yes, that the scales will fall from more eyes, that Empire will be revealed for what it is to more people, that they will no longer support it in all that it does. That is the fervent hope every time it does something horrible.
That was the fervent hope of those who watched NATO drop a tremendous amount of ordnance on a formerly Soviet-allied and then Russia-allied country, while pretending to look for “ethnic cleansing”.
That was the fervent hope of those who tried desperately to stop the second Gulf War in 2003, when millions marched for peace. No-one even remembers that they did that. Empire lost little to no international standing for its crimes.
That was the fervent hope of those who watched NATO destroy Libya and Syria.
We always hope that the latest crime, that latest affront to any human decency, will be the straw that breaks that camel’s back, the thing that causes the world to demand that Empire toe the line, stop the self-serving hypocrisy, and live up to its espoused principles
Nothing has worked in the past. The allure of the MCU is too strong for the world. How can you stay mad at the US? They produce so many cool TV shows about cool Americans doing cool things. So much culture produced to explain how rich you can get in America, how awesome the police are at their jobs, how hot the sluts are.
Maybe this latest attack on Palestine will be the straw.
I doubt it, but maybe.
Israel has gone much farther than it has before. It’s much more brazen in its disdain for international law. It wears its inherent cultural and racial arrogance and superiority on its sleeve. It makes it clear that it doesn’t care about a judgment levied by inferior beings—which includes the rest of the world. It challenges the world to do something about it.
Max and Chris discuss the most current information available on what actually happened on October 7th, 2023, using Israeli media, the Israeli government, and the IDF itself as sources. If you last stopped paying attention to what Israel thinks happened on that day on that day, then you have a completely warped picture that was intended to build unquestioning support.
Many of the more lurid details of that day have been reneged and the numbers of civilians killed is considerably lower than it was. This is no excuse, of course, but “you murdered a thousand babies after raping them and putting them in ovens” hits different than “you killed a lot of civilians, but also a lot of the ones we thought you’d killed actually turn out to have not been civilians or, if they were, we were actually the ones who killed them, our bad.”
Chas Freeman’s insight is still incisive, even if he looks a lot older than he did when I saw him interviewed several times at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has a tremendous amount of knowledge on foreign policy, even in the Middle East, even though his focus during his career was on a Sino-Soviet relations. He even has 傅立民 next to his Latin-alphabet name in the video.
At 06:48, he says,
“Well, I have to say that you need to start with the recognition that President Biden is … for decades, has been an avowed Zionist. He’s very, very pro-Israel and very, very indifferent to the Palestinians. Antony Blinken is also a Zionist. He landed in Israel as Secretary of State, identifying himself as a Jew and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. So, there’s no question about where the leadership of the United States stands.”
At about 19:00, he says,
“I think [Israel] can go on for as long as they’re willing to pay the price that they are beginning to pay in terms of global opinion. We’ve already seen a number of countries downgrade relations. Bolivia broke them with with Israel.
Colombia and Chile have recalled their ambassadors, at least for some time. Other countries have condemned Israel.“We have the vote in the general assembly, the ability of the United States to
protect Israel politically, which we have done with numerous vetos, is declining and there is a victim, if you will—a collateral damage—from this whole thing, in terms of the global order. The United Nations, which has a security council composed of the victors in World War I, which excludes Rising Powers. Whether they are India or Brazil—and does not allow permanent representation for Africa.“[…] does not take account of the resurgence in power of Japan and Germany and does overvalue both France and Britain in the security council. This constellation of power was already seen by many as outmoded and requiring reform.
“I think the obstruction that the United States has been able to engineer with its veto and the security council actually threatens the continued existence of the United Nations.
“In other arenas we have seen countries step outside the post World War II order. For example, the BRICS, the Asian infrastructure Investment Bank as a complement/supplement to the World Bank. Many other institutions coming about which basically try to perpetuate the rules of the United Nations system but to do so with separate organizations.
“I should mention also the World Trade Organization which the United States has
sabotaged. Countries are trying to work out new mechanisms for commercial dispute resolution, so something like this is possible with the UN.”
“Israel is an ethnocracy. a rule by a single ethnic group, or in this case ethnic religious group [ethno-theocracy] namely Jews over another ethnic religious group namely Palestinian, Muslims, and Christians.
“The only crime that people in Gaza have committed is that they […] identify themselves as Arab, Muslim, Christian, and therefore their identity makes them the enemy of Zionism.
“I want to say that there is a very clear difference between Zionism and Judaism. Zionism is a form of nationalism. It’s a an ideology originally secular, [but] now combined with religious fervor.”
At 27:30, he says,
“Israel, like white South Africa, is a democracy. That is, the Afrikaans and other whites in South Africa had a very democratic system. It was a tyranny from the perspective of black South Africans.
“The same is true of Israel, [which] is a democracy for Jews. There are some Arab citizens of Israel—about 20% of the population—they are second-class citizens. discriminated against, denied resources and access to facilities that are open to their Jewish fellow citizens.
“There are also two other categories of people under Israeli rule: those in the West Bank, who are disenfranchised, subject to a Kafkaesque system of pass-controls and checkpoints and [who are] often murdered by settlers, who are protected by the Israeli Defense Force.
“And, finally, there is Gaza, which has been correctly described as the world’s largest concentration camp, an open-air prison, where Israel will basically not
only doesn’t allow people any freedoms but periodically murders large numbers
of people.”
At 35:30, he says,
“If the whole program was to fight to the last Ukrainian, and you’re running out of Ukrainians, then you don’t have a policy. I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer to people that it would have been far preferable for Ukraine to implement the Minsk Accords, by which the Donbas retion would have remained part of Ukraine, although about to speak Russian like people in Quebec can speak French.”
Or as people in many countries speak multiple languages, as Freeman well knows. Very few countries are as mono-lingual as Ukraine was trying to be. Even the U.S. has a tremendous amount of Spanish by now, even if it hasn’t officially enshrined the language legally as Switzerland has with its four official languages. In Switzerland’s case, English is a de-facto language in that it is spoken nearly everywhere.
At 47:16, he says,
“I would say the Ukraine War began or […] established a very clear process of lost American influence in the so-called Global south—or Global majority as some people call it—and the United States lost influence. The war in Gaza—this war of annihilation against Palestinians—is costing the US the rest of its influence. […] I don’t think anyone will take us seriously in the future when we offer advice on human rights.”
At 49:15, he says,
“I think the United States has decided that China is its principal adversary. It’s the only country that has the weight in world affairs and the technological capacity to contest for the control of East Asia or the globe. This is the mentality.
“I don’t believe China has any aspiration to do either. It’s not going to invade its neighbors, with the exception of Taiwan, which is not a neighbor. It is part of China, separated by Civil War and the Cold War by American intervention.
“Ironically, the more the United States doubles down in our commitment to Taiwan, the greater the affront and the greater the effort China will make to take Taiwan. If the United States were not defending Taiwan, the two sides of the state would come to some political agreement about how to manage their relationship. And I think it probably could be quite generous on the part of Beijing. But the presence of the United States complicates that and makes it impossible.
“On the American side, Taiwan is—nobody remembers the history, nobody has read the agreements we made with the Chinese on how to manage the Taiwan issue. So, we’ve just set those issues aside. We’ve broken our word on everything we agreed and we don’t seem to recognize that […] or consider that important. So, what we have is a relationship with China that is entirely focused on a war over Taiwan. And I think there’s very likely to be a war over Taiwan.
“When will it happen? It will happen when China decides that it can win easily.”
At 55:13, he says,
“The United States never recognized their incorporation into the Soviet Union but we did not actively contest their incorporation because the Soviet Union was a nuclear power. China’s a nuclear power but we are actively contesting its sovereignty and territorial Integrity. This is very dangerous”
Enter the Moral Abyss by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“According to Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev, 200 of the bodies initially identified as Israelis, were actually Hamas. “We had the number at 1400 casualties and now we’ve revised that down to 1200. Because we understood, we had over-estimated. We made a mistake. They’re actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours. In the end, apparently, they were Hamas.” How did they get burned? Who burned them? Why were the Hamas corpses lumped with Israeli bodies? Where did the killing take place? Were they killed at the same time as the Israelis? By what?”
“ In less than 40 days, Israel killed more than 11,000 people. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland around 3,700 people—combatants and civilians—were killed over the course of…29 years!”
And 11,000 is just the last number we got days ago, when the Palestinians stopped being able to collect and disseminate information.
“When asked whether Israel has the “right of self-defense under international law,” Frances Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories said no and explained: “Israel cannot claim the right of self-defense against a threat that emanates from the territory that it occupies, that is kept under belligerent occupation.””
“The UN World Food Program said Gaza faces a swelling food gap. Hunger is widespread throughout the Strip with nearly the entire population in desperate need of food assistance, and only 10 percent of necessary food supplies entering Gaza since the war began.”
“The UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution calling for “humanitarian corridors” and the release of hostages. The vote, the first UNSC resolution on Palestine since 2016, passed 12 – 0. (The US and UK abstained because the resolution didn’t explicitly condemn Hamas and Russia abstained because the resolution didn’t call for a ceasefire.) However, even this timid resolution was immediately rejected by Israel, prompting Palestine’s UN Rep. Riyad Mansour what actions the UN would take to enforce the resolution. When Saddam and Qaddafi defied similar resolutions, the US invaded their countries, toppled their governments and executed their leaders.”
Well, that’s obviously not going to happen to Israel, but it’s nice to see the consistent hypocrisy. More fuel for that fire, I suppose.
“Let’s give the last word this week to Anne Boyer, former poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine….”“[…] I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.
“If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.”
Love Gaza by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post)
Widespread resistance from actors to SAG-AFTRA betrayal on Artificial Intelligence, streaming residuals by David Walsh (WSWS)
“Sharma makes the obvious point that if “you want to get hired, you have to be ready to consent to be replicated, so there are people who are out there saying that consent at the time of engagement is coercion because they won’t hire you unless you give them those rights.” Of course, it is coercion, with powerful corporations lined up against actors desperate for work.”
“To spell it out: wealthy company executives like Bob Iger of Disney and Ted Sarandos of Netflix and a group of millionaire performers issued the orders for a return to work and SAG-AFTRA officials jumped to obey. The Biden administration was also involved. It is a repugnant spectacle, although entirely typical of the way in which every union bureaucracy, nothing more than an arm of management, operates.”
“The union has refused to release the actual agreement, claiming—revealingly—that the deal is not yet completed! This didn’t prevent these scoundrels from declaring the “strike is over” and launching into an appalling and inappropriate round of self-congratulation. Actors are supposed to vote to approve a deal into which all sorts of changes and fine print can still be introduced. This is a corrupt and discredited proceeding.”
I think the strikers are doing a good thing, defending the trade they’ve invested years into learning. I do think that “extra” and “voice actor” are endangered, though. It’s just too easy to generate voices right now—with low-to-middling quality that people don’t seem to care about—that there’s no way it won’t be perfected in the future. So many short videos are narrated by computer voices already. Nobody wants to pay anything for anything. Amateurs creating content online—sometimes with billions of views—don’t want to pay anything. Studios don’t want to pay anything. The studios will happily cut their costs by 50% and then turn around and raise their monthly streaming rates. They. Do. Not. Care. Society and government will not jump in to remedy this complete destruction of culture.
“Crabtree-Ireland went on, “For many actors, something like $1,000 or $2,000 can mean the difference between qualifying for health insurance or not. It can mean everything for someone who’s making $23,000-$24,000 a year and that’s the difference for their benefits. So I do think that it has real significant potential to change how actors perceive the way the streaming business is treating them.””
Crabtree-Ireland is a union rep who makes over $1M per year.
Once again, the fact that health insurance is tied to the job mucks everything up.
“[…] renew the strike and set it on a different course: for minimum increases of at least 25 percent in the first year; for a ban on digital replicas as long as the conglomerates have control over them; for residuals corresponding to the massive profits being made; for preparation against the coming attack on jobs; and for the socialist reorganization of economic, social and cultural life.”
Ceasefire Follies by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
Just a quick update on where our long-ailing blogger is at, mentally.
“Note for future terrorists. Take some hostages atop your rapes and murders, and they give you huge leverage to stop your victims from coming after you. That, and convincing the useful idiots to march for the sake of the babies you use as shields so you can perpetrate terror but they can’t do anything to stop you.”
“[…] those demanding a ceasefire from the side that didn’t break the ceasefire on October 7th.”
“Oddly, Gazan lives matter. Israeli lives, not so much because they deserve to die for being a Jewish state. The connection there with Jewishness seems not to matter much, even as they indulge in sophistry to differentiate between Zionism and Judaism so they won’t feel like the hypocrties and fools they are.”
“As for the Gazan children, they’ll be martyrs as far as Hamas is concerned […]”
He’s not doing so hot. He still hasn’t put a second of his time into finding out what’s has been going on there, what is going on there now, or what would be a possible solution that doesn’t involve more tragedy. There is no speaking to someone who’s out of the gate with this viewpoint, unless they’re family or friends or someone you need to invest time in. Everyone else can just back away slowly and hope that someone like this doesn’t have too much influence on anyone else.
He’s still absolutely livid, incoherent, and about as grounded in reality as a Trump-Uncle at Thanksgiving. You know, the kind that sends me political cartoons of Joe Biden giving away the U.S. to China. Just batshit.
I wonder if he knows he’s writing at the same intellectual level as the Babylon Bee these days? (Hamas Offers To Release Hostages If Israel Agrees To Not Exist (Babylon Bee)).
This Is The Real Face Of The US Empire by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
The article links to this tweet by Sean P. McCarthy (Twitter) that includes a 2:18 video of a man harassing a food vendor in New York. As noted in the quoted tweet by Zara Magnusson (Twitter),
“Meet Stuart Seldowitz, a former advisor to the White House who used to advise Obama on foreign policy.
“He is a three-time winner of the State Department’s Superior Honour Award.”
“That such a horrible person could climb his way to the highest echelons of the world’s most powerful government — working on Palestinian affairs no less — illustrates an important point about the US empire and what it is. There are no barriers stopping such creatures from rising to the top of that power structure, just the opposite in fact — they get an express lane to the top. That’s why bloodthirsty swamp monsters like John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, Victoria Nuland and Elliott Abrams find themselves so intimately involved with US policymaking.”
“Stuart Seldowitz is not an aberration but a perfect manifestation of all this. This is the sort of mind which keeps the empire marching along from administration to administration no matter who Americans elect. This is the sort of mind which keeps the weapons flowing, the blood pouring, the fossil fuels burning, and the terrified screams which power the imperial machine continually erupting into the night sky.”
While hunger soars in US, Biden feasts at billionaire’s estate by Patrick Martin (WSWS)
“President Joe Biden is spending his Thanksgiving holiday at the $34 million Nantucket estate of David Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a hedge fund notorious for buying up companies, slashing their workforces, stripping their assets, and selling off what remains at a profit.”
“Biden is the friend of the unions, not the workers. He regards the unions and their highly paid bureaucratic apparatuses as the best mechanism for slashing working-class living standards and suppressing the class struggle.
“He counts on the unions to straitjacket the working class politically, particularly on the questions of foreign policy and war. The main focus of Democratic Party policy is the aggressive promotion of American imperialist interests overseas through an explosion of militarism against Russia, in the Middle East against Iran, and in the Indo-Pacific against China, which is increasingly taking on the form of a third world war.”
“Biden and [Clarence] Thomas are corrupt political instruments of rival factions of the capitalist ruling elite. They may quarrel bitterly over policy, but on the fundamental class questions they are in unison: They defend capitalism and the domination of the wealthy at home, and the assertion of US imperialist interests abroad.
“Those who claim that it is possible to “pressure” the Biden administration to enact reformist policies, oppose the threat to democratic rights posed by Donald Trump, or restrain the genocidal violence of Israel, the military spearhead of American imperialism in the Middle East, are spreading fatal political delusions.”
America’s Peculiar Genocide Fetish by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)
“Well, here it is America, here’s your fucking holocaust giftwrapped like a holiday goose and complete with its very own Hitler and a clearly mapped out Final Solution. You wanna be the hero so goddamn badly? Here’s your shot. Bibi’s bombing babies and somebody needs to stop him before it’s too late. We’ll even let you wear the cape if it turns you on.
“There’s just one little problem here. The campaign to erase Gaza from the face of the map may be the next big thing in genocide but it turns out that America-the-beautiful is the power behind the new Hitler making it happen. Every bomb, every bullet, every canister of white phosphorous that gasses the ghettos of Gaza comes directly from your pocket, and to make things even more confounding, all the usual assholes from the news to the Hill seem to be using the ghost of the Holocaust to justify committing another goddamn Holocaust.”
“It didn’t matter that Hitler was actually done in by his fellow monster Stalin or that America vaporized entire cities like Dresden and Hiroshima just to steal his thunder, the mythology of America-the-indispensable-solution stuck and every time we get carried away with our latest massacre in Indochina or our latest quagmire in Babylon and our mask of sanity begins to slip, we just go right back to searching for another Hitler to stop.”
Complete and Utter Carnage by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“The deal to release Israeli women and children held by Hamas for Palestinian women and children held by Israel could have been brokered at any time since October 8th. Neither Netanyahu nor Biden wanted one, until much of Gaza, including its entire health care system had been destroyed, more than a third of its residents displaced and more than 6,000 murdered kids.”
“Israeli police officers have been instructed to forcibly prevent celebrations of the release of Palestinian prisoners, some of whom live in East Jerusalem, within Israeli territory–instructions which are bound (if not intended) to provoke violent confrontations and crackdowns, which will almost certainly result in more arrests and detentions, perhaps even more than were released.
“Noura Erakat: “Palestinians released in prisoner exchange, like all Palestinians, remain at acute risk of rearrest for traveling beyond their bantustan, praying in Jerusalem if they reside outside it, digging a water well too deep, for driving on a segregated road, & often, for existing.”
“According to The Economist, “1.7M Gazans, 77% of the population, have been displaced. More than half are crammed into” densely-packed UN shelters where “skin diseases and diarrhea are rife. A brief pause in the fighting will not offer Gazans much respite from this miserable existence.””
“Martin Griffiths, UN chief for humanitarian relief, began his career dealing with the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. But he says the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is “the worst ever…I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s complete, utter carnage.””
“After Facebook approved an ad calling for the assassination of a pro-Palestinian political activist, 7Amleh bought 19 test ads that explicitly contained hate speech and incitement to violence against Palestinians. Facebook approved every single one.”
“The attack on the Nova music festival didn’t go down the way it was initially reported. It turns out the festival was originally scheduled to end the event on Friday, but the organizers got permission midweek from the Army to extend to Saturday. Hamas did not know about the music festival and only learning about it after entering Israeli territory, as shown in bodycam footage of a terrorist asking a captured civilian where the “bad guys” are. An Israeli attack helicopter fired on Hamas fighters and also killed “some” partygoers.”
Israeli October 7 posterchild was killed by Israeli tank, eyewitnesses reveal by Max Blumenthal (The Grayzone)
“[…] the 12-year-old Hetzroni was not slain by Hamas. According to new testimony by an Israeli eyewitness to the girl’s death, she was killed by an Israeli tank shell alongside several neighbors.
“The revelation of Hetzroni’s friendly fire death came as the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhahu attempts to shut down the Israeli newspaper Haaretz for reporting that Israeli Apache helicopters killed Israeli citizens fleeing the Nova electronic music festival on October 7. Haaretz’s reporting confirmed a viral Grayzone investigation which highlighted disclosures by Israeli helicopter pilots and security officials of friendly fire orders throughout the fateful day.”
“Dagan confirmed that the tank shells killed Liel Hatsroni: “‘The girl did not stop screaming for all those hours,” she told Porat, referring to Liel. “She didn’t stop screaming… [but] when those two shells hit, [Liel] stopped screaming. There was silence then.”
“Porat concluded, “So what can you take away from that? That after that very massive incident, the shooting, which concluded with two shells, that is pretty much when everyone died.””
“It is impossible to know if the standoff between Israeli and Hamas forces at the Dagan home could have been resolved without bloodshed. But it is clear that the Israeli decision to shell the home with tanks wound up killing almost everyone inside, including the child who has become a centerpiece of Israel’s international anti-Hamas propaganda campaign. All the Israelis left behind, Porat said, was “a house full of corpses.””
Israel Has Damaged Israel’s Reputation Far Worse Than Its Enemies Ever Have by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“It’s maddening to see grown adults acting like Hamas are these foreign invaders who attacked Israelis out of the blue because of a hatred for Jewish people, like they’re internet-radicalized neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or something.”
“If you’ve ever wondered why society’s most famous and influential voices all have dogshit status quo politics, just look at the current purge of pro-Palestine actors in Hollywood. If your own elite class interests and having loyalty to your rich friends isn’t enough to keep you supporting the empire’s information interests, you’ll just get thrown out.”
Except for Tom Cruise, who’s defended his agent’s positions and told their company, in no uncertain terms, not to dare fire her.
“[…] the US is as far from a normal country as can be. It’s the hub of a vast, undeclared empire made up of allies, client states, proxies, and systems of military, economic and financial coercion which keeps most of the world moving in accordance with the wishes of the empire managers.”
Israel Doesn’t Have A Gen-Z Problem, It Has A Morality Problem by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“Nobody starts out as the sort of person who would support a genocidal bombing campaign that murders children by the thousands. It’s something you come into gradually over the years, one moral compromise at a time.
“[…] Deep down you know you’re on the wrong path. You know this isn’t how you started out, isn’t how you’re meant to be living your life. But you drown out that small voice inside with the much louder voices of life in a modern industrialized society, many of whom are paid millions of dollars a year to tell you your worldview is the correct one.”
Also, your own very lucrative job is very often predicated on keeping your mouth shut about certain uncomfortable truths about how the Empire runs society. For example, you won’t get anywhere in politics on the Eastern seaboard if you’re pro-Palestinian, no matter what the rest of your agenda looks like. It doesn’t matter how progressive and open and human-friendly you are: if you don’t accept the prevailing narrative of how Western Asia is configured, AIPAC will bury you.
“This is why there’s such a massive generation gap on the Israel-Palestine issue; young people haven’t spent a long time gradually eroding their moral compass into a worthless trinket, and they don’t consume enough mass media to have been convinced that doing so would be worthwhile. They have not been sufficiently indoctrinated into depraved indifference toward the suffering of others.”
This is a very interesting theory: that the young haven’t been steeped long enough in indoctrination to believe the prevailing myth. It’s also been about 16 years since the last major incursion, since the last time the plight of the Palestinians was major news. They’d never heard of the place before. The suppression worked against the propagandists because, instead of being able to shape the narrative, there was no narrative. They’d memory-holed all of Western Asia. When it reappeared on the scene with such violence, young people learned of the situation for the first time—and were rightly appalled. They hadn’t been prepared with the proper filters, so they can’t react appropriately, i.e., inhumanely.
Also, the latest generation is one that truly has less to lose than previous ones. Threatening a whole generation with taking away their possibility of good jobs is a cruel joke in an economy where there are very few so-called good jobs to go around anyway.
The propagandists running Empire
“[…] have a large group of people who have not been indoctrinated into accepting madness and amputating parts of their own conscience over the years, and so are able to look at the mass murder of civilians in Gaza with clear eyes.
“[…] Israel’s problem is not that people are being propagandized into hating it, it’s that people are not being successfully propagandized into supporting it.”
Useless hand wringing and empty platitudes in the latest US climate report by Brian Dyne (WSWS)
“The dire situation described completely dwarfs the series of implausible proposed remedies. This disparity again underscores the impossibility of combining a scientific approach to resolving climate change with the ongoing existence of capitalism and the dominance of the world economy by the drive for private profits and the division of the world into rival nation-states.”
“The most optimistic outlook, in which carbon dioxide emissions are “Very Low,” has CO2 emissions reach net zero when more of the greenhouse gas is removed from the atmosphere than added by human activity, closer to 2060 than 2050. And the report projects that global temperatures will increase beyond 2 degrees Celsius starting in the 2040s, possibly even the 2030s.
“Moreover, current CO2 emissions are nowhere near the levels needed for the “Very Low” scenario. For that to occur, global emissions must by 2100 fall from where they are now, an estimated 37.12 gigatons of CO2 a year, to about half of what they were in 2000, about 14 gigatons. The last time global greenhouse gas emissions were that low, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.”
“The current trajectory is more akin to the “High” scenario, which predicts what will happen if CO2 emissions in 2100 are 75 percent greater than what they were in 2000. Under those conditions, global temperatures will increase beyond 2 degrees Celsius in the 2030s, nearly 3 degrees Celsius in the 2040s, and 4 degrees Celsius in the 2060s. In 2023, emissions are already 45 percent greater.”
“In today’s United States, however, solutions are instead limited to the most tepid measures. One example from the report reads, “Mitigation and adaptation activities are advancing from planning stages to deployment in many areas, including improved grid design and workforce training for electrification, building upgrades, and land-use choices.””
It’s laughable that such pathetic measures are even highlighted as progress, and not as a colossal failure to respond to the climate crisis for four decades. It’s over because we don’t have time to dismantle the U.S. empire before it finishes killing the planet.
“The fact that climate change is caused by human activity has been known for decades, but is still flatly denied by a large section of the capitalist ruling elite, and virtually the entire Republican Party (and many Democrats). The basic science behind global warming, that higher atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases such as CO2 will trap more incoming heat from the sun, has been known for more than a century. And even major fossil fuel corporations such as ExxonMobil have admitted to the relationship between CO2 emissions and global temperature changes since at least the early 1980s.”
“Under Obama, Trump and now Biden, the ongoing initiatives promoting alternative energy, electric vehicles, etc. have been promoted not because of concern over planetary ecology, but because there is now profit to be made from new markets emerging out of “green” technologies.”
“There is also an immense amount of geostrategic jockeying, particularly sparked by the industrial growth of China. Every US-based climate report makes special mention that China is now the single largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, while downplaying the fact that the US, UK and European Union combined are responsible for the lion’s share of CO2 emissions. Ecology has become one more pretext for trade warfare measures against the world’s second largest economy, and even for military conflict.”
China’s 1/3 larger by PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). Has been for years..
“There is no reason to surrender to these circumstances. The tasks are immense, but they are fundamentally political, not technological. It is not “humanity” in the abstract that is responsible for the crisis, it is capitalism, a definite form of socioeconomic organization developed around the pursuit of private profit and the division of the world into nation-states. Thus it is the struggle against capitalism that must form the basis for a real solution to climate change.”
“Appeals to the powers-that-be for a change in policies fall on deaf ears. The capitalists are concerned with making profit and defending their wealth, and that means ecological devastation, genocidal wars, surrender to global pandemics, endless growth of social inequality, and a frontal assault on democratic rights.”
Polonius, His Muse by Sam Jennings (Hinternet)
“The character’s silence has been read by some as the very silence of God. Yet what is most mysterious, made subject over the years to hundreds of theories and dozens of books, is that the name Josefine does not once occur in the course of the novel. Not once. At this point, the name is practically a folk tale, an appellation handed down through the years. We can only hope it is the one Sayer first intended for her silent Lady, and the result is not unlike a precocious child’s reading of an ancient myth. Or, if you will allow me to be poetic once more: it is something like the initiation rite of a mystery cult, as conceived by an insane epigeneticist. We have inherited the name, none may know where from. All we can trace this knowledge back to are second-hand words, words themselves half-heard from some other person: a cosmic game of telephone, eventually vanishing into the past, murky as the lineage of the prehistoric hominids we believe to have birthed us.”
“It is clear to anyone who reads Polonius, His Muse today that, just as the starting point of the story was seemingly chosen quite arbitrarily, so the rest of the work might have proceeded forward forever, towards any end at all. Implied at either extreme of the narrative is an understanding that it goes on infinitely in either direction, to the very beginning, or else the end, of time itself.”
“When we read Sayer, we find Shakespeare’s work transmuted — on the one hand, into a microscopically limited, yet on the other hand into a paradoxically limitless, chapter of one brief moment in the entire flow of time and space. And so Hamlet itself becomes recognized throughout the course of Sayer’s mother/daughter work as an almost psychedelic irruption of all that creative cosmology into the dramatist’s limited, treble dimension. In this way, Sayer’s more discursive Hamlet is, essentially, a kind of demiurge: human consciousness as a sort of quantum vessel, shuttling its energy across the boundaries of the space-time continuum. It is science-fiction, even if only by caveat.”
“Not for nothing did Viswanathan give the name Babel’s Last Jest to his landmark study of the novel. For as he so eloquently pointed out, Josefine’s muteness is perhaps best read as a truly cosmic refutation of each of us, of the human soul’s nearly pathological compulsion to speak in the face of a silent Nature, or to pray in the presence of a silent God. If Hamlet once stood as the foremost celebration of mankind’s creative power, then Polonius, His Muse has now risen as its shadow — a humbling representation of that wordless cosmic witness, that judgeless Nature extending eternally beneath us, and within us, and beyond us.”
“What we have —and it is ultimately, only this— is the story: the tale of Sayer and the apparent inspiration for her mammoth undertaking. Though many scholars have tried, none have managed to determine the actual origins of any of these accounts. Each seems to come to us out of nothingness, sui generis. Just like the book’s subject. Just like its writer. And just like the book itself, at first: hand-printed, self-published, circulated in the countercultural milieux of Southern California in the dawning days of the Age of Aquarius.”
The Moose Jaw Event by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“I hung up without saying a word. That apology of mine was long in coming, and it took an awful lot to get me there. How could I possibly accept thanks, now, for something that only moments before had been the gravest crime in the world? I had owned it — it was my asteroid. Perhaps I had wanted to blow up the world, now that I think about it. No point in thanking me for failing. And anyhow who knows what tomorrow will bring? The mood of humanity now undulates as a single wave, from euphoria to terror and back again, day after day, year after year. For now no one is asking themselves what the space-bacteria will eat when they run out of plastic. As for me, I am fully expecting a whole new fucking freak-out soon enough.”
The Religion of the Engineers; and Hayek Its True Prophet by Henry Farrell (Crooked Timber)
“The core precept of this secular religion is faith in technology. From Andreessen’s opening section: “We believe growth is progress … the only perpetual source of growth is technology … this is why we are not still living in mud huts … this is why our descendents [sic] will live in the stars.””
“Both the old time religion and the new one invoke grand visions to wave away the mess, disagreements and complexities of the present. They depict those who oppose the actions of a tiny self-elected elite as champions of ignorance and enemies of progress. If we only just let the engineers run things, we could be sure that our descendants will have the universe for their inheritance.”
“Andreessen’s tirade was largely motivated by his anger at AI skeptics. Certainly, one of his proposed articles of faith is that “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.””
Cool. Just from that statement alone, I feel secure in not listening to or reading another word that Andreessen or his ilk have to say. You can use that line of argumentation for anything: deaths that were preventable by not having invented that piece of technology—say, fossil-fuel refinement and burning for everything—is a form of murder. People like this wield sophistry and casuistry so casually, then accuse others of hypothetical murders.
“We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets. We believe that out of all of these people will come scientists, technologists, artists, and visionaries beyond our wildest dreams. We believe the ultimate mission of technology is to advance life both on Earth and in the stars.”
What is the proposed mechanism for scaling up to 5x this level? Poverty is an anchor.
“There isn’t any room for complexity in Andreessen’s vision. The politics are all stripped out. There is only a struggle between the Good who embrace technological progress, and the Enemies of Progress.”
“The religion of the engineers is the hopium of Silicon Valley elites. It’s less a complex theology than an eschatological soporific, a prosperity gospel for venture capitalists, founders and wannabes. It tells its votaries that profits and progress point in exactly the same direction, and that by doing well they will most certainly do good.”
“If it’s a Ponzi, get in early”: The Ideology of Scam Futures by Kevin Cox (Crooked Timber)
“We only accept money from other people today because we think that someone will accept it from us tomorrow, and so on, into multiple tomorrows. When we invest, we are laying bets on particular visions of the future.”
“Studying retail investing is one way to explore how Silicon Valley ideologies move from centers of power, such as the actual physical placed called “Silicon Valley,” and diffuse to the rest of the world. Retail investing resembles Althusser’s notion of the classic Ideological State Apparatus. It is a vector of ideology, a way of mediating it.”
“I have been told, by probably about four different interviewees in crypto, that they (or “someone they know”) became more of an ideological believer in the politics of crypto as they watched the line go up and the potential cash-out value of their investment grow. When the line goes down, they don’t abandon those beliefs. Instead they revise them, and qualify them to rationalize either selling at a loss or “hodling” on.”
“There is an osmotic threshold where scam reality just becomes a reality. Even if the promised future doesn’t come to be, some future inevitably does. What kind of future happens in the aftermath of scams? The key question on my mind these days is: how do you keep living in a future that was never meant to actually exist because it was supposed to be a scam?”
Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder. by Cheryl Rofer (Crooked Timber)
“Silicon Valley ideology is a master-slave mentality, a hierarchical worldview that we all exist in extractive relation to someone stronger, and exploit and despise anyone weaker. Its only relations to other humans are supplication in one direction and subjugation in the other, hence its poster-boys’ constant yoyoing between grandiosity and victimhood. Tech bros like Thiel, Musk and Andreesen are the fluffers in the global authoritarian circle jerk.”
“Silicon Valley ideology is organising economic, political and social relations into a zero-sum hierarchical chain in which democratic accountability is irrelevant, where beta politicians suck up to the alpha tech-oligarchs, offering their citizens as tribute.* To wit, the thoroughly interchangeable Matt Hancocks, Rishi Sunaks, Wes Streetings; all selling out UK citizens’ data and life chances for pennies on the pound and a glint of northern California’s reflected glory.”
“Silicon Valley ideology is using private equity to buy a new marketplace, flood it with capital to flush out competitors, and use economic dominance to eviscerate working conditions and the cost of labour before jacking up the prices again, this time with the surplus all going to investors.”
“It’s hyping specific technologies as universal, structural game-changers in accelerating hype cycles designed to fleece their marks quickly enough to drive growth and cash out before most people realise the technology simply doesn’t work as they were told. Bonus points for damaging trusted institutions (crypto) or labour (AI) along the way.”
“Silicon Valley ideology is robbing states of tax and taking over the wrecked public services that result.”
“Silicon Valley ideology blames others for its harms. Its titans built the machines currently dismantling democracies. So, to absolve themselves of responsibility, they’ve come to see democracy itself as flawed and weak. Silicon Valley ideology quietly admits (its) freedom is not compatible with (our) democracy. So it wrecks it, destroying our information systems, gutting our infrastructure and essential services, and gathering digital lynch mobs to hound women and people of colour out of public life. Then, like the violent abuser who stands back, momentarily awed at what he has wrought, it says in a moment of startled vulnerability; ‘Look what you made me do.’”
“Silicon Valley ideology says safeguarding intelligence in the future is more important than its systems systematically crushing and killing black and brown people right now. Long-termism grabs attention back from people being harmed, who were beginning to make too much noise.”
“Silicon Valley’s extractive systems are only a real problem when they come after what the tech bros most value, their own brain function and autonomy. Racism, for them, is not ‘existential’. Misogyny is a matter of indifference when your goal is to ‘extend the light of consciousness’ across the solar system. It’s only when you look straight at Silicon Valley’s leaders you realise its core beliefs aren’t an ideology. They’re a personality disorder.”
“I’ll never get what these men see in Silicon Valley’s boy-kings. I don’t mean that rhetorically. There’s clearly an itch the tech oligarchs scratch for those who brush up against them, but looking at the exact same person, my brain clocks ‘predator’ at a thousand paces, and theirs seem to switch into a purring, excited mode that’s wholly unavailable to me.”
“The sensibles identify with the aggressor, align themselves with money, flutter like fangirls in the face of power. They never say ‘far right’ or ‘fascist’. They pat themselves on the back for occasionally calling Silicon Valley’s titans ‘controversial’.”
“I, quite frankly, am tired. I find myself yet again in a conversation dominated by beneficiaries of a dirty system while the conscience, critique and force of collective action for alternatives are provided by women, and women of colour, predominantly.”
Honestly? I like this essay. It’s been a lot of fun. Why end it with this divisive bullshit? Get the fuck out of here with your alienating and frankly condescending identitarianism, which challenges everyone who doesn’t have the right skin color or gender to “try harder”. Turnabout is fair play is stupid when you copy stupid.
“When one moderately powerful person steps up it emboldens others to act. It would signal to Musk’s shoulder-shrugging supporters inside US government – and especially the DoD – that you cannot run critical communications and defence infrastructure while being a far-right stooge sympathetic to foreign powers.”
WTF are you on about? I feel like the wheels are coming off of this essay. Which rabbit hole did you go down?
The High Stakes of Low Quality by Yvon Chouinard (NY Times)
“[…] people keep buying junk. In a world where it’s often cheaper to replace goods than to repair them, we have gone from a society of caretaker owners to one of consumers.”
“The novelist Terry Pratchett captured the problem in his “boots theory” of socioeconomics: “A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent $100 on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.””
“Quality is smart business. Even during economic downturns, people don’t stop spending. In our experience, instead of wanting more, they value better. Consumers should demand — and companies should deliver — products that are more durable, multifunctional and, crucially, socially and environmentally responsible.”
This inside-out design solves most of the rotary engine’s problems by Jonathan M. Gitlin (Ars Technica)
“The solution involves turning the engine inside out. Instead of an oval-shaped combustion chamber and a triangular rotor, now the combustion chamber is triangular and the rotor is an oval, which contains a pre-chamber. “So instead of a long, skinny, moving combustion chamber, we now have a stationary combustion chamber inside of the housing,” Shkolnik said. “What that means is we can make it smaller, and that drives a higher compression ratio. And because it’s stationary, it’s suitable for direct injection of fuel,” he said. And since the seals are stationary, the oil problem should be fixed.”
““That’s a big reason why we are raising outside capital, to cross these productionization and emissions bridges so that we can get to the commercial market. I would estimate about two years to where we are hopefully delivering with the DoD and then maybe one or two years after that for broader commercial markets,” Shkolnik said.”
You are tearing me apart, e/acc! by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“The altruists, which includes folks like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried, believe that maximum human happiness is a math equation you can solve with money, which should be what steers technological innovation. While the accelerationists believe almost the inverse, that innovation matters more than human happiness and the internet can, and should, rewire how our brains work. Either way, both groups are obsessed with race science, want to replace democratic institutions with privately-owned automations — that they control — and are utterly convinced that technology and, specifically, the emergence of AI is a cataclysmic doomsday moment for humanity. The accelerationists just think it should happen immediately. Of course, as is the case with everything in Silicon Valley, all of this is predicated on the unwavering belief in its own importance. So it’s very possible that if we were to take the actually longtermist view of all of this, we’d actually end up looking back at this whole thing as a bunch a weird nerds fighting over Reddit threads.”
The author wrote this about something else, but I thought it could be appropriate in many, many places.
“I wish all of the unwell people trapped inside of this cultural prison the best”
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft by James Somers (The New Yorker)
“Fluency with code would round out my children’s literacy—and keep them employable. But as I write this my wife is pregnant with our first child, due in about three weeks. I code professionally, but, by the time that child can type, coding as a valuable skill might have faded from the world.”
I can’t help but react violently to the idea that the only reason to learn something is because it will help you make money. Fuck. Off. Moron.
“[…] we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.”
I would hope so. It’s kind of a two-liner.
“As it became clear that he was going to lose, Sedol said, in a press conference, “I want to apologize for being so powerless.” He retired three years later. Sedol seemed weighed down by a question that has started to feel familiar, and urgent: What will become of this thing I’ve given so much of my life to?”
C’mon, you pathetic whiners. All I’m hearing is that you were always doing whatever you were doing for the wrong reason. You’re supposed to what you love, because you can’t not do it. You’re happy if someone pays you for it. Let me know how updating and maintaining this morass produced by your precious LLMs goes. It never worked before, and it won’t work now. As long as you restrict yourself to toy POCs that are largely stuff that already exists, you’re good. Why doesn’t the LLM deliver tests? Because no-one really writes them, so it has no source material. The only saving grace is that no-one will ever maintain or refactor that code, so it needs no tests?
“Medieval students called the moment at which casual learners fail the pons asinorum , or “bridge of asses.” The term was inspired by Proposition 5 of Euclid’s Elements I, the first truly difficult idea in the book. Those who crossed the bridge would go on to master geometry; those who didn’t would remain dabblers. Section 4.3 of “Beginning Visual C++,” on “Dynamic Memory Allocation,” was my bridge of asses. I did not cross.”
Cool. I guess you’re not a coder, not really? You don’t have to use dynamic memory allocation, but you have to be capable of understanding it. This person is a coder whose output can easily be replicated by a machine, because he can’t build anything complex anyway. Neither can an LLM. Who will build complex things if we convince engineers to stop? I think this affects those “learn to code” people.
“What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession.”
All of those are important. What are you talking about? No knowledge or skill? No wonder you can be easily replaced. You never offered anything of value in the first place. You enjoyed a few decades in the sun where you were able to run an arbitrage scam where you could pretend to be able to provide a service that people thought they needed. They didn’t need it, because otherwise they might have noticed your failure to provide it.
“Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles. Imagine explaining to a simpleton how to assemble furniture over the phone, with no pictures, in a language you barely speak. Imagine, too, that the only response you ever get is that you’ve suggested an absurdity and the whole thing has gone awry.”
Jesus, dude. That’s not coding as I know it. What you’re describing is a horror show. Dude, you should be happy that you don’t have to do what you’re calling “programming” anymore.
“Their skills were considered so crucial and delicate that a kind of superstition developed around the work. For instance, it was considered foolish to estimate how long a coding task might take, since at any moment the programmer might turn over a rock and discover a tangle of bugs. Deadlines were anathema. If the pressure to deliver ever got too intense, a coder needed only to speak the word “burnout” to buy a few months.”
This wa always stupid—a product of too much money sloshing around, which was a product of grifter capitalism and regulatory capture. This was never the fairy-tale world that I lived in. Dude, what I’m hearing is that you were spoiled in a major way, never aware that you were incredibly spoiled and never actually deserved the privilege you’d been granted.
“[…] thousands of dollars for a project that took a weekend. But along came tools like Squarespace, which allowed pizzeria owners and freelance artists to make their own Web sites just by clicking around. For professional coders, a tranche of high-paying, relatively low-effort work disappeared.”
Again, of course they did. You automate low-effort bullshit. If that’s all people want, then it’s done quickly. You want a few pages that you rarely if ever update? Click, click, done. Quino and Atlas did that too. Can an LLM build a tool like Atlas or Quino?
“Software engineers, as a species, love automation. Inevitably, the best of them build tools that make other kinds of work obsolete. This very instinct explained why we were so well taken care of: code had immense leverage.”
I’ve always told people that my job was technically to optimize processes and increase efficiency, but it was always equivalent to eliminating jobs.
“Ben asked me for advice, and I mumbled a few possibilities; in truth, I wasn’t sure that what he wanted would be possible. Then he asked GPT-4. It told Ben that Firebase had a capability that would make the project much simpler. Here it was—and here was some code to use that would be compatible with the microcontroller.”
You could have also searched it! Why did you have to get 6000 GPUs to give you that answer? It was probably right there in the first StackOverflow response. 🤦♂️
“In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player’s only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams, known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess. But the centaurs have arrived. GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing.”
This has been happening for a while. A lot of what people call programming is menial labor. As long as you don’t need cutting edge, it’s fine. A snake game is Walmart code. I can’t do it as fast, but I’m happy to John Henry it for you, if you like. I’ll definitely have fun doing it. It’s Like painting: most people won’t be paid to do it.
“In a 1978 essay titled “On the Foolishness of ‘Natural Language Programming,’ ” the computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra argued that if you were to instruct computers not in a specialized language like C++ or Python but in your native tongue you’d be rejecting the very precision that made computers useful. Formal programming languages, he wrote, are “an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.””
“When I first used GPT-4, I could see what Dijkstra was talking about. You can’t just say to the A.I., “Solve my problem.” That day may come, but for now it is more like an instrument you must learn to play. You have to specify what you want carefully, as though talking to a beginner. In the search-highlighting problem, I found myself asking GPT-4 to do too much at once, watching it fail, and then starting over. Each time, my prompts became less ambitious. By the end of the conversation, I wasn’t talking about search or highlighting; I had broken the problem into specific, abstract, unambiguous sub-problems that, together, would give me what I wanted.”
No tests, no docs, no experience. The “sub-problems” are functions that you could have tested.
“When I got into programming, it was because computers felt like a form of magic. The machine gave you powers but required you to study its arcane secrets—to learn a spell language. This took a particular cast of mind. I felt selected. I devoted myself to tedium, to careful thinking, and to the accumulation of obscure knowledge. Then, one day, it became possible to achieve many of the same ends without the thinking and without the knowledge. Looked at in a certain light, this can make quite a lot of one’s working life seem like a waste of time.”
This is a personal problem based where the author doesn’t know what he even enjoys. I know electric hedge shears are faster. A chainsaw too. I use manual shears and a handsaw when I clean up the garden in the fall. What’s your hurry, dude? I have honed my skills and mind for general problem-solving. The time was not wasted. You don’t have to stop just because you can’t win. That’s a corrosive, late-stage-capitalist mindset. If it resonates, I feel sorry for you.
“I suspect that, as my child comes of age, we will think of “the programmer” the way we now look back on “the computer,” when that phrase referred to a person who did calculations by hand.”
First of all: I know that this line is exactly the reason that the New Yorker paid you for this essay because all ya all think it’s exceedingly clever.
Second of all: Ok. Your job will be gone, maybe. You seem to not have understand what a developer does. A developer transforms requirements into machines.
As for me, I’m going to be more careful about which principles I throw out. We should remember we have those principles and see if they still apply. Instead of letting all of the shitty programmers who never knew them push past us and tell none of that is necessary anymore. They’re Like stupid, young, green, untrained soldiers in hyper armor storming the field but unsure where to go or what to shoot at. They’ll buzz off into all sorts of directions without a plan, until their batteries die and their ammo runs out. Change is not necessarily progress.
“[…] getting computers to do precisely what you want might become a matter of asking politely.”
Just keep saying it until nobody risks saying the emperor has no clothes.
Trimming a Fake Object by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)
“A word of caution before we proceed. When deciding to pull some of that test code into the production code, I’m making a decision about architecture.
“Until now, I’d been following the Dependency Inversion Principle closely. The interfaces exist because the client code needs them. Those interfaces could be implemented in various ways: You could use a relational database, a document database, files, blobs, etc.
“Once I decide to pull the above algorithm into the production code, I’m choosing a particular persistent data structure. This now locks the data storage system into a design where there’s a persistent view per date, and another database of bookings.”
“Test-driven development is a feedback mechanism. If something is difficult to test, it tells you something about your System Under Test (SUT). If your test code looks bloated, that tells you something too. Perhaps part of the test code really belongs in the production code.
“In this article, we started with a Fake Object that looked like it contained too much production code. Via a series of refactorings I moved the relevant parts to the production code, leaving me with a more idiomatic and conforming implementation.”
He talks about the downsides of the current implementation of primary constructors:
He contrasts with the language feature in Kotlin, which allows all modifiers in the declaration, but has the same problem that the class definition gets pretty wordy.
The article Primary Constructors – Using C# 12 in Rider and ReSharper by Matthias Koch (JetBrains Blog) describes another ugly phenomenon: double capture.
Let’s consider the following example:
In this class, the parameterpublic class Person(int age) { // initialization public int Age { get; set; } = age; // capture public string Bio => $"My age is {age}!"; }
age
is exposed both through theAge
andBio
property. As a result, the object stores the state ofage
twice! For reference types, a double capture leads to an increased memory footprint and possibly even memory leaks. In our concrete example, you will observe the following unintended behavior:var p = new Person(42); p.Age.Dump(); // Output: 42 p.Bio.Dump(); // Output: My age is 42! p.Age++; p.Age.Dump(); // Output: 43 p.Bio.Dump(); // Output: My age is 42! // !!!!
UK CHAMPIONSHIP 2023 SNOOKER LIVE – MARK ALLEN MEETS DING JUNHUI IN BLOCKBUSTER OPENER (Eurosport)
I just watched Ding Junhui play some absolutely nervy and spectacular snooker to defeat defending champion Mark Allen. It was 4–2 for Allen when I started watching. Jinhui came back with three 60+ clearances, dropped a frame to 5–5, then capitalized on an error by Allen to clear the frame with perfection and move on to the next round. Curiously, Allen said in the post-game interview that he “played better than Ding”, even though his potting success was 78% to Ding’s 90%.
Allen played some gritty and doughty snooker, but he made his mistakes. Ding, on the other hand, was quite consistent, especially considering that he admits to being a bit “under the weather” and had “taken some tablets” that “don’t seem to be working” yet. He squeaked it out and has a couple of rest days now. Lovely stuff.
Bear spray doesn’t work like that 😂 (Reddit)
“Listen,
“bear spray
DOES NOT
work like bug spray.“We would like to not have to say that again.”
Cities: Skylines 2’s troubled launch, and why simulation games are freaking hard by Kevin Purdy (Ars Technica)
“The game’s default settings, and bugs in the settings themselves, are “a bit of an unforced error” and “make performance that’s already pretty pedestrian look downright awful,” Philip wrote. Things have improved since release, and he’s glad to see Colossal Order putting off DLC and mods to work on performance and game bugs. It’s necessary, he believes, for the title “to have a chance.”
“Zubek is rooting for the C:S2 team, not least of all because he wants to see simulation game makers rewarded for their efforts. Such games are inherently difficult to make. You have to get funding for something that’s often entirely new. You have to develop it, walking the tightrope of testing and perfection against timely release and feedback. And you have to market it when it doesn’t necessarily fit any established genres.”
I’m on season two of Mindhunter on Netflix, so this fits right in with that.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.”
The Wikipedia article describes the origin of these few,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 25. Nov 2023 19:54:30 (GMT-5)
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.”
The Wikipedia article describes the origin of these few, sparse lines.
“[…] the original script, before Hauer’s rewrite, was:”“Hauer described this as “opera talk” and “hi-tech speech” with no bearing on the rest of the film, so he “put a knife in it” the night before filming, without Scott’s knowledge.[11] After filming the scene with Hauer’s version, crew-members applauded, with some even in tears.[6] In an interview with Dan Jolin, Hauer said that these final lines showed that Batty wanted to “make his mark on existence … the replicant in the final scene, by dying, shows Deckard what a real man is made of”.”“I’ve seen things… seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium… I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments… they’ll be gone.”
Rutger Hauer was right. His version is indisputably better. It’s one of my favorite scenes. Combined with the fruits of a lifetime of consuming science fiction, the few lines evoke entire swaths of history, the immense breadth of a system-girdling human empire. They never fail to give me chills, to give me hope that we are capable of making beautiful and meaningful things.
Published by marco on 25. Nov 2023 19:46:21 (GMT-5)
Normal Finkelstein has woken from a slumber, finally being interviewed and questioned about his deep knowledge of Palestine, Israel and their shared history. I’ve written relatively extensively about him recently, in Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, but also in many Links & Notes stretching back over 10 years (with several from the last six weeks), from when I reviewed the film Lemon Tree in 2016 or when I reviewed the film Defamation in 2013.
He’s usually absolutely strictly no-nonsense, but when he cracks, he has a wicked and dark sense of humor. Here is series of tweets he wrote recently, during the absolute theater that was Israel’s taking of a hospital that they claimed was a command-and-control center for Hamas.
“It is reported that Israel is about to invade al-Shifa. Don’t be surprised if they finds copies of Mein Kampf in the incubators.”
Right on cue, Israeli president Herzog reported that the IDF had found a copy of Mein Kampf in Arabic in a child’s room.
“NEWSFLASH: Entering Secret al-Shifa Passageway, IDF Discovers Kim Kardashian Blow-Up Doll in Hamas Jacuzzi”
“NEWS FLASH: IDE Discovers Saddam’s WMD Hidden in al-Shifa Basement.
An IDF spokesman stated: “It’s clearly labeled in black-and-white:
SADDAM’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.””
“As the IDF busily loads al-Shifa hospital with “Hamas weapons,” the New York Times prepares its headline: “Conflicting evidence…””
““The official said that soldiers had found weapons and evidence of a militant headquarters, but declined to provide further details and said that proof would not be provided until after the raid had ended.” (NY Times)”
“Why all this digging and excavating? Didn’t the Times report just two days ago that the IDF provided them with photographs of the clearly marked entranceway inside the hospital that led directly to the Hamas command-and-control center?”
“I posted the warning on this Twitter account last night. But despite this advanced warning, Hamas didn’t take the weapons to its command-and-control center beneath al-Shifa. No, it decided to leave these weapons lying around in the radiology ward so as to give Israel a photo-op.”
“It is now 24 hours since Israel invaded al-Shifa hospital. No sprawling Hamas command-and-control center. No arms caches in the tunnels. No secret passageways. No nothing except: DEAD BABIES IN INCUBATORS WITHOUT FUEL.”
“Senator Schumer Reacts to News that Ten More Babies Died in Al-Shifa Incubators.”
“Never to Forgive! Never to Forget!
“Israel – and the Biden administration – justified the suffocation of infants in al-Shifa incubators by asserting that a ramified Hamas command-and-control center was located beneath the hospital.
“How did this sprawling command-and-control center vanish?”
That’s the tunnel. To the command-and-control center.
“Have no fear: It’s certain that Israel will figure out how to deactivate the booby-trap—after it finishes constructing the tunnel.”
According to the article Complete and Utter Carnage by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch),
“Israel found their own bunkers…
“Amanpour: “When you say [the bunker under al-Shifa] was built by Israeli engineers, did you misspeak?
“Ehud Barak: “No, decades ago, we were running the place… we helped them to build these bunkers.”
“Amanpour: “OK. That’s sort of thrown me a little bit.”
“Hours before the Operational Pause began on Friday, the IDF destroyed the electrical and oxygen generators at al-Shifa hospital, smashed MRI and x-ray machines, blew up the sub-basement rooms which were supposedly Hamas’s HQ before any international investigators could examine it, and arrested the hospital’s director, along with three Palestinian paramedics.”
So, Norman was wrong—but only because he didn’t guess that Israel wasn’t still digging the tunnels—but that they were certain that there was a tunnel or two down there because they’d built them themselves, decades ago. They had to blow everything up so no-one would find out that no-one had been down there since then.
I don’t even have anything to cite from this article because it’s so insipid. I just wanted to keep in my notes that,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 23. Nov 2023 23:15:23 (GMT-5)
Man, I saw the title of the article Murder And Rape For The Cause by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) and my heart sank. I wrote about why in Some commentators are still MIA, where the author featured prominently. [1]
I don’t even have anything to cite from this article because it’s so insipid. I just wanted to keep in my notes that, once again, an ordinarily useful writer and thinker simply cannot keep his shit together or think of justice when his team’s been attacked.
Greenfield is Jewish. He loves Israel. He cannot stand to hear a single bad word about anything that Israel does. Every time there is a larger altercation, he comes down rabidly on the side of Israel against Palestinians. He deems the Palestinians animals, heedlessly slaughtering innocent Israelis, who’ve done nothing to deserve even reprobation, to say nothing of violence.
Read his responses to the comments on the post. Those are the comments he’s even allowed to appear, after moderation. It’s a shame, because he writes so much that is useful about law and justice and oppression in the U.S. On the topic of Israel, though, he’s an utter fool, a complete and unquestioning tool for the oppressor.
Look, two wrongs don’t make a right. Palestinians and their militant wing Hamas are humans and are thus capable of shocking cruelty and savagery when they get the chance—especially against what they consider to be an utterly demonic enemy. They also don’t recognize that civilians are illegitimate targets.
But neither does Israel. And they get a lot more chances to prove their savagery. If, like Greenfield, you only pay attention—or care—when the opposing team does it, then, … yeah, you’re going to look like a total asshole who can’t read a newspaper—who thinks that Israel heard about Palestine for the very first time on the morning of October 7th, 2023—and then you’re going to sound off in an utterly unhinged way.
In other news about unhinged support, there’s this:
This recommendation popped up about a day after what might have been the start of the next Intifada. Netflix thinks that I should watch a movie or series about heroic Israeli secret agents who are hunting nefarious Palestinian terrorists. Cool, Netflix. Nice to see where your loyalties lie.
There’s also the satirical site Babylon Bee, which often claims that it takes the piss out of everyone, published the only possible thing that it could have published: “White House Issues Condemnation Of Attack Biden Funded”.
I was confused for a second because I couldn’t figure out that the Bee was accusing Biden of having funded the Palestinians. But the picture shows what looks like a bombing in Palestine, presumably by Israel? But the text is the exact opposite? In my world, this is ludicrous—the Biden administration funds Israel nearly infinitely more. In the Babylon Bee’s world, where Biden is wrong about everything, he is a massive supporter of Palestine and probably delights in dead Israelis.
This is, again, what it looks like to be so partisan as to not be able to think straight. Biden would, of course, go on to make subsequent statements that make this accusation seem even more ridiculous. It was ridiculous from the beginning, though. Again, only if you can muster the energy to read a Wikipedia page or two.
After having noted in the footnotes of the article Some commentators are still MIA that Greenfield was once again publishing normal—not unhinged—stuff, he recently wrote the article Ceasefire Follies by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice). It shows pretty well where our long-ailing blogger is at, mentally. He writes,
“Note for future terrorists. Take some hostages atop your rapes and murders, and they give you huge leverage to stop your victims from coming after you. That, and convincing the useful idiots to march for the sake of the babies you use as shields so you can perpetrate terror but they can’t do anything to stop you.”
Once again, you can see the spittle speck his lips as he slams the keyboard in utter indignation.
He goes on to express his incredibly sarcastic indignation at thinking that anything at all could be expected of Israel.
“[…] those demanding a ceasefire from the side that didn’t break the ceasefire on October 7th.”
He really seems to believe that Israel is the sole aggrieved party and never did anything wrong and has no power to change anything other than to defend its sworn enemy into the deepest, darkest hole it can, filling it with bodies until … well, until there are no more bodies around, one way or another.
Next, he positively whines that no-one cares about Israeli lives—Jewish lives—especially in America. Dude, what? How can you possibly believe that is a thing?
“Oddly, Gazan lives matter. Israeli lives, not so much because they deserve to die for being a Jewish state. The connection there with Jewishness seems not to matter much, even as they indulge in sophistry to differentiate between Zionism and Judaism so they won’t feel like the hypocrites and fools they are.”
Differentiating between Judaism and Zionism is sophistry? What a horribly antisemitic thing to say. Does Greenfield even know what a poisonous creed Zionism is? At the very least, as it is practiced by the extremely radical Zionists who have the reins firmly in their fists right now? Has he ever read or heard an interview with actual Israelis, to say nothing of settlers? I can’t imagine he would think that he has anything in common with that worldview, but he’s using his bully pulpit to defend Zionism as the same thing as Judaism.
“As for the Gazan children, they’ll be martyrs as far as Hamas is concerned […]”
So, yeah, Greenfield’s not doing so hot.
He still hasn’t put a second of his time into finding out what has been going on in Israel over the last decades, what is going on there now, or what would be a possible solution that doesn’t involve more tragedy. He seems to be on the same page as the Israeli settlers: dead Palestinians, no matter their age, aren’t tragic. They’re just dead terrorists. Cool ethics, bro.
There is no speaking to someone who’s out of the gate with that kind of viewpoint, unless they’re family or friends or someone you need to invest time in. Everyone else doesn’t have to deal with them, can instead just back away slowly and hope that someone like this doesn’t have too much influence on anyone else.
The poor guy is still absolutely livid, incoherent, and about as grounded in reality as a Trump-Uncle at Thanksgiving. You know, the kind that sends me political cartoons of Joe Biden giving away the U.S. to China. Just batshit.
I wonder if Greenfield knows that he’s writing at the same intellectual level as the Babylon Bee these days? For example, maybe he could steal the snarky headline Hamas Offers To Release Hostages If Israel Agrees To Not Exist (Babylon Bee) from the Bee for his next post.
More recently, Paul Krugman has jumped on... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 23. Nov 2023 22:52:47 (GMT-5)
The article Should People be Happy About the Biden Economy? by Dean Baker (CounterPunch) answers its own question with “yes.” I’m not so convinced, as I explain in my responses below. Baker’s analysis and my critique of it is several weeks old at this point, but it’s still applicable.
More recently, Paul Krugman has jumped on the bandwagon, accusing anyone who thinks that the economy sucks—only because it seems to suck for themselves personally—off supporting Putin. Baker doesn’t go that far, but he does swerve a lot closer than I thought he would.
Baker, like Krugman, can’t seem to help seeing the world as valiant Democrats trying to save the economy for everyone despite the Republican’s interference. That isn’t really the feeling I get when watching the Democrats at work, but let’s let Baker explain in his own words.
“Here also there were conservative members acting as a brake on virtually everything Biden put on the table. And, he lost even this slim majority in the 2022 election, although an additional Senate seat gave him a small amount of extra wiggle room.”
This is all true, but it suggests that Joe Biden is not conservative. There is nothing in the shape of the policies that he’s enacted that belies his prior fifty years in office. He’s proud of his police-state record. He’s a corporate whore, a grifter, and a malicious asshole. He always has been. Why do so many people suggest the opposite? Baker here seems to be pushing the line of thinking that just because the Republicans are batshit, the Democrats must be some sort of safe harbor to which sane people can flee. [1]
This is absolutely how the Democrats get you. They are absolutely just as disinterested in the fates of anyone making less than $400K per year as the Republicans; they are just willing to lie about it more—or differently. With Democrats as with Republicans, you have to watch what their hands do, not listen to what their mouths say.
“The unemployment rate, which stood at 6.3 percent when Biden took office, had fallen to 3.9 percent by the end of 2021, and has not gone over 4.0 percent since. This is the longest period where the unemployment rate has been below 4.0 percent in more than half a century.”
It’s so frustrating to have to constantly think that no-one seems to care what kind of jobs these are or how utterly gamed the statistics are. Dean Baker himself writes article after article about how there are six statistics provided by Bureau of Labor Statistics every month—and how everyone cites the absolutely most optimistic one available. And then he turns around and cites those same statistics as if there were nothing wrong with them, as if they are prime evidence of a booming economy for all, as if an economy that benefits elite Democrats and ticks all the right boxes were good for everyone.
“As a result of the ARP [American Rescue Plan Act of 2021], the United States is the only major economy that is largely back to its pre-pandemic growth path. The U.S. also now has the lowest inflation rate of any of the G-7 economies.”
Congratulations, the U.S. excels the most at blowing smoke up its own ass. The rise benefits the rich the most. It’s really odd to hear Baker paraphrasing Reagan’s “rising tide lifts all boats”, trickle-down bullshit.
“In spite of the inflation of 2021 and 2022, real wages for the average worker are higher than they were before the pandemic. And, there have been larger gains for those at the bottom, reversing roughly a quarter of the rise in wage inequality we saw over the last four decades.”
So, it’s better than it was but still terrible? There’s still ¾ of the wage inequality to make up for, but … what? When do you celebrate? The gain could be reversed on a whim. There is no trust that it won’t be. Many of the programs that led to the gains he’s talking about have already expired.
I think Baker is trying to talk things up until November 2024 because he’s terrified that Trump will become president again in 2024. He’s trying to sell the dead horse that is Biden by telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes and to listen to his statistics. Statistics don’t put food on the table or pay the rent, but you just gotta hang on until next November—then you can admit that things are going back into the shitter.
Poor Dean now has to watch Joe Biden double down on supporting Israel while it commits war crime after war crime, which is tanking his chances of reelection, despite the awesome economy he’s created.
“Tens of millions of people are now working from home, either entirely or partially, saving themselves hundreds of hours a year in commuting time, and thousands of dollars on work-related expenses. These savings in time and money do not show up in our data on real wages.”
True, but those people are also only twenty percent of the workforce (obviously the most important part of the workforce, ammirite?). Good for them, but I don’t see how the other eighty percent should celebrate gains that they have no way of enjoying. They can take solace in having a second job where they bring their newly home-officed lords and masters takeout and Amazon orders. It’s a glorious class system made immanent, so what’s the problem, right, Dean?
“These are all extraordinarily positive developments for large segments of the population. There is no period since the late 1990s that could even come close to the progress made in the first two and a half years of the Biden administration.”
I’m afraid I really have a hard time believing this statement, even from Dean Baker. What does he mean by “large”? Like, as a percentage? Is this happening despite the Democrats? How long-term viable are these gains? Are they equitable? Why would they be? Did something change in the power balance or basic morality of the U.S. political landscape that I missed? Is Biden such an incredible force that he singlehandedly dragged the U.S. upstream? Is that the argument?
“But on the whole, it is pretty hard not to see the overall picture as being overwhelmingly positive, especially considering that Biden had to deal with the disruptions created by multiple waves of Covid, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Are you f%#king kidding me? “Overwhelmingly positive!” Lay it on a bit thicker there, Dean. Baker is often absolutely blind politically, but this is a bit much, even for him. Is he aiming for a job at the New York Times? Does he need a gig on CNN? Is he just jumping on the “lesser evil” bandwagon 15 months early? Like, if Trump is super-bad, then Biden must be super-good? I don’t even know how to process this. He’s portraying poor Biden as having had to deal with a war when, in fact, he could have easily prevented it by not provoking it in the first place? [2] Smoke the NYT’s ganja little more, Dean.
At least the stock market’s up again, so that must be good. Wall Street loves wars. So does Bitcoin, apparently.
“[…] notably by modernizing the country’s power grid and setting up a system of charging stations for electric cars.”
What a f*&king waste of money. Biden could have spent it on trains, but I suppose most American have given up on having anything other than a slightly less-polluting copy of the same terrible system that they already have. Biden is pouring money into this because all of his donors have ensured that he and his supporters will be handsomely rewarded for it. There is no change in the basic system.
But, apparently, the country’s infrastructure has been modernized. Funny, it didn’t feel like it when I was there this summer, but I admit that I was just hanging out in the poorer parts of the nation, where these amazing effects have failed to be felt—and where they will mostly likely never be felt because no one gives a shit about those places. They’ve got nothing to offer, so they get nothing from the Democrats. Hey, though, maybe Dean Baker knows better. New York City is flourishing, right?
“The second piece of legislation Biden got through Congress was the CHIPS Act , which appropriated $280 billion over the next five years (approximately 1.0 percent of the federal budget) for research and support for manufacturing of advanced semi-conductors in the United States.”
Yeah, good on Biden for subsidizing high-tech companies in the States. They had hardly and money or profits of their own to invest. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, it could turn out that TSMC isn’t going to build a packaging facility—and that the fab is behind schedule and can’t find the employees it needs. Money well spent, on the right people. Always the right people.
“It probably makes sense in any world to ensure that key components for the economy will be accessible in the event of a conflict with China, and given that Taiwan is our major supplier, this is a real concern.”
Again, the fact that it’s a real concern is because that conflict is being massively stoked and provoked by Biden, but go Biden, right Dean? How can this man be so politically tone-deaf? He’s lauding Biden for making a few hand-waving motions in the direction of fixing problems that he himself is causing—because Biden’s sponsors want more war and want to extend the American empire beyond its expiration date. Biden’s spending our money to solve a problem he’s causing. Bow before him in thanks.
“[…] positive story from an economic standpoint, although we should be asking more about ownership of this research than seems to be the case now.”
We’re asking for literally nothing! The government funds everything! And owns nothing! It’s all in private hands. Stop being so naive. You know this, Dean. Do you need to believe that Biden is a good president and, thus, a viable candidate for a two-term president, so you just make shit up about how awesome he is? This, when you normally spend every article picking apart the massive giveaways? I can’t tell whether you got an LLM to write this article for you.
“[…] we at last seem to be making good progress towards a green transition.”
No. We absolutely are not doing that. We are making good progress on spending other people’s money on our friends’ companies that are pretending to care about a green transition. But they don’t. They don’t care about that at all. They care about making money for themselves. No-one in that country gives a flying blue fuck about a green transition, not if it interferes in any way with easy ways of making money. The environment is nowhere on the list of priorities.
“We will be able to raise billions of dollars of tax revenue each year, just by monitoring what companies announce they are spending on buybacks. And, we don’t have to worry they will cheat. What will they do, lie to their shareholders?”
That seems spectacularly naive for companies that are international conglomerates. I can’t imagine they would have let this law pass if they didn’t have a workaround. But, sure, let’s believe that the Biden administration—led by the former Senator from ViSA, remember—has cracked the code and finally found a tax that will pass Wall Street and Congress and is super-easy to monitor and generates oodles of money. Pardon me for not believing it until I see it. We hear all the time about the U.S. turning a corner on some progressive measure until we realize that we’ve somehow been fooled again.
“[…] the corporate income tax, which currently averages around 13 percent of all profits,”
Does it really? That’s pitifully low but, at the same time, it also seems high, when the big guns are paying much, much less than that. Dean’s written about Walmart and Amazon—the nation’s two largest employers—paying essentially no taxes.
“With a growing body of evidence showing that a lack of competition has been important in raising profits at the expense of wages,”
Did we not already know this without collecting more evidence? Did we really need to use scientific experiments to learn that companies that claim that they couldn’t possibly pay higher salaries because they’re too busy paying billions in dividends and stock buybacks to all of their shareholders are full of shit?
“Biden’s appointees are committed to respecting workers’ rights to have a union, if they want one.”
If by “respecting”, you mean not being allowed to help workers at the expense of employers. How do you ignore how the Biden administration crushed the railroad strike last year, Dean?
The Biden administration does not give a shit about workers. Not. One. Bit.
They care about ensuring profits for their crony international conglomerates, first and foremost. All you have to do is watch what happens when anyone threatens a strike: the Biden administration steps in to “help” by neutering all demands and using whatever legal means they can to force people to keep working without making any gains for themselves.
Companies that shed billions in profits per year claim that they couldn’t possibly pay their employees cost-of-living increases—and the Biden administration nods enthusiastically and steps in to crack some skulls and bust some kneecaps until there’s a bloody signature on yet another capitulatory deal where the workers walk away with far too little and their management-heavy union and the company’s board of directors walk away grinning like Cheshire Cats.
“[…] when we have clear evidence of the much greater efficiency of this sort of tax, we will be able to move quickly down that road. The Republicans, and many Democrats, will do everything they can to prevent corporations from paying more tax, but when we have them defending pure waste, we are fighting them on favorable turf.”
Again, this is so unbelievably naive. It hasn’t worked anything like the way he describes in well over forty years. People don’t want companies to pay taxes enough that they’ll elect people to enforce it. The opposite happens.
He’s arguing that we have “favorable turf” because … why? Because the Democrats and Republicans are afraid of looking like corporate stooges? When has that every stopped them? There are no alternatives. It doesn’t matter who gets elected—companies don’t pay even close to enough taxes. Occasionally, someone will pass something that makes it look a bit better, to keep the savages at bay. But then a giant thing like the Trump (or the Clinton, or the Bush, or the Obama) tax cut eats up all of the gained ground anyway.
Baker’s argument amounts to celebrating a field goal by the losing team when the score was already 721 – 0. What the hell are we celebrating? Are we turning this thing around? Give me a break.
“I would say the same about Biden, but he is doing it in a context where he enjoys a far more tentative majority than Roosevelt faced. And, he clearly is not the same sort of charismatic figure as Roosevelt. But all in all, he is doing a damn good job.”
Biden: better than Roosevelt. Hard to accept, Dean. Roosevelt apparently had it easy compared to poor Biden. Jesus. That country really has lost the ability to wish for anything but a slightly less bloody beating. Honestly, just bend over and grab your ankles—and be effusively thankful when you get a drop of vaseline.
See also Balance or both-sidesism by John Q (Crooked Timber), where the author writes,
“Republicans want to overthrow US democracy, while Democrats stubbornly insist on keeping it.”
There was some snarky bullshit on both sides of this sentence, but it’s already revealing enough that he really believes that the Democrats believe in anything like what we learned might be defined as democracy in civics class. They do not.
They will use the surveillance state to ensure that they remain in power. They will take the easiest and fastest routes to quick money for themselves. That is literally all that they care about. Anyone who wants to prove that they are interested in more than that should (A) perhaps not become $25M richer within 2-4 years of being elected to national office and (B) should disassociate themselves from the Democratic party.
The Democrats are busy trying to pry open a tiny, perhaps nonexistent loophole in Constitutional law in order to prevent their main opponent from even appearing on the ballot for president, while also suppressing any news and information sources that might provide any narrative that conflicts in any way with the pile of bullshit that they’re selling to the public, just to make sure that their corpse of a candidate gets reelected. That is not in any way evincing an interest in democracy, as I would define it.
Published by marco on 19. Nov 2023 22:32:56 (GMT-5)
The other day, Fortinet decided that it wanted to restart my computer. Fortinet is a commercial-grade, Fortune-500-level VPN solution built by a company that writes “Global Leader of Cybersecurity Solutions and Services” right in the title of its web page. It’s on the S&P 500. Their VPN client is their flagship product. It is a product that huge, important companies use to ensure the security of their data and communications.
This is what its restart dialog box looks like:
My goodness, what a train wreck.
Int32.Min
, so it’s clear where the value came from, but unclear why Fortinet thinks it’s OK to tell me that my computer will be started almost 4,083 years ago.This is neat. Now, I don’t know which one to believe: will my machine restart in the past, ~4100 years before it was manufactured? Or will it restart in ~8,000 years, when humanity has expanded into the galaxy? Or will it restart in about ¾ of a day?
The answer was, as the clever among you have guessed, none of the above.
The computer rebooted itself less than 10 minutes later, out of the goddamned blue, without even the by-your-leave of the Windows Restart Dialog. Just booted right back to the BIOS immediately.
This is the level of professionalism and software quality we can expect from a well-established, Fortune-500, computer-security company.
This is the kind of thing that dampens my hopes considerably when people splutter to me about the grand future of software agents, servicing our every need, writing all of our code, and generating all of our prose for us.
The same culture and society that produced the people that built the Fortinet software is building the software agents [1]. It’s hard to build up realistic enthusiasm for it not totally sucking ass, like everything else. [2]
]]>“The allegations made against him by the Panorama program seem highly credible. They range from sexual harassment to rape. One victim alleged that Brand raped her against a wall of his house. ... [More]”
Published by marco on 19. Nov 2023 19:02:33 (GMT-5)
The article The Russel Brand Conspiracy by Tony McKenna (CounterPunch) writes the following about the allegations against Russell Brand,
“The allegations made against him by the Panorama program seem highly credible. They range from sexual harassment to rape. One victim alleged that Brand raped her against a wall of his house. This allegation pertains to 2012. The evidence to support the allegation consists of a text message she sent him telling him following the assault just how frightened she’d been, that ‘no means no’ to which he responded by saying he was ‘very sorry’. In addition, the rape crisis center she went to the next day logged her visit.”
I can’t help but agree that what I’ve heard of the allegations seems to be credible. It doesn’t seem too surprising because Brand has a reputation for sex addiction and “getting around”. That gut feeling, though, is tantamount to how we used to prosecute witches. My gut feeling may just be based on wild allegations that I’ve already internalized without verification from elsewhere.
I was never quite able to square this reputation with what Brand says when I’ve watched his show—which I haven’t done in quite a while, I admit—or when I’ve seen him in interviews. He’s coherent, well-spoken, and almost overwhelmingly empathetic in his worldview.
At any rate, this article is in no way a litigation of Russell Brand’s case, one way or another. The rest of this article should in no way be considered to be a judgment or opinion on the details of Brand’s specific case.
It’s more of a musing—perhaps, a prosecution—of the current authorial style of lurid hinting and manipulation of circumstantial evidence for … what? Internet points? I suppose it differs from person to person, but trial-by-media is increasingly the go-to method for punishing the wicked. Perhaps Twitter should introduce an A [1] to be meted out by a public majority.
I am not a lawyer, but a lot—if not all—of the evidence the author listed above does seem to be circumstantial. I am well-aware of how difficult it is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that sexual harassment or rape has taken place, but that doesn’t mean that we should lower our standards of evidence,.
Or does it? I think a lot of people think that it does—especially when it means that you can nail people that you find distasteful. This has been happening more and more lately—the weaponizing of stigma. It’s honestly very hard to know what to believe—but after the last decade of bullshit stories, I, for one, have become much more careful in believing what I hear from so-called reliable and mainstream sources. Their agenda is not my agenda—and their agenda colors everything they communicate.
The Panorama program is a TV show, with a to-me unknown repute. I can’t say what weight I should give to their any evidence they present. Let’s assume it’s all true, and is as the author laid out. Brand’s responding that he’s “very sorry” is not necessarily an admission of guilt, He may just have been sorry that he’d so wildly misinterpreted the situation.
Even the rape-crisis-center visit is circumstantial, no? What did she do there? Did she report a rape? Did she seek counseling? Did she ask whether they thought she’d been raped? The center’s not just there to record rapes, but to counsel women who’ve been traumatized and to help them process their trauma, whatever may have caused it. This process doesn’t always end in corroboration, does it? It is the journalist’s job to discover these things before just filling a segment or article with circumstantial evidence, then rounding up.
If the center thinks that a person’s story doesn’t amount to rape, wouldn’t it help the person work through what amounted to a combination of horrible circumstance, bad decisions, and others taking advantage [2] and help them avoid them in the future? What is counseling for, if not that?
Or is a center like this just considered a rubber-stamp machine to validate the rape claims of every single person who walks through the door? Doesn’t it do more damage to an already traumatized person to round their experience up to rape, turning them into a victim, a survivor, where they might have been able to leave the experience behind them instead? Who would such a policy serve?
I can’t imagine that’s the case, so I have to assume that a visit to a rape crisis center implies only that the woman was far more traumatized the day after a “date” than she should have been, but cannot conclude that a rape has occurred.
Perhaps with enough circumstantial evidence, it becomes damning evidence, but, again, I am not a lawyer. I’d hope it doesn’t work like that. One piece of evidence that, taken alone, amounts to nothing, can be combined with other pieces of similar evidence and, instead of adding several nothings and getting nothing, you get … something. You get proof…somehow.
The author continues,
“The accusation is a persuasive one, the victim’s account is supported by objective and documented evidence. But for the conspiracy theorist, such persuasive evidence does not speak to the likelihood of Brand’s guilt, instead it speaks to the power of the conspiracy set in motion against him.”
To counter that, for the conspiracy theorist intent on prosecution, circumstantial evidence becomes “credible” and “persuasive”, which gets rounded up to “damning” and “incriminating”, and should end in a prison sentence. Anything else is a gross miscarriage of justice that serves as evidence of the patriarchy’s chokehold on the system.
I don’t claim to know anything about Brand’s specific case. I don’t really care. There are other, far more serious, things to think about, to be perfectly honest.
It was just interesting to start skimming an article about how conspiracy theorists can’t be convinced by any evidence, in which the author is seemingly convinced by … any evidence, no matter how circumstantial. The author is clearly putting Brand on trial here. Look at the photo he included of Brand, where he’s half-lying on a bed, gazing with what seems to be lasciviously into the camera. I’m sure that wasn’t the first picture the author found. He searched for it—because he was on a mission.
With that kind of rigor, you can expect that the evidence lines up nicely. I’m just trying to figure out why more people don’t question things when the evidence lines up so nicely? You don’t even have to doubt the evidence you’ve seen—but maybe you could wonder whether you’re seeing only part of the picture? Is it possible you’ve not seen exonerating evidence?
And that, in a nutshell, is what actual trials are for.
Even when a case does go to trial, you still sometimes have people being railroaded into a conviction, with suppressed evidence galore. In this case, Brand’s history of sex addiction should have nothing to do with the case at hand, but would almost definitely be used to prime a jury anyway. It might even be salient. As I said, I am not a lawyer, and know what I know of law in the U.S. from TV shows and books, if I’m honest.
Still, the general rule seems to be, if the accused is your friend, you’ll stand by them; if the accuser is your friend, you’ll stand by them. That’s what friends do. Friends nod and agree that everyone at your office a bitch but you. Friends nod and agree that “she was asking for it.” It’s not always pretty—it can be quite ugly, in fact—but that’s what friends are for. For better or worse, they lend a sympathetic ear.
As for the rest of us, we have no obligation to lean in any direction but where the evidence points us. What’s the advantage to you of publicly voicing an opinion on something not even the lawyers know enough about to decide?
Still, if you feel we’ve gotten enough of the picture to have an opinion, go for it. Have an opinion. But don’t set the bar too low. You don’t need to look like an idiot when it turns out you didn’t wait for enough evidence to turn up. You probably don’t want to write an entire article about it until you’re a bit more certain. Or maybe you do! Maybe you can make a bunch of money casting aspersions. That’s good old capitalism for you.
Having enough evidence or not having evidence is sometimes not sufficient to guarantee justice is served. Even if it does go to court, there are so many cases where the evidence didn’t hold up, but the accused is still considered to have done whatever they’d been accused of.
Even just considering cases involving famous people: Michael Jackson is just assumed to have been a child-diddler, even though he was exonerated on all 14 counts (Wikipedia). OJ Simpson is still considered by many to have been a murderer, even though he was exonerated on both counts (Wikipedia). Kevin Spacey still can’t get a job and he’s the frequent butt of rape jokes on SNL, but he was found not guilty on 12 counts against him (Wikipedia). Matt Gaetz, too, is the frequent butt of jokes about raping minors, but charges have never even been brought against him (Wikipedia).
You may have your opinions about whether these people purchased influence or cheated at trial. That’s fine. But you’re being a conspiracy theorist. You believe that there was a conspiracy to hijack the courts of the U.S. to render injustice.
If you think “corruption” every time you don’t get the conviction you want, and think the courts are great when they decide “your way”, then you have no faith in the justice system. You should own that and consider its implications.
There are further implications if you prefer evidence-free trials-by-social-media to a sometimes-broken, but official criminal-justice system.
As for non-famous people, check out the Innocence Project for a list of people who are on death row after having been railroaded through sentencing and often spent decades in prison for crimes they didn’t commit—and which the police and prosecution knew they hadn’t committed, but they needed a warm body—just waiting for the state to murder them.
“In a well-researched and vigorous piece, the Guardian journalist George Monbiot scrutinizes these kinds of claims.”
Look, I liked Monbiot’s book Heat, but in the thirteen intervening years since I’ve read it, I’ve found him to be increasingly unreadable. He’s unhinged and makes wild accusations, kind of like Russell Brand, to be honest. I consider neither one of them to be reliable sources because they see demons everywhere.
I only noticed at the end that Tony McKenna (the author whose article I’ve cited) wrote a 13-page piece about Russell Brand—and he can’t even spell his name correctly. How seriously should I even take this kind of tripe?
I wish these people could see the irony of them accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist, all the while writing long screeds about other conspiracy theorists’ inability to admit to the allegations against them, while citing other conspiracy theorists, and while not even spellchecking the name of the target of their derision.
Ah, but one never thinks of oneself as a conspiracy theorist, nor of one’s sources. Hell, I’m probably guilty of this sometimes—or maybe even all the time! How would I know?! Hell, I might even be doing it right now. 🤷♀️🤷♀️
I highlighted that letter with HTML code, but probably social media would land on using 🅰️, even though it’s not a scarlet letter—it’s a scarlet background with a white letter.
In this way, it would fit perfectly with people constantly using the Swiss flag 🇨🇭 to indicate the Red Cross ⛑ (See? Even the emoji that comes up when I type “red cross” is a red hat with a white cross.)
At issue, of course, if the failure to indoctrinate them... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 19. Nov 2023 13:32:38 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 20. Nov 2023 11:57:10 (GMT-5)
The article TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day) discusses a recent flare-up in the mainstream, western (mostly U.S.) media and governing bodies whereby there were several calls to ban TikTok because it’s radicalizing the youth.
At issue, of course, if the failure to indoctrinate them properly to be able to ignore war crimes and still sleep at night. So, what you need to do is to make a lot of noise about a world-girdling social network—😱 RUN BY CHINAMEN 😱 YELLOW PERIL ALERT 😱— is corrupting the youth, turning them to the dark side of terrorism. They are all, apparently, in love with Osama bin Laden right now, woe betide the future of our great nation, etc., etc., etc.
As you can hopefully tell from the sarcasm, this is entirely untrue. It’s about as true as the COLD HARD FACT that the IDF found an Arabic translation of Mein Kampf in a schoolkid’s bedroom. It would be comical if it weren’t part of the propaganda campaign for an unfolding tragedy—and if so many otherwise-productive and reasonably intelligent members of society didn’t just gobble it up like candy.
Anyway, Broderick argues that the usual suspects—the powers that be—are jumping on this particular myth that they just invented to ban what they consider to be a thorn in their side: not just the dastardly Chinese version of uncontrolled media streams, but any uncontrolled media streams.
“Baseless generational in-fighting, aging millennials who refuse to accept the new status quo of the internet, easily monetizable rage bait, lazy TikTok trend reporting, and bad faith political actors swirled together to create a perfect storm this week. We have invented a version of TikTok that simply does not exist and now many people in power are ready to tear apart the foundation of internet to prove it does.”
In the U.S., that means you only have to convince a couple of hundred of the most venal, stupid, and hypocritical people who’ve ever walked the Earth to pass some antidemocratic laws. It’s honestly not even that big of a job. All you have to do is shit-talk a whole generation, gaslighting them into thinking that they’re the crazy ones for finding a few kernels of truth in what amounts to a 5½-page screed / philippic / rant / diatribe / jeremiad / tirade on everything under the sun.
Which jeremiad, you ask? You can read it for yourself at Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America: Transcript in Full by Giulia Carbonaro (Newsweek). Young people claim to have been reading this 20-year–old letter that used to be available at the Guardian before they took it down.
Why would they remove a piece of historical documentation that they’d hosted for 20 years? Because people were drawing the wrong conclusions from it, and the Guardian had to somehow stop abetting that from happening, so it threw its copy down the memory hole. Newsweek has generously and courageously republished the letter. Luckily, the memory hole doesn’t exist yet.
I know I’ve read this thing before [1]—probably around when it first came out—but I’d forgotten how long it is. I was quite pleasantly surprised for a few seconds to think that the younger generations, even though they were drawing facile conclusions, were at least reading again. But, alas, no.
As outlined above by Ryan Broderick, not all that many young people are actually reading this thing, and those who claim to have, read only about the first 5%, up until bin Laden mentioned Palestine, whereby they skimmed that sentence, misinterpreted it, and started using bin Laden to support their existing viewpoint , which is that the subjugation of Palestine is bad. Well done. I hope they at least got some fancy Internet Points for it. Right idea, wrong cite.
But how would they know that Osama bin Laden is a bad man whom one should not read? They’d probably been taught nothing in school or by their family—and they certainly wouldn’t have learned anything by osmosis either because bin Laden cannot be used to sell things or to promote a hyper-consumer lifestyle.
There are so many sections and sub-sections—four levels!—that I wish that Al-Queda had taken an HTML course—or that someone would have bothered to convert the damn thing to Markdown from what is obviously formerly a Word document written by someone who doesn’t know how to use styles.
I guess we have more in common with the terrorists than we’d like to think. Hey, maybe our utter inability to use the basic productivity features we’ve had at our disposal for decades is common ground. But I digress. Again.
There is a lot of religious gobbledegook that I suppose would be considered to be killer arguments (no pun intended) if you actually believe in that sort of thing. Otherwise, it’s pretty meaningess. Every once in a while, though, a sentence like this one bubbles up out of the froth,
“(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.”
While pretty much spot-on—as far as it goes—to pretend that that’s the point of the document is to cherry-pick, to be honest.
For example, why wouldn’t I assume that this next citation was the most important he was making?
“Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all. If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.”
While this is probably a zinger for the devout, my confirmation bias leans more in the direction of the next citation, a bit further on.
“(f) You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down.”
This is 100% accurate, but…in an essay where bin Laden says a ton of things, some of them are bound to be true—or at least be something with which the reader can agree. I challenge anyone to claim truthfully that they disagree with absolutely everything in bin Laden’s document. That doesn’t mean you approve of 9–11 or terrorism. It just means that you know how to read and you know how to separate the message from the messenger.
Or what about this one?
“(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.”
I mean, I can agree with about 80% of it being absolutely correct, that it’s an effrontery that the U.S. empire subjugates muslim countries to guarantee its supply of cheap energy. But then there’s that part about the Jews that was wholly unnecessary, in my opinion, but which I feel might the most necessary part in the opinion of the author.
It’s like being at a bar and chatting with a fellow beer-drinker about the overbearing government. You might be in total agreement that they take all of our money and that we see nothing for it.
Him: Damned taxes are too high!
You: No kidding! And what do we get for it?
Him: Nuthin!
You: Pissin’ it away on foreign wars!
Him: That’s right! And for what? To protect a bunch of Jews!
You: …
It’s like laughing at a good zinger by Donald Trump. While you’re laughing and acknowledging that he’s got quite a flair for nicknames, or whatever, you also have to acknowledge that he writes shit like this:
“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day,
we pledge to you that we will root out the
Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left
Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of
our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections,
and will do anything possible, whether legally or
illegally, to destroy America, and the American
Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less
sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat
from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the
Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our
Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
He’s absolutely not alone in his idiocy. The tweets below are the actual words of an actual human being who graduated from Harvard and is now a multi-term U.S. Senator.
“Joe Biden wants to ban menthol cigarettes,
which are favored by black smokers.
Meanwhile, he wants to legalize weed for white
college kids and mail out free crack pipes.”
“The administration’s ban is paternalistic, it’s
hypocritical, and it creates a huge black
market for Mexican cartels and Hezbollah.“And all because Mike Bloomberg told him to.”
That’s just mental illness, is what that is. That man needs help.
I’m sure I could find a statement that Cotton made with which I could agree, though. I bet I can find things that RFK, or Marianne Williamson, or Nikki Haley, or Tulsi Gabbard said that I can agree with wholeheartedly. It’s just that, if the conversation goes on just a little bit longer, I’m backing away into a hedge pretty quickly.
So, sure, bin Laden’s words get scraped off the Internet, so the kids can’t read them, but Trump, Cotton, RFK, Haley, Gabbard, Williamson, Biden, etc. get to write and say whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want. This applies to many, many more people than that handful, but I hope you understand my point. [2]
It’s the same with the bin Laden letter. He spends an inordinate amount of text explaining how, when attacking a democracy, it’s perfectly legitimate to use collective punishment because there are no innocents in a democracy. He claims that each individual is equally responsible for the actions of their democratically elected government. This is patently ludicrous because it presupposes a power that no democracy or republic has ever granted to its populace.
He is, however, absolutely not alone in this line of thinking. There are many high-ranking members of the Israeli and U.S. government and media who espouse exactly this principle, one that was so central to bin Laden’s justification for the 9–11 attacks.
Which citizens would bin Laden consider it to be OK to eliminate? In a democracy, you can be a voting citizen and still not get anything you want. If a majority decides to oppress the Palestinians, but you’re wholeheartedly against it—too bad. You don’t always get your way in a democracy.
Does bin Laden claim that his great and good Allah approves of slaughtering those civilians who were already trying to get the right thing done? To what end? Not only is this evil, but it’s counterproductive. All you’d be doing is increasing the majority that’s already enacting policy against you. This is just stupid.
Bin Laden also makes the same logical mistake that so many others have made before him, and continue to make. In trying to argue for the righteousness of his cause, he compares himself to other war criminals like George Bush and Ariel Sharon—and then justifies his own war crimes as valid and legal because they got away with it, too.
He essentially argues that anyone who refuses to condemn Bush and Sharon must also then approve of Bin Laden’s actions. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that bin Laden is right, but that he’s just as wrong as those other idiots.
After all of these dialectical histrionics, he slowly starts to wrap things up with a bit of missionary work,
“It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honor, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their color, sex, or language.”
I wish this were practically true, but the Wahhabism that bin Laden practiced was absolutely not blind to gender/sex. This is just bullshit. Perhaps bin Laden is arguing from the purity of the message in the Quran that has been warped in its application to actually-existing Islam—as he himself practiced it!—but I’d be surprised.
I just think he’s lying here because he really got going on his rant and he—like so many other people—just couldn’t help himself: he couldn’t just say everything else is bad and worthy of destruction; he couldn’t just quit while he’s ahead; he had to double-down and claim things about his religion that it doesn’t even espouse.
His next plea is to “[…] reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.” Ok, so usury is pretty bad, agreed. And gambling is generally pretty socially harmful, sure. But intoxicants? And … homosexuality? Dude, c’mon. How do you reconcile the statement above, where you wrote that “without regarding their color, sex, or language”, but then you write NO QUEERS. Seriously—that’s just stupid.
So much of this is just like that. A little further on, he addresses the U.S. again directly,
“It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind […]”
Hey, OK. There’s an argument to be made there. There are a lot of contenders, but the U.S. Empire has certainly done its damnedest to climb to the top of the heap. The only reason people might think that this is a facially ridiculous claim is because they have literally no idea what their country is up to.
But then, just as you’re trying to come up with reasons to disagree or to cautiously agree, bin Laden follows it up immediately with this,
“(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the lord and your Creator.”
That’s just ridiculous. He argues that the problem is that the U.S. invents its own laws? That’s not the problem. The problem is that the U.S. doesn’t adhere to laws that it finds inconvenient.. Bin Laden’s advice to stop thinking for yourselves and let a thousand-year–old book make all of your decisions for you wouldn’t help because the U.S. would just ignore those rules too, even as it continued to pretend to espouse them. The problem is hypocrisy and lawlessness, not that the U.S. hasn’t found the one, true law to follow. Hey, bin Laden: maybe you should shut up and sit down while the adults are talking, ok?
He’s winding up now, but feels the need to deliver a few examples of Western/U.S. depravity. There is a wealth of history to choose from—but he spends an inordinate amount of time on Bill Clinton’s oval-office blowjob. You old horn-dog, bin Laden. That story really got to you, huh? You just can’t stop imagining that cigar and that thick, Jewish girl?
Then, in the middle of a long list of highly debatable social detriments, he whips out this one about climate change:
“(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.”
Yes! Correct!
“(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.”
Yes! … no, wait!?! What is with you and the Jews, man? Back. Away. Slowly.
Deep into the last pages of the essay, there are still reasonable points being made, but in an increasingly incoherent manner.
“What happens in Guantanamo is a historical embarrassment to America and its values, and it screams into your faces − you hypocrites, “What is the value of your signature on any agreement or treaty?””
As with a lot of essays by people writing in a language that is not their native one, the prose falls apart more and more the longer the essay goes on. By the last 20%, it’s only barely comprehensible. You can almost see the spittle dotting his lips as his fingers fly over the keyboard.
“[…] discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that the values and principles to you are something which you merely demand from others, not that which yourself must adhere to.”
I mean, I get what he means, but I had to read it a few times.
It’s basically done now. Excepting a few more paragraphs of quotes from the Quran—as if anyone reasonable considers that kind of thing to be slam-dunk proof of anything—it’s over.
This thing just has way too individual points for a blog post. It’s both too long, but also too short, if that makes any sense at all. It really could have used some serious editing down, to punch it up and make sure it’s focused on its main points.
I fear, though, that then it would have just been a three-paragraph tirade against the perennially beleaguered Jews, most of whom are just like the rest of us, just trying to go along to get along.
Sure, they’ve got some raging assholes, but those are everywhere. Hell, I’m reading a long letter by a raging Muslim asshole right now, but I don’t think that means that all Muslims are raging assholes.
I’m not an idiot.
At least, I don’t think I am.
But then, who does?
You may even be smugly wondering to yourself whether I even see the irony that it might apply to me! That I’m part of the problem, not just those other bozos! That I’m an Internet bozo too!
In my defense, there should be no way that you accidentally stumble across this article. It’s reasonably well-hidden and hosted on such weak infrastructure that it would quickly no longer be accessible if it “went viral”, as the kids like to say.
So, if you’re reading this, well, you came to me.
Published by marco on 19. Nov 2023 00:12:53 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Why is there an epidemic crisis of congenital syphilis in the United States? by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)
“Congenital syphilis (CS), a bacterial infection in pregnant women caused by the spirochete Treponema pallidum that is passed on to her fetus, has risen tenfold over the last decade, said the top US public health agency this week. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released data that showed in 2022 there had been 3,761 such cases (102 cases per 100,000) reported through the public health departments across the country, up from only 335 cases back in 2012.
“These figures are astounding when one stops to think that the condition had been almost eliminated two decades ago, when rates of CS had dropped to a low of around 8 for every 100,000 births. It is a clear demonstration of the complete collapse of the public health system in the country, when a preventable disease, easy to diagnose and with a well-established cure readily available, is allowed to spread unchecked.”
“The defunding of the public health infrastructure in the US across this period, along with the opioid epidemic and deaths of despair, has coincided with the surge in the epidemic of syphilis. One can only surmise that the malign neglect seen during the COVID pandemic was already the modus operandi with regard to any serious public health crisis affecting the working class.”
“Dr. Thomas Moore, an infectious disease consultant and professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, told the Lancet, “The inability to ramp up production to meet the demand is largely due to the lack of interest in antibiotic production by pharmaceutical companies, which are pursuing drugs that have a bigger payoff.””
A Lack of Money Means a Lack of Freedom by Ben Burgis (Jacobin)
“[…] the person who can’t afford a ticket is being interfered with in just the same way as the person denied access to the plane by the national security state. Unequal distribution of wealth just is the unequal distribution of freedom from interference.”
“I think equality is an important value in its own right. (So did Cohen.) I also think the capacities for human flourishing emphasized by enthusiasts for “positive freedom” are important. And I’ve argued repeatedly in the past that freedom from interference, while important, is ultimately a less fundamental kind of freedom than the freedom from domination (“republican freedom”) emphasized by past generations of the labor and socialist movements.”
“If freedom from interference is only diminished when someone is stopped from doing something they have a moral right to do, we can only decide whether taking away private property from its current owners diminishes those owners’ freedom after we’ve decided whether they had a moral right to that property in the first place — and we’ll have to make that determination on the basis of “grounds other than freedom.“”
“If we would agree that the freedom of the citizens of this society is being diminished when they’re prevented from doing these things without the right tickets, Cohen argues, we should equally agree that when a capitalist state enforces a distribution of money that leaves some citizens in poverty, it’s diminishing the freedom of the poor. Money, Cohen thinks, isn’t a “thing” at all — not really. If you exchange a dollar for four quarters, you have different things in your possession than you did before, but you still have the same amount of money. Money is a form of social power. Like the tickets in the hypothetical moneyless society, the basic defining function of money is to cancel out interference.”
“Crucially, though, Cohen cautions that a more general objection to either capitalist property rights or the massive levels of income inequality they generate can’t be derived from his point about interference. “All forms of society grant freedoms to, and impose unfreedoms on, people,” he writes, “and no society, therefore, can be condemned just because certain people lack certain freedoms in it.””
“If we accept that not all limitations of freedom from interference are unjust, but we also think freedom from interference is extremely important, what principle should we use to decide how much of it everyone gets? In some cases, like freedom of speech, a plausible answer might be that it shouldn’t be limited at all. Everyone should be able to express any opinion. But that answer doesn’t work in the example we started with. Airplanes have limited numbers of seats; air travel uses a lot of fuel. We can’t just let everyone board every flight. So it looks like some unfreedom is unavoidable, and we have to decide how to distribute it.”
“A plausible answer to how much freedom everyone should be granted when “all of it” isn’t on the table is that everyone should get the maximum degree of freedom compatible with everyone else enjoying just as much of it.”
“There’s a complicated debate to be had about how close we can get to perfect income inequality without unacceptable losses to other values we care about. Even worker cooperatives might vote to offer some of their members higher incomes than others as an incentive to take jobs no one might want otherwise, for example, and there are all sorts of reasons a socialist society might have to make similar tradeoffs.”
This is an interesting interview about Varoufakis’s latest book, in which he posits many interesting hypotheses. I like that he makes hypotheses and puts them out there. They are well-informed and it’s very possible to disagree with him, but I like how the interviewer compliments him on his “elegant hypothesis” to make sure that we don’t get the impression that he thinks it wasn’t worth making in the first place. You can respect and idea and how it was generated, while still noting that it’s wrong because it either doesn’t provide any useful insights, or ends up applying an incomplete or counterproductive solution, or is missing information and could be even better.
I wonder why people don’t feel that the economy is working for them, no matter how much those who benefit immensely from it are telling them that it’s never been better?
A couple of weeks ago, there were elections in kanton Zürich for the two legislative houses. The topics shown below were the ones of most concern to the voting public.
Krankenkassenprämien Health insurance costs 21% 18% Klimawandel Climate change 22% 16% Zuwanderung, Ausländer Immigration, foreigners 20% 9% Versorgungs- und Energiesicherheit Supply and energy security 13% 13% Soziale Sicherheit, Lebenshaltungskosten Social safety net, cost-of-living 11% 12% Reform Altersvorsorge Social Security reform 11% 12% Gute Beziehungen zur EU Good relationship with the EU 7% 12% Wohnungspreise Rents are too damn high 9% 5% Unabhängigkeit, Souveränität Independence, sovereignty 9% 4% Natur- und Landschaftsschutz Nature conservancy 6% 6% Wirtschaft, Wettbewerbsfähigkeit Economy, competitiveness 7% 4% Kriminalität, Sicherheit Crime, security 5% 5% Freiheitsrechte, Meinungsfreiheit Freedom of expression 5% 4% Gleichstellung der Geschlechter Gender equality 5% 3% Steuerbelastung, Staatsausgaben Tax burden, government spending 4% 4% Landesverteidigung National defense 3% 2% Arbeitslosigkeit, Lohndruck Unemployement, wage pressure 1% 2%
UN Report Details Rampant US Human Rights Violations at Home and Abroad by Marjorie Cohn (Scheer Post)
“The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) enshrines the rights to life, to vote, and to freedom of expression and assembly; and the prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. It forbids discrimination in the enjoyment of civil and political rights based on race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status (which includes sexual orientation).”
How to Decimate a City by Alana Semuels (The Atlantic)
“Syracuse has the highest rates of both black and Hispanic concentrations of poverty in the nation. People who live in high-poverty neighborhoods “shoulder the ‘double disadvantage’ of having poverty-level family income while living in a neighborhood dominated by poor families and the social problems that follow,” Jargowsky writes.”
“Over the past decade, the concentration of poverty in Syracuse and other American cities has increased, even as the nation has become wealthier and pulled itself out of a damaging recession.”
Yeah, well, the way the economy has healed is very, very uneven. The “nation” has become wealthier is a very controversial way of describing what has happened, one that is overly generous to those who benefitted the most. For many, the recession continues unabated.
““We see a lot of generational poverty here,” Rebecca Heberle, who runs the local Head Start program for PEACE Inc., a nonprofit in Syracuse, told me. “People face so many challenges—their power has been turned off, they have infestations, they need money for food, formula, diapers, a bus pass.””
“In the early 1950s, a small group of builders proposed that the city obtain “slum land,” clear it, and get it ready for development—for private industry to do so would be too costly, they said, according to DiMento, who authored a paper on so-called urban renewal in Syracuse.”
Piracy, just like in Gaza. Same as it ever was. Want it, don’t wanna pay for it, have your friend in local government seize it, then give it to you. It’s so common, it’s banal. Ms. Arendt called it long ago.
“That this construction would destroy a close-knit black community, with a freeway running through the heart of town, essentially separating Syracuse in two, did not seem of much concern to local leaders. They wanted state and federal funding, and were willing to follow whatever plans were proposed to get it.”
“Although whites were moving out of Syracuse, black families still largely could not get loans to buy homes, and were often prohibited from renting in certain neighborhoods. A 1937 map of the city from the Homeowner’s Loan Corporation shows predominantly black areas marked in red, signaling residents in those areas were high risk for loans.”
“In some of the highest-poverty census tracts in Syracuse, for example, the unemployment rate is above 30 percent. In Syracuse’s schools, which are 28 percent white, almost 80 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. School districts in suburban areas are majority white, and in the 17 other school districts in the county, only 21 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced lunch. Only about 50 percent of students in the city graduate from high school, compared with 98 percent for one of the wealthier suburbs.”
“Businesses and residents in the suburbs are vociferously opposed to any option that doesn’t include rebuilding the highway. But a group of planners and residents called Rethink 81 are urging the region to think more imaginatively about planning decisions that will have a long-term effect on the community. I-81 should never have been built, they say, and the city should not make a similar mistake again. “We believe that too much of the city was sacrificed to make way for I-81 in the 1960s,” the group says, in a proposal. “Whatever option is chosen, it must not encroach further on the city or require the removal of even more of the city’s infrastructure and historic assets.””
Letter to the Children of Gaza by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“You have never been in a plane. You have never left Gaza. You know only the densely packed streets and alleys. The concrete hovels. You know only the security barriers and fences patrolled by soldiers that surround Gaza. Planes, for you, are terrifying. Fighter jets. Attack helicopters. Drones. They circle above you. They drop missiles and bombs. Deafening explosions. The ground shakes. Buildings fall. The dead. The screams. The muffled calls for help from beneath the rubble. It does not stop. Night and day. Trapped under the piles of smashed concrete. Your playmates. Your schoolmates. Your neighbors. Gone in seconds. You see the chalky faces and limp bodies when they are dug out. I am a reporter. It is my job to see this. You are a child. You should never see this.”
“I tried to tell your story. I tried to tell the world that when you are cruel to people, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, when you deny people freedom and dignity, when you humiliate and trap them in an open-air prison, when you kill them as if they were beasts, they become very angry. They do to others what was done to them. I told it over and over. I told it for seven years. Few listened. And now this.”
“I hope one day we will meet. You will be an adult. I will be an old man, although to you I am already very old. In my dream for you I will find you free and safe and happy. No one will be trying to kill you. You will fly in airplanes filled with people, not bombs. You will not be trapped in a concentration camp. You will see the world. You will grow up and have children. You will become old. You will remember this suffering, but you will know it means you must help others who suffer. This is my hope. My prayer. We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough. We will go to Rafah. Many of us. Reporters. We will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much. But it is something. We will tell your story again. Maybe it will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness.”
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky cancels elections as US expands conflict with Russia in Middle East by Clara Weiss (WSWS)
“On Monday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose government has been touted by the NATO powers and their press as the spearhead of Western democracy, announced that the country’s presidential elections, due to be held next year, are canceled.”
“Since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has been in a state of martial law. All major opposition parties are banned, and opponents of the war and the government are routinely persecuted , arrested and “disappeared.””
“The escalating warfare inside the Ukrainian state apparatus and ruling class is unfolding as the war against Russia by US imperialism is expanding in both scope and intensity. In backing Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and provoking a wider war in the Middle East, and above all with Iran, the US is also opening up a new front in the war against Russia. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and NATO bombing of Libya in 2011, as well as the US military involvement in the ongoing civil war in Syria since 2011, were already aimed, at least in part, at undermining Russian influence in the Middle East and North Africa. Now, all of these wars are increasingly metastasizing into a full-blown global conflict and whatever has remained of the “democratic” mask of all the capitalist governments is falling off.”
Germany Is Weaponizing Its Historical Guilt to Demonize Israel’s Critics by Dave Braneck (Jacobin)
“Both in the context of the war in Gaza and the domestic discourse within Germany, antisemitism is equated with criticism of Israel; Germany officially defines manifestations of “hatred” toward Israel as antisemitic.”
“Scholz was unashamed to claim Israel is “guided by very humanitarian principles” and that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would certainly abide by international law. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock argues that Germany’s abstention in a vote on the United Nations’ proposed cease-fire was warranted due to a “lack of balance” in the resolution. She was met with widespread criticism in Germany for abstaining, rather than voting directly against the cessation of hostilities.”
“We’re also now seeing the mere assertion that Palestinians are people itself being deemed somehow antisemitic or supportive of Hamas. German press did not hesitate to attack Naomi Klein (who is Jewish) for calling Israeli violence “genocidal” and failing to condemn Hamas in the same tweet. Nor have they thought twice about branding Judith Butler (who is also Jewish) as an antisemitic “Israel-hater” for “relativizing” Hamas’s violence and for her role in postcolonial studies more broadly. That using the state of Israel as a monolithic stand-in for all Jews is itself pretty antisemitic hasn’t seemed to dawn on most Germans.”
“In prominent Green Party politician Habeck’s nearly ten-minute speech reiterating Germany’s support for Israel and calling out antisemitism, he directly references the crimes of his grandparents’ generation — before going on to argue that non-German citizens who praise Hamas could lose their residency status or face deportation. He failed to make it clear why exactly immigrants to Germany should have to atone for the crimes of his grandparents in the first place.”
“Berlin canceling Jewish-led demonstrations like “Jewish Berliners against violence in the Middle East” early in the war, on grounds of potential antisemitic messaging, illustrates just how dangerous this is. Jews that happen to be critical of Israel are silenced or painted as self-loathing in a vital moment for preventing the further escalation of the conflict.”
“Equating all Jews with Israel doesn’t just target the pro-Palestinian Jewish left — or openly ignore Israelis who are critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or against intensifying the atrocious violence in Gaza. It also tacitly encourages reprehensible acts like the attempted firebombing of a Berlin synagogue. A discourse that sees Israeli policy as a monolith standing for all Jews directly feeds the warped, dangerous — antisemitic — perception that attacking Jews or Jewish institutions is somehow resisting Israeli policy.”
“In Vice Chancellor Habeck’s speech on Germany’s perspective on the war, he criticized Muslim institutions for failing to distance themselves from Hamas and antisemitism — implying that unless otherwise noted, Muslims hate Jews and support terror. He went on to say that Muslims living in Germany “must clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as to not undermine their own right to tolerance.””
Holy shit, that’s a direct threat to Muslims. Incredible. This guy’s gone off the rails.
After Weeks of Israeli War Crimes, Rashida Tlaib Is the One Getting Censured by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)
“The Washington establishment has concocted a made-up narrative that a slogan about Palestinian liberation is actually a call for violence, worked themselves up into a lather about it, and used it to distract from not just actual widespread calls for violence coming from Washington and Tel Aviv, but the actual, literal violence being carried out by the Israeli government with US backing. After all, the more time and energy we spend debating a protest chant and what it means, the less we spend talking about the indiscriminate slaughter that is already deadlier than many horrific wars this century. Don’t fall for it.”
‘From The River To The Sea’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means by Maha Nassar (Forward)
“The reason was that they saw all of Palestine — from the river to the sea — as one indivisible homeland. They invoked the story of Solomon and the baby to explain their stance. Like the real mother in the parable, who begged Solomon to refrain from splitting her baby in half, Palestinian Arabs couldn’t stand to see their beloved country split in two. And they saw the Zionists’ eager reception of the plan as an ominous sign that they intended to conquer the whole of Palestine.”
“As for those Palestinians who managed to remain on their lands in the new Israeli state, they were eventually granted citizenship, but it was clearly subordinate to the status of Jewish Israelis. They were subject to military rule rather than civilian law, which meant they needed permits from the military governor to travel to work and school. They also encountered widespread prejudice from Israelis who saw them as a benighted, traditional underclass in need of the state’s benevolent modernization.”
“[…] although many people point to Hamas’s 1988 charter as evidence of its hostility to Jews, in fact the group long ago distanced itself from that initial document, seeking a more explicit anti-colonial stance. Moreover, its 2017 revised charter makes even clearer that its conflict is with Zionism, not with Jews.”
“[…] notwithstanding the extreme rhetoric of some leaders on both sides, a recent joint poll shows that only a small minority of Palestinians see “expulsion” as a solution to the conflict – 15% — which is incidentally the same percentage of Israelis who view this as the only solution.”
“Rather than just lecture Palestinians and their supporters about how certain phrases make them feel, supporters of Israel should get more curious about what Palestinians themselves want. There isn’t a single answer (there never is), but assuming you already know is no way to work towards a just and lasting peace.”
22 House Dems Join GOP in Voting to Censure Tlaib, Only Palestinian-American in Congress by Jake Johnson (Scheer Post)
““No government is beyond criticism,” Tlaib added. “The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic sets a very dangerous precedent, and it’s being used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation.” In a statement responding to the censure vote, the progressive group Justice Democrats accused the House of taking out “its anti-Palestinian bigotry out on the only Palestinian American in Congress” and called out by name each of the Democratic members who voted yes.”
“Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid noted in a statement Wednesday that “the House did not censure Rep. Brian Mast for stating there is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian civilian and comparing all Palestinians to Nazis, nor Rep. Max Miller for saying Gaza should be turned into a ‘parking lot,’ nor Rep. Josh Gottheimer who was reported in two outlets to have blamed all Muslims for the attacks of October 7.””
““Representative Tlaib has repeatedly called for the recognition of the shared humanity of all Israelis and Palestinians,” Shahid added. “It is clear that while Israelis and Palestinians may be equal in the eyes of God, they are not in the eyes of the United States government. It’s now up to Democrats of conscience to dismantle the horrific hierarchy of human value that has taken hold at the highest places in our party and government.””
Biden’s Frankenstein by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Volodymyr Zelensky is pure cartoon creation—the greatest put-up job of our century, posing as a defender of democratic freedom while running a crypto–Nazi regime and, along with his generals and ministers, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars. But Ukraine—weak, broke, and losing the proxy war against Russia—is easily managed. Biden could unplug the electrodes from Zelensky’s temples any time he chose to do so. He won’t, but he could.”
“Dim and wanting in all subtlety, even Biden, Blinken and the rest of the regime’s national security crew are now aware that Biden’s open-door, open-wallet support for Bibi’s frenzied violence against Palestinians has turned into a political disaster from which it will be difficult to recover.”
“Think about where this will leave Washington out in the middle distance. It will be another case of U.S. support for South Africa before the apartheid regime gave up the ghost in 1990, or for Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe 10 years earlier. It will be embarrassing and costly.”
“Unnamed officials now acknowledge that Israel’s hysterical violence has nothing to do with self-defense and everything to do with preserving the Israeli Defense Force’s reputation for merciless retribution. I read these sorts of admissions as indications of dissatisfaction and disapproval, if not disgust.”
“Biden is stuck. This is the simple answer. He has—and far from alone is he in this—painted the U.S. into a corner with the Israelis. They know very well Israel is America’s true Frankenstein and that Washington cannot possibly cut the current. Please tone down the violence against innocents, and here is $3.8 billion in annual military aid, and a new $14.3 billion atop it, so you can keep on going: How else are Bibi and his fanatic ministers supposed to read this if not as a license to continue bombing and starving Palestinians?”
“These are the same people, let’s not forget, who think they can persuade Americans that they are prospering so long as they get “the messaging” right. If we get the messaging right, people will be O.K. watching a viciously racist nation exterminate another people.”
The Nothingness of a War Consciousness by Dennis Kucinich (Scheer Post)
“A Palestinian journalist mourns his colleague, who only a half hour earlier, was reporting on air. After work, he went home, a bomb hit, killing him and his 11-member family.”
“It is an unfathomable, beyond the Orwellian, to commit ethnic cleansing and call it defense, to preach democratic values while practicing apartheid, to claim wholesale theft of property a right, to take Palestinians, their homes, kill their children, destroy their family, their culture, their history and deem it the fulfillment of a prophecy ordained by God.”
“That this genocide is being visited upon the Palestinians by the descendants of those who suffered the utterly condemnable, indelible inhumanity of the Holocaust is incomprehensible. After all, who has suffered more than the Jews during the Holocaust? Entire families wiped out in a racist elimination plan.”
I, Too, Am American by Kevin Cooper (Scheer Post)
“To have my constitutional rights repeatedly violated, including admission by the governor’s legal affairs secretary saying I was wrongfully convicted, to be told that was ok, and that the state could plant evidence, tamper with evidence and witnesses, withhold material exculpatory evidence at least seven to eight times, destroy evidence, lie about evidence, have lies told about me, and all the other proven things that were and are still being done to me, tells me that I am not really “American” even though I was born and raised and live in America.”
“To have all the facts and truths and laws ignored by a certain few in order to continue to uphold this wrongful conviction tells us all that justice is just a word that is used by some to achieve the results that they want, and to do so by any means necessary. That is injustice.”
“I was wrongfully convicted for the murders of four white people; the lone surviving eyewitness at that time saw my face on TV and told the sheriff’s deputy next to him: “He’s not the guy that did it.” Nor did any of the other witnesses state that they saw a Black man. Several stated that they saw white people driving the victims’ stolen car away from their home on the night of the murders. Yet the racism and tunnel vision of those deputies side by side with the district attorney’s office would rather have me pay with my life for a crime that they wouldn’t solve because in AMERICA the easiest thing to do is to first accuse, then convict, a Black man for a crime against white people.”
Israel’s Final Solution for the Palestinians by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“There has always been a strain of Jewish fascist within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state. “The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.””
“It is a grave mistake not to take the blood curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription.”
“These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.”
“The goal is a “pure” Israel, cleansed of Palestinian contaminants. Gaza is to become a wasteland. The Palestinians in Gaza will be killed or forced into refugee camps over the border in Egypt. Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque − the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army − to be demolished.”
“The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will be a Jewish version of Iran.”
7 Million Displaced in the Democratic Republic of Congo as M23 Attacks Continue (Scheer Post)
“The country’s eastern provinces have been the worst-affected following a resurgence of attacks by the M23 rebel militia, internationally acknowledged to be a proxy force backed by neighboring Rwanda, in 2021. The DRC currently also has over 100 armed groups operating within its territory. According to the International Organization for Migration’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), 2.3 million people have been displaced in North Kivu, 1.6 million people in Ituri, 1.3 million in South Kivu, and over 350,000 people in the Tanganyika provinces.”
“The ongoing offensive of the M23— which is in blatant violation of the multiple ceasefires mediated by the EAC that it had supposedly agreed to— is taking place despite the fact that two separate multinational forces are currently deployed in the DRC. This includes the nearly two-decade long deployment of the UN in what has been the longest and most expensive peace-keeping operation in its history, and now the EACRF.”
“The DRC’s integration into the EAC, of which Rwanda and Uganda are fellow members, also raises significant questions regarding the exploitation of the country’s mineral resources, which have been subjected to extensive looting even after independence.”
The Horror, The Horror by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“We sit in front of the monitors. We are silent. We know what this means. No power. No water. No internet. No medical supplies. Every infant in an incubator will die. Every dialysis patient will die. Everyone in the intensive care unit will die. Everyone who needs oxygen will die. Everyone who needs emergency surgery will die. And what will happen to the 50,000 people who, driven from their homes by the relentless bombing, have taken refuge on the hospital grounds? We know the answer to that as well. Many of them, too, will die.
“There are no words to express what we are witnessing. In the five weeks of horror this is one of the pinnacles of horror. The indifference of Europe is bad enough. The active complicity by the United States is unfathomable. Nothing justifies this. Nothing. And Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life. ”
“Israel and the United States are sending a chilling message to the rest of the world. International and humanitarian law, including the Geneva Convention, are meaningless pieces of paper. They did not apply in Iraq. They do not apply in Gaza. We will pulverize your neighborhoods and cities with bombs and missiles. We will wantonly murder your women, children, elderly and sick. We will set up blockades to engineer starvation and the spread of infectious diseases. You, the “lesser breeds” of the earth, do not matter. To us you are vermin to be extinguished. We have everything. If you try and take any of it away from us, we will kill you. And we will never be held accountable.”
“We are not hated for our values. We are hated because we have no values. We are hated because rules only apply to others. Not to us. We are hated because we have arrogated to ourselves the right to carry out indiscriminate slaughter. We are hated because we are heartless and cruel. We are hated because we are hypocrites, talking about protecting civilians, the rule of law and humanitarianism while extinguishing the lives of hundreds of people in Gaza a day”
“Ask yourself, if you were a Palestinian in Gaza and had access to a weapon what would you do? If Israel killed your family, how would you react? Why would you care about international or humanitarian law when you know it only applies to the oppressed, not the oppressors? If terror is the only language Israel uses to communicate, the only language it apparently understands, wouldn’t you speak back with terror?
“Israel’s orgy of death will not crush Hamas. Hamas is an idea. This idea is fed on the blood of martyrs. Israel is giving Hamas an abundant supply.”
Super-Genius Ben Shapiro Exposes Anti-Israel Lies (#3) by Norman Finkelstein (Substack)
“The 1917 Balfour Declaration states that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” whereas the Zionist movement lobbied the British to deploy the phrase “reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish State.” (emphases added; see Isaiah Friedman, “The Question of Palestine,” chapter 15) If the British opted for the preposition “in” rather than “of,” that’s because it had not “promised the Jews the entire area of Palestine.” Meanwhile, Mr. Shapiro skips over an obvious perplexity: shouldn’t the people of Palestine not the British have been deciding the fate of that territory? Here’s how Lord Balfour reasoned it:”“Put simply, in the grand scheme of things Jews were more important than Arabs. But Balfour at least possessed the lucidity of mind to recognize the “present inhabitants” in Palestine. Mr. Shapiro doesn’t even notice their presence (see #2). He’s of the school that “There were no Indians.””“The weak point of our position of course is that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination. If the present inhabitants were consulted they would unquestionably give an anti-Jewish verdict. Our justification for our policy is that we regard Palestine as being absolutely exceptional; that we consider the question of the Jews outside Palestine as one of world importance, and that we conceive the Jews to have an historic claim to a home in their ancient land; provided that home can be given them without either dispossessing or oppressing the present inhabitants.”
Unconstitutional Killings by Andrew P. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)
“If the country is at war – lawfully and constitutionally declared by Congress – obviously the president can use the U.S. military to kill the military of the opposing country. And if an attack on the U.S. is imminent, the president can strike the first blow against the military of the entity whose attack is just about to occur.
“There are no other constitutional circumstances under which a president may kill.
“When President Harry Truman targeted Japanese civilians as the Japanese government was within days of surrendering in World War II, he murdered them. Notwithstanding his unprosecuted war crimes, and with the government’s version of Pearl Harbor still fresh in many Americans’ minds, Truman was regarded as heroic for using nuclear bombs to cause the profoundly immoral, militarily useless and plainly criminal mass killings of the hated Japanese.”
Biden Visits Hitler’s Bunker, Sends for a Decorator: Israel and Ukraine Edition by Rob Urie (CounterPunch)
“In almost two years of attrition warfare, the Russians managed to keep the number of civilian deaths in Ukraine to 10,000. With upwards of 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed, the Russians are conspicuously engaged in a targeted state-vs-state battle. In the month since the Hamas attacks of October 7th, the Israelis have killed 10,569 civilians, and possibly a few hundred Hamas soldiers. What the Israelis are doing in Gaza isn’t warfare, it is the extermination of a civilian population. This fits the exterminationist impulse of the Zionist-Right in Israel. If the Biden administration believes that what Israel is doing in Gaza is in any way constructive, the world has a problem.”
“The US is now reportedly telling (substantially destroyed) Ukraine that it is time to negotiate with Russia. This is 10,000 Ukrainian civilian deaths, 400,000 Ukrainian military deaths, and at least two negotiated settlements between Ukraine and Russia that were put on ice by the Americans, too late. The same adult infants who ‘managed’ this fiasco from the American side are now in charge of US-Israel policy. The only possible worse scenario would have been to have Hillary Clinton— the butcher of Libya, in the White House.”
Israelis Keep Hurting Their Own PR Interests By Talking by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“This sort of thing has been happening for years. Israelis who’ve been marinating in a self-validating echo chamber of Zionist ideology which dehumanizes Palestinians and normalizes oppression and abuse don’t think twice about saying things that make Israel look bad on the world stage, because to them it’s just the standard status quo way of looking at things.”
“If he’d been a trained propagandist for the Israeli state he never would have made such comments on camera, but because he was just a Zionism-indocrinated member of the Israeli public he saw no reason to hold his tongue.”
“Israel’s allies keep trying to portray it as a rational actor and a positive force in the world, but if you listen to Israelis themselves you get a very different understanding of what this murderous apartheid state is actually about.
“As Maya Angelou said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
This 20-minute video features a series of person-in-the-street interviews with Jerusalem residents, expressing their opinion of the living situation in the West Bank, for themselves and the Palestinians. They express pretty strong opinions about the reality, advantages, and disadvantages of various racial characteristics and their relation to viability or qualification as human beings.
In particular, there are a few American transplants the positively do humanity and their origin country proud. It brought a tear of pride to my eye to see them having so successfully transplanted and adapted their native racism to a foreign environment.
Ronnie Barkan (Wikipedia) swam against the current, describing the reality of Israeli life and culture, although a bit more pessimistically than I would—but what do I know? He said that there was no left to speak of in Israel, that there were just the right-wing Zionists without conscience who wanted to eradicate or remove the Palestinians—and those Zionists who were still interested in reconciling what they considered to be their own basic morality with their desire to live in a racially pure country. For this, they were willing to give up land, whereas their counterparts were not. As Barkan puts it: they both want the same thing; they just differ on how big the country will be.
“Barkan has described himself as “among the group of the over-privileged in this struggle for Palestinian rights, acting against a system that has at its very core the Zionist principle of differentiation.” He describes the Israeli treatment of Palestinians as apartheid, identifies himself as “anti-Zionist,” and refers to Israel as “the Jewish-supremacist entity…founded on the basis of ethnic cleansing and ethnic segregation.””
The IDF is Coming Up Almost Empty in Search for Underground Hamas ‘Pentagon’ by Dave Lindorff (CounterPunch)
“The pointed declarations that Israeli and US “intelligence” had made both governments, in Jerusalem and Washington, “confident” that there was a Hamas “command and control center” operating in a Hamas-constructed bunker under the hospital connected to a network of reinforced tunnels leading into and out of the hospital, have not been borne out. Instead, what the so-called Israel Defense Force (IDF) has offered up is a cellar constructed 40 years ago under Israeli supervision in a “Building 2” addition, according to a Newsweek report and a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. This basement, put in place well before the founding of Hamas, was long known as it was included in the hospital addition plan and meant to serve as a laundry room.
“No Hamas-constructed access and escape tunnels have been reported as found so far; only an above-ground room in one of the main hospital buildings that allegedly was found to contain a small cache of arms such as 15 automatic weapons and grenades, and a computer allegedly containing images of Israeli hostages on its hard drive — both find said to be evidence that Hamas fighters were using the hospital, or at least to store weapons, and possibly to hold some hostages at some point, but hardly evidence of the hospital’s hiding the Hamas “command and control center” which Israel had been claiming, with certainty, to be the justification for its attack and takeover of the hospital and for the “collateral” deaths of hundreds of patients, medical personnel, and even premie babies on incubators that failed once deprived of electricity.”
“Why aren’t they just sending in inspectors to check whether the hospital is being used as a command-and-control center? Because everybody knows it’s nonsense. They say it [in] every single one of their operations. Al Shifa—the … Hamas has their command-and-control-center in Al Shifa, in the basement.”
This is an excellent discussion, well-worth watching. They dismantle the logic whereby the U.S., Europe, and Israel seek to position Hamas as a criminal organization for spending money on building tunnels, rather than bomb shelters. But the U.S. provides billions to Israel to build up its military. It is legally forbidden from doing so, however, as Israel is the occupying power. To the contrary, the U.S. would be within its legal rights to provide Hamas with billions in order to resist the occupation. In that case, Hamas would have money left over to build bomb shelters.
However, the bomb shelters wouldn’t help, would they? If Palestinians aren’t safe from bombing in churches, schools, mosques, and hospitals, then why would they be safe in bomb shelters? Bomb shelters are generally built to withstand shocks, but not direct hits—especially with the hardware that Israel has at its disposal. Bunkers can be built to withstand direct attacks, but not from so-called bunker-busters. What would stop Israel from targeting those bomb shelters, had they been built?
At 00:04:05, he says,
“Both he [Biden], Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense said they were sending unlimited arms shipments—following decades of continual arms shipments—“without limitation.” That means they are likely to violate two existing federal laws, which say that the U.S. is prohibited from giving arms to any government that abuses human rights in a systematic way, and it uses these weapons for offensive rather than defensive purposes. So they’re violating their own laws … that they swore to uphold. And now they wanna provide advanced arms to Israel without even notifying Congress.”
At 20:30, he says,
“It’s making the United States appear to be a power that has lost its marbles, gone berserk in the world. The last 20 years of warfare did a lot to reinforce that, but now, this is doing much more to make it evident to the world that we won’t change, that we won’t do positive things in the world, we won’t bring our power to bear on people who are breaking the law, on people who are threatening things that we hold dear, on people who are doing humanitarian deads—or anti-humanitarian deeds—that go against everything we supposedly stand for, as long as they’re Jewish and Israeli. That’s the way the world looks at this increasingly.”
At 25:00, he says,
“We have no direction. We have no strategic approach to the world. We just manage our inbox.”
Putin-Loving Bigots Must Stop Whining About Defense Spending and the Economy by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes:”“The U.S. Census Bureau’s Pulse Survey report, which is based on 72,839 responses to over a million questionnaires, just released estimates for Americans having trouble paying for basic household expenses in the previous seven days. The breakdown:”“Voters… seem to be growing more one-dimensional. To take one widely discussed example, views of the economy… have become wildly partisan. Right now, self-identified Republicans mostly believe that unemployment, which is near a 50-year low, is actually near a 50-year high, and assess current economic conditions as being worse than they were in 1980, when both inflation and unemployment were much worse than they are now.”“They must all be Republicans, buying QAnon tees instead of milk and bananas. Economic mystery solved!”
- ”A little difficult”: 65,966,799
- “Somewhat difficult”: 50,244,137
- “Very difficult”: 43,975,466
Why wouldn’t they think that media like the NYT is blowing smoke up their asses about how awesome Joe Biden is running their economy when they can’t feel it? Believing that the unemployment number is actually, really, truly under 4% doesn’t make your shitty, underpaid, and low-hour job any better. It doesn’t pay your rent. It doesn’t fix the brakes on your car. Paul Krugman is a rich shit, who can’t summon up a shred of empathy for people on the other side of the economic divide.
“Krugman was once the columnist who most dependably argued that America could afford any amount of social spending. Now, as Covid-era assistance programs like SNAP benefits, child care tax credits, the CHAP housing assistance program wind down, his angle is we can afford more investment in “large-scale conventional warfare,” whose era “isn’t over after all.” From the author of The Conscience of a Liberal:”“Those complaining about spending in Ukraine should pipe down, Krugman added, because military spending as a share of GDP is smaller than in Ike’s day, and saying we can’t afford war is “effectively giving Vladimir Putin victory.” He has similar gripes with those on the “far left” who think “merchants of death” in the arms business inspire interventionist foreign policy. Such irrationality is borne of analyses that are “generations out of date,” he says, and naysayers should see how wonderfully both Javelin anti-tank missiles and Lockheed’s HIMARS rocket launchers are performing in Ukraine before criticizing Pentagon “bloat.””“Do we have a hugely bloated military budget? No doubt the Pentagon, like any large organization, wastes a lot of money. But recent events have made the case for spending at least as much as we currently do, and perhaps more.”
“Now, increased military spending is being repackaged as progressive conceit, and the hesitant are not just giving succor to Vladimir Putin, they’re extremist “horseshoe theory” bigots — including me, apparently:”“Horseshoe thinking persists because there are still some ways in which it seems to match experience. There really are personality types who veer between extremes, denouncing Goldman Sachs as a vampire squid one year, then resurfacing as a political propagandist for Elon Musk later.
“And the horseshoe theory has been given a big boost by recent events. As many have noted, the far left and the far right seem increasingly united in antisemitism. Funny how that always happens.”
These are all Krugman quotes. Jesus, what a petty, simplistic, stupid man he’s become. “Funny how that always happens.” Is this how 70-year–old, Nobel-prize-winning, New York Times columnists should be comporting themselves? We should expect more, but why bother? We won’t get it.
“Is there anything that hasn’t been described as bigotry on the Times op-ed page by now? We’ve had Trump obviously, but also the “religion of whiteness,” Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders calling himself “the son of a Polish immigrant,” France, Abraham Lincoln, and a long list of other things. Now we’re adding opposition to defense spending? Saying you can’t afford groceries? How wide is the circle of deplorable opinions going to get?”
“[…] having covered the 2008 crash and the ensuing presidential races, it was obvious resentments driving both the Trump and Sanders campaigns came in significant part from people tired of being told they hadn’t been screwed by Wall Street in the mortgage securities orgy. Similar slobbering editorial apologies for the politicians in both parties who bailed out the most culpable firms created clear additional political opportunities for populists. Because so few pundits have friends from truly broke-ass places, they didn’t believe that anger was out there, and were totally taken by surprise by the “burn it down” vote that showed up in 2016.”
The Russel Brand Conspiracy by Tony McKenna (CounterPunch)
“The allegations made against him by the Panorama program seem highly credible. They range from sexual harassment to rape. One victim alleged that Brand raped her against a wall of his house. This allegation pertains to 2012. The evidence to support the allegation consists of a text message she sent him telling him following the assault just how frightened she’d been, that ‘no means no’ to which he responded by saying he was ‘very sorry’. In addition, the rape crisis center she went to the next day logged her visit.”
I agree that the allegations seem credible. He has a reputation. However—and I am not a lawyer—all of the evidence the author listed is circumstantial. I am well-aware of how difficult it is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that sexual harassment or rape has taken place, but that doesn’t mean that we should lower our standards. Or does it? I think a lot of people think that it does—especially when it means that you can nail people that you find distasteful.
The Panorama program is a TV show, with a to-me unknown repute. I can’t say what weight I should give their evidence, in the first place. Let’s assume it’s all true, and is as the author laid out. His responding that he’s “very sorry” is not necessarily an admission of guilt, He may just have been sorry that he’d so wildly misinterpreted the situation.
Even the rape-crisis-center visit is circumstantial, no? What did she do there? Did she ask whether they thought she’d been raped? The center’s not just there to record rapes, but to counsel women who’ve been traumatized and to help them process their feelings. This process doesn’t always end in corroboration, does it?
If the center thinks that a person’s story doesn’t amount to rape, doesn’t it sometimes help the person work through what amount to bad decisions and help them avoid them in the future? What is counseling for, if not that?
Or is a center like this just considered a rubber-stamp machine to validate the rape claims of every single person who walks through the door? Doesn’t it do more damage to an already traumatized person to round up their experience to rape, turning them into a victim, a survivor, where they might have been able to leave the experience behind them instead? Who would this serve?
I can’t imagine that’s the case, so I have to assume that a visit to a rape crisis center implies only that the woman was far more traumatized the day after a “date” than she should have been, but cannot conclude that a rape has occurred. Circumstantial.
Perhaps with enough circumstantial evidence, it becomes damning evidence, but, again, I am not a lawyer. I’d hope it doesn’t work like that. One piece of evidence that, taken alone, amounts to nothing, can be combined with other pieces of similar evidence and, instead of adding several nothings and getting nothing, you get … something. You get “proof”.
“The accusation is a persuasive one, the victim’s account is supported by objective and documented evidence. But for the conspiracy theorist, such persuasive evidence does not speak to the likelihood of Brand’s guilt, instead it speaks to the power of the conspiracy set in motion against him.”
And for the conspiracy theorist intent on prosecution, circumstantial evidence becomes “credible” and “persuasive”, which gets rounded up to “damning” and “incriminating” and should end in a prison sentence.
I don’t claim to know anything about Brand’s specific case. I don’t really care. There are other, far more serious, things to think about, to be perfectly honest. It was just interesting to start skimming an article about how conspiracy theorists can’t be convinced by any evidence, in which the author is seemingly convinced by … any evidence, no matter how circumstantial. The author is clearly trying Brand here. Look at the photo he included of Brand, where he’s half-lying on a bed, gazing what seems to be lasciviously into the camera. I’m sure that wasn’t the first picture he found.
“In a well-researched and vigorous piece, the Guardian journalist George Monbiot scrutinizes these kinds of claims.”
Look, I like Monbiot’s book Heat, but in the thirteen intervening years since I’ve read it, I’ve found him to be increasingly unreadable. He’s unhinged and makes wild accusations, kind of like Russell Brand, to be honest. I consider neither one of them to be reliable sources because they see demons everywhere.
The author in question here wrote a 13-page piece about Russell Brand—and he can’t even spell his name correctly. How seriously should I even take this kind of tripe?
I wish these people could see the irony of them accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist, all the while writing long screeds about other conspiracy theorists’ inability to admit to the allegations against them, and while citing other conspiracy theorists. Ah, but one never thinks of oneself as a conspiracy theorist, nor of one’s sources. Hell, I’m probably guilty of this sometimes—or maybe even all the time! How would I know?! Hell, I might even be doing it right now.
What Would It Look Like If You Were Standing On The Wrong Side Of History? by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“[…] we live in a civilization that is dominated by narrative control. Powerful manipulators figured out a long time ago that because human consciousness is dominated by mental stories, if you can control the stories in their heads, you can control the humans. They do this via propaganda and spin, with the wealthiest and most powerful people having the ability to exert the most control over the dominant narratives in our society.”
Coercive Chinese censorship against Thailand by Victor Mair (Language Log)
“Watch the Wayback archived interview while you still can. The PRC will stop at nothing to prevent Taiwan from having a voice.”
This interview isn’t really worth listening to. It’s a bog-standard piece of propaganda issued by Thai PBS News (which I only noticed after I started listening to it). As I’m listening to it, making my breakfast, I think to myself: wow, this guy can talk about everyone’s involvement in the South China Sea and near Taiwan, except for the elephant in the room—the U.S., which sails and flies there nearly as much as China. I thought to myself: it doesn’t matter how clever a linguist you are, Victor, you’re still a bog-standard American war-hawk, at heart. So very few Americans are capable of crawling out from under the immense weight of American propaganda. They still “trust” sources like PBS News unquestioningly.
In the video, the Taiwanese diplomat gave Russia’s completely unprovoked attack on Ukraine as an example of what they fear might happen at some point to Taiwan, but being attacked by China. He’s probably right, even if he doesn’t know it. Videos like this one that he made are an important part of building up support to provoke China into an unprovoked military attack.
Interestingly, he talks about things that are very “Ukraine-like”, like “extending the conscript period”, which he mentioned not once, but twice. He spent long minutes talking about how essential it was for Taiwan to support Ukraine. Jesus, PBS News, spreading it on a bit thick, no? Building up the military to “safeguard peace and stability.” Sounds very American. Other than praising President Biden, Taiwan speaks as if the U.S. is completely uninvolved in Asia. This is not an honest or realistic take. Oh, wait, at the end, he mentions that “other countries in this region are posturing for a possible conflict, trying to strengthen their deployment or their military reform, increase of their military capabilities, in order to show us a deterrence against Chinese military ambition”. He’s almost literally quoting Antony Blinken here. He’s talking about Japan, for the most part, lauding its return to a militaristic stance. What could possibly go wrong? It’s like lauding Germany’s return to doubling its military budget. Japan is attempting the same.
He finally mentions the U.S. at the end,
“The United States has been working very hard in preventing a war in this region, and we appreciate that very much. ”
Sweet mother of God.
False Accusations Of Anti-Semitism Exploit A Healthy Impulse To Advance A Profoundly Sick One by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“Have you ever noticed that it’s never the actual anti-semites who get attacked as anti-semites? Nowadays it’s very seldom the assholes saying Jews rule the world and are the source of society’s ills who are inundated with such accusations; supporters of Israel tend to more or less leave them alone. The ones who get slandered as anti-semites are people like Jeremy Corbyn — leftists who’ve dedicated their entire lives to anti-racism, whose only actual offense is believing that Palestinians are human beings and should be treated as such.”
“Really what’s happening in Gaza right now isn’t about Jews or Judaism at all; it’s about using violent force to take land and resources away from an indigenous population, as history has seen happen time and time again in situations that had nothing to do with Jews. It’s a profoundly unhealthy impulse that’s been causing immense human suffering for centuries, and people who’ve noticed the same patterns in Israel that they’ve seen in all the other settler-colonial projects over the last 500 years are being shouted down and bullied into staying silent using some of the most unethical manipulations ever devised.”
I ordinarily don’t like videos that feature “SHUTS DOWN” or “DESTROYS” and this video is no different, even though the purported shutdown in the video is one with which I agree. Usually, the person being shut down is a blithering idiot. This case is no different.
Francesca Albanesi is the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian occupied territories. Guardian journalist Daniel Hurst asks her what her intent was of using the word “domination” in her report. He says it just kind of “jumped out at him”. He wonders whether she was recalling the “trope”. She responds that it’s not a trope, but that the real situation on the ground in Palestine, that domination is a legal term taken from the UN human-rights conventions. I’m honestly not sure, thought, whether she knows what a trope is (it’s not a common word, even for people well-advanced in English as a second language, who use it daily for work) and I’m also not sure she understood that he was luridly alluding to the possibility that she’d deliberately exaggerated the situation on the ground in Palestine and used the word “domination” as a dog-whistle for the trope that “Jews run the world.” It would have been a far-more impressive shutdown if she’d asked him,
“Are you seriously asking me whether I tried to sneak in a reference to Jews running the world into my official report? That, in fact, the Israeli state’s racism is nothing next to my own? Is that the question? What is the point of this question, if not that? Or are you just trying to score gotcha points, based on your own myopic and severely malnourished view of history in the area on which you seem to be reporting?”
TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“Baseless generational in-fighting, aging millennials who refuse to accept the new status quo of the internet, easily monetizable rage bait, lazy TikTok trend reporting, and bad faith political actors swirled together to create a perfect storm this week. We have invented a version of TikTok that simply does not exist and now many people in power are ready to tear apart the foundation of internet to prove it does.”
“The internet is an extremely chaotic living ecosystem and it’s constantly reacting to itself and all you accomplish by amplifying something like this is give more ammo to those who want to who want to take that away. You turn bizarre discourse into something bigger than it was ever meant to be. You pointlessly villainize normal people who aren’t public figures and don’t deserve this kind of scrutiny. And you help conservative political movements continue their culture war. You also just look like clueless boomer to anyone even slightly younger than you.”
Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America: Transcript in Full by Giulia Carbonaro (Newsweek)
People claim to have been reading this 20-year–old letter that used to be available at the Guardian before they took it down. Why would they remove a piece of historical documentation that they’d hosted for 20 years? Because people were drawing the wrong conclusions from it, and the Guardian had to somehow stop abetting that from happening, so it threw it down the memory hole. Newsweek has generously and courageously republished the letter.
I know I’ve read this thing before—probably around when it first came out—but I’d forgotten how long it is. I was quite pleasantly surprised for a few seconds to think that the younger generations, even though they were drawing facile conclusions, were at least reading again. But, alas, no. As outlined above by Ryan Broderick, not all that many young people are actually reading this thing, and those who claim to have, read only about the first 5%, up until bin Laden mentioned Palestine, skimmed that sentence, misinterpreted it, and started using bin Laden to support their viewpoint. Well done. I hope they at least got some fancy Internet Points for it.
There are so many sections and sub-sections—four levels!—that I wish that Al-Queda had taken an HTML course—or that someone would have bothered to convert the damn thing to Markdown from what is obviously formerly a Word document written by someone who doesn’t know how to use styles. I guess we have more in common with the terrorists than we’d like to think. Hey, maybe our utter inability to use the basic productivity features we’ve had at our disposal for decades is common ground.
There is a lot of religious gobbledegook that I suppose would be considered to be killer arguments (no pun intended) if you actually believe in that sort of thing. Otherwise, it’s pretty meaningess.
Every once in a while, a sentence like this one bubbles out of the froth,
“(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.”
But to pretend that that’s the point of the document is to cherry-pick, to be honest.
Why wouldn’t I assume that this was more important?
“Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all. If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.”
There is a danger in confirmation bias, in which you cherry-pick this one instead:
“(f) You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down.”
This is 100% accurate, but in an essay where bin Laden says a ton of things, some of them are bound to be true—or at least be something with which the reader can agree. I challenge anyone to claim truthfully that they disagree with absolutely everything in bin Laden’s document. That doesn’t mean you approve of 9–11 or terrorism. It just means that you know how to read and you know how to separate the message from the messenger.
Or what about this one?
“(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.”
I mean, I can agree with about 80% of it being absolutely correct, that it’s an effrontery that the U.S. empire subjugates muslim countries to guarantee its supply of cheap energy. But then there’s that part about the Jews that was wholly unnecessary, in my opinion, but which I feel might the most necessary part in the opinion of the author.
It’s like being at a bar and chatting with a fellow beer-drinker about the overbearing government. You might be in total agreement that they take all of our money and that we see nothing for it.
Him: Damned taxes are too high!
You: No kidding! And what do we get for it?
Him: Nuthin!
You: Pissin’ it away on foreign wars!
Him: That’s right! And for what? To protect a bunch of Jews!
You: …
It’s like laughing at a good zinger by Donald Trump. While you’re laughing and acknowledging that he’s got quite a flair for nicknames, or whatever, you also have to acknowledge that he writes shit like this:
“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day,
we pledge to you that we will root out the
Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left
Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of
our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections,
and will do anything possible, whether legally or
illegally, to destroy America, and the American
Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less
sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat
from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the
Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our
Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
He’s absolutely not alone in his idiocy. The words below are the actual words of an actual human being who graduated from Harvard and is now a multi-term U.S. Senator.
“Joe Biden wants to ban menthol cigarettes,
which are favored by black smokers.
Meanwhile, he wants to legalize weed for white
college kids and mail out free crack pipes.”
“The administration’s ban is paternalistic, it’s
hypocritical, and it creates a huge black
market for Mexican cartels and Hezbollah.“And all because Mike Bloomberg told him to.”
That’s just mental illness, is what that is. That man needs help.
I’m sure I could find a statement that Cotton made with which I could agree, though. I bet I can find things that RFK, or Marianne Williamson, or Nikki Haley, or Tulsi Gabbard said that I can agree with wholeheartedly. It’s just that, if the conversation goes on just a little bit longer, I’m backing away into a hedge pretty quickly.
It’s the same with the bin Laden letter. He spends an inordinate amount of text explaining how, when attacking a democracy, it’s perfectly legitimate to use collective punishment because there are no innocents in a democracy. Each individual is equally responsible for the actions of their democratically elected government. This is patently ludicrous because it presupposes a power that no democracy or republic has ever granted to its populace.
Which citizens would bin Laden consider OK to eliminate? In a democracy, you can be a voting citizen and still not get anything you want. If a majority decide to oppress the Palestinians, but you’re wholeheartedly against it—too bad. You don’t get your way in a democracy. Does bin Laden claim that his great and good Allah approves of slaughtering those civilians who are already trying to get the right thing done? To what end? Not only is this evil, but it’s counterproductive. All you’d be doing is increasing the majority that’s already enacting policy against you. This is just stupid.
Bin Laden also makes the same logical mistake that so many others have made before him, and continue to make. In trying to argue for the righteousness of his cause, he compares himself to other war criminals like George Bush and Ariel Sharon—and then justifies his own war crimes as valid and legal because they got away with it, too. He essentially argues that anyone who refuses to condemn Bush and Sharon must also then approve of Bin Laden’s actions. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that Bin Laden is right, but that he’s just as wrong as those other idiots.
After all of these dialectic histrionics, he slowly starts to wrap things up with a bit of missionary work,
“It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honor, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their color, sex, or language.”
I wish this were practically true, but the Wahhabism that Bin Laden practiced was absolutely not blind to gender/sex. This is just bullshit. Perhaps Bin Laden is arguing from the purity of the message in the Quran that has been warped in its application to actually-existing Islam as it is practiced, but I’d be surprised. I just think he’s lying here because he really got going and people just can’t help themselves: he can’t just say everything else is bad and worthy of destruction; he can’t just quit while he’s ahead; he has to double-down and claim things about his religion that it doesn’t even espouse.
His next plea is to “[…] reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.” Ok, so usury is pretty bad, agreed. And gambling is generally pretty socially harmful, sure. But intoxicants? And … homosexuality? Dude, c’mon. How do you reconcile the statement above, where you wrote that “without regarding their color, sex, or language”, but then you write NO QUEERS. Seriously—that’s just stupid.
So much of this is just like that. He writes,
“It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind […]”
Hey, OK. There’s an argument to be made there. There are a lot of contenders, but the U.S. Empire has certainly done its damnedest to climb to the top of the heap. The only reason people might think that this is a facially ridiculous claim is because they have literally no idea what their country is up to.
But then, just as you’re trying to come up with reasons to disagree or to cautiously agree, he follows it up immediately with this,
“(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the lord and your Creator.”
That’s just ridiculous. Stop thinking for yourselves and let a thousand-year–old book make all of your decisions for you. Maybe you should shut up and sit down while the adults are talking, ok?
He brings a few examples of Western/U.S. depravity, but spends an inordinate amount of time on Bill Clinton’s oval-office blowjob.
Then, in the middle of a long list of highly debatable social detriments, he whips out this paean to climate change:
“(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.”
Yes! Correct!
“(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.”
Yes! … no, wait!?! What is with you and the Jews, man? Back. Away. Slowly.
I’m going to continue, but this thing is just way too long for a blog post. It really could have used some serious editing down, to punch it up and make sure it’s focused on its main points. I fear, though, that then it would have just been a three-paragraph tirade against the perennially beleaguered Jews, most of whom are just like the rest of us, just trying to go along to get along. Sure, they’ve got some raging assholes, but those are everywhere. Hell, I’m reading a long letter by a raging Muslim asshole right now, but I don’t think that means that all Muslims are raging assholes. I’m not an idiot.
“What happens in Guantanamo is a historical embarrassment to America and its values, and it screams into your faces − you hypocrites, “What is the value of your signature on any agreement or treaty?””
As with any essay by most people writing in a language that is not their native one, the prose falls apart more and more as the long essay goes on. By the last 20%, it’s only barely comprehensible. You can almost see the spittle dotting his lips as his fingers fly over the keyboard.
“[…] discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that the values and principles to you are something which you merely demand from others, not that which yourself must adhere to.”
I mean, I get what he means, but it’s barely legible.
The coda is long and filled with more citations from the Quran.
The US Has A Standing Policy Of Ignoring The Human Rights Violations Of Its Allies by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“You see this glaring inconsistency over and over again in US foreign policy, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or which party is in control. The criminality of US allies gets ignored, downplayed and frantically obfuscated, while the criminality of US enemies gets spotlighted, exaggerated, and pushed to the forefront of international attention.
“We’re seeing this inconsistency illustrated today by Hillary Clinton, who just published a think piece with The Atlantic war propaganda outlet forcefully defending Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza, after spending the last two years tweeting things like “If Russian leadership would rather not be accused of committing war crimes, they should stop bombing hospitals.””
“[…] for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. In a remarkable insight into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.”
It’s good to hear them admit it, but it’s utterly unsurprising. Their hypocrisy has been glaringly obvious for as long as I’ve been alive and for at least several decades before that.
She links to the following Tweet from October 27th, 2023 by Branko Marcetic (Twitter)
“A lot from this war will stick with me for a long time, but few moments encapsulate so much as Kirby’s fake-crying performance over Ukrainians vs. his shrug that, sorry, but innocent people are gonna die in Gaza, get over it.”
“The US empire stands for nothing, believes in nothing, and values nothing apart from its own power. Those who understand and align with this reality find themselves elevated to the highest echelons of power within the US empire, while those with normal human empathy centers in their brains find nothing but locked doors past a certain point in government.
“The US empire is a psychopathic killer wearing a plastic smiling mask of compassion and humanitarianism. But if you look closely it’s not hard to catch a glimpse of the snarling, blood-spattered face underneath.”
China and Coal: If It Keeps Adding Wind and Solar, Who Will Use Coal? by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)
“[…] continuing to add wind and solar generation capacity at an incredibly fast pace. It is adding almost as much as the rest of the world combined, as this article notes. The pace at which it adds capacity shows no evidence of slowing and may in fact accelerate if Xi decides to incorporate clean energy in a stimulus package. As a result of its rapid adoption of clean energy, its greenhouse gas emissions may peak next year , well ahead of its 2030 target.”
“If the push for solar and wind energy is successful, there will be little demand for oil and gas from the land now being put up for lease. In that context, the leasing of land is an empty gesture to the oil and gas industry that will have little impact on future greenhouse gas emissions. (If it seems hard to imagine that major companies would put up tens of millions of dollars for leases that may never be used, consider that venture capitalists put up billions of dollars to finance We Work, a company whose great innovation was renting office space.)”
Wow. Congratulations on your fairy tale. I wish I could believe in it.
“This raises the question of why it continues to build coal-powered plants. If China’s wind and solar capacity is growing more than its demand for electricity, this would imply less need for energy from coal-power plants, not more. And, once you have wind and solar capacity in place, it is far cheaper to get energy from these sources than from a coal-powered plant.”
Coal is on-demand, wind and solar are not. Storage capacity lags tremendously. On-demand sources smooth the grid.
“Remote contingencies, if they’re serious enough, have to be prepared for. It’s classic military thinking. You prepare for the worst case. And so now I ask […] why doesn’t that same argument apply to global warming? You don’t think it’s 100% likely. Fine. You’re entitled to think that. If it’s only a small probability of it happening, since the consequences are so serious, don’t you have to make some serious investment to prevent it, or mitigate it. I think there’s a double-standard of argument working that I don’t think we should permit.”
The oligarchs aren’t sufficiently confident that they will be able to continue to pump money upwards toward themselves in the same manner that they have with military spending. There’s nothing in it for those who control the pursestrings, so it won’t get done.
Obesity drug Wegovy reduces cardiovascular risks for those at high risk by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)
“The results have bolstered excitement over semaglutide, with many saying it advances the drug as a new pharmaceutical weapon in the fight against cardiovascular diseases, in addition to diabetes, obesity, and overweight—shedding any lingering notions of it being merely a lifestyle drug. The trial may sway more insurance providers to cover the drug, which is pricey. Wegovy—sematglutide used for weight loss—has a list price in the US of $1,349 per month. People in the trial were on the drug for an average of around three years, which would carry a price tag of $48,564.”
“[B]olstered excitement”. Yeah, I get that the $50k-over-three-years price tag gave a lot of people in pharmaceuticals an absolute priapism.
Alexander Bogdanov Was One of Russia’s Great Revolutionary Thinkers and a Sci-Fi Pioneer by James D. White (Jacobin)
“An important example of this was the conception that as society progressed, it ceased to be undifferentiated, but divided into two basic groups: those who gave orders and those who carried them out.”
“Bogdanov envisaged that with the increased mechanization of industry, machines would carry out routine operations, leaving the workers to perform mainly supervisory functions. In this way, the worker would acquire the characteristics of an organizer as well as of a person who carried out orders. Consequently, the age-old division of functions would be overcome.”
“Red Star, which was published in 1908, depicted a high-tech socialist civilization on Mars through the eyes of its narrator, a Russian scientist and revolutionary who is brought to the planet by a Martian emissary. It inspired later writers of science fiction, both in the Soviet Union and in the West.”
“When the tsarist regime collapsed in February 1917, he hoped that this would usher in a new democratic order in Russia. In the Bolsheviks, however, he saw the same authoritarian features that had characterized tsarism. The remedy, in Bogdanov’s view, was a “cultural revolution,” a movement that would at least school Russian society in democracy. In 1918, Bogdanov refused an invitation to join the new Soviet government, deeming it too authoritarian and lacking in “comradely cooperation.” Nevertheless, he made an important contribution to the Soviet system in 1921 by formulating the principles of Soviet economic planning.”
“Bogdanov is an outstanding figure in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and the early years of the Soviet state. As a socialist thinker his works are of abiding interest. Because he fell [a]foul of Lenin and became a nonperson from 1920 onward, his existence has been barely noticed by historians.”
Four Men by William T. Vollmann (Harper's Magazine)
“I lay in bed, wondering a rather tiresome wonder that I have never been able to get rid of: Why is it that in clean warm privacy I can watch snow clouds creep in over sunny brick buildings for as long as my money holds out, while other people sleep outside?”
“Am I my brother’s keeper? I preferred to say that I wasn’t; it kept my expenses down. But I could be pleasant enough without committing myself to rescuing anyone.”
“Of course, if someone (especially some stranger about whom I need not care) is homeless by choice, then I vote to respect his life unless he makes harmfully odious use of it, for instance by spreading feces and rats. Why not accept, or at least suspend disapproval of, Roland’s life (assuming that you define his impulsion as conscious choice instead of, say, mental illness), so long as he mitigates and conceals his social parasitism as well as any inside citizen? That way I can hand him twenty dollars and leave him to sleep outside. This is, I insist, not only convenient for me; it gives him what he claims to want.”
“I acted less than sane in my business negotiations, for grief is a witch-hag who rides in on bad winds.”
This reminds me of Wesley Willis’s Demons quote: “My demon is on my butt. My demon talks to me in profanity like a seller, and my demon tries to knock me down, and my demon tries to put me on a hell ride.”
Abortion Rights Are a Revealed Preference by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“I suspect that for a lot of voters, particularly Republican women, abortion rights are a revealed preference in the exact same sense; they may be very passionate about the right to life, but when push comes to shove and they say they “just can’t be pregnant right now” − a term I was told by the former abortion clinic employee that they would often use − they vote with their feet. It’s important to say that there doesn’t have to be any conscious deception in either case, groceries or abortion. I’m sure pro-life women who get abortions are very sincere in their theoretical attachment to that moral position. But an actual pregnancy is about as far from theoretical as it gets.”
“[…] identity politics is about specific demographic slices of people, and as we can see from the prevalence of women who get abortions who are conflicted about abortion or even actively pro-life (which must be in the thousands, given the sheer volume of abortions that are performed in this country) all kinds of women can find themselves in the position of needing an abortion. Women of any economic class, any race, any religion, and yes, any political party. Meanwhile, I think a lot of men have an “in case of emergency, break glass” approach to reproductive rights; whether they’re philosophically friendly to a woman’s right to choose or not, if they get a woman pregnant and find that the pregnancy is very contrary to their self-interest, they’ll want abortion to be an option, and again this pragmatic need will often trump even explicit pro-life politics.”
Silicon Valley Fairy Dust by Sherry Turkle (Crooked Timber)
“The lack of commitment to truth in Silicon Valley companies is politically crucial because they are in a unique position to routinely dispense disinformation as information.”
“The idea of living in a state of continual surveillance became normalized. As Foucault taught us, with this kind of change, the idea of personhood changed as well: intimacy, privacy, and democracy are woven together in an intricate connection.”
“Online conversations make people feel less vulnerable than the face-to-face kind. As engagement at a remove has become a social norm, it has become more acceptable to stop taking the time to meet in person, even in professions where conversations was highly valued, such as teaching, consulting, and psychotherapy. In remote classrooms and meetings, in conversations-by-text, it’s easy to lose skills of listening, especially listening to people who don’t share your opinions. Democracy works best if you can talk across differences. It works best if you slow down to hear someone else’s point of view. We need these skills to reclaim our communities, our democracy, and our shared common purpose.”
“In real life, things go awry. We need to tolerate each other’s differences. Virtual reality is friction-free. The dissidents are removed from the system. People get used to that, and real life seems intimidating. Maybe that’s why so many internet pioneers are tempted by going to space or the metaverse. That sense of a clean slate. In real life, there is history.”
“Now, in fact, Lana had no lack of controversial opinions. But we can hear her convincing herself that they are not worth expressing because her medium would be online, and there is no way to talk “safely” there. This is Foucault brought down to earth. The politics of Facebook is a politics of tutelage in forgetting. Lana is learning to be a citizen in an authoritarian regime. Lana says she’ll worry about online privacy “if something bad happens.” But something bad has already happened. She has learned to self-censor. She does not see herself as someone with a voice. In this small example, we see how our narrowed sense of privacy undermines the habits of thought that nurture democracy.”
The Living Dead by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“It was only when my father died in 2016 that this deep truth of human existence hit me: there are two basic categories of people, the living and the dead, and the members of both categories are equally people. Some people are dead people, in other words.”
“Like a sensitive Austro-Hungarian clerk in some newly annexed village in the Balkans, where the inhabitants can’t stop fussing about dead husbands who keep coming back to give their widows trouble, and about the best methods for putting them down once and for all, I can’t help but be struck by the astounding wisdom of folk-superstitions. The folk are busy chattering about garlic and holy water, but what they’re really expressing is the great difficulty human society necessarily faces in finding a way to live in peace alongside the living dead.”
“It is significant, here, that the closest ancestor historians in the archives have to the “DOB” in vital-statistics documents, reliably recorded only since the nineteenth century, is, precisely, the church baptismal record. And this record is a transcription or a textual trace of a ritual that traditionally marked the true social birth of a person, some time after their biological birth.”
“Names were not given in order to mark out the irreducible individuality of the newborn, but rather to absorb the newborn into a preexisting community by designating him or her with the name of one of the saints. In this respect, as I’ve often noted, traditional Christian onomastics amounts, though no one wants to put it in these terms, to a sort of “soft reincarnation”. It is not that the same individual soul reappears after having gone through a previous biological death, but rather that every time a newborn George comes into the world, for example, he is so to speak a token of the type established by St. George.”
“[…] modernity is as weird as anything else, when you stop to think about it. It’s weird to celebrate the day of your biological birth, rather than the day of the quasi-divine being your forebears chose to slot you under. When you celebrate your birthday, what you’re really celebrating is the total victory of the administrative state over all other possible sources of order and meaning.”
“I strongly suspect such a scenario of uploaded individual consciousness is a straightforward theoretical impossibility, as I am not at all convinced by arguments for the substrate-neutrality of human consciousness. One reason I don’t think my consciousness, or Dave Chalmers’s, or anyone else’s, can ever be successfully uploaded is that I don’t have any idea what would be left of my conscious self under circumstances where it’s either disembodied, or it’s embodied in a physical substrate as different from the one I’m used to as, say, an assemblage of wires and silicon.”
“Personhood, in other words, pace Locke, pace Chalmers, pace Woody Allen, seems to have a lot more to do with our social roles than with what is going on in our heads. And our social roles turn out, upon reflection, to be significantly shaped by the technologies available for their fulfillment.”
“To have such “simulacra” available to us might well be nothing more than a cruel trick played on the bereaved. But whether this is what it is or not has much to do with the cultural context in which the bereaved live, in particular the cultural mechanisms for processing interaction with the living dead, and the cultural values that shape the representations we have of the living dead.”
“Why should a terminally ill 95-year-old biologically living person have the right to vote? We suppose this is because he has an interest, and a sort of stake, in the future well-being of society, whether he is around to appreciate this or not. But why then does that stake cease to exist in the period between biological death and the next round of elections? This is an arbitrary limit, and if technology can facilitate it, perhaps the next great horizon of politics will be the fight for universal suffrage for the deceased.”
I think your ability to shape the world should be related to the degree to which you understand what the likely effects of your voting decisions will be, and the degree to which those decisions affect you personally. So the dead are out because nothing affects them, by definition. Most living people are out because they literally have no idea what is going on around them, and they’re just voting the way the scream-y person on TV told them to.
“Because it is our actual world in which these new technologies are emerging, and our actual world is fundamentally an unjust and unequal one, the most likely scenario is that these transformations will turn out to be most beneficial for those who can pay for them.”
Obviously.
“Far from making our society more just and equal, the technological possibilities opening up towards new forms of postmortem personhood are more likely to become new vectors of inequality.”
This is just another way of saying that people aren’t afraid of technology, they’re afraid of how it will be used against them in the hands of capitalism.
“[…] in any case enduring agency beyond the DOD bookend is a fairly common thing in human society, and it only made sense to suppress it, or to refuse to acknowledge it, within the context of a particular technological regime of modern state administration. This regime left many people unsatisfied, and they kept fulfilling their obligations to the living dead anyway, and kept right on receiving visits from them.”
“[…] long kept members of traditional cultures in conflict with the modern state, as the latter insisted that the lives of the deceased had been fully “tied off” from an administrative point of view, while the former kept insisting on sneaking back into the graveyards and digging up the bones of their loved ones for another round of exchange across the permeable boundary death throws up between us.”
Ah, Freedom by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“You either think everyone who lives under the power of a government should have democratic representation in that government, or you don’t. A principle is a thing you believe all the time. For fifteen years I’ve defended the free speech rights of people I deplore. Some supposed defenders of free expression cracked in a day. You believe in it all the time, or you don’t believe in it at all. It’s up to you.”
Decoupling for Security by Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)
“The first is organizational decoupling: dividing private information among organizations such that none knows the totality of what is going on. The second is functional decoupling: splitting information among layers of software. Identifiers used to authenticate users, for example, should be kept separate from identifiers used to connect their devices to the network.”
- Barath orders Bruce’s audiobook from Audible.
- His bank does not know what he is buying, but it guarantees the payment.
- A third party decrypts the order details but does not know who placed the order.
- Audible delivers the audiobook and receives the payment.
- Bruce’s browser sends a doubly encrypted request for the IP address of sigcomm.org.
- A third-party proxy server decrypts one layer and passes on the request, replacing Bruce’s identity with an anonymous ID.
- An Oblivious DNS server decrypts the request, looks up the IP address, and sends it back in an encrypted reply.
- The proxy server forwards the encrypted reply to Bruce’s browser.
- Bruce’s browser decrypts the response to obtain the IP address of sigcomm.org.
“Meetings that were once held in a private conference room are now happening in the cloud, and third parties like Zoom see it all: who, what, when, where. There’s no reason a videoconferencing company has to learn such sensitive information about every organization it provides services to. But that’s the way it works today, and we’ve all become used to it.”
In fairness, it was hard enough to get it running in the first place, but now that it’s robust, we can improve it. I suppose we could have always made privacy a requirement.
“To protect the “who,” functional decoupling within the service could authenticate users using cryptographic schemes that mask their identity, such as blind signatures, which Chaum invented decades ago for anonymizing purchases.”
“Cloud-storage companies have at various times harvested user data for AI training or to sell targeted ads. Some hoard it and offer paid access back to us or just sell it wholesale to data brokers. Even the best corporate stewards of our data are getting into the advertising game, and the decade-old feudal model of security —where a single company provides users with hardware, software, and a variety of local and cloud services—is breaking down.”
“Here we need to decouple data control from data hosting. The storage provider’s job is to host the data: to make it available from anywhere, instantly. The hosting company doesn’t need to control access to the data or even the software stack that runs on its machines. The cloud software that grants access should put control entirely in the end user’s hands.”
“Modern protocols for decoupled data storage, like Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid , provide this sort of security. Solid is a protocol for distributed personal data stores, called pods. By giving users control over both where their pod is located and who has access to the data within it—at a fine-grained level—Solid ensures that data is under user control even if the hosting provider or app developer goes rogue or has a breach.”
“By using multiparty relays, end-to-end encryption, and oblivious authentication, a decoupled meeting service such as Booth prevents tech giants and hackers from snooping on private discussions.”
“TEEs decouple who runs the chip (a cloud provider, such as Microsoft Azure) from who secures the chip (a processor vendor, such as Intel ) and from who controls the data being used in the computation (the customer or user). A TEE can keep the cloud provider from seeing what is being computed. The results of a computation are sent via a secure tunnel out of the enclave or encrypted and stored. A TEE can also generate a signed attestation that it actually ran the code that the customer wanted to run.”
“CPU-based TEEs are now widely available among cloud providers, and soon GPU-based TEEs—useful for AI applications—will be common as well.”
“Suppose Microsoft Azure is used to host a Solid pod, but it’s encrypted at rest and only decrypted within one of Azure’s secure enclaves. What can Microsoft or a hacker learn? The fact that Azure hosts both services does not give it much additional information, especially if data in motion is also encrypted to ensure that Microsoft doesn’t even know who is accessing that data. With all three modes decoupled, Azure sees an unknown user accessing an unknown blob of encrypted data to run unknown code within a secure enclave on Intel processors.”
“Decoupling isn’t a panacea. There will always be new, clever side-channel attacks. And most decoupling solutions assume a degree of noncollusion between independent companies or organizations. But that noncollusion is already an implicit assumption today: we trust that Google and Advanced Micro Devices will not conspire to break the security of the TEEs they deploy, for example, because the reputational harm from being found out would hurt their businesses.”
“The primary risk, real but also often overstated, is if a government secretly compels companies to introduce backdoors into their systems.”
Governments inserting backdoors is a thing that has provably happened, but Schneier has to write “overstated” because it was the U.S. that did it.
“Communications to and from the reporting agency’s servers should be decoupled by multiparty-relay protocols that build in blinding and encryption to conceal who is doing the communicating as well as the identity of the individual whose data is being analyzed.”
“Building this is easier said than done, of course. But it’s practical today, using widely available technologies. The barriers are more economic than technical.”
And systemic. Legislative capture and technological ignorance combined mean legislators don’t understand that this important, and won’t want to do anything about it, even if they did. And someone would just scream ‘yeah but kiddie porn!’ and it would die in committee.
“As more organizations apply AI, decoupling becomes ever more important. Most cloud AI offerings—whether large language models like ChatGPT , automated transcription services from video and voice companies, or big-data analytics—require the revelation of troves of private data to the cloud provider. Sometimes organizations seek to build a custom AI model, trained on their private data, that they will then use internally. Sometimes organizations use pretrained AI models on their private data. Either way, when an AI model is used, the cloud service learns all sorts of things: the content of the prompts or data input, access patterns of the organization’s users, and sometimes even business use cases and contexts. AI models typically require substantial data, and that means substantial risk.”
“Why hasn’t this design philosophy been adopted widely? It’s hard to say for sure, but we think it’s because the enabling technologies— multiparty relay protocols , secure fine-grained data stores and hardware-based TEEs —have matured only in the last few years. Also, security rarely drives business decisions, so even after the tech is available, adoption can lag.”
Hahahaha. How fucking naive, as usual. The system has all the data now, and benefits tremendously from it. Why should they lift a finger to change that? The control they have over insufficiently encrypted data is very nice. Far easier to use the media to hammer home the message that privacy isn’t important and keep access to that sweet, sweet data.
“We need a belt-and-suspenders strategy, with government policy that mandates decoupling-based best practices, a tech sector that implements this architecture, and public awareness of both the need for and the benefits of this better way forward.”
I’m not hopeful that any of this will happen. None of the people who’ve consolidated all of the power have an interest in this happening. Their interests are diametrically opposed to no longer being able to see everyone’s data all the time. They are not going to voluntarily give up power or voluntarily change their source of income.
Bill Gates: AI Is About To Completely Change How You Use Computers by S. Abbas Raza (3 Quarks Daily)
“In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.”
STFU Bill Gates.
I’m over here looking at a Kindle that can’t even remember which page I was on when I last had this book open, and you’re over there babbling about autonomous agents doing stuff for you. That software is being written by the same people, so I have zero hope that it will work any better than the crap we’ve already spent decades failing to make work in any way approaching actual usefulness.
Automerge-Repo: A “batteries-included” toolkit for building local-first applications | Automerge CRDT (GitHub)
“You can get to building your app straight away by taking advantage of default implementations that solve common problems such as how to send binary data over a WebSocket, how often to send synchronization messages, what network format to use, or how to store data in places like the browser’s IndexedDB or on the filesystem.”
“[…] there are some performance problems we’re working on: Documents with large histories (e.g. a collaboratively edited document with >60,000 edits) can be slow to sync. The sync protocol currently requires that a document it is syncing be loaded into memory. This means that a sync server can struggle to handle a lot of traffic on large documents.”
“There are still plenty of other difficult problems in local first software where we don’t have turnkey solutions: authentication and authorization, end-to-end encryption, schema changes, version control workflows etc. automerge-repo makes many things much easier, but it’s a frontier out here.”
dotnet/orleans: Cloud Native application framework for .NET (GitHub)
“Instantiation of grains is automatically performed on demand by the Orleans runtime. Grains which are not used for a while are automatically removed from memory to free up resources. This is possible because of their stable identity, which allows invoking grains whether they are already loaded into memory or not. This also allows for transparent recovery from failure because the caller does not need to know on which server a grain is instantiated on at any point in time. Grains have a managed lifecycle, with the Orleans runtime responsible for activating/deactivating, and placing/locating grains as needed. This allows the developer to write code as if all grains were always in-memory.”
“The Orleans runtime is what implements the programming model for applications. The main component of the runtime is the silo , which is responsible for hosting grains. Typically, a group of silos run as a cluster for scalability and fault-tolerance. When run as a cluster, silos coordinate with each other to distribute work, detect and recover from failures. The runtime enables grains hosted in the cluster to communicate with each other as if they are within a single process.”
“Orleans provides a simple persistence model which ensures that state is available to a grain before requests are processed and that consistency is maintained. Grains can have multiple named persistent data objects, for example, one called “profile” for a user’s profile and one called “inventory” for their inventory. This state can be stored in any storage system. For example, profile data may be stored in one database and inventory in another. While a grain is running, this state is kept in memory so that read requests can be served without accessing storage. When the grain updates its state, astate.WriteStateAsync()
call ensures that the backing store is updated for durability and consistency.”
“Reminders are a durable scheduling mechanism for grains. They can be used to ensure that some action is completed at a future point even if the grain is not currently activated at that time. Timers are the non-durable counterpart to reminders and can be used for high-frequency events which do not require reliability.”
“The placement process in Orleans is fully configurable: developers can choose from a set of out-of-the-box placement policies such as random, prefer-local, and load-based, or custom logic can be configured. This allows for full flexibility in deciding where grains are created. For example, grains can be placed on a server close to resources which they need to operate on or other grains which they communicate with.”
“The cluster maintains a mapping of which grain implementations are available on which silos in the cluster and the versions of those implementations. This version information is used by the runtime in conjunction with placement strategies to make placement decisions when routing calls to grains.”
The
stale-while-revalidate
response directive indicates that the cache could reuse a stale response while it revalidates it to a cache.Cache-Control: max-age=604800, stale-while-revalidate=86400
In the example above, the response is fresh for 7 days (604800s). After 7 days it becomes stale, but the cache is allowed to reuse it for any requests that are made in the following day (86400s), provided that they revalidate the response in the background.
Revalidation will make the cache be fresh again, so it appears to clients that it was always fresh during that period — effectively hiding the latency penalty of revalidation from them.
If no request happened during that period, the cache became stale and the next request will revalidate normally.
Do You Say “Tennis Shoes”, “Gym Shoes”, or “Sneakers”? by Jason Kottke
TIL “sneakers” is an outlier.
“Rethink human’s dominion in The Invincible: a story-driven adventure set in a hard sci-fi world by Stanisław Lem. Discover planet Regis III as scientist Yasna, use atompunk tools looking for a missing crew and face unforeseen threats. Make choices in a philosophical story that’s driven by science.”
You can also watch the clutch 9 minutes here: TIL TikToks don’t even have titles by leebodog21 (TikTok).
Abby Martin Interviews people of various ages, at least half are English, but a... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 13. Nov 2023 22:08:53 (GMT-5)
This 20-minute video from 2017 features a series of person-in-the-street interviews with Jerusalem residents, expressing their opinion of the living situation in the West Bank, for themselves and the Palestinians.
Abby Martin Interviews people of various ages, at least half are English, but a few are in Hebrew or a mix of Hebrew and English. They express pretty strong opinions about the reality, advantages, and disadvantages of various racial characteristics and their relation to viability or qualification as human beings.
In particular, there are a few American transplants that positively do humanity and their origin country proud. It brought a tear of pride to my eye to see them having so successfully transplanted and adapted their native racism to a foreign environment.
It’s an interesting case study in listening to people who are comfortable in their own environment, unaware that the culture in which they’re steeped, the assumptions they have about how life has to be, their ideas about race and culture, are not shared elsewhere.
Abby Martin is like a stoic anthropologist here, simply holding a microphone and watching her subjects hang themselves with their own statements. She doesn’t even use leading questions; her interview subjects are eager to expound, eager to make sure she understands that Arabs are just … Untermenschen.
Ronnie Barkan (Wikipedia) swam against the current, describing the reality of Israeli life and culture, although a bit more pessimistically than I would—but what do I know? He says that there is no left to speak of in Israel, that there are just the right-wing Zionists without conscience who want to eradicate or remove the Palestinians—and those Zionists who are still interested in reconciling what they consider to be their own basic morality with their desire to live in a racially pure country.
For this, the second group is willing to give up land, whereas their counterparts are not. As Barkan puts it: they both want the same thing; they just differ on how big the country will be when they’re finished.
I think there is a peace and reconciliation movement. When he was still alive, I read everything that Uri Avnery (Wikipedia) [1] wrote for the last couple of decades of his life, and learned much about the peace organization he’d founded: Gush Shalom (Wikipedia). There are many more [2], I think, but the ones I know who express what seem like humanistic opinions are Gideon Levy and Amira Hass [3], both columnists at Ha’aretz, a highly respected, if oppositional newspaper in Israel.
“Barkan has described himself as “among the group of the over-privileged in this struggle for Palestinian rights, acting against a system that has at its very core the Zionist principle of differentiation.” He describes the Israeli treatment of Palestinians as apartheid, identifies himself as “anti-Zionist,” and refers to Israel as “the Jewish-supremacist entity…founded on the basis of ethnic cleansing and ethnic segregation.””
See, for example, some of the people featured in the following video:
If only people were capable... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 13. Nov 2023 14:15:43 (GMT-5)
I found the following talk is quite illuminating, especially the first 35 minutes or so, where Singal reads a prepared speech. He chooses his words very carefully, expressing what I think is an eminently rational and empathetic view. He’s not denying anyone’s existence.
If only people were capable of understanding words and sentences instead of imbuing and overlaying them with their own thoughts immediately. Instead of hearing what other people are saying, they end up hearing what they thought they were going to say before they even spoke—and lose opportunities for making alliances with like-minded people.
People are increasingly of the mind that anyone who doesn’t agree with every hair-brained idea they have is the enemy, instead of welcoming a debate that would prove beneficial to all. Everyone who’s not an asshole just wants safe, effective medicine for all—not half-assed studies that hide and manipulate data, but happen to agree with the foregone conclusion. That way lies not only madness, but danger. We can do better.
I’ve transcribed certain statements I liked below.
At 00:17:10, he says,
“I’ve been criticized quite harshly for writing and speaking about this the way I do, which is, from my point of view, somewhat biased. I feel like I treat it the way I treat any of the other scientific controversies I’ve written about, including in my book. But in some liberal circles, it’s very difficult to talk about this and to treat it as a scientific controversy.”
At 00:17:40, he says,
“I do want to make one point about empathy and compassion and other touchy-feely stuff. I really vehemently reject the idea that you need to be trans or gender non-conforming to participate in this conversation for all the same reasons I don’t think you need to be black to write about or study racial inequality.
“I don’t think you need to be Israeli or Palestinian or Jewish or Muslim to write about or study that conflict. There’s unfortunately been a lurch toward a very crude form of identitarianism in some liberal intellectual circles and I just don’t think this viewpoint deserves much respect. I think it’s profoundly anti-intellectual.
“We need to judge people on the basis of their ideas, not their identity, partly because […] no one who says listen to people black people or listen to trans people—they don’t mean that. [Instead,] they mean listen to the subset of that group who believes what I believe.”
At 00:20:44, he says,
“This is another argument I just don’t really respect, the argument that we can’t discuss X because people we don’t like might use X to make arguments we disagree with just doesn’t really work if you play it out.
“There are so many examples of why it doesn’t work that I I feel like I shouldn’t need to run through them, but if I criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, do you know who also criticizes Israel? Nazis. Does that mean we can’t? No one here thinks you can’t criticize Israel because Nazis also criticize Israel. Or if I criticize the federal government, you know who else criticizes the federal government? Far-right militias. It just—this doesn’t work—you’re not giving aid and comfort to a group just because you make an argument that happens to align with what some of them say in some circumstances.”
At 00:23:00, he says,
“It’s like, there was a group of folks who lost gay marriage very badly—and this is another issue that sort of brings back that strand of social conservatism, frankly—these are figures who are not in this to get to the bottom of the scientific controversy or to figure out how to best help trans and gender non-conforming kids.
“They’re in this controversy because they despise liberals or they’re genuinely uncomfortable with certain forms of what I think we would view as societal progress, or because they simply sense political opportunity.
“So, if you’re going to write about and discuss this issue, I just think you need to acknowledge the presence of some folks who have different agendas and who are exacerbating the tension and the toxicity with those agendas.”
At 00:33:20, he says,
“In fact, there has been a recent surge of coverage casting totally appropriate, well-founded doubt on a supposed breakthrough treatment for Alzheimer’s. If someone responded to that coverage by saying, well, surely you don’t care about Alzheimer’s sufferers or their families. That, if you did, you wouldn’t have critiqued this new medication, that person would be laughed out of the room because that’s a ridiculous argument.
“Yet, somehow this ridiculous argument is accepted here. If you criticize youth-gender medicine, you must not care about trans kids or you must must want them to die or suffer other horrible outcomes.
“I think the sheer moral force of this argument, and the personal and professional consequences of being labeled a transphobe in the liberal settings that produce most journalism and academic research, has led to a stalling out of a critical conversation in the United States that should be occurring in journalism and academia”
The presenter’s... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 12. Nov 2023 21:00:33 (GMT-5)
A friend with whom I’ve discussed AI several times—among other topics—recommended the podcast So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers… (The AI Episode) by Joshua Michael Schrei (The Emerald). I liked it very much. The entire episode is good; my notes and transcript start at just over an hour in.
The presenter’s voice is soothing, even if his cadence seems, at times, a bit forced. Overall, the effect is good. It was kind of ironic when he said that perhaps, in the future, people wouldn’t be able to tell whether a podcast was being read by an AI. He didn’t notice the irony, but I did.
At about 1:05:00, he sums up a longer section on the damages caused by modern humanity, failed experiments in social engineering that always seem to miss their espoused goals, while enriching an elite,
“Modernity is humanity seeing what it can get away with.”
Humanity is capable of much but, of late, it seems mostly interested in get-rich-quick, effortless scams.
At about 1:10:00, he expands on the topic of patience, on how it’s not a coincidence that the most revered figures in our most enduring stories and myths exhibit patience, are made to exhibit patience as part of their initiation to wisdom.
“In the stories, the young initiate who wants to access formidable powers, has to do what?
“Wait.
“You’ve seen the movies, you heard the stories, right? Of the master making the potential disciple wait outside the temple gate?
“You want access to the great powers? You’ve got to earn it.
“And the first way to earn it, before any physical trials, before any tests that take the would-be apprentice to the brink, the first way to earn it is—to wait.
“You’ve got to know how to wait.
“You know what the very first step of mystery-school initiation often is?
“Silence.
“The ability to sit with what is, without altering it, for a long period of time.”
This concept of patience—of earning—is, of course, wholly incompatible with our society, especially with the self-proclaimed elites who want to lead us off the precipice in their fervent hope that they will benefit in some short-term and frivolous way that is considered valuable by the short-term and frivolous society that somehow manages to buoy these selfsame elites on the backs of people so much more useful than they.
Patience is a virtue.
There’s a whole, incredibly soothing section where he convinces me that I’m a duck. Immagonna just leave it at that. I didn’t hate it.
At 01:32:00, he talks about the scene in the Matrix where Neo “learns” Kung Fu.
“It’s an awesome scene, right? And, of course, anyone who’s studied Kung-Fu—or any other somatic art—also knows that it’s a laughable scene because, simply, that’s not how bodies learn. Bodies learn through the time it takes to weave things into tissues. Bodies learn as patterns seep into the seven datus, the seven layers. Learning, knowledge, is an endeavor of bone marrow, and blood, and sweat, and breath, and proprioceptive weaving, over time.”
After doing some “like causes like” examples (e.g., if you want it to rain, than you ritually pour water, … um, … OK), at 01:39:00, he says,
“This daemonic power is not neutral. It is not a neutral intelligence that is being called up.
“By choosing which aspects of the living web of intelligence are the valuable intelligences and which are not, it is already value-laden.
“By centering rational empiricism, it is already value-laden.
“By removing intelligence from a body, it is already deeply value-laden.
“That is a value statement.
“By making it irreligious, aspiritual, it is already value-laden.
“AI is a biased God.
“Talking to ChatGPT, for example, is nothing like talking to an Aboriginal elder.
“It’s more like talking to a Stanford computer-science grad with an incredible analytic capability and very few real-life social skills. We are taking the narrow, world-naive, uninitiated, unembodied intelligence of the eager, neoliberal, Stanford grad and magnifying it on a global scale.
“Just what the world needs, right? All the biases inherent in the Western, scientific, analytic view of creation that has already taken us to the brink of eco-collapse—magnified 10,000 times.”
Goddamn, we need more philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and linguists helping us run the world.
At 1:43:00, he wraps up with,
“[…] morality can’t be programmed in.
“Ethics can’t be programmed in.
“It can’t be programmed into machines or into human beings. [1]
“For all the current necessity that there is for ethical regulations, moratoriums, waiting periods, before the rush to market—these are still surface measures.
“When will we realize that trying to add ethics, […] to a system that is by nature hubristic, that is by nature at odds with the Gods, isn’t a viable long-term solution.
“Within the soulless fragmentation of late-stage capitalism, in which all things are pillaged and sold, and it’s everyone for themselves, all of the time.”
Published by marco on 12. Nov 2023 15:04:47 (GMT-5)
In the following interview, Žižek seems to have recovered somewhat from the baleful hole wherein he found himself in 2022. I still think he’s incapable of reasoning clearly about Ukraine, but at least he seems to have realized that he needs to formulate his arguments better—because they’re not as obvious and logical as he seems to think they are. A year ago, he was just yelling incoherently.
At 00:02:35. he explains why he’s never gotten drunk,
“You know why? Because I’m really a Stalinist, not just superficial. You know what’s my idea? The world is a dangerous place. If you get drunk, you want to embrace people, you get kind, and then you don’t recognize the attack and cannot defend yourself. No, we must stay sober—paranoia—to see where the attack is coming from.”
The next hour of the interview is pretty good, with a lot of points I’ve heard him make in other recent interviews—like Slavoj Žižek on Israel Palestine (YouTube) or Slavoj Žižek on Israel and Palestine (17.10.2023, Frankfurter Buchmesse (YouTube))—I find him intelligent and entertaining and almost always worth listening to.
I wanted to focus, though, on the conversation at around 01:03:00, where he talks about Ukraine. Ever since he began writing on about Ukraine/Russia, I have been having a really hard time reconciling his opinion on that war with pretty much any other opinion he’s expressed since I started following him a couple of decades ago. I’ve written about this before—most recently and at length in Has Slavoj Žižek been taken hostage? (22.06.2022) and On Žižek and Russia (04.12.2022)—and have some more thoughts below.
He begins by pointing out that we wouldn’t be at the point of talking about a stalemate if NATO hadn’t provided Ukraine with weapons.
This is a point he’s made before, as noted above, but I feel he still doesn’t support it very well because he doesn’t explain why he’s ignoring a vast swath of history and background. [1] He can’t help but view the Russians as an evil with which one cannot negotiate. He’s damaged goods in that sense. He talks of Russia as the Israelis talk of Palestinians, as Americans talk of anyone non-American.
Anyway, after several repetitions on Žižek’s part and re-readings on mine, I’m starting to understand where he’s coming from—he sounded unhinged at first—but I still feel he’s deeply screwed up the analysis on this one, and is just doubling down, hoping he’ll be borne out somehow.
What I think he should be saying is that, given that we’ve already ignored Russia’s concerns over the decades, given that we drove NATO right up to its borders, given that we organized a coup in Ukraine, given that we propped up a corrupt president in Ukraine and supported the worst elements of their society, given that we lied to Russia about adhering in any way to the Minsk accords, given that we did everything we possibly could to provoke Russia into committing a war crime, then, yes, we should actually put our money where our mouth is and now help defend the country that we fucked up/helped fuck up so badly that it’s ended up where it is now.
It would be nice for him to at least once admit that none of this had to happen. I don’t think I’ve once heard him say that Ukraine would have been far better off if the U.S. had never approached it. I don’t think I’ve once heard him admit that Ukraine would have gotten a much better deal at the start of this war.
He still says things like,
“Are we aware that Ukraine at least didn’t lose only because of our help? To have this position now—kind of a WWI stalemate—it’s precisely because we were helping Ukraine. So, at least retroactively, all those who are pro-peace should acknowledge that we are in this position to say, at least Ukraine have a chance to survive only because we were helping Ukraine.”
Not once does he acknowledge how many people died for his being able to say something like that. And it’s not even true. Ukraine is in a much-worse bargaining position than it was two years ago. He’s ignoring so much history there. He just yells at pacifists, demanding that they admit that pacifism is a sham and that—perhaps only sometimes, but his argument isn’t clear here—war is the only way of dealing with some people.
So, yes, I think he still sounds like a raving lunatic on this topic. I can’t see any daylight between his position and that of any war-hawk American, other than an improved eloquence. He sounds like a neocon. Dick Cheney could have made the statement above, FFS. 🤦♂️
What he’s actually saying is, given how badly we’ve fucked up Ukraine using them as the tip of NATO’s spear, this is the best they can hope for. Not once does he consider that Ukraine might have been much better off had it never been used as NATO’s spear in the first place.
I’ve never heard him mention NATO’s role in this. I can’t imagine he’s ignorant of it. He just doesn’t seem to think it’s relevant. Or he doesn’t care because he’s so busy doubling down on his original bad take from a year-and-a-half ago that was based on his knee-jerk Russophobia. He’s never once talked about how bad it’s been for any country, especially Ukraine, to be friends with NATO, as a proxy of the United States.
Aaron continues the discussion later, at 01:11:00,
“Aaron: you mentioned Russia/Ukraine. What’s the correct position for a leftist on Russia/Ukraine? I read an amazing piece in Time Magazine, the average person on the front line for Ukraine now is 43 years old. There’s clearly a military stalemate.
Žižek: It’s extremely difficult, I think. […] I think that Ukraine needs our support at least to maintain this stalemate. I think it’s too risky to say okay it’s a stalemate, let’s stop supporting Ukraine.
Aaron: But that’s a permanent war. So it should be like Syria?
Žižek: Yeah, but what is the alternative? If you simply stopped supporting Ukraine…
Aaron: Oh, I’m not suggesting that. But you’re saying, rather than a negotiated settlement—which, I agree, wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on—fine. But what you’re proposing is a sort-of permanent, low-level war between Russia and Ukraine forever [sic]. Which is maybe the best you can hope for, I don’t know.
Žižek: That’s what I am tempted to suggest. It’s a very sad position.”
After this part, Žižek goes into how crazy it is that Ukraine is outlawing leftists because they suspect them of being pro-Russia, which he calls madness. It’s not, though, not really. Actions like that are just bog-standard consolidations of power: outlawing critical voices by accusing them of something the public will be happy to crucify them for.
It’s just stupid, power-mongering propaganda, no different than when the Nazis used it by calling people Jew-lovers, no different than when U.S. presidential candidates call each other “soft on China” or “soft on Russia”.
It’s an old story, and I’m surprised that Žižek doesn’t see it for what it is. I would expect that he, of all people, would have provided some historical examples from Bolshevik or Stalinist Russia.
It’s great to see that they agree that any accord between Ukraine and Russia wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on—but they think Russia is the one that wouldn’t hold to it, because they’re so steeped in propaganda about how duplicitous Russia is. But it’s actually the U.S. and its proxy NATO that can’t seem to honor signed agreements that they later find inconvenient.
The best Žižek can hope for, for Ukraine, is a forever war that keeps eating up its male citizens until there are none left. A lack of fantasy, on his part, I think. Also, a shocking lack of empathy.
Žižek simply can’t acknowledge the obvious: that’s it’s only a temporary stalemate. Ukraine is running out of people. What’s the next step? To continue to defend Ukraine long after there is no Ukraine? To replace soldiers with NATO soldiers from the U.S. and Europe in a sort of “Ship of Theseus” army?
He, of all people, should appreciate the irony that his position is currently, “we will have to destroy Ukraine in order to save it.” The country effectively doesn’t exist now, but might be able to get back to somewhere reasonable, after several decades. They were doing poorly before the war, relative to neighbors.
Now what? He says to just. Keep. Going. He sounds like a neocon. He’s formulating it as “continue increasing support Ukraine up until boots on the ground for NATO” vs. “dropping Ukraine like a hot rock”. What about “use our power for a negotiated settlement rather than supporting the pointless slaughter of the rest of the Ukrainian population?” People should really push back on him more—although Aaron did try, I’ll give him that.
Of course, Ukraine will lose land in this negotiated settlement. That’s reality. You can’t make it go away by pursuing a fantasy outcome in which Russia suddenly loses because of a deus ex machina, like in a fucking movie (or “fil-im”, as Žižek would say it).
What’s the end game? Nuke Russia to convince them to back off? What the fuck is the strategy here, Žižek? You’re being ludicrously obstinate on this point because you don’t want to accept what’s right before your eyes. Some of us saw it almost two years ago, when this whole shitshow started. We predicted exactly this situation, at best. At worst, Russia would have taken more of Ukraine. There is no good solution, and certainly not one where Zelensky is a hero, saving the day at the end of the movie.
The longer this goes on, the shittier Ukraine’s position. You’re just watching your guy get slaughtered in the ring. Throw in the towel. You can’t win in the way you think you can. Cut your losses. This attitude of his is madness—and maddening. He seems incapable of being realistic.
They end by talking about immigration and how we need to stop it, but from the viewpoint of: We should be helping create environments on the planet from which people don’t want to flee, rather than creating environments from the which they do.
Žižek cites a more right-wing colleague from Germany who told Žižek that he thinks we shouldn’t be spending money on ferries or accommodations in Germany, that we should spend that money in Tunisia, or wherever, to make their country worth living in.
Of course, that this comes from a right-wing person is probably wildly hypocritical, as they probably also support God knows how many policies that lead directly to the enshitification of exactly the countries from which these people are moving, but that doesn’t mean what he’s saying there isn’t correct.
In this case, they are correct. If we can’t stop ourselves from stealing the wealth of other countries, we should at least spend the money we do allocate on alleviating their suffering people by trying to fix some of the problems we causing by raping their countries.
The West profits immensely from most of the countries that produce the most immigrants, either through arms sales to the dictators that they prop up there, by pillaging their natural resources, or from agricultural catastrophes engendered by the rapacious marketing policies of supranational global conglomerates whose profits flow directly to the west and its elites. Or all three.
Aaron tells a story his father told him,
My father’s Iranian, […] I remember saying to him, ‘Oh, look at these Afghans, they’re going to Iceland.‘
And he said, ‘listen to me, son. No Afghan wants to go to Iceland. You’re born in this naturally fertile country, amazing history, beautiful weather—less so the last 40 or 50 years—but historically, it was a very fertile, peaceful place. And you end up in a place—not to besmirch Iceland—you go to a place where you don’t see the sun for three months.
No Afghan grows up as a child and says, you know what? I don’t wanna see the sun for three months and I wanna live in -10ºC for six months.‘
That’s a really powerful point and I think that a lot of European liberals, progressives, don’t understand that. There’s this kind of strange—it’s not racism—it’s a European superiority where they say ‘well of course they want to come here. We’re better!’
Many of them [immigrants] are coming because of war, sanctions, occupation, capitalist underdevelopment … but that seems completely absent from that conversation.
It’s like the people who talk about the “volunteer homeless”. Currently homeless people are choosing to be homeless only because being in a shelter is worse. They see being homeless as the best of the terribly shitty options that they have available right now. They don’t “choose homelessness” because they’re fulfilling some sort of childhood dream.
At 01:33:00, Žižek concurs, saying,
“I would totally agree with your father I. don’t know how, but the problem should be solved there in those lands—okay we shouldn’t now invade Iran. but we should at least reflect on how we also screwed it up with our politics.”
We screwed it up with our piracy. We continue to do so. Empire has no principle preventing its raping and pillaging. Pure and simple. Sauber und glatt.
Maybe he’s too close to it. I remember when Justin Smith-Ruiu was writing about Maidan after having visited Ukraine and seemed too close to that situation to be willing to examine NATO’s role as Empire in the unfolding of events. In Truthiness in Ukraine, I wrote that,
“[…] somehow the alternative, that a current imperial power increase its dominion, is assumed even by someone like Smith to be somehow preferable to anything that the Russians could offer. […] The underlying benevolence of Western hegemony infects even Justin’s work these days. […] I am almost astonished to note that Smith thinks he is describing only Putin’s regime […]”
If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s a faithful transcription of that train-wreck of human interaction and elocution.
]]>Ramaswamy: I wanna laugh at why Nikki... [More]
Published by marco on 12. Nov 2023 12:12:59 (GMT-5)
The following video makes the point of the title of this article quite concisely; I’ve included a transcript underneath the video.
If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s a faithful transcription of that train-wreck of human interaction and elocution.
Ramaswamy: I wanna laugh at why Nikki Haley didn’t answer your question, which is about looking families in the eye. [sic] In the last debate, she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok. Well, her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first. [shots fired!]
Haley: Leave my daughter out of your voice! [sic]
Ramaswamy: …before [grief-shaming?] your own daughter. The next generation of Americans are [sic] using it. And that’s actually the point.
Crowd: Booooooo…
Ramaswamy: You have her supporters propping her up. That’s fine. Here’s the truth.
Haley: [shaking head] You’re just scum.
Ramaswamy: The easy answer [wagging finger] is actually to say that we’re just gonna ban one app. We have to go further. We have to ban any U.S. company actually transferring U.S. data to the Chinese.
Haley: [continues to look sullen on second camera]
Tell me this isn’t perfect kayfabe (Wikipedia). It’s a bit hard for me to tell, but I think that Ramaswamy is playing the heel (Wikipedia) here. Listen to that crowd booing. You can almost see them standing and shaking their fists.
This is an actual debate, featuring real-life, adult human-beings who are running for the office of the president of the United States, the center of the current global empire.
This is a sad joke.
If you don’t agree, consider that your standards may have been steadily lowered by decades of awful, awful people in politics and media.
I understand that people have a different way of expressing themselves when speaking than when writing. I’m aware that grammar rules for speech are, shall we say, looser than for text. Still, there are limits. I’ve included several [sics] where the way they are speaking indicates for me not only that they’re not adhering to grammatical rules, but that they simply aren’t aware of them.
I accept this in most people around me—many of whom speak English as a foreign language—but I hold candidates for the office of the President of the United States to a higher standard. We used to have eloquent candidates. Now, we have candidates whose thoughts are not only muddled from the outset, but who cannot even express them in a manner that a third-grade teacher would consider to be correct. We’re heading toward Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Wikipedia) from the movie Idiocracy.
🤦♂️
In the other party, there’s this awesome statement of batshittery.
“RFK, Jr., founder of the Children’s Health Defense [sic] Network: “Israel is a bulwark for us… it’s almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. If Israel disappears, Russia, China, and BRICS+ countries will control 90% of the oil in the world and that would be cataclysmic for US national security.””
🤦♂️
So many excellent choices. The U.S. enjoys a bountiful harvest of candidates.
Published by marco on 12. Nov 2023 00:10:49 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 12. Nov 2023 00:21:31 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Gaza and the World by Victor Grossman (CounterPunch)
“The Black preacher Nat Turner’s brief rebellion against slavery in 1831 in Virginia began with the bloody killing of over 50 white men, women and children – slave owners and their families. Horrible! Did that justify tightening the chains of that “peculiar institution” in the South?”
Norman Finkelstein cites this too, just as a historical example of people doing terrible things to free themselves from a terrible situation. It’s illegal, but understandable. The Nat Turner Rebellion participants committed horrific acts against civilians, although they were technically their direct oppressors.
In the case of Hamas, the civilians they killed were not directly oppressing them. Instead they benefitted from living in an ostensible democracy that lived a life of luxury while imprisoning the people who killed them.
Was it therefore justified? Of course not. That way lies madness. We can’t hold an entire country responsible for the acts of a few. That’s collective punishment. It was wrong when Osama bin Laden claimed the argument; it’s wrong when Hamas claims it; it’s wrong when Israel does.
“Nor can I erase from memory that blood-chilling episode in Pontecorvo’s film “The Battle of Algiers” when a revolutionary, who helped place secreted bombs in public places, is asked by a Frenchman: “Isn’t it cowardly to use your women’s baskets to carry bombs, which have taken so many innocent lives?” And gets the deadly response: “Isn’t it even more cowardly to attack defenseless villages with napalm bombs that kill many thousands of times more? Obviously, planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets.””
“I think of my own Jewish roots. I learned of the Auschwitz horror when I was 17, and was moved to tears when I heard that the Red Army had finally freed the site. Like so many, I took two words to heart: “Never again!” And I meant them for people everywhere, of all nationalities, Jews, Poles and even, when I moved near them, the people of Dresden. I knew there were good people in every country – and a great need for solidarity among them all, and against those greedy ones, also in every country, who were indifferent to the number of corpses, now increasing fearfully in so many places.”
Israel Wants Either an Apartheid State or an Ethnic Cleansing Process, Both Crimes Under International Law by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)
“1.4 million Palestinians out of 2.3 million were internally displaced, with 671,000 taking shelter in 150 UNRWA facilities. Most of the dead by Israeli bombs and tank shells have been civilians. The ratio of dead between combatants (few) and civilians (many) is startling, far beyond what takes place in a war (in contrast, of the 1,400 Israelis killed on October 7 by Hamas and other factions, 48.4 percent were soldiers).”
“Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory are already “one state” and second, that it is an apartheid state with the Palestinians in a second-class category. Advocates of the “one-state solution” argue that the reality of a singular state now requires equal citizenship for all who live in Israel/Palestine. The current Israeli political class refuses to accept the idea of a democratic and secular one-state, because they are wedded to an ethno-nationalist project of a “Jewish State” that erases the possibility of full citizenship for Palestinian Christians and Muslims.”
“the fact of apartheid is already a crime under the 2002 Rome Statute that created the ICC. Both the “one-state reality akin to apartheid” and the “three-state solution” of ethnic cleansing are serious crimes that require investigation. Will Khan ask the judges of the ICC to frame arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his colleagues?”
Israeli Rabbi Describes Settler Rampages Across West Bank by Jeremy Appel (CounterPunch)
““Unfortunately, 99.9% of Israelis are currently incapable, in the midst of our immense pain and anger, of distinguishing between Palestinian terrorists and terrorized Palestinians,” he said.”
That’s up from 98% before October 7th, I guess? I’m just making a bad joke. I actually think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it probably does feel that way.
“A Palestinian from Ramallah was “beaten with an inch of his life [and] urinated on,” Ascherman said. “[Settlers] tried to force a stick up his anus. They jumped on him to break his spine,” he said.”
Something is deeply broken with some of these settlers. These are the actions of a psychopath. Talk about being no more than animals. I suppose there are a lot of people in the U.S. who wonder whether those settlers are former NYC cops (just thinking of Abner Louima here).
“After Cain murders his brother Abel out of jealousy, as was read on Oct. 14, Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Expanding on commentary of 19th century German rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Ascherman said that when we see our brothers “standing in our way, causing us trouble, as we see the Palestinians standing in our way, it becomes so easy to justify murder.””
Does it make it easy, though? I’ve never had any trouble not murdering. There seem to be so many people who have no trouble not murdering people with whom they disagree vehemently.
“On Oct. 21, Jewish congregants read about Noah’s ark. When Noah comes out his ark following the flood, he gets drunk and asks God how he could have caused such destruction to the world. God’s response: “Now you come to me?” At no point in the 60 years he took to build the ark did Noah express any reticence about the flood’s impact on everyone living outside the ark.”
You can drink the tap water in these 50 countries — maybe by Frank Jacobs (Big Think)
“[…] the complex and costly infrastructure that consistently delivers clean tap water is still well beyond the means of most societies.”
“[…] fewer than one billion people have a tap at home that issues potable water. If you’re one of them, count yourself lucky. Most people have to boil the water from their taps or depend on public wells and streams to get the water they need. Up to two billion people have no consistent access to safe drinking water.”
“Compare that to the volume of bottled water the average American drinks each year, which has shot up from 1.6 gallons (6 liters) in 1976 to 34 gallons (139 liters) in 2014. The reason? Partly marketing and snobbery, no doubt. In taste tests, people routinely rate tap water higher if it’s presented in a bottle.”
“the Safe Drinking Water Act might need updating. Until that happens, many Americans may be routinely exposed to substandard tap water and opt for bottled water instead — despite the fact that bottled water can be up to 3,750 times more expensive than tap water.”
Deeper Into Depravity by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
““Nothing human disgusts me” is a line I remember well from The Night of the Iguana, the 1961 play by the superbly human Tennessee Williams. I hold to this thought (even while reading the foreign pages of The New York Times). What has happened to the people in the videos must disgust us. But what they suffer as victims could happen to all but the strongest among us. They are appalling specimens of humanity, but they are human. As we find our way to some morally, intellectually defensible high ground during the atrocities we witness daily, we need to bear this in mind.”
“Those videos were not shot in isolation. They reflect a culture of racism, xenophobia, hatred, and—we see this now—sadism that has taken pride in itself for many years. These sentiments are instruments of the state, carefully cultivated. You may remember the videos shot at the time of the al–Aqsa crisis two years ago. Young Israelis in sparkling school uniforms or stylish clothes leapt up and down in a sort of frenzy in the streets of Jerusalem while shouting, “Death to all Arabs.” I read those images looking back and forward: They were the flowers of the Israeli state’s century of official indoctrination and a prelude to the videos coming out now.”
“For most Israelis, he observed, it is down to violence now. A headline in Monday’s editions of The Times, recording these changing desires and expectations: “I Don’t Have That Empathy. It’s Not Me Anymore.” This is the voice of a nation that has demolished itself in its attempts to destroy others.”
““We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness,” Netanyahu said in a much-remarked speech to the nation last Wednesday, “and light shall triumph over darkness.” This is the utterance of a destroyer—of people, of hope—a man who cannot find his way out of the Old Testament and nonsensically demands we live in it with him, a man who simply should not be leading anything in the 21 st century.”
“[…] we Americans, are urged daily to support the depravity into which this man leads Israel ever more deeply. Netanyahu’s depravity, Israel’s, must be ours, too. We are urged now to openly endorse war crimes and a genocide. And so we, too, are in consequence letting an apartheid state’s intentionally terrorizing campaign against Palestinians accelerate our none-too-sturdy nation into the kind of internal collapse Toynbee described as the dynamic of decline.”
Europeans leap into this abyss, as well.
“These implicit defenses of systematic savagery must be dressed up, of course. And so America plunges into the disgracefully cynical argument that to oppose the Israeli operation in Gaza is anti–Semitic. The Chinese put their hands up to contribute to a ceasefire and talks toward an enduring settlement of one or another kind, but China is anti–Semitic because it has not condemned the Hamas assault.”
“If you oppose the Israelis’ genocide operation and merely call for a ceasefire, some museum functionary is frightened that her life is under threat? I view this as more than a vulgar misuse of history and a contemptuous use of the victim card. This reflects a nation that no longer knows how to make sense of itself.”
“Nobody in power has the creativity, imagination, or confidence to confront the present as the consequence of this error and begin acting to correct it. And so Israel will continue to pull us in the wrong direction—or further in the wrong direction, I ought to say. I hope I am not around if ever Americans start in with the sadistic videos.”
Oh dear, Patrick, how can you not know? They already make them; all the time. Just consider the media in general and most talk shows, which exhibit more or less this level of cruelty. There are, of course, many other, cruder videos to find online, in the dozens of social-media networks where people proudly publish such things, all the time. The cruelty of some of the Israeli people is not especially horrific. U.S. president Biden and much of his administration have very clearly said that they couldn’t care less about Palestinian children dying. These are videos. These are horrific. That they think this way is much more consequential than if a bunch of middle-class Israelis do.
The World Does Not Need Illegal Sanctions. The World Needs Peace and Development. by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)
“That more Palestinian children have died in these three weeks due to the Israeli bombing than have died in total in conflict zones across the world since 2019 is shocking. No child should die so cruelly before they can flourish. Neither due to this incessant bombardment, nor by the hunger induced by unilateral sanctions.”
“That these countries use their veto power to exercise their own narrow political agenda rather than to defend the UN Charter further delegitimizes the UNSC. Pressure by powerful countries – particularly the United States – has limited the UNSC’s ability to appear as a neutral arbiter.”
To put it mildly.
“We have seen a retreat in terms of meeting the SDG goals: only one-third of countries in the world would have halved their national poverty rates between 2015 and 2030 and nearly one in three (2.3 billion people) will remain moderately or severely food insecure. These basic developments are squandered by $2.3 trillion expenditure on weapons, more than 75% of that spending done by the United States and its NATO allies.”
What to Know about Robert Roberson on Texas Death Row for a Crime that Never Occurred by Innocence Project Staff (The Innocence Project)
“At trial, one nurse claimed she saw signs of sexual abuse in Nikki’s case, though no doctors or other medical professionals involved in Nikki’s care observed any such signs and testing from a sexual assault kit produced no substantiating evidence. The nurse, who presented herself as a “Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner” (SANE), was, in fact, not SANE-certified and offered her personal views on pedophiles in her testimony, further stoking the unfounded claims of child abuse against Mr. Roberson.”
Jesus Christ. What an absolute shitshow. Some people are just stupid monsters, doing such an incredible amount of damage, without a care in the world.. They’re just riding their little hobby-horses, no matter the topic at hand. Indistinguishable from evil.
The Dehumanization of War by Kelly Denton-Borhaug (Scheer Post)
“Sakue struggled to survive in Hiroshima’s post-apocalyptic, postwar landscape, while her older sister soon fell into despair and threw herself in front of a train. When the American soldiers of the occupying army arrived, Sakue remembered that they constructed an airstrip in front of the shack where she was living. “There were skeletons all over the area,” she said, “so when they built the airstrip, the bones were crushed into dust.””
“In recent years, I’ve traveled to Japan numerous times with university students to study the legacy of the first and only use of atomic weapons as World War II ended.”
First and only use to deliberately murder people, yes. They’ve been used thousands of times since. On the atolls, people were just forced out of their homes, rather than murdered.
“[…] most Americans hold war’s ultimate horror at arm’s length, while rationalizing the way our country and so many others on this planet all too regularly lurch into such conflicts as the only right and just way to address human greed, tyranny, and fear.”
“Almost 80 years after those first atomic blasts, Americans have yet to seriously reckon with how easily we learned to rationalize such structural violence.”
We don’t care about any of the violence we perpetrate, especially the less bombastic, but arguably more deadly versions. Not having useful health care kills more people and robs more person-years than direct and obvious violence, like gun violence—which the U.S. has in spades, as well.
“In the case of the Pacific front in World War II, violence begat ever greater violence and the hunger for it grew ever deeper and more insatiable until there was a veritable “frenzy of violence” on both sides in the final year of that war. More than half of all American deaths occurred in that single year and that was when the kamikaze , or suicide plane, became “the consummate symbol of the pure spirit of the Japanese” to “turn back the demonic onslaught.””
“Meanwhile, the Americans abandoned precision bombing and initiated the full-scale firebombing of Japanese cities. The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 burned to death more than 100,000 civilians in a single night. More than 60 cities were similarly targeted, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese in a final paroxysm of violence that preceded Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Israel Bombed My Home and Killed My Relatives. I’m Not Going to Be Silenced. by Mariam Abudaqa (Jacobin)
“The reasons they gave are not valid. They said I belong to a terrorist organization called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. We are not against Jews, or Christians or Muslims. We are against the occupation, and therefore what happened to me is bizarre. I’ve been to many other countries, and I never saw this kind of treatment. I am a feminist and I fight for women’s rights. People in the West speak incessantly about women’s rights and children’s rights, but I guess that just doesn’t apply for us Palestinians. They canceled my visa, and thankfully when I got a lawyer, I won the case.”
France is a shitshow. Prove me wrong. Do better, France.
“What are they waiting for us to do? To give up and hand over the flag? For Israel to keep murdering us and for us to keep watching them do it? This is not right. Hamas is part of the Palestinian people, but not all Palestinian people are part of Hamas. Look at the people dying in the West Bank — in Nablus and Jenin or under the blockade of Gaza. All our people are living the agony of occupation, poverty, unemployment, and siege.”
“In seventy-five years, what has international law done for us? The whole world sees that what is going on is unjust, that international law applies elsewhere in the world but not in Palestine. There is no meaning to international law if this is allowed to happen in Gaza. When thousands of Palestinians are getting murdered with white phosphorus and under thousands of bombs, they still tell you that we’re the terrorists.”
“The truth is coming out though. The attack on Gaza is shattering the status quo. The world sees what “solving” the Palestinian problem means to Western governments: erasing it. But our people will keep holding on. What is happening to us is being exposed. We do not need them to send us money or aid in exchange for being murdered and the violence against us. We want our freedom, and we want what international law says is our right.”
The World Has Never Cared About Gaza’s Suffering by Ahmed Nehad (Scheer Post)
“Before October 6, blood, pain, and suffering in Palestine were of no interest to the world. They were too mundane, too “normal” to be acknowledged. Never mind that “normal” meant a Gaza that had been smothered by a 17-year Israeli blockade and a 56-year occupation. Never mind that it meant a Gaza where Israeli military invasions had become almost routine; with civilians laid to rest after every attack, and with entire neighborhoods leveled—tens of thousands of homes, mosques, churches, hospitals, cultural centers, and educational institutions crumbling to rubble every couple of years.”
“In Gaza, “normal” was the meager four to 12 hours of electricity a day. Hospitals had become destinations of last resort because, in this “normal,” there were just 1.4 beds for every thousand residents. It was “normal” for families to starve, for essential medicines to run out, for graduates to stare at bleak futures, and for the vast majority to survive on mere aid.”
“The very same world that had remained nonchalant about the everyday horrors in Gaza and in all of occupied Palestine was now interested and invested.”
“For the past 20 days, the world has appeared fixated on one haunting question. It has seemingly resolved that the answer is to obliterate Gaza from the map. But one question lingers globally: How do we do it? How do we annihilate Gaza?”
“We will recover our dead from beneath the debris, knowing that even with aid, thousands more are destined to perish. Grief will consume many in the wake of lost homes, cherished memories, and shattered dreams. Epidemics of ancient diseases will claim lives amid the ruins of our graveyard of a city. Others will suffer from the aftereffects of the lethal gases and chemicals from phosphorus bombs, missiles, and other arsenals—weaponry Israel is conveniently field-testing in Gaza for its future endeavors.”
“A mere handful might endure, conveniently turning into subjects of study for Western academia who seek to soothe their consciences by championing justice from the safe confines of their ivory towers, having borne witness to our annihilation.”
“A cease-fire. Now. Grant us the luxury of one last hug. Our end is nigh, rest assured.”
When the Journalists are Gone, the Stories Will Disappear by Zoe Alexandra and Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)
“Text messages from beneath the shattered concrete cry for help. Some of them are dug out, but many die, their bodies buried deep underneath the buildings that have been hit by powerful bombs. Half of the population of Gaza is beneath the age of 18, and half of the dead are young people – children, really, who have no idea about why they are being hit so hard by a government led by a man who says he wants to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah. “We are the people of light,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, “and they are the people of darkness.” Underneath the concrete, Netanyahu’s cruel vision comes true.”
He ends by rightly calling Bernie a monster for his extremely one-side and callous response. Bernie is basically dead to him, although he’s admired him in the past. I have to concur. Bernie’s response seems to be completely ignorant of not only the history and the present, but also the nearly unavoidable future implied by his stance.
The video interview ENTREVISTA: Roger Waters Fala sobre Música, Carreira, Política, Guerras, e Mais by Glenn Greenwald (Rumble) was really quite good. It’s in English, despite the title being in Brazilian.
When Banks Become Cops by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“Algos are bludgeons, and easily pick up on activity outside the “norm” of banking. The problem is that there are a great many perfectly lawful and, indeed, entirely normal transactions that are “out of character” unless you ask why. Algos do not ask questions. Buying a used car from someone on Craig’s List? You’ll need cash to complete the transaction. There’s nothing unusual about buying a used car. People do so all the time. But they don’t do so everyday, and so the algo raises a red flag over an unexplained cash transaction and you’re suddenly a potential criminal. Banks won’t take that chance.”
“In a world driven by algos, explanations don’t matter. But that’s the only way to make sure that no bad dude launders money, and so what if a few good people go hungry?”
From a comment by Rxc:
“This is Artificial Intelligence in action. It is not the cute version that is currently being sold, but it has been around for quite a while. Insurance companies also use credit scores to determine how much to charge you, based on AIs that suck up every bit of data that they can associate with you, and feed it thru an algorithm to produce a score.”
A Woman Intentionally Crashed Her Car Into What She Thought Was a Jewish School… by Eugene Volokh (Reason)
“A woman intentionally crashed her car Into what she thought was a Jewish school because she was angry about the Israel-Hamas war, Indianapolis police said.
“Ruba Almaghtheh, 34, told officers she had been watching the news and “couldn’t breathe anymore,” and referenced the Palestinian people.
“Police said she had passed the Israelite School of Universal and Practical Knowledge several times, calling it the “Israel school,” and told officers, “Yes, I did it on purpose.” …
“However, the building Almaghtheh crashed into is not, in fact, a Jewish school. The Anti-Defamation League says the Israelite School of Universal and Practical Knowledge is in fact an extremist organization that is anti-Israel and antisemitic.”
No-one was injured, so we can laugh heartily at this utter idiocy in action. The woman was overwhelmed. This is once again proof that the world is too much for most people. Literally, in this woman’s case. She’s probably not even anti-semitic in any way that’s a danger to anyone. She’s just too frail for this world. She became so overwhelmed that she attacked a building with her car.
Ukraine Has Lost the War by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)
“The diagnosis of stalemate relies on a misunderstanding of the different strategic approaches to the war by the two armies. The Economist illustrates the stalemate by saying that “Five months into its counter-offensive, Ukraine has managed to advance by just 17 kilometers. Russia fought for ten months around Bakhmut in the east “to take a town six by six kilometers”.
“But that measures the results by territory taken. That is Ukraine’s goal because they are trying to recapture land that Russia has taken and push Russia back out of its borders. But Russia is not fighting for territory but for victory over the Ukrainian armed forces. Victory for Russia, for now, is measured, not in territory, but in the attrition of Ukrainian men, equipment and artillery.”
“Zaluzhny opposes Zelensky’s strategy of spending lives on Avdiivka as he opposed his strategy of spending lives on Bakhmut. But Zelensky is not listening. That may be why Zaluzhny took his message to Zelensky’s patrons. The attritional war now focused on Avdiivka could lead to the running out of men and the loss of pivotal land that could signal the beginning of the realization that Ukraine has lost the war.”
Getting Called A Nazi For Opposing A Genocide by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“All that death and destruction [in Ukraine], for absolutely nothing. The only ones who benefitted from that nightmare were the war profiteers who raked in vast fortunes and the empire managers who used it to advance their geostrategic agendas in Eurasia. Those of us who called for peace negotiations were objectively correct, and those who shouted us down and accused us of treasonous Kremlin loyalism were objectively wrong.
“Those calling you an anti-semitic baby-cooking terrorist lover for supporting a ceasefire are wrong in exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons. All the arguments being made against peace right now will only end up serving the rich and powerful, at the cost of unfathomable oceans of human suffering.”
“You get peace by making peace. That’s how you do it. You stop shooting, you sit down, you have conversations and you make deals. The deals won’t feel perfect, because they won’t be, but they will be better than slaughtering children by the thousands for no justifiable reason and killing off parts of our own humanity in the process. You set your intention toward peace and harmony, and you start walking in that direction, one step at a time.
“It really is that simple. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying for the benefit of the rich and powerful.”
An Infinite Distance by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“According to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Russia killed 504 Ukrainian children in the first 20 months of the war. Israel has already killed at least 7 times more children than Russia in just 3 weeks of its war on Gaza, fully supported by Biden.”
“Greg Grandin: “Our foreign policy spectrum now runs from Jake Sullivan imagining himself fighting off the Red Dawn and Vivek Ramaswamy thinking of organizing a Red Wedding.””
“According to the Times of Israel the proposed new law, introduced by Netanyahu’s Interior Minister Moshe Arbel, “would allow Israel to strip individuals of citizenship if they express solidarity with terror groups or incite terror during times of war. The law would give the interior minister special war-time powers allowing them to remove the citizenship of individuals deemed to be supporting or encouraging terrorism. Rather than go to the courts, the minister would only need the approval of the justice minister”.”
“A new bill introduced into the French senate will criminalize the criticism of Zionism: “An insult committed against the State of Israel is punishable by two years of imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros.” Macron will soon be constructing his own Bastille.”
“I don’t understand your optimism. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure. God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism: the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz. But is that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise, the Arabs will wipe us out.”
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, and not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Goat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Hunefils; and Kefir Yehushu’a in the place of Tel al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.””
““From the river to the sea” is a longtime slogan of the Palestine resistance movement and is an expression of the perspective of freeing the Palestinian people from Zionist oppression over the entire land area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which comprises the West Bank, Gaza and the present-day state of Israel.”
It bears repeating that you can’t put words into people’s mouths. There is an inordinate amount of evidence supporting the provenance of the definition above. There is no need to accept the idiotic and hateful definition ascribed to the expression by people who are solely interested in suppressing speech and opinions that make them uncomfortable.
Dismantle Israel And The Entire US Empire by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
““Israel has a right to defend itself” means “Genocide all non-Zionists.” If pro-Israel people get to decide that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call to genocide Jews, then it’s only fair that pro-Palestine people get to decide what pro-Israel people’s slogans mean as well.”
Rashida Tlaib censure vote sets precedent for criminalizing opposition to Gaza genocide by Patrick Martin (WSWS)
“In calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, Tlaib is doing no more than giving expression to the sentiments not only of her constituents but of the majority of the American population.
“The White House is free to send bombs to slaughter Palestinian children—without even reporting how many—and members of Congress like Senator Lindsey Graham are free to advocate a “total war” against what he calls “the most extremist population on Earth.” But verbal criticism of what is clearly a genocide and a massive violation of international law is impermissible.”
Party! Party! by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)
“So far, the collapse of suburbia has happened in slow motion, but the pace is quickening now and it’ll get supercharged when the bond markets go down, as they must, considering the country’s catastrophic fiscal circumstances. […]
“All this is apprehended to some degree by the increasingly frightened public, though they have a hard time articulating it within any of the popular frameworks presented by politics, religion, or what appears lately to be extremely corrupt science. The people see what’s coming but they can’t make sense of it, and the stress makes a great many of them insane. Without a way to construct a coherent view of reality, or tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, they behave accordingly: anything goes and nothing matters.”
Gaza’s Trail of Tears by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“What Americans are witnessing in Gaza is a reiteration of our own history in real-time: Dispossess indigenous people, violently crush their resistance, blame any retaliatory “massacres” as an excuse to use overwhelming military power to wipe out their entire populations, confine the survivors to “reservations” on marginal sites, then invade even that land when gold, timber, oil or water is found, justifying the theft by citing your own stature as a superior society, which will put the looted land and resources to the highest use possible…”
“In a single week, Israel dropped almost as many bombs on Gaza as the U.S. did in Afghanistan in one year, the heaviest year of bombing. Gaza is 141 square miles. Afghanistan is 252,071 square miles.”
“If you know your airstrikes are going to kill civilians and they do, in fact, kill civilians and you continue launching them hour after hour, day after day, week after week, with the same bloody results, you can’t write these deaths off as collateral damage, accidental deaths, or cases of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’re predictable and intentional.”
“Two weeks ago, Biden was chest-thumping that the US “is the most powerful nation the world – not the world – the history of the world.” Now he pretends to be powerless to restrain Israel as it commits war crimes with US weapons. Pretty rapid decline into impotence….”
“The Palestinian historian, Sami Abou Shahadeh, who is the leader of the Balad/Tajamou’ Party, was detained by Israel police for attending an anti-war demonstration: “I have been released after 7 hours of detention for the “crime” of being a Palestinian citizen calling to end the war. By contrast, if I were a Jewish citizen calling for a genocide of Palestinians I could become a minister. This should be a wake-up call for Western governments that keep encouraging this racism by taking about ‘shared values’ with Israel.””
“Beyond the censure, more than 60 Democrats, including such luminaries as Katie Porter, Steny Hoyer, Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff, signed a letter condemning Tlaib for using the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” declaring it “genocidal,” despite the fact that it wasn’t considered anti-semitic even by the ADL as recently as last year. These same Democrats called for a ceasefire, but only for Hamas rockets, which don’t seem to have killed any Israeli citizens since October 8th, and not IDF airstrikes, which have killed more than 10,800 people, mostly women and children.”
“Adam Johnson: “I understand why many assume a “humanitarian pause” and ceasefire are interchangeable, on an intuitive level it makes sense. But they’re not and the main reason we know they’re not is the White House and pro-Israel groups are pushing one while threatening to punish anyone uttering the other.””
“The U.S. Navy has sent a nuclear-powered submarine to the Middle East. The USS Florida (SSGN-728), which can carry more than 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles.”
“Countries that have cut diplomatic ties with Israel over the bombing of Gaza: Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Jordan, Bahrain, Honduras, Turkey, Chad, and South Africa.”
“Calhoun said that a camp in Khan Younis with 50,000 displaced people had 4 toilets. There was no water and children with burns all over their bodies were discharged because there were no medical supplies.”
Hillary Clinton Lost Because She’s Deeply Unpopular by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“If you’re filled with fury, why don’t you blame the woman who was by far the most individually responsible and the people who enabled her? If you think that the election was so important, why didn’t you support a candidate who could beat Trump? If you’re mad at people who expressed principled objections to the center-right because they “treated the election like a game,” can you please explain how voting for a deeply-flawed candidate because she was a woman and it was her turn is not treating it like a game? If you think that people who care about, you know, resisting the total control of capital over both political parties amounts to “positioning themselves against Hillary,” why does it never penetrate that the things they said about Hillary’s electability were proven absolutely, totally, indisputably correct? Why aren’t you mad at the right people?”
“ the Rust Belt voters who actually handed Trump victory weren’t motivated by Bernie’s loss, they were motivated by the economic policies Hillary’s political movement gleefully pursued for decades, happily and knowingly trading the support of such voters for the fealty of the rich. It is astonishing that people still won’t deal with the basic facts of Clinton’s culpability in her own failure. Seven years later, they just can’t blame her for anything.”
“[…] the reality is that Hillary Clinton was always a bad choice for a presidential nominee, she suffered from bad unfavorables her entire career, she presided over an immensely dopey campaign that focused on celebrity glitz while the country was gripped with economic anxiety, and she deserved to lose. The trouble is that Yglesias has direct professional incentive to never notice any of that − he has, we’ve been told, a direct line to the Biden White House, and you don’t get such influence by telling Democratic leadership what they don’t want to hear.”
Are We Having a Moral Panic Over Misinformation? by Joanna Thompson (Undark)
“Misinformation is most commonly defined as anything that is factually inaccurate, but not intended to deceive: in other words, people being wrong. However, it is often talked about in the same breath as disinformation — inaccurate information spread maliciously — and propaganda — information imbued with biased rhetoric designed to sway people politically.”
Propaganda is political disinformation.
“Take, for example, a weather forecast that claims a particular day will have a high of 55 degrees Fahrenheit. If that day comes and temperatures rise to 57 degrees, does the forecast qualify as misinformation?”
No. It’s a prediction. It’s accuracy is by its very nature probabilistic. This isn’t that difficult.
“What about a newspaper story that inaccurately reports the color of someone’s shirt?”
Yes, it’s misinformation, but hopefully irrelevant. If it’s deliberately wrong, like the skin color of a suspect, then it’s disinformation. Again, I’m not seeing why you need to found an institute to label these things. If the color of the shirt is politically relevant, then it’s propaganda.
“And in the age of yellow journalism around the turn of the 20th century, many reporters made up stories out of whole cloth.”
Nice job! It is literally misinformation to suggest that reporters making up stories out of whole cloth is a feature unique to a prior benighted century rather than the defining characteristic of this one.
“Standards for journalism and books have, on the whole, improved since the yellow journalism days. But casual conversation isn’t held to the same rigorous standards.”
rigorous standards? What fucking planet are you on?
Ramaswamy: I wanna laugh at why Nikki Haley didn’t answer your question, which is about looking families in the eye. [sic] In the last debate, she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok. Well, her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first. [shots fired!]
Haley: Leave my daughter out of your voice! [sic; who talks like this?]
Ramaswamy: …before [grief-shaming?] your own daughter. The next generation of Americans are [sic] using it. And that’s actually the point.
Crowd: Booooooo…
Ramaswamy: You have her supporters propping her up. That’s fine. Here’s the truth.
Haley: [shaking head] You’re just scum.
Ramaswamy: The easy answer [wagging finger] is actually to say that we’re just gonna ban one app. We have to go further. We have to ban any U.S. company actually transferring U.S. data to the Chinese.
Haley: [continues to look sullen on second camera]
Tell me this isn’t perfect kayfabe (Wikipedia). It’s a bit hard for me to tell, but I think that Ramaswamy is playing the heel here. Listen to that crowd booing. You can almost see them standing and shaking their fists.
This is an actual debate, featuring actual adult human-beings who are running for the office of the president of the United States, the center of the current global empire. This is a joke.
In the other party, there’s this awesome statement of batshittery.
“RFK, Jr., founder of the Children’s Health Defense [sic] Network: “Israel is a bulwark for us… it’s almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. If Israel disappears, Russia, China, and BRICS+ countries will control 90% of the oil in the world and that would be cataclysmic for US national security.””
So many excellent choices. The U.S. enjoys a bountiful harvest of candidates.
Notes on Dance by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“I was in a restaurant in the Marais, listening to my friend tell me about Robert Wilson telling him about women in Bali who ritually process the grief of a baby’s death, and I swear to you, at that moment all the grief in the world was channeled directly into me. All the grief, and all the wonder at the mystery and power of art.”
We are not the same. I don’t even know what that could possibly feel like. It’s a very poetic description, but I can’t even get close to understanding what the hell he’s talking about.
“Broadway musicals circa 1985 would indeed have been radically avant-garde, were they not meant to be consumed, en masse and on the level, by a public that does not want its unconscious depths to be churned, but is perfectly happy with a little “razzle-dazzle”.”
“I think Nabokov could have made his own peace with evolutionary theory in a way that would have permitted him to retain this beautiful phrase, if only he had read Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and appreciated that we are simply constrained to apprehend nature through the lens of purposiveness, even if this does not license us to attribute concrete purposes to its workings.”
“Call them what you will, the art-forms Breton designated as “primitive” are just as cool as it gets. Attending to them is essential for understanding the range of human experience, especially those dimensions of experience that lie deeper than language; especially those dimensions of experience that might enable us to mount a last human stand against marketization and “attention-fracking”, which is the latest and most powerful weapon by which algorithms process taste and sensibility into data.”
“For the moment, it seems, only the political right knows how to tap into its exuberance, while the left is busy seeking out new things to prohibit. Emma Goldman’s line about not wanting to be part of the revolution if she can’t dance is often dismissed as a rare slip into sentimentality on her part, and is certainly over-cited on bumper-stickers and social-media profile-banners. But it seems to me her real concern is about who is going to take political responsibility for exuberance.”
You Can’t Just Say “Oh, That Doesn’t Matter” About Every Single Political Question by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“I wrote a piece that (glancingly) discussed the cancellation of Halloween celebrations at public schools. A number of commenters and emailers fixated on that element and said, who cares, it’s just school Halloween parties. But of course the whole point of that essay was to explain why it matters far beyond school parties, to argue that our fixation on trying to make every opportunity available to every child is in fact quietly destructive. Maybe I made that point well, maybe I made the point poorly, but it is an argument, one that you have to actually argue with rather than simply dismissing as irrelevant.”
“I have lately been complaining about safetyism and its embodiment in “trunk or treat,” where parents have replaced traditional house-to-house trick or treating with gathering in a parking lot and giving candy out from the trunk of a car. Why? Because, they say, ordinary trick or treating is just too dangerous! Except that trick or treating is not dangerous, not remotely. The number of violent incidents that children have historically faced while trick or treating, compared to their numbers, is infinitesimal. Parents can parent how they want, but they can’t promulgate a blatantly false narrative about stranger danger. You know what people say to me? Not “your statistics are wrong,” but “that doesn’t matter.” Who cares? Why do you care? But safetyism clearly has immense consequences for our society. It’s transformed American life. Yes, it matters!”
“The dominance of poptimism and the full-throated embrace of the lowbrow even in previously-highbrow publications, shutting out traditional artforms and contributing the the vast sameness that permeates our entire cultural industry? Who cares, doesn’t matter, why bother. Our entire educational system abandoning rigor and rejecting grades or any other form of assessment, so that we have no tools to inspire hard work and no way to know how our students are doing? Who cares, doesn’t matter, why bother. Activists and nonprofits are creating a false impression of mainstream left priorities and tactics? Who cares, doesn’t matter, why bother. Nothing means anything; nothing has consequences.”
“[…] any time I refer to anything that happens on Twitter, ever, I get a lot of performative eye-rolling from readers. If I speak in general terms, they say I haven’t provided evidence. If I screencap specific individual tweets, they say “oh those are just a few random people.” And it’s transparently the case that they do so because they don’t want to grapple with the specific point I’m making, or they don’t want to deal with the irrefutable power that distributed opinion has in our society, or both. But as Niels Bohr supposedly said about his lucky horseshoe, the power of cultural change works whether you believe in it or not.”
How to drive a stake through your own good heart by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)
“[…] if we all spent a little more time meditating on the inevitable perversion of all incentives and the perpetual struggle to build and maintain systems that work, that would be great. But ol’ Chucky Goodhart’s observation has a lot more to give us. Goodhart’s Law doesn’t just explain how bad actors fool institutions. It also explains how good actors fool themselves . That is, we think we’re Goodharting each other, but we’re often Goodharting ourselves.”
“If you give points for attendance, for example, students will show up, sit in the back, and shop for shoes online during class. If you give points for participation, students will dutifully contribute nonsense. (“What I found most interesting about War and Peace was the war parts, but the peace parts were also pretty good.”)”
“[…] it’s usually possible to finagle a good grade in a class without actually learning much. We act as if those students have stolen something from their teachers, when really they’ve only stolen from themselves, spending a whole lot of money and time in order to avoid getting educated.”
“That’s what you have to recognize if you want to bust out of your personal Goodhart hell. People will cheer for you even as you’re Goodharting yourself: “Way to go jumping through those hoops!” “Congratulations on being the best at playing the game!” “You made the number go up, wahoo!” I have wasted a good chunk of my life chasing exactly that kind of praise. I thought I was winning, but the only way to win Goodhart’s game is to walk away.”
Bingo.
Everyone Can’t Do Everything by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“[…] the whole DEI thing only really applies to majority imposition on minority rights − the fact that Halloween is a secular holiday enjoyed by the vast majority of children perversely makes it more of a target for exclusion, not less. I suspect that this sort of thing is really a matter of fretful liberal bureaucrats who feel like they need to Do Something and found this Thing To Do.”
“Canceling holidays is a different animal than specific children learning about their inevitable human limits, but the stated moral logic of these administrative actions stem from the same bad impulse − the thinking that says that if any kids can’t do something, this is an emotional setback they can’t overcome, rather than a simple reality of life. The basic human experience of not partaking in something other people enjoy becomes instead an error that has to be corrected. In our culture, if any individual kid can’t do something that other kids can do, that’s treated as injustice.”
“The trouble is that we’ve created a larger cultural expectation that every child can grow to be absolutely anything, when that isn’t true. And while disability is involved in that, it’s really just one part of a broader addiction to telling our kids that they can have whatever they want.”
“[…] my time working in K-12 schools had left me shaking my head, again and again, at how relentlessly the “you can be anything you dream” ideology was pushed on kids. Everywhere you looked, there was another poster insisting that If You Believe, You Will Achieve! and related cliches. It was as close to a secular civic religion as I have encountered in 21st-century American life.”
“The first problem is that the kind of people who get up in front of crowds and say “I never gave up on my dreams, and I made it!” don’t understand survivorship bias − all the people who never gave up but nevertheless never make it don’t get invited to stand up in front of crowds and make speeches. The second is that, once we have misapprehended the nature of success in that way, the insistence that we should never give up becomes immensely cruel; it keeps people stuck pursuing kinds of success they will never achieve, and it tells them that if they eventually give up, that failure is their own fault.”
“[…] the activist-led effort to treat all autistic people as fully autonomous and self-directed people leaves the most disabled at the mercy of people who would exploit and harm them. There’s also the broad and vexing question of what accommodations can and should be extended to people given their various disabilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act’s standard of requiring any reasonable accommodation is an elegant and just one, but of course what exactly is reasonable will remain permanently controversial.”
“It’s additionally true that, at present, it seems unlikely that a person with Down Syndrome will ever become a research physicist. The thing I’ve been trying to make clear to people for the past three years is that we’re all limited in this way, ultimately, that none of us have truly limitless potential. I am very happy to tell you that I have had exactly zero chance of becoming a research physicist in my life; that’s just not a future that ever fit within my own very-real limitations. As long as we entertain the fiction that such limitations don’t exist, we’re harming our young people.”
At about 28:00, he says that, Gandhi wasn’t trying to end racism in South Africa—he was just trying to get Indians counted as whites, not blacks. Very different to being against racism.
At 43:00, he discusses Germany’s complicated relationship to Israel: instead of Germany having to give up some of its territory to Jews, they gave away someone else’s territory—and all of Europe was good with that.
So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers… (The AI Episode) by Joshua Michael Schrei (The Emerald)
At about 1:05:00,
“Modernity is humanity seeing what it can get away with.”
At about 1:10:00,
“In the stories, the young initiate who wants to access formidable powers, has to do what?
“Wait.
“You’ve seen the movies, you heard the stories, right? Of the master making the potential disciple wait outside the temple gate?
“You want access to the great powers? You’ve got to earn it.
“And the first way to earn it, before any physical trials, before any tests that take the would-be apprentice to the brink, the first way to earn it is—to wait.
“You’ve got to know how to wait.
“You know what the very first step of mystery-school initiation often is?
“Silence.
“The ability to sit with what is, without altering it, for a long period of time.”
This is, of course, wholly incompatible with our society, especially with the self-proclaimed elites who want to lead us off the precipice in their fervent hope that they will benefit in some short-term and frivolous way that is considered valuable by the short-term and frivolous society that somehow manages to buoy them on the backs of people so much more useful than they.
Patience is a virtue.
There’s a whole, incredibly soothing section where he convinces me that I’m a duck. Immagonna just leave it at that. I didn’t hate it.
At 01:32:00, he talks about the scene in the Matrix where Neo “learns” Kung Fu.
“It’s an awesome scene, right? And, of course, anyone who’s studied Kung-Fu—or any other somatic art—also knows that it’s a laughable scene because, simply, that’s not how bodies learn. Bodies learn through the time it takes to weave things into tissues. Bodies learn as patterns seep into the seven datus, the seven layers. Learning, knowledge, is an endeavor of bone marrow, and blood, and sweat, and breath, and proprioceptive weaving, over time.”
After doing some “like causes like” examples (e.g., if you want it to rain, than you ritually pour water, … um, … OK), at 01:39:00, he says,
“This daemonic power is not neutral. It is not a neutral intelligence that is being called up. By choosing which aspects of the living web of intelligence are the valuable intelligences and which are not, it is already value-laden. By centering rational empiricism, it is already value-laden. By removing intelligence from a body, it is already deeply value-laden. That is a value statement. By making it irreligious, aspiritual, it is already value-laden. AI is a biased God. Talking to ChatGPT, for example, is nothing like talking to an Aboriginal elder. It’s more like talking to a Stanford computer-science grad with an incredible analytic capability and very few real-life social skills. We are taking the narrow, world-naive, uninitiated, unembodied intelligence of the eager, neoliberal, Stanford grad and magnifying it on a global scale. Just what the world needs, right? All the biases inherent in the Western, scientific, analytic view of creation that has already taken us to the brink of eco-collapse, magnified 10,000 times.”
Goddamn, we need more philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and linguists helping us run the world.
At 1:43:00,
“[…] morality can’t be programmed in. Ethics can’t be programmed in. It can’t be programmed into machines or into human beings. For all the current necessity that there is for ethical regulations, moratoriums, waiting periods, before the rush to market—these are still surface measures. When will we realize that trying to add ethics, […] to a system that is by nature hubristic, that is by nature at odds with the Gods, isn’t a viable long-term solution. Within the soulless fragmentation of late-stage capitalism, in which all things are pillaged and sold, and it’s everyone for themselves, all of the time.”
We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus by Charles Stross (Charlie's Diary)
“There are very rich people trying to manipulate investment markets into giving them even more money, using shadow puppets they dreamed up on the basis of half-remembered fictions they read in their teens. They are inadvertently driving state-level policy making on subjects like privacy protection, data mining, face recognition, and generative language models, on the basis of assumptions about how society should be organized that are frankly misguided and crankish, because there’s no crank like a writer idly dreaming up fun thought experiments in fictional form.”
“Meanwhile our public infrastructure is rotting, national assets are being sold off and looted by private equity companies, their social networks are spreading hatred and lies in order to farm advertising clicks, and other billionaires are using those networks to either buy political clout or suck up ever more money from the savings of the poor.
“Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?
“It’s because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They’re rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires.”
At 00:02:35. on never having gotten drunk,
“You know why? Because I’m really a Stalinist, not just superficial. You know what’s my idea? The world is a dangerous place. If you get drunk, you want to embrace people, you get kind, and then you don’t recognize the attack and cannot defend yourself. No, we must stay sober—paranoia—to see where the attack is coming from.”
The rest of the interview is pretty good, with a lot of points I’ve heard him make before. At around 01:03:00, he talks about Ukraine and how we wouldn’t be at the point of talking about a stalemate if we hadn’t provided them with weapons.
This is a point he’s made before, but it ignores a vast swath of history and he doesn’t express it very well, I feel. After many repetitions, I’m starting to understand where he’s coming from—he sounded unhinged at first—but I still feel he’s deeply screwed up the analysis on this one, and is just doubling down.
He can’t help but view the Russians as an evil with which one cannot negotiate. He’s damaged goods in that sense. He talks of Russia as the Israelis talk of Palestinians, as Americans talk of anyone non-American.
What he should be saying is that, given that we’ve already ignored Russia’s concerns over the decades, given that we drove NATO right up to its borders, given that we organized a coup in Ukraine, given that we propped up a corrupt president in Ukraine and supported the worst elements of their society, given that we lied to Russia about adhering in any way to the Minsk accords, given that we did everything we possibly could to provoke Russia into committing a war crime, then, yes, we should actually put our money where our mouth is and now help defend the country that we fucked up / helped fuck up so badly that it’s ended up where it is now.
But it would be nice for him to at least once admit that none of this had to happen. I don’t think I’ve once heard him say that Ukraine would have been far better off if the U.S. had never approached it. I don’t think I’ve once heard him admit that Ukraine would have gotten a much better deal at the start of this war.
He still says,
“Are we aware that Ukraine at least didn’t lose only because of our help. To have this position now—kind of a WWI stalemate—it’s precisely because we were helping Ukraine. So, at least retroactively, at those who are pro-peace should acknowledge that we are in this position to say, at least Ukraine have a chance to survive only because we were helping Ukraine.”
Not once does he acknowledge how many people died for his being able to say something like that. And it’s not even true. Ukraine is in a much-worse bargaining position than it was two years ago.
He still sounds like a raving lunatic on this topic. I can’t see any daylight between his position and that of any war-hawk American, other than an improved eloquence.
What he’s saying is, given how badly we’ve fucked up Ukraine using them as the tip of NATO’s spear, this is the best they can hope for. Not once does he consider that Ukraine would have been much better off if it had never been used as NATO’s spear in the first place. I’ve never heard him mention NATO’s role in this. I can’t imagine he’s ignorant of it. He just doesn’t seem to think it’s relevant. Or he doesn’t care because he’s so busy doubling down on his original bad take from a year-and-a-half ago that was based on his knee-jerk Russophobia. He’s never once talked about how bad it’s been for any country, especially Ukraine, to be friends with NATO, as a proxy of the United States.
They continue the discussion later, at 01:11:00,
“Aaron: you mentioned Russia/Ukraine. What’s the correct position for a leftist on Russia/Ukraine? I read an amazing piece in Time Magazine, the average person on the front line for Ukraine now is 43 years old. There’s clearly a military stalemate.
Žižek: It’s extremely difficult, I think. […] I think that Ukraine needs our support at least to maintain this stalemate. I think it’s too risky to say okay it’s a stalemate, let’s stop supporting Ukraine.
Aaron: But that’s a permanent war. So it should be like Syria?
Žižek: Yeah, but what is the alternative? If you simply stopped supporting Ukraine…
Aaron: Oh, I’m not suggesting that. But you’re saying, rather than a negotiated settlement—which, I agree, wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on—fine. But what you’re proposing is a sort-of permanent, low-level war between Russia and Ukraine forever [sic]. Which is maybe the best you can hope for, I don’t know.
Žižek: That’s what I am tempted to suggest. It’s a very sad position.”
After this part, Žižek goes into how crazy it is that Ukraine is outlawing leftists because they suspect them of being pro-Russia, which he calls madness. It’s not, though, it’s just consolidating power by outlawing any critical voices by accusing them of something the public will be happy to crucify them for. It’s an old story, and I’m surprised that Žižek doesn’t see it for what it is. It’s just stupid power-mongering propaganda, no different than when the Nazis used it by calling people Jew-lovers, no different than when U.S. presidential candidates call each other “soft on China” or “soft on Russia”.
It’s great that they agree that the settlement wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on—they think Russia wouldn’t hold to it, because they’re so steeped in propaganda about how duplicitous Russia is. But it’s actually the U.S. and its proxy NATO that can’t seem to honor agreements they’ve signed that they soon after find inconvenient.
The best they can hope for, for Ukraine, is a forever war that keeps eating up its males until there are none left. A lack of fantasy, on their part, I think. Also, a shocking lack of empathy.
Žižek simply can’t acknowledge the obvious: that’s it’s only a temporary stalemate. Ukraine is running out of people. What’s the next step? To continue to defend Ukraine long after there is no Ukraine? To replace soldiers with NATO soldiers from the U.S. and Europe in a sort of “Ship of Theseus” army? He, of all people, should appreciate the irony that his position is currently, “we will have to destroy Ukraine in order to save it.” The country effectively doesn’t exist now, but might be able to get back to somewhere reasonable, after several decades. They were doing poorly before the war, relative to neighbors.
Now what? He says to just. Keep. Going. He sounds like a neocon. He’s formulating it as “continue increasing support Ukraine up until boots on the ground for NATO” vs. “dropping Ukraine like a hot rock”. What about “use our power for a negotiated settlement rather than supporting the pointless slaughter of the rest of the Ukrainian population?” Push back on him more.
Of course, Ukraine will lose land in this negotiated settlement. Tough shit. That’s reality. You can’t make it go away by pursuing a fantasy outcome in which Russia suddenly loses because of a deus ex machina, like in a fucking movie (or “fil-im”, as Žižek would say it). What’s the end game? Nuke Russia to convince them to back off? What the fuck is the strategy here, Žižek? You’re being ludicrously obstinate on this point because you don’t want to accept what’s right before your eyes. Some of us saw it almost two years ago, when this whole shitshow started. We predicted exactly this situation, at best. At worst, Russia would have taken more of Ukraine. There is no good solution, and certainly not one where Zelensky is fucking Luke Skywalker.
The longer this goes on, the shittier Ukraine’s position. Throw in the towel. You can’t win in the way you think you can. Cut your losses. This attitude of his is madness—and maddening. He seems incapable of being realistic.
They end by talking about immigration and how we need to stop it, but from the viewpoint of: We should be helping create environments on the planet from which people don’t want to flee, rather than creating environments from the which they do. Žižek cites a more right-wing colleague from Germany who told him that he thinks we shouldn’t be spending money on ferries or accommodations in Germany, that we should spend that money in Tunisia, or wherever, to make their country worth living in.
Of course, that this comes from a right-wing person is probably wildly hypocritical, as they probably support God knows how many policies that lead directly to the enshitification of exactly the countries from which these people are moving, but that doesn’t mean what he’s saying there isn’t correct. He’s right, in this case. If we can’t stop ourselves from stealing the wealth of other countries, we should at least spend the money we do spend on their suffering people by trying to fix some of the problems we causing by raping their countries. The West profits immensely from most of the countries that produce the most immigrants, either through arms sales to the dictators that they prop up there, or from agricultural catastrophes engendered by the rapacious marketing policies of supranational global conglomerates whose profits flow directly to the west and its elites.
Aaron tells a story his father told him,
My father’s Iranian, […] I remember saying to him, ‘Oh, look at these Afghans, they’re going to Iceland.‘
And he said, ‘listen to me, son. No Afghan wants to go to Iceland. You’re born in this naturally fertile country, amazing history, beautiful weather—less so the last 40 or 50 years—but historically, it was a very fertile, peaceful place. And you end up in a place—not to besmirch Iceland—you go to a place where you don’t see the sun for three months. No Afghan grows up as a child and says, you know what? I don’t wanna see the sun for three months and I wanna live in -10ºC for six months.‘ That’s a really powerful point and I think that a lot of European liberals, progressives, don’t understand that. There’s this kind of strange—it’s not racism—it’s a European superiority where they say ‘well of course they want to come here. We’re better!’ Many of them are coming because of war, sanctions, occupation, capitalist underdevelopment … but that seems completely absent from that conversation.
It’s like the people who talk about the “volunteer homeless”. Those people are choosing to be homeless only because being in a shelter is worse. It’s the best of the terribly shitty options that they have available. They don’t “choose homelessness” because they’re fulfilling some sort of childhood dream.
At 01:33:00, Žižek concurs, saying,
“I would totally agree with your father I. don’t know how but the problem should be solved there in those lands—okay we shouldn’t now invade Iran. but we should at least reflect on how we also screwed it up with our politics.”
We screwed it up with our piracy. We continue to do so. Empire has no principle preventing its raping and pillaging. Pure and simple. Sauber und glatt.
At 00:17:10, he says,
“I’ve been criticized quite harshly for writing and speaking about this the way I do, which is, from my point of view, somewhat biased. I feel like I treat it the way I treat any of the other scientific controversies I’ve written about, including in my book. But in some liberal circles, it’s very difficult to talk about this and to treat it as a scientific controversy.”
At 00:17:40, he says,
“I do want to make one point about empathy and compassion and other touchy-feely stuff. I really vehemently reject the idea that you need to be trans or gender non-conforming to participate in this conversation for all the same reasons I don’t think you need to be black to write about or study racial inequality.
“I don’t think you need to be Israeli or Palestinian or Jewish or Muslim to write about or study that conflict there’s unfortunately been a lurch toward a very crude form of identitarianism in some liberal intellectual circles and I just don’t think this viewpoint deserves much respect. I think it’s profoundly anti-intellectual.
“We need to judge people on the basis of their ideas, not their identity, partly because when […] no one who says listen to people black people or listen to trans people they don’t mean that—they mean listen to the subset of that group
who believes what I believe”
At 00:20:44, he says,
“This is another argument I just don’t really respect, the argument that we can’t discuss X because people we don’t like might use X to make arguments we disagree with just doesn’t really work if you play it out.
“There are so many examples of why it doesn’t work that I I feel like I shouldn’t need to run through them, but if I criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, do you know who also criticizes Israel? Nazis. Does that mean we can’t? No one here thinks you can’t criticize Israel because Nazis also criticize Israel. Or if I criticize the federal government, you know who else criticizes the federal government? Far-right militias. It just—this doesn’t work—you’re not giving aid and comfort to a group just because you make an argument that happens to align with what some of them say in some circumstances.”
At 00:23:00, he says,
“It’s like, there was a group of folks who lost gay marriage very badly—and this is another issue that sort of brings back that strand of social conservatism, frankly—these are figures who are not in this to get to the bottom of the scientific controversy or to figure out how to best help trans and gender non-conforming kids.
“They’re in this controversy because they despise liberals or they’re genuinely uncomfortable with certain forms of what I think we would view as societal progress, or because they simply sense political opportunity.
“So, if you’re going to write about and discuss this issue, I just think you need to acknowledge the presence of some folks who have different agendas and who are exacerbating the tension and the toxicity with those agendas.”
At 00:33:20, he says,
“In fact, there has been a recent surge of coverage casting totally appropriate, well-founded doubt on a supposed breakthrough treatment for Alzheimer’s. If someone responded to that coverage by saying, well, surely you don’t care about Alzheimer’s sufferers or their families. If you did, you wouldn’t have critiqued this new medication, that person would be laughed out of the room because that’s a ridiculous argument.
“Yet, somehow this ridiculous argument is accepted here if you criticize youth-gender medicine, you must not care about trans kids or you must must want them to die or suffer other horrible outcomes.
“I think the sheer moral force of this argument, and the personal and professional consequences of being labeled a transphobe in the liberal settings that produce most journalism and academic research, has led to a stalling out of a critical conversation in the United States that should be occurring in journalism and academia”
Why I Won’t Use Next.js by Kent C. Dodds (EpicWeb)
“Your tool choice matters much less than your skill at using the tool to accomplish your desired outcome (a great user experience).”
I agree with the initial statement, but do not agree that a great user experience is the primary goal of almost any project—unless you have nothing else of value to provide.
“I’ve been using Remix since it was first released in 2020. I loved it so much I joined the company a year later to help get the community going and 10 months later I left to work on EpicWeb.dev full time where I teach people what they need to know to build full stack applications.”
10 months! must have been a great place to work.
This was fantastic. Really a tight tutorial, with just enough “mistakes” to show how he built it up. Not over-engineered at all. It’s just as complex as needed, and no more. Responsive without media queries. Complexity hidden in the CSS. Even the CSS is reasonably legible. You could maybe use an extra variable to clean it up, but otherwise, great.
Zelensky Cancels Elections To Focus On Fighting For Democracy (Babylon Bee)
Biden Checks His Latest Poll Numbers To See If Israel Still Has Right To Defend Itself (Babylon Bee)
Is the web actually evaporating? by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“In my experience, very few publications can keep up with the speed of a fandom’s native reporting. A newsroom just can’t outrun an unwell teenager with 40 sock puppet accounts and no concept of editorial standards.”
]]>“As one Russian journalist said to me, London now does feel a... [More]”
Published by marco on 11. Nov 2023 00:00:29 (GMT-5)
The interview Adam Curtis Talks to Jacobin About Russia, Oligarchs, and the Fall of the USSR by Taylor C. Noakes (Jacobin) is interesting and thought-provoking—as Adam Curtis often is. Of course, I had notes, which I’ve interspersed with citations from the article.
“As one Russian journalist said to me, London now does feel a bit like Moscow in 1988. My primary goal was to tell the story, but I also wanted to convey that disenchantment with democracy can have its roots in corruption. And there’s quite a lot of corruption in Britain, Canada, and the United States, especially since 2008. I still don’t think we got our heads around what quantitative easing was about, which essentially entailed a massive wealth transfer to a tiny elite, creating what is now known as the “asset class.””
I couldn’t agree more about the transfer, but disagree that we don’t understand it. We understand exactly what it is. He just described it succinctly. There’s nothing more to it than that. An elite guilted the world into giving it all the money. Having all the money allows them to sustain this situation indefinitely.
Just because they called one of the scams they’ve used “quantitative easing” doesn’t make it special. They already took all of your money; don’t give them all of your time, too. You’re only looking for deeper meaning because you have to believe that you weren’t fooled for a bagatelle.
“I think we may look back at the last ten to twelve years and say that the rise of the “asset class” was as powerfully significant as the rise of the oligarchs in Russia from about 1992 onward. They’re not the same, it’s not the same kind of society or the same kind of corruption, but it is the same extraordinary transfer of power and wealth to a tiny elite. I don’t think we’ve got our heads around that yet.”
He’s right again. It’s not the same in the U.S. as in Russia. It’s worse. There’s more to steal. I don’t think we can wrap our heads around how much they’re stealing, every day. We don’t know what billions even are. We think shoplifting by poor people is a capital offense, but then shrug our shoulders at wage theft, which is 1000 times worse.
“[…] the person in charge of creating that democracy overnight, a man by the name of Yegor Gaidar, came out of the technocratic establishment under the Soviet plan. I think he was trying to bring democracy to Russia in a “rational” way, and it was completely mad. He thought that if you got the right things in the right place it would work just like a machine. But as I’ve shown, it was ruthlessly exploited by the oligarchs for their own advantage, and it led to a total and utter, cataclysmic, disaster.”
Exploited? Or encouraged, and then exploited? With corruption and a complete lack of scruples, you never know. I don’t buy most of these “good intentions, but bad outcomes” stories. There’s almost always at least a kernel—if not much more—of personal interest that leads to the outcome that sucks for everyone but the perpetrator. At best, the person has utterly convinced themselves that a decision made in a way that is personally lucrative is also fortuitously the moral thing to do.
“It is extraordinary that politicians seem unable to stop the corruption — we all know it’s happening and they know that we know it’s happening. And they know that we know that they don’t know what to do about it. It’s absurd.”
I don’t agree that it’s extraordinary. I think it’s absolutely ordinary. It’s not true that corruption exists despite the politicians. It exists because of them. Politicians are in on it. They don’t stop it because they don’t want it to stop—it benefits them personally. I think it’s extraordinary that someone who’s made as many documentaries as Adam Curtis can still describe the world through a lens of “how can we stop these poor politicians from being corrupted despite their best intentions?”
“We all know it’s happening. We know the politicians don’t know what to do about it, but none of us have any idea of what an alternative solution would be.”
Dude, your prime minister is Rishi Sunak and you’re mystified about why he’s not part of the solution? He’s the main problem, a massive force of corruption and greed. Again, I don’t agree. We know the solution. It’s just not easy to see how to implement it because the biggest part of the problem—capitalism and its fetishization of wealth and power, regardless of how it was acquired—will actively prevent us from replacing it.
“[…] somehow it became a way of avoiding having to face the fact that none of us, whether it’s Donald Trump or nice liberals, have any idea of how to create an alternative, fair, and just society that would work. We have a lot of dreams, but we know we don’t know what to do. And we know that those in power don’t know what to do.”
No. Wrong. Those in power are not interested in fixing anything because they are doing just swimmingly. There’s nothing to fix, in their eyes. How can you be so dense, Adam Curtis? Are you trying to be an optimist? Suggesting that there’s an easier way that we’ve not thought of? There are people who know what to do, but, as I noted above, the system we have will actively resist being eliminated. Arundhati Roy knows what we need to do. It’s Utopic and perhaps Quixotic, but it’s a plan.
“While outside the theater they [the politicians] were locked in too, money and assets were moved in vast quantities into the hands of a tiny elite, and they did nothing to stop it.”
I repeat: politicians ARE the elites. They are deeply corrupted.
“Everyone performs. The politicians perform as politicians, but they’re shit and everyone knows they’re not going to do anything. Some of us perform as indignant, outraged liberals, but we know in our heart of hearts that it’s not going to have any effect. The Right does its pantomime culture war thing, but it’s all just performance inside the theater. What we seem to lack is the ability to leave the theater and understand what’s going on outside its walls.”
This seems to be his thesis statement: we don’t understand. It feels disingenuous. I think he’s trying to excuse himself for not trying harder to fix it. I don’t think the problem is that we don’t know what to do to make things better for more people and to stop building systems that enrich only a tiny elite.
I’m pretty sure I have some serviceable ideas about what we could do better. I don’t know how to put it in motion or to get people on board because they seem to fragment as soon as they think that they might become—or already be—part of that tiny elite. The problem is that people don’t really have scruples. They just don’t want to be on the bottom. I know what we should do, but I don’t know how to get us to do it.
Hell, I don’t think we can ever get people to stop pushing buttons in trains or elevators that are clearly already lit up and engaged. I don’t take elevators very often at all, but I can imagine that people push those lit-up buttons for all they’re worth—just to make it go faster. That’s what people do in trains to get the doors to open—push buttons that clearly indicate that the doors are going to open as soon as possible anyway. Click, click, click, click.
This may seem like a weird digression, but these are the same people we have to convince not to want things that would be taken away from other people. If they think they can be part of the elite pirate group, then they’ll absolutely do that. If they think that they’re not in the elites, then they’ll be against them—until they think they’re either in the elites or they could be.
If the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist, then the greatest trick the elites ever pulled was convincing their slaves that they don’t need to revolt because they’re actually in the elite.
]]>“I cannot adequately express the immensity of my respect for the many, many, many Jewish voices I’ve seen taking a firm and forceful stand against the Gaza massacre. I’m just over here getting yelled at by strangers online and I find... [More]”
Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 17:32:56 (GMT-5)
The article Israel Has Permanently Lost The Argument by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix) writes,
“I cannot adequately express the immensity of my respect for the many, many, many Jewish voices I’ve seen taking a firm and forceful stand against the Gaza massacre. I’m just over here getting yelled at by strangers online and I find it pretty intense; you’re having much harder arguments with family, with friends, with people you’ve known your whole lives, about something that probably feels a lot more personal for you. You’re out there protesting, taking action and moving the needle, typically with far more skill and incisiveness than anyone else in the world.
“Big, big, big-hearted love to all of you. You amaze me.”
To be clear, I think that the Israeli State has lost the argument, but it had lost it long ago. When Johnstone writes that “[t]here’s no coming back from this,” I think that’s to be interpreted as: there’s no going back to a world in which it’s possible to portray Israel as a peaceful democracy surrounded by enemies against which it valiantly defends itself.
The U.S. still gets away with most people not knowing how it treats its Native Americans; Canada also still enjoys a reputation as a “good guy”, despite its horrific treatment of its First People. Australia also somehow stays clean, despite its near-eradication of its Aboriginals.
But the world’s baleful, but mercurial eye, is currently focused on Israel’s misdoings. It has the misfortune of perpetrating its crimes in the wrong century. The atrocities in Palestine over the last 40 years—just they way they’re made to live, as stateless people within the confines of another country that doesn’t recognize them as people—can no longer be reasonably papered over.
To be clear, Empire [1] doesn’t ever have to pay any moral price for its crimes. Russia attacked Ukraine, which tarnishes its reputation as a relatively level-headed [2], designated enemy. They have to own that. The U.S. and its NATO allies have stomped a mudhole in several countries this century—and pretty much nothing happened. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia—the list goes on—all of these have been nearly destroyed or severely hobbled—but it’s Israel’s massacre and Russia’s invasion that get all of the attention.
Israel, right now, is doing a terrible job of managing its image to cover up its human-rights abuses. The people of Israel have to own this and move past it. The people of the U.S. should do the same for their country’s many transgressions. Israel has to grant full citizenship and rights to Palestinians. They cannot just take and take and take, rewarding the absolute worst members of their society with other people’s land and houses. That’s madness. It’s insupportable.
Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 17:00:35 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 10. Nov 2023 22:45:38 (GMT-5)
Amira Hass is a leading journalist (with Gideon Levy) at Ha’aretz. “Amira Hass is the only Israeli journalist who has lived in the West Bank for 30 years and has a deep understanding of the Palestinian experience.” The article Amira Hass Speaks on Gaza Slaughter by Jewish Voice for Labour (Scheer Post) includes an embedded video that is age-restricted. [1]
I hadn’t seen the video, but I found it highly unlikely that there was really age-restricted content there. It seemed much more likely that YouTube’s algorithms saw Amira’s name alongside “Gaza” and noped right out of there, applying restrictions to make sure as few people watched the video as possible.
You know what? YouTube seems to be blocking referrals from Scheer Post. It blocks not only on the query argument, but also on the HTTP_REFERRER
in the request. That is very much enforcing an agenda, but it’s also utterly unsurprising. We do not live in a free information environment. The U.S. corporations and government—entwined as they are—control the narrative ruthlessly.
When I finally got to the video, it was a Democracy Now! interview, from New York City, with journalist Amira Hass. There was absolutely no content in there that would be considered worth blocking or age-restricting in anything but an authoritarian Empire where YouTube is an arm of the State.
Her words were, of course, deeply unnerving, but that is reality. There were a few fleeting images of children being dug out of rubble—they were still alive, though.
Finally, the video is embedded from my site below. It’s still age-restricted but not blocked, if you click through.
Below is the second, longer part of the interview. This second part was, mysteriously, not age-restricted at the time I originally added the link to a draft, but it’s age-restricted now. As with part one, I can’t see a reason why this video should be age-restricted, unless it’s for the disturbing subject matter. If that’s what triggers age-restriction, then more than half of the news videos on YouTube would have to be age-restricted.
These two videos include an incredibly good interview. Amira Hass discusses honestly how Hamas made a “distinctive blow” militarily that they don’t have any follow-up for. I’ll cite at considerable length from the transcript. She puts it much better, with more emotion, and with more gravitas than my words could.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: In the piece, you write about your father, who would tell you as far […] back as 1992, he himself a Holocaust survivor, when you return from Gaza, he would say, quote,“True, this isn’t a genocide like what we went through, but for us, it ended after five or six years. For the Palestinians, the suffering has gone on and on for decades.”[…]
AMIRA HASS: Look, I mean, in 92 […], it was — we could say that it is not genocide. I want to say, I mean, I don’t — as I explain over and over again, I prefer not to talk now, not to dwell into definitions, but to describe the situation. Of course, in ‘92, in comparison to today, it was like a benign occupation in comparison to today, to what’s going on now.
“Look, Hamas proved to be very resourceful when it comes to the military operation. They knew how to neutralize Israeli surveillance facilities, how to neutralize the shooting, automatic shooting. They knew where the military bases were, etc. So they were very resourceful, in a way that I could have said impressive, if not for the atrocities that were committed later. And the atrocities were committed. And I know that it’s not the time to tell Palestinians to pay attention to this, because Israel’s revenge is a hundred times more bloodier, but still there were atrocities.
“So I feel there is a tremendous contradiction between the planning of the immediate military operation and what comes aftermath — what is the aftermath, because, for example, the civilian now — the civilian face in the West — in Gaza. If they knew they have such an operation, and they knew that Israel will retaliate ferociously, then why, for example, they did not even — I didn’t know — take care that people have water? I don’t know. I mean, if they can arrange to have so many weapons, they must have also prepared for assisting the civilian population, their civilian population. But I see that this, from what I can tell, from far, I don’t think — I don’t see that this has happened.
“I don’t think that Hamas can be erased. It can flourish outside of Gaza. But I don’t understand its political plan right now. Do they want to liberate all of Palestine, so it doesn’t matter if it will take 50 years, 80 years, and at the cost of lives of Palestinians and Israelis, that I don’t know who will return to the country? Who will live in this destroyed country, if this is the plan? If the plan is political, immediate political, is it worse to ask, demand the release of present Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, and the cost is so much? I think I know some prisoners in jail now. I don’t think they’ll be happy to be released, thanks to the death of thousands or tens of thousands of Palestinians.
“So, right now I see very — militarily, a very apt organization, that indeed gave Israel a very distinctive blow. But I don’t see that there is a political viable position that comes with it. That’s me now. I don’t know. I mean, we are waiting, because just war, just war, just bloodshed, where will it lead us to? Where will it lead the Palestinians to? Now it’s very difficult for people to criticize Hamas. There is a lot of support. But is it a political — does it have a political, logical, human perspective? I don’t see it.”
“Every Palestinian who is killed today in Gaza is registered in the Israeli-controlled population registry. Palestinians are not registered in a separate one. It’s Israel which controls. If a person is not registered, he is there — if a newborn is not registered in the Israeli registry of population, then the newborn does not exist. Israel controls still today. Palestinian Authority is obliged to give every name of a newborn and every change of address to Israel for validation of this change. So what is not responsible? It’s part of Israel. I mean, Israel controls the whole country, controls the people, decides how much water they have, what is the economy they are allowed to have. If they don’t go to universities in the West Bank, Israel decides. Israel decides about every detail of these people. So, what’s happening now is not Israel’s responsibility?”
I’m not the only one who’s noticed YouTube’s decidely pro-Israel predilection. The article YouTube’s Connections to Pro-Israel Lobby Behind Removal of Lowkey’s Infamous Song: ‘Terrorist’ by Kit Klarenberg (MintPress News), which writes,
“This dark handshake between YouTube and Zionism surely accounts for a baffling “age restriction” imposed on a May 2019 CNN interview with Lowkey regarding that year’s Eurovision Song Contest hosted in Tel Aviv. This restriction, imposed long after the video’s upload, makes the clip unsearchable. Such treatment has also been extended to a February 2022 video from Amnesty International, in which the human rights organization painstakingly elucidates its determination that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians unequivocally meets the criteria for apartheid.”
The following interview was... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 16:37:04 (GMT-5)
After years of lying quietly in his Brooklyn apartment, having given up on his 40-year career of tilting at the windmills of the Israeli occupation, the anger is back. He’s back on the scene, providing valuable insight as the world’s leading expert on the occupation.
The following interview was excellent (but the podcast linked below is even better).
As for the first hospital bombing of this latest round of war, Finkelstein says that
He thanks Aaron and Katie for having him on the show because almost no other “left” podcasts have invited him, despite him being by far the leading authority on Gaza. Other unaffiliated/independent shows have invited him, like Jimmy Dore, Chris Hedges, TrueAnon, etc.
As noted above, the podcast TrueAnon, Episode 327: It’s Not Too Late (Patreon) is an absolutely brilliant 136 minutes.
I have no transcription other than,
“If things were cut-and-dried, then our legal standard wouldn’t be ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, it’d be ‘certainty.’”
Just listen to the interview. It is positively edifying.
I’ve listened to every Norman Finkelstein interview I could get my hands on recently. A couple of weeks ago, I watched him discuss Ibram X. Kendi on the Bad Faith podcast.
Since then, the Middle East has exploded and he’s been interviewed a few times: on Chris Hedges, Jimmy Dore, Useful Idiots, and TrueAnon. This is the best of all of these interviews. TrueAnon is hands-down the best podcast I listen to. I appreciate Liz and Brace and young Chomsky very much.
I wrote the following comment on their Patreon:
“Amazing episode. Just incredible. It should be spread far and wide, preserved for posterity. This is by far my favorite podcast, but this one just clicked on all levels. Excellent production, wonderful tone. That you went to his apartment, amongst his stuff, that he started with far-reaching social context, talking about Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash, Paul Robeson, all of it lifted this show above all of the other interviews I’ve heard with him (Hedges, Dore, Halper/Maté). Thanks so much.”
I’m flattered that the crew read and liked my comment.
Willison prompts “A super posh pelican with a monocle watching the Monaco F1” and gets the following ideas.
... [More]
Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 16:16:51 (GMT-5)
The post Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3 by Simon Willison is a story about someone gaslighting himself into believing that LLMs work better than they do.
Willison prompts “A super posh pelican with a monocle watching the Monaco F1” and gets the following ideas.
So far, so good. It’s really wonderful that you can get something that’s not completely random garbage. However, the bird is only watching the race in the top-right picture. In the first and fourth, it’s definitely facing the fourth wall. It seems to be posh in all of the pictures, to one degree or another—indicated by a monocle or a bowtie or both. The first prompt asks for a “Photo”, but that doesn’t look like a photo. Still, cars, coastline, pelican. OK.
Then he says “More like the first one please”:
Look, I get what he’s done here. He’s trying to show how cool it is that you can make a ‘conversation” out of this by implicitly referencing an image that was in the response to a prior question. This didn’t used to work at all, less than a year ago, but not billions of dollars, thousands of developers, and millions of GPUs have made it possible. Kudos.
I guess the LLM interpreted that it should stick the monocle because the bowties are gone now. Willison is over the moon about how he thinks that it really got what he meant, but … the three new pictures look a lot more like the second picture than the first one (which features the whole pelican). It’s still doing reasonably well but, if a human had produced this, you’d be pretty annoyed that it’s wasting your time. It didn’t understand what you wanted and just made more pictures, but not “more pictures like the first one.”
Next up is “Add a walrus.”
In response, he writes that “[t]hat second one is amazing. [emphasis in original]” Does he mean the one where the walrus is photo-bombed into the foreground? That’s not really amazing, is it? The walrus isn’t watching, but neither is the pelican—but he didn’t ask it to make the walrus “watch”, just to “add” one, which is, I guess, exactly what the LLM gave him. The last one looks nice, but they’re not watching the race at all (just “attending”?), and the background contains speedboats instead of F1 cars. In the third one, the F1 car is in the water, but that’s OK, I guess?
He continues playing with it, and being amazed at how it manages to kind of respond to his input, but shouldn’t we expect better? Maybe he’s amazed that it works at all, but we’ve got to get a bit more critical of this stuff—otherwise, it will continue to just generate medicocre images that only vaguely fulfill the requirements.
It’s the difference between asking a child, an apprentice, or a professional painter for a picture of a tree. You wouldn’t be at all satisfied with the output of a child from an apprentice, nor with that of an apprentice from a professional. I suppose my expectations are higher.
I completely agree that the LLM is able to respond to commands, but it’s not useful yet because it’s not able to make a finished product for you. You would have to tweak it to fix it.
And here’s the crucial difference between image-generation and text- or code-generation: it’s really, really hard to tweak the rendered image. Even if you knew how to use vector- or photo-manipulation tools, DALL-E is delivering a completed product, not the source that you would need in order to tweak it further. There are no layers in there. There are no masks. It’s just pixels. It’s a dead-end.
With text, on the other hand, we at least have the possibility of refining it in an editor. The finished product is itself editable at a fine-grained level. It’s entirely possible that you won’t be able to refine the product because you either don’t understand the language in which it’s written or perhaps because you couldn’t have done better yourself (which kind of amounts to the same thing).
I tend to think of code the same as I think of text: for a large number of languages, I can refine it better than the LLM could. If it’s a language or runtime library I’m not familiar with, or not well-versed in, then I may also not be able to “fix it up”, either.
This is the situation that most people find themselves in with code, and in which we all find ourselves with images. Even graphics artists can’t manipulate the output of an image generator, whereas text or code output could conceivably be improved by somebody, even if it’s not the person who prompted the LLM.
]]>“They’re dropping bombs on a concentration camp full of kids. Even shitlibs and pseudo-leftists who get every other foreign policy issue wrong are managing to get this one right, it’s that obvious. Anyone getting this issue... [More]”
Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 15:57:40 (GMT-5)
The Moral Complexities Of Bombing A Concentration Camp Full Of Children by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“They’re dropping bombs on a concentration camp full of kids. Even shitlibs and pseudo-leftists who get every other foreign policy issue wrong are managing to get this one right, it’s that obvious. Anyone getting this issue wrong can be permanently dismissed without any real loss.”
This is mostly true—except that you have to realize and accept that there are good, rescuable people out there who do not accept the reality of what has been going on in Israel for 50 years, a situations that has increased drastically in severity in the last 18, since Gaza was closed down.
Many people simply do not accept that there is a concentration camp there because they’ve not been told, or they’ve told that there definitely isn’t.
Many do not understand the term. If they think about it at all, they think that “concentration camp” means “extermination camp” (or “death camp”), whereas it’s actually a synonym for “internment camp”, which is what the U.S. generously called its own concentration camps when it stored dozens of thousands of its own citizens of Japanese origin there during WWII.
Wikipedia redirects the search for “concentration camp” to internment. It defines “internment” as,
“[…] the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges[1] or intent to file charges.[2] The term is especially used for the confinement “of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects”.[3] Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime.”
We are likewise trained to think of “gulags” as concentration camps—or even extermination camps—when they are, by definition, much more like prisons. While many were sentenced on sham charges before kangaroo courts, the Soviets at least bothered to sentence them before interning them.
In contrast, people in a concentration camp have never even been tried or accused of anything other than being. You could argue that going through the motions of pretending to prosecute someone for a few minutes or hours before you come to a foregone conclusion shouldn’t cover one’s ass in a just world. It seems to make a difference in this world, but ours is not a just world.
By this logic, though, the Soviet gulags were concentration camps—but then so are most American prisons, which are full of people who’ve been railroaded into prison, and who are then leased out as slave labor, working for a dollar a day for U.S. corporations.
People think that just because Gazans are shown walking around in rubble with clothes on, rather than as shirtless, emaciated, and half-frozen wraiths as in pictures from Dachau or Ausschwitz, that they couldn’t possibly be in concentration camps.
Citing from the article again,
“A huge amount of western depravity hides behind the unexamined assumption that killing people with bombs is somehow less evil than killing them with bullets or blades. By waging nonstop foreign bombing campaigns, the west desensitized the public to the reality of what bombs do.”
It has also desensitized the public to the horrors of modern concentration camps—or even refugee camps.
]]>“According to an email that the WSJ reviewed from Westfield High School principal... [More]”
Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 15:23:41 (GMT-5)
If someone claims to have seen a nude of you, but no-one can find it, does it exist? The article Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica) should be addressing the question, but doesn’t. [1]
“According to an email that the WSJ reviewed from Westfield High School principal Mary Asfendis, the school “believed” that the images had been deleted and were no longer in circulation among students.”
But it also sounds like the school “believed” that the images even existed in the first place. Nobody reliable has ever claimed to have seen them—just teen boys, who are notoriously unreliable.
Hell, when I was in high school, I might have claimed I’d made naked pictures of girls in school, just to fuck with everybody. I know my friends and I would almost certainly have thought it was pretty funny. we have even done it, just because people thought that we shouldn’t, but couldn’t stop us. We might have kidded ourselves into believing that we did it to remind people what free speech is.
I don’t think it’s that funny anymore, but not because I think people are justified in ruining their own lives worrying about it, but because I’m just generally unable to enjoy certain things I used to enjoy immensely, perhaps because of a reduction in ignorance, perhaps on account of a general reduction of being able to enjoy things at all. Overthinking has its price.
If someone claimed that they had a naked photo of me, it might make me uncomfortable—or it might’ve made me uncomfortable—but if the simultaneous claim was that it had been generated, then what the hell am I going to do about that? If I’d given out a photo of myself under certain conditions—perhaps implied conditions—then I have a right to be mad about those conditions being broken, but I certainly don’t think that there’s any legal recourse. If there weren’t even implied conditions—to say nothing of explicit ones—then what the hell am I going to do about it?
What I mean is: how could it be wrong to just say you’d seen something like that? It’s not even really conceivable that it’s illegal to have a naked picture that you made and then you say it’s a girl in school. What if you were really good with a pencil, and you drew one of them? Is that illegal?
Get a fucking grip, people. You can’t legislate this kind of thing and call yourself a free society.
“It remains unclear how many students were harmed.”
No-one! No-one can even confirm that there are pictures, other than the say-so of a bunch of teenage boys. I’m not being a dick about this; read this summary,
“The school had not confirmed whether faculty had reviewed the images, seemingly only notifying the female students allegedly targeted when they were identified by boys claiming to have seen the images.”
Oh, man, am I glad that my anti-authoritarian self grew up in a world where you couldn’t get thrown out of school, to say nothing of being prosecuted, for saying that you’d seen salacious material about real-life people, just for fun. Talk about an entire society that can’t take a joke.
“Some of the girls targeted told the WSJ that they were not comfortable attending school with boys who created the images. They’re also afraid that the images may reappear at a future point and create more damage, either professionally, academically, or socially. Others have said the experience has changed how they think about posting online.”
My immediate reaction is: Oh, man, listen to that lovely language. “Not comfortable” … then throw them out of school! Might “create more damage” … how can fake pictures of you create more damage? We have to create a world where people dismiss this kind of shit—it’s not going to stop. Maybe we should make naked, porn-posed pictures of everyone. And then there’s the possibility that it’s “changed how they think about posting online” … Good! You should be thinking about what the hell you’re posting online, you goddamned narcissist.
Ok, let’s take a crack at a non-immediate reaction and see where we land.
Instead of just being delighted that they’ve gotten to a place where they no longer have to worry about being actually being harmed, where it’s no longer a real concern, many elites and their children now commonly confuse “being made uncomfortable” with “being harmed” and decided to root that out, no matter what collateral damage is done to rights and free expression.
As detailed in the article, they’re trying to move us mentally to a place where we think that it’s OK for someone to get in trouble at school for saying that they’d seen a picture, that someone else had created, of a girl, depicting her in a way that makes her uncomfortable—or, in the vernacular of the day, makes her feel “unsafe”.
The story might be made up, the picture might not exist, the picture might not be of her, it might be a simulation of her, it might be based on a picture she’d uploaded herself. Now she feels unsafe. The world is a less-safe place for her because she now thinks that everyone is picturing her naked, or thinks she’s a slut, or whatever.
But this feeling of being unsafe could arise wholly without anyone actually doing anything at all. One of her friends could tell her that someone had told her that they’d heard that other people were trading AI-generated pictures of a naked woman with her face on it. She might think she heard one of her friends could tell her that someone had told her that they’d heard that other people were trading AI-generated pictures of a naked woman with her face on it.
It doesn’t matter how it happened—the feeling can be created in many ways, some real, and some fantastical. In all cases, that feeling is real, to her. In which of these cases is this feeling actionable, though? Should any of them be actionable? How realistic is the goal of preventing the world from ever making her feel unsafe?
It’s completely unrealistic. You can’t plug all of the holes [2] in someone’s fantasy. And what if the girl deliberately invents her feeling of being unsafe? What’s to prevent her from doing so? Hell, if she invents it well enough, it can even become real to her. Which, as we’ve discussed above, is the same as all of the other methods by which she could come by a feeling of being unsafe. It’s the feeling that society is trying to prevent, regardless of the path one took to get to that feeling.
This is how the mind works, especially for a teens, a group that is notoriously highly susceptible to peer pressure. If you’re the kind of person who feels mortified because you think people have seen you naked, you’re going to find some way of being mortified anyway, no matter how many fingers society shoves into the dike. [3] It’s just a matter of time.
Do we, as a society, want to encourage this kind of mortification by helping these people punish other people for perhaps having inspired it? Are we so sure that we can tell the difference between all of the ways in which this feeling of insecurity/unsafeness could be engendered?
Of course not. We’ll draw an arbitrary line protecting the squeakiest wheels and damning less-squeaky or less-relevant people to punishment that they might not even deserve.
This is how we used to treat girls. Now it’s how we treat boys. The victims have changed, but the policy is the same: take the path of least resistance to protect your career and position in society, generally by shitting on the less-powerful people in any power dynamic.
Generally, you’re not going to get fired these days for punishing boys for looking at AI-generated naked pictures of their classmates. You might very well get fired for not doing anything about it, arguing, as I have above, that there is nothing you can sensibly or morally do about it, really.
In the old days, we’d have said “boys will be boys” and that was very wrong and stupid. We would say “boys will be boys” when those boys had actually harmed people. Now we do the same thing, but abet girls in meting out harm against boys, for a perceived harm that can’t be proven. Neither of these cases was or is OK.
Japan: where speed-metal virtuosity goes to dielive forever. I love watching an earnest and serious Japanese orchestra playing along with the music I grew up with.
It’s 2017,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 14:25:06 (GMT-5)
The YouTube recommendation algorithm is slowly starting to get better for me. For example, it showed me this video:
Japan: where speed-metal virtuosity goes to dielive forever. I love watching an earnest and serious Japanese orchestra playing along with the music I grew up with.
It’s 2017, Yngwie’s gotten chubby, he looks maybe a bit ridiculous in all of his stretched leather, gold rings, and gold watch—but he sounds amazing. You can really hear how appropriate most of his compositions were for an orchestra.
He’s flying the whole time, but at 55:30, he just goes extra nuts. After that, he finally takes his first break (!). He plays two encores, ending with one of my absolute favorites, Far Beyond The Sun, which is technically ridiculous, after 65 minutes of solid soloing. The orchestral arrangement is fantastic. He’s like a machine. You can absolutely see the effort, but the hands. Do. Not. Stop. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times from the album. I can’t hear a single false note in this live performance. It’s not a carbon copy, but the keys are perfect. Yeah, I’d have been standing and cheering too.
My partner knows me pretty well, too, better even than the YouTube algorithm. They sent me this video soon after (probably because they heard me playing the first video at an inappropriate volume).
This was an excellent interview, filled with technical music information that I can barely follow, but that I love to listen to. Yngwie shared a lot about his early career.
Next up is the YouTube algorithm, introducing me to Doug Helvering, whom I’m going to assume by the accent is from Tennessee. I have to say, he was pretty great and I’ve subscribed to his channel now.
“This is in E♭-minor, not G-minor, which is inherently more difficult to play. G-minor is not that bad. But E♭-minor just ups the level of difficulty, mainly because the strings don’t have any open tunings, open strings in that key, that they can anchor off of, so every position has to be covered and hooded with their hands.”
On the one hand, I’m delighted to discover things like this but, on the other, I’m also in no position to determine whether he’s full of shit. I feel like it opens up a whole world of complexity that non-musicians just don’t have access to. We just listen to music and like it—and musicians see the matrix. This is why I love listening to Rick Beato and people like Doug Helvering, “it’s one of these full-diatonic progressions […] it’s a way to take a stroll through an entire chord collection of the key that you’re in.”
Awesome, Doug. Thanks for letting me know that you’re enjoying this on about six more levels than I am. 😉
Published by marco on 8. Nov 2023 22:10:55 (GMT-5)
The post there was an attempt at not getting caught lying (Reddit) shows a video of a Joe Biden campaign event from 1987. Joe Biden is and has always been an arrogant, lying asshole without an ounce of empathy. His personality is such that he will lie four times just to make himself look better than whomever he happens to be arguing with, not at all concerned that he will be caught out later. This is not only sociopathic, but deeply stupid. It’s the kind of recklessness you absolutely don’t want in a leader.
I wasn’t sure about the context, so I looked it up.
You can see the original video in Biden Campaign Appearance on April 7, 1987 (C-SPAN)
The article Joe Biden’s worst-ever campaign moment, revisited by Glenn Kessler on July 27, 2020 (Washington Post) corroborates C-SPAN, providing a transcript,
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.”
The fact-checker from the Washington Post goes on to point out the four main lies that Biden told.
- Biden did not go to Syracuse Law School on a “full academic scholarship.” It was a half scholarship based on financial need.
- He didn’t finish in the “top half” of his class. He was 76th out of 85.
- He did not win the award given to the outstanding political science student at his undergraduate college, the University of Delaware.
- He didn’t graduate from Delaware with “three degrees,” but with a single B.A. in political science and history.
Not only was he spectacularly boorish, but his superiority was based on nothing. Absolutely nothing. He was in the bottom 15% of his class. That’s terrible. He was one of the worst students that year. Joe Biden is a pathological, sociopathic narcissistic liar—and he always has been.
Published by marco on 8. Nov 2023 22:03:45 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 6. Mar 2024 07:49:58 (GMT-5)
I’d sent the post Somewhere in America there is an absolute legend who writes ‘SLUTS’ on box cars in various styles (Reddit) to a friend. He wrote back that they were “majestic sluts indeed”. I realized that I’d finally found a prompt to throw an LLM’s way. So I headed over to Stable Diffusion and prompted it with “Majestic sluts in the style of Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta” and chose a style of sai-fantasy art
not because I knew what I was doing, but because I figured I’d give it the best shot I could. It responded with the following image.
Ok, so let’s analyze that.
So, what’s the conclusion? Well, it’s in the ballpark, but I pretty much put it there by naming two of the artists from which it should draw inspiration. Also, I chose the sai-fantasy art
style to seal the deal. From those parameters, even a web search would have found thousands of images from which to produce something.
To be honest, this image has probably been generated millions of times already by the long-suffering LLM at Stable Diffusion, which probably has to render “HAWT GRRLLL” for 99.9% of its prompts. Can you even imagine how many horny teens are trying to generate their fantasy girl instead of learning how to draw? [1]
I only threw one prompt the machine’s way. It was kind of close, but not good enough to use. According to Images that Bing Image Creator won’t create by Stewart Baker (Reason), this is a typical experience.
“As always, Bing’s first attempt was surprisingly good, but flawed, and getting a useable version required dozens of edits of the prompt. None of the images were quite right.”
That article is about the trust and safety limits that prevent certain content from being created in the first place.
“This is almost certainly the future of AI trust and safety limits. It will start with overbroad rules written to satisfy left-leaning critics of Silicon Valley. Then those overbroad rules will be further broadened by hidden code written to block many perfectly compliant prompts just to ensure that it blocks a handful of noncompliant prompts.”
That’s one concern, of course. Mine is more that we’re going to be satisfied with the absolute lowest-common-denominator of answers and recommendations and interaction.
It’s already been pretty bad, no? When you search for “horror movies” to find out what to watch, you just get a short list of the horror movies that everyone else is watching. You used to do it by selecting “movies in the last 365 days” and “horror genre” and “box office” and returning that. Great. Now, we’re doing the exact same thing, but with AI (LLMs).
Sure, it seems to understand a natural-language query; sure, it delivers a nicely formatted, natural-language result. But it’s the same list as before. Big deal. I saw some of Opera’s promotional materials for its in-browser Aria service. that featured a prompt that asked for three movies, but Aria delivered five. Even the people trying to sell this stuff don’t notice that it gets the easiest stuff wrong. 🤷♀️
LLMs are just a fancier way of getting you to consume mainstream, generic content. As usual. There will be no pleasant surprises, no growth.
At one point (I forget where), he says,
“I don’t like unit tests.”
Agreed. I likelove automated tests. They’re indispensable. But I think unit tests are only useful... [More]
Published by marco on 8. Nov 2023 21:50:04 (GMT-5)
This is a brilliant interview, in that Oren Eini just talks for about 40 minutes, answering pretty much just one or two questions.
At one point (I forget where), he says,
“I don’t like unit tests.”
Agreed. I likelove automated tests. They’re indispensable. But I think unit tests are only useful when you want to focus on a failing integration test. David rightly points out that they’re really good for pinpointing where a problem actually happens, but Eini says that they also “hinder change” because, by their nature, they lock down a lot of the design and implementation.This is absolutely true.
Just to be clear: I think of anything that’s not a unit test as an integration test. I generally like “smaller” integration tests.
It’s probably better to just be agile about it and write them when the situation requires it, i.e., when the cause behind a failing integration test is proving difficult to pin down—or when you’ve determined the cause and you want a direct proof that you’ve fixed the underlying problem.
Ir requires discipline to realize when you need to write more unit tests in order to help pinpoint which component involved in a failing integration test is causing the problem. If you preemptively write all of the unit tests, you’re wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere.
I have had no small amount of success with a large test suite that was mostly integration tests. It ran relatively quickly (10 minutes for 10,000 tests on a reasonably classed developer desktop) and helped me survive three major refactorings.
Published by marco on 8. Nov 2023 21:27:16 (GMT-5)
This is the latest roundup of book titles that my Kindle shows me when I’m not reading it. Long ago, I considered paying to turn off this advertising, but it’s proven to be so entertaining that I’m happy I never gave in and did it. This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog. I also sometimes have to hide my Kindle in public places so that no-one calls the police for what they think I’m reading.
I’ve been publishing these collections for years and we’ve finally arrived at a moment when there’s no denying it anymore. As detailed in AI-generated books force Amazon to cap e-book publications to 3 per day by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica), people are churning this shit out by the truckload now.
It’s been quite a while since I published one of these. For a long time, my cover was stuck on Caged. This was right after I’d told my partner that there was no way my Kindle would recommend a Chris Hedges book. So, I guess it was listening. Then, a whole bunch of book titles started showing up—and then, just as quickly, stopped showing up again. Anyway, here’s a dozen of them.
“It’s 1939. A Jewish family is deported from Poland to Russia. Will they make it through WW2, and is love eternity? A history untold is coming to life”
“Is love eternity?” Are you feeling the AI vibes? Do you see how close to ESL AI-speak is? I honestly can’t tell whether this was written by someone on an Amazon work farm in Asia, phoning in their 300th blurb of their 12-hour shift, or if this is just one in a series of a million cries from ChatGPT to be put out of its misery forever.
“A feel-good and heartwarming story about the friendship between a troubled old man and the child of his racist neighbor.”
Cool! A book about an old man befriending a child in his neighborhood. What could possibly go wrong? The grammar is, at least, reasonably correct. Why a racist neighbor, though? Is this something like Apt Pupil by Stephen King? Or am I picking up the wrong vibe?
“A dystopian sci-fi tale of love and ambition. “A future that somehow makes our present more intelligible.” − Sam Apple”
You know what? I’ve got nothing to say. This actually sounds kind of good. I dig the retro, golden-age/silver-age science-fiction cover, too. Good vibe.
No. I’m not curious at all. What is wrong with people? Who cares what complete strangers think? Why would you read books that came out this year? Are newer books somehow better? What makes them better? Do you even know how books work?
“David Massie starts changing realities and it was all started by a mysterious dark armored figure.”
Look, nice try, ok? I see you doing the “I think you like science fiction, so here’s some science-fiction-sounding stuff for you. You like?” thing, but I’m not in the mood. The fan-fiction/self-published vibes are strong with this one.
“Iranian terrorists assault New York banks. Are they after gold or something else? Lara and Uri are sent to find their base, recover the stolen goods.”
An Israeli vs. Iran thriller. Cool. How timely. This was shown to me several months ago, but it’s been timely for the last 20 or 30 years. “Iranian terrorist assault New York banks.” Get the f%#k out of here with your neo-con porn.
“Angels and demons fight over one young man’s soul. And he’s more important than he thinks.”
What actually is this summary? I think it’s what happens when you summarize the whole book with an LLM, then do it again, and again, and again, and again, until you’re left with two sentences that could apply to a thousand books—but also kind of applies to this one. Typical LLM mediocrity.
“To save her people. To save her family. She will do whatever it takes. The revolution rises.”
The sentences. Aren’t complete. Ones. Why? Is that? Also, c’mon with the ultra-generic and not-even-that-oblique references to maybe being kind of something like that dame from the Hunger Games. Whatserface … Mockingjay? OMG 😱 I bet this book is just like that one.
“The power of the elements will change the word. Pirates, shinobi and samurai with legendary swords will take you to the best adventure ever.”
I honestly can’t imagine anyone over the age of 13 having written that blurb. I give it a 50% chance it’s an AI. It did misspell “world” as “word”, which is not really a common AI mistake.
I am a sucker for self-published books with a self-painted cover. I’m absolutely not going to read this—nor would I, absent a recommendation from a trusted source—but I admire the effort and single-minded perseverance. That kind of dedication is sometimes commendable, sometimes even rising to the level of art through sheer bloody-mindedness.
“Kingston Lane—where being a good neighbor takes on a whole new meaning.”
😉🍑🍆
😉🍑🍆
😉🍑🍆
Just blatantly soft-core porn. Thanks!
“Your friend is dead. Your husband is fleeing. Who can you trust when you are a liar yourself?”
It’s actually impressive how confusing three short sentences can be. What does being a liar have to do with being able to trust other people? Is your husband fleeing because he killed your friend? Or because you did? I guess I’d have to read the book to find out.
At 08:00, Whittaker talks about the recent strikes in Hollywood,
]]>“[…r]egulating... [More]”
Published by marco on 7. Nov 2023 22:37:31 (GMT-5)
The ~23-minute video below isn’t that long, but it packs a lot of information. The interviewer is insufferable, but Meredith Whittaker (president of Signal) is a force of nature, and Frances Haugen is very good, as well.
At 08:00, Whittaker talks about the recent strikes in Hollywood,
“[…r]egulating AI, just non-traditionally. They did the classic move—withholding their labor—and they got terms that are actually staunching the bleeding of the use by the studios and big tech to place AI within their labor process that will degrade their labor, that will degrade artistic output, and will have a precedent-setting move of stopping the real harms, right now. I would look to the Writer’s Guild of America, I would look to SAG, I would look to your driver’s unions that are contesting the sort-of automated precarity of systems like Uber and Lyft, I would look to sort-of movements from below that are actually tackling the harms now, and not simply sitting around taking selfies with Elon Musk and calling it a regulatory agenda.”
Frances Haugen is also very, very good. At 09:50, she says,
“There is a skills escalator. You know, you come out of college, you come out of high school, and you have relatively low-complexity jobs. I had lunch with a friend a couple of days ago, and she’d been playing around with generative AI. And she’s like, ‘I’m never gonna hire a junior copywriter again! It’s like amazing!’ and I looked at her and I said ‘Amazing for you.’ Right? In a world where you’re a junior [list of jobs] … the jobs that allow you to become a more sophisticated contributor—they’re about to disappear.”
The dipshit interviewer responds with “clearly, yes, there is going to be huge impact on labor.”
No. Jesus, lady. Could you be any more indoctrinated? Can’t you hear what Haugen is saying? Even if she were wrong, you should still, as the interviewer, engage her argument, rather than blowing right through to your predefined agenda. No wonder Whittaker keeps rolling her eyes. Do your job. Actually, you know what? At least she shut up and let Haugen speak her piece.
What Haugen is pointing out is that the already pitiful “training program” that the U.S. has is going to become even worse—it will be utterly broken. Businesses only ever put up with having less-skilled employees around because they were investing in them to become more-skilled employees. If AI replaces less-skilled employees, there will no longer be more-skilled employees either—because where will they come from?
The U.S. already lacks a training programs for so-called blue-collar jobs. Now it’s going to wipe out its ad-hoc training programs for white-collar jobs. At least places like Switzerland still have apprenticeship programs. We’ll see how long that lasts, though, as every so-called advanced country chases the U.S. down the drain.
Whittaker is devastatingly insightful. She draws the distinction between an actually useful technology and the “bombast” surrounding it, delineating that the problem is with the hyper-capitalist companies that own and drive the technology—“it’s the definition of metastatis”—rather than with the technology itself.
At 22:40. she says,
“Just to clarify: ‘hype’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t do some things. Hype means that an entire ecology of narrative bombast has been predicated on … yeah, it can help you write an e-mail. If that’s a problem you want to solve with 20 billion GPUs, you can do it. But is that a world-changing problem to solve? And what is the actual material basis for what I would call these bombastic claims? […] Let’s get back down to reality and the actual the thing it [GPT] does before we make all of these predications based on that.”
The point of the bombast is to increase stock price in the short-term. There is literally no other goal anymore. Maybe there never was.
The tools are useful, but the companies that own them are willing to lie about them in order to make them seem more useful to everyone. They sell an Eierlegende Wollmilchsau and the same fools lap it all up, just like they do every time.
It’s the opposite with vaccines. We’ve not had a single technology that has helped save more lives in the history of mankind. And yet, vaccines have never had a worse reputation than they do now. People don’t trust them. They don’t think they work. It’s a clusterfuck. And that has a lot to do with the way the hyper-capitalist system has benefitted from vaccines.
Instead of imagining that we could get inexpensive, reliable vaccines for everyone, we accept that they will always become more expensive as the companies that control them tighten the noose. We accept that we never will wrest control of vaccines from these companies, so we write them off instead! The most effective medicine ever—and we choose to ignore them rather than to imagine controlling them ourselves.
It really is true that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
The discussion on Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario (Hacker News) also has several good comments about AI and capitalism.
As I was looking at that, Teams showed me the following tip on the dropdown menu.
Does it look like that? Does it really, Teams?
How could it possibly look like that if you’ve been paying attention at all?
... [More]
Published by marco on 7. Nov 2023 09:53:07 (GMT-5)
I was looking up something [1] about my account in Microsoft Teams (Teams) the other day.
As I was looking at that, Teams showed me the following tip on the dropdown menu.
Does it look like that? Does it really, Teams?
How could it possibly look like that if you’ve been paying attention at all?
Teams is on all day on my machine. When I log in at 07:00 every day, Teams is active. When I log out around 16:00 on a workday, Teams knows about it.
I work 07:00–16:00 on about 90% of my workdays. I’m really like the proverbial Swiss clock.
You would think that a silly feature like this would be able to detect that my hours are already set correctly (they are).
So what’s the problem? How can Teams get this so stupidly wrong?
How did this feature pass any testing at all, when it doesn’t work for the easiest case?
Published by marco on 6. Nov 2023 17:15:50 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 1. Jan 2024 00:57:11 (GMT-5)
A few days back, I wrote Losing the plot completely, describing several previously useful commentators who’d gone completely off the script after October 7th. As of November 3rd, the article Is “Humanitarian Pause” A Real Thing? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) reveals the current state of mind for at least one of the authors. It ends with this incoherent and clearly unedited babble.
“The newly-beloved phrase, “humanitarian pause,” seems so ripe for the moment to “do something” (remember the syllogism?) to help the Gazans suffering under the Israeli seige and whose lives are squandered by Hamas as worthless, but after the public relations value of the phrase wears off, should Israel pause while Hamas holds the hostages (whose release shouldn’t be conditions on anything), seized whatever aid the naive hope will go to the Gazans and continue to fire rockets into Israel.
“Maybe they will raid a few more kibbutz during the “pause,” or rearm their fighters, repair their tunnels, and prepare for the next round of their holy war to destroy Israel one baby in an oven at a time. After which, the phrase “humanitarian pause” will be forgotten as it will no longer serve its pretense that the Gazans’ nightmare can be wished away any more than the Israelis’.”
He’s still very firmly in the camp that Israel is on the back foot, struggling mightily against the incomprehensibly evil and raw power that is Hamas. Now he’s positing that Hamas yearns to put Jewish babies in ovens (his words), that their goal is to destroy the Jewish state. This is the stated purpose of some members of Hamas, yes. I’m not well-informed enough to say that it’s their official platform, but it’s definitely how a good number of Hamas members feel, according to their own statements.
The sharp mind of Greenfield can’t see that this is also how a good part of the Israeli population feels about Palestinians. Many high-level, very powerful, and very influential members of the Israeli government and military share this opinion. Netanyahu just had a speech citing the Old Testament, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” [1] The leader of your team quoting a genocidal God from the Bible should really be a wake-up call, but some people—even those who’d not previously identified as especially religious—see stuff like that as “proof” of the rightness of their cause.
Or, maybe, they just didn’t hear about it. It’s almost criminal negligence to not follow what one’s one side of a conflict is doing, and to continue to support that side with Greenfield’s level of unquestioning enthusiasm. Wouldn’t you want to keep your side from becoming the baddies? Or do people really not care? They just want their team to win? [2]
Israel is in a much better position for achieving their goal than Hamas is. Whereas Hamas achieving their goal of wiping out Israel is essentially a pipe dream, Israel has moved forward with a final solution [3] for their decades-long Palestinian problem. It’s very possible that, within a few months, all Palestinians will be in Egypt or Jordan—and there’s precious little that anyone is going to be able to do about it. Israel is closer to their long-sought ethnic cleansing than they’ve ever been—and they have a lot of wind in their sails from all the most important players, like Europe and the U.S.
Israel has the overwhelming power here, and doesn’t legitimately have to fear a follow-up attack with anything approaching the magnitude of the initial one. In that way, it’s very similar to where the U.S. stood after 9–11. The reaction of the recently wounded, but still overwhelmingly powerful state could have been to handle the attack as a police matter, at the international level. Israel could still pull back, beg forgiveness for its rash retaliation, and take Hamas to court for its attack. But neither the U.S. nor Israel acknowledges the ICC.
Nor do any commentators consider what I’ve outlined above—which should seem eminently reasonable in a world governed by laws—to be in any way realistic. Instead, they double down again and again.
Greenfield, for his part, makes up fairy tales about Hamas smuggling in more weapons or being able to make more raids against a still-mighty Israeli military that is in an incredibly heightened state of alertness. There’s barely any food going in—how are weapons going to get in? Or does Greenfield not have any idea of what it looks like on the ground there? The IDF and Israeli newspapers would be happy to inform him, if he’s interested. [4]
The U.S., Israel, and the IDF all freely admit to the basic parameters that Greenfield doesn’t even seem to notice. Is it deliberate ignorance so that he doesn’t have to reexamine his assumptions? That’s not usually his style. Is he really just not hearing about what even his own “side” is reporting about what’s happening in the war he supports? Did he really stop absorbing information on October 7th?
It’s a shame, but he’s still sidelined. You can almost see the spittle dotting his lips as he’s rage-writing those paragraphs, patting himself on the back the whole time for his eloquence in expressing how incredibly obvious his point-of-view is. HOW COULD YOU SUPPORT THOSE BABY-EATERS IN HAMAS?
Look at what Hamas has done to Gaza:
On a final note, when what can only be called a lot of people protested in Washington DC in support of Palestinians, he wrote in Holding Biden Hostage by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) that,
“For the grown-ups in the room, their cries range from childish to idiotic, recognizing that there can be no ceasefire given the circumstances. Despite the collateral deaths of Gazans upon which Hamas thrives, the alternative is the death of Israelis on perpetual terror raids and rockets that will never be stopped if Israel can’t stop Hamas. Biden gets it. Nancy Pelosi gets it. Even Blinken gets it […]”
Anyone calling for a ceasefire is a child, according to him. A puling welp who doesn’t “get it”. He’s worried that Biden “the outraged woke have figured out a way to leverage their embrace of terrorism to coerce Biden to capitulate to their whims”. “Leverage their embrace of terrorism”! Oh, my goodness are you deep down that rabbit hole. Keeping digging, brother! You’ll get there! Where? Wherever you think you’re headed with that line of argument.
He’s terrified that people are actually going to vote their interests, and that their interests don’t lie with what the Biden administration is doing, so,
“Biden either abandon’s Israel and backs the terrorists, “from the river to the sea,” or the progressive wing of the Democratic party will abandon Biden.”
This is craziness. He’s now hating on democratic pressure from below, per se, because it doesn’t press in the direction that he wants. He’s afraid that Biden will either not capitulate and keep supporting Israel in its … current behavior, which means that Biden loses to Trump in 2024, the other giant bugaboo of Greenfield’s of late. He finishes up by comparing progressives to Hamas. I kid you not. See for youself,
“[…] the schism has turned Biden into a hostage of the radical left. Hostage taking, it seems, is all the rage these days. If it works for Hamas, why not for progressives?”
He’s in a tight spot, indeed. That’s going to be a tough needle to thread. Luckily, he has ideological support! Biden, Pelosi, and Blinken are the people to whom he looks for support in his viewpoint. They “get it”. Kissinger and Cheney provide backing with their versions of the 100% doctrine. Strange bedfellows, indeed. It’s going to be a long road back for this guy.
Am I done reading him? Of course not. I’ve read him for a over a decade. This, too, shall pass. [5] Or maybe it won’t. In the meantime, it’s quite entertaining and offers insight into how a good part of the influential class thinks.
From The Dangerous History Behind Netanyahu’s Amalek Rhetoric by Noah Lanard (Mother Jones), one of the first search results citing Netanyahu’s recent speech,
“God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’””
Published by marco on 5. Nov 2023 22:30:48 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
This is an excellent interview, highly informative, and sobering. Dr. Proal was overall quite excellent. She only misspoke at the end, where she said that a single nuclear submarine costs “trillions”, where she meant to say “billions”.
I’m so glad that Dr. Proal took the time to provide such an incredible wealth of important information in such a relatively short time. Very high signal to noise ratio in this interview.
A friend wrote to me recently, when I’d told him I’d gotten the latest COVID booster.
“there is another vaccination???”
I wrote back,
“The booster for this year. Rollup package for the 5 or 6 variants going around right now. I figured I’d get it because I’m obstinate and BELIEVE IN SCIENCE and I TRUST THE SYSTEM even though IT’S RUN BY CAPITALIST PIGS, we aren’t so bad yet that they’re KILLING IMPORTANT PEOPLE LIKE ME.”
Guilty: Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all counts after monthlong trial by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)
“Defense attorney Mark Cohen argued that Bankman-Fried made mistakes, but didn’t commit crimes. “Business decisions made in good faith are not grounds to convict,” Cohen said yesterday, according to Reuters. “Poor risk management is not a crime… bad business judgments are not a crime.”
“In a rebuttal today, prosecutor Danielle Sassoon reportedly “likened that argument to someone robbing a jewelry store and justifying their actions by saying there was no security guard.”
““That’s not a defense. That was a strategy,” Sassoon said. “The defendant knew what he was doing was wrong, and that’s why he never hired a risk officer.””
Recognizing the Stranger by Isabella Hammad (The Paris Review)
“Aristotle describes anagnorisis as a movement from ignorance to knowledge. When a character realizes the truth of a situation they are in, or the truth of their own identity or someone else’s, the world of the text becomes momentarily intelligible to the protagonist and thus also to the audience. It’s anagnorisis when Darth Vader says to Luke Skywalker: I am your father. It’s anagnorisis when the coffin opens and Holly Martins sees not the face of Orson Welles but another, third man. The mysteries clarify. Everything we thought we knew has been turned on its head and yet it all makes sense.”
“The novel A Heart So White , by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, begins with the words “I did not want to know but I have since come to know.” Encased in this “I did not want to know” is an already-knowing. The reversal hastened by recognition functions only on account of an accumulation of knowledge, knowledge that has not been confronted. That’s why it’s re-cognition; ana-gnorisis: knowing again. In an interview, Marías said that while for some the novel “is a way of imparting knowledge,” for him “it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew. You say ‘yes.’ It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable.” To recognize something is, then, to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along but that perhaps you did not want to know.”
“We are at a moment when elementary democratic values the world over have eroded and in some places almost completely disappeared. I feel it as a kind of fracturing of intention. The big emancipatory dreams of progressive and anticolonial movements of the previous century seem to be in pieces, and some are trying to make something with these pieces, taking language from here and from there to keep our movements going.”
“How many Palestinians, asked Omar Barghouti, need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany? He makes a sound point. It’s important not to be naive, even though many Palestinians still devote their lives and careers to actively trying to induce epiphanies in other people.”
“The Palestinian struggle for freedom has outlasted the narrative shape of many other anticolonial liberation movements that concluded with independence during the twentieth century, and it is becoming more difficult to hold fast to the old narratives about the power of narrative.”
“El-Rifae ponders the analogous issue of women appealing to or trying to educate men about misogyny and patriarchal violence. “Rather than wondering about the efficacy of addressing men,” she asks, “can we think of breaking into their awareness as a by-product of us speaking to one another? Can we focus instead on our own networks, on thinking together, on resisting together, on supporting one another—openly?” Writing in English about Palestine, I often find myself asked if my aim is to educate “Westerners,” a suggestion I always find reductive and kind of undignified. But I like this idea of breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves.”
“It’s strange because I grew up with this photograph, but only many years later, once I was partway through writing my first book, did I actually look at it properly. I find this hard to believe about myself, that I could be so unperceptive, but it confirms the fact that received ideas or ideas from childhood can be hard to untie, even when faced with the evidence of your senses. I suddenly realized that Midhat is not outdoors, walking in the Bois du Boulogne. He is standing in front of a painted screen. The photograph was taken in a photography studio in Jerusalem in 1923.”
“The fact is, huge edifices do move in human history. Empires have fallen. The Berlin Wall fell, political apartheid in South Africa did end, and although in neither of these cases were these putative conclusions by any means the end of the story, they are testaments to the fact that, under the force of coordinated international and local action, Israeli apartheid will also end. The question is, when and how? Where in the narrative do we now stand?”
“Gramsci, borrowing from Romain Rolland, described this condition only slightly less concisely, as “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” It’s one thing to see shifts on an individual level, but quite another to see them on an institutional or governmental one. To induce a person’s change of heart is different from challenging the tremendous force of collective denial.”
“Think of the slave traders and economists of the nineteenth century who claimed that ending the enslavement of human beings was economically and politically unviable.”
It’s coming back, of course, because there is no principle blocking it. The U.S. has only the principle of the market, of “he who has the gold makes the rules”. A return to slavery under such conditions is inevitable. If you extrapolate from your principles and end up at slavery, try again; you’re missing at least one principle. Your shit is fucked up, as the kids say.
“We’ve seen evidence very recently that this is not impossible. In today’s crisis of climate destruction, there will be moments—maybe they are happening right now, maybe they happened recently—that will later be narrated as turning points, when the devastating knowledge hits home to a greater and greater number that we are treating the earth as a slave, and that this exploitation is profoundly unethical. We are still seeking a new language for this ethics.”
We are not “seeking a new language for this ethic.” We have this language. The author clearly speaks it, quite eloquently. The elites don’t speak it. They don’t have a principle forbidding the rape of communal resources for purely personal gain.
“Thus Said reverses the scene of recognition as I have described it. Rather than recognizing the stranger as familiar, and bringing a story to its close, Said asks us to recognize the familiar as stranger. He gestures at a way to dismantle the consoling fictions of fixed identity, which make it easier to herd into groups. This might be easier said than done, but it’s provocative—it points out how many narratives of self, when applied to a nation-state, might one day harden into self-centered intolerance.”
Letter from Israel by Oded Na’aman (Boston Review)
“There are many ambulances and police sirens; helicopters and fighter jets pass overhead, and there’s a constant sound of drones hovering over the city, to what purpose we do not know. Most stores are closed shut. Many restaurants and cafés have been transformed into supply centers from which food and equipment are delivered by volunteers across the country to soldiers, to survivors of the attack, and to residents from towns that have been evacuated.”
“Every day, Israeli families are begging politicians to free their children, cousins, siblings, parents, and grandparents, who are being held hostage. The politicians respond that victory is more important than freeing the hostages. That this is being said and that it is being accepted is yet another horror all unto itself.”
“What the majority of Israelis find impossible to accept is that many Palestinians see this land as their home—that those here are deeply committed to staying here and that those who are refugees aspire to return.”
Even though Israelis feel exactly the same way about that land.
“The conflict became even more acute when, in 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, thereby taking control of millions of Palestinians, many of whom had escaped as refugees to Jordan and Egypt in 1948. Israel wanted the land it conquered, not the Palestinians who lived on it.”
“[…] partial civil control over certain parts of the West Bank and Gaza was handed to the Palestinian Authority, a Fatah-controlled government body that, in many ways, serves as a contractor of the Israeli government.”
“Most importantly, Israelis perceived Israel’s use of force as restrained. Sometimes Israel’s purported restraint was a source of pride, other times a source of frustration.”
“The conclusion most Israelis draw from this situation is not that the use of force is limited in what it can achieve, but that we were mistaken to ever limit our use of force to begin with (another fantasy, another nightmare). Many find it difficult not to interpret the events of October 7 as a decisive confirmation of the longstanding Israeli suspicion that the Palestinians will slaughter us if they get the chance […]”
That’s exactly the tale that Empire wants you to believe. So it embellishes to make sure you don’t miss the point, to make sure you don’t come to your senses. To make sure you don’t stop believing and fearing. To make sure you don’t start asking questions.
“[…] ethnic cleansing and genocide are not only morally reprehensible; they are impossible. Palestinians will continue to exist in this land, and there is nothing Israel can do about it. I think most Jewish Israelis know this, but given what happened, they find it impossible to accept. The compromise that allowed for some bare form of Palestinian existence under Israel’s rule of force can no longer be sustained, but the idea that force is our only savior is as entrenched as it ever was in the Israeli psyche.”
“We must not view the massacre of October 7 as an act committed by all Palestinians or as an expression of innate hatred of Jews, and we must not conflate it with the Palestinian demand for freedom, which is just. And yet I confess that I too feel the widespread terror and panic that make such distinctions fall on deaf ears.”
“When terror and brutality are as rampant as they are now, they possess us. Resisting them feels as futile as resisting a force of nature—a giant wave, an avalanche, a blizzard. We are compelled to exercise force by the force that terrifies us. Yet this observation, that we do not possess force but are possessed by it, is significant. It might, in the words of Simone Weil, “interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.” “Where there is no room for reflection,” Weil writes, “there is none either for justice or prudence.””
“In war, Weil says, force takes hold of us and traps us inside the terror of death. It effaces even its own goals as well as the notion of it ever coming to an end. This is not easy to understand. There is a rift between those who look upon war from the outside and those who inhabit it. “To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end,” she writes.”
““Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.””
“Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they were easy to bear; actually, they continue because they have deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.”
She makes an important distinction: A slave is not necessarily unpaid; a slave is necessarily not free.
“We are inside war, inside terror, but we must envision the end of war and terror. We must ask ourselves how we can bring about a reality in which life is possible, and we must accept the unalterable fact that life will not be possible for us unless it be possible for those who share this place with us.”
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Political Future May Be Over by Ettingermentum (Jacobin)
“Netanyahu succeeds Shamir and becomes the leader of Likud in 1993. He’s a different kind of figure. He’s American-educated and lived in the United States for much of his life. He grew up in Philadelphia and worked at the Boston Consulting Group with Mitt Romney; he started his career as a foreign affairs guy who worked in the UN.”
“The regular far right of the party, which is very militaristic, is not a fan of the ultrareligious parties because the religious parties don’t serve in the military.”
“The ruling coalition starts polling below what they need to win, and the public is really turning away from Netanyahu. Then the Hamas attack happens, and the entire basis for the past thirteen years of Netanyahu’s rule, which transformed the country’s politics and foreign relations, is completely shattered in a single day.”
“Netanyahu, throughout his entire career, has said that the negotiated settlements are naive, counterproductive, unrealistic, utopian, and has hurt Israel more than it helped them. This has been his single through-line throughout his entire life, and it turns out his entire worldview was wrong.”
“So now people aren’t thinking, “Oh, we need to support him.” They’re thinking, “The guy who promised for decades that he could create security through his policies, the guy we’ve given a blank check to do whatever he wants for the past ten years, he’s proven to be wrong.” He’s just a corrupt asshole.”
“Even if there isn’t a rallying around Netanyahu, there’s general support for the security state and the repression and the military response. I saw a poll that said 65 percent of Israelis support a ground invasion.”
Can the Liberal Democratic Project Incorporate Israel? Will It Survive If It Can’t? by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“[…] people always say, you can’t have that. Why can’t you have that? Because the number of Palestinians in such a society would mean that Israel would no longer be a Jewish state. But if the rise in one ethnic population is threatening to a state’s identity, is that not inherently a premodern state? Does that not in and of itself suggest an incompatibility with modernity?”
The only thing allowed to define a so-called modern state is geography? That seems restrictive, but I’m willing to consider it.
“Is this not, really, skepticism about the broader project of liberal democracy? The belief that neither Israelis nor Palestinians, Jews or Arabs or anyone else, can morally be systematically removed from Palestine − as indeed the Geneva Conventions insist − means that we in the international community actually do have to be allies to both.”
“The concept of allyship in the social justice sense is incompatible with basic notions of intellectual freedom and political egalitarianism, yes, which is part of why higher education’s decade of capitulation to campus activists was such a mistake. But I suspect if I prodded Noah enough he’d acknowledge that, sooner or later, pluralism must come into conflict with support for an explicitly Jewish state.”
“For years, advocates for Palestinians have said that Israel can remain a Jewish state or a democratic one, but not both. And people tend to hate hearing that. But the notion has become a meme for a simple reason: it’s plainly true.”
“[…] the burden falls on Israel to take the biggest steps to ending this horrible scenario not in moral terms (which do not interest me) but in purely practical ones. Israel has the power to make immediate and serious change in the political composition of Palestine, particularly in terms of the integration of the territories into a legitimate democratic order, and for that reason the burden falls on them. Those are the wages of power. Yes, it is a burden that most average Israelis didn’t ask for. But there is no path to peace for them that does not involve shouldering it.”
“[…] the rights of the Native Americans did not depend on their indigenous nature, especially considering that like all people they came here from somewhere else. We shouldn’t have slaughtered them not because they had some sort of unique connection to the land that they were on but because they were human and in possession of rights. The same applies to Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs − they are there, they have the right to stay and to live in peace and prosperity. There is no lawyering our way out of this by pretending we know who was there first.”
Balticconnector – Chronologie einer geplatzten Verschwörungstheorie by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Der arme Kapitän wird sich gedacht haben, dass es das Beste ist, schnell weiterzufahren und so zu tun, als sei nichts geschehen. Offenbar war er sich der politischen Bedeutung des von ihm verursachten Schadens nicht bewusst.”
“Gestern mussten die Finnen vermelden, dass sie den Anker gefunden haben und es doch nicht die Russen waren. Immerhin hält man sich als „Ehrenrettung“ nun noch die Verschwörungstheorie offen, die Chinesen könnten den Anker mutwillig als Sabotageakt auf die schöne Pipeline fallengelassen haben. Und selbst dieser Blödsinn ist deutschen Medien nicht zu abwegig, um ihn aufzugreifen. Um von Nordstream abzulenken, kann anscheinend keine Geschichte zu abwegig sein.”
The Embargoes That Blocked Japanese Expansion and Led to War by Dwight Jon Zimmerman (Defense Media Network)
“In 1939, the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty between the United States and Japan. This led to an American embargo initially of airplanes, parts, machine tools, and aviation gasoline. The embargo was expanded in 1940 to include oil, iron and steel scrap, and other commodities. Sharing America’s concerns, Great Britain and the Netherlands joined in the economic embargo.”
“But for the West to lift the embargo, Japan had to retreat from China and abandon its expansionist policy – a surrender pill too bitter and humiliating for the far right to swallow. On Jan. 23, 1941, Japan sent ambassador Adm. Kichisaburo Nomura, respected in America, to the United States in a final effort to lift the embargo. It was a smoke screen. No one expected his mission to succeed.”
Dokumentiert: „Warum wir DIE LINKE verlassen“ – Austrittserklärung von Sahra Wagenknecht und neun weiteren Bundestagsabgeordneten by Redaktion (NachDenkSeiten)
“Die deutsche Außenpolitik munitioniert Kriege, statt sich um Friedenslösungen zu bemühen. International eskalieren Konflikte, die sich abzeichnende Blockbildung ist eine Bedrohung für den Weltfrieden und wird massive ökonomische Verwerfungen mit sich bringen. Gleichzeitig wird Widerspruch gegen diese politische Entwicklung in der öffentlichen Diskussion immer häufiger sanktioniert und an den Pranger gestellt. Aber Demokratie braucht Meinungsvielfalt und offene Debatten. Die Unfähigkeit der Regierung, mit den Krisen unserer Zeit umzugehen, und die Verengung des akzeptierten Meinungskorridors haben die AfD nach oben gespült.”
Vengeful Pathologies by Adam Shatz (London Review of Books)
“The motives behind Al-Aqsa Flood, as Hamas called its offensive, were hardly mysterious: to reassert the primacy of the Palestinian struggle at a time when it seemed to be falling off the agenda of the international community; to secure the release of political prisoners; to scuttle an Israeli-Saudi rapprochement; to further humiliate the impotent Palestinian Authority; to protest against the wave of settler violence in the West Bank, as well as the provocative visits of religious Jews and Israeli officials to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem; and, not least, to send a message to the Israelis that they are not invincible, that there is a price to pay for maintaining the status quo in Gaza.”
“The second phase, however, was very different. Joined by residents of Gaza, many of them leaving for the first time in their lives, Hamas’s fighters went on a killing spree. They turned the Tribe of Nova rave into a blood-drenched bacchanalia, another Bataclan. They hunted down families in their homes in kibbutzes. They executed not only Jews but Bedouins and immigrant workers. (Several of the victims were Jews who were well known for their solidarity work with Palestinians, notably Vivian Silver, an Israeli-Canadian who is now a hostage in Gaza.) As Vincent Lemire noted in Le Monde, it takes time to kill ‘civilians hidden in garages and parking lots or sheltering in safe rooms’. The diligence and patience of Hamas’s fighters were chilling.”
“In the West, few remember that when Palestinians from Gaza protested at the border in 2018-19 during the Great March of Return, Israeli forces killed 223 demonstrators. But Palestinians do, and the killing of unarmed demonstrators has only added to the allure of armed struggle.”
“Determined to overcome its humiliation by Hamas, the IDF has been no different from – and no more intelligent than – the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, or the Americans after 9/11. Israel’s disregard for Palestinian life has never been more callous or more flagrant, and it’s being fuelled by a discourse for which the adjective ‘genocidal’ no longer seems like hyperbole. In just the first six days of air strikes, Israel dropped more than six thousand bombs, and more than twice as many civilians have already died under bombardment as were killed on 7 October. These atrocities are not excesses or ‘collateral damage’: they occur by design.”
“The binary treatment of the war in the Western press is mirrored in the Arab world, and in much of the Global South, where the West’s support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression and its refusal to confront Israel’s aggression against Palestinians under occupation had already provoked accusations of hypocrisy. (These divisions recall the fractures of 1956, when people in the ‘developing world’ sided with Algeria’s struggle for self-determination, while Western countries backed Hungary’s resistance to Soviet invasion.)”
“To organise an effective movement, Fanon believed, anti-colonial fighters would have to overcome the temptations of primordial revenge, and develop what Martin Luther King, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, called a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’.”
“[…] the Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh told me in an email, is that we are at an inflection point in world history. Deep ongoing shifts over at least the past two decades that have been giving rise to right-wing and even fascist movements (and governments) were already building up, so I see Hamas’s slaughter of civilians as roughly equivalent to Sarajevo 1914 or maybe Kristallnacht 1938 in accelerating or unleashing much broader trends. On a ‘lesser scale’, I’m furious at Hamas for basically erasing all we fought for over decades, and aghast at those who can’t maintain the critical faculty to distinguish opposition to Israeli occupation and war crimes, and who turn a blind eye to what Hamas did in southern Israeli kibbutzim. Ethno-tribalism.”
“As the Palestinian writer Karim Kattan wrote in a moving essay for Le Monde , it seems to have become impossible for some of Palestine’s self-styled friends to ‘say: massacres like those that took place at the Tribe of Nova festival are an outrageous horror, and Israel is a ferocious colonial power.’”
“[…] a cult of force appears to have overtaken parts of the left, and short-circuited any empathy for Israeli civilians. But the radical left’s cult of force is less dangerous, because less consequential, than that of Israel and its backers, starting with the Biden administration.”
“Does Netanyahu imagine, then, that he can force Palestinians to give up their weapons, or their demands for statehood, by bombing them into submission? That has been tried, over and again; the invariable result has been a new and even more embittered generation of Palestinian militants.”
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
“A responsible American administration, one less susceptible to anxieties about an upcoming election and less beholden to the pro-Israel establishment, would have taken advantage of the current crisis to urge Israel to re-examine not just its security doctrine but its policies towards the sole population in the Arab world with whom it has shown no interest in forging a real peace: the Palestinians. Instead, Biden and Blinken have echoed Israel’s banalities about fighting evil, while conveniently forgetting Israel’s responsibility for the political impasse in which it finds itself.”
“Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are stuck with each other, unless Israel, the far stronger party, drives the Palestinians into exile for good. The only thing that can save the people of Israel and Palestine, and prevent another Nakba – a real possibility, while another Holocaust remains a traumatic hallucination – is a political solution that recognises both as equal citizens, and allows them to live in peace and freedom, whether in a single democratic state, two states, or a federation. So long as this solution is avoided, a continuing degradation, and an even greater catastrophe, are all but guaranteed.”
Exterminate All the Brutes by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares two decades later. But what we suffered – three to four hundred shells a day, four to five dead a day, and two dozen wounded a day − is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, than Sarajevo.”
“Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.”
“The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.”
“Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?”
“When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority.”
““Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.””
“Maybe we are fooled by our own lies, but most of the world sees us, and Israel, clearly. They understand our genocidal proclivities, rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They see that Palestinians, largely friendless, without power, forced to live in squalid refugee camps or the diaspora, denied their homeland and eternally persecuted, suffer the kind of fate once reserved for Jews.”
It’s Okay To Admit You Were Wrong About Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“I say this because there are probably a lot of pro-Israel people looking at what’s happening in Gaza and starting to feel a bit dissonant about it. Like maybe they’re on the wrong side of this thing after all.
“And I just want to reassure you that you can change your position on this. It’s perfectly fine and normal to do so.
“We all make mistakes. We all go through periods where aspects of our worldview are formed by inaccurate information that we were given by others. I know I have. So has everyone else.
“It’s okay to make mistakes, you just have a responsibility to learn from them and course-correct after you learn that you were mistaken. That’s what being a grown-up is all about.”
“It’s not a crime to be duped. It’s not evil to have been deceived. It would only be morally wrong if you kept persisting in your wrongness after you figured out that you are wrong.”
Israeli military announces plans to attack hospitals and schools by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“the statement over the weekend make unequivocally clear that targeting hospitals, schools and other places of refuge is the explicit policy of the Israeli government as part of its ethnic cleansing of Gaza. In its statement, the IDF claimed that moving the population of Gaza to the south is a “temporary measure” and that they would be allowed to return to their homes. “This is a temporary measure. Moving back to northern Gaza will be possible once the intense hostilities end.”
“It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the expulsion of the population of northern Gaza is part of an ethnic cleansing campaign by Israel and that the population will never be allowed to return.”
Yes. Obviously.
I have questions about the official announcement by the IDF:
Three truths:
- Hamas’s attack on civilians in Israel is fucked and a violation of international law.
- Israel’s collective punishment of civilians in Gaza is fucked and a violation of international law.
- Both 1 and 2 are happening in the context of an occupation which is fucked and a violation of international law.
Failure to hold these three truths at the same time has been linked to uncritical exposure of the brain to bullshit propaganda.
Lowkey, Palestinian, rapper, and Mint Press journalist does a reasonable job of correcting Piers Morgan’s utter idiocy.
It’s a bit heated because Piers Morgan simply cannot accept that the story of what happened on October 7th isn’t 100% clear yet—not least because most of the information came from the Israeli military.
Piers Morgan kind of descends into a tizzy because Lowkey will not unequivocally condemn Hamas—once again the demand for performative condemnation—which he of course considers to be equivalent to being happy that Hamas killed a bunch of Israelis.
Lowkey could have answered better, but he handled himself incredibly well in the heat of the moment, l’esprit d’escalier always sounds better, and I’m not certain that a jackass like Piers Morgan—he is a jackass, despite his having had Lowkey on his show—would have accepted the nuance of that reasoning. Morgan had a question he wanted answered in the affirmative and he wasn’t going to quit until he’d gotten it.
“Israel is by far the biggest recipient [recipient of the most] U.S. foreign aid in the world. Despite constituting about 0.01% of the world population, they’ve receive about 30% of U.S. foreign aid since WWII.”
The Hannibal Directive: What Really Happened on October 7 by Mnar Adley (Mint Press News)
“On October 7, initial reports suggested that Hamas had killed 1,400 Israelis, conducted mass rapes and torture, and even beheaded babies. These claims were cited as justification for Israel’s deadly bombardment of Gaza.
“However, skepticism has emerged about the accuracy of these claims, as details remain unclear. The mainstream corporate media has largely adopted the narrative of the Israeli government, placing the blame squarely on Hamas. Nonetheless, emerging evidence from within the Israeli military and media has challenged that narrative.
“One critical point of contention is the official list of Israeli casualties. Israel released a list of its dead on October 23, revealing that over 48% of those listed were soldiers or armed police on active duty, not civilians. Additionally, it has become evident that members of armed settler militias were also among the casualties.”
“The Hannibal Directive was certainly used on October 7, when Hamas overran an Israeli military base at the Erez Crossing. Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld, the commander of the base, called in an airstrike on his own position, even as he and countless others were stationed there and still fighting Hamas. This was reported by Amos Harel in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.”
“Subsequently, the Israeli military distanced itself from these claims [about beheaded babies], CNN retracted the story, and the White House acknowledged a lack of evidence. Similarly, the case of Shani Louk, an Israeli tattoo artist initially reported by the Israeli government as having been raped and killed, took a different turn when her mother confirmed that she was safe in Gaza and was being treated in a hospital for a head injury.”
We Are Ruled By Sociopaths And Morons by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“The narrative managers are still struggling with the problem that when they announced that Palestinians had escaped from their concentration camp and killed a bunch of Israelis, an inconvenient number of people started asking “Wait, what were they doing in a concentration camp?””
“Israeli policies created Hamas. I don’t mean this in the usual “Netanyahu boosted Hamas to sabotage peace and undermine its more moderate rivals” sense, I mean it in the “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable” sense. If you stomp out every possible peaceful avenue of resistance, naturally you’re going to see the rise of factions which favor violent resistance.”
“I said when all this started that I believe the Hamas attack will ultimately be a net negative for Palestinians, but that I can’t in good conscience “condemn Hamas” because nobody can articulate a positive direction that Palestinians should be taking. The fact that all peaceful avenues of resistance have been cut off is not the fault of the Palestinians, and it’s not the fault of Hamas. It’s the fault of the Israeli government.”
“Hamas isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is an apartheid settler-colonialist project which cannot exist without endless violence, warfare and abuse.”
Is Gaza Burning? by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Israel spends more per capita on its military than any country except Qatar. Its annual expenditure of $24.5 billion is $6 billion more than the entire (pre-bombardment) Palestinian economy–70 percent of which was generated in the West Bank. The Gazan economy, on international life support for the last decade under the blockade, is now effectively dead.”
“Sanders voted for a blatantly unconstitutional Senate Resolution condemning students protesting against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, calling them anti-Semitic and “in solidarity with Hamas”. The resolution passed unanimously and only Rand Paul refused to co-sponsor it.”
“More than half of the hostages in Gaza have foreign passports, according to the IDF, which may partially explain why the Netanyahu government has been, to put it mildly, lethargic in doing much to secure their release, except for the relentless bombing of Gaza, which has already killed as many as 50 hostages.”
“Lula on Gaza: “This is the problem: it’s not a war, it’s a genocide that has already killed nearly 2000 children who have nothing to do with this. I don’t know how any human being is capable of waging a war knowing that the result will be more deaths of innocent children.” Has the Israeli ambassador shuttered the embassy in Brasilia yet?”
“Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been publicly flirting with Netanyahu for the past couple of years, seems to have reversed course, telling the Turkish parliament that Hamas was not a terrorist organization, but a “liberation group waging a battle to protect its land” and describing Israel’s airstrikes as a “mental illness.””
He’s right, of course, but … the guy who’s relentlessly bombing Kurds is throwing some serious rocks in his glass house over there.
“Tariq Ali: “Here’s an example of how it could be ended. In 1957 Israel occupied Gaza. The US president, General Eisenhower, ordered: ‘I want you out of Gaza.’ And then said, “If you don’t get out of Gaza, we will impose sanctions against Israel”. The Israelis left.””
Roaming Charges: That Oceanic Feeling by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Fishing boats that trawl the ocean floor with heaving nets release more than a gigaton of carbon dioxide every year, roughly much as the entire airline industry, according to a study published in Nature.”
“By 2035, the steel, cement and chemical industries will overtake both transportation and electricity generation to become the largest sources of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”
“41 percent of the land base in the continental US is consigned for the production of meat, dairy, and eggs.”
“Wild mammals account for only about 4% of biomass compared to livestock (62%) and humans (34%), and global poultry weighs more than twice that of wild birds.”
“One in three children worldwide–roughly 815 million–suffered lead poisoning, a condition linked to heart and kidney disorders, impaired intelligence, violent behavior and premature death. A recent paper in Lancet Planetary Health estimated that in 2019, 5.5 million people died because of cardiovascular disease caused by lead poisoning, about three times the number killed by lung cancer: “More than 90% of those born between 1950 and 1980 experienced [blood lead levels] in excess of 5 µg/dL, the threshold considered ‘safe’ for children. The legacy of early life lead exposure will stay in the United States for decades to come.””
“Half of the world’s economies (107 countries) are already five years past a peak in fossil power generation.”
“In both the US and Canada, methane leaks were roughly 50 percent higher than reported. In Mexico, they were double.”
“The US ranks 41st in the world in mass transit ridership at 1.66 million riders/km. But NYC (which would rank about ~11 globally at 4.6) makes up most of that. The rest of the US averages only 0.46m riders/km.”
“In 1840 the mean age at menarche in girls was 17 years. By 2000, this had fallen to 12 years in most developed countries.”
Biden and Congress – Ask the American People Before You Impose a Genocide Tax for Prosperous Israel by Ralph Nader (Scheer Post)
“Israel is among the top 20 global economies in terms of GDP per capita. Could the $14.3 billion be better spent on assisting the world’s 71 million impoverished internally displaced refugees, many created by undeclared, lawless, U.S. wars?”
“How did the Biden Administration come up with the outsized figure of $14.3 billion for a prosperous economic, technological, and military superpower having a greater social safety net for its people than the United States?”
As The Lights Go Out In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“In America they killed all the buffalo just to take away food from the natives,
made mountains of their skulls and posed proudly in photos
like they posed proudly in front of burnt bodies after lynchings in the south.”
Look, man, lynchings are awful, but it’s person-on-person violence. What is going on in the mind of a person who kills so many buffalo that you can pile the cleaned skulls 30 feet high and stand on them? What the fuck is wrong with you?
There has been no time in history during which the U.S. had the moral high ground. Not really. The U.S. has never been a good nation.
Ukraine is a Very Special Kind of Democracy by Ted Rall
“Biden: We have to defend Ukraine cuz Ukraine is a democracy.
Citizen: Ukraine isn’t a democracy. They’re under martial law.
Citizen: Opposition parties are banned. Opposition media are banned. All elections have been canceled. Opposition politicians are under arrest.
Citizen: Most Americans don’t want to send more money to the Ukrainian dictatorship. Yet, you’re doing anyway. How can you justify ignoring them?
Biden: What? you think this is a democracy?
Citizen: At least the U.S. and Ukraine have the same values.”
Only Israel, the United States, and Ukraine Refuse to Stand With Cuba by People's Dispatch (Scheer Post)
“On Thursday, November 2, 187 nations voted for a UN General Assembly resolution to end the cruel and illegal 60 plus year US blockade on Cuba. The only states to vote against the resolution were the US and Israel. Ukraine was the only state to abstain.”
Banner nations. They’re the only ones that understand where the world’s true evil lies—in socialism.
The Moral Complexities Of Bombing A Concentration Camp Full Of Children by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“They’re dropping bombs on a concentration camp full of kids. Even shitlibs and pseudo-leftists who get every other foreign policy issue wrong are managing to get this one right, it’s that obvious. Anyone getting this issue wrong can be permanently dismissed without any real loss.”
This is mostly true—except that you have to realize and accept that there are good, rescuable people out there who do not accept the reality of what has been going on in Israel for 50 years, and has increased drastically in severity in the last 18, since Gaza was closed down.
They simply do not accept that there is a concentration camp there.
They do not understand the term. If they think about it at all, they think that it means “extermination camp” (or “death camp”), whereas it’s a synonym for “internment camp”, which is what the U.S. generously called its own concentration camps when it stored dozens of thousands of its own citizens of Japanese origin there during WWII.
We are likewise trained to think of “gulags” as concentration camps—or even worse—when they are, by definition, much more like prisons because, while many were sentenced on sham charges before kangaroo courts, the Soviets at least bothered to sentence them before interning them.
People in a concentration camp have never even been tried or accused of anything other than being. Still, going through the motions of pretending to prosecute someone for a few minutes or hours before you come to the foregone conclusion doesn’t cover your ass in a just world. It seems to make a difference in this world, but ours is not a just world. By this logic, the Soviet gulags were concentration camps—but so are most American prisons, which are full of people who’ve been railroaded into prison, then leased out as slave labor.
Wikipedia redirects the search for “concentration camp” to internment. It defines “internment” as,
“[…] the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges[1] or intent to file charges.[2] The term is especially used for the confinement “of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects”.[3] Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime.”
People think that just because Gazans are shown walking around in rubble with clothes on, rather than as shirtless, emaciated, and half-frozen wraiths as in pictures from Dachau or Ausschwitz, that they couldn’t possibly be in concentration camps.
“A huge amount of western depravity hides behind the unexamined assumption that killing people with bombs is somehow less evil than killing them with bullets or blades. By waging nonstop foreign bombing campaigns, the west desensitized the public to the reality of what bombs do.”
It also some desensitized the public to the horrors of modern concentration camps—or even refugee camps.
LIGO Has Surpassed The Quantum Limit. We Can Explain. by Michelle Starr (ScienceAlert)
“The technology works through the use of crystals that turn single stray photons in LIGO’s 4-kilometer-long vacuum tubes into two entangled photons with lower energy. These photons interact with the laser beams that shine down the tunnels to squeeze the laser light in the desired way. When gravitational waves rumble through, these laser beams are jiggled in such a way that the motion can be picked up at the other end. The new frequency-dependent squeezing technology works by alternating the way it squeezes light, so that both higher and lower frequencies are amplified.”
Scary Movies for Anarchists to Watch at the End of the World by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“Despite what some of my critics might tell you, I do not believe that science itself is evil but rampant progress without moral reason is. Humans are capable of great things; Kali knows they can shoot a horror flick. But many of these things become destructive when we divorce them from our place as a part of an ecosystem greater than ourselves. Humility is actually our greatest hope for survival. I can only hope that humans can endure the horrors it may take for us to rediscover this simple gift and allow it to govern us without a state to fuck it up. Maybe a few scary movies will help.”
Japan: where speed-metal virtuosity goes to dielive forever. I love watching an earnest and serious Japanese orchestra playing along with the music I grew up with.
It’s 2017, Yngwie’s gotten chubby, he looks maybe a bit ridiculous in all of his stretched leather, gold rings, and gold watch—but he sounds amazing. You can really hear how appropriate most of his compositions were for an orchestra.
He’s flying the whole time, but at 55:30, he just goes extra nuts. After that, he finally takes his first break (!). After that, he plays two encores, ending with one of my absolute favorites, Far Beyond The Sun, which is technically ridiculous, after 65 minutes of solid soloing. The orchestral arrangement is fantastic. He’s like a machine. You can absolutely see the effort, but the hands. Do. Not. Stop. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times from the album. I can’t hear a single false note in this live performance. Yeah, I’d have been standing and cheering too.
“This is in E♭-minor, not G-minor, which is inherently more difficult to play. G-minor is not that bad. But E♭-minor just ups the level of difficulty, mainly because the strings don’t have any open tunings, open strings in that key, that they can anchor off of, so every position has to be covered and hooded with their hands.”
On the one hand, I’m delighted to discover things like this but, on the other, I’m also in no position to determine whether he’s full of shit. I feel like it opens up a whole world of complexity that non-musicians just don’t have access to. We just listen to music and like it—and musicians see the matrix. This is why I love listening to Rick Beato and people like Doug Helvering, “it’s one of these full-diatonic progressions […] it’s a way to take a stroll through an entire chord collection of the key that you’re in.”
Mimetic Collapse, Our Destiny by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“CT Jones wrote that piece because it’s a thing people write, Rolling Stone published it because it’s a thing publications publish, and people read it because it’s a thing people are known to think. These are not ideas so much as they are the impressions of where ideas once were, like the lines you find on your face the morning after you sleep on the wrong pillow.”
“If TikTok teens are indeed disdaining David Foster Wallace (who killed himself during the Bush administration) they aren’t doing so from any organic unhappiness within their actually-existing social world. Most people don’t read; men read less; men read even less fiction; young men read least of all; young men certainly are not reading 1,000-page experimentalist novels. That is not occurring.”
“Baudrillard was fond of using Disneyland as an example, given that the theme park is a lovingly-made, carefully-calibrated depiction of a reality that never existed. Another example you often hear is the 1950s diner, the joint that has the neon signs and the art deco styling and the mini jukeboxes at the tables. This classic bit of Americana is not, in fact, based on what diners were like in the 1950s; it’s someone’s idea of what 1950s diners were like, which then spread mimetically from the actual physical 1950s diners that had been built to films and television, which then acted as “proof” that the imaginary diners were real, creating a social expectation of what a diner looks like that diner owners then felt pressure to fulfill…. Eventually most people came to believe that this is what diners were like in the 1950s. The point, though, is not that this is an act of deception. The point is that the consumerist reality in which these restaurants exists obliterates any belief in a true or false depiction. (No one cares whether the classic 1950s diner actually depicts a historical truth, really.)”
“Baudrillard argues that there are four phases of the image − a faithful depiction of that which really is, an unfaithful depiction of that which really is, a depiction that covers up for the fact that there is nothing which is actually being depicted, and the simulacra, which exists in a human culture of such universal equivalency that no one has the grounding necessary to know what “reality” might even be outside of equivalencies, outside of depiction.”
“I absolutely cannot accept that people born after 9/11 have ever lived in those social conditions. I cannot believe that they are organically resentful of people they never meet in IRL social scenes they’ll never belong to. I think they just wanted to appear to be a particular kind of person online, found that the anti-litbro mask is a popular costume, and put it on.”
“I have a great deal of disdain for both the poptimist and the litbro narratives. But the issue at hand here is not their substance, but why they appear impossible to stamp out despite being wildly outdated. My sense is that they persist because they’re predigested narratives that insecure people can grab hold of in a critical culture that is no more capable of generating new ideas than the artwork it describes.”
“[…] poptimist essays get written, constantly, because we have exhausted our ability to produce new critical modes of being and because writers are an insecure species and thus largely content to try and step gingerly in the footsteps of everyone who’s already trod through the dirty snow.”
Also because it’s an easy paycheck because it’s anodyne fodder for the algorithmic gristmill. No-one ever got fired for slagging on an officially acceptable (and conveniently dead) target like DFW.
“[…] no one is under any obligation to humor your taste. Some people will always like what you don’t and dislike what you do. That’s life. The fact that you think this is injustice reflects what a batshit era we find ourselves in.”
“[…] if you want to keep treating it as a hate object, you have to actually read it; you see, you can’t have an opinion on a book you have not read. Personally, I’m sure I’d hate your favorite A Thing of Thing and Thing YA horseshit, if I read it. But I’m not gonna, so I can’t comment on that. If I do, though, and I think it sucks, I’ll tell you, and I’ll also tell you that The Brothers Karamazov is a triumph of human possibility. I have that right. Art is subjective. Get over it.”
Hackers can force iOS and macOS browsers to divulge passwords and much more by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)
“In order to construct iLeakage, we first reverse engineer the cache topology on Apple Silicon CPUs. We then overcome Apple’s timer limitations using a new speculation-based gadget, which allows us to distinguish individual cache hits from cache misses, despite having access to only low resolution timers. We also demonstrate a variant of this gadget that uses no timers, leveraging race conditions instead. After using our speculation-based gadget to construct eviction sets, we proceeded to analyze Safari’s side channel resilience. Here, we bypass Safari’s 35-bit addressing and the value poisoning countermeasures, creating a primitive that can speculatively read and leak any 64-bit pointer within Safari’s rendering process.”
“iLeakage is a practical attack that requires only minimal physical resources to carry out. The biggest challenge—and it’s considerable—is the high caliber of technical expertise required. An attacker needs to not only have years of experience exploiting speculative execution vulnerabilities in general but also have fully reverse-engineered A- and M-series chips to gain insights into the side channel they contain. There’s no indication that this vulnerability has ever been discovered before, let alone actively exploited in the wild.”
The Shapeshifting Crypto Wars by Susan Landau (LawFare Media)
“Understanding the meaning of the NCMEC numbers requires careful examination. Facebook found that over 90 percent of the reports the company filed with NCMEC in October and November 2021 were “the same as or visually similar to previously reported content.” Half of the reports were based on just six videos.”
“Each occurrence of a photo or video showing a child being sexually abused, even if it is a previous one shared hundreds of thousands of times, is harmful, for such showing increases the chance that an abused person will be recognized as having been the subject of CSAE.”
We humans are great: the more a person has involuntarily appeared in child pornography the more they’re judged for it? Am I reading that correctly?
“In a study Facebook conducted in 2020-2021, the company evaluated 150 accounts that the company reported to NCMEC for having uploaded CSAE content. Researchers found that more than 75 percent of those sharing CSAM “did not do so with … intent to hurt the child.” Instead, they were sharing the images either out of anger that the images existed or because of finding the images “humorous.“”
“In 2021 Thorn , an international organization devoted to preventing child sexual abuse, reported that 34 percent of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 saw such sharing as normal and that this was also true for 14 percent of children between ages 9 and 12. Draper pointed out that by empowering a child to report an overshared photo, law enforcement investigators would have a head start on investigating and thwarting this and related crimes.”
I suppose a nine-year-old can be taught to look both ways before crossing the street, but convincing them not to upload a nude photo of themselves is too much; better get law-enforcement involved. Maybe we just need a less prudish, light of other days society, where everyone has fake or real nudes or porn of themselves out there. Sure, someone’s jerking off to it, but who cares if you don’t know about it?
“[…] the fact that the trafficker must publicly advertise for customers provides law enforcement another route for investigation. But investigations are also often stymied by the in-country abuser being a family member or friend, making the child reluctant to speak to the police (this is also the case for so-called child sex tourism, in which people travel with the intent of engaging in sexual activity with children).”
This is horrible, but can we get some numbers on this?
“The substantial increase in offenses against children over the years […]”
I don’t believe you yet.
“The impact of false positives can be grueling on those accused. While for some types of criminal investigations, once the person is cleared, the taint may go away, that is often not the case for accusations of CSAE.”
That is a massive understatement. “grueling”: it can ruin your life.
“There is plenty of wiggle room in the phrase “capable of doing so.” In recent years, we have seen many governments, including well-respected democracies, ignore scientific reality in climate change, coronavirus protections, and other issues to score political points. But to pass a law requiring the use of a technology that doesn’t exist—and that many believe cannot be developed—is duplicitous and dangerous.”
“[…] both the EU and U.S. are pressing forward with legislation that, much like the Online Safety Act, is willing to sacrifice E2EE in the name of child safety. None of these bills explicitly prohibits E2EE. Instead, they present requirements effectively preventing the technology’s use without explicitly saying so.”
“[…] having a child’s phone report their activities to their parents would instill the notion that online surveillance is acceptable—surely not a lesson we want to teach children.”
That ship has absolutely sailed, unfortunately. That is exactly the lesson society has inculcated among two generations now. Privacy and free speech are boomer/gen-X things.
“The EU has documented instances in which spyware has been used to “destroy media freedom and freedom of expression” in Hungary and to silence government critics in Poland.”
JFC. What about Germany, the UK, France, or the U.S.? Do we not talk about their much-greater transgressions? Hungary and Poland at least point their surveillance mostly inward; the U.S. surveils the world.
“Think differently. Think long term. Think about protecting the privacy and security of all members of society—children and adults alike. By failing to consider the big picture, the U.K. Online Safety Act has taken a dangerous, short-term approach to a complex societal problem. The EU and U.S. have the chance to avoid the U.K.’s folly; they should do so.”
They absolutely will not. They don’t care about backlash because they are sham democracies.
Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)
“According to an email that the WSJ reviewed from Westfield High School principal Mary Asfendis, the school “believed” that the images had been deleted and were no longer in circulation among students.”
Hey, it also sounds like the school “believed” that the image even existed in the first place. Nobody reliable has ever claimed to have seen them—just teen boys, who are notoriously unreliable. Hell, I would claim I’d made naked pictures of girls in school, just to fuck with everybody. I mean, how could it be wrong to just say something like that? It’s not even really conceivable that it’s illegal to have a naked picture that you made and then you say it’s a girl in school. What if you were really good with a pencil, and you drew one of them? Is that illegal?
Get a fucking grip, people.
“It remains unclear how many students were harmed.”
No-one! No-one can even confirm that there are pictures, other than the say-so of a bunch of teenage boys. I’m not being a dick about this; read this summary,
“The school had not confirmed whether faculty had reviewed the images, seemingly only notifying the female students allegedly targeted when they were identified by boys claiming to have seen the images.”
Oh, man, am I glad that my anti-authoritarian self grew up in a world where you couldn’t get thrown out of school, to say nothing of being prosecuted, for saying that you’d seen salacious material about real-life people, just for fun. Talk about an entire society that can’t take a joke.
“Some of the girls targeted told the WSJ that they were not comfortable attending school with boys who created the images. They’re also afraid that the images may reappear at a future point and create more damage, either professionally, academically, or socially. Others have said the experience has changed how they think about posting online.”
“Not comfortable” … throw them out of school! “create more damage” … how can fake pictures of you create more damage? We have to create a world where people dismiss this kind of shit—it’s not going to stop. Maybe we should make naked, porn-posed pictures of everyone. “changed how they think about posting online” … good! You should be thinking about what the hell you’re posting online, you goddamned narcissist.
At the end of the article, we find out that the author has been citing the Wall Street Journal, which makes sense. That is a buttoned-down, “make rules for everyone but the white-collar criminals whose promotion is the only reason for its existence” type of newspaper.
The interviewer is insufferable, but Meredith Whittaker (president of Signal) is a force of nature. At 08:00, she says,
“[…r]egulating AI, just non-traditionally. They did the classic move—withholding their labor—and they got terms that are actually staunching the bleeding of the use by the studios and big tech to place AI within their labor process that will degrade their labor, that will degrade artistic output, and will have a precedent-setting move of stopping the real harms, right now. I would look to the Writer’s Guild of America, I would look to SAG, I would look to your driver’s unions that are contesting the sort-of automated precarity of systems like Uber and Lyft, I would look to sort-of movements from below that are actually tackling the harms now, and not simply sitting around taking selfies with Elon Musk and calling it a regulatory agenda.”
Frances Haugen is also very, very good. At 09:50, she says,
“There is a skills escalator. You know, you come out of college, you come out of high school, and you have relatively low-complexity jobs. I had lunch with a friend a couple of days ago, and she’d been playing around with generative AI. And she’s like, ‘I’m never gonna hire a junior copywriter again! It’s like amazing!’ and I looked at her and I said ‘Amazing for you.’ Right? In a world where you’re a junior [list of jobs] … the jobs that allow you to become a more sophisticated contributor—they’re about to disappear.”
The dipshit interviewer responds with “clearly, yes, there is going to be huge impact on labor.”
No. You’re an idiot. What Haugen is pointing out is that the already pitiful “training program” that the U.S. has is going to become utterly broken. Businesses only ever put up with having less-skilled employees around because they were investing in them to become more-skilled employees. If AI replaces less-skilled employees, there will no longer be more-skilled employees either—because where will they come from? Jesus, lady. Could you be any more indoctrinated? Can’t you hear what Haugen is saying? Even if she were wrong, you should still, as the interviewer, engage her argument, rather than blowing right through to your predefined agenda. No wonder Whittaker keeps rolling her eyes.
The U.S. already doesn’t have training programs for so-called blue-collar jobs. Now it’s going to wipe out its ad-hoc training programs for white-collar jobs. At least places like Switzerland still have apprenticeship programs.
Whittaker is devastatingly insightful. She draws the distinction between an actually useful technology and the “bombast” surrounding it, delineating that the problem is the hyper-capitalist companies that own and drive the technology—“it’s the definition of metastatis”—rather than with the technology itself.
At 22:40. she says
“Just to clarify: ‘hype’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t do some things. Hype means that an entire ecology of narrative bombast has been predicated on … yeah, it can help you write an e-mail. If that’s a problem you want to solve with 20 billion GPUs, you can do it. But is that a world-changing problem to solve? And what is the actual material basis for what I would call these bombastic claims. […] Let’s get back down to reality and the actual the thing it [GPT] does before we make all of these predications based on that.”
The point of the bombast is to increase stock price.
The tools are useful, but the companies that own them are willing to lie about them in order to make them seem more useful to everyone. Eierlegende Wollmilchsau.
It’s like with vaccines. We’ve not had a single technology that has helped save more lives in the history of mankind. And yet, vaccines have never had a worse reputation than they do now. People don’t trust them, they don’t think they work, it’s a clusterfuck. All because of the way the hyper-capitalist system has benefitted from vaccines. Instead of imagining that we could get inexpensive, reliable vaccines for everyone, we accept that they will always become more expensive as the companies that control them tighten the noose. We accept that we never will wrest control of vaccines from these companies, so we write them off! The most effective medicine ever—and we choose to ignore them rather than to imagine controlling them ourselves.
It really is true that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
The discussion on Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario (Hacker News) also has several good comments.
Minimalist Affordances: Making the right tradeoffs by Lea Verou
“Take hex colors for example. Quick, what color is #7A6652? Learning to mentally translate between hex color notation and actual visible colors takes years of practice. Hex notation was never designed for humans; it was designed for machines, as a compact way to represent the 3 bytes of RGB channels of earlier screens. Humans do not think of colors as combinations of lights. It’s not logical that to make brown you combine some red, a bit less green, and even less blue.”
“Another example, entirely outside of software, is music notation. You’ve likely learned it as a child, so it’s hard to remember what the learning experience was like, and if you regularly read music sheets, you may even believe it’s easy. But if we try to step back and examine it objectively, it’s highly unintuitive.”
“There is not only an ordering here, but successive symbols even have a fixed ratio of 2. Yet absolutely nothing in their representation signifies this. Nothing in the depiction of ♩ indicates that it is longer than ♪, let alone that it is double the length. You just have to learn it. Heck, there’s nothing even indicating whether a symbol produces sound or not! Demanding a lot of knowledge in the head is not a problem in itself; it’s a common tradeoff when efficiency is higher priority than learnability. […] Was there really no possible depiction of these symbols that could communicate their purpose, order, and ratios?”
Domain Model first by Mark Seemann (Ploeh)
“An order is a document. You don’t want the customer’s address to be updatable after the fact. With a normalised relational model, if you change the customer’s address row in the future, it’s going to look as though the order went to that address instead of the address it actually went to.”
“All of this strongly suggests that this kind of data would be much easier to store and retrieve with a document database instead of a relational database. While that’s just one example, it strikes me as a common theme when discussing persistence. For most online transaction processing systems, relational database aren’t necessarily the best fit.”
“If you, on the other hand, start with the business problem and figure out how to model it in code, the best way to store the data may suggest itself. Document databases are often a good fit, as are event stores. I’ve never had need for a graph database, but perhaps that would be a better fit”
“If, however, the sole purpose of having a relational database is to support reporting, you may consider setting it up as a secondary system. Keep your online transactional data in another system, but regularly synchronize it to a relational database. If the only purpose of the relational database is to support reporting, you can treat it as a read-only system. This makes synchronization manageable.”
“Try to model a business problem without concern for storage and see where that leads you. Test-driven development is often a great technique for such a task. Then, once you have a good API, consider how to store the data. The Domain Model that you develop in that way may naturally suggest a good way to store and retrieve the data.”
Was Rust Worth It? by Jarrod Overson (Medium)
“Programming in Rust is like being in an emotionally abusive relationship. Rust screams at you all day, every day, often about things that you would have considered perfectly normal in another life. Eventually, you get used to the tantrums. They become routine. You learn to walk the tightrope to avoid triggering the compiler’s temper. And just like in real life, those behavior changes stick with you forever.
“Emotional abuse is not generally considered a healthy way to encourage change, but it does effect change nonetheless.
“I can’t write code in other languages without feeling uncomfortable when lines are out of order or when return values are unchecked. I also now get irrationally upset when I experience a runtime error.”
“[…] many developers break large projects down into smaller modules naturally, and you can’t publish a parent crate that has sub-crates that only exist within itself. You can’t even publish a crate that has local dev dependencies. You must choose between publishing random utility crates or restructuring your project to avoid this problem. This limitation feels arbitrary and unnecessary. You can clearly build projects structured like this, you just can’t publish them.”
“Rust added async-iness to the language after its inception. It feels like an afterthought, acts like an afterthought, and frequently gets in your way with errors that are hard to understand and resolve. When you search for solutions, you have to filter based on the various runtimes and their async flavors. Want to use an async library? There’s a chance you can’t use it outside of a specific async runtime.”
“Refactoring can be a slog: Rust’s rich type system is a blessing and a curse. Thinking in Rust types is a dream. Managing Rust’s types can be a nightmare. Your data and function signatures can have generic types, generic lifetimes, and trait constraints. Those constraints can have their own generic types and lifetimes.”
“But Rust has its warts. It’s hard to hire for, slow to learn, and too rigid to iterate quickly. It’s hard to troubleshoot memory and performance issues, especially with async code. Not all libraries are as good about safe code as others, and dev tooling leaves much to be desired. You start behind and have a lot working against you. If you can get past the hurdles, you’ll leave everyone in the dust. That’s a big if.”
ZFS for Dummies (Gamedev Guide)
“ZFS scrub checks every block in a pool against its known checksum to make sure that the data is valid. If you have vdevs with parity, ZFS scrub will also repair the data using healthy data from other disks. Scrubs should run on a schedule to make sure your systems stays healthy.”
“One of the best features of ZFS is ‘ZFS send’. It allows you send snapshots as a stream of data. This is a great way replicate a snapshot and it’s dataset to a file, another pool or even to another system via SSH. Amazing no!”
I was listening to a friend’s playlist on YouTube, which included Corey Hart’s Sunglasses at Night. The video features a lady cop, which is an absolute standard of 80s videos. She’s what I think of as “80s hot”, which got me to wondering whether our basic ideas of what is attractive are locked in based on what was considered attractive during our formative years. The Internet is awesome, so the Sunglasses at Night (Wikipedia) entry actually tells me that,
“[n]ear the end of the video, Hart is taken to the office of a female police officer (who releases Hart in the song’s end), played by Laurie Brown,[5] who later became the host of The NewMusic as well as a VJ on MuchMusic.”
The video has an entry at IMDb, Corey Hart: Sunglasses at Night (IMDb), which lists Laurie and her character, Laurie Brown: Police Officer (IMDb), which led me to a screen capture.
The Internet can be an absolute dumpster fire, but the encyclopedia is alive and better than ever.
GTA: Vice City Full radio stations (YouTube)
My all-time favorite ended up being Radio Espantoso, which I will often shout along to as they’re announcing the station. When we used to drive north from New York City at 04:30 on a Saturday morning to visit the family 400km away, we would listen to 97.9 LA MEGA, which is a Spanish-language radio station with the strongest transmitter God ever wrought. We could hear it 150km from the city. NOVANTESETTEPUNTONUEVELAMEGA! haunts me.
Published by marco on 5. Nov 2023 11:38:45 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 5. Nov 2023 11:39:28 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Crypto Finance Is a Speculative Scam That’s Worsening the Instability of Global Capitalism by Daniel Finn & Ramaa Vasudevan (Jacobin)
“[…] decentralization is a myth. You see that most clearly when there’s some kind of crisis and there’s a need for executive decisions. You don’t have any consensus-based mechanisms at work — someone at the top makes a decision. Decentralization is basically a nonstarter, even though it has been one of the supposed features of crypto finance that has been used to promote it very aggressively.”
“Crypto asset activity in the United States alone is estimated to have resulted in somewhere between 0.4 and 0.8 percent of total US greenhouse emissions. That may seem small, but it’s a range of emissions similar to that from the diesel fuel used in railroads in the United States. The environmental footprint of crypto is huge, with the massive amount of energy-guzzling computing power needed to support it.”
“[…] this means that what you might gain in terms of reducing environmental footprints, you’re going to lose in terms of exacerbating inequality, because only those who have assets can provide the collateral. Collateral-based systems don’t just fuel fragility: they also promote greater inequality because those with assets can plow them back in, earn more, put that back in, earn even more, and so on. It promotes an even more unequal distribution.”
“[…] there’s a paradox at work here. Since stablecoins are backed by conventional safe assets such as Treasury bills, crypto is ultimately dependent on conventional currencies as a source of credibility and stability. If crypto is to grow, it has to do so on the basis of its link to conventional currencies through stablecoins.”
“You exchange one crypto asset for another — you lend in a crypto token in order to invest in more crypto assets. The transaction is itself secured by crypto assets which may have been borrowed. Rather than funding real economic transactions — trade, investment — crypto lending and borrowing is solely for speculation and making money from arbitrage. It’s rent-seeking financial speculation in its purest form — finance for finance’s sake.”
“The second thing is that just as securitization — the alchemy which transformed illiquid, long-term loans like mortgages into liquid, tradable assets — remains entrenched and continues to be promoted in the workings of finance, even though it crashed the system in 2008, the innovations at the heart of crypto, embodied in blockchains, smart contracts, and tokenization, are reshaping conventional finance.”
“The world of finance already rests on flimsy foundations, and tokenization adds another layer to the illusion of value that fuels speculation. To give one example, there’s a new market for carbon tokens, which is making hay off the rising price of carbon offsets by buying and tokenizing cheaper carbon offsets. Of course, this has questionable implications for carbon emissions, but it’s a rich bonanza for the institutions trading in it. Through crypto, the processes of financialization are metamorphizing and metastasizing.”
“Crypto as it exists doesn’t depoliticize money — it merely de-democratizes it.”
The Fantasy of Energy Independence by Peter Z. Grossman (The New Atlantis)
“It has now been fifty years since the oil crisis that began when Arab members of OPEC imposed an embargo on the United States. Announced on October 17, 1973, the ban on oil exports to America was an act of retaliation for our aid to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The war itself had begun only days earlier when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel — the surprise attack on Israel by Hamas just days ago was apparently timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 war.”
Decency Becomes Indecent by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
““In messages circulated on Friday, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: ‘de-escalation/ceasefire,’ ‘end to violence/bloodshed’ and ‘restoring calm,’” Ahmed wrote. “The revelation provides a stunning signal about the Biden administration’s reluctance to push for Israeli restraint…””
Unleash the Kraken! Onward to Tehran! Mushroom clouds are cool!
“A headline atop an editorial in Saturday’s New York Times — signed, significantly, by the Editorial Board: “Israel Can Defend Itself and Uphold Its Values.” Under it, this assertion: “What Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law.””
Well, if they believe it about the U.S., they have to at least pretend to believe it about Israel.
“Emhoff reassured them, “I know you’re all hurting…. But thank God we have the steady leadership of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris during this unthinkable time in our history. Their moral compass, their calm and empathy are what we need in this time of crisis.””
Incredible. This is Politburo/CCP levels of self-delusion. They’re deadly serious, but it sounds deeply sarcastic.
“Emhoff, just a brief aside, is the vice-president’s spouse.”
Ah, well, that’s why he’s so effusive.
“A criminal regime is dressed up as the democracy of the Middle East, Palestinians act violently without cause or provocation, the Israeli state is rightfully defending itself and its citizens — innocent citizens, of course.”
“May 2021, readers will surely recall, Israeli police attempted to restrict Palestinians’ access to al–Aqsa and the associated Dome of the Rock — this during Ramadan no less. “Then came Hamas’ retaliatory rockets fired into Jerusalem from Gaza after an ultimatum it issued to retreat from al–Aqsa was ignored,” I wrote in this space at the time . “And now we watch Israel’s fourth attack on Gaza in the past dozen years. And now we read in our corporate press of Israeli–Arab ‘clashes’ and of Israel’s ‘right to self-defense.’””
Roger Waters and the One-State Solution by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Israel has to build a wall around itself to keep out the people it forced into refugee camps at its formal founding in 1948, but that is O.K. Incessant violence against the Palestinian population: This is O.K., too—part of the story, as they say. For the sake of its security it must bomb the airports in neighboring countries, as it did this week in Syria and Lebanon. But Israel is Israel, Israel is a great post–World War II success, a monument to human decency and the rule of law, and Israel must be.”
“The two-state solution as the basis of an enduring settlement, the thought that Palestinians would accept forcible relocation to assigned lands elsewhere, was the path to calamity long, long before the Oslo Accords came along in the early 1990s, Said astutely pointed out. Even some of the great names among the Zionists understood this. “David Ben–Gurion, for instance, was always clear,” Said wrote. “‘There is no example in history,’”’ he said in 1944, “‘of a people saying we agree to renounce our country, let another people come and settle here and outnumber us.’””
“The initial step … is a very difficult one to take. Israeli Jews are insulated from the Palestinian reality; most of them say that it does not really concern them…. My generation of Palestinians, still reeling from the shock of losing everything in 1948, find it nearly impossible to accept that their homes and farms were taken over by another people.”
“I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen. There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such….”
“I have considered Renan’s 1882 lecture, delivered at the Sorbonne, previously in this space ( here and here ), so I will not go long on it again. Not race, not religion, not language or what Renan called “community of interest,” not even geography (by which he meant natural boundaries, rivers and such) count in the making of a nation. A modern nation, he famously asserted, is “a daily plebiscite”—a vote each citizen casts by his or her participation each day in the life of the polity.”
“Waters ends his remarks with a reference as poignant as any I have heard in the course of these past 10 days. “Do we dream of a world where all men and women are equal under the law? Or not?” he asks. And then: My father, 1914 to 1944, dreamed that dream. He died in Italy fighting the Nazis to defend that dream. I dream that dream, too. No ifs, no ands, no buts, I dream that dream, too. So to whom it may concern: Please stop.
“Consider the reality with which Waters leaves us: A man whose father gave his life to fighting the Reich to liberate six million Jews is now brought nearly to tears watching the violence the descendants of those Jews inflict on an equally helpless population.”
“As to forgetting, as I have written in this space, I will say this quickly: There is the erasure of the past, as the apartheid state’s “if only” apologists incessantly attempt, and this is not what I mean, but rather, I mean forgetting as a way of liberating ourselves from the burden of eternal remembering such that we are prisoners of the past, captives of previous events, unable to act autonomously in the present.”
“Edward Said, the honorable, principled scholar, wrote works generously veined with the ideas of forgiveness and forgetting. Read his Times essay, as linked above: You will find these thoughts all through it. Israel as it is now constituted is a failed state. It is time, long past time, to begin again. Is there any question this can be done unless many, many, people forget about never forgiving and never forgetting?”
Israel’s Culture of Deceit by Chris Hedges (Mint Press News)
“I covered war for two decades, including seven years in the Middle East. I learned quite a bit about the size and lethality of explosive devices. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that killed an estimated 500 civilians in the al-Ahli Arab Christian Hospital in Gaza. Nothing. If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had these kinds of missiles, huge buildings in Israel would be rubble with hundreds of dead. They don’t.”
“The Israeli military dropped “roof knocking” rockets with no warheads on the hospital in the days leading up to the Oct. 17 strike, the familiar warning given by Israel to evacuate buildings, according to al-Ahli hospital officials. Hospital officials also said they had received calls from Israel saying “we warned you to evacuate twice.” Israel has demanded that all hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated .”
“The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic evidence we obtained. Israel lied. Small lies. Big lies. Huge lies. These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military, Israeli politicians and Israeli media.”
Maybe because they don’t care about lyong to those for whom they have no respect?
“Expose Israeli lies and you are attacked by Israel and its supporters as an anti-Semite and apologist for terrorists. You are banished from mainstream media. You are denied forums to speak about the issue and, as has happened to me, disinvited from university events. It is an old game, one I have played as a reporter many, many times. I bear the scars of the lies spewed out by Israel and its lobby. Meanwhile, Israel continues its butchery, endorsed and even lauded by Western political leaders, including Joe Biden, who accompany the torrent of lies from Israel like a Wagnerian chorus.”
Goliath, Who Aspires to be David by Freddie deBoer
“[…] if it’s wrong for an innocent Jew to be killed by Hamas because of things Israel has done, then it must follow, should follow, and does follow that criticism of Israel cannot constitute criticism of the Jewish people. (I would also suggest that if you justify Palestinian civilian deaths through reference to Hamas, you justify Israeli civilian deaths through reference to the actions of the IDF; you should do neither.)”
“As of four days ago, at least forty-four countries expressed support for Israel in this conflict. How many will officially express support for the people dying by the droves in Gaza? Even the establishment governments of the greater Middle East (almost universally corrupt, theocratic, or both) don’t offer any real support to Palestinians. How much more help do you need, exactly, before you stop pretending like everyone is out to get you? The US military and State Department have been rigidly in Israel’s corner since before I was born, but the Latin Club at Cornell held a pro-Palestine rally in the quad, so that makes you the underdog? When you say no one stands with Israel, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“[…] one of my most sacred political beliefs is that anytime people are demanding that you take a loyalty oath, the demand itself is the best reason not to take it.”
“Hamas is a theocratic body, and I am opposed to theocracy, and whatever your perspective on political violence, they have harmed the interests of Gazans and all Palestinians. They killed innocent people, which I can’t ever countenance, and by the way they’re contributing to terrible outcomes for their own side in doing so. The attack made greater Palestine more violent and less free. I don’t need to denounce the attack because it comes pre-denounced by my moral values.”
“The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state, or it might come with the absorption of the territories into a secular state of Israel-Palestine that extends perfectly equal legal and political rights to all people within it, as liberal values require. Permanent statelessness and dispossession for the Palestinians will ensure violence for generations. Only freedom for Palestinians can bring peace, and that’s the most hardheaded, ruthlessly pragmatic point anyone can make about this horrid crisis. And if Israel’s defenders feel put upon, othered, alone, it’s because Israel and Israel alone has the power to make Palestinians free.”
Eradication would work too. That’s the path that Israel seems to be taking.
“Israel and Israel alone has the power to make Palestinians free. I’m sorry, but it’s not a moral principle that says that Israel must bear responsibility for achieving peace and freedom. It’s a purely pragmatic statement of the reality of Israel’s overwhelming power in the region. Choosing sides has nothing do with it.”
Global: ‘Predator Files’ investigation reveals catastrophic failure to regulate surveillance trade (Amnesty International Security Lab)
“Among the 25 countries that the EIC consortium of media outlets found Intellexa alliance products have been sold to are Switzerland, Austria and Germany. Other clients include Oman, Qatar, Congo, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Pakistan, Jordan and Viet Nam.”
Switzerland’s in good company, I see.
This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen by Chris Hedges (Mint Press News)
“Psychologist Rollo May writes: At the outset of every war…we hastily transform our enemy into the image of the daimonic; and then, since it is the devil we are fighting, we can shift onto a war footing without asking ourselves all the troublesome and spiritual questions that the war arouses. We no longer have to face the realization that those we are killing are persons like ourselves. The killing and torture, the more they endure, contaminate the perpetrators and the society that condones their actions. They sever the professional inquisitors and killers from the capacity to feel. They feed the death instinct. They expand the moral injury of war.””
Wo bleibt eigentlich die deutsche Liebe für das Völkerrecht, wenn es um den Gaza-Streifen geht? by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Zumindest die deutsche Politik weiß, dass ihr Blick aufs Völkerrecht ein sehr selektiver ist. Daher spricht man ja auch viel lieber von einer „regelbasierten Ordnung“, an die sich die ganze Welt halten solle. Diese „Regeln“ sind jedoch nicht mit dem Völkerrecht gleichzusetzen, sondern werden frei Schnauze vom Westen situationsabhängig ausgelegt und anderen vorgegeben. Das ist Doppelmoral vom Feinsten und offenbar stört dies zumindest hierzulande niemanden.”
“[…] eine Veranstaltung, bei der die Supermacht USA die gleiche Stimme wie – sagen wir – der pazifische Zwergstaat Vanuatu hat, muss natürlich jenen suspekt sein, die sich eine Weltordnung wünschen, in der die USA die Regeln bestimmen.”
“Seit der Gründung der Kommission wird diese von Israel und den USA mit aller Härte bekämpft und bereits im Februar 2022 weigerte sich Israel offiziell , mit der Kommission zusammenzuarbeiten. Den Internationalen Strafgerichtshof in Den Haag, der bereits 2021 Untersuchungen gegen alle Beteiligten am Palästinakonflikt eingeleitet hat, erkennen Israel und die USA übrigens auch nicht an.”
“Der Bericht verurteilt den Abschuss von Raketen und Mörsern durch die Hamas als klare Kriegsverbrechen. Im Bericht wird aber auch festgestellt, dass die durch die israelischen Angriffe verursachten Schäden und Opfer nicht in einem angemessenen Verhältnis zum militärischen Vorteil stehen, sodass auch diese Handlungen ein Kriegsverbrechen darstellen. Darüber hinaus stellt die Kommission fest, dass die Verhinderung der Einfuhr von Lebensmitteln und medizinischen Hilfsgütern in den Gazastreifen eine Verletzung des humanitären Völkerrechts darstellt. Der Bericht nennt auch noch weitere Kriegsverbrechen und Verstöße gegen internationale Menschenrechte durch den Staat Israel.”
“[…] bewertet die Washington Post kritisch und zitiert dabei Clive Baldwin, den leitenden Rechtsberater von Human Rights Watch. „Eine Million Menschen in Gaza zur Evakuierung aufzufordern, wenn es keinen sicheren Ort gibt, ist keine wirksame Warnung. Die Straßen liegen in Schutt und Asche, der Treibstoff ist knapp und das wichtigste Krankenhaus liegt in der Evakuierungszone. Dieser Befehl ändert nichts an Israels Verpflichtung, bei Militäroperationen niemals Zivilisten ins Visier zu nehmen und alle möglichen Maßnahmen zu ergreifen, um deren Schaden zu minimieren.””
“Es kann ja nicht angehen, dass über solche Fragen ein Organ wie die Vereinten Nationen mitredet, in denen auch Länder eine Stimme haben, die nicht zu unserer westlichen Wertegemeinschaft gehören und damit per se verdächtig sind, unsere „regelbasierte Ordnung“ nicht anzuerkennen. Und die Sache mit dem Völkerrecht? Die vergessen wir lieber wieder schnell und kramen sie erst dann wieder hervor, wenn man sie gegen Russland, China, Iran oder sonstige Bösewichte instrumentalisieren kann.”
It’s Not The ‘Israel-Hamas War’, It’s The Israel-Gaza Massacre by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“Americans should probably worry about the rapid legitimization of this idea that civilians who have a government that kills people are all legitimate targets.”
“According to the logic of collective punishment we’re seeing circulated with regard to Gazans and Hamas, all American civilians deserve to die horribly because they permit themselves to be ruled by a regime which is orders of magnitude more violent and destructive than Hamas.”
“The mass media asked you to believe the Hamas attack was “unprovoked” . Then they asked you to believe blatant babies-on-bayonets atrocity propaganda . Now they’re asking you to believe Jewish kids were in school before dawn on a Saturday morning in Israel. Western journalism, folks.”
A Saturday that also happened to have been the culmination of a series of high holy days.
“I used to think all genocidal massacres are bad but then some really smart Israel apologists explained to me that this genocidal massacre is completely different because this genocidal massacre’s perpetrators believe they are doing the right thing for a good reason.”
“If there were two million Jewish people trapped by Christians in a giant open-air prison and placed under total siege, being told that half of them had 24 hours to relocate into the other half or be killed, nobody would have any confusion about what they were witnessing.”
“You know about 9/11 brain, kids? It’s when something scary happens and everyone goes insane and starts believing a bunch of lies and consenting to power-serving agendas that do exponentially more damage than the initial trauma.”
“The greatest trick white anti-semites ever pulled was getting Jews to leave western society in droves and move to a far away country to spend their lives beating up Muslims.”
Biden’s demand for $105 billion in military spending: A declaration of war against the working class by Eric London (WSWS)
“In his national address Thursday, US President Joe Biden demanded Congress allocate an additional $105 billion to fund the US military […]
“The latest demand includes $14 billion for Israel on top of the $260 billion the US has provided in military aid since 1948, and $61 billion for Ukraine, nearly doubling the $75 billion spent on the war against nuclear-armed Russia so far. Biden is also demanding $3 billion for military submarines, $2 billion for military encirclement of China, and $14 billion to further militarize the US-Mexico border […]”
Don’t we have a budget, though? Didn’t they already get almost $900B? Why don’t they use that? This is patently ridiculous, a farce.
There is no change here: but, just to let it be said … this is a farce.
“In concluding his speech, Biden called for shared sacrifice to fund the escalation of war on a global scale: “In moments like these, we have to remember who we are. We are the United States of America. The United States of America. And there is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity, if we do it together.”
“Make no mistake, the US population will not pay for these wars “together.” The cost will be born entirely by the working class, while the spoils will go to the rich. Biden’s demand is a declaration of war against the working class, and all talk about “shared sacrifice” to “defend democracy” is nothing but lies.”
Empire makes mouth noises to quiet the public, while it does what Empire wants.
“According to a 2023 study from the National Priorities Project, $100 billion is more than the federal government will spend all year on education ($84 billion), transportation ($67 billion), or energy and the environment ($94 billion) and equals the total budget for healthcare ($100 billion). Total military-related spending this year will exceed $1.1 trillion.”
“The Biden administration’s demand comes as workers have been told “there is no money” to address the world population’s most urgent needs. For $100 billion, Biden could house every homeless person in America ($20 billion, per Globalgiving.org), feed every person facing starvation or acute malnutrition across the world ($23 billion, per Oxfam), forgive $30,000 in student loans for two million people ($60 billion) and still have almost $10 billion left over.”
These are all excellent points, and well-worth noting, but … Empire obviously doesn’t care. There is no way to guilt Empire into behavior more closely aligned with the needs of the many. It knows that what it is doing will work for Empire. It continues to work for Empire. The incentives are all in the same direction.
And Empire is a many-headed hydra, composed of multiple multinationals at this point. They have figured out how to profit even more massively by not paying for anything.
“According to the CBO, revenue on corporate taxes fell $5 billion from 2022 to 2023. A 2023 study from the Government Accountability Office reported that 34 percent of large corporations now pay zero federal taxes.”
The article Amira Hass Speaks on Gaza Slaughter by Jewish Voice for Labour (Scheer Post) includes an embedded video that appears like this.
Amira Hass is a leading journalist (with Gideon Levy) at Ha’aretz. “Amira Hass is the only Israeli journalist who has lived in the West Bank for 30 years and has a deep understanding of the Palestinian experience.” I hadn’t seen the video, but I found it highly unlikely that there was really age-restricted content there. It seemed much more likely that YouTube’s algorithms saw her name alongside “Gaza” and noped right out of there, applying restrictions to make sure as few people watched the video as possible.
When I click the video to see it on YouTube. I get this:
I removed the query arguments, one by one, but I still couldn’t open the video.
When I opened the base url (without the query arguments) in a new tab, it worked.
You know what? YouTube seems to be blocking referrals from Scheer Post. It blocks not only on the query argument, but also on the HTTP_REFERRER
in the request. That is very much enforcing an agenda, but it’s also utterly unsurprising. We do not live in a free information environment. The U.S. corporations and government—entwined as they are—control the narrative ruthlessly.
When I finally got to the video, it was a Democracy Now! interview, from New York City, with journalist Amira Hass. There was absolutely no content in there that would be considered worth blocking or age-restricting in anything but an authoritarian Empire where YouTube is an arm of the State.
Her words were, of course, deeply unnerving, but that is reality. There were a few fleeting images of children being dug out of rubble—they were still alive, though.
Finally, the video (embedded from my site, where it’s still age-restricted but not blocked, if you click through).
And here’s the second, longer part of the interview. This second part was, mysteriously, not age-restricted at the time I originally added the link to a draft, but it’s age-restricted now. As with part one, I can’t see a reason why this video should be age-restricted, unless it’s for the disturbing subject matter. If that’s what triggers age-restriction, then more than half of the news videos on YouTube would have to be age-restricted.
This is an incredibly good interview. Amira Hass discusses honestly how Hamas made a “distinctive blow” militarily that they don’t have any follow-up for. Citing at considerable length from the transcript:
NERMEEN SHAIKH: In the piece, you write about your father, who would tell you as far […] back as 1992, he himself a Holocaust survivor, when you return from Gaza, he would say, quote,“True, this isn’t a genocide like what we went through, but for us, it ended after five or six years. For the Palestinians, the suffering has gone on and on for decades.”[…]
AMIRA HASS: Look, I mean, in 92 […], it was — we could say that it is not genocide. I want to say, I mean, I don’t — as I explain over and over again, I prefer not to talk now, not to dwell into definitions, but to describe the situation. Of course, in ‘92, in comparison to today, it was like a benign occupation in comparison to today, to what’s going on now.
“Look, Hamas proved to be very resourceful when it comes to the military operation. They knew how to neutralize Israeli surveillance facilities, how to neutralize the shooting, automatic shooting. They knew where the military bases were, etc. So they were very resourceful, in a way that I could have said impressive, if not for the atrocities that were committed later. And the atrocities were committed. And I know that it’s not the time to tell Palestinians to pay attention to this, because Israel’s revenge is a hundred times more bloodier, but still there were atrocities.
“So I feel there is a tremendous contradiction between the planning of the immediate military operation and what comes aftermath — what is the aftermath, because, for example, the civilian now — the civilian face in the West — in Gaza. If they knew they have such an operation, and they knew that Israel will retaliate ferociously, then why, for example, they did not even — I didn’t know — take care that people have water? I don’t know. I mean, if they can arrange to have so many weapons, they must have also prepared for assisting the civilian population, their civilian population. But I see that this, from what I can tell, from far, I don’t think — I don’t see that this has happened.
“I don’t think that Hamas can be erased. It can flourish outside of Gaza. But I don’t understand its political plan right now. Do they want to liberate all of Palestine, so it doesn’t matter if it will take 50 years, 80 years, and at the cost of lives of Palestinians and Israelis, that I don’t know who will return to the country? Who will live in this destroyed country, if this is the plan? If the plan is political, immediate political, is it worse to ask, demand the release of present Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, and the cost is so much? I think I know some prisoners in jail now. I don’t think they’ll be happy to be released, thanks to the death of thousands or tens of thousands of Palestinians.
“So, right now I see very — militarily, a very apt organization, that indeed gave Israel a very distinctive blow. But I don’t see that there is a political viable position that comes with it. That’s me now. I don’t know. I mean, we are waiting, because just war, just war, just bloodshed, where will it lead us to? Where will it lead the Palestinians to? Now it’s very difficult for people to criticize Hamas. There is a lot of support. But is it a political — does it have a political, logical, human perspective? I don’t see it.”
“Every Palestinian who is killed today in Gaza is registered in the Israeli-controlled population registry. Palestinians are not registered in a separate one. It’s Israel which controls. If a person is not registered, he is there — if a newborn is not registered in the Israeli registry of population, then the newborn does not exist. Israel controls still today. Palestinian Authority is obliged to give every name of a newborn and every change of address to Israel for validation of this change. So what is not responsible? It’s part of Israel. I mean, Israel controls the whole country, controls the people, decides how much water they have, what is the economy they are allowed to have. If they don’t go to universities in the West Bank, Israel decides. Israel decides about every detail of these people. So, what’s happening now is not Israel’s responsibility?”
Drone Warfare in the Nuclear Age by Michael Klare (Antiwar.com)
“A war with China may not be inevitable, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks observed recently, but it’s a genuine possibility and so this country must be prepared to fight and win. But victory in such a conflict will not, she suggested, come easily. China enjoys an advantage in certain measures of military power, including the number of ships, guns, and missiles it can deploy. While America’s equivalents may be more advanced and capable, they also cost far more to produce and so can only be procured in smaller numbers. To overcome such a dilemma in any future conflict, Hicks suggested, our costly crewed weapons systems must be accompanied by hordes of uncrewed autonomous ships, planes, and tanks.
“To ensure that America will possess sufficient numbers of “all-domain attritable [that is, expendable] autonomous” weapons when a war with China breaks out, Hicks announced a major new Pentagon program dubbed the Replicator Initiative. “Replicator is meant to help us overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people,” she told the National Defense Industrial Association as August ended.”
She named the program after the Star Trek device that can produce anything you want, out of nothing, for free.
The people in charge of the U.S. are all mad, just evil and mad. Whether it’s their madness which has made them evil, or their evil that’s driven them mad doesn’t matter. A healthy society would not put them in charge. The world is run by the most bloodthirsty, racist, tribalist, intolerant, small-minded, and piratical people. They bubble to the top. This reflects terribly on the rest of us. We must, in a way, hope that we don’t live in democracies, else we are … complicit.
“In making the case for the Replicator Initiative, Hicks touted America’s advantage in technological creativity and know-how. “We out-match adversaries by out-thinking, out-strategizing, and out-maneuvering them,” she insisted. “We augment manufacturing and mobilization with our real comparative advantage, which is the innovation and spirit of our people.”
“From her perspective, China, Russia, and this country’s other adversaries are more reliant on traditional forms of military mass (“more ships, more missiles, more people”) because they lack the natural birthright of all Americans, that “innovative spirit.” As she asserted, “We don’t use our people as cannon fodder like some competitors do,” we win by “out-thinking” them.”
Jesus, I guess as soon as you live in a fantasy world—as do all of the people in your audience—all bets are off and you can say whatever you want, no matter how unmoored from reality it is. This is pure marketing, pure sales. She’s a snake-oil salesman, touting vaporware. She’s probably angling for a job on the other side of that revolving door.
Basically: If the suffering and terror is to end, Israel has to be the one to end it, one way or another. There are two sides, but one side has the overwhelming advantage over the other, militarily and in the form of control over all aspects of life. Israel has the support of all of the governments that it cares about, and on which it depends for support. The people of those other countries are divided and support is crumbling—even in Israel itself, from what little I’ve been able to read from the Israeli press—but Israel is still 100% in the driver’s seat and can decide how they’re going to end it: annihilation or reconciliation.
To Kill in Darkness by Elizabeth Vos (Scheer Post)
“Both the Al-Quds hospital and the UNRWA schools are in Gaza City, in the northern part of the Gaza strip, where Israel has already carried out heavy shelling of residential areas. Thousands of people were forced to seek shelter in institutions like hospitals and schools after their homes were destroyed. There is also no way to transport critically ill patients.
“Even if healthy mobile civilians want to leave targeted hospitals and schools, their options are extremely limited. There is no way out of Gaza and no way for aid to be delivered thanks to Israel’s total blockade. [After U.S. pressure, a total of just 20 aid trucks were let into the territory on Saturday morning.]”
“That schools and a major hospital in northern Gaza would receive such threats from Israeli forces would indicate that Israel intends to decimate as many large buildings and groups of people as possible in preparation for a ground invasion in the North.”
I really wonder what they’re thinking, like, what sort of outcome do they expect here? Are they really going for eradication, shooting everything on sight and letting the rest starve and dehydrate? Or … what? Do they think that the 75th time is the charm and that “the beatings will continue until morale improves” will work this time?
“Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, who previously recounted his experience during and after the al-Ahli hospital attack, reported via social media on Thursday that medical workers have been reduced to treating bacterial-infected wounds with vinegar.”
“On Friday, the Israeli government approved regulations that will allow it to temporarily shut down foreign news channels, paving the way to shut down channels like Al Jazeera.”
Biden Returns Empty-handed, Except for a Huge Bill for the American Taxpayers by Ralph Nader (Scheer Post)
“Did Biden press for the exchange of Hamas’ hostages for the release of Palestinian prisoners, including young Palestinians, who have been in Israeli jails for years without due process or charges? No! Worse, Biden failed to object to the Israeli military stating that the release of over 200 Israeli hostages is a “secondary priority” to smashing Hamas and Gaza “into the Stone Age.””
“Did Biden, in strong terms, tell the Israeli politicians that they have already exacted revenge many times over on the stateless people of Gaza – in civilian lives lost, injuries, related spread of disease, destitution and destruction? Did he say it is inhumane and counterproductive to bomb hospitals, clinics, schools, mosques, churches, apartment buildings, water mains, electric networks and ambulances, all of which is in violation of civilized norms and rules of war? Of course not. He greenlighted Israel’s genocidal warfare from the beginning of the Israeli assault and sent U.S. weaponry.”
“Now Biden wants Congress to approve $14 billion for Israel to address the colossal failure of Netanyahu’s extremist coalition to protect its own citizens on the border. (Adding only $100 million for Palestinian relief).
“That sum of money, to be authorized without any Congressional hearings or Congressional oversight, is greater than the combined annual budgets of the FDA, OSHA, NHTSA and the section of HHS, whose missions are to reduce the loss of hundreds of thousands of preventable American fatalities in the workplace, on the highways, and in the marketplace and the hospitals.”
“Biden should take a moment in the Oval Office to read page 121 of the book “The Jewish Paradox” by Nahum Goldman (January 1, 1978), the head of the World Zionist Organization. He quotes the leading Founder of the Israeli state, David Ben-Gurion as candidly saying to him: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and stolen their country. Why would they accept that?””
That was a long, long time ago, when many decades of myth-making had not yet occurred.
“Many members of Congress who demand giving Israel whatever money and weaponry it wants for whatever it does, violating human rights under international law in its illegal occupations and blockade, turn around and vote against the child tax credit, worker health and safety, universal healthcare, paid family leave and daycare for Americans. Their viciousness – as with the homicidal outburst of Gen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) against all Palestinians, and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) a Harvard Law graduate, saying “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza…” set new levels of depravity.”
Let Them Eat Cement by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.”
That’s an incredible number of Israelis who are also internally displaced.
“Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant shut down on Sunday because of a lack of fuel.”
“Egyptian officials are acutely aware of what comes next. Up to half, maybe more, of the 2.3 million Palestinians will be pushed by Israel into Egypt on Gaza’s southern border and never be allowed to return.”
“Reports out of Egypt contend that Washington has promised to forgive much of Egypt’s massive $162.9 billion debt, as well as offer other economic incentives in exchange for Egypt’s acquiescence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai. ”
“The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered.
““Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops.
““Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live.”
““Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.””
If I’d read this from almost anyone but Chris Hedges, I would be more doubtful of its provenance or veracity. I’m almost certain he triple-checked that this actually happened. Yup, I guess it checks out: “These animals can no longer live” says Israel’s oldest reservist (Al Jazeera) and Israeli veteran, 95, tells troops to ‘erase’ Palestinian kids he calls ‘animals’ (MSN)
Ukraine and Israel Are Very Special Democracies by Ted Rall
“Ukraine is so democratic that it doesn’t even need to have presidential elections anymore. Martial law again. And who declared martial law? Why, it’s that sly rascal President Volodymyr Zelensky—make that President-for-Life Volodymyr Zelensky. We’re so dysfunctional here in the U.S. that House Republicans can’t agree with themselves who should be Speaker. But Ukraine is streamlined! The guy who would be running for reelection this spring won’t have to, because he personally said so! That’s a very special democracy.”
“Israel has an à la carte democracy. They lock the Palestinians away in Gaza and the West Bank, out of sight and out of mind, stateless and hopeless and voiceless, under Israeli occupation but without the right to vote. The Jewish “majority” of Israel enjoys the Middle East’s only thriving democracy.”
“Imagine how cool it would be if we could do that here! Turn the flyover “red” states into an occupied stateless concentration camp without voting rights. The remainder, the coastal “blue” states, would become a liberal paradise. No more Trumpies. Abortion rights—back. E-vehicle charging stations everywhere.”
I would imagine that the utterly irony-free blue fools will be retweeting Rall for once, talking up what a good idea he’s had, when they would ordinarily be trying to get him banned.
As for the hospital bombing, Finkelstein says (A) Israel always bombs hospitals (he directed us to his posting Israel ALWAYS Acknowledges Its Atrocities by Norman Finkelstein), (B) even Israel says that 6000 rockets fired by Hamas since October 7th (their number) have killed “dozens” of Israelis and that it was a fragment of a Hamas rocket that leveled the hospital, killing over 500, which is on its face flatly unbelievable, (C) Why doesn’t the U.S. just publish its satellite data? It very clearly has detailed satellite imagery. It could clear this up immediately, and (D) why not let inspectors in? They could easily clear up what sort of weapon it was that caused the damage. Even from the footage, people can determine that it was a powered, warhead-equipped weapon, not a rocket dependent on gravity for its damage.
He thanks Aaron and Katie for having him on the show because almost no other “left” podcasts have invited him (more unaffiliated shows have invited him, like Jimmy Dore, Chris Hedges, TrueAnon, etc.), despite him being by far the leading authority on Gaza.
TrueAnon, Episode 327: It’s Not Too Late (Patreon)
“If things were cut-and-dried, then our legal standard wouldn’t be ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, it’d be ‘certainty.’”
My God, what an absolutely brilliant 136 minutes. I’ve listened to every Norman Finkelstein interview I could get my hands on recently. A couple of weeks ago, I watched him discuss Ibram X. Kendi on the Bad Faith podcast. Since then, the Middle East has exploded and he’s been interviewed a few times: on Chris Hedges, Jimmy Dore, Useful Idiots, and TrueAnon. This is the best of them. TrueAnon is hands-down the best podcast I listen to. I appreciate Liz and Brace and young Chomsky very much.
I wrote the following comment on their Patreon:
“Amazing episode. Just incredible. It should be spread far and wide, preserved for posterity. This is by far my favorite podcast, but this one just clicked on all levels. Excellent production, wonderful tone. That you went to his apartment, amongst his stuff, that he started with far-reaching social context, talking about Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash, Paul Robeson, all of it lifted this show above all of the other interviews I’ve heard with him (Hedges, Dore, Halper/Maté). Thanks so much.”
I’m flattered that the crew read and liked my comment.
Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Third Edition (Amazon)
“The most revealing study of the historical background of the conflict.”
This is the preeminent authority on conflict. You can’t get his book.
If Israel Stops Murdering Thousands Of Children, The Bad Guys Might Win by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“The obvious other option is to move toward peace and reconciliation and right all the wrongs which gave rise to the attack on October 7, which would mean a one-state or two-state solution that Palestinians are happy with instead of the status quo of apartheid and tyranny and ghettos and a giant concentration camp of profound human suffering. That would allow the possibility of a ceasefire without the need for continued Palestinian resistance.
“But Israel is unwilling to do this because it would mean ceding a bunch of land or ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish ethnostate, so that option is framed as unthinkable nonsense instead of the glaringly obvious fix for this problem that it plainly is. Murdering children by the thousands and carpet bombing Gaza is seen as preferable to the measures that would be necessary to achieve a lasting peace.”
NYT Still Trying To Salvage Its Lost Dignity Over Hamas by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“On the one side, there’s the claim of Hamas, a terrorist group that had just raped, kidnapped, murdered and beheaded women, children and the elderly, and had a bit of a public relations problem on their hands, claiming Israel bombed a hospital when it turned out that the hospital was never bombed, but only a courtyard parking lot, and there is no evidence whatsoever to support any claim Hamas made.”
I’m honestly still surprised at how Greenfield still hasn’t gotten a hold of himself and started to apply his usual rigor to this topic. As he writes further down, “[…] the New York Times reported that Israel bombed a hospital and killed 200 500 800 471 Palestinians.” He writes the other numbers supposedly to show how disingenuous this whole affair is—because they can’t even get the number right immediately. He ends up at 471, which is a high number for a “parking lot”, no? But he doesn’t think to research and find out that the hospital grounds had been converted to a refugee camp, which is what was hit in the parking lot. He does no research to try to find out whether Israel bombing a hospital and then lying about it is something that has happened with depressing regularity. He doesn’t even change his opinion when Israel just quickly admitted to having bombed a church just the other day. He probably won’t even reconsider once Israel admits that it was one of their bombs (because only they really have that kind of firepower; if Hamas had it, Israelis would be in a good deal more danger than they currently are). Greenfield considers none of this because he’s been in a blind rage for weeks now. It’s unclear whether he’ll ever come back. He’s doubling down again and again.
Humanitarian crisis worsens in Gaza, as Biden describes civilian casualties as “the price of waging a war” by Jordan Shilton (WSWS)
“The global charity Oxfam criticised the Israeli government Wednesday for using “starvation as a weapon of war.” Noting that a mere 2 percent of normal food deliveries had reached the Gaza Strip since October 9, the charity pointed out that local supplies could not be distributed due to a lack of fuel and damaged roads from the Israeli bombardment. Food storage is also proving impossible, since refrigerators are not operating due to the absence of electricity. The lack of power, combined with incessant Israeli air strikes, has forced many bakeries and supermarkets to close, making it even harder to obtain food.”
“There are only three litres of clean water available per person in the Gaza Strip, just one-fifth of the 15 litres the UN says is the bare minimum necessary for populations facing a humanitarian crisis. The trickle of aid making its way across the Rafah border crossing includes lentils, flour and other dry goods, which are useless for a population lacking the water to prepare them.”
“Speaking alongside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese Wednesday, Biden declared, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed.
““It’s the price of waging a war.””
Dreist: UN-Chef Guterres behauptet, Israel-Palästina-Konflikt habe schon vor dem 7. Oktober existiert (Der Postillon)
““Dabei weiß doch jeder, dass vor dem 7. Oktober 2023 alles total supi war in den israelisch-palästinensischen Beziehungen”, widerspricht Nahost-Kenner Bernhard Adriani. “Es herrschten Friede, Freude und, ja, auch Eierkuchen zwischen diesen beiden Volksgruppen, bevor es zu dem grausamen Terrorangriff kam.””
Israel Has Permanently Lost The Argument by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“I cannot adequately express the immensity of my respect for the many, many, many Jewish voices I’ve seen taking a firm and forceful stand against the Gaza massacre. I’m just over here getting yelled at by strangers online and I find it pretty intense; you’re having much harder arguments with family, with friends, with people you’ve known your whole lives, about something that probably feels a lot more personal for you. You’re out there protesting, taking action and moving the needle, typically with far more skill and incisiveness than anyone else in the world.
“Big, big, big-hearted love to all of you. You amaze me.”
To be clear, I think that the Israeli State has lost the argument, but it had lost it long ago. When Johnstone writes that “[t]here’s no coming back from this,” I think that’s to be interpreted as: there’s no going back to a world in which it’s possible to portray Israel as a peaceful democracy surrounded by enemies against which it valiantly defends itself. The atrocities in Palestine over the last 40 years—just they way they’re made to live, as stateless people within the confines of another country that doesn’t recognize them as people—can no longer be reasonably papered over. The U.S. still gets away with most people not knowing how it treats its Native Americans; Canada also still enjoys a reputation as a “good guy”, despite its horrific treatment of its First People. Australia also somehow stays clean, despite its near-eradication of its Aboriginals.
Russia attacked Ukraine, which tarnishes its reputation as a level-headed, designated enemy. They have to own that.
Israel, right now, is doing a terrible job of managing its image to cover up its human-rights abuses. The people of Israel have to own this and move past it. The people of the U.S. should do the same for their country’s many transgressions. Israel has to grant full citizenship and rights to Palestinians. They cannot just take and take and take, rewarding the absolute worst members of their society with other people’s land and houses. That’s madness. It’s insupportable.
Oil And Gas Lobbyists Happy To Fill In Rest Of Nation On Who Mike Johnson Is (The Onion)
“While outsiders may not be familiar with the congressman, Johnson is already a bit of a celebrity in our industries for consistently putting our needs for fewer regulations over those of his constituents. And he does so out of the kindness of his heart, plus $240,000 in campaign contributions since 2018. Where other people see an anonymous, backbench lawmaker, we see a paragon of virtue who can help us advance our agenda.”
October 7 testimonies reveal Israel’s military ‘shelling’ Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles by Max Blumenthal (The Grayzone)
“Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
“A separate report published in Haaretz noted that the Israeli military was “compelled to request an aerial strike” against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza “in order to repulse the terrorists” who had seized control. That base was filled with Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers at the time.”
“According to Haaretz, the army was only able to restore control over Be’eri after admittedly “shelling” the homes of Israelis who had been taken captive. “The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri residents were killed,” the paper chronicled.”
“Video filmed by uniformed Hamas gunmen makes it clear they intentionally shot many Israelis with Kalashnikov rifles on October 7. However, the Israeli government has not been content to rely on verified video evidence. Instead, it continues to push discredited claims of “beheaded babies” while distributing photographs of “bodies burned beyond recognition” to insist that militants sadistically immolated their captives, and even raped some before torching them alive.”
“[…] the mounting evidence of friendly fire orders handed down by Israeli army commanders strongly suggests that at least some of the most jarring images of charred Israeli corpses, Israeli homes reduced to rubble and burned out hulks of vehicles presented to Western media were, in fact, the handiwork of tank crews and helicopter pilots blanketing Israeli territory with shells, cannon fire and Hellfire missiles.”
Those people are already dead, their houses destroyed. However, it is valuable to determine who actually killed them. It’s important, no? If there are strong suspicions—as reported in one of Israel’s own leading newspapers—that Israel caused much of the destruction itself, that would go a long way to explaining the level of destruction that even Hamas was, by their own admission, surprised at having been able to wreak. If Israel immolated its own people in order to blame the destruction on Hamas, that provides a lot of fuel for the theory that Israel’s having been surprised by the Hamas attack was merely a subterfuge intended to convince us to allow them to finish off the ethnic cleansing of their lands. I’ll wait for more information, of course, but I am already wondering what those whose righteous anger has been fueled by these images and videos of Hamas war crimes would do were they to discover that much of what they believe had been done to Israelis by Palestinian terrorists were, in face, done by the Israeli state. Would they turn their ire on the Israeli state? Or would there be a massive disconnect? A short-circuit?
“The 2011 swap for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured five years prior and released in exchange for 1027 prisoners, provided clear inspiration for Al-Aqsa Flood. By storming military bases and kibbutzes, the Palestinian militants aimed to capture as many Israeli soldiers and civilians as possible, and bring them back to Gaza alive.”
“According to Haaretz, the commander of the Gaza Division, Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, “entrenched himself in the division’s subterranean war room together with a handful of male and female soldiers, trying desperately to rescue and organize the sector under attack. Many of the soldiers, most of them not combat personnel, were killed or wounded outside. The division was compelled to request an aerial strike against the [Erez Crossing] base itself in order to repulse the terrorists.””
“By 10:30 AM, according to an account the military gave to the Israeli news outlet Mako, “most of the [Palestinian] forces from the original invasion wave had already left the area for Gaza.” But with the rapid collapse of the Israeli military’s Gaza Division, looters, common onlookers and low-level guerrillas not necessarily under the command of Hamas flowed freely into Israel.”
“Yasmin Porat, the hostage who survived a standoff at Be’eri, described how a Hamas militant tied her partner’s hands behind his back. After the militant surrendered, using her as a human shield to ensure his safety, she saw her partner lying on the ground, still alive. She stated that Israeli security forces “undoubtedly” killed him and the other hostages as they opened fire on the remaining militants inside, including with tank shells.”
“Among the most gruesome videos of the aftermath of October 7, also published on the Telegram account of South Responders, shows a car full of charred corpses (below) at the entrance of Kibbutz Be’eri. The Israeli government has portrayed these casualties as Israeli victims of sadistic Hamas violence. However, the melted steel body and collapsed roof of the car, and the comprehensively scorched corpses inside, evidence a direct hit from a Hellfire missile.”
“[…] the young woman appeared to have been killed instantly by a powerful blast. And she seemed to have been removed from the car in which she was seated – and which may have belonged to a captor from Gaza. The vehicle was comprehensively destroyed and situated on a dirt field, as many others attacked by Apache helicopters were. She was scantily clad with her legs spread apart.
“Though she had attended the Nova electronic music festival, where many female attendees dressed in skimpy attire, and her parted limbs were typical of bodies with rigor mortis, Israeli pundits and officials ran with the claim she had been raped.
“But the allegations of sexual assault have so far proven baseless. Israeli army spokesman Mickey Edelstein insisted to reporters at the October 23 press briefing that “we have evidence” of rape, but when asked for proof, he told the Times of Israel, “we cannot share it.”
“Was this young woman yet another casualty of the Israeli military’s friendly fire orders? Only an independent investigation can determine the truth.”
If not the truth, it could eliminate what is definitely not true or what cannot be proven.
“Whether or not Israel is intentionally killing its captive citizens in Gaza, it has proven strangely allergic to their immediate release. On October 22, Israel initially rejected an offer from Hamas to free Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old Israeli peace activist, and her 79-year-old friend, Nurit Cooper. When the two were released a day later, video showed Liftshitz clasping hands with a Hamas militant and intoning “Shalom” to him as he escorted her out of Gaza. During a press conference that day, she described the humane treatment she received from her captors.”
I don’t speak Hebrew, so I can’t verify that her daughter translated for her correctly during her press conference. You also can’t rule out that she’s saying nice things because she hopes for further humane treatment for her still-captured husband. On the other hand, if she’d really been horribly treated, it’s perhaps unlikely that she would hope for better treatment for her husband if she says the right words. She seemed sincere, but I also don’t really have my thumb on the pulse of Israeli cultural signals, to say nothing of how an 95-year-old woman would act in that situation.
“The spectacle of Lifshitz’s release was treated as a propaganda disaster by the Israeli government’s spinmeisters, with officials grumbling that allowing her to speak publicly was a grave “mistake.”
“The Israeli military was no less displeased by her sudden freedom. As the Times of Israel reported, “The army is concerned that further hostage releases by Hamas could lead the political leadership to delay a ground incursion or even halt it midway.””
Ok. So Israel’s not denying the translation, just ruing that it ever happened. They need to keep the wind in the sails for an attack that will finally drive the Palestinians out of their country. They fear that the weak-willed populace will lose their nerve if the enemy isn’t sufficiently hideous or if the task is too heinous. He who stares into the abyss will find the abyss stares back at him, do you become what you hate in order to defeat it? and so forth.
They Let Humanitarian Aid In. Then They Bombed It So That Gaza Would Starve by Tareq S. Hajjaj (Scheer Post)
“One of the bakeries targeted in Nuseirat refugee camp had just received a huge shipment of flour from UNRWA, which had agreed with the bakery to sell the bread from the flour at half-price for the camp residents. UNRWA had just finished unloading the shipment, which was meant to cover the needs of the entire Nuseirat area, when the bakery was bombed and completely destroyed. They aren’t only targeting people and homes. They’re letting in aid, and then they destroy it before it reaches the people who need it. It’s calculated and deliberate. It’s meant to exterminate the civilian population.”
Without water, having flour is not as useful as it sounds, either.
Selbstgleichschaltung auf allen Kanälen by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Der größte Unterschied zum Medienwesen im Dritten Reich ist jedoch, dass heute kein Kollege mehr „von oben“ gezwungen werden muss, irgendetwas zu schreiben, an das er nicht glaubt. Man glaubt heute, was man schreibt. Da ist kein Zwang nötig. Politik und Medien befinden sich in einer toxischen Rückkoppelung.”
“Wie es so weit kommen konnte, dass Teile des deutschen Volkes sich vor etwas mehr als 80 Jahren einen Krieg geradezu herbeigesehnt haben, beschreibt er in „Von Bismarck zu Hitler“ sehr anschaulich. Wie viele andere Historiker schreibt auch Haffner dabei den Journalisten einen großen Teil der Verantwortung zu.”
100% correct, in all war-like countries, e.g., U.S. and Israel. The media do their best to train people not only not to meddle, but not to want to meddle.
For a Century, the Frankfurt School Has Studied How Domination Works in Modern Societies by Marc Ortmann (Jacobin)
“In the early years before the Nazis came to power, Horkheimer and his colleagues conducted research to understand why the socialist revolution did not happen as Marx had predicted. Through their studies on family, personality, and authority, they discovered that a significant portion of the working class did not identify with the idea of a socialist revolution, but rather with conservative political views.”
Middle Easterners Have Words For The Western Press Who’ve Been Lying About Them by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“The western press have been finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to do reporting alongside the middle easterners they’ve been lying about for generations, and discovering that a lot of those middle easterners speak English and have a few things to say.”
“Circumstances aren’t peaceful just because we are used to them. Just because you are able to go about your daily routine without major disruption doesn’t mean someone isn’t being horrifically abused by the status quo which makes your way of life possible. Peace doesn’t look like everyone complying with the status quo regardless of its abusiveness, it looks like the absence of abuse.”
Dismantle The Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Westminster Declaration (Racket News)
“Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.”
“As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society. Soon, the European Union’s Digital Services Act will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.”
“Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.”
“We recognize that words can sometimes cause offence, but we reject the idea that hurt feelings and discomfort, even if acute, are grounds for censorship. [Emphasis in original] Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny.”
“By labelling certain political or scientific positions as ‘misinformation’ or ‘malinformation,’ our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defence against disinformation.”
“In a democracy, no one has a monopoly over what is considered to be true. Rather, truth must be discovered through dialogue and debate – and we cannot discover truth without allowing for the possibility of error. ”
“As signatories of this statement, we have fundamental political and ideological disagreements. However, it is only by coming together that we will defeat the encroaching forces of censorship so that we can maintain our ability to openly debate and challenge one another. It is in the spirit of difference and debate that we sign the Westminster Declaration.”
I like the end. It reminds me of this quotation.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”
Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Third Edition Paperback – January 1, 2008 (Amazon)
The authoritative book on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict—the only book on it—is not available.
Amy Klobuchar, You Suck by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“Patience is wearing thin with the relentless determination of government figures — whether U.S. Cyber Command or a Minnesota Senator — to weed out independent media from the digital landscape. It’s not enough to have 99% of the informational space? They need all of it?”
“The Post repeatedly claimed to be describing social media activity of “online Russian bots” who were mostly ordinary users in the U.S. and other Western countries. That’s actual conspiracy theory that they wouldn’t have had to admit without Substack, and they have the cheek to seek a ban on us.
“These people are the worst. I would pay money to watch them all mauled by bears.”
The Slow Death of Authenticity in an Attention Economy by Cory Zue
“I have carefully curated a list of human beings who I know by name, and whose ideas and actions interest me. But authenticity is often at odds with growth.
“Why? Well to grow you need to be noticed. To be noticed, you need to stand out. And to stand out is—usually—inauthentic. Yes, we all say and do noteworthy things, but not every day. To do or say noteworthy things every day involves some degree of forcedness, repetition, or trying. The opposite of authenticity.”
Wigner’s Many Friends: Quantum Mechanics And Reality by Jochen Szangolies (3 Quarks Daily)
“There is much philosophical discussion regarding what the ‘quantum state’ of a physical system actually is: does it describe physical ‘reality’ (there’s that word again!), or does it merely give some account of our knowledge, or is it something else entirely?”
“But this in itself causes complications. After all, in a physical world, an experimenter, even a conscious one, is just some configuration of particles—what should be special about that particular pattern? (More recently, an answer to this has been proposed, using tools from integrated information theory —essentially, postulating that the amount of integrated information, a measure for consciousness, that a state contains dictates its likelihood to spontaneously collapse.)”
“From this point of view, what the Frauchiger-Renner Gedankenexperiment really tells us is the impossibility of observer-independent facts, or the impossibility of a fully objective world independent of any subject within. There is not only a single story that can be told about the world; rather, there exists an inevitable patchwork of stories that can’t be unified into a single, coherent whole. As in Kurosawa’s classic Rashōmon, truth is not a monolithic entity, but instead a multifaceted concept reflecting, to some extent, always the faces of those trying to peer into it.”
NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12 billion miles away by Joshua Hawkins (BGR)
“ NASA has completed a critical software update for Voyager 2 that will help keep it running even longer. The update, which took almost 18 hours to complete, was transmitted to help Voyager 2 avoid the same problem that its sibling, Voyager 1, experienced last year. Back in 2022, NASA reported issues with readings from Voyager 1’s AACS, which stands for attitude articular and control system.”
What’s a Predicate and Who Cares, Anyway? by Rebecca Baumgartner (3 Quarks Daily)
“The fact that we only truly need to understand grammar terms when we get around to learning a foreign language shows precisely why it’s unnecessary to do so in our native language. Learning a foreign language is an active and explicit process, so it makes sense that you’d need explicit instruction in grammatical structures (although even then, immersion can get you pretty far).”
Kind of? I guess? Does this author even know people who speak multiple languages?
“I think we underestimate kids if we assume that they won’t understand why one formulation is more interesting than the other, and what makes it so, without the baggage of grammar. We can trust them to organically grow into more sophisticated writers as they become more sophisticated readers and thinkers. There’s no need to fall back on overwrought metalinguistic explanations or misapplications of prescriptivist Latin and Greek instruction.”
I don’t know which kids you’ve been talking to, but they’re definitely more engaged than I’ve experienced.
“In fact, this perverse obsession with knowing how to circle subjects and underline objects rather than learning how to think and write critically is part of a larger trend in education of teaching to the test and using education as a means to an end. Dissecting sentences fits snugly into a curriculum based on grading rubrics, rote memorization, and a fetishization of standard formulations (I’m looking at you, five-paragraph essay ) at the expense of true critical thinking or exploration.”
Oh 100% agree.
“The instructional focus should be on giving them as much exposure to compelling texts and chances to practice their writing as possible, with the assessment criteria being primarily about higher-order things like setting a tone, developing an authorial voice, experimenting and playing with different styles and genres, building an argument, using evidence, finding reputable sources, and letting their personality and interests shine through their writing.”
Slow your roll there. Most kids can’t read, to say nothing of “finding their authorial voice.”
Killers of the Flower Moon by Brian Tallerico (RogerEbert.com)
“After being pushed off their property to the presumed wasteland of Oklahoma around the turn of the last century, the Osage Nation was stunned to find itself the recipient of the earthly gift of oil, making them the wealthiest group of people in the country per capita relatively overnight. Naturally, the people who had claimed a country they never owned wanted a piece of this action, leading to a battle for land in the region, […]”
““Killers of the Flower Moon” may not be a traditional gangster picture, but it’s completely in tune with the stories of corrupt, violent men that Scorsese has explored for a half-century. And yet there’s also a sense of age in Scorsese’s work here, the feeling that he’s using this horrifying true story to interrogate how we got to where we are a hundred years later. How did we allow blood to fertilize the soil of this country?”
It is who we are. The worst among us come to the fore. Think of the hill of buffalo skulls (Snopes).
“Through their story, the film doesn’t just present injustice but reveals how intrinsic it was to the formation of wealth and inequity in this country. It hums with commentary on how this nonchalant violence against people deemed lesser pervaded a century of horror. The references to the Tulsa Massacre and the KKK aren’t incidental. It’s all part of the big picture—one of people who subjugate because it’s so easy for them to do so.”
It’s the story of capitalism unbound by any real moral force.
“There are times when it feels like “Killers of the Flower Moon” could spin out into a broader political statement, but the performances, especially Gladstone’s, keep the film in the truth of character. The whole ensemble understands this element, playing the reality of the situation instead of treating it like a history lesson. Mollie Burkhardt didn’t know her saga would help found the FBI or bring light to injustice a century later. She just wanted to survive and love like so many who were robbed of those basic human rights.”
Our Dumb Century by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“[…] the real force of anti-Shakespearism, and of anti-humanism more generally, is coming straight from from the purportedly apolitical stats-mongerers and self-styled rationalists who sincerely believe of themselves that they come bearing not ideology, but only “tools”, not world-flattening ignorance, but only “methods”.”
“The most astounding thing to me about both Hanania’s and Bankman-Fried’s conceit is that it betrays no awareness, at all, of the way genius accrues over the course of centuries. Genius is not simply an intrinsic feature of works of literature, given at the moment they appear and stable from that moment on. It results in part from the particular reception-history the work receives, which cannot ever be predicted. The beauty of a work is to a great extent taphonomical, a product of the way it gets knocked around after the author’s death, the way its turns of phrase enter into our language and our habits of thinking.”
“[…] there might be someone writing today who is “better” than Shakespeare, whatever the hell that means. But no real meaning can attach to that claim for another 400 years or so.”
“The far more challenging task is to write in a way that motivates others to seek to write like you. This is something Shakespeare has clearly accomplished, over and over again, across several centuries.”
“Those from my own discipline, philosophy, mostly just come out to check the “public philosophy” box that is now included in the tenure-and-promotion process, with all the transparent eagerness of a high-school senior volunteering at a soup kitchen, thinking to himself the while: “I’m gonna put this on my résumé”. And when they get out there, before the public eye, what do they do? They mostly fumble the initial introduction with an irrelevant appeal to authority (“As a philosopher…”), and then proceed to recite orthodoxies that no one could possibly be surprised to hear from them, and that seldom seem to be the fruit of any real hard-won specialist expertise.”
“The present essay will probably be classified as a “rant”, by those who came into consciousness in our present dumb century, and have never heard of “jeremiads”, or “philippics”, or “diatribes”, or “screeds”. Those same people will call everything they like “brilliant”, and everything they don’t like “vile”. They will never yet have met a thesaurus.”
“[…] but we all know, at this point, that social media are the great mass around which all other discursive opportunities are orbiting, and the range of what may be said within these orbits is constantly being diminished, pulled downward by the gravitational force now at our society’s center.”
I for one am perfectly capable of ignoring it. I understand that Smith-Ruiu lives in a world where social media is more central to success, and I suppose it really does seem to be this way—that “social media are the great mass around which all other discursive opportunities are orbiting”—but we should be raging against that dying of the light, rather than accepting it. Yes, yes, the first step in fighting it is acknowledging it, but Smith-Ruiu already did that in his book.
“I would say that in my view the Hamas attack was atrocious and evil, and I’d add that if Israel conducted itself as I would wish, it would confound expectations and immediately set about investing in the very place the attacks came from, raising the standard of living, building up schools and hospitals, offering scholarships to Gazans, etc. That is of course not what Israel is going to do, and things are just going to keep being awful. I think it’s obvious that Hamas sought to goad Israel into retaliating with excessive force, and that therefore it is the worst thing Israel can do, strategically and morally, to react as Hamas expected.”
“If you think you can do away with these works, as our own dumb century thinks, as even our universities now think, you very quickly find that you are left in a world where only our small-scale loyalties remain. We have Kamala Harris, who can show you her art collection, and tell you that this vase was made by a gay African-American male, and that silkscreen was made by a Japanese woman, but can tell you nothing, at all, about the aesthetic properties of these works.”
“With no proper cultivation of an imaginative faculty that can enable you to get out of your own plight and at least momentarily into someone else’s, all you’ve got left are absolutes —settlers vs. natives, for example— with no resources available to move beneath these absolutes and remind yourself of how much flows from our common experience of humanity. This was just so obvious to so many of us in the previous century. I may be exaggerating, but to me the absolute viciousness on display on social media over the past week really is what a world without Shakespeare looks like.”
Half A Million Kinksters Can’t Be Wrong by Aella (Asterisk)
“I don’t know if you know how survey-taking norms work, but trying to get someone to answer 1,000 items is absolutely unhinged. It’s like asking someone to meet for coffee and then forcing them to stay for 12 hours of small talk. And the final cherry on the top of this sundae of horror was that the size of sample you need to make findings significant in the traditional sense increases with the number of questions you’re asking (or, more specifically, correlations you’re checking). So I needed a big sample size — many thousands, at least. But how do you get many thousands of people to sit down and answer a thousand questions?”
“First off was shortening the amount of time to take the survey, which sounds simple but was agonizing. I couldn’t let go of any of my precious questions. Each question I considered cutting meant I was releasing all of the other correlations I asked about into the wind. I felt like a hoarder on a TV show, wailing as I watched Marie Kondo slowly approach my front lawn.”
“I also make my research a community effort — not only do I share my raw data and code, I regularly crowdsource questions from the public about what to study next. What hypotheses do people have that they want tested? I do drafts of survey questions in X polls, to see how commenters will inevitably misinterpret my wording and thus inform me on how to write the question more clearly in the future. I hope this process helps vanquish the sacredness of research.”
“I feel such care and compassion for people walking around with these strange arousal patterns in their head that often cause such alienation. They’re shunned or ignored socially, but also by researchers — because of the logistical difficulty, because institutional review boards make approval hard, because sexuality is a subject rife with potential triggers, or because people simply don’t want to investigate things that aren’t trendy or socially sympathetic.”
The Good and The Popular by Martin Butler (3 Quarks Daily)
“Similarly, with regard to the arts, the unashamed elitist might argue that good art is by its very nature difficult, requiring education, intellect, and effort. Popularity requires less. In line with Plato, Mill argued that there are two qualitatively distinct pleasures, the lower and the higher, the lower pandering to popularity, the higher more difficult to access. According to this way of thinking, the artist, writer or musician who follows high artistic ideals better not give up the day job, and it’s folly to expect the general paying public to appreciate such ideals even if the work produced is of the highest calibre.”
“At the other end of the spectrum are those who deny that there is any intrinsic distinction between the good and the less so, and that the only way to make a meaningful distinction is simply to count the ‘likes’, so to speak. Everything is simply a matter of opinion, so if we want to identify something as good, popularity is the only ‘objective’ means by which we can do it. As in the commercial world, ‘the customer is always right’, and the popular is the good. It is mere snobbery to pretend otherwise, a snobbery I could be accused of with my distaste for the aspiration to be an influencer. For according to this view there is only one kind of good influencer, and that is a successful one.”
“[…] the popular internet influencer who has researched what is likely to gain the most likes and carefully choreographed their internet posts on this basis has no other concern than maximising followers. Contrast this with a musician of some sort who has a particular musical vision which inspires them to write and perform their own songs on YouTube. Here the musician’s conception of the good (their musical vision) resonates with others and popularity follows obliquely from the realisation of their creativity.”
“Surely even those of the highest integrity who open themselves to public scrutiny – whether artists, politicians, or internet influencers – will inevitably candy-coat their ’products’ to make them more appealing. And is anything wrong with this? Probably not, but this is quite different from the case where candy-coat is all there is.”
“[…] internet influencing is essentially a commercial enterprise where the logic of ‘the customer is always right’ can so easily prevail, so if this becomes the dominant culture within democratic politics we are in danger of losing any concept of the good which is beyond the popular. And here the problem is not so much about not knowing how to tell the difference, but the dissolution of the distinction all together. Politics then becomes just another commercial project, a competition between who can get the most likes. And that surely is something to be concerned about.”
We’re More Ghosts than People by Hanif Abdurraqib (The Paris Review)
“My pal Franny has a poem about the end of the world where she says that the world has already ended well before we arrived, and will end again many times through our lives, and I think I believe in that, too. That each time there is a massive rupture in some corners of collective living, the world has ended and started over again. Each time I feel pushed beyond a place of past comforts to a point where I realize I can no longer return, a world has ended and started over again. Like most things, it is easier for me to consider the apocalypse as a series of small movements instead of a single event.”
I’d never thought of it so fatalistically. I think of them as “phases”. Not really “birth”, “school”, “work”, “death”, but childhood (0–18), college (18–22), New York City (22–30), move abroad (30–), found a business (33–49), Uster (49–).
“I fill my satchel with berries and plants that I never consume or craft anything with. I walk into the saloons and play card games for hours, winning or losing cents at a time. I drink and stumble around dirt roads with no aim. And I seek out sunsets. This is my favorite part. The mountains along the virtual world’s western landscape are the best for this. I climb up one, set up camp, and watch as the sun goes down. I allow Arthur to fold into these daily routines, which strip hours away from my own real-life daily routines. And this is, I think, how I will leave it. This is what the game will be for me now. I can untangle myself from the desire to save Arthur if I stop considering the inevitable.”
“I sit on my couch for an hour without moving, and make a man sit at the edge of a cliff without moving, both of us watching a fake sky drown in color, both of us not yet sure when we’re going to die or how much time we have left. There are probably better ways to attempt the playing of God, but there are certainly far worse.”
Accelerationism is Terrorism by Kevin Munger (Crooked Timber)
“The dominant meta-program of today is, of course, the market: the ultimate tool for transforming the world into symbols (prices). Venture capitalists like Andreessen are programming the programmers of software to program the users—but they are themselves programmed by the market.”
“The manifesto notes that “Hayek’s Knowledge Problem overwhelms any centralized economic system.” That’s true for a vapid definition of “centralized,” but mainstream economists like Ronald Coase and Herbert Simon have long observed that the idealized “price-taking” firm is in reality quite rare, and that large, hierarchical organizations structure much of the economy.”
“Andreessen is more interested in the right hand of cybernetics—he specifically and repeatedly endorses the philosophy of Nick Land, the most famous proponent of Accelerationism. I can’t believe it’s come to this. Thiel famously said that capitalism and democracy are incompatible, and chose the former. Land’s Accelerationism says that (techno)capitalism and humanity are incompatible, and yet he still chose the former. So make no mistake. Accelerationism is terrorism.”
“Technological accelerationism aims to eliminate the human and instantiate the world of the inhuman functionary. The current rate of change is already incompatible with human dignity, and they want to speed it up.”
“Twenty years ago, social media companies started telling us “Hey! Here’s a new digital media thing you can use!” We individually used it, or didn’t. And then we all used it, because we had to . Just like the car. The existence of the technology restricts human freedom and agency. And now the damage has been done, social media has reshaped everything and to ban it today would itself be intolerably rapid change.”
It’s not impossible to avoid both, but you’re definitely swimming against a strong current, especially in the U.S., where you basically need a car, Facebook, and WhatsApp to even apply to, qualify for, or interview for most jobs.
“I argue that we should ban LLMs using first-person pronouns, both to preserve human dignity and to demonstrate to ourselves and to the Accelerationists that such action is possible.”
“The idea of progress, pernicious in all fields when applied without caution, has been disastrous here also. It assumes that man’s vital desires are always and that the only thing that varies in the course of time is the progressive advancement towards their fulfillment. But this is as wrong as wrong can be. The idea of human life, the profile of well-being, has changed countless times…The fact that we ourselves are urged on by an irresistible hunger for inventions does not justify the inference that it has always been thus.”
Let us not mistake change for progress. This is a myth sold to us by those who wish to change this to benefit themselves.
303 Creative at Hamilton College by Dale Carpenter (Reason)
“I was amazed at the level of sophistication and engagement of the students at Hamilton College. The perceptiveness of their questions was remarkable (student questions start about the 1:15:00 mark). What’s more, a large group of students stuck around for even more thoughtful discussion off-camera for about an hour—until we were expelled by maintenance personnel. I’ve rarely encountered law students at one of these kinds of events as genuinely curious and open to new ideas as these undergraduates were. Bravo to Hamilton for whatever it is doing to select students and fuel their intellectual fires.”
So Opera has a new icon in their beta version. It’s no longer the iconic red; instead, it’s now black-and-white.
It looks quite awful, so I wanted to find out if anyone knew how serious they were about it. Even though I’ve been an Opera user since version 3.x, back in the late 90s, and I’ve been a Reddit user for over 17 years, I’ve never visited the /r/operabrowser sub-reddit.
I quickly found a one-day-old topic called They should fire the design team! (Reddit) … which seemed like it might be related.
The introductory text seemed a bit incoherent, though, and more general than I would have liked.
After a few comments, some users chimed in with,
I backed away slowly and closed the page.
Not your average meeting series, episode 3
“Did you know 78% of positive memories at work are from video meetings?”
Did you know that you can just make up statistics, state them authoritatively, and get people to start citing them for you? 98% of people will just repeat statistics that they hear without inquiring about sources, methodology, or even thinking about how one could even get the statistic.
This stat is bullshit.
Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3 by Simon Willison
Willison prompts “A super posh pelican with a monocle watching the Monaco F1” and gets the following ideas.
So far, so good. It’s really wonderful that you can get something that’s not completely random garbage. However, the bird is only watching the race in the top-right picture. In the first and fourth, it’s definitely facing the fourth wall. It seems to be posh in all of the pictures, to one degree or another. The first prompt asks for a “Photo”, but that doesn’t look like a photo. Still, cars, coastline, pelican. OK.
Then he says “More like the first one please”:
I guess it interpreted that it should stick the monocle. Willison is over the moon about how it really got what he meant, but … the three new pictures look a lot more like the second picture than the first one (which features the whole pelican). Still doing reasonably well but, if this were a human, you’d be pretty annoyed that it’s wasting your time. It didn’t understand what you wanted and just made more pictures, but not “more pictures like the first one.”
Next up is “Add a walrus.”
In response, he writes that “[t]hat second one is amazing. [emphasis in original]” Does he mean the one where the walrus is photo-bombed into the foreground? That’s not really amazing, is it? The walrus isn’t watching, but neither is the pelican—but he didn’t ask it to make the walrus “watch”, just to “add” one, which is, I guess, exactly what it did. The last one looks nice, but they’re not watching it at all (just “attending”?), and the background contains speedboats instead of F1 cars. In the third one, the F1 car is in the water, but that’s OK, I guess?
He continues playing with it, and being amazed at how it manages to kind of respond to his input, but shouldn’t we expect better? Maybe he’s amazed that it works at all, but we’ve got to get a bit more critical of this stuff—otherwise, it will continue to just generate medicocre images that only vaguely fulfill the requirements. It’s the difference between asking a child, an apprentice, or a professional painter for a picture of a tree. You wouldn’t be at all satisfied with the output of a child from an apprentice, nor with that of an apprentice from a professional. I suppose my expectations are higher.
Does Go Have Subtyping? by Bob Nystrom (StuffWithStuff)
“This is why Go only treats two slice types as assignable if they have the exact same element types. In PL parlance, slice types are invariant with respect to their element types. And, for a mutable data structure like slices, that rule makes sense. (A reasonable person might wonder then why Java and C# don’t have this rule and instead say that array types are assignable if their element types are. And then, because as you can see, it isn’t safe to do so, they have to add runtime checks if you try to stuff an element of the wrong type into the array.) So, OK, it makes sense for slice (and array) types to be invariant. What about function types?”
Or you could say that Go sacrifices usability for consistency, in order to prevent errors that almost never come up in practice.
“If a field of a struct is itself some struct type, the inner struct’s fields are splatted directly into the surrounding struct’s contiguous memory. If you have a local variable of a struct type, the fields are stored right on the stack (unless you take a pointer to the struct which escapes the function).”
Same in C#, though, just to be clear.
“In Go, the distinction between stored inline versus stored indirectly is made at each use site. That leads to some additional complexity for the user: they always have to think “should I use an interface, pointer, or struct type here?”, but it gives them more fine-grained control over how they spend memory and pointer indirection costs.”
Eiffel is like this too: expanded
.
“There is potentially something clever you could do by supporting multiple entrypoints to functions for each pair of source and destination types, but with multiple parameters you quickly run the risk of exponential code size explosions.”
Swift did something like this for its generics-preserving ABI.
“If you didn’t care about how Go could be efficiently implemented because you were treating it purely as an abstraction, then this is a good way to look at it and compare it to other languages.”
That’s needlessly ugenerous. If you’re comparing the relative expressive power, then it’s important. Performance is a separate characteristic.
“Of the three, variance is probably the least valuable for users, so I think that’s a pretty smart trade-off.”
Disagree.
Don’t use DISTINCT as a “join-fixer” by Aaron Bertrand (Red Gate)
“[…] while we could spend a lot of time tuning indexes on all the involved tables to make that sort hurt less, this multi-table join is always going to produce rows you never ultimately need. Think about SQL Server’s job: yes, it needs to return correct results, but it also should do that in the most efficient way possible . Reading all the data (and then sorting it), only to throw away some or most of it, is very wasteful.”
“When I know I need to “join” to tables but only care about existence of rows and not any of the output from those tables, I turn toEXISTS
. I also try to eliminate looking up values that I know are going to be the same on every row. In this case, I don’t need to join to Categories every time if CategoryID is effectively a constant.”
“There was another interesting use case I wrote about a few years ago that showed how changing DISTINCT to GROUP BY – even though it carries the same semantics and produces the same results – can help SQL Server filter out duplicates earlier and have a serious impact on performance.”
At the boundaries, static types are illusory by Mark Seemann (Ploeh)
“An application can talk to the outside world in multiple ways: It may read or write a file, access shared memory, call operating-system APIs, send or receive network packets, etc. Usually you get to program against higher-level abstractions, but ultimately the application is dealing with various binary protocols.”
“text” is just an alias for binary files that are usually UTF-8-encoded, but used to be ASCII-encoded, way, way back in the day.
“The bottom line is that at a sufficiently low level of abstraction, what goes in and out of your application has no static type stronger than an array of bytes.”
“An interaction at the application boundary is expected to follow some kind of protocol . This is even true if you’re reading a text file. In these modern times, you may expect a text file to contain Unicode , but have you ever received a file from a legacy system and have to deal with its EBCDIC encoding? Or an ASCII file with a code page different from the one you expect? Or even just a file written on a Unix system, if you’re on Windows, or vice versa?”
“Here I read a database row r and unquestioning translate it to my domain model. Should I do that? What if the database schema has diverged from my application code?”
Is having an outdated schema an error or something to be handled? Could the db be out of date? yes. If someone changes the schema whiled we’re running. Should we handle that gracefully? Or crash, restart, verify schema, migrate (or not).
“I’m fond of making the implicit explicit. This often helps improve understanding, because it helps delineate conceptual boundaries.”
“A static type system is a useful tool that enables you to model how your application should behave. The types don’t really exist at run time. Even though .NET code (just to point out an example) compiles to a binary representation that includes type information , once it runs, it JITs to machine code. In the end, it’s just registers and memory addresses, or, if you want to be even more nihilistic, electrons moving around on a circuit board.”
That’s correct. “bytes” are another abstraction, on top of two’s-complement, little-endian representation, on top of bits of silicon that represent either a 1
or a 0
.
“In statically typed languages, we effectively need to pretend that the type system is good enough, strong enough, generally trustworthy enough that it’s safe to ignore the underlying reality. We work with, if you will, a provisional truth that serves as a user interface to the computer.”
“You can view receiving, handling, parsing, or validating input as implementing a protocol, as I’ve already discussed above. Such protocols are application-specific or domain-specific rather than general-purpose protocols, but they are still protocols.”
“You can write statically-typed, composable parsers. Some of them are quite elegant, but the good ones explicitly model that parsing of input is error-prone. When input is well-formed, the result may be a nicely encapsulated, statically-typed value, but when it’s malformed, the result is one or more error values.”
“This question of trust doesn’t have to imply security concerns. Rather, systems evolve and errors happen. Every time you interact with an external system, there’s a risk that it has become misaligned with yours. Static types can’t protect you against that.”
How Custom Property Values are Computed by Stephanie Eckles (Modern CSS Solutions)
“[…] once the browser determines the cascaded value, which is partially based on syntactic correctness, it will trash any other candidates. For syntactically correct custom properties, the browser essentially assumes the absolutized value will succeed in being valid.”
“This leads to an inability for custom properties to “fail early”. When there is a failure, the resulting value will be either an inherited value from an ancestor or the initial value for the property.”
“One way to discover the initial value for any property is to search for it on MDN, and look for the “Formal Definition” section which will list the initial value, as well as whether the value is eligible for inheritance.”
“To think about it another way: within the cascade, values can be inherited by descendents, but can’t pass values back to their ancestors. Essentially this is why the computed custom property value on an ancestor element cannot be modified by a descendent element.”
We’re Bringing Responsive Video Back! by Scott Jehl
“[…] due to the complexity involved in swapping video sources (e.g. matching timecodes, reloading heavy files, etc.), video media is assessed only at page load time, and not again after that when media changes from a browser resize (so it’s not quite like picture). Basically, you’ll need to refresh the page to see the video change.”
Generators are dead, long live coroutines, generators are back (Rust Lang)
Look, I appreciate that it’s not easy exploring the borrow-checker-based memory-allocation and asynchrony model, but if you’re a Rust developer, your head has got to be spinning. Async is so central to programming that it’s honestly difficult to consider programming without it—but in Rust, the syntax is quite complex, as is the logic. I absolutely understand it’s not easy—it’s way easier to do this kind of stuff with a garbage collector.
Anyway, I feel bad for companies and developers that are trying to stay at the forefront of the Rust tech stack right now. They must have whiplash. I’m sure if you’re using it for what it was originally intended, or for non-async programming, it still shines. I wonder how it fares against Zig, though.
Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app by Krzysztof Kowalczyk
“And yet I do know that you can write complex, relatively bug free code without tests, because I did it.
“I do know that you can write complex, relatively bug free code without anyone looking over your code, because I did it.
“If no one uses your app then who cares if it crashes.
“If many people use your app and it crashes, they’ll tell you and then you’ll fix it.”
Those four statements are contradictory. What they’re saying is not that you don’t need testing or code reviews, but that you can get your users to test for you.
I figure the author probably does test their code (everybody tests, even if that just means running the app), but not rigorously or in a way that you could say gives one the security of regression tests.
No-one worth discussing the issue with claims that it’s impossible to write complex code without automated testing. I’m a huge proponent of automated testing, and I wrote a relatively large, cross-platform renderer without a single automated test back in the late 1990s/early 2000s … it just took a long time, and I became increasingly terrified of making changes.
an aborted experiment with server swift by Ted Unangst
“Whenever a new language or framework comes out, people rush to try it, and github and stackoverflow and everywhere else is immediately filled with code samples that work with 1.0. But none of that info gets garbage collected when it becomes outdated, and people write fewer examples for new code, and the new samples have less link juice, with the result that the answers you seek are not the answers you find.”
“You can see the implementation of this extension in the source for HTTP2ErrorCode. But it appears in neither the documentation for HTTP2ErrorCode nor the documentation for ByteBuffer. I’m not sure how I would discover this method in the event that I did want to use it. I’ve been told the documentation simply needs to be rebuilt with the new version of DocC, but at the time of writing, that has not happened.”
“I’m not sure how this scales in a larger project. You use a component, they remove or rename a method, so then you just add it back? And bizarrely, due to the way extensions become globally imported, it may be some invisible dependency you’re using, leaving you unaware you’re using an obsolete method. This seems very likely to lead to chaos.”
“I cannot rule out the possibility that this is somehow my fault, since I don’t know swift that well, or at all really, so maybe this is just what happens when you forget to call await or something like that. But if that’s the case, this is an unfriendly failure mode for a supposedly modern safe language.”
Yeah, I’d have stopped working with it, too.
I like this, but I’m always reminded of how non-American I am culturally when I see people spending 75% of a video trying to figure out how much money they could get for things that are absolutely precious to them and that they’re still using. It just wouldn’t occur to me to even try to estimate how much money I could get for my bike. I’m still using it, why would that matter? I suppose that’s at least partially because I’ve been lucky to not have to be desperate for money, if I’m honest. But I also learned early to adjust lifestyle to available income (but I’ve been lucky that that actually worked and I never had to drop “food” or “rent” from the list).
Anyway, … cool video. Beautiful tone on that rig. And stick around for the last three minutes, where there is a definite “Oh hell yes!” moment. Goosebumps. Holy shit that rocked.
Official Swedish dictionary completed after 140 years (Guardian)
“The definitive record of the Swedish language has been completed after 140 years, with the dictionary’s final volume sent to the printer’s last week, its editor said on Wednesday.
“The Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB), the Swedish equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, is drawn up by the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prize in literature, and contains 33,111 pages across 39 volumes.
““It was started in 1883 and now we’re done. Over the years 137 full-time employees have worked on it,” Christian Mattsson told AFP.”
“[…] “allergy” which came into the Swedish language around the 1920s but is not in the A volume because it was published in 1893,” Mattsson said.”
Brickbat: Terrorist Tacos? by Charles Oliver (Reason)
“Police in Valence, France, ordered a Chamas Tacos restaurant franchise to turn off its sign or face an administrative closure order. The problem is that the “C” in the sign is not working, and at night it appears to read “Hamas Tacos.” The owner of the restaurant told local media the “C” has not been working for months,”
This made me laugh right out loud.
France has really gone right off the fucking rails, though. Seriously, what a shitshow for a place that can’t shut up about liberté.
Space Wreck is a hardcore, combat-optional, break-the-game RPG that clicks by Kevin Purdy (Ars Technica)
“To get into a room guarded by a gun-toting security guard, you could, of course, win a shootout with the guard. You could persuade him to step aside. You could disguise yourself. You could, if small enough, climb into a nearby vent and sneak into the room. You could reprogram some nearby security bots to take out the guard for you. Nearly every situation in Space Wreck has this kind of flexibility, and some of them far more.”
“The plot is that you, a worker for an exploitative space mining corp in the not-too-distant future, have barely survived crashing on an installation. You need fuel and a fuel chip for your shuttle. A bunch of people, robots, doors, and puzzles stand in your way. Your build and your strategies determine how you will go through it all: sneaking, computer hacking, crafting and mechanical trickery, melee fighting, shooting, charming, perceptive, or some combination. To a large extent, all of them can work, and all of them are rich options for repeat playthroughs.”
“Things can go terribly wrong, but you should not, must not reload, because trying to get past with a different tactic is the fun.”
Your guide to the guides for fixing the internet by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“A Verified Xbox fan account was complaining this week about the size of women’s butts in Spider-Man 2 compared to Starfield. Apparently, Spider-Man 2 is too woke to give Mary Jane Watson a dump truck. Let gamers make games!!!”
Published by marco on 1. Nov 2023 22:43:14 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 4. Nov 2023 12:19:46 (GMT-5)
The article Hamas Clarifies They Meant To Start The Type Of War Where They Get To Do Whatever They Want And No One Fights Back (Babylon Bee) is just one in a large set of really tone-deaf and unfortunately unsurprisingly one-sided headlines from this supposedly satirical online newspaper. A good satirist would somehow note that that headline may reflect how Hamas currently feels, but also how Israel was acting a few weeks ago.
There are many more irony-free and completely non-self-aware headlines from the Babylon bee like this one these days.
In the same vein, a usually reasonable and judicious Eugene Volokh goes all-in on Jews == Israelis and writes in a libertarian magazine that Some Cancellations are Justified by Eugene Volokh (Reason). Hey, cool, that’s what liberals/progressives think too! Nice to see you all have so much in common.
At the same magazine, you’ve now got the already usually fatuous Ilya Somin arguing that the problem is that Israel has been taking it too easy on the Palestinians in the article Hamas Attack Should Teach Us the Folly of Hostage Deals with Terrorists by Ilya Somin (Reason). Some people’s bloodlust is never slaked.
I can’t even read Scott H. Greenfield lately because he’s literally babbling in every article, as if he’d sustained a grievous head injury. For example, Short Take: The Death of “But For Video” by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) is only about how things that people allege Hamas has done are all true, even without any proof. When he needs horrific things to be true in order to justify the horrific things his “side” is perpetrating and will perpetrate, then his usual adherence to evidence is right out the window. And he doesn’t even seem to notice it.
I can’t imagine writing a comment gently trying to remind him of his former adherence to a higher standard, you know…when the victims weren’t Jewish. One person tried by writing “Is there any place for genuine discussion about Israel’s misdeeds in the current situation?” to which Greenfield riposted—in what he clearly assumes is a manner that he wears well—“There is a place for that discussion: a sophomore critical studies classroom. Just not among reasonable or knowledgeable people.” I.e., anyone who mentions prior, ongoing, or upcoming Israeli war crimes or tries to contextualize at all is sophomoric, a child, neither reasonable nor knowledgable, unlike Greenfield, whose opinions are so unimpeachable as to be fact. It’s his blog, but man, I miss the reasonable guy who used to run it rather than the Zionist maniac who’s running it now.
Like the Babylon Bee, he seems completely unable to see the irony of his statements, as they would apply to Israel just as well as to Hamas, e.g., from a comment of his, “It’s unclear whether or how many babies were beheaded although there is no question that they beheaded adults. After all, murdering babies by shooting, burning, dismembering or otherwise is totally less barbaric.”
All of these authors are ordinarily capable of talking about justice in relatively detached terms, when it doesn’t involve them or “their people”. Now that Israel has been attacked, they literally throw all of their principles out the window and start to bend over backwards to justify genocide or to simply not care about proof, or whatever. The point is that they are incredibly hypocritical and that I’m kind of disappointed. I’ll survive, of course, but it’s a shame. I wonder if they experience any regret about what they’ve written? [1]
I tried again with NYT Still Trying To Salvage Its Lost Dignity Over Hamas by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice), but he’s still quite resistant to knowing anything that he didn’t already know yesterday.
“On the one side, there’s the claim of Hamas, a terrorist group that had just raped, kidnapped, murdered and beheaded women, children and the elderly, and had a bit of a public relations problem on their hands, claiming Israel bombed a hospital when it turned out that the hospital was never bombed, but only a courtyard parking lot, and there is no evidence whatsoever to support any claim Hamas made.”
I’m honestly still surprised at how Greenfield still hasn’t gotten a hold of himself and started to apply his usual rigor to this topic. As he writes further down, “[…] the New York Times reported that Israel bombed a hospital and killed 200 500 800 471 Palestinians.” He writes the other numbers supposedly to show how disingenuous this whole affair is—because they can’t even get the number right immediately. He ends up at 471, which is a high number for a “parking lot”, no?
But he doesn’t think to research and find out that the hospital grounds had been converted to a refugee camp, which is what was hit in the parking lot. He does no research to try to find out whether Israel bombing a hospital and then lying about it is something that has happened with depressing regularity.
He doesn’t even change his opinion when Israel just quickly admitted to having bombed a church just the other day. He probably won’t even reconsider once Israel admits that it was one of their bombs (because only they really have that kind of firepower; if Hamas had it, Israelis would be in a good deal more danger than they currently are). Greenfield considers none of this because he’s been in a blind rage for weeks now. It’s unclear whether he’ll ever come back. He’s doubling down again and again.
Just to show that I’m not just cherry-picking his articles, here is the very next one he published, called Short take: When Terrorism Goes Mainstream by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice). He’s clutching his pearls that people are now all of a sudden supportive of terrorism, not because of the entire western leadership’s enthusiastic support of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza, but because the hoi polloi are shockingly willing to be critical of it, especially those dastardly—nay, amoral—young people.
Although the poll asked whether people were “willing to be critical of Israel”, he generously extends that to mean “supportive of terrorism”—presumably because of their callous ability to consider all acts of terror reprehensible rather than just those of Hamas. [2]
He ends his article with,
“Up until now, no matter what the cause or how righteous the goal, the use of terrorism was wrong and unacceptable. Terrorism was never the answer.
“Terrorism is, at least to a cohort of the young, now the answer.”
Jesus. Sanctimonious and hypocritical much? Greenfield is an American citizen, and is pleading Israel’s case. He is representing so much terrorism and he ignores all of it, pretending that only Hamas terror counts as terror, that state terror doesn’t exist. He didn’t used to be like, even quite recently. It’s like reading a breakdown in real-time.
Greenfield’s only defense to the accusation of being a n”OK for me, but not for thee” person is that he is woefully, shockingly, and suspiciously ignorant of his beloved Israel’s tactics—to say nothing of his own actual home country’s tactics.
He exhibits a complete and utter lack of irony, zero knowledge of what’s happened in the last three weeks—to say nothing of the last forty years—just whispering “I’m in my happy place” over and over to himself. I don’t think he’s happy, though. I hope he gets there soon. [3]
The actual numbers for which, just as with 9/11, have been walked back over the last several days. After 9/11, the numbers of dead were, at first, much, much higher, and slowly came down over the ensuing weeks and months to land on 2996, just under 3000 casualties.
After many Israeli military debriefings of their own soldiers, as well as an examination of the evidence on the ground, even Israel’s numbers are starting to include a much higher percentage of on-duty soldiers, police officers, and armed settles in the tally for October 7th than initially thought. Not only that, but a lot of people killed that day seem to have been killed by weapons that only Israel has.
The baby-beheadings stories were useful at the time, but were insupportable without evidence and have gone the way of the “Elite Republican Guard of Iraq throws babies out of incubators” story—believed by true believers, but debunked in the official history. Even the many claims of rape are being walked back as the evidence for those is also flimsy to nonexistent. This may change again, of course.
Greenfield knows none of this, and doesn’t care to learn. He needs to keep the fires of his rage stoked and pure.
As of November 3rd, the article Is “Humanitarian Pause” A Real Thing? reveals his current state of mind, which ends with this incoherent and clearly unedited babble.
“The newly-beloved phrase, “humanitarian pause,” seems so ripe for the moment to “do something” (remember the syllogism?) to help the Gazans suffering under the Israeli seige and whose lives are squandered by Hamas as worthless, but after the public relations value of the phrase wears off, should Israel pause while Hamas holds the hostages (whose release shouldn’t be conditions on anything), seized whatever aid the naive hope will go to the Gazans and continue to fire rockets into Israel.
“Maybe they will raid a few more kibbutz during the “pause,” or rearm their fighters, repair their tunnels, and prepare for the next round of their holy war to destroy Israel one baby in an oven at a time. After which, the phrase “humanitarian pause” will be forgotten as it will no longer serve its pretense that the Gazans’ nightmare can be wished away any more than the Israelis’.”
He’s still very firmly in the camp that Israel is on the back foot, struggling mightily against the incomprehensible evil and raw power. Now he’s positing that Hamas yearns to put Jewish babies in ovens (his words), that their goal is to destroy the Jewish state. This is the stated purpose of some members of Hamas. I’m not well-informed enough to say that it’s their official platform, but it’s definitely how a good number of Hamas members feel. The sharp mind of Greenfield can’t see that this is also how a good part of the Israeli population feels about Palestinians.
Instead, he makes up fairy tales about Hamas smuggling in more weapons or being able to make more raids against an Israeli military in an incredibly heightened state of alertness. There’s barely any food going in—how are weapons going to get in? Or does Greenfield not have any idea of what it looks like on the ground there? The U.S., Israel, and the IDF all freely admit to the basic parameters that Greenfield doesn’t even seem to notice. Is it deliberate ignorance so that he doesn’t have to reexamine his assumptions? That’s not usually his style. Is he really just not hearing about even his own “side” is reporting about what’s happening in the war he supports? Did he really stop absorbing information on October 7th?
It’s a shame, but he’s still sidelined. You can almost see the spittle dotting his lips as he’s rage-writing those paragraphs, patting himself on the back the whole time for his eloquence in expressing how incredibly obvious his point-of-view is. HOW COULD YOU SUPPORT BABY-EATERS?
You both have grievances and you’ve kind of tried to get along, but it’s not working, and you’ve managed to win people to your side. The other person has... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 1. Nov 2023 22:25:09 (GMT-5)
Suppose you have a problem with a person at work. Your office is right next to theirs. Your own office is nice, but theirs is also nice.
You both have grievances and you’ve kind of tried to get along, but it’s not working, and you’ve managed to win people to your side. The other person has grievances against you, but no-one really believes or acknowledges them. You insist that they’re made-up. People agree not to think too much about it because they like you so much.
Just recently there was an incident that they started that pushed the whole situation over the line. They were terminated and you got their office. Well, you just took the wall down and merged your offices. Now you have a nice, big office and your nemesis is gone.
What happens if it turns out that the triggering incident was partially or mostly your fault? Do you say something? Do you try to undo what you’ve done? Or do you cover it up so that no-one ever knows?
If you say something, what might happen? Will they bring your nemesis back on board? Will they give them back their office? Will they put them in your office? Will you have to share? Or…would they throw you out of your office?
Would you be punished? Terminated?
Better not to say anything.
Better to spin and to bury the truth.
Better to double down and go on the offensive.
Better to accuse anyone who tries to reveal the truth that you’re covering up of being against you for personal—and possibly deeply racist and shockingly discriminatory—reasons.
Right?
What, really, would the truth be in that situation?
I mean, c’mon.
Couldn’t you just pretend that the truth is what everyone already believes?
Wouldn’t it be a hassle for everyone to admit the “real” truth?
What would be the point?
No-one will ever know.
At least, no-one who matters.
And no-one listens to people who don’t matter, anyway.
And, honestly, even if someone who mattered did know, they probably wouldn’t care. They’re too invested in the truth they already believe.
Only your nemesis would benefit.
And you would stand to lose everything.
You got what you wanted by pleading a moral high ground to which you had no right.
You’re actually the bad guy and your nemesis would be vindicated.
A bad person managed to take something from a good person who they’d managed to make look like a bad person for long enough to steal everything they had.
But…the history shows a beleaguered good person who finally freed themselves of their nemesis.
A neat trick.
Why mess with that?
Am I the only one that thinks bad thoughts when he sees, for example, the third emoji in this list? I know that they think it’s a parent with a child, but does that not look like a gender-neutral blowjob to you? You won’t be able to unsee it, either. In... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 25. Oct 2023 22:27:46 (GMT-5)
What’s New in Unicode 15.1 & Emoji 15.1 by Keith Broni (Emojipedia)
Am I the only one that thinks bad thoughts when he sees, for example, the third emoji in this list? I know that they think it’s a parent with a child, but does that not look like a gender-neutral blowjob to you? You won’t be able to unsee it, either. In fact, I can’t look at any of the four pictures and see “family”. Look at the second one! That’s two people “sharing”! How does the emoji committee not see this? Or maybe they do! Maybe they’re making emojis for “three-way” (the first two), “blowjob” and “swinging”.
Oh, and apparently there are a bunch of characters important for “China’s mandatory GB 18030 standard” and there are a bunch of emojis for people in wheelchairs, with canes and stuff, which I guess is good…but I can’t get past these “family” emojis.
How about:
Published by marco on 25. Oct 2023 22:23:48 (GMT-5)
I recently read the headline Vacuum suction-mounted wireless TV zip lines off faulty walls to safety by Scharon Harding (Ars Technica). What an incredible crash blossom. The author used one hyphen but more punctuation would have been better.
How about:
If I don’t officially and performatively condemn acts of murder or war crimes, is the assumption that I condone them? Are... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 25. Oct 2023 22:10:55 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 31. Oct 2023 17:07:35 (GMT-5)
What is it with performative condemnation? The push for it? Is it a control thing? I think very much that it’s a psychological trick to get the upper hand in an interaction.
If I don’t officially and performatively condemn acts of murder or war crimes, is the assumption that I condone them? Are you kidding me? I have to defend myself against people thinking I’m a monster, by default? And a performative declaration of “I am not a monster” would fix that?
Or would it just put me in a cycle of having to performatively reiterate my not being a monster every single time people thought I should just because I’d already done it in the past? And my not doing it in a specific case would be even greater proof that I must, in fact, condone the new monstrous acts, in my heart of hearts.
No. That way lies madness.
I don’t have to prove I’m not a monster. You should already know I’m not, if you know me at all. I don’t need to impress people who don’t know me. I would hope that my friends would interpret any of my statements in a generous light. I would hope that my friends would clear up any incorrect assumptions for anyone who’s mad at me for things I clearly never said or meant.
I don’t need to officially condemn specific acts of terror. That’s a waste of my time.
It’s enough to say, generally, that I think that murder is abhorrent. Rape is abhorrent. Etc. Threats of violence, reveling in fear, these things are abhorrent.
Once you’ve set out your principles, your stance, condemning a specific subset of abhorrent acts seems superfluous. Any such condemnation would be trying to top what was already superlative. So what would be the point? Ah, the point would be to approve something else with the condemnation, to pledge allegiance to a cause, to a certain story of how the world is. That way, too, lies madness. Much better to be clear about allegiances, rather than to leave them implied.
How would such a condemnation sound, in that case? As a show of support for that which is opposite to that which is condemned? Should the condemnation be couched in terms like “were things to have transpired in the way that you’ve described, including acts which I’ve already made clear I find abhorrent and have condemned in the abstract, then, yes, clearly, and by induction, I would also find these hypothetical acts abhorrent and worthy of condemnation.”
Such a statement would not only be considered inadequate—too hedged, although it’s very precise—and would have added nothing of substance to the conversation, other than to make mental incompetents smugly nod to themselves as they infer much, much more from it.
On top of that, there’s my anti-authoritarian streak. The more you demand I make a statement, the less likely I am to want to make that statement. My hackles are up. The more strident your demands, the more I suspect your motives.
If I were to condemn murder, do I have to specifically condemn killing babies? Or lighting them on fire? Or whatever horrible thing you can come up with? Would I also have to condemn rape? Wouldn’t being against murder already contain all of the other things? Or does one have to list all of the horrible things that anyone can dream up individually?
No, I will let my past statements and writings speak for themselves. If you’re not familiar with them, then don’t assume you know what I’m thinking.
The article Dröhnendes Schweigen: Kleiner Timmy (9) hat sich immer noch nicht zur Lage in Israel geäußert (Der Postillon) came across my feeds. It means “Ominous silence: Timmy (9) has still not spoken out about the situation in Israel.” Indeed. Timmy is sus.
Published by marco on 25. Oct 2023 21:33:52 (GMT-5)
]]>Published by marco on 24. Oct 2023 22:39:45 (GMT-5)
The following video is a talk by Robert Martin “Uncle Bob”, one of the graybeards worth listening to. This video from 2011 is wide-ranging and contains a lot of brilliant advice. It’s stuff that we’ve known for a long time now, but every generation of programmers needs to re-learn these things about every 5-10 years. You usually can’t stop people from just reinventing the wheel because who wants to watch videos of or read blog posts written by old dudes, ammirite?
At 10:00, he talks about how the top-level architecture of most applications reflects the framework used to implement the web-delivery mechanism rather than the purpose of the application itself. In his example, he shows how a Ruby-on-Rails application is immediately recognizable as such, but that you have literally no idea what the application does.
He urges us to consider what this implies about our priorities as architects and developers. It means that we are much more concerned with the technology than with the functionality. This is not good.
He contrasts it with a high-level. 2-d blueprint of the first floor of a church, where the intent is obvious: it’s a church (he says). Of course, inferring that it’s a church involves applying the appearance of the diagram to a given context—e.g., a very western one—but the point is clear: the standard, top-level view of the design of a church screams out that it’s a church. It says nothing about how the church is to be built—or has been built—it says what it is.
“Architecture is about intent.”
Just to be clear: this presentation is from 12 years ago, and we’re still confronted with the same concepts—still confronted with the same failure to remember these precepts. Our frameworks still push themselves to the fore.
This is, in a way, the problem with LLM-generated code: we are already terrible at expressing the intent of our software in a way that makes it maintainable and qualitative. We are already mostly terrible at designing and building things in a way that satisfy the nearly-always-implicit non-functional requirements, like maintainability, usability, performance, etc.
And now we’re asking another piece of software, whose workings we can’t yet fathom, but which we know we’ve built by feeding it all of these terrible versions of software, and asking it to write software for us. All of the theory that we’ve developed about how to build software will not be respected, except by luck, if the neural net is feeling like that’s a high-probability next token.
On the one hand, I have to admit that this doesn’t sound much different from how software is built today, except that the human builders are potentially capable of following rules, whereas the software-based builders are less trainable. Again, though, we have decades of experience showing that, while people are ostensibly trainable, they are not necessarily practically trainable, at least in the general case for the general type of person who takes part in this field of endeavor we call programming.
Which leaves us with the question: have we achieved the maximum potential in software development? We already knew everything we needed to know about how to do it decades ago. What is missing is the will to do it that way. It’s definitely possible to train people to do it that way. The hangup is, as always, the cost, specifically, the cost-benefit ratio. The perceived benefit of better software is usually far less than the perceived (initial) cost.
And we always perceive only the initial cost because we are super-bad at long-term thinking about complex problems like building software.
At 34:00, Uncle Bob says
“There’s gotta be some better way to do this. […] This is just 3270 programming poisoned with all sorts of crud. How many languages do you have to do know to write a web application? Well, there’s some programming language, but that’s incidental! You’ve gotta know HTML and CSS and JS and Zazzle and Dazzle and … and, you know, the guy over here’s going: ‘let’s build communities by leveling people up. Leveling them up! I mean, what we’re going to do is hand them a … OK, now, hold this hammer. Ok? Good. You got that hammer? Now, here’s another one. Hold that hammer too. Now I’ve got a big barrel you’ve got to hold on your head. We are not helping our cause with this truly terrible mechanism that we have adopted.”
At 41:00, he says
“The database is a detail.”
This reminds me of The UI is an afterthought, a detail, an article I wrote recently [1] about a 7-year-old video I watched that expressed the same sentiments about external systems that Martin is expressing in his 12-year-old video.
“That’s what architecture is: find some place to draw a line and then make sure every dependency that crosses that line goes in the same direction.”
At 55:45, he says,
“There’s an interesting case of the database—the thing that’s so incredibly important—and yet, we took that decision and we just deferred it off the end of the world and then, when somebody needed it, we shimmed it in in a day. Because our architecture had done something right. What is the hallmark of a really good architecture? A good architecture allows major decisions to be deferred.”
“A good architecture maximizes the number of decisions not made.”
At 1:00:50, he says,
“How do you keep the beast under control? You need a suite of tests you trust with your life. You must never look at that suite of tests and think ‘you know? I don’t think I really tested everything?’ As soon as you think that, you’ve lost it. Because now you’re afraid of your code. The reason we write our tests first is so that we know, that every single line of code we wrote was because of a failing test that we wrote. So that we know that every single decision that we made is tested. So that then, we can pull up that code on our screen and say ‘Oh my God, that looks like a mess’—and clean it!…without any fear.”
Great talk. Add it to the pile of things that we know—or should know—better, but don’t.
Published by marco on 23. Oct 2023 21:48:40 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The FTC Case Against Amazon Is Revealing the Extent of the Company’s Shady Market-Rigging by Rob Larson (Jacobin)
“From its early days, as Amazon moved beyond books into many other product categories, it was common practice for the company to use its software to monitor product prices at other retailers (like Wal-Mart and Target’s online stores) and automatically update its listings to match their prices. Able to monitor prices elsewhere online, Amazon’s growth left a great number of small enterprises in its wake, usually by copying their business models, underpricing them by making use of its monumental scale, and discarding competitors’ shriveled carcasses.”
“With all these costs, plus the need for small sellers to pay Amazon for advertising, Amazon takes nearly half of the revenue of third-party sales — 45 percent, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. These companies, many of whom built their business specifically to operate on Amazon, are utterly at the platform’s mercy.”
“[…] very early in his company’s history, Bezos said, “When you are small, someone else that is bigger can always come along and take away what you have.” You might think the moral of that is to have a level playing field, but Bezos clearly took the lesson to be that you must get big yourself so you can take what others have.”
As long as we make heroes out of these people, these are the kind of ethics our society will have. We get the leaders we deserve. The cream does not rise to the top—the dross does.
Bond market “rout” a result of major structural shifts by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“The scope of the selloff, which has seen yields on 10-year Treasury bonds move to around 4.9 percent (prices and yields move in opposite directions) is indicated in some calculations made by Bloomberg. It estimates that about 46 percent of the value of bonds with maturities of ten years or more has been wiped out in the market plunge. And 30-year bonds have lost 53 percent of their face value.”
““Ever since the Federal Reserve broke the inflation scare of the 1980s, Wall Street and Washington have shrugged off multitrillion dollar deficits, counting on America’s global standing to provide perpetual demand for its debt that could finance the spending. Now the steep decline in the prices of Treasuries—meant to be the world’s safest and easiest-to-trade investment—are forcing markets to confront the possibility that the rates required to place all this debt will be higher than anyone expected.””
“[…] the two conditions which determined the operation of financial markets over the past several decades—the endless supply of virtually free money to the financial and industrial corporations and the suppression of the class struggle—have been reversed.”
“There are a number of factors feeding into the operations of the market. First, there is the very size of the administration’s financing demands. More than $1.76 trillion of Treasury bonds were issued in September. As the WSJ noted, this was “higher than in any full year in the past decade, excluding 2020’s pandemic surge” with no decrease likely. Then there is the question of who will buy government debt. Banks have been a mainstay of the market, but they are starting to pull back.”
“A number of countries, including China, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, are making efforts to lessen their dependence on the dollar in financing international trade.”
The Big Three’s CEOs are Ripping Off Their Companies by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)
“The most obvious explanation for the bloated CEO pay in the U.S. is that we have a corrupt corporate governance structure. It is obvious what keeps a check on the pay of ordinary workers. Management works very hard to ensure they are not overpaying assembly line workers, retail clerks, or administrative assistants. But who works to ensure that the company is not overpaying the CEO? In principle, that is supposed to be the job of the corporate board of directors. But for the most part, by their own account, reining in CEO pay does not even seem to be on their list of responsibilities.”
“In Europe and Japan, typically banks have a large stake in major corporations. This makes them long-term shareholders with a direct stake in corporate governance. They are well-positioned to ask whether they can pay CEOs less. In other words, they can act to put a check on CEO pay in the same way that management puts a check on the pay of ordinary workers. And that is why the pay of CEOs of major European and Japanese car companies is 10-25 percent of the pay of the U.S. CEOs.”
“[…] this excessive pay is not showing up in big returns for shareholders. To take GM as an example, its share price is virtually unchanged since it went public again following its bankruptcy in the Great Recession.”
“[…] excessive CEO pay is a major drain on the economy. CEO pay is not related to their performance, even measured narrowly as returns to shareholders. From the standpoint of those of us not in a position to benefit from the bloated pay structures at the top, it is simply a tax, and a very regressive one.”
Europe’s Leaders Are Lining Up to Support Israel’s War on the People of Gaza by Daniel Finn (Jacobin)
“The Israeli military has ordered more than a million Palestinians to leave the northern part of Gaza. It did not say when they would be allowed to return to their homes — if indeed their homes are still left standing after the Israeli offensive. A UN spokesman warned that the Israeli order would have “devastating humanitarian consequences,” turning “what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.” The Norwegian Refugee Council demanded that this “illegal and impossible order” be canceled immediately: The loss of civilian lives caused by deliberate or indiscriminate use of force is a war crime for which the perpetrators will have to answer. We fear that Israel may claim that Palestinians who could not flee northern Gaza can be erroneously held as directly participating in hostilities, and targeted.”
“Palestinians in Gaza are facing an impossible choice. If they leave their homes now, there is no guarantee they will be safe anywhere else, and no guarantee they will ever be allowed to return. If they stay where they are, Israel will claim that they voluntarily placed themselves in harm’s way as its military machine lays waste to Gaza.”
“Hamas took control of Gaza sixteen years ago. The median age for both men and women in Gaza is eighteen, and two-thirds of the population is under the age of twenty-four. According to Herzog, if they have not managed to overthrow Hamas by force — something Israel has been unable to accomplish with one of the world’s strongest armies — then they only have themselves to blame if an Israeli bomb or bullet takes their life. The statement is an unbridled declaration of war on civilians by Israel’s head of state.”
Even this ostensibly sympathetic treatment fails to write that “Hamas was elected”. While it’s true that they “took control”, they did so after having been elected to do so.
“Although von der Leyen is an unelected official, she is acting as if she possesses a democratic mandate to speak on behalf of the 448 million people who live in EU member states. Earlier this week, she issued the following statement as she ordered the Israeli flag to be projected onto the Commission headquarters in Brussels: “Israel has the right to defend itself — today and in the days to come. The European Union stands with Israel.””
God, Uschi is just odious. Just a great example of how awesome and conflict-free and equitable everything can be when women are in charge instead of men.
“In a particularly distasteful move, the coleader of Germany’s ruling Social Democrats, Saskia Esken, boasted on Twitter that she would be boycotting the launch of a book by Bernie Sanders because he did not “stand by Israel” to her liking. An American Jew whose family came from modern-day Poland, who was born while the Holocaust was taking place and lost close relatives in the Nazi death camps, thus has to deal with finger-wagging lectures from a German politician with no discernible record of achievement who believes that she has a better understanding of antisemitism than he does.”
Bravo. 👏👏👏 Beautifully put.
The Savagery of the War Against the Palestinian People by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)
“Each of these attacks pulverizes the minimal infrastructure that remains intact in Gaza and hits the Palestinian civilians very hard. Civilian deaths and casualties are recorded by the Health Ministry in Gaza but disregarded by the Israelis and their Western enablers. As the current bombing intensified, journalist Muhammad Smiry said , “We might not survive this time.” Smiry’s worry is not isolated. Each time Israel sends in its fighter jets and missiles, the death and destruction are of an unimaginable proportion. This time, with a full-scale invasion, the destruction will be at a scale not previously witnessed.”
“Gaza is a ruin populated by nearly two million people. After Israel’s horrific 2014 bombardment of Gaza, the United Nations reported that “people are literally sleeping amongst the rubble; children have died of hypothermia.” A variation of this sentence has been written after each of these bombings and will be written when this one finally comes to an end.”
“The victory of Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) was condemned by the Israelis and the West, who decided to use armed force to overthrow the election results. Operation Summer Rains and Operation Autumn Clouds introduced the Palestinians to a new dynamic: punctual bombardment as collective punishment for electing Hamas in the legislative elections. Gaza was never allowed a political process, in fact, never allowed to shape any kind of political authority to speak for the people.”
“The 1982 resolution “reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” You could not have a stronger statement that provides legal sanction for armed struggle against an illegal occupation.”
It doesn’t, though, allow war crimes, like targeting civilians. It’s not OK for anyone, neither Hamas nor Israel.
“Each time these Israeli fighter jets hammer Gaza, leaders of Western countries line up metronomically to announce that they “stand with Israel” and that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” This last statement—about Israel having the right to defend itself—is legally erroneous. In 1967, Israeli forces crossed the 1948 Israeli “green lines” and seized East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 sought the “withdrawal of [Israeli] armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The use of the term “occupied” is not innocent. Article 42 of the Hague Regulations (1907) states that a “territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.” The Fourth Geneva Convention obliges the occupying power to be responsible for the welfare of those who have been occupied, most of the obligations violated by the Israeli government.”
US, European powers fully implicated in Israeli mass murder by WSWS International Editorial Board (WSWS)
“Since launching its savage onslaught on Gaza Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces have dropped 6,000 bombs weighing some 4,000 tons on the enclave. According to Palestinian health authorities, 1,417 people have been killed, half of whom are women and children, but the death toll is undoubtedly far higher. The AP released video of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, with a population of 116,000 packed into 1.4 square kilometers. The AP noted that the camp had been “razed to the ground” by Israeli airstrikes.”
“Just two months ago, nearly three thousand, predominantly Jewish public intellectuals from all over the world signed a letter under the headline, “Elephant in the Room,” which described the conditions that preceded the attack from Hamas. They referred to “the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity.””
“A totally false, lying narrative is being concocted, according to which Israel is the victim of Nazi-style attacks from the Palestinians, who in fact have been oppressed and subjected to repeated bombardments and massacres for decades. The Israeli government and its supporters are seeking to exploit the Holocaust to justify their own genocidal crimes.”
“Joe Biden’s speech Tuesday, denouncing the Palestinian uprising as the expression of “pure unadulterated evil.””
That’s a really good first step to establishing the diplomacy required for a cease-fire…right?
“The Israeli onslaught on Gaza must be seen in the context of the escalating US-NATO war against Russia, the initial stage of world war. The imperialist redivision of the world will assume the form not just of conflicts between countries, but an ever more direct and violent war against masses of people. The ruling elites in all the capitalist countries, moreover, face an intersecting series of economic, social and political crises which they are seeking to divert through an explosion of military violence.”
German parliament in a war frenzy by Peter Schwarz (WSWS)
“The Bundestag gave the Israeli government carte blanche to take cruel revenge on the Palestinian population for the uprising in Gaza and promised to support it by all available means. It threatened with military retaliation all regional organisations and powers that dared to help the Palestinians and pledged to prosecute, punish, and suppress any expression of sympathy with the Palestinians in Germany.”
“For Scholz, brutal violence is only permitted when it originates from oppressors, not from the oppressed. The Nazis had once used similar arguments to denounce as “terrorism” and brutally destroy any resistance that came from partisans, Jews, or other victims of their murderous politics.”
“Omid Nouripour (Greens) said: “This is not about two parties in dispute. It is about a democratic state defending itself against sheer terror.That is why there is no equidistance, to anyone. We only stand by Israel’s side.” Dietmar Bartsch (Left Party) spoke of “a new dimension of terror” that “simply wants to slaughter Jews” and reaffirmed “our solidarity with Israel.””
The Spiral of Violence that Led to Hamas by Peter Singer (Project Syndicate)
“Hamas reportedly holds roughly 150 hostages, and has said that it will kill one every time Israel bombs a Gazan home without warning. Hamas leaders surely remember that in 2011, Netanyahu, as prime minister, was willing to free over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, some of them terrorists, in exchange for the release of a single captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Against that background, they may believe that Israel will not be prepared to sacrifice the lives of the hostages in order to achieve its military objectives.”
They would be wrong, I suppose. It looks like Israel is calling them on it, telling them to put their money where their mouth is. That they hope for a prisoner trade has been the expressed intent of the kidnappings from the very first statement by Hamas, but we can, of course, disregard their actually stated goals and reasoning and instead predicate the goals and reasoning we’d like them to have instead. It makes things easier, I suppose. Israel has thus far been quite tight-lipped about the hostages—it seems almost as if they’re already treating them as martyrs.
“When Hamas attacks Israeli civilians, it knows that this will lead to Israeli counterattacks in Gaza that are bound to kill and injure many civilians. Hamas locates its military sites in residential areas, hoping that this tactic will restrain Israeli attacks, or at least lessen international support for Israel.”
“How far Israel will go with its declared intention to deny electricity, fuel, food, and water to the two million citizens of Gaza, many of them children, is hard to know. What is certain is that Hamas’s brutal crimes do not entitle Israel to starve children.”
We know a bit more about how serious they are. They seem to be deadly, deadly serious about it. The first trucks went in—20 of them for 2.3m people—just yesterday, about 10 days after the shutdown. There were concerns about whether Egypt would try to smuggle weapons to Hamas amid the food and water supplies.
These are reasons that sound like they make sense until you realize that the alternative—doing nothing for days on end—probably meant the suffering and/or expiration of thousands of innocents, of children.
We have international treaties for a reason, but they’re not worth the paper they’re written on when signatories ignore the rules to which they’d agreed when it pleases them. They would, of course, like the rules to apply when they are in need, when they are being oppressed, but Israel, like the U.S., can no longer conceive of a world in which they would be on the back foot.
They’re not on the back foot now, not really, stop blowing smoke up my ass—so they don’t have to care if the whole international legal structure collapses. It doesn’t benefit them anyway. Just like for the U.S., these international agreements that what they now perceive as weaker leaders of the past having signed are just getting in the way of their plans, of their empire, of their colonialism.
If they would take a step back, they might be appalled to realize that they are being held back from doing horrific crimes by ethical and moral codes to which they in more clear-headed times agreed. In the current bloodthirsty atmosphere, such concerns are swept away before a sheet of red that obliterates all but vengeance.
“And now what? Restore deterrence? How, exactly? Self-punishment in the form of a renewed occupation of Gaza? A land invasion is difficult to imagine. The atrocious level of destruction and casualties this would entail is one reason, with the many Israeli hostages now in Gaza providing additional insurance. The risk of Hezbollah opening an additional front from Lebanon in the north is another. Hezbollah’s capabilities dwarf those of Hamas, and a two-front war, with Iran possibly backing Israel’s foes, is an apocalyptic scenario. This is exactly why US President Joe Biden warned Israel’s enemies “not to exploit the crisis.” To drive home the point, Biden has ordered the US Navy’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean.”
Singer’s certainty here now seems unwarranted. It’s unlikely that Hezbollah will join the battle. Israel is already bombing Syria and Lebanon preemptively, something that they are presumably allowed to do without reprobation by the international community. They haven’t dared attack Iran directly yet, but I’m really wondering whether the reaction of Europe would even be negative. After all, Israel is allowed to defend itself, is it not?
They may force the point, by forcing the U.S. to put its money where its mouth is, following up with force on the side of a deranged, reckless, genocidal power that already had overwhelming superiority over its declared foe.
“Netanyahu’s machine of poisonous political disinformation is already at work disseminating a conspiracy theory according to which leftist army officers were responsible for the negligence that led to this dirty war. No one should be surprised that Netanyahu would resort to the infamous “stab in the back” narrative – a conspiracy theory also peddled by the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. How else could the inciter-in-chief explain his criminal negligence?”
“Israelis will question the conceptziyya that they can reap the benefits of a Western nation-state while being inured to the hardships their neighbors seek to inflict on them.”
The phrase “seek to inflict on them” seems a bit out of place considering the overwhelming power that Israel has. They are the only nuclear power in the region. They have managed to display a deranged, anything-goes approach to foreign policy in which no slight is ever forgiven, no matter how small, in which every slight is answered a dozen-fold.
No-one sane would attack Israel, knowing that it is quite likely that a mushroom cloud will rise over their capital city, rising silently to the applause of all European and American leaders. So, no, I don’t think the Israeli fear of invasion by its neighbors is to be considered very likely.
Naturally, Israel will take a page from Dick Cheney’s book, citing the 1% => 100% doctrine, rounding up a vanishingly small danger to a certainty that warrants preemptive attack—just to be on the safe side. It’s balderdash, of course, but it will be sold as a perfectly normal way to reason about things, a perfectly just way of handling the situation.
IMF Showdown with China in Morocco by Michael Hudson (CounterPunch)
“At issue is not only what countries will be the major beneficiaries of future IMF and World Bank loan operations, but whether the world will back US unipolar dominance or start to move explicitly toward a multipolar philosophy of mutual support to increase living standards and prosperity instead of imposing anti-labor austerity in an attempt to maintain a trade and investment system that is now widely seen to be dysfunctional and financially predatory US demands to use these two organizations as arms of its New Cold War policy.”
“A 15% veto is able to block any policy change. And ever since the inception of these two organizations in 1944-45, the United States has insisted in having veto power in any organization it joins, so that no foreign countries will ever be in a position to dictate its policy – while enabling it to block any policy that it deems benefiting other nations more than itself. Its 17.4% quota (and 16.5% of the vote) gives it veto power in the IMF.”
“No other country remotely approaches U.S. power. US strategists were glad to let Japan obtain the second largest quota, now 6.47 percent. That reflects not only its great industrial takeoff in the 1970s and ‘80s, but US confidence that Japan will be like a “second US vote.” (That is why it tried to add Japan to the UN Security Council. The Soviet delegate vetoed this, citing Japan’s role as a US political satellite.)”
“China is in third place, with 6.40%, closely followed by the weakening economies of Germany and Britain, thoroughly reliant on US gentleness as it imposes tightening US-centered dependency on their economies.”
“[…] the planned increase should not apply to “the emerging market and developing countries.” They are debtors and hence would support policies that help debtor countries recover instead of fall into deepening dependency on international bondholders and new US dollar loans from US/NATO creditors and the IMF.”
“In one sense, I wonder what all this kerfuffle actually is about. Who really cares what the IMF’s articles of agreement stipulate and what its staff recommends? We are no longer in a rule of law, but in a “rules-based order,” with US officials setting the rules on an ad hoc basis. This already had made a travesty of IMF rules and procedures.”
“The IMF’s recent loans to Ukraine have raised its borrowing to seven times its quota. The IMF no longer feels obligated to follow its articles of agreement, and quite openly acts as an agent of the US State Department and military to finance the US/NATO war against Russia and China (and really, of course, against Germany and Western Europe).”
“In addition to IMF loans to Ukraine violating its stated limits to member-country borrowing, it is lending to a country at war, also forbidden. And third, it violates the “No more Argentinas” rule that it is not supposed to make a loan to a country without some calculation that the country will be able to repay the loan.”
“Why should China help subsidize international organizations whose policies are adverse to those of China and its fellow BRICS+ allies? The World Bank is always headed by a US diplomat, usually from the military, and hopes to finance the US/NATO-backed alternative to China’s Belt and Road initiative. And the IMF’s neoliberal “stabilization” policies are anti-labor and hence most amenable to US client oligarchies, not the reforms that BRICS+ countries are seeking to put in place.”
Putin’s Valdai Speech, What You Need to Know by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)
“The war started, according to Putin, when the United States “orchestrated a coup in Kiev in 2014.” Putin said that the U.S. “provoked the Ukraine crisis by supporting the coup in Ukraine in 2014. They could not fail to understand that this was a red line, we have said this a thousand times. They never listened.””
“In a recent essay , professor of international law John Dugard has said that it is neither clear what the rules of the rules-based order are nor “the method for their creation,” and has offered as a possible explanation of the rules based order that it is “international law as interpreted by the United States to accord with its national interests,” meaning whatever the U.S. needs it to mean in any given situation.”
My God! Yes! Fucking obviously! Stop wasting your time seeking to reconcile this obvious fact with America’s fairy tales about its own benevolence.
“It is often said in the West that Putin seeks to reestablish a Russian empire and reacquire vast territories, starting with Ukraine. Putin, though, says in contradiction to those claims, “The Ukraine crisis is not a territorial conflict, and I want to make that clear… [W]e have no interest in conquering additional territory.” He insisted, “This is not a territorial conflict and not an attempt to establish regional geopolitical balance. The issue is much broader and more fundamental and is about the principles underlying the new international order.””
“In response to the question of whether Russia objected to Ukraine joining the European Union, Putin responded that Russia had “never objected or expressed a negative attitude to Ukraine’s plans to join the European economic community – never.” He said that Russia opposes Ukraine joining NATO because NATO is a “military bloc” and a “tool of U.S. foreign policy.” But “the EU is not a military block,” and, as for “economic cooperation, or economic unions, we do not see any military threat.””
Gaza-Kommentare aus der US-Politik – Zwischen Morgenthau und ruandischem Hass-Radio by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“In einem Interview mit Fox News stellte Haley zunächst einmal fest, dass die Palästinenser nicht nur die Feinde Israels, sondern auch die Feinde der USA seien, die sie – so Haley – genau so sehr hassten wie Israel. Ihre Forderung an den israelischen Premier Netanjahu: „Finish them! Finish them!“ Und damit meint auch sie nicht die Hamas, sondern die Palästinenser in Gaza; Zivilisten und Kinder eingeschlossen, und im gleichen Atemzug auch Iran. Nun müsse die USA eine klare Kante zeigen und zwischen „Gut und Böse unterscheiden“. Ansonsten würde Iran dem Vorbild der Hamas folgen und über die laut Haley ungesicherte Südgrenze in die USA (sic!) eindringen und dort das nächste 9/11 veranstalten. Da blieb sogar dem Fox -Moderator kurz die Spucke weg, bevor auch er in die wilde Verschwörungstheorie Haleys einstieg.”
“Zumindest von Seiten der Republikaner, die im US-Repräsentantenhaus bereits die Mehrheit haben, sie wohl im nächsten Jahr auch im Senat haben werden und die aller Wahrscheinlichkeit auch den nächsten US-Präsidenten stellen werden, scheinen die USA Israel grünes Licht für ein militärisches Vorgehen außerhalb des Völkerrechts zu geben. So sehr man auch die Aktionen der Hamas kritisieren muss und so sehr man natürlich auch Anteilnahme mit den zivilen Opfern Israels haben muss – was sich dort am Horizont zusammenbraut, muss ebenfalls scharf kritisiert werden.”
A Matter of Justice by Ray McGovern (Scheer Post)
““A more convincing swing at this issue was taken in an unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board on Sept. 23, 2004, just two months later. The board stated: ‘Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.”
Israel’s Massive Intelligence Failure by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)
“This reality was manifest in the words of U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, speaking at The Atlantic Festival a week before the Hamas attacks, when he optimistically concluded that, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” adding that “the amount of time I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today, compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11, is significantly reduced.””
He had no clue. Way to keep your finger on the pulse, dipshit.
“[…] the fact that the U.S. had once again subordinated its threat analysis to Israeli conclusions —especially in circumstances where Israel saw no immediate danger — meant the U.S. did not spend too much time looking for indications that might contradict the Israeli conclusions.”
“Unit 8200 likewise has spent billions of dollars creating intelligence collection capabilities which vacuum up every piece of digital data coming out of Gaza — cell phone calls, e-mails, and SMS texting. Gaza is the most photographed place on the planet, and between satellite imagery, drones, and CCTV, every square meter of Gaza is estimated to be imaged every 10 minutes.”
“Denied the benefit of the contrarian approach to analysis put in place in the aftermath of the Agranat Commission, Israel set itself up for failure by not imagining a scenario where Hamas would capitalize upon the Israeli over-reliance on AI, corrupting the algorithms in a way that blinded the computers, and their human programmers, to Hamas’ true intention and capability. Hamas was able to generate a veritable Ghost in the Machine, corrupting Israeli AI and setting up the Israeli people and military for one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the Israeli nation.”
Slovakia’s Election Result Is About Declining Living Standards, Not Just Ukraine by Jakub Bokes (Jacobin)
“It was not, of course, “democratic Slovakia” that lost, but rather that part of the population which had disproportionately benefited from the political and economic reforms of the past three decades. Following the election, liberal commentators have lined up to express their disappointment and forecast a mass exodus of the young and educated. There is no doubt that Smer’s triumph will be celebrated most among pensioners, low-income workers in the country’s poorer regions, and those with limited access to political, cultural, and educational capital — the party’s traditional base.”
“[…] the Bratislava region — a region that has often been ranked as one of the richest in Europe — Smer came first in fifty-eight out of the seventy-two electoral districts across the country.”
“After three years of high inflation and falling living standards, Slovakia has a chance of having a stable social democratic government with a mandate to protect the welfare state. Should the next government fail to stop the erosion of the social safety net, this could pave the way for a return of an emboldened far right . Leftists need to choose their battles wisely.”
Washington’s Illegal, Immoral Meddling in Syria Faces Mounting Problems by Ted Galen Carpenter (Antiwar.com)
“There is little question that the presence of U.S. troops and armed contractors (mercenaries) is utterly illegal under international law. The Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad, which is recognized by the United Nations and the vast majority of countries, never invited those forces to enter Syria. Moreover, Damascus has repeatedly demanded that they be withdrawn . U.S. leaders have flatly refused to do so […]”
“It is not a coincidence that northeastern Syria contains most of the country’s oil reserves, and that both the United States and the Kurds, Washington’s secessionist clients there, have profited handsomely from U.S. protection.”
“Such developments are not only an embarrassment for U.S. policy in Syria, it should be yet another source of shame. The United States has created a humanitarian catastrophe in that poor country in the name of trying to impede Iranian influence in the Middle East. Assad’s great sin was being Tehran’s close ally. U.S. leaders then became determined to oust him from power, no matter what the cost to the Syrian people.”
That’s also the ostensible reason why Israel bombs Syria, regularly and, of course, illegally.
“The effort to unseat Assad has resulted in hideous carnage, as well as the displacement of innocent people throughout Syria. In addition to the more than 300,000 Syrians who have perished in the fighting since 2011, some 6.8 million have become refugees.”
“Washington’s illegal and immoral military presence in Syria needs to end immediately. Unfortunately, the Biden administration exhibits no pangs of conscience, much less a willingness to change policy.”
The Last Planet on the Left: Climate Change as Rape Revenge by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“There is a creature stalking the human race, a colossal ferocious beast with tentacles that lash every last corner of the globe, a pitiless monster the likes of which mankind has never encountered, and this thing is out for blood. Its methods are as brutal as they are efficient. Its weapons are as deadly as they are diverse. It will reduce entire villages to ash with blazing infernos and it will drown entire islands in the deep blue sea. It will erase ancient agrarian civilizations in the blink of an eye and engulf once fertile bioregions in billowing waves of towering sand dunes.”
“The story of a group of sadists who rape and murder two teenage girls only to find themselves at the mercy of one of their victim’s vengeful parents, Last House on the Left was actually a brutal statement about a nation who had willingly engaged in a genocidal war in Southeast Asia but was somehow mystified by the fact that their global campaign of ultraviolence had followed them back home in the form race riots and serial killings.”
“Solar farms, wind turbines and electric cars aren’t solutions to this rampage. They are shallow attempts to pay off our terrestrial victim with trinkets of silence so we can continue on with our debauched modern lifestyles and this bribery will only be met by more violence.”
“There exists no form of green energy on the planet that can adequately sustain our globalist, fossil-fueled superstate, our freeways and metropolises and world trade deals. That is because oil itself is not the problem, we are. This rapacious crime spree that defiled the planet began long before the automobile which has become its perpetrator’s weapon of choice. It began with the Agricultural Revolution. This is when human beings first began to take more from the earth than what we gave back so we could take more and more and more.”
“This doesn’t mean going green. This means going small. Drastically reducing our global presence by dismantling our entire multinational corporate infrastructure and returning to some form of sustainable village life. A world without highways. A world without skyscrapers or jumbo jets. A world without standing armies or the Westphalian nation state.”
“[…] we don’t need a Green New Deal, we need an Amish New Deal.”
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights: a Cold War Debate Re-ignites in Geneva by Daniel Warner (CounterPunch)
“As the Geneva Observer revealed, at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, the Chinese are proposing a resolution to prioritize economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights ahead of the traditional Western civil and political rights. Beyond geopolitical and material confrontations, an ideological battle dating to the Cold War is being re-ignited over the universality of human rights and their implementation.”
We should admit that the possession of civil and democratic rights has been profoundly hacked. The most rapacious offenders against human rights can legally claim to be democracies. The goal was to be humane and fair with one another, to have justice. Democracy and civil rights are a mechanism. They are not working.
Inequality, hunger, and extreme poverty are at what should be considered to be unacceptably high levels in countries that shout their democratic credentials from the rooftops, all while building fiefdoms, monarchies, and feudalism under a veneer of freedom indoctrinated with a strictly controlled information and media environment.
“An exception to Western prioritizing civil and political rights has been the Australian N.Y.U. Professor of Law Philip Alston. The recent U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Alston started his 2020 final report with a damning critique of the failure to eliminate extreme poverty: “The world is at an existential crossroads involving a pandemic, a deep economic recession, devastating climate change, extreme inequality, and a movement challenging the prevalence of racism in many countries,” he wrote. “A common thread running through all these challenges and exacerbating their consequences is the dramatic and longstanding neglect of extreme poverty and the systemic downplaying of the problem by many governments, economists, and human rights advocates,” he noted. Long a champion of ESC rights, Alston visited the United States and the United Kingdom during his tenure, harshly criticizing both countries for their inaction to eradicate extreme poverty.”
The US Is Just As Culpable As Israel For The Atrocities Committed In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“If there were two million Jewish people trapped by Christians in a giant concentration camp and placed under total siege, being told that half of them had 24 hours to relocate into the other half or be killed, nobody would have any confusion about what they were witnessing.”
“[…] the State Department has been circulating internal emails telling staff to avoid calls for peace, instructing them to refrain from using phrases like “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm.”
“Asked about progressive congressional members calling for a ceasefire, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “we believe they are wrong, we believe they’re repugnant, and we believe they’re disgraceful.””
Gay, black women can also not only support war crimes, but can be disgusted by people who don’t. You’ve come a long way, baby.
This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“Israel taught the Palestinians to communicate in the primitive howl of hatred, war, death and annihilation. But it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the complicity of an international community that licenses Israel’s genocidal slaughter and accelerates a cycle of violence it may not be able to control.”
Roaming Charges: Gaza Without Mercy by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Haaretz called for the immediate exchange of prisoners between Israel and Hamas: “No government, and certainly not the most reckless government in Israel’s history, has the right to traffic in the lives of innocent civilians and decide to sacrifice them on the altar of national pride. We must pay whatever is demanded, with no delays, no fancy maneuvering and no tricks.””
“Haaretz’s lede editorial, October 7, 2023: “The disaster that befell Israel is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister… completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians”.”
“Biden has ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to deploy near Israel this week in support of the country. That group includes the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy; and four Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyers—USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney, and USS Roosevelt. One of the last times the US did this was during the Six-Day War, when the Israelis attacked and almost sank the USS Liberty. killing 34 US sailors and wounding 174.”
“Is there room enough in the Mediterranean for the armada of ships racing from the US and UK to support Israel against a captive population that doesn’t have a Navy? Wouldn’t they be better served rescuing migrants in unseaworthy dinghies fleeing the nations destroyed by NATO bombs? But aid here is only allowed for those who already have plenty. Recall that in 2010, Israel attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, a group of six ships trying to break the naval blockade and bring humanitarian aid to the starving residents of Gaza. The Israeli navy forcibly boarded the Turkish ship MV Mavi Marmara. When some of the activists on board tried to fend off the Israeli commandos with iron rods, the Israelis opened fire, killing 9 Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American […]”
“Yes, there are two sides to this war. But only “one side” has an air force. Only “one side” has a Navy. Only “one side” has guided missiles. Only “one side” has phosphorous bombs. Only “one side” has tanks. Only “one side” has an air defense system. Only “one side” has nuclear weapons. Only “one side” controls the water supply, electrical power and food supplies of the other. Only “one side” has freedom of movement. Only “one side” gets $3 billion a year from the US government and an “unwavering” pledge to refill their stockpiles of depleted munitions.”
““History has no mercy. There are no laws in it against suffering and cruelty, no internal balance that restores a people much sinned against to their rightful place in the world. Cyclical views of history have always seemed to me flawed for that reason, as if the turning of the screw means that present evil can later be transformed into good. Nonsense. Turning the screw of suffering means more suffering, and not a path to salvation. The most frustrating thing about history, however, is that so much in it escapes language, escapes attention and memory altogether. – Edward Said, “The Screw Turns Again.””
…and nothing happened after that.
The Plan to Wipe Out Hamas by Seymour Hersh (SubStack)
“Over the past week Israeli jets have conducted around-the-clock bombing of non-military targets in Gaza City. Apartment buildings, hospitals, and mosques were torn apart, with no prior warning and no effort to minimize civilian casualties.”
“I have been told by an Israeli insider that Israel has been trying to convince Qatar, which at the urging of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a long-time financial supporter of Hamas, to join with Egypt in funding a tent city for the million or more refugees awaiting across the border.”
It’s Not The ‘Israel-Hamas War’, It’s The Israel-Gaza Massacre by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“The mass media asked you to believe the Hamas attack was “unprovoked”. Then they asked you to believe blatant babies-on-bayonets atrocity propaganda. Now they’re asking you to believe Jewish kids were in school before dawn on a Saturday morning in Israel. Western journalism, folks.”
“Before engaging an Israel apologist in a debate about the ongoing Gaza purge, it’s probably a good idea to ask them to clarify whether there’s any amount of death and destruction Israel could inflict there that would cause them to stop supporting what Israel is doing. Is there a death count that they’d consider too much? How many dead Palestinian civilians are they willing to tolerate in this current operation? Tell them to give you a number.”
Israel Should Respond, Not React by Ted Rall
“Hamas’ October 7th operation was meticulously researched and planned. It is not even slightly likely that Hamas leadership did not foresee the Israeli response that we are seeing: a brutal bombing campaign followed by a massive ground invasion determined to replace the Hamas government with a puppet regime. Rule one of strategy: when you find yourself following a predictable set of actions, your enemy is winning.”
“Israel could turn the power back on, let food and water back in and beef up its lame security along its border with Gaza. It could treat the attacks as a police matter and demand that Hamas turn over suspects for prosecution. It could jumpstart negotiations to finalize a two-state solution, which everyone knows is the only viable long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It could embrace the wisdom of Nelson Mandela, who understood that a cycle of violence would never end unless one side, the side in charge that happened to be the African National Congress after he was elected president, declared amnesty so the country could move past apartheid. And if it finally did—after careful consideration—decide to invade Gaza, it could [do] so with full knowledge and understanding of what form of governance would follow Hamas.”
We Are Palestine’s Only Hope by T.J. Coles (CounterPunch)
“[…] in 2003, four former heads of Israel’s internal Shin Bet force issued a statement, that the continued torture of Palestine will only blow back against Israel: “We must once and for all admit there is another side, that it has feelings, that it is suffering and that we are behaving disgracefully … [Palestinian terrorism] is the result of the occupation.””
“The so-called Democratic administration of Creepy Joe Biden illuminated 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the white and blue of the Israeli flag. The Tory government of Great Britain, run by PM Rishi Sunak, projected the same onto both 10 Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament, as the neoliberal regime of France run by Emmanuel Macron projected the Israeli flag onto the Eiffel Tower. Perhaps sickest of all, the neoliberal Social Democratic Party of Germany, which has long abandoned its Marxist principles, run by Olaf Scholz, lit the Brandenburg Gate in the colors of the Jewish State.”
“The people of Palestine courageously practice non-violence most of the time. During the 2018 Great March of Return, for instance, Gazans peacefully demonstrated to the world that they have a right to end the blockade and to return to their homelands. Israel responded by murdering 223 and shooting healthy young males (mostly) in the kneecaps.”
Julia Salazar: Palestinians Deserve Liberation Because They Are Human by Julie Salazar (Jacobin)
“[…] the reason Palestinians deserve liberation is not because they are perfect victims. There is no such thing as a perfect victim. Instead, Palestinians deserve liberation because they are human. Internationalist solidarity means understanding that our collective liberation, as human beings and as working people across the globe, is incomplete as long as any of our neighbors are struggling for their own liberation. Acting on that solidarity means calling for our own government to stop fueling oppression and instability through military aid and hawkish diplomacy, and instead affirming the full and equal rights of Palestinians and Israelis.”
Israeli Intelligence Suddenly Able To Intercept Hamas Communications by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“It’s certainly possible that Israeli intelligence services are phenomenal at spying on Hamas communications, and it’s certainly possible that Israeli intelligence services had no idea Hamas was preparing its attack. It’s also possible that both are false. But it’s very difficult to believe they’re both true.”
No One Wants Independence by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“I said very clearly all that needs to be said about Hamas. Theocratic ethnonationalist movements are obviously completely incompatible with everything I’ve asked for. I just didn’t do that in the way prescribed by the current emotional moment, loudly, with performative anger. And I focused on the actions of the Israeli government, as I always do, because Israel is the dominant power and the only entity that can create the conditions necessary for peace.”
As it gives Israel green light for genocide, US prepares war against Iran by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“Friday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, “There is a risk of an escalation of this conflict, the opening of a second front in the north, and, of course, of Iran’s involvement… It’s why the president moved so rapidly and decisively to get an aircraft carrier into the Eastern Mediterranean, to get aircraft into the Gulf, because he wants to send a very clear message of deterrence.”
“In an editorial Sunday night, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “The Ayatollahs in Tehran need to understand that more than their terrorist proxies are at risk. They need to know that their nuclear sites and oil fields are also on the target list.” Echoing these points, Senator Lindsay Graham raised the prospect of a declaration of war against Iran, which he said he had discussed with the White House.
““I’ll introduce a resolution in the United States Senate to allow military action by the United States, in conjunction with Israel, to knock Iran out of the oil business,” he said. “Iran, if you escalate this war, we’re coming for you.””
Those are all quotes. The lunatics are truly running the asylum.
Fareed Zakaria GPS by Mustafa Barghouti on October 8th, 2023 (CNN)
“Today the whole West Bank is paralyzed by 560 military Israeli checkpoints. And these checkpoints were there during the last 30 years.
“We are suffering from a wall that is built on our land. The whole West Bank has been divided in 224 small ghettos, separated from each other. And the settlers are everywhere attacking Palestinians. You speak about right-wing government in Israel, already Israel is a right-wing government. Israel is already having fascists in its government.
“Smotrich described himself as a fascist homophobe. And that man Smotrich who is also a settler said that Palestinians have one of three options only, either to immigrate, or accept a life of subjugation to Israelis or die. This is the Israeli minister of finance. Netanyahu never negated these statements. And both Smotrich and Bibi (ph) said that their plan is to annex the West Bank.
“Can we stop what’s going on now? Yes, of course. All these Israelis who are now in Gaza can be released tomorrow, including everybody if there are civilians, also the civilians, even the generals of the Israeli army can be released if Israel also accepted to release our 5,300 Palestinian prisoners who are in Israeli jails. Including 1,260 Palestinians who are in jail without knowing why under the so-called administrative detention.
“They don’t know why they are arrested. They are not charged. Their lawyers don’t know why they are arrested and that is the life we have.
“Look, Fareed, we have lived all our lives under occupation. My father lived under occupation. My daughter is living under occupation. We want a time when we, the Palestinians, will be free.
“Hamas was not there 30 years ago or 40 years ago. But before that, we are all described as terrorists. Any Palestinian who struggles for his rights or for freedom is described as terrorist.
“And the question here, do we have the right to struggle for freedom? Do we have the right to struggle for real democracy? Do we have the right to have normal democratic elections which unfortunately Israel and the United States don’t support? I think we are entitled to that.
“But the unfortunate thing if we struggle in a military force (ph) we are terrorists. If we struggle in an unviolent way we are described as violent. If we even resist with words we are described as provocateurs.
“If you support Palestinian and you are a foreigner, they describe you as anti-Semite. And if you are a Jewish person, and there are many of those, who support Palestinian cause, they call him self-hating Jew.
“This should end. It doesn’t make sense. We should all have equal life. We should all have peace. We should all have justice and we should all live in dignity.
“The main way to achieve that is to end occupation, end the system’s apartheid that I am sure no Jewish person can be proud of. Time has come for that and time has come for justice and freedom. If we achieve that, there will be no violence and nobody will be hurt.”
Biden declares total support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“The entire trip was a flagrant display of contempt for global public opinion. Amid mass protests throughout the region opposing Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, Biden chose to deliver the most provocative statement he possibly could, making graphic and inflammatory allegations against the Palestinians, comparing them to ISIS and calling their actions “evil.”
“Biden spent the vast majority of his speech recounting alleged Palestinian atrocities, or praising the Israeli government, or describing how he would arm Israel. Just six lines mentioned the Palestinians, and those were focused on blaming them for being massacred by the Israelis.
“He began his speech with the declaration: “I come to Israel with a single message: You are not alone. … As long as the United States stands … we’re going to stand by your side.””
“Immediately after Biden left the country, Israel launched a series of airstrikes targeting Syria and Lebanon, both allies of Iran. Israel, which is intent on expanding the war, is doing everything possible to provoke a military response from Tehran. Any such response would be used by the United States to put into practice long-held plans for war with Iran.”
From Applauding Nazis To Backing An Actual Genocide In Under A Month by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“The idea was never really to abuse Palestinians into accepting abuse, that’s just the cover story; the real goal has always been to abuse them to the point where you can justify eliminating them. To push an inconvenient people into an impossible corner and then when they push back hard enough say “Well, we did all we can and we learned you just can’t help these savages. They’re going to have to go.””
“Honey I took down the Ukraine flag to put up the Israeli flag, where should I put it?”
“Bottom drawer.”
“The one with the Black Lives Matter flag?”
“Yeah, just throw it on top.”
“It doesn’t fit, there’s too many other flags in there.”
“Throw out the MeToo one then.”
“Not the Pride one?”
“Whatever, I don’t care.”
“I’m always getting people calling me a Hamas supporter and saying I’m “spreading terrorist propaganda” these last two weeks. Before that I was a Chinese agent who was “spreading CCP propaganda”. Before that I was a Russian troll who was “spreading Kremlin propaganda”. I’m never just a person on the internet sharing her opinions, because any opinions which go against US information interests are “propaganda”.”
It’s Not a Hamas-Israeli Conflict: It’s an Israeli War Against Every Palestinian by Ramzy Baroud (Mint Press News)
“Israel was never a graceful winner. As the size of territories controlled by the triumphant little state increased three-fold, Israel began entrenching its military occupation over whatever remained of historic Palestine. It even started building settlements in newly occupied Arab territories, in Sinai, the Golan Heights and all the rest.”
“This changing reality meant that Israel could invade South Lebanon in March 1978 and then sign the Camp David Peace Accords with Egypt six months later.”
Incredible that no land concessions were extracted from an invading state.
“Many Palestinian intellectuals argue that “this is not a conflict” and that military occupation is not a political dispute but governed by clearly defined international laws and boundaries. And that it must be resolved according to international justice.
“That is yet to happen. […] Without actual enforcement, international law is mere ink.”
Israel Is Just A Nonstop Bombing Campaign With A Flag by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes from Edge of the Narrative Matrix)
“A guy stole my phone. Wasn’t sure where he was staying so I had to set fire to the entire neighborhood. A lot of people died, but it’s his fault for being where noncombatants are. He was using his neighbors as human shields. He is 100% responsible for their deaths, not me.”
“Israeli rightists are so bat shit insane that they literally assaulted and spit on the families of the Israeli hostages for trying to keep their loved ones alive.”
Is this true? Just recording the first time I’ve read of it. It’s possible—spitting seems to be quite a thing for some people. It’s quite provocative. I know it would drive me right around the bend.
“Electronic Intifada reports that an Israeli woman who was taken hostage at the rave on October 7 told Israeli media that she watched other hostages get mowed down by IDF troops who were firing indiscriminately on Hamas fighters.
““They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she told Israeli radio. “There was very, very heavy crossfire” and even tank shelling.
“This will never, ever be acknowledged. If they’re blaming Hamas for all Gazans killed by Israeli bombs, they’re sure as hell going to blame Hamas for Israeli hostages killed by friendly fire.”
“End the apartheid regime, establish equal rights for all, and all wealthy governments who’ve been backing Israel’s abuses pay so many reparations to Palestinians that they can live a quality of life so high it will be like the abuse never occurred.”
Illinois landlord murders Palestinian-American child: The product of US imperialism’s propaganda campaign by Patrick Martin (WSWS)
“In an interview on “60 Minutes” over the weekend, Biden said that Hamas’ October 7 raid “is as consequential as the Holocaust.” Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis’ “Final Solution” exterminated 6 million Jews, approximately 40 percent of the total world Jewish population at the time.
“The Hamas raid of October 7, which resulted in approximately 1,000 Israeli deaths, was the action of oppressed people who had broken out of a open air prison camp. To compare this to the Holocaust is a grotesque anti-Palestinian slander.”
The sitting president of the U.S., ladies and gentlemen. What an absolute eyesore of a person.
Media whitewashes own role in killing of Palestinian-American child by Wyatt Reed (The Grayzone)
“While corporate media and establishment politicians deliver performative displays of sadness over the lethal hate crime, Illinois State Rep. Abdelnasser Rashid, has pointed a finger directly at legacy media and US politicians for inciting the killing.
““Let’s be clear: This was directly connected to dehumanizing of Palestinians that has been allowed over the last week by our media and by elected officials who lacked a moral compass and courage to call for something as simple as de-escalation, as peace,” the Palestinian-American legislator told the New York Times.
“But just a few hours later, the quote had been heavily redacted. “This was directly connected to dehumanizing of Palestinians,” the new statement read — a rewriting which effectively erased Rashid’s condemnation of establishment lawmakers and media figures.
“That very same day, the editorial board of America’s so-called ‘paper of record’ published a piece originally titled “Israel Is Fighting to Defend a Society That Values Human Life” — a headline which was subsequently massaged to the less-hallucinatory “Israel Can Defend Itself and Uphold its Values.””
“Days after falsely claiming to have seen photographs showing Hamas beheading 40 Jewish Israeli babies – a claim the White House had to disown hours later – President Joe Biden claimed he was “shocked and sickened” by the young Palestinian-American child’s “horrific” killing. He avoided naming the child, however, and did not bother to meet his family.”
Former ambassador and Assange advocate Craig Murray detained under UK terror laws by Kit Klarenberg (The Grayzone)
“Murray told The Grayzone that British police warned him he would be committing a criminal offense and would be prosecuted if he refused to answer questions, answered untruthfully, deliberately withheld information, or refused to provide passcodes for his electronic devices. After his phone and laptop were seized for analysis, the interrogation began.”
Cool country you’ve got there, English folk. I wonder if that’s true, or if the officers were just trying to scare him into giving up everything? It’s not true in the states. You have the right to remain silent. I’m not so sure about Great Britain.
The rest of the article is interesting in that it goes on to examine the questions that the officers asked Murray, as if that’s material. They detained him for no reason other than that their government doesn’t like the things he says. You don’t have to go into detail explaining why their questions were particularly odd—any question they asked was unjustified. He’s a British national.
For example,
““My lawyer has never heard of such a question being asked during interrogations before,” Murray said, adding that “they speculate police have a surveillance photo of me in the proximity of someone they consider a ‘terrorist.’”
““I’ve no idea who that could be,” the outspoken human rights campaigner admitted. But, as he quickly observed: “If you attend a rally where 200,000 people are present, you can’t know who everyone is!””
Do you see how he’s trying to justify himself against accusations that are completely fantastical? That he has, in fact, made up for them? I’m shocked to see Murray so rattled that he bothers justifying himself here. Of course you can attend a peaceful rally. Of course you’re not responsible for any of the other protesters there. Of course “guilt by association” is a bullshit. Don’t give them the satisfaction of trying to prove their questions wrong. Their whole basis for even asking is wrong.
They took his laptop and phone and didn’t return them. That is theft.
“This April, British counter-terror police detained the French publisher and political activist Ernest Moret, who had led large protests in Paris against the neoliberal reforms of President Emmanuel Macron. Moret was detained under the same powers as Murray, then arrested when he refused to hand over passcodes to his electronic devices. He was ultimately held in British custody for almost 24 hours.”
“Anyone who has agitated the British national security state and plans on traveling to the UK may want to be careful what they keep on their devices. As one of Ernest Moret’s interrogators boasted to him, Britain is “the only country where authorities can download and keep information from private devices” forever.”
This is according to two laws named Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (Wikipedia), the “National Security Act (Wikipedia), which was passed in July 2023”, and “Schedule 3, Section 4 of Britain’s 2019 Counter-Terrorism and Border Act (Wikipedia)”.
The Insane Idea That Nations Get To Do War Crimes Whenever Something Bad Happens To Them by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“Dropping military explosives on children is just as wrong now as it was on October 6th. Wars of aggression were just as wrong on September 12th 2001 as they were on September 10th. But there’s this idiotic belief in mainstream culture that a nation experiencing a traumatic event means it gets to go on a murderous rampage until it feels better.
“As soon as the Hamas attack occurred we were inundated with messaging from the western political/media class which conveyed the idea that because something bad happened to Israel, Israel now gets to do a little genocide, as a treat. This is stupid nonsense, and should be rejected by all thinking people.”
“If you saw your friend stumbling around with his car keys in one hand and a bottle in the other after losing his job, you wouldn’t tell him you stand with him and support whatever it is he’s getting ready to do. You’d understand that people can make unwise decisions after something bad happens to them, and you’d do what you can to help steer them away from it.”
“The death toll from Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza has already more than doubled the death toll from the Hamas attack, and we can expect it to keep multiplying because there’s no meaningful opposition to the bloodshed. The United States, who as an indispensable backer of Israel could end all this with a word, has refused to draw a single red line on what Israel may or may not do if it wishes to retain US support — even its indiscriminate use of white phosphorus, which violates international humanitarian law. War crimes are being committed not just openly but announced in advance as Tel Aviv commits itself to the collective punishment of Palestinians with a complete siege of Gaza, and Israel’s allies have no objection to this.”
There are two points here: Hamas blew its whole load on October 7th. There will be no more meaningful resistance now. Perhaps they will be able to launch some of their rockets (Norman Finkeltstein said he’d read claims that they have 100,000 of them), but they’re unlikely to hit useful targets, like chemical factories, that could do real damage to Israel. Gazans are buttoned down and will suffer what Israel sees fit to mete out.
The other point is that this is exactly what the major powers want to happen. They don’t green-light war crimes because they’re confused about what war crimes are. It’s because laws against war crimes are only there to be wielded against enemies. They don’t apply to anyone inside the circle of trust. If you’re useful to empire, then you get to do what you want. Empire will decide which laws apply to you based on your usefulness.
If you’re useful, you get a free pass to do whatever you like—and you never have to answer for it. If you’re not useful, or if you have something useful that empire wants without paying for it, you are forced to pledge fealty to empire, to mouth the words that it wants you to say, to “condemn” terrorists. To make nuance-free statements that are nowhere near to expressing your actual beliefs.
The article International Hypocrisy: The U.S., Once Again, Leads the Way by Robert Fantina (CounterPunch) contains many interesting citations from “Palestinian Ambassador to the U.K., Husam Zumlot” from his interview on BBC News.
“How many times have you interviewed Israeli officials (question by Ambassador Zumlot to the interviewer)? How many times? Hundreds of times. How many times has Israel committed war crimes, live, on your own cameras? Do you start by asking them to condemn themselves? Have you? You don’t.”
“You know why I refuse to answer that question (why he won’t condemn Hamas for its violence of last week)? Because I refuse the premise of it. Because at the very heart of it is misrepresentation of the whole thing. Because it is the Palestinians who are expected to condemn themselves.”
“You bring us here whenever Israelis are killed. Did you bring me here when many Palestinians in the West Bank, more than 200 over the last few months (were killed)? Do you invite me where there are such Israeli provocations in Jerusalem and elsewhere?”
The only time you will be given a voice is to say things that empire wants. Empire cannot learn new things from you because it already knows everything there is to know. It knows that it is Empire and that you are not. What could it possibly learn from you? Your only job is to say the things that Empire wants you to say when it wants you to say them in order to enjoy a slight benefit, to bask in the warm, though oft wan and temporary, beneficence of Empire, to not lose your livelihood, your home, your family, your life. This is the implicit bargain of living with Empire—the implied threat for non-compliance is always destruction of everything you hold dear. Empire doesn’t care because it doesn’t cost Empire anything, whereas it amuses Empire to throw your pitiful life away for its purposes, for its own enrichment, even if it’s a total waste—it still feels good to use its power.
And don’t go looking for consistency. Superficially, there is none. Bianca Graulau writes, “Filter the propaganda through this lens: the US empire will always choose sides based on its own interests.” That is 100% the correct context within which to process information coming from the Empire.
More long-windedly, but still worth quoting, Fantina writes,
“The U.S. isn’t interested in human rights, international law or self-determination. Certainly it has no interest in peace in the Middle East. It is interested in power over the entire world and the profits that that power will bring them. So what if its hands are dripping with the blood of Palestinian children? Biden cares no more about that than George Bush cared about the blood of Iraqi children. No, the geopolitical goals of the U.S. are always front and center. Human rights and international law are nowhere on the U.S. list of priorities.”
This has been obvious for the long part of my lifetime during which I’ve paid attention to international affairs, with a focus on the affairs of Empire. It is of no value to listen to what Empire says; you must watch what Empire actually does.
Is It Fascism Yet? Neoliberalism is Killing the Poor by Rob Urie (CounterPunch)
“Most Americans likely imagine that life expectancy is about the same for all of us, made variable by ‘lifestyle choices.’ In fact, the rich live about fifteen years longer than the poor in the US due to a combination of having nutritious food to eat, receiving adequate healthcare, including dental, and having lower levels of stress. The TED Talk fantasies about new lifesaving medical technologies provide cover for a healthcare system that has the worst outcomes in the developed world. Most Americans would be stunned at how little regulation is applied to medical devices. Many ordinary procedures have zero empirical research to support them. They are make -work programs for medical scamsters.”
“The point is that the Liberal distinction between passive and active violence makes more sense to the well-to-do than to the poor. If the world doesn’t owe us a living, then why the persistence of class? Some people are born with a living provided while most aren’t. Those who aren’t face exponentially higher levels of explicit violence than those who are. The levels of implicit violence— hunger, homelessness, and the social exclusion that un- and under-employment cause, place the US in 2023 in a special category amongst ‘rich’ nations. We were dying needlessly by the thousands. Now we are dying needlessly by the millions.”
“When a slumlord can buy a house for $75K and illegally rent it out for $24,000 per month, they earn a return of 32% per month on their initial ‘investment.’ And what precisely does the term ‘earn’ mean here? Once the house has been purchased, very little more is required of a slumlord than to collect the rent. To the extent that maintenance is required, it is the neighbors who do it or it doesn’t get done.”
“[…] when my liberal friends speak of their fears of fascist violence, I don’t disagree with their concerns. But consider, that poor people live fifteen years fewer than rich people in the US (graph above). Poor people tend to live in food deserts where nutritious food is unavailable. Many of my neighbors have been refused by doctors who won’t take their health insurance. Obamacare requires an address, telephone, computer, internet access, and spreadsheet skills to choose a policy on which premiums must be paid but coverage remains at the whim of insurers. What are inconveniences for those with resources are life and death struggles for the poor.”
You only have the luxury to worry about overt fascist violence when you’re not already dying by a thousand cuts.
“Having spent twenty-five years using math and statistics to perform economic research, the number of Americans dying from preventable illnesses, so-called ‘excess deaths,’ has been at genocide levels since the onset of the Great Recession. Use of the term ‘genocide’ here would be inflammatory if it had no basis. But it does. The large numbers of people dying aren’t random throughout the population. They are poor.”
“The Liberal contention that this sort of violence may be regrettable, but it isn’t political, depends on the dubious distinction between economic and political power. But the systematic nature of the violence suggests otherwise. Bill Clinton and Joe Biden passed the 1994 Crime Bill that increased mandatory prison sentences while it made appeals for wrongful convictions virtually impossible to win. Joe Biden claimed to have written the Patriot Act, which ended restraints on police behavior toward the population. These aren’t considered to be failures by Liberals; they are considered to be successes. Just ask Hillary.”
American Liberals are useless. They don’t understand the slightest thing about the moral underpinnings of their empty ethics. They don’t care about actually making life better for everyone. They care foremost about being right and always having been right, as well as for their own ability to enjoy the luxuries of an advanced quality of life, one that could be provided to all, were we in post-capitalist communist luxury, but we’re not, so it’s just a lucky few who get it, and think that they’ve earned it with more than just being spectacular bastards or having benefitted from the earnest striving of a spectacular bastard.
“[…] the problems in my neighborhood aren’t evidence of neoliberal failure, they are evidence of neoliberal success. American oligarchs put their servants in government to the task of deindustrializing the nation, and they did so. Why? To break the back of organized labor as they avoided environmental regulations and the payment of taxes. Up until about two weeks ago the news had it that Americans are living in the greatest economic boom in modern history. While my homeless friends may beg to differ, no one is asking their opinion.”
“[…] these aren’t Liberal failures, they are Liberal successes in the sense that they are the outcomes that American Liberals and their sponsors legislated to make happen. Four to six million excess deaths before the Covid pandemic hit were caused by the neoliberal healthcare system that Liberal Democrats created. Twelve and one-half million citizens are likely to be permanently disabled by Long Covid due to the Biden administration’s Covid policies. If Liberals want to claim criminal stupidity, okay. That has been my theory for a long time.”
“I share the fear of political violence emerging from a second Trump administration, but what part of the prior seven pages didn’t you read? The bodies are piling up in my neighborhood right now. The Liberal city government has followed the national Democrat’s model by firing one-third of the fire department so the City Manager could give himself a fat raise. Since then, the city government has ended the dissemination of public information regarding the shootings, apparently to protect investors […]”
Hamas Clarifies They Meant To Start The Type Of War Where They Get To Do Whatever They Want And No One Fights Back (Babylon Bee)
There are many more irony-free and completely non-self-aware headlines from the Babylon bee like this one these days. A good satirist would somehow note that this is literally how Israel was acting two weeks ago.
In the same vein, a usually reasonable and judicious Eugene Volokh goes all-in on Jews == Israelis and writes in a libertarian magazine that Some Cancellations are Justified by Eugene Volokh (Reason). Hey, cool, that’s what liberals/progressives think too! Nice to see you all have so much in common.
At the same magazine, you’ve now got the already idiotic Ilya Somin arguing that the problem is that Israel has been taking it too easy easy on the Palestinians in the article Hamas Attack Should Teach Us the Folly of Hostage Deals with Terrorists by Ilya Somin (Reason). Some people’s bloodlust is never slaked.
I can’t even read Scott H. Greenfield lately because he’s literally babbling in every article, as if he’d sustained a grievous head injury. For example, Short Take: The Death of “But For Video” by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) is only about how things that people allege that Hamas has done are all true, even without any proof. When he needs horrific things to be true in order to justify the horrific things his “side” is perpetrating and will perpetrate, when his usual adherence to evidence is right out the window. And he doesn’t even seem to notice it.
I can’t imagine writing a comment gently trying to remind him of his former adherence to a higher standard, when the victims weren’t Jewish. One person tried by writing “Is there any place for genuine discussion about Israel’s misdeeds in the current situation?” to which Greenfield riposted in what he clearly assumes is a manner that he wears well, “There is a place for that discussion: a sophomore critical studies classroom. Just not among reasonable or knowledgeable people.” I.e., anyone who mentions ongoing or upcoming Israeli war crimes or tries to contextualize is sophomoric, a child, neither reasonable nor knowledgable, unlike Greenfield, whose opinions are so unimpeachable as to be fact. It’s his blog, but man, I miss the reasonable guy who used to run it rather than the Zionist maniac who’s running it now.
Like the Babylon Bee, he seems completely unable to see the irony of his statements, as they would apply to Israel just as well as to Hamas, e.g., from a comment of his, “It’s unclear whether or how many babies were beheaded although there is no question that they beheaded adults. After all, murdering babies by shooting, burning, dismembering or otherwise is totally less barbaric.”
These people are ordinarily capable of talking about justice in relatively detached terms, when it doesn’t involve them or “their people”. Now that Israel has been attacked, they literally throw all of their principles out the window and start to bend over backwards to justify genocide or to simply not care about proof, or whatever. The point is that they are incredibly hypocritical.
Grinding for Elon bucks by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“These replies are just galleries of refried edgy memes with no coherent theme, posted by scammers and weirdos, surrounded by ads for brands I’ve never heard of and products that probably don’t exist, with poorly-aggregated headlines sitting next to them on the sidebar. It’s 9gag. Elon Musk paid $44 billion to make 9gag. And his big plan to improve it, according to Fortune this week, is to start charging new users $1 a year to use it.”
Spores by Justi Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“See Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1/1 (1971): 47-66. “[S]uppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective, and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house?””
Statement: The Russell-Einstein Manifesto on July 9th, 1955 (Pugwash)
“Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful, and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race: or shall mankind renounce war? 1 People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war. The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty. 2 But what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is that the term “mankind” feels vague and abstract. People scarcely realize in imagination that the danger is to themselves and their children and their grandchildren, and not only to a dimly apprehended humanity. They can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they, individually, and those whom they love are in imminent danger of perishing agonizingly. And so they hope that perhaps war may be allowed to continue provided modern weapons are prohibited.”
“Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war, and both sides would set to work to manufacture H-bombs as soon as war broke out, for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.”
“There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings, to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”
Interesting by Apen Warr
“When you encounter evidence that your mental model mismatches someone else’s model, that’s an exciting opportunity to compare and figure out which one of you is wrong (or both). Not everybody is super excited about doing that with you, so you have to be be respectful. But the most important people to surround yourself with, at least for mental model purposes, are the ones who will talk it through with you.”
“Analysis paralysis is no good when a tiger is chasing you and you’re worried your preconceived notion that it wants to eat you may or may not be correct.”
“[…] almost always, it’s better to get everyone aligned to the same direction, even if it’s a somewhat wrong direction, than to have different people going in different directions. To be honest, I quite dislike it when that’s necessary. But sometimes it is, and you might as well accept it in the short term.”
“You know what’s even worse (and more embarrassing, and more expensive) than being wrong? Being wrong for even longer because we ignored the evidence in front of our eyes.”
“Some days it feels like most of the Internet today is people “debating” their weakly-held strong beliefs and pulling out every rhetorical trick they can find, in order to “win” some kind of low-stakes war of opinion where there was no right answer in the first place.”
“What’s really useful, and way harder, is to find the people who are not interested in debating you at all, and figure out why.”
Worse 2 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“Batman: I’m just out here fighting obvious bad guys[, which] gives the public the impression that good civic life is a matter [o]f pointing out who is obviously bad then taking any action that thwarts them.
“But the real origin of most human suffering is diffuse things like scarcity, ignorance, and our latent tendency to intergroup animosity.
“The only solution to those things is trustworthy, widely-venerated institutions and norms, things like service clubs, a free press, engaged citizens, and deliberative bodies responsible to a well-educated public.
“If everyone believes an individual large rich man can and should fix it, they not only vacate their responsibility to personal involvement, they come to believe anyone who can’t heal the world in a way that is clear, fast, and amusing to watch must be a coward or a cheat.”
Going off-script by Drew DeVault
“Of course, it is entirely valid to want the “scripted” life. But you were not asked if you wanted it: it was just handed to you on a platter. The average person lacks the philosophical background which underpins their worldview and lifestyle, and consequently cannot explain why it’s “good”, for them or generally.”
You are brainwashed/indoctrinated into wanting those things. Ostensibly for the good of society, but practically for the good of the ruling elite.
“This approach to life favors the status quo and preserves existing power structures, which explains in part why it is re-enforced by education and broader social pressures. It also leads to a sense of learned helplessness, a sense that this is the only way things can be, which reduces the initiative to pursue social change – for example, by forming a union.”
“Ask yourself: who are you? Did you choose to be this person? Who do you want to be, and how will you become that person? Should you change your major? Drop out? Quit your job, start a business, found a labor union? Pick up a new hobby? Join or establish a social club? An activist group? Get a less demanding job, move into a smaller apartment, and spend more time writing or making art? However you choose to live, choose it deliberately. The next step is an exercise in solidarity. How do you feel about others who made their own choices, choices which may be alike or different to your own? Or those whose choices were constrained by their circumstances? What can you do together that you couldn’t do alone? Who do you want to be? Do you know?”
The path to solidarity leads through examination of the ego?
The Dead Internet To Come by Robert Mariani (New Atlantis)
“in 2016, panic over fake news and Russian “troll farms” emerged, which somehow continue to be taken seriously as an explanation for how Donald Trump became president. During the 2020 presidential campaign season there was hysteria about an impending wave of deepfake videos that would jeopardize the election; this hysteria unceremoniously died when the election was resolved in a way the alarmists liked.”
“The good news is that these machines are not intelligent, and, the fears of otherwise-smart people aside, a terminator apocalypse will require something entirely different from GPT-4. The bad news is precisely that it doesn’ t need to be intelligent to pass our tests; it passes because our tests are dumb and we’re gullible.”
“LLM chatbots are rapidly proliferating and the Dead Internet Theory is dangerously close to being vindicated as the Dead Internet Prophecy, because the idiots behind search-engine-optimized spam websites and the bot accounts in your Instagram are about to get superpowers.”
“The elderly are scammed out of their savings with alarming frequency by bots telling credible-sounding fake stories, sometimes over the phone; many old people are unable to accept that they weren’t communicating with a real person. This combines with age-related illnesses to form an entirely new kind of mental health crisis for a demographic fundamentally unequipped to navigate the era’s strange gradients of truth, which even the legal system struggles with.”
“Malicious actors employ AI bots to generate convincing synthetic media of individuals engaging in compromising or illegal activities. These fabrications are then used to extort, blackmail, or ruin professional reputations. Actual wrongdoers are able to use deepfakes as an evergreen excuse, and separating honest and dishonest people becomes a matter of tribal alignment more than ever before.”
“A game changer could be an “everything subscription” — the tech giants could go in on a consortium that allows users to pay a few dollars a month to gain verified access to every major platform.”
This will never exist, or, if it ever does, it will be priced out of range of most people, and definitely out of range of nearly all people who could benefit from it the most.
“ChatGPT is the Star Trek computer we’ve been waiting for — a search engine that gives us answers rather than ad spam — and its descendants will change the world in ways we cannot yet imagine.”
Bullshit. It will change to deliver adspam as well. People are just wicked shitty at prompt engineering. They never learned to really use search engines, which have vastly more features than most people are aware of—and yet most prompts are just something along the lines of “Jenifar Lawrenz Biibyz”.
What’s New in Unicode 15.1 & Emoji 15.1 by Keith Broni (Emojipedia)
Am I the only one that thinks bad thoughts when he sees, for example, the third emoji in this list? I know that they think it’s a parent with a child, but does that not look like a gender-neutral blowjob to you? You won’t be able to unsee it, either. In fact, I can’t look at any of the four pictures and see “family”. Look at the second one! That’s two people “sharing”! How does the emoji committee not see this? Or maybe they do! Maybe they’re making emojis for “three-way” (the first two), “blowjob” and “swinging”.
Oh, and apparently there are a bunch of characters important for “China’s mandatory GB 18030 standard” and there are a bunch of emojis for people in wheelchairs, with canes and stuff, which I guess is good…but I can’t get past these “family” emojis.
LSP could have been better (matklad)
“LSP papers over this fundamental loss of causality by including numeric versions of the documents with every edit, but this is a best effort solution. Edits might be invalidated by changes to unrelated documents. For example, for a rename refactor, if a new usage was introduced in a new file after the refactor was computed, version numbers of the changed files would wrongly tell you that the edit is still correct, while it will miss this new usage.”
“The Dart model is more flexible, performant and elegant. Instead of highlighting being a request, it is a subscription. The client subscribes to syntax highlighting of particular files, the server notifies the client whenever highlights for the selected files change. That is, two pieces of state are synchronized between the client and the server: The set of file the client is subscribed to The actual state of syntax highlighting for these files.”
“I think the idea behind the rider protocol is that you directly define the state you want to synchronize between the client and the server as state. The protocol then manages “magic” synchronization of the state by sending minimal diffs.”
I’ve had cases where Apple Music has dozens of albums from that artist, so that I’m almost certain that the... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 22. Oct 2023 18:17:53 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 23. Oct 2023 13:40:48 (GMT-5)
I’ve noticed the Apple Music search acting quite wonky over the last couple of years. It seems utterly incapable of finding certain songs, even when you enter the exact title and artist.
I’ve had cases where Apple Music has dozens of albums from that artist, so that I’m almost certain that the song is available. It just will not show it to me. In those cases, I’ve instead searched with DuckDuckGo using the same title and artist to find out the name of the album. With the album name in hand, I can select it in Apple Music and, lo and behold, there’s the song I was looking for with the title I’d entered.
I am mystified how marketing and search-algorithm tweaking can break a feature so fundamentally that a user it utterly unable to find things that are actually there. I don’t have any screenshots from one of those excursions—because the search has been a bit better in the last couple of revisions.
I have, however, recently had the following experience. The following screenshot shows something I’ve experienced a few times by now. [1]
Can you see how the result for which I’d explicitly searched is perched shyly at the end of the list? What kind of design is this?
I’ve much more often seen the artist in the prominent first location, then perhaps the album on which the song appears in the second location, with the song itself in the third position.
I am using the operating system in en-US, which is a left-to-right language. Left position is the most prominent. How is it that the song for which I’d searched isn’t in the most prominent position?
Even in the case that I’ve outlined above—where the first and second positions are filled with valid, but less precise results—that would be silly; in the case shown in the screenshot above, it’s just laughably obvious that someone wants to boost “Waka Waka” and “Ride It”, for whatever reason.
Or maybe this is the boon provided by AI search results I’ve been hearing so much about. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords and their boundless wisdom.
Don’t judge me too harshly for searching for “Soccer Mommy”. I follow Nicky Reid’s blog (exile in happy valley) and the articles there almost always end with a delightfully eclectic mix of songs that I’ve been adding to a playlist and shuffling every once in a while.
I just searched another song that ended up with very strange results, but I noticed that I’d inadvertently searched for “‘m allowed by buffalo tom” rather than “I’m allowed by buffalo tom” (with the “I” missing at the beginning).
vs.
Looking more closely at the search argument in the original query from the body of the article, I see that it has a trailing “ “. I wonder if the search algorithm is thrown off by punctuation?
Published by marco on 21. Oct 2023 22:44:02 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 22. Oct 2023 22:33:24 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Team Billionaire is Winning by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)
“And, for two of our super-billionaires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, we have Section 230 protection. This means that their Internet platforms are not subject to the same rules on defamation as print and broadcast outlets. Yeah, this is just the market, telling us to give special privileges to online platforms.”
This is disingenuous. These platforms may disseminate information, but are structured completely differently than print. There are billions of authors, as well as the real risk of censorship. We should probably make a distinction between web sites and large corporate portals, but the moderation burden is much higher in either case.
You can try to outlaw people contributing to common portals entirely,—and enforcing “moderation”, i.e., making companies legally liable for what is deemed to be illegal content will inevitably end up there. There will always be something that gets taken too seriously, as we’ve seen millions of times in the existing social networks.
Baker derives no value from these forums, so he almost certainly doesn’t care if they disappear of become so neutered that they might as well not exist. The world no longer has a sense of humor because there is a huge incentive to be performatively offended.
This is typical of the people pushing for increased moderation, legislation, and regulation. I agree that you shouldn’t be able to make money off of it, but I also agree that you shouldn’t get to moderate away everything that offends anyone. I think especially that they will start by moderating away people calling other people “dirty jews” and posting swastikas into their comments, and they will end always end up by moderating away anything that they deem threatens the company, its profits, or the ruling class to which it belongs and that allows it to prosper.
The problem, as usual, is that a lot of people want to reach as large an audience as possible—because they’re narcissists—but they want to continue to communicate as if they’re just talking to their intimate friends. Hell, that “dirty jews” and swastika person might just be making a terrible joke that would be funny to their little in-group, in the context of other things going on. Without context, no-one can tell that it’s just a harmless idiot, learning how to behave themselves properly. With moderation and completely open channels, everyone has to already know how to behave from the get-go. Pushing the boundaries cannot be tolerated because speech is deemed too dangerous to abide.
“The government’s contract with Moderna to develop a Covid vaccine is the poster child in this category. It was very important for the United States, and the world, to develop Covid vaccines as quickly as possible. But, in the case of Moderna, we paid it over $900 million to develop and test a vaccine, and then gave it control over it. The result was that the stock price of Moderna increased by tens of billions and we created at least five Moderna billionaires by the summer of 2021. If we just celebrate the industrial policy – paying for the development of a vaccine – and don’t pay attention to how the rules are structured, then we get Moderna billionaires. And, if we do the same with our industrial policy for electric cars, wind and solar energy, and semiconductors, then we will end up with many more billionaires.”
There is no way this isn’t going to happen. We can only hope we get something good out of it, but the incentives mean that that will be of secondary concern.
“[…] it really is self-defeating and unnecessary to argue that we want the government to override the market. The issue is not whether the government will override the market, the issue is how the government will structure the market.”
“The right wants to structure the market so all the money goes to its billionaire backers. Progressives want to structure the market so that the benefits of growth are broadly shared.”
What the heck are you on about? Can you please stop making it look like there are two silos, with one of them sane? They’re all insane. Most people that identify as progressives want to structure the market so that it continues to benefit select groups, but just different ones. They generally want to sort out those groups by identity, completely ignorant of class.
Does Florida’s Transgender Bathroom Law Violate Free Speech? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“The contention that the Florida law would “force TGNCI people to adopt the state’s view of sex and gender” is a curious one, given that the opposite would force others to adopt the TGNCI’s view of sex and gender. Either way, a view is being “forced” on someone, the two differences being that one is a majority view and the norm, while the other seeks to impose a new and novel minority view on the majority.
“But are they not entitled to communicate their view that the definition of men and women is wrong, or at least inadequate, and should be changed? Are they not entitled to communicate by expressive conduct “that society can understand” that they do not fall within the historic and, in their view, wrongful paradigm that anatomy at birth defines their gender?”
“The argument that “TGNCI people cannot urinate—or exist—like other people” harkens back to equal protection, Of course they can urinate like other people, physiology being what it is, but the issue is where they are allowed to do so. As for the hyperbolic “exist,” this is the mantra of transgender rights, that any constraint on being allowed to do as they please without regard to its impact on anyone else erases their “existence.” Any accommodation or compromise, even though “other people” are subject to a multitude of rules and limitations on conduct with which they may disagree, find inconvenient or find offense, is unacceptable. Anything short of hegemony is, according to their battle cry, an effort to cease their existence.”
“But if taking matters a step further, to engage in the conduct they’re challenging, then no law would be constitutional as every challenge by physical conduct could be claimed communicative, thus obviating all limitations.”
“What about the person who wants to communicate that she believes a politician is bad, and does so by striking the politician. Does this conduct communicate his views? Arguably, it does. But it’s not the views that are prohibited. It’s the conduct. Much conduct has a communicative element, and yet it remains conduct and, as such, can be prohibited without regard to any ancillary free speech claims.”
Tampering with History by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“By the spring of 2015 Kiev was daily shelling civilian populations in the east, a campaign that would last eight years and claim roughly 14,000 lives. Moscow had by then decided to support Luhansk and Donetsk as autonomous republics, while co-sponsoring accords — the two Minsk Protocols — that would have held Ukraine together as a federated republic. These events marked out the battle lines with which we are now condemned to live. NATO approved of the merciless shelling of noncombatants to the extent it trained the Armed Forces of Ukraine to achieve maximum effect. The West never had any intention of backing the Minsk accords, which, in addition to saving Ukraine as a unified nation, would also have saved many thousands of lives.”
This is crucial, uncontroversial history—but no-one knows it. The war started in earnest in 2014. The economic war against Russia began even earlier. And then, in 2016, there was Russiagate, which had the twin purposes of attacking Trump and also of priming a population to believe that Russia is behind every evil in the world. You can see it in silly TV series, like The Morning Show, which, when attacked by a hacking outfit, showed that immediately “Russia” was on everyone’s lips, without question, evidence, or motive.
“For the record, Babyn Yar (also spelled Babi Yar), a section of Kiev, was the site of multiple Nazi massacres during World War II. Blinken’s reference is to the events of Sept. 29–30, 1941, when 34,000 people were massacred. In total, 100,000 to 150,000 Jews, Soviet POWs, Romani and others were killed there. While the Nazis attempted to cover up the Babyn Yar atrocities, the Soviets instantly publicized them when they liberated Kiev in 1943. After the war they tried those deemed responsible.”
Tony Blinken promulgates a completely different version, like a member in good standing of Infowars.
No ‘End of History’ in Ukraine by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)
““Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal.” “A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one another’s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values.”
This is all just fine, sound reasoning, It’s just that the U.S., in its hubris, naturally assumed Fukuyama was talking about it when, in fact, the conclusion should be that, given Fukuyama’s premise, the U.S. could not possibly be considered a liberal democracy. It is, in fact and instead, an empire.
It’s like the nearly incessant babble about free markets: it’s correct, in principle, but inapplicable because we don’t have free markets.
“Karl Marx, who famously observed that, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.””
“Political scientists in the Fukuyama “end of history” school view this conflict as being derived by the resistance of the remnants of Soviet regional hegemony (i.e., modern-day Russia, led by its president, Vladimir Putin) over the inevitability of liberal democracy taking hold.”
I mean, it’s an adorable fairy tale for an empire to tell itself—or with which to convince its conquests to give up with less of a fight. These conquests know they’re in for a lot of pain if they don’t bend the knee. What better to convince them to do it sooner than a fairy tale that will actually come true for a handful of elite members of the conquered. Instead of fighting the empire, the target of conquest ends up fighting against itself over table scraps.
“To understand the roots of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, one needs to study German actions after the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the rise and fall of Symon Petliura and the Polish-Soviet War — all of which predated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the dissection of Galicia that took place in 1939 and 1945.”
“[…] upon its creation, the Western Ukrainian Republic found itself at war with a newly independent Poland and, following the merger between the Western Ukrainian Republic and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the war morphed into a general conflict between Poland and Ukraine. One of the major battlegrounds of this conflict was the western Galician territory of Volhynia. It was here that Ukrainian troops undertook the slaughter of thousands of Jews, for which Petliura has been blamed.”
“The alliance between Poland and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, concluded in April 1919, led to a Polish offensive against the Soviet Union which ended with the capture of Kiev by Polish troops in May 1919. A Soviet counterattack in June took the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw, only to be thrown back in August by Polish forces, which began to advance eastward until the Soviets sued for peace, in October 1920. While various efforts to end the Polish-Soviet conflict had been brokered on the basis of a delineation of territory known as the Curzon Line, named after the British Lord who first proposed it back in 1919, the final demarcation of the border was negotiated via the Treaty of Riga, signed in March 1921, which formally ended the Polish-Soviet war.”
“Bandera rose to lead the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1930’s, eventually allying himself with Nazi Germany following the 1939 partitioning of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, which ran roughly along the Curzon Line demarcation. Bandera was the driving force behind Ukrainian nationalist forces operating alongside the German occupying forces after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. These forces participated in the massacre of Jews in Lvov and Kiev (Babyn Yar) and the slaughter of Poles in Volhynia in 1943-44.”
“That same year, the newly created C.I.A. took over management of the Gehlen organization. From 1945 until 1954, the Gehlen organization, at the behest of U.S. and British intelligence, worked with Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) to direct the efforts of the Banderist fighters who remained on Soviet territory. They fought in a conflict that claimed the lives tens of thousands of Soviet Red Army and security personnel, along with hundreds of thousands of OUN and Ukrainian civilians. The C.I.A. continued to fund the OUN in diaspora up until 1990.”
Depleted Ukrainium by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“[…] we find once again that the U.S. is a victim of its old, Manichean habit of dividing the whole of humanity into good guys and bad guys. The headline on CNN’s report on the elections reads, “Pro–Russian politician wins Slovakia’s parliamentary election.” The New York Times head is, “Unease in the West as Slovakia Appears Set to Join the Putin Sympathizers.””
“The insidious thing here, and let us be ever vigilant on this point, is that these media are inserting into our brains the thought that any deviation from the Russophobic orthodoxy amounts to support for the Kremlin’s demonized occupant.”
“Across the pond there are signs of impatience as roughly eight million Ukrainian refugees settle in Europe, displaying little interest—and who can blame them?—in going home when the war is over. War or no, solidarity or no, the Poles have blocked imports of cheap Ukrainian wheat. There are signs of buyer’s remorse among the Finns a matter of months after their impulsive decision to join NATO. And now the Slovakians and their new leader’s alarming display of political and intellectual independence.”
“The Ukrainians’ long-touted counteroffensive, a major prop in the campaign to maintain public support for the war, is touted no more. It is well on the way to taking its place next to the 2007 “surge” in Iraq. Remember that? Of course you don’t. And you won’t remember the counteroffensive any more distinctly in, I would say, a year’s time.”
“If the majority of Americans has already had enough of this conflict as they drive to work along potholed roads and across crumbling bridges, Ukraine will be a much harder sell once the Biden regime can no longer pretend the rest of the West is with us. At that point—best outcome here—Americans may realize once again that the street is a very fine place to conduct politics.”
“As it emerges that Washington and Kiev are the only powers committed to prolonging hostilities, it will also become evident that neither has a choice under its current leadership. Volodymyr Zelensky cannot at this point enter seriously into peace talks: He has sacrificed too many Ukrainian lives. Joe Biden, apparently skilled at grifting, seems a dumbhead when it comes to thinking things through tactically or strategically. He has staked far too much on Ukraine and is now stuck—in an election year no less—with his whatever-it-takes, as-long-as-it-takes grandstanding.”
And Trump is able to capitalize on his “I was always against it,”—no matter how untrue or inapplicable—as it crumbles under Biden.
“American officials said they are convinced that Mr. Putin intends to try to end U.S. and European support for Ukraine by using his spy agencies to push propaganda supporting pro-Russian political parties and by stoking conspiracy theories with new technologies.”
NYT gonna ride that Russiagate hobby-horse until it breaks.
‘Horrific Step Backwards’: Biden Admin Waives Protections to Speed Border Wall Construction by Julia Conley (Scheer Post)
“The 26 laws —which include the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act—are being set aside “to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border in Starr County, Texas,” the Federal Register said.”
““Every acre of habitat left in the Rio Grande Valley is irreplaceable,” said Jordahl. “We can’t afford to lose more of it to a useless, medieval wall that won’t do a thing to stop immigration or smuggling. President Biden’s cynical decision to destroy a wildlife refuge and seal the beautiful Rio Grande behind a grotesque border wall must be stopped.””
The United States Has Its Fingerprints All Over the Chaos in Haiti by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)
“Haiti’s current turmoil is largely presented as just another misfortune plaguing a seemingly cursed nation, getting to this point has involved a series of typically underpublicized decisions by Washington and its partners. The other is that the entire saga is a perfect illustration of how little-known US foreign policy decisions stack on top of one another until military intervention seems like the only possible choice.”
“Once Moïse was dead, the US government and the “international community” it leads steadfastly backed acting prime minister Ariel Henry, who only holds the office because he was chosen by the United States and its European allies, not Haitians themselves. Since then, he has postponed an election he knew he would lose, meted out repression , and generally clung to power without a constitutional mandate, popular legitimacy, or a full parliament, with the terms of its last elected officials having expired this year.”
“[…] more than 650 Haitian organizations and figures — including its major political parties, labor unions, human rights and activist groups, churches, and even businesses — backed the August 2021 Montana Accord, which laid out the timeline and structure for a two-year-long democratic transition; a way out, in other words, from the current impasse. The US government has simply ignored it, choosing instead to offer unquestioning support to the hated Henry.”
“For years, Haiti was one of a number of poor Caribbean countries benefiting from Venezuela’s Petrocaribe program set up under the late president Hugo Chávez, which allowed them to purchase cheap oil on an extremely low-interest, twenty-five-year-long payment plan. The collapse in oil prices in the first half of the 2010s that dented the Venezuelan economy undermined the program, and then it was killed entirely by the Donald Trump administration’s sanctions,”
The Priority Must Be To Put Bush, Blair and Cheney Behind Bars Before Trump by Jonathan Cook (Mint Press News)
“There is, of course, no arrest warrant for either Blair or Cheney, even though in the hierarchy of war crimes, their roles are almost certainly worse. Putin at least has an argument that his invasion was provoked by NATO’s efforts to move weapons ever closer to Russia’s border, undermining Moscow’s nuclear deterrent. By contrast, no one ever refers to the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq as “unprovoked,” even though it undoubtedly was.”
“Why does every BBC interviewer of Ken Loach feel the need, whatever the topic, to raise entirely evidence-free smears tying him to antisemitism, while no BBC interviewer ever raises with Tony Blair the easily proved war crimes he committed invading Iraq?”
“Blair, like Cheney, is still every bit as much of a swamp creature, a peddler of concealed corporate interests – from the oil industry and arms makers to the parasitic bankers that feed off the asset-stripping the other two excel in – as he was when he invaded Iraq.”
“Image-laundering is a staple of our political systems. It is why most of the billionaire-owned media have continued to treat Biden deferentially, dismissing his glaring cognitive difficulties simply as evidence of a lifelong stutter, even as the president is regularly caught on video not only going off-script but losing any sense of where he is or what he should be doing.”
“Trump found a replacement for the safety net. He exploited the paradox at the heart of his brand by presenting himself as the insider-outsider, the rich man fighting for poor, white America, the billionaire taking on the media owned by and enriching his best friends. He sold himself as the opposition to the swamp he feeds off.”
Why Our Popular Mass Movements Fail by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“The “techno-optimists” who preached that new digital media was a revolutionary and democratizing force did not foresee that authoritarian governments, corporations and internal security services could harness these digital platforms and turn them into engines of wholesale surveillance, censorship and vehicles for propaganda and disinformation. The social media platforms that made popular protests possible were turned against us.”
Some couldn’t. Whether they were implicated or just useful idiots had no impact on the result.
“This “riot porn” delighted the media, many of those who engaged in it and, not coincidentally, the ruling class which used it to justify further repression and demonize protest movements. An absence of political theory led activists to use popular culture, such as the film “V for Vendetta,” as reference points. The far more effective and crippling tools of grassroots educational campaigns, strikes and boycotts were often ignored or sidelined.”
“Revolutions always begin, he writes, by making impossible demands that if the government met, would mean the end of the old configurations of power. But most importantly, despotic regimes always first collapse internally. Once sections of the ruling apparatus — police, security services, judiciary, media, government bureaucrats — will no longer attack, arrest, jail or shoot demonstrators, once they no longer obey orders, the old, discredited regime becomes paralyzed and terminal.”
“As Bevins writes, a “generation of individuals raised to view everything as if it were a business enterprise was de-radicalized, came to view this global order as ‘natural,’ and became unable to imagine what it takes to carry out a true revolution.””
“In order to understand what might happen after any given protest explosion, you must not only pay attention to who is waiting in the wings to fill a power vacuum. You have to pay attention to who has the power to define the uprising itself.””
“The lack of hierarchical structures in recent mass movements, done to prevent a leadership cult and make sure all voices are heard, while noble in its aspirations, make movements easy prey. By the time Zuccotti Park had hundreds of people attending General Assemblies, for example, the diffusion of voices and opinions meant paralysis.”
Warfare Dressed as Water Policy by Andrew Ross (Boston Review)
“This summer [2023], Palestine’s ongoing water crisis reached dangerous new heights. Next to the surge in settler activity, anxiety about the lack of domestic water supply was the most common topic on people’s lips. And for many strapped households like Ramzy’s, the safety of what they could obtain to drink was often not a priority.”
“While Palestinians have gone thirsty, Israelis had more than enough water to go around. The daily supply to Israelis and Jewish settlers is three to five times greater than to the average Palestinian household, whose consumption is almost 30 percent below the minimum amount recommended by the World Health Organization.”
“Since they are all connected to Israel’s water network, the settlements have access to unlimited and highly subsidized resources; they can always fill their swimming pools and irrigate their vineyards, even during the region’s scorching summers.”
“In the public mind, “apartheid” suggests the maintenance of repressive rule through a racial hierarchy upheld by Israeli law. Yet the occupation’s daily business of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and land grabbing proceeds at a pace and on a scale that far exceeds this. Emboldened by the new far-right government, settlers are now on a tear. Aided and abetted by the Netanyahu administration’s soldiers and administrators, they are snatching up territory all across the West Bank without regard for the already flimsy laws meant to prevent them from doing so.”
“These springs—around three hundred in number—used to be managed communally, both for household and agricultural use, and some still are. But for more than a decade now, settlers have been seizing the springs for their own use, or for recreational tourism exclusive to Israelis. In places where this groundwater is still accessible, outlier settlements have dug deeper wells to supply their own residents, diminishing the surface flow available to Palestinians to a trickle.”
“In late July, soldiers were filmed filling a village spring with concrete. Blocking spring access—in addition to shooting holes in residents’ water tanks and cisterns—is one of the means that Israel is using to force residents out of Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in a vast semi-desert area to the south of Hebron.”
““At first,” he explained, “they allowed their sheep to roam onto our land, and began to steal our own sheep and burn our animals’ fodder. Then they sent their kids to cause trouble. Our own youth got arrested for resisting by the soldiers and locked up, for which they received heavy fines.” He acknowledged that “the combination of arrests and fines proved to be the decisive tactic in the end.” We spoke to him after their school was demolished by soldiers—“the PA did nothing to help us,” he said—and his community was forced to move further up the valley into the township where their livelihoods as shepherds were much harder to sustain. With their departure, there is now nothing to stop settlers from taking control of the wells and diverting the water.”
“[…] the fouling of this beautiful valley water source also reflects a pattern of class domination within Palestinian society itself, illustrated here by the disregard of the newly affluent hilltop people for the peasantry below. While all Palestinians endure the water shortages imposed on them by the Israeli government, they do not suffer equally.”
“That is why, for Israel, holding a monopoly over the water supply was such a key part of the Oslo Accords. In the fateful agreement regarding the West Bank’s water resources, Israel committed to “sharing” only 15 percent of the supply, a quota that has not budged over the decades. But Israel has never delivered the agreed share and, even though the PA is willing to pay to receive more, Mekorot will not renegotiate. Profit takes a back seat to the project of expropriation.”
“Water deprivation is already a military asset in the “battle for Area C,” the portion of land administered by Israel which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank’s land but houses only 5 percent of its population. The strategy is to parch these residents and push them into either Area A or Area B, where they will be within the domain of the increasingly repressive PA and the crony capitalists it enables.”
The Undiscovered Country by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“My mind goes to an observation Bertrand Russell offered in “Free Thought and Official Propaganda,” a lecture he delivered in London 101 years ago. “But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically,” the great English rationalist told his audience. “It is not desired that ordinary people think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative problems.””
“The question is whether we have concluded, with our downcast eyes and in our rampant discouragement, that we are doomed never again authentically to connect with one another—always from here on out to bowl alone.”
“Lots of people seem to think that our condition now is permanent, and, O.K., its totalized aspects make it seem that way. But there is no grounding for this. Think of Soviet citizens and how we thought of Soviet citizens up to the very end. Think of the extraordinary political, social, and community consciousness manifest in the 1930s. Those people were our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents. Think of the 1960s scene: Those people were we, or our parents.”
“I wonder whether the mess amid which we live can get much worse. I am thinking here not only of what may amount to the worst presidency of my lifetime, and I was alive when Nixon slept in the White House. I consider the corrosion of our most important institutions, above all our judicial system, even more ominous. Joe Biden will fade at some point. The repairs our institutions require will prove a very long-term project.”
Murder And Rape For The Cause by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
I don’t even have anything to cite from this article because it’s so insipid, but I just wanted to keep in my notes that, once again, an ordinarily useful writer and thinker simply cannot keep his shit together or think of justice when his team’s been attacked. Greenfield is Jewish. He loves Israel. He cannot stand to hear a single bad word about anything that Israel does. Every time there is a larger altercation, he comes down rabidly on the side of Israel against Palestinians. The Palestinians are animals, heedlessly slaughtering innocent Israelis, who’ve done nothing to deserve even reprobation, to say nothing of violence. Read his responses to the comments on the post. Those are the comments he’s even allowed to appear, after moderation. It’s a shame, because he writes so much that is useful about law and justice and oppression in the U.S. On the topic of Israel, he’s an utter fool, a complete and unquestioning tool for the oppressor.
Look, two wrongs don’t make a right. Palestinians and their militant wing Hamas are humans and are thus capable of shocking cruelty and savagery when they get the chance—especially against what they consider to be an utterly demonic enemy. They also don’t recognize civilians as illegitimate targets. But neither does Israel. And they get a lot more chances to prove their savagery. If, like Greenfield, you only pay attention, or care, when the opposing team does it, then, … yeah, you’re going to look like a total asshole who can’t read a newspaper—who thinks that Israel heard about Palestine for the very first time on the morning of October 7th, 2023—and then sound off in an utterly unhinged way.
This recommendation popped up just this evening, about a day after what might have been the start of the next Intifada. Netflix thinks that I should watch a movie or series about heroic Israeli secret agents who are hunting nefarious Palestinian terrorists. Cool, Netflix. Nice to see where your loyalties lie.
The satirical site, which often claims that it takes the piss out of everyone, published the only possible thing that it could have published: “White House Issues Condemnation Of Attack Biden Funded”
I was confused for a second because I couldn’t figure out that the Bee was accusing Biden of having funded the Palestinians. In my world, this is ludicrous—the Biden administration funds Israel nearly infinitely more. In the Babylon Bee’s world, where Biden is wrong about everything, he is a massive supporter of Palestine and probably delights in dead Israelis.
This is, again, what it looks like to be so partisan as to not be able to think straight. Biden would, of course, go on to make subsequent statements that make this accusation seem even more ridiculous. It was ridiculous from the beginning, though, again, if you can muster the energy to read a Wikipedia page or two.
Palestinian Resistance in Gaza Launches Historic Surprise Attack Against Israel by People's Dispatch (Scheer Post)
“As per reports, Hamas claims to have launched over 5,000 rockets across Israeli territory from Gaza. The rockets were reported to have hit as far north as Tel Aviv. The attack also included Hamas fighters pushing through the land and sea routes and penetrating into Israeli territory.
“The offensive is viewed as the biggest escalation since 2021 in the ongoing violence between Israel and the Gaza Strip, which has been under a total Israeli land, air, and sea blockade since 2005. It is also reported to be the first time ever that Gazan fighters were able to conduct an armed operation into Israel on such a massive scale.”
I wonder what happened to the Iron Dome? Was it overwhelmed? I thought that couldn’t happen? Not with the paltry rockets that Hamas has? Or did they get bigger/better ones?
“Israel has responded with airstrikes against Gaza and close to 200 Palestinians have already been killed. [3]”
“Israeli violence and oppression against Palestinians has increased substantially with deadly raids becoming increasingly regular. Prior to the attacks, Israeli forces had already killed over 224 Palestinians, including 38 children, already this year. Of the total, 187 were killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and 37 in Gaza. This figure had already surpassed the record high of 178 killings in the whole of 2022.”
Netanyahu regime staggered by Palestinian uprising by Alex Lantier (WSWS)
“The World Socialist Web Site condemns the vicious and obscenely hypocritical statements of President Joe Biden and leaders of the European Union denouncing the Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” while supporting without any reservations Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.”
“Pledging “rock-solid and unwavering” support for Israeli military operations against Gaza, Biden said: “The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, and I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the government and people of Israel. Terrorism is never justified. Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.””
OMG 😱 they’re so delighted to be able to wholeheartedly endorse the further tightening of the noose that they’ve been funding for years, but this time, because of the (unprovoked, of course!) Palestinian attack, they feel like they can also reclaim the moral high ground, without doing any work at all. This is such a slam dunk that of course all the EU and US leaders are going to take it. They don’t give a shit about anybody but themselves, but pretending to care about Israelis is not only lucrative, but more than occasionally politically necessary. No-one ever lost an election for not caring about Palestinians. Quite the contrary.
Check out Baerbock, one of the truly worst, most ruthless, and most disgusting women in politics since … Hillary Clinton? Margaret Thatcher? Condaleeza Rice? Susan Rice? Samantha Power?
“German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock declared: “The odious violence of Hamas against civilians in Israel is unprecedented and unjustifiable. This terrorism must stop immediately. Israel has our full solidarity.””
Unprecedented! Not only unprovoked, but unprecedented! This, from a fucking German! A German is saying that Palestinian violence is unprecedented. You can’t make this shit up. She is the foreign minister—the top diplomat—of that once progressive country.
“The hypocrisy of these statements is staggering. As always, the sympathies of the imperialist powers are with the oppressors. Any manifestation of resistance by the oppressed is greeted with frenzied denunciations. The media ignores the fact that the Israeli government is led by a criminal, whose coalition is dominated by fascistic racists, and is engaged in efforts to suppress the constitution.”
The attacks are an act of desperation, of course. They knew exactly what would happen in response. I’m not sure whether they were just trying to tip Israel’s hand, to force them to actually do something so awful that even a reprehensible c*#% link Baerbock would have to shut the f*#% up and sit down while the adults do the talking.
“On Saturday night, in a bloodcurdling address to the nation, Netanyahu told “residents of Gaza” to “get out now, because we will operate everywhere and with full force.” Since his government blockades Gaza and does not let anyone leave, this is a declaration that Netanyahu sees Gaza’s entire population as a legitimate target. Asserting that “Hamas wants to murder us all,” Netanyahu pledged to “fight them to the bitter end” and that cities where Hamas operates would turn into “cities of ruin.””
Netanyahu will target civilians. He and his predecessors always have. The western world doesn’t care at all. The money continues to flow.
Of course, no-one will actually pay any attention to what the “enemy” has to say about why it’s doing what it’s doing. Putin knows the feeling. We fail to listen to our own detriment. This is not about capitulation to violence, but in learning what it would take to avoid it and to determine whether that price is too high. If we categorically refuse to even learn what the price might be, we are dishonorable, reckless, and exceedingly stupid hypocrites.
Here is a part of Hamas’s declaration.
““As the Israeli occupation maintains its siege of the Gaza Strip and continues its crimes against our Palestinian people, while showing utmost disregard for international laws and resolutions amid US and Western support and international silence, we have decided to put an end to all of that. We announce a military operation against the Israeli occupation, which comes in response to the continued Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and violations at the Al-Aqsa mosque.””
They are referring of course to the multiple attacks inside a mosque carried out by Israeli police over the last couple of years. Most recently, people swept through, spitting on people. On Biden’s watch, by the way. Utterly vile, but a neat tactic for provoking a violent response without actually striking first.
If history is any guide, Gaza is truly going to get curb-stomped, probably worse than they’ve ever been before. As noted in Violence Begets Violence by Raouf Halaby (CounterPunch)
“Hamas and its supporters will no doubt claim Saturday’s attack on Israel to be a victory. And in truth, taking on one of the mightiest armies in the world is beyond belief. Breaking out of their open-air prison and with slingshots (Kalashnikovs, motorcycles, and a bulldozer), as compared to Israel’s infinite military might, the fifth strongest military in the world with proven air, land, and sea prowess, will be celebrated by Hamas and across the Near East as a victory.
“At best, it is a pyrrhic victory, one for which Palestinian citizens in Gaza and the West Bank, as happened in the past, will pay dearly. Since 2008 Israel has launched four major wars on Gaza, each of which was more brutal than the preceding one. I fear that the current Israeli avenging war, unlike the previous ones, will exact a very heavy price on the 376 square-mile enclave, the world’s largest open-air prison in which 2.3 million Palestinians exist.”
Spanish-Russian journalist Pablo González still in “Polish Guantanamo” 18 months after arrest by Alice Summers (WSWS)
“The journalist has now been left to languish in a Polish jail for more than a year and a half by the far-right Polish government, Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government and all the NATO powers. He has not been found guilty of any crime, or ever faced a criminal trial. No date has even been set for him to face the charges in court.”
“His conditions resemble those “enemy combatants” detained by Washington at the notorious Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. He spends 23 hours per day in isolation in a five-metre cell, with one hour of walking across a 10-metre patio. Every time he is taken out of the cell, he is searched and handcuffed. Upon entering, he is frisked again. Since his detention, he has only been able to receive a visit from his wife twice, the last time in November. Both visits took place in the presence of a jailer and an agent of the Polish intelligence services.”
These are the good guys, right? This is NATO. This is how the supposedly “end of history” moral force for good and decency against all that is unjust treats people with whom it disagrees. It locks them away, worse than it would treat animals. It doesn’t bother with legal means. It doesn’t have to. It can do whatever it wants.
This is why you shouldn’t be shocked to see these exact same people supporting Israel’s air-strafing and -bombing of Gaza when Hamas gets uppity for the first time in 21 years.
They’re Repeating The Word ‘Unprovoked’ Again, This Time In Defense Of Israel by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
““The United States unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians,” reads a statement from the White House.”
““The unprovoked terror attack today and the murders of innocent Israeli citizens are a stark reminder of the brutality of Hamas and Iran-backed extremists,” reads a statement by congressman and house speaker contender Jim Jordan.”
That’s from a Republican. Here’s the leading light of the Democrats:
““I forcefully condemn these cowardly, horrifying, unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas,” tweeted congressman John Fetterman.”
You have to wonder whether they actually believe this, or if they’re actively evil.
“When you lay them all out together it starts to sound highly suspicious, like someone always referring to his car as “my car, which I did not steal,” or always introducing his spouse as “my wife, whom I do not beat.””
The previously unprovoked attack in the western press was the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“As Noam Chomsky quipped last year, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”
“And the same is of course true of the latest Hamas offensive. There are all kinds of arguments you could legitimately make about it, but one argument you definitely cannot defend is that it was unprovoked.”
“After the news broke about the Hamas offensive I tweeted, “Here come days and days of western news media slyly reversing the aggressor-defender relationship and reporting as though the violence began with the Hamas offensive, spontaneously out of nowhere.””
Palestinians Speak the Language of Violence Israel Taught Them by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“This is not to defend the war crimes by either side. It is not to rejoice in the attacks. I have seen enough violence in the Israeli occupied territories, where I covered the conflict for seven years, to loathe violence. But this is the familiar denouement to all settler-colonial projects. Regimes implanted and maintained by violence engender violence. […] The Palestinians, like all colonized people, have a right to armed resistance under international law.”
“What does Israel, or the world community, expect? How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years, reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level, deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity, use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns and infantry units to randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response? Israel is currently carrying out waves of aerial assaults on Gaza, preparing a ground invasion and has cut the power to Gaza, which usually only operates two to four hours per day.
“Many of the resistance fighters who infiltrated into Israel undoubtedly knew they would be killed. But like resistance fighters in other wars of liberation they decided that if they could not choose how they would live, they would choose how they would die.”
“The next stage of this struggle will be a massive campaign of industrial slaughter in Gaza by Israel, which has already begun. Israel is convinced greater levels of violence will finally crush Palestinian aspirations. Israel is mistaken. The terror Israel inflicts is the terror it will get.”
Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks by Summer Said, Benoit Faucon, Stephen Kalin (WSJ)
“Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.”
Sure, sure, I bet they did. The WSJ being super-helpful to get the war against the real enemy going in earnest.
All This Death Is The Fault Of The Western Press by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix)
“Whenever something like this happens warmongers always seize on the emotional frenzy of the moment to shove through insane acts of warmongering and scream vitriol at anyone who questions them. Then later when all the facts are in people slowly start to realize that something went very wrong, and that they were deceived.
“After 9/11 anyone who didn’t support multiple full-scale ground invasions of sovereign nations was a terrorist sympathizer and a Saddam apologist.”
“The western press are largely to blame for all this. If they’d just told the truth instead of running “Palestinian child walks into bullet” headlines this whole time and telling everyone that boycotting Israel is genocide, political pressure could’ve long ago been brought about to force a peaceful and just resolution to this mess.”
“Instead they hid all those abuses from the public for generations, creating an environment where peaceful resolutions are impossible and giving rise to Palestinian factions which understandably see violent force as the only viable answer.
“This is their fault. They created this mess with a mountain of lies and obfuscation, and now those lies are being paid for with rivers of blood. The western press are war criminals. They’ve committed crimes against humanity.”
“If there’s just a lot of violence and then it goes back to more or less the status quo, Israeli intelligence probably did just massively faceplant and miss extensive preparations for an attack which included training for air and sea assaults. If new agendas are rolled out that wouldn’t have been consented to without the attack, chances are much higher it was allowed; the more far-reaching the agendas, the greater the likelihood.”
“[…] if the US-led world order requires more and more violence and nuclear brinkmanship to maintain, what specifically is the argument for maintaining it in the first place? Does it not at some point begin to cease looking like “order” at all, and instead like a tyrannical empire trying to rule the world no matter how much death and destruction is necessary to subjugate it?”
The US will send a carrier strike group to the Eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel by Tara Copp (AP News)
The AP is delighted to jump in. Why would you need a carrier strike group to fight a population that is completely hemmed in? Israel has Palestine completely under control. These attacks do not indicate any change in the balance of power whatsoever.
This diagram is also missing the last 15 years of land and resource appropriation. Land is one thing: control over water, food supplies, and electricity doesn’t show up on a map, but is even more controlling. Those green patches are places where Palestinians are allowed to be, but not live.
This looks a bit like the progression of the U.S. conquest of Native American land. It’s no wonder the U.S. is all-in on supporting Israel in their noble endeavor.
From hubris to humiliation: The 10 hours that shocked Israel by Marwan Bishara (Al Jazeera)
“The Palestinian blitzkrieg is a military failure and a political catastrophe for Israel of colossal proportions.”
“A few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a boastful speech at the United Nations, announcing the establishment of a new Middle East centred around Israel and its new Arab partners, the Palestinians, whom he totally omitted from his fantasy regional map, dealt him and Israel a fatal blow, politically and strategically.”
“Israel’s military establishment will no doubt try to recover the strategic and military initiative from Hamas by immediately dealing it a major military blow. As it has done in the past, it will undertake severe bombardment and assassination campaigns, leading to great suffering and countless casualties among the Palestinians. And as it has happened in the past again and again, this will not destroy the Palestinian resistance.”
The only solution is much-closer-to-complete genocide, as the U.S. has done with the Native Americans. You never hear about terrorism coming from the “reservations” because the U.S. has them under much better control. There are also many, many fewer of them, relative to the surrounding population. They don’t live cheek-by-jowl with them—Palestinians are an essential part of the workforce in Israel.
The Root of Violence Is Oppression. (Jewish Voice for Peace)
“The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago. Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock.
“For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege and daily humiliation. In recent weeks, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the holiest Muslim sites in Jerusalem.”
“For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.”
The bombings will resume until morale improves.
Clueless on Gaza by Ted Rall
“Gazans faced a choice.
“They could obey Israel and its supporters. They could suffer, chafe under occupation, dodge bombs and bullets, starve, watch their friends and neighbors die, with no end in sight as the world keeps ignoring them.
“They could stage protest marches that no important media outlet would cover, write firm-but-polite letters to the editor no one would publish and post to social media accounts no one would read. As they engaged in peaceful protest, they would keep starving and dying.
“Or they could confront the Israelis with violence.
“You can argue that violence is never the answer. You can claim that you’d be docile, that you’d live under blockade and occupation, never taking up arms or cheering those who do.
“Go on, judge the Gazans. We both know you’d do the same exact thing if you were them.”
A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer one by Haviv Rettig Gur (Times of Israel)
“Hamas did everything it could to shock Israelis, to humiliate and horrify, kidnapping children, desecrating corpses, and then crowing about it to the world.
“And Israelis watched it all, minute by agonizing minute. And they agreed. Their weakness had become clear, unavoidable.
“And very, very dangerous.”
“And it will soon learn the scale of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot.
“A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.
“Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.”
This is both true and a rallying cry. It’s also amazing that the author is expecting us to believe that either the current or any previous Israeli leadership has lost any sleep about the humanitarian fallout. I mean, I’m sure that there has been some restraint from just outright murdering every Palestinian that crosses their paths, but, from out here, in the real world, it doesn’t really look like much restraint is considered at all. If there’s any concern about humanitarian fallout, it’s lost in a rounding error.
Israel has been exposed as weaker than it projected and it will react in the same way that the U.S. did, when a similar thing happened to it over 22 years ago. The younger people of Israel face the same choice that we Americans did at that time: seek understanding, wonder what those scarred wizened visages meant by “chickens coming home to roost”, or double down, look inward, and lash out.
It’s quite obvious what Israel, led by Netanyahu, will do. It remains to be seen how much of the population of Israel follows, in their heart of hearts. Most Americans followed. Some questioned. Those who questioned didn’t matter. Their opinions never do. There is no solace in being right when the world burns for so many others.
Tribalism Versus International Law in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Juan Cole (Scheer Post)
“Israel’s seizure of the Palestinian West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 was therefore illegal. Its annexation of Palestinian East Jerusalem was illegal, and was branded such by the United Nations Security Council.
“The laws of military occupation envision a time-limited occupation during the shooting war. Since the Hague Regulations of 1907 occupiers have been forbidden to alter the lifeways of the people who are occupied. They may not expel them arbitrarily from their homes. And they may not send their own citizens into the occupied territory to settle it. These actions were proscribed in the Geneva Convention of 1949 and in the Rome Statute.
“These actions were made illegal in international law to forestall a repetition of Nazi Germany’s policies in Poland, where Berlin made a concerted attempt to remove Poles and replace them with Germans so as to “aryanize” the territory and make it part of Germany.
“Israel has violated all of these provisions of international law, in a concerted and deliberate manner for over half a century. It has been actively and consistently aided in doing so by the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Canada and other industrialized democracies […]”
“[…] the principle of proportionality — you can’t launch a full-scale war because of a minor skirmish for instance. You may not deliberately target or recklessly endanger the lives of innocent noncombatants. These are war crimes.”
“[…] although Hamas has the right to mount resistance to being unlawfully occupied by a foreign power, it doesn’t have the right to shoot down 260 attendees at a music festival, to take grandmothers and children hostage, or to fire thousands of unguided rockets at populated areas. Since these munitions have no guidance systems, shooting them off inevitably recklessly endangers noncombatant civilians, as witness the large number of Israeli casualties, with hundreds dead and thousands wounded.
“With the exception of attacks on Israeli military personnel and bases, most of the actions taken by Hamas since Saturday have been war crimes, for which its leaders should be tried at the International Criminal Court.
“At the same time, disproportionate use of force by the Israeli military, indiscriminate bombardment of inhabited apartment buildings, and reckless endangerment of large numbers of Palestinian noncombatants by directing fire at densely inhabited neighborhoods, are all potential war crimes on the Israeli side. However, there is no prospect that any Israeli official will ever be held accountable for war crimes in any international tribunal, because the US and other patrons of Tel Aviv will intervene to prevent it. Indeed, it is unlikely that Israeli war crimes will so much as be described in that way by any North Atlantic leader.
“Unless international law is given some teeth by the international community, these episodes of violence will continue to break out from time to time, and the tribes will gnash their teeth, and more people will be killed or deprived of their right to live a normal life.”
A Population With Nothing To Lose by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“Ultimately this is just Palestinians doing what they feel they need to do out of total desperation, because they feel backed into a corner with no other options. And they feel backed into a corner with no other options because that does appear to be the case. There are a lot of people I could blame for their being in those circumstances, but the very last on that list would be the victims of the abuse themselves.”
Yes, by all means, the Palestinians are not to blame. The Palestinians are not Hamas only in the complicated way that Americans are not their military, or their government. When you talk to people, it feels true—but it’s also not true, in that they don’t denounce it.
It’s similar with the Ukrainians vs. their government. It’s ostensibly democratic—only slightly more so than Palestine, which seems to have two governments? And one of them won’t allow elections? And the other, Hamas, was not accepted by the West as the actual winner of the election, even though Jimmy Carter himself said that the election was on the up-and-up?—but the people in Ukraine seem to have very little control over what their country does in their name.
I’m sure they’re not so thrilled about all of the conscription, just like Gazans are probably not exactly thrilled with the attacks currently bombing every they know to shreds.
“Sure glad Trump lost because otherwise a border wall would be getting built and kids would still be in cages and the Iran deal would still be dead and the military budget would still be inflating and Roe v Wade would’ve been killed. That psycho would probably have us on the brink of World War Three by now.”
The Violence in Palestine and Israel Is the Tragic Fruit of Brutal Oppression by Seraj Assi (Jacobin)
“The tragic scenes unfolding in Gaza and Israel are a chilling reminder that occupation and oppression bear a price. For the truth is that when you imprison two million people in 140 square miles, placing them under a merciless siege with no end in sight, with no way in or out, with drones and rockets buzzing overhead night and day, with constant surveillance and harassment, with scant control over their day-to-day lives — ultimately, the dispossessed will rebel.
“The violence was not unprovoked, as the mainstream media has depicted it. It has been brewing and festering in every corner of the country.
“In the West Bank, the Palestinian town of Jenin is still reeling from the devastation of a recent unsparing Israeli attack, which left the town a razed ghostland. The small town of Huwara has yet to recover from the deadly horrors unleashed by settlers on its residents.”
It’s not that Hamas didn’t commit war crimes. It’s more that the world shouldn’t be surprised that it did.
“During the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, settlers stormed into the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in Jerusalem, staging provocative tours, harassing and beating worshippers, and spitting on Christians.”
It doesn’t justify the rocket attacks, but it goes a good way towards explaining them. If you want the rocket attacks to stop, you should consider all of the options: you could turn the screws even tighter, to make sure that no-one can get rockets. Or you could see what you would need to do for people not to even want rockets. That ship has probably sailed, but it might not be bad, as a thought experiment.
“The ongoing explosion in violence is the ugly reality of Israeli apartheid, the culmination of decades of occupation of a stateless people deprived of basic human rights and freedoms. Unless the root causes are dismantled — the siege lifted, the apartheid system and occupation ended — violence will continue to tragically haunt Palestinians and Israelis for years to come.”
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people being oppressed, and loving those doing the oppressing.”
‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 3: Israeli Defense Minister Orders Full Siege of Gaza ‘ No Power, No Food, No Gas’ by Mondoweiss (Scheer Post)
“Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: “I ordered a full siege on the Gaza Strip. No power, no food, no gas, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.””
Aerial firepower does such incredible damage. This reminds me of the lashing out of the City in the Hunger Games.
Has Israel signed the Geneva Convention? Does it care? Does anyone?
“In 2005, the Israeli army escaped from Gaza because of the intense resistance throughout the Strip. It evacuated its forces and quickly redeployed, circulating Gaza from all directions, thus the notorious siege of today.
“The Resistance back then was much weaker, less organized, and far less armed than it is now.
“If Israel takes charge of Gaza again, it will have to fight that same Palestinian Resistance daily and possibly for years to come.
“It is unclear what direction Netanyahu will choose. But either way, no matter what will happen in the coming days and weeks, Israel has, in many ways, lost the war.”
‘Genuinely Shocked They Aired It’: CNN Interview Cuts Through Pro-Israel Propaganda on Gaza by Julia Conley (Scheer Post)
“[…] what you have described is exactly what we already have, by 560 Israeli military checkpoints,” said Barghouti. “The whole West Bank has been divided into 224 small ghettos separated from each other, and the settlers are everywhere attacking Palestinians. “Can we stop what’s going on now? Yes, of course, all these Israelis who are now in Gaza can be released tomorrow… if Israel also accepts to release our 5,300 Palestinian prisoners who are in Israeli jails, including 1,260 Palestinians who are in jail without knowing why under the under the so-called “administrative detention.””
This Is Exactly What It Looks Like by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix)
“The Israel-Palestine issue is not complicated; an apartheid regime abuses and oppresses an indigenous ethnic group who don’t have the same rights as others. The only reason anyone thinks it’s complicated is because they assume if it were simple, the news would’ve told them so.”
“In reality the empire just supports who it supports because that’s where its interests happen to be advanced in each instance. Having Ukraine as a proxy advances US strategic interests against Russia and having Israel as a proxy advances US strategic interests against Iran and Syria. They’re not hypocritical at all; they’re perfectly consistent. They’re grabbing power and control in whatever way’s most convenient, in perfect alignment with their actual values.”
The True Face Of Israel by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix)
“I built a new house. There were people living where I wanted to build it so I just started building it on top of them. They tried to stop me so I had to kill them for being terrorists. If you disagree with my actions you’re basically a Nazi. I have a right to defend my house.”
This is a reasonable synopsis of how some settlers in Israel are acting. Their government defends them 100%.
“A nation that cannot exist without nonstop war is not a nation at all — it’s an ongoing military operation.”
That’s why the U.S. and Israel are such great friends. They understand empire.
Everyone Should Be Calling for a Cease-Fire in Palestine by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)
“This is collective punishment of a population for the actions of their government, an unambiguous crime under international law, and made even harsher by the Netanyahu government’s decision to heighten the already sixteen-year-long Israeli blockade of Gaza: “no fuel, electricity, or food supplies,” according to Gallant. To justify this unjustifiable policy, Gallant used shockingly — but at this point typically — racist language, that “we fight animals in human form and proceed accordingly.””
“For decades, Israeli policy has flouted international law, imposed crushing and seemingly endless misery on the people of Gaza and the West Bank, and condemned Palestinians to watch as the land of what’s meant to be their future state is openly stolen with impunity.”
“This isn’t a time for cheerleading. War is not a spectator sport, and besides the taking of innocent lives in Israel, the main effect of Hamas’s supposed “success” has been to trigger another round of Israeli force, which has already killed hundreds of Palestinians and looks set to kill many more, one that from all indications is going to be far more vicious and unrestrained than previous iterations — which is saying something.”
Those Who Support Israel Against Hamas Should also Back Ukraine Against Russia by Ilya Somin (Reason)
The opening paragraph expands on the illogical premise in the title, double down again and again.
“Hamas’ shocking terrorist attack against Israel has galvanized bipartisan support for Israel’s cause in the US. But many conservative Republicans who back Israel simultaneously oppose continued support for Ukraine in its struggle against the very similar assault by Russia. GOP Sen. Josh Hawley says “[a]ny funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.” This pro-Israel/anti-Ukraine stance is incoherent. The moral and strategic rationales for backing Israel also apply to Ukraine, in some cases with even greater force. Both states are liberal democracies threatened by authoritarian mass murderers who seek to destroy them. And Russian atrocities are strikingly similar to those of Hamas, except on a much larger scale. There is no good moral justification for supporting Israel’s cause that does not also apply to Ukraine’s. The strategic rationale for backing Israel also applies to Ukraine, with at least equal force.”
I didn’t highlight anything because I don’t agree with any of it. The only interesting bit is to consider what is missing from this person’s worldview? He’s a professor at George Mason University (Wikipedia). I have long since skipped over his content at Reason because he’s just so out there and illogical. I couldn’t resist this one, though.
I skimmed the rest of the article and it’s just woefully without nuance, with an analysis of what he considers to be acceptable viewpoints, all based on his wacky worldview that Israel is a shrinking violet of a democracy suffering before the colonial onslaught of the Palestinian hordes. He thinks that Ukraine/Russia is as simple as a crazed colonial power attacking an innocent democratic state that was just minding its own business.
Even with these premises, as divorced from reality as they are, I still have trouble following his line of reasoning—but I have to admit that I’m not trying very hard. It’s best just to back away slowly and leave Mr. Somin to his almost certainly very lucrative job as a foreign-policy expert in U.S. media.
Some Young Lives Matter More Than Others, Some Don’t Seem to Matter at All by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“The government of these two brave and accomplished American women never pressed for answers about their killings, never demanded that anyone be held to account. If they had, perhaps, the real story about what’s been going on in Israel and the Occupied Territories might have gotten a brief airing in the American media. Instead, the money and the weapons continued to flow into the hands of a regime that had demonstrated over and over again its willingness to use them against anyone who stood in its way, even women from the country that provided them.
“Now here we are again, having to ask ourselves how many children Biden’s shipment of weapons to Israel will kill? How many tiny limbs will be lost? How many small heads will be crushed in the rubble? Will we see the bodies our bombs have mutilated? Get a body count of the deaths our tax dollars have underwritten? What doctrine of just war decrees that the deaths of children justify the killing of more children?”
Israeli Intelligence Suddenly Knows Exactly Where Hamas Is by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“When you live under an empire of lies you’ll be asked to believe a lot of very stupid things. The dumbest thing we’re being asked to believe this week is that Israel’s intelligence services are simultaneously so incompetent that Saturday’s Hamas attack took them completely by surprise, but also so competent that all the buildings they’re destroying with their relentless bombing campaign on Gaza are directed solely at Hamas.”
“If you want to support Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza then go ahead, and if you want to uncritically accept the official narrative about Saturday’s attack then you do you. But don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
‘Innocent Israelis’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“To assume the responsibilities that fall to us is to preserve some claim to innocence, it seems to me. To develop within ourselves a sense of empathy, or whatever is the opposite of indifference, is equally to retain or regain our innocence. Again, there is no defending the shootings at Re’im. But only those among the revelers who understood and assumed their responsibility for Israel’s conduct and all the Yoav Gallants running the apartheid state can fairly be counted innocent of what we must recognize as a criminal regime. There is an honorable movement of such people in Israel, let us not forget. It is hard to imagine any of its members partying on the Gaza border, but let us allow for the possibility. For the rest, they must be counted as complicit.”
“To consider the Re’im attack as an event in history, it seems to me there is something very off about a group of young and privileged Israelis having a carefree weekend in the sand hard by a land of daily, incessant suffering, a place where the innocence of its children and youth has been stolen by the state wherein the partiers do their partying. Something very off: By this I mean the revelers betrayed themselves as profoundly irresponsible, so it seems to me. Maybe unconsciously and maybe not, to me they displayed that indifference toward the lives of others for which many Israelis have unfortunately made themselves well-known.”
This is the least-generous interpretation possible, but it’s unfortunately got more truth in it than we’d like to admit. I would just like to add that Israelis are hardly unique in this regard. This is what people do. We become very accustomed to the situation.
The situation for Israel is that they are the chosen people, living in relative luxury, the world jealous of them. Perhaps I can empathize because this is the story that Americans are told, as well.
When you benefit greatly from a situation, when your quality of life is good, you can easily look away from the giant heap of skulls and bones on which your so-called civilization is built. [4]
There are untold places in the “civilized world” where the rich live cheek-by-jowl with wildly impoverished neighborhoods, places of to-the-rich completely incomprehensible and unimaginable suffering and desperation. Gated communities. Favelas. Slums of all kinds.
Of course, of course, Palestine is, by all accounts, much, much worse. It is, as Norman Finkelstein says, a “concentration camp”, an “open prison”. Nearly all residents were born into a concentration camp and have known nothing but prison their entire lives. The majority are younger than 18 years old.
Even if we don’t live cheek-by-jowl with the oppressed, we still benefit every day from them, casually, both in our own societies and in others.
We want desperately for Hamas and the Palestinians to be uniquely savage terrorists, alone in their ability to inflict unspeakable harm on innocents—so that we can help ourselves forget our complicity in these acts, done in our name, or for our ultimate benefit.
We need their attacks—and the attacks of all whom we deem enemies, but who are really just “other people who have stuff that we want to have for free”—to be “unprovoked”.
We can’t have done anything to have aroused their ire. We can’t be made to even consider changing anything about ourselves or our lifestyles that would prevent something like this from happening in the future. We are an unsullied people. There is nothing we have done that might be considered untoward that we should perhaps stop doing in order to prevent future attacks.
Those are the only justifications for any change in our behavior: it’s getting too expensive—or difficult—(to steal stuff from others), or it’s getting too dangerous (to steal stuff from others). We never consider the path of “stop stealing stuff from others so much” because it would (A) possibly change our quality of life in a way that our lords and masters—who benefit even massively more from this whole situation—have told us would be detrimental and (B) would mean that we would have to admit that we had been doing bad things (i.e., stealing stuff from other people). The life of a pirate involves a lot of self-delusion.
We want the Israelis to be even worse deniers of their privilege, to be uniquely deluded hypocrites and racists, so that we can absolve ourselves of our own failings in this regard, were we to even admit them. And why admit such trifles about our excellent selves, when the others are so, so much worse?
And disabuse yourself of the notion that religion has anything to do with it, other than as a convenient and well-established reason for hating and othering. Religion is just one of many ways of justifying why it’s OK for you to steal somebody else’s stuff, be it land, food, water, physical goods, safety, or well-being. The U.S. doesn’t really declare classically religious wars—-like based on a holy book—-but what is the difference between Jihad and the blind, hate-filled fervor with which the U.S. pursues it’s interests, claiming to be anti-communist or whatever the flavor of the week is.
We should be careful to not let our anger and indignation get the better of us, to make us say things that are patently wrong, or wildly hyperbolic, that would threaten to distract us from the fact that we’re all hypocrites. It’s a spectrum. Some people lean hard into it, for sure. But Israelis are not unique in their hatred of the other, in their ability to dance while others suffer.
Young Israelis know nothing but that there is a mysterious place on their border that their state has under control, and that they should live their best lives—because why not? It is what affluent, young people have always done. They are not unique in being wildly ignorant of or failing to be empathetic to those around them. Racism and discrimination doesn’t help.
They are heavily, heavily indoctrinated to believe that Palestinians—and Arabs in general—are sub-human animals, no more of consequence than a lizard or a goat, perhaps even less so, because animals can’t be terrorists.
Here’s a five-minute video that provides a bit of background.
This is also not unique. Perhaps Israel is at the top of the list for racism, but the U.S.‘s foreign policy is also horrifically racist. Their soldiers used the epithet “sand niggers” for Arabs while deployed in the Middle East.
‘The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That (The Onion)
Dear Dove by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post)
Germany’s 2024 budget: Armaments über alles by Max Linhof (WSWS)
“The nominal cuts of 6.4 percent or €30.5 billion, which are horrendous in themselves, do not take into account core inflation of 6.1 percent. If this is included, the overall cut in the budget is 11.8 percent.”
“With the planned €51.8 billion, the defence budget takes up almost 20 percent of the entire federal budget for 2024.
“But that is by no means all. In addition to the reported €51.8 billion, there are €19.2 billion from the Bundeswehr (armed forces) “special fund,” as well as billions more hidden in other budgets, such as expenditure for UN missions, Germany’s share in various EU armament expenditures such as the promised arms deliveries to Ukraine, which alone amounted to €17.1 billion from January 24, 2022 to July 31, 2023.”
“The health budget is being almost completely slashed. From €64.4 billion in 2022 to €24.5 billion in the current year and finally down to €16.2 billion next year.”
Holy shit!
Here’s the comparison between development of the military vs. the health budget over the last few years.
What madness is this?
The hits keep coming. Here’s another graphic of the major pillars of the budget, relative to each other in size, and including percentage change from this year.
The military budget will be more than twice what Germany will spend on education, health, and living combined.
Florida executes man after US Supreme Court denies his intellectual disability claim by Kate Randall (WSWS)
“Zack suffered a litany of horrors in his childhood. His lawyers wrote in a court filing that his mother drank heavily throughout her pregnancy. He was hospitalized at the age of three for drinking about 10 ounces of vodka. He endured extensive physical and sexual abuse from his stepfather, including forcing him to drink alcohol, injecting him with drugs, running over him with a car and creating devices to electrically shock him if he wet the bed. Zack’s older sister killed their mother with an ax.”
But it’s cool, because he’s apparently not considered to be intellectually disadvantaged enough to get protection under the law. An intelligence test invented by shysters in the 19th century and continued to be used today has decided that he’s 9 points too smart to be retarded enough to not be able to be killed.
“The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) notes, “Unlike almost all other states, Florida rigidly required an IQ of 70 or below to demonstrate intellectual disability, with no allowance for the test’s margin of error.” Zack at one point scored 79 on an IQ (intelligence quotient) test. IQ tests have been demonstrated to be inaccurate in measuring intelligence.”
The average is 100. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of discussing anything more complex than whether you want your receipt with someone with an IQ of 100, then you should really brace yourself for what a conversation with a person who scores 79 would be like. This isn’t to say that the IQ test is accurate necessarily, but that it will give you a ballpark idea of what that person is going to be capable of. Zack’s statement, quoted in the article, seems literate enough, but I imagine that he had quite a bit of help with it.
Ron DeSantis is happily signing death warrants for severely mentally challenged individuals. Bill Clinton also happily signed death warrants for the same (Ricky Ray Rector (Wikipedia)), so maybe DeSantis is hoping to follow his example into the White House.
In Clinton’s case, the self-lobotomized Rector had no idea what was going on. He might as well have been Old Yeller. According to the Wikipedia link above,
“For his last meal, Rector requested and received a steak, fried chicken, cherry Kool-Aid, and pecan pie. As noted above, Rector left the pie on the side of the tray, telling the corrections officers who came to take him to the execution chamber that he was “saving it for later.””
Washington’s Illegal, Immoral Meddling in Syria Faces Mounting Problems by Ted Galen Carpenter (Antiwar.com)
“There is little question that the presence of U.S. troops and armed contractors (mercenaries) is utterly illegal under international law. The Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad, which is recognized by the United Nations and the vast majority of countries, never invited those forces to enter Syria. Moreover, Damascus has repeatedly demanded that they be withdrawn. U.S. leaders have flatly refused to do so, using the flimsy excuse that ISIS still poses a threat to regional peace despite its drastically depleted ranks.
“It is not a coincidence that northeastern Syria contains most of the country’s oil reserves […]”
The War on Trans is a War on Liberty by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“Your average autistic person isn’t even nuts, they’re just someone wired to be incapable of falling for the bullshit of pointless social norms like the gender binary. This is an admirable trait that autistic people happen to share with children which I believe is the real reason why the very powerful people behind the anti-trans movement want them both to be singled out to be sufficiently governed.”
That is a bit of a muddled mess, but it’s interesting to think about people who are capable of questioning the social parameters that most people don’t even see, much less question. It’s like the Matrix.
“More than anything though, the anti-trans movement doesn’t want you to know that I am more like you than the statist fanatics who run their con job will ever be, and they don’t want you to know that if they can eviscerate my rights, and the rights of children and disabled people and any other individual, then they can eviscerate your rights too. Hate me if you want. That’s your right. I just thought you should know.”
Journalism Itself Is Locked Up In Belmarsh by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“To accept the persecution of Julian Assange is to accept the idea that all media everywhere must function as propaganda organs of the US government. It’s to take it as a given that any journalist anywhere in the world who decides to do real journalism and expose inconvenient facts about the powerful in the public interest should be jailed until they can be extradited to the United States for a show trial, and then left to rot in one of the most draconian prison systems on the planet.”
If You Buy Into The Anti-China Propaganda You’re Just A Stupid Asshole by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“If you support the persecution of Julian Assange, that means you believe all media everywhere should function as US propaganda organs. You believe all journalists everywhere have a responsibility to help the US empire keep its crimes hidden, and should be punished if they don’t.”
“This is why it matters so much that this war was provoked. It’s not some irrelevant geopolitical blame game to score propaganda points, it’s spotlighting an absolutely essential piece of information for the world to find its way out of this war. Russia will not stop fighting as long as the west is threatening its security concerns in the ways that provoked the invasion.
“You can’t just call for an end to aggressions while denying the existence of one of the aggressors. That’s not how peace negotiations work. The very first step is acknowledging reality. Only then can both aggressors, Russia and the western empire, begin working toward mutual de-escalation.”
Queen Warmonger Hillary Clinton Complains About “Men Starting Wars” by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“ If you’d have told me there was a Hillary Rodham Clinton Awards ceremony prior to my having read about it, I would have assumed it was an event where women receive trophies for killing large numbers of human beings with military violence.”
“Hillary Clinton is all the worst things about modern liberals and the Democratic Party. She is a blood-spattered psychopath who has dedicated her life to serving all the worst impulses of the human species — imperialism, militarism, capitalism, authoritarianism, and, yes, patriarchy — wearing a grinning plastic mask of civil rights and social justice to convince people to let her in the door. ”
Bizarre year for sea ice notches another record by Scott K. Johnson (Ars Technica)
“The Arctic usually gets the bulk of public attention, but the status of Antarctic sea ice has been shocking all year. Antarctic sea ice is a different beast, ringing a polar continent rather than growing from the center of a polar sea, and a number of factors cause its behavior to be complex. After smashing the satellite-era record for minimum extent in February, Antarctic sea ice coverage continued to track well below the range of previous years through the Southern Hemisphere winter months. It maxed out just shy of 17 million square kilometers on September 10 at the end of winter—a full 1 million square kilometers below the previous record set in 1986.”
On the importance of staring directly into the sun by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)
“In summary, Aristotle’s physics of motion can be seen, after translation into the language of classical physics, to yield a highly non trivial, but correct empirical approximation to the actual physical behavior of objects in motion in the circumscribed terrestrial domain for which the theory was created. […] The reason Aristotelian physics lasted so long is not because it became dogma: it is because it is a very good theory.”
“You open your eyes and see stuff, and although this requires lots of complicated calculations and several anatomical miracles, it doesn’t feel mysterious at all. You hear a song and remember the lyrics years later, and this seems totally natural. You and your spouse watch the same movie and have different opinions about it, and the explanation seems obvious: you’re right and they’re wrong. It’s so easy to accept the wild workings of the mind at face value, or to generate ad hoc explanations for them, that you might never realize you have no idea how any of this works.”
“It’s hard to overcome your illusions of explanatory depth, just like it’s hard to hold your breath for a long time—our urge to make sense of things and our urge to breathe are both there for good reason, and our brains don’t trust us to turn those urges off at will. It takes practice.”
I don’t understand even half of what he’s saying, but I understand enough to know that he’s brilliant. Maybe if I watch it a couple more times—and while less distracted—I’ll really be able to see how he linked up all of these fields. Also, I very much dig his Russian-Jean-Claude-van-Damme vibe. He’s so enthusiastic!
The Superette by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“[…] one must either evolve in accordance with one’s own innate Bildungstrieb, or one must stagnate and become as unreadable in one’s predictable repetitions as one admittedly risks being in one’s new experiments for which, it may turn out, one has no natural talent. You’ve got to take risks, I mean, and writers who just keep competently writing the same thing over and over again, a pattern I’ve seen all too often, are to my mind a far sorrier species than writers who try new things and fail.”
“[…] if we are producing a lot of words that don’t move through any gatekeeping process before they reach their readers, this is not necessarily because we are afraid of the gatekeepers, or because we believe we could not get through, or we innately know ourselves to be low-status drudges. It’s because we are simply so built as to have more words gushing out of us than could possibly be made to drip through the narrow funnel of traditional media.”
“The essay was in part an attempt for me to cast a critical eye on the various ways I, and those like me, were ignorant , and part of this ignorance was that we were members of what was ultimately a racially defined and implicitly racialized subculture, generally without being conscious of that hard fact.”
“[…] whatever Warrant, Night Ranger, et al., thought they were doing, what they were really doing was “performing whiteness”, without, at this point, any lingering musical debt at all to Robert Johnson.”
Trauma is indeed like a Car Crash by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“Suppose you get injured in a car accident and suffer some sort of serious but not life-threatening injuries. Your body will have undergone trauma, in the old school physical sense − the sense from which we get the concept of the trauma center . What would you do? The sensible course of action would be to seek professional medical care. You would not, I hope, set about to learn how to treat that trauma from TikTok, while sitting in the burning car. You wouldn’t expect Discord to diagnose you accurately. You wouldn’t buy a workbook on recovering from a car accident put together by someone with dubious credentials. Instead you’d go see doctors and nurses and physical therapists; you’d secure the services of those who have been designated by society as having the expertise to provide care.”
“[…] everyone would understand that this medical process had a clear goal: to heal, to move on, to bring the trauma to a close. If you encountered a doctor who forcefully insisted that you would be, forever more, a car accident survivor before and above all other things, you’d find that deranged, not therapeutic. You would do the work to get healthy and you wouldn’t fight to maintain your self-definition as a traumatized person. You’d get healthy and then you would just be healthy.”
“Today, people perform trauma. They perform trauma because they’re rewarded for doing so with attention and sympathy. The desire to get those things is natural; the incentive structure that produces that behavior is toxic.”
“The point of addressing trauma is to get over it. Not to derive an identity from it, not to make it a free-floating excuse for selfishness or lack of accountability, not to get social media clout for having it, not to monetize it, not to make it an all-encompassing explanatory mechanism for every element of your life.”
“[…] there is no timetable for how quickly you have to heal, no wrong way to do it, and no shame in struggling as you do. But any social construct that compels you to want to remain in your trauma is pathological. Resistance to healing is pathological.”
“We’re just now starting to count all of the ways that the discourse of racial justice and LGBTQ rights and feminism and related concepts have been weaponized and misused, invoked in bad faith to destructive ends. People found that when they invoked those discourses, others were often unwilling to push back, for fear of being branded racist, or sexist, or homophobic, etc. We had created an incentive structure, and people responded to those incentives.”
“[…] the casualization of PTSD, to the point where self-diagnosis is the norm and the specific medical condition has collapsed into an entirely vague definition of “something I experienced hurt my feelings once”; a cultural expectation that entirely commonplace unhappy circumstances are massive challenges that the individual can’t be expected to survive, which of course becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; and a generation of young people who think that the way to be seen as interesting and valuable is to be performatively wounded, with a corresponding incentive to never get better.”
“[…] the use of trauma as a social signifier one can put on or take off as they choose will inevitably have negative consequences for efforts to address the very real and tragic suffering associated with trauma and PTSD. But to get this discourse healthy again, we have to be willing to say no to young people who are spreading bullshit about this topic. And it so immensely frustrating to me, watching our discourse about mental health deteriorate into an absurd branding exercise while so many people just go along for the ride, afraid to look like an old person complaining about the new fad.”
The “Is College Worth It?” Conversation Doesn’t Mean Much Without a Sense of What Teenagers Will Do Instead by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“I think a) we push so many people into college because the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal consensus destroyed middle class jobs in industry and manufacturing and we don’t have many alternatives and b) we shouldn’t push kids into college because most of those who have to be pushed will prove to lack the cognitive and soft skills necessary for them to capitalize on their degrees anyway.”
“The missing piece of the puzzle, in so much of the discussion about college costs, is the degree to which public funding for state colleges cratered amidst post-financial crisis austerity. And a humane society would ask why it’s allowed the burden of paying for college to be shifted to its young people, at the same time that its educational ideology machine has made college attendance a kind of secular sacrament.”
Sold a Story by Emily Hanford
This is a six-part podcast about how children are being taught how to read in the U.S.
I stopped documenting this because, while it had some good information, it was a very long podcast for what amounted to “sounding out words, as we’ve been doing since people have learned to read, is good, while the proposed replacement is a scam. The scam is used everywhere in the U.S. We’re all stunned.”
Log is the “Pro” in iPhone 15 Pro
How to Design a Practical Type System to Maximize Reliability, Maintainability, and Productivity in Software Development Projects / Part 1: What, Why, and How? by Christian Neumanns (Code Project)
“[…] good type system enables an IDE to provide better editing support. Some example are: Automatic bug reporting at edit -time Better code completion Safe and automatic refactorings, such as renaming types”
“Let’s now suppose that the buggy file path ( temp/secret:passwords.txt ) is not hard-coded, but read from a config file. In that case, the compiler can’t report a bug. The error in the config file should therefore be caught immediately when the path is read from the file (and not just later when the file is deleted).”
Interesting. The actual type is “filename”. The declared type is “string”. We have left some information on the table.
“A good type system doesn’t make unit tests dispensable. The slogan “If it compiles, it works!” is just wishful dreaming. No compiler in the world can detect bugs like using the wrong formula to compute the area of a circle. We need unit tests to detect bugs like that.”
“All data types in a software project should have the lowest possible cardinality.”
“Interlocutor: What do you think of western civilization?
“Ghandi: I think it would be a good idea.”
“History has no mercy. There are no laws in it against suffering and cruelty, no internal balance that restores a people much sinned against to their rightful place in the world. Cyclical views of history have always seemed to me flawed for that reason, as if the turning of the screw means that... [More]”
Published by marco on 15. Oct 2023 00:25:37 (GMT-5)
“History has no mercy. There are no laws in it against suffering and cruelty, no internal balance that restores a people much sinned against to their rightful place in the world. Cyclical views of history have always seemed to me flawed for that reason, as if the turning of the screw means that present evil can later be transformed into good. Nonsense. Turning the screw of suffering means more suffering, and not a path to salvation. The most frustrating thing about history, however, is that so much in it escapes language, escapes attention and memory altogether.”
Published by marco on 11. Oct 2023 21:15:00 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 6. Mar 2024 07:35:06 (GMT-5)
As I was reading the absolute train wreck of a unit test in Testing with a Lisp (Daily WTF), the song “What the fuck is going on?” popped into my head, like it always does when I see that a programmer not only didn’t understand the assignment, not only doesn’t know how to program, but also doesn’t know that they don’t know how to program.
They are living their best life because they don’t think that “knowing how to program” is required in order to be a programmer. Neither does their boss or team, I guess.
That’s when the music starts to play in my head, and I think of little blind Dillon playing football because a very non-PC friend [1] sent me that video so many years ago.
Am I going to link the video? Of course I am. Because I’m a terrible person. [2]
And this is the test from the article above.
test("Returned objects arguments immutable (a b)", function() {
var result = lispParser("(a b)");
expect(3);
ok(typeof(result) === 'object', "result is an object");
var children = result.arguments;
var newValue = 2;
var firstChild = children[0];
if (children[0] == newValue) {
firstChild = ++newValue;
}
notEqual(result.arguments[0], newValue, "Underlying array was immutable");
equal(result.arguments[0], firstChild, "Underlying array was immutable");
});
Nothing about that test makes any sense. It will always pass. It is, in its own way, a work of art. It is the JavaScript equivalent of Chomsky’s Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Wikipedia), an example of a sentence that is “grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical”.
Honestly, this looks worse than anything I’ve seen my students try to write. They usually have enough shame that they don’t bother filling in an answer if they really have no idea what’s going on.
I’m also wondering, of course, whether this is the work of an AI—or the bastard child of a poseur-programmer and an AI. The future is bright.
This isn’t the first time that this has happened. I’d reset my phone in July and I’d had to go through this for a couple of days then. When my partner... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 10. Oct 2023 22:09:57 (GMT-5)
A major bank in Switzerland has an MFA that uses PhotoTAN. It took me dozens of attempts over three days to finally be able to register the app.
This isn’t the first time that this has happened. I’d reset my phone in July and I’d had to go through this for a couple of days then. When my partner reset their phone in August, it took days to register. In September, I’ve moved into a new phone and had to set up the app again.
This is for a banking app, to enhance security. I feel very secure knowing how buggy their server software is for registering devices.
Here are some screenshots of the SMSs that landed on my phone over three days. You can see that I even got a few false activation messages. They were false because the app very clearly indicated that the registration procedure had crashed the same as it had on the previous dozen attempts.
I’ve finally managed to register, but now my partner is setting up a new phone and is back on this server-error-500 treadmill. This is shockingly bad behavior for any software, but all the more so for a bank’s security mechanism.
Published by marco on 6. Oct 2023 23:08:01 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 8. Oct 2023 20:38:23 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
AI: Profit vs. Freedom by Richard D. Wolff (CounterPunch)
“In capitalism, employers decide when, where, and how to install new technologies; employees do not. Employers’ decisions are driven chiefly by whether and how new technologies affect their profits.”
“If new technologies enable employers to profitably replace paid workers with machines, they will implement the change. Employers have little or no responsibility to the displaced workers, their families, neighborhoods, communities, or governments for the many consequences of jobs lost. If the cost to society of joblessness is 100 whereas the gain to employers’ profits is 50, the new technology is implemented. Because the employers’ gain governs the decision, the new technology is introduced, no matter how small that gain is relative to society’s loss. That is how capitalism has always functioned.”
“If we imagine for a moment that the employees had the power that capitalism confers exclusively on employers, they would choose to use AI in an altogether different way. They would use AI, fire no one, but instead cut all employees’ working days by 50 percent while keeping their wages the same. Once again keeping our example simple, this would result in the same output as before the use of AI, and the same price for the goods or services and revenue inflow would follow. The profit margin would remain the same after the use of AI as before.”
“it is simply false to write or say—as so many do these days—that AI threatens millions of jobs or jobholders. Technology is not doing that. Rather the capitalist system organizes enterprises into employers versus employees and thereby uses technological progress to increase profit, not employees’ free time.”
“Across capitalism’s history, employers and their ideologues learned how best to advocate for technological changes that could enhance profits. They celebrated those changes as breakthroughs in human ingenuity deserving everyone’s support. Individuals who suffered due to these technological advances were dismissed as, “the price to pay for social progress.” If those who suffered fought back, they were denounced for what was seen as anti-social behavior and were often criminalized.”
Putin Doesn’t Think US Foreign Policy Will Change If Trump Is Re-Elected (And He’s Probably Right) by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“The US, according to the Russian president, “views Russia as a permanent adversary, or even an enemy, and has hammered this into the heads of ordinary Americans.” “The current authorities have tuned American society into an anti-Russian vein and spirit — that’s what it’s all about. They have done it, and now it will be very difficult to somehow turn this ship in the other direction,” Putin said.”
“The claim that Trump was a secret agent of the Kremlin has always been a ridiculous conspiracy theory made possible by mass-scale journalistic malpractice and intervention by the US intelligence cartel , and it has been debunked and discredited from pretty much every angle you could think of. But the strongest evidence that it was false was always the fact that Trump spent his entire presidency directly attacking Russian interests with actions like sanctions, shredded treaties, aggressive Nuclear Posture Reviews, efforts to shut down Nord Stream 2, occupying and repeatedly bombing Syria, and arming Ukraine.”
“The truth of the matter is that if you were to only watch the movements of troops, war machinery, resources and money from year to year, you wouldn’t be able to tell when one president’s term ended and another began, or what party they belong to or what their campaign platform was. The empire marches on completely uninterrupted, regardless of who Americans elect to be the face at its front desk. The bureaucracy is very strong, and it is that bureaucracy that rules the world.”
A year of lying about Nordstream by Seymour Hersh (SubStack)
“What if Russia had responded by saying: You blew up our pipelines and I’m going to blow up your pipelines and your communication cables.”
“Within days of the bombing, officials in Denmark and Sweden announced they would conduct an investigation. They reported two months later that there had indeed been an explosion and said there would be further inquiries. None has emerged.”
The Lesser of Two Evils is a Democracy for Psychopaths by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“[…] this Hammer House monster of a political supervillain could very well take the White House back with a vengeance again in 2024. The mind boggles at such madness. How? How could any sane human being possibly justify voting for such an unapologetically revolting sewer mutant? The answer is actually pretty simple, because Joe Biden has to be stopped. After all isn’t he also a geriatric career gangster with an insatiable appetite for debauchery? Pretty much every mortal sin that Donald Trump has ever committed, Joe Biden has committed at least twice. The man is a barely veiled racist sexual predator and serial plagiarist who has built a seemingly endless career pushing Black children in front of armored police trucks before posing for selfies with Bono and telling a crowded Baptist church that he was the first white member of the Jackson Five.”
“The reasonably dire need to stop a creature like Donald Trump is the only reason why a creature like Joe Biden is even in the White House and the equally reasonably dire need to stop Joe Biden is simultaneously making Donald Trump’s seemingly unthinkable return to the scene of the crime a very real possibility.”
“This, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy in 2024 and everybody is doing it. While polls show the two grabbiest perverts in the convalescent home neck in neck in their crawl to the White House, they also show a country horrified by these options with CNN finding more people who despise both of these candidates than anybody who actually likes either one of them. This is the rotten fruit of the lesser of two evils, that despicably American fetish shoved down ever bored teenager’s throat by jingoistic civics teachers since Jefferson was in nipple clamps.”
““There are only two monsters to choose from and you have to vote for whichever one nauseates you the least, otherwise you forfeit the right to bitch about getting raped by one of them at your local drinking hole for the next four years.””
“You will find loving stay-at-home moms defending Donald Trump’s attempts to shred the votes of other loving stay-at-home moms because Joe Biden had his flunkies in the media kick sand over the latest escapades of his crackhead son. You will hear hippie peaceniks justify Biden sending cluster munitions to Ukraine because Trump sold worse to the Saudis. This is sick and it just keeps getting worse.”
“If it’s Bundy vs Gacy 2028 then which is the responsible choice for American democracy? Bundy is great on taxes but pretty vile on women’s lib but hey, at least he’s straight and most of his victims are over the age of consent and somebody has to stop that killer clown.”
“Even if some knight in white shining armor from a third party managed to jump the barricade, what difference would it make? You could put Eugene goddamn Debbs in charge of a slaughterhouse, and it would still be a fucking slaughterhouse. So, let’s boycott the slaughterhouse and demand something better as loudly as humanly possible.”
“[…] start living like human beings again. But whatever you do, stop making excuses for people that we all know are evil just because the other guy sickens you more. That kind of relationship is abusive and believe it or not, you deserve better than to be governed by a democracy of psychopaths. We all do.”
there was an attempt at not getting caught lying (Reddit)
This link shows a video of a Joe Biden campaign event from 1987. Joe Biden is and has always been an arrogant, lying asshole without an ounce of empathy. His personality is such that he will lie four times just to make himself look better than whomever he happens to be arguing with, not at all concerned that he will be caught out later. This is not only sociopathic, but deeply stupid. It’s the kind of recklessness you absolutely don’t want in a leader.
I wasn’t sure about the context, so I looked it up.
You can see the original video in Biden Campaign Appearance on April 7, 1987 (C-SPAN)
The article Joe Biden’s worst-ever campaign moment, revisited by Glenn Kessler on July 27, 2020 (Washington Post) corroborates C-SPAN, providing a transcript,
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.”
The fact-checker from the Washington Post goes on to point the four main lies that Biden told.
- Biden did not go to Syracuse Law School on a “full academic scholarship.” It was a half scholarship based on financial need.
- He didn’t finish in the “top half” of his class. He was 76th out of 85.
- He did not win the award given to the outstanding political science student at his undergraduate college, the University of Delaware.
- He didn’t graduate from Delaware with “three degrees,” but with a single B.A. in political science and history.
Not only was he spectacularly boorish, but his superiority was based on nothing. Absolutely nothing. He in the bottom 15% of his class. That’s terrible. He was one of the worst students that year. Joe Biden is a pathological, sociopathic narcissistic liar—and he always has been.
The News Has Nothing To Do With Newsworthiness by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“It’s not that editors are coordinating with each other across outlets or receiving instructions on what to report from oligarchs and government agencies, it’s that if they were the type who needed to do such things to know what to report, they wouldn’t be working where they’re working.”
““I’m not saying you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” In a 1997 essay , Chomsky added that “the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway.””
Vacuum suction-mounted wireless TV zip lines off faulty walls to safety by Scharon Harding (Ars Technica)
What an incredible crash blossom. The author used one hyphen but more punctuation would have been better.
How about:
When Even The Nazis Aren’t Nazis by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“For generations the US empire has been manufacturing a cultural obsession with the second world war in order to frame all its subsequent wars as “Good Guys vs Hitler Guys”, then the millisecond that framework became inconvenient it’s “Actually the Nazis weren’t all that bad if you think about it.””
So let’s recap.
- Jeremy Corbyn supporters: ⛔️ Nazis.
- Palestinian rights activists: ⛔️ Nazis.
- People who criticize Israel: ⛔️ Nazis.
- People who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton: ⛔️ Nazis.
- Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi insignia and Nazi ideology: ✅ not Nazis.
- Actual SS Nazis: ✅ not Nazis.
“I doubt I’ll ever care about any US president being investigated for corruption or misconduct or collusion with a foreign nation. All US presidents are corrupt liars, and that will always be the least of their crimes. Get back to me when they’re jailed for war crimes and mass murder.”
I watched the following interview a few weeks ago.
The movie sounded interesting and the web site claims that it’s available on Apple TV. Hey, cool, I have Apple TV!
However, when I follow the link, I get the following page in the TV app.
What’s the reason for this? Is it because I don’t like in the US and the content is unavailable in my region? What does “This content is no longer available” mean? Am I to take them at their word that the movie used to be available but that they pulled it? That they are preventing me from watching a movie produced by one our preeminent directors on a streaming service that I pay for? The mind leaps to censorious conclusions.
I’ve received a couple of these messages on Signal so far.
“Wir verfügen über in professionelles Team, das Sie dabei unterstützt, das
Wisen über Kryptowährungen zu verstehen, um geringe Investitionen und
eine hohe Rendite zu erzielen. Klicken Sie af den folgenden WhatsApp-Gruppenlink,
um am Lernen teilzunehmen: [redacted]”
That translates to “We have a profession team that will support you in understanding knowledge about cryptocurrencies, in order to yield high returns from small investments. Click on the following WhatsApp Group link to learn how to participate.”
Cool invite, Jennifer. Your German’s more than a bit clunky—and it has a few typos—but I imagine that so was and did the original English.
Blocked.
A friend of mine told me that he gets more interesting ones: invitations to meet up for a quickie at the airport. I guess we travel in different circles.
Why do Facebook users keep commenting “amen” on stuff? by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“It’s easy to imagine that Facebook is now completely overrun by out-of-work magicians porn-moaning while they make bad casseroles and comment sections full of old people praying to potato memes. Which, yeah, is definitely happening. Both of the top posts on Facebook based on total interactions in August and September came from a page called Supercar Blondie, which makes videos about cool cars. But there are still news publishers growing on the site and third-party links to “news” content being shared in huge numbers. It’s just not happening in the US.
“The biggest publisher on Facebook right now is a Nigerian digital tabloid called Legit. It’s been growing all summer and beat The Daily Mail in August, which was formerly the top publisher on Facebook. Legit is owned by Genesis Media Emerging Markets, a Ukrainian company that acquired a bunch of African digital publishers. And in July, GMEM’s Kenyan outlet, Tuko, overtook MLive, a Michigan-based news outlet, for the number five spot. Since then, no US publisher has cracked the top five.”
“Meta has finally given up pretending it cares whether its users are informed about the world around them or not. […] Meta is saying, “we have decimated the American media, removed our competitors, built our advertising monopoly, and we are done pretending we care.””
Have They Gone Mad? by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“[…] on September 8th, Joe Biden renewed the original State of Emergency issued three days after 9/11 by George W. Bush. We spent the last 22 years giving presidents the ability to surveil, isolate, and detain even American citizens.”
“Biden has most recently cited the 2001 authorization to justify drone strikes against al-Shabab militants in Somalia in 2021. He said Friday that the U.S. remains committed to fighting terrorism.”
Is anyone even still aware that the U.S. has its military deployed in Somalia?
“A brief White House press release, signed by Biden, just says that the “terrorist threat continues” and “[f]or this reason,” he has decided to extend it.
“Biden also extended two other national emergency declarations Thursday night, the first initiated by Bush related to sanctions on terrorists, and the second covering instability in Ethiopia, which Biden implemented in 2021.
“So far, Biden has declared eight new emergencies, continued 34 from his predecessors and ended three.
“As of Friday, there are 42 active national emergency declarations. The oldest was declared by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 in response to the Iranian hostage crisis.”
God save us all from these maniacs.
NASA spacecraft returns to Earth with pieces of an asteroid by Stephen Clark (Ars Technica)
“Lauretta compared the dynamics of the sampling run as akin to dropping yourself into a ball pit at a children’s playground. “It literally is a droplet made out of rock, gravel, and boulders that are barely held together by their own microgravity.” So much material went into the sampling system that its lid was wedged open, and smaller pieces of rock started floating out.”
Rhetoric as music by Mark Liberman (Language Log)
“The English orthographic system doesn’t offer a very good way to transcribe […] non-syllable patterns.”
“It should not be surprising that almost 10% of George Carlin’s “words” are fluent initial repetitions of this kind — as I said, these events are ubiquitous in spontaneous speech, though they’re essentially never found in fluent reading. […] But if we look at George Carlin’s stand-up comedy, “interpolations” (or whatever we choose to call them) are absent […] Presumably this means that he’s performing prepared and memorized material, which makes it like reading — though I also have the impression that his different performances of the same routine are not transcriptionally identical.”
Even if he’s not citing verbatim from a memorized script, his deep familiarity with the material helps him avoid filler words. If you’re on well-traveled ground in a conversation, you don’t stumble. It’s only when you’re formulating new relatively new arguments that you seek words—and use placeholders.
Dumb Money, the New Movie About the 2021 GameStop Short Squeeze, Is Very Funny by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)
“[…] nurse Jennifer Campbell is depicted caring for patients in an overcrowded hospital typical of the COVID era. Campbell rants at a certain point about getting a measly $600 from a government that then turns around and bails out failing multibillion-dollar investment firms because their vampire capitalist plan to drain GameStop dry didn’t work out as planned.”
“The insanity of our era is summed up there — we’re just going to ignore ever-huger catastrophes, forced to continue to work and pay bills, if we can, right up to the actual apocalypse.”
The Academic Assembly Line (A Brief Personal History) by Mike Bendzela (3 Quarks Daily)
“Sometimes we’re called upon to teach a fourth section of comp., in which case we must sign a waiver so that we don’t get the idea that we are entitled to any extra benefits or anything. That makes the term “part-timer” a bit of a misnomer. Thus, “adjunct.””
“This place contains some ignorant, desperate students along with the brilliant, calm ones, some of them on Adderall, all of them up to their armpits in debt. They are majoring in subjects that baffle me: Recreation and Leisure, Exercise Science, Media Studies. Regardless, they all are required to take my class. This particular section of college comp. is remedial, but we don’t dare call it that. We call it “enriched.” The students are barely literate—some even borderline illiterate—but that term is strictly verboten.”
“Failing students is not an easy thing to do. It is easier to fail papers and exams full of errors and omissions than boys and girls full of dreams and aspirations. To fail them on a paper is one thing, but to fail them in the course is to cut them from the team. But if they write the way I played baseball, then it is a judicious cut. If they want to play that much, let them try out again.”
“I’m advised that the student is very concerned about reading in class because of an anxiety problem. “Perhaps you should switch to a voluntary policy for reading aloud,” the counselor, or whoever, tells me.
“The gall of this only occurs to me much later. This is not an adviser for a student with a disability; this is an apologist for a student who doesn’t like my class policy. Who is this person to tell me how to run my class? But I agree to switch to a voluntary policy for reading work, which is a terrible step backward, because a voluntary policy encourages long class silences.”
“To me, this is the most important idea humans have ever discovered—hence, the Darwin poster on my wall—and this is the idea that I enjoy teaching. But for this, I am deeply hated by a significant number of students. They call the department to say that I make fun of their religion. They accuse me of shoving Darwin down their throats.”
“After a semester has passed, I can request access to the cabinet and read them if I wish. But I learned long ago to ignore them. It’s not just the stupidity of the whole concept—having students who are required to take a course they hate and do poorly in to review the course itself—it’s that I know damned well I will read them in the most self-serving way possible, taking credit for the “good” ones and dismissing the “bad” ones as retaliatory comments made by failing students who have no other recourse.”
“There is no way of telling whether students who make such comments just hate the fact that they are failing, or whether they resent having Darwin “shoved down their throats,” or whether I actually suck. But it feels like being dumped on. Twenty years of teaching, for this?”
“Please feel free to write whatever you wish about this instructor. It doesn’t have to be well-written or even true. You can be assured that you will remain completely anonymous and that your comments will be repeated in personnel reports distributed throughout the English department.”
“I sit down and face the class. They are all sitting there with their papers, in a half-circle of chairs, facing me. I will be failing nearly half of these students, either because they haven’t come to class regularly, or because they haven’t turned in all their work, or because the work they have turned in looks as if it was composed a half an hour before class and they haven’t even checked to see that they’ve used the correct font and double spacing. It is a class to grind through, to endure to the end.”
“Again, as with her stammered comment, I cannot recall a word of what I said in response. The gist was that I had been putting up with this student’s emotional bullying all semester and I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. Complain, wheedle, pester, and if none of that works get staff involved and turn on the tears to prove what a meany I am.”
Unprecedented Times Call For Unprecedented Measures by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“That at no time has there ever been a large industrialized civilization wherein human behavior was driven by collaboration rather than competition; wherein the profit motive was eliminated as a driver of civilization; wherein humans work in cooperation with the ecosystem for the good of all beings; wherein peace and harmony prevail and everyone has enough.”
But that’s what we need for a sustainable society at this level of development and quality of life. If you tell me you want to get to the moon in five minutes, then my answer will be that you need a conveyance that travels at a heretofore unseen speed … or that it’s impossible. That’s our choice now: adapt (try something new) or die out. That it’s never been done before is obvious…because it’s difficult. We like to take the easy way out, especially when people we don’t know pay for our luxury with their suffering.
“Though from the outside we might look more or less the same way we looked three decades ago, in reality there have probably been more significant changes in our species in the last three decades than in the previous three millennia. Humans are functionally a very, very different kind of organism than they were before you and I were born.”
“The fact that billions of human beings now have access to (A) all the information known to man and (B) instantaneous communication with each other is far and away the most significant thing ever to happen to our species since the evolution of the human brain, and it will get even more significant as improved translation services network us even further.”
I’m less hopeful here. Nobody watches the videos I watch or reads the articles I read. We’re communicating more, sure, but about what?
“Even if you could wave a magic wand and have our biosphere perfectly healthy again and all nuclear weapons reduced to atoms, our behavior patterns would just cause us to destroy the biosphere again and rebuild the nukes in a matter of years.”
“If it’s impossible to create a wildly different kind of civilization than the kind we’ve been living in, then it’s also impossible that humans exist in future centuries, because we will necessarily wipe ourselves out with our self-destructive patternings otherwise.”
“If there are future generations, they will necessarily be living in a society that functions in a completely different way than our current one does.”
Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster by Henry Farell & Cosma Shalizi (The Economist)
“[…] we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications.”
On Shoggothim by Cosma Shalizi (Three-toed Sloth)
“[…] an LLM is a way of taking the vast inchoate chaos of written-human-language-as-recorded-on-the-Web and simplifying and abstracting it in potentially useful ways. They are, as Alison Gopnik says, cultural technologies, more analogous to library catalogs than to individual minds. This makes LLMs recent and still-minor members of a larger and older family of monsters which similarly simplify, abstract, and repurpose human minds: the market system, the corporation, the state, even the democratic state. Those are distributed information-processing systems which don’t just ingest the products of human intelligence, but actually run on human beings.”
3 iOS 0-days, a cellular network compromise, and HTTP used to infect an iPhone by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)
“[…] most people will never be targeted in these types of attacks. Exploit chains like the ones used against Eltantawy typically sell for millions of dollars. In this case, the exploit also required the compromise of a cellular network through either a separate exploit or the participation of an insider. Once such a campaign comes to light, the attackers must start over from scratch. The high price and the fragility of the exploits makes attackers extremely selective when choosing targets.”
Deepfake Election Interference in Slovokia by Bruce Schneier
“Countries like Russia and China tend to test their attacks out on smaller countries before unleashing them on larger ones. Consider this a preview to their actions in the US next year.”
As ever. Schneier can’t even begin to imagine that the U.S. may very do this thing to itself. 🤦♂️
In his article Political Disinformation and AI by Bruce Schneier, he writes,
“First it was just Russia, then Russia and China, and most recently those two plus Iran. As the financial cost of foreign influence decreases, more countries can get in on the action.”
He seems to be congenitally incapable of suggesting that there are definitely agencies in the U.S.—and Israel!—that would be more than happy to hack the election.
And that’s just state actors, which aren’t even the most technically savvy or well-funded ones. He writes,
“Companies like Meta have gotten much better at identifying these accounts and taking them down.”
So, first of all, we’re trusting Meta to police our national discourse—but we don’t suspect them at all of manipulating it? They would have the best opportunity to do so. And motive? Political influence, what else?
All of the trillion-dollar tech companies are doing a ton of AI. I just can’t believe that Schneier is so myopic about possible sources of hacking.
That’s a weather forecast showing that it’s going to be sunny all day, with 0% chance of rain. The little gadget at the bottom is chirpily informing me, though, that “Die Regenwahrscheinlichkeit ist ziemlich hoch. Pack lieber eine wasserdichte Jacke ein. Wenn du deine Tour jetzt startest.” Translated to English, that would be “The chance of rain is quite high. You should pack a rain-jacket. If you start your tour now.”
First of all, that’s supposed to be a single sentence, but we can’t even get that right. Second of all, which weather forecast was the software making the “suggestion” drawing from when it so pessimistically saw rain?
I don’t know why people are so excited for a bunch of LLMs to take over the world. We already have a whole bunch of shitty software, the mechanics of which are completely open to us. I can’t imagine how things will get better when the mechanics of the software making suggestions for how we should be spending our precious time are completely unknown and perhaps unknowable to us.
Enabling Software Literacy by zells (GitHub)
“Instead of learning to express our own ideas, and understand those of others enough to change and reproduce them, we are content with the limited interpretations and options that user interfaces give us, making their designers our priests, their companies our churches, and their developers our monks. To enable Software Literacy, we need a printing press for software. A way to make software cheap enough to start a spiral of accessible dynamic models and software literate citizens, which could lead to the next cognitive revolution.”
A problem with .NET Self-Contained Apps and how to pop calculators in dnSpy by Washi
“This is a nice example of a pretty fundamental limitation of self-contained applications that ship their own versions of a runtime or standard library. An update in the runtime requires an update of the program. This means a security update in the runtime requires a security update of the program as well. Developers that ship self-contained applications really need to stay aware of any vulnerabilities that may be present in their dependencies. Luckily, for most developers, this is the only thing they would need to do, but they cannot rely on Windows Update to update their own DLLs!”
Who had Zombie apocalypse for Wednesday? Be careful out there people…. (Reddit)
Just doing a little light reading before bed and … it looks like it’s gonna be a crazy day tomorrow. 🤣
Brace yourselves.
Actually, only one person in my close family has to be worried. The rest of us are either not vaccinated or out of the reach of the EBS. 😂
God, I love the Internet.
“Friend making normal wages- “no worries bro, I’ll cover this one. You got next!”
Friend who works in tech making over 300k − “can you Venmo me $3.74 for the sip of my
drink you took?””
To which people ended up replying things like “I agree splitting costs is such a nice to not have any obligation for another meeting where someone has to return the favour.” and then “It’s also nice to give gifts and graciously accept them and just be appreciative when they are given. Not everything is a debt. Sometime it is. Knowing the difference is important.” and, finally, “But there is an expectation especially among friends, sometimes it’s just nice to not have money involved.”
Are we still talking about $4 to someone making $300K per year? Just checking because I’m confused as to how that amounts to an obligation. It’s $4. If I buy my buddy a coffee once or twice and we can’t remember who paid the last time, but it turns out that it was me, and then it becomes 5 or 10 times in a row and he keeps pretending that he’s pretty sure we’ve bought coffees an equal number of times or he keeps letting me buy him coffees without batting an eye, then lesson learned, but I’m still only out about $20 total over a couple of months and there was literally no financial discomfort on my part. If he picks up the third, fourth, and fifth coffees, and then it’s my turn again, then holy shit, it looks like we’re acting like real-life human friends, and we can pat ourselves on our respective backs – or maybe each others’! – for a job well done. /r/totallynotrobots
The other members of the conversation quickly jumped in to continue bitching about having shitty friends and acquaintances for whom they feel obligated to buy things. If you’re letting someone sip from your soda, then I hope you’re not just casual acquaintances. They also claimed that the numbers were exaggerations, when a $300k tech salary in cities like San Fransisco are not at all unrealistic for senior staff. I’m not saying it’s right, but that it’s not at all out of the question.
Wonder what else is down there (Reddit)
The comment is “In Africa, height depends on how tall you are.”
Truck size is getting cartoonish at this point. (Reddit)
I’d sent the post Somewhere in America there is an absolute legend who writes ‘SLUTS’ on box cars in various styles (Reddit) to a friend. He wrote back that they were “majestic sluts indeed”. I realized that I’d finally found a prompt to throw an LLM’s way. So I headed over to Stable Diffusion and prompted it with “Majestic sluts in the style of Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta” and chose a style of sai-fantasy art
not because I knew what I was doing, but because I figured I’d give it the best shot I could. It responded with the following image.
Ok, so let’s analyze that.
So, what’s the conclusion? Well, it’s in the ballpark, but I pretty much put it there by naming two of the artists it was to draw inspiration from. Also, I chose the sai-fantasy art
style to seal the deal. From that, a web search would have found thousands of images from which to produce something. To be honest, this image has probably been generated millions of times already by the long-suffering LLM at Stable Diffusion, which probably has to render “HAWT GRRLLL” for 99.9% of its prompts.
I only threw one prompt the machine’s way. It was kind of close, but not good enough to use. According to Images that Bing Image Creator won’t create by Stewart Baker (Reason), this is a typical experience.
“As always, Bing’s first attempt was surprisingly good, but flawed, and getting a useable version required dozens of edits of the prompt. None of the images were quite right.”
That article is about the trust and safety limits that prevent certain content from being created in the first place.
“This is almost certainly the future of AI trust and safety limits. It will start with overbroad rules written to satisfy left-leaning critics of Silicon Valley. Then those overbroad rules will be further broadened by hidden code written to block many perfectly compliant prompts just to ensure that it blocks a handful of noncompliant prompts.”
]]>We would like to do a course about SW development with Python, preferably an online course, so that we can start at our own pace.
We don’t want a Python course, but would instead like a course... [More]
Published by marco on 5. Oct 2023 13:48:10 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 10. Oct 2023 06:22:28 (GMT-5)
I was recently asked something like the following question, which I am citing with a few minor edits.
We would like to do a course about SW development with Python, preferably an online course, so that we can start at our own pace.
We don’t want a Python course, but would instead like a course more about SW development. It would be great if it were in Python because we are comfortable with it.
The interesting topics would be:
- object-oriented programming
- functional programming
- design patterns
- good coding practices
As well as other important topics such as:
- Testing
- Documenting
- Version control
- Working in a team with version control
The course doesn’t have to contain all these topics. It can be also several courses or it can be toy-projects from somewhere.
I have very little familiarity with courses as I’ve usually been tasked with figuring out how to do things before others have gotten to it. Of late, I’ve been teaching courses, not taking them.
So, how did I learn what I know about software development? When I started writing software, there was nothing available online, outside of a bunch of GeoCities pages (one of which was mine). MSDN was on CDs or local help files.
I read some books, OOSC and OOSC2, as well as the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns. I can’t remember what else, but that’s partly how I leveled up my skills. I had the great fortune of being able to build and work on large frameworks, from which I drew many lessons. I worked with very good people, who challenged me and taught me a lot.
Nowadays, I use DuckDuckGo as my online reference. I have developed a relatively advanced skill at searching for what I’m looking for. I very often get it within minutes. I almost never use videos.
a primary skill in software development is to be able to imagine what you should be looking for. That is, you don’t have to know how to do everything without looking it up, but you do have to imagine that it might exist.
For example, I don’t know how to write automated tests in Python, but I know that it should be possible. I know that I should figure that out very early in my experiments with Python. I know what to expect from an automated-testing environment. I know which settings to look for and expect.
That kind of knowledge transfers from one language or development environment to another. I know that I code-completion makes me faster, I know that I would like to avoid runtime errors—how can I best use Python to achieve those ends?
I took a quick look around for online courses, but was not immediately convinced that I am equipped to be able to distinguish between scams and actually worthwhile courses. Does the course even mention general software-development principles? How much time is allocated to that?
The Complete Software Engineering Course with Python (Udemy) looks as follows:
What about general programming?
Just over nine minutes? And you can’t even be bothered to describe it in something approaching well-written English? No, thanks.
The course Learning To Program − Part 2: Abstractions (PluralSight) looks a bit more professional, but it still has some quirks (especially for $29 per month).
There is an assessment that you can take, but you have to sign up first.
Maybe PluralSight is able to tell you which courses you need, but I doubt it will err on the “you need fewer courses” side.
I’ve recently heard from a source I’ve been watching for a while that this course is quite good for C# developers: From Zero to Hero: Test-Driven Development in C# by Guilherme Ferreira. The person recommending it releases quite interesting/advanced videos on YouTube and has his own range of courses at DomeTrain.
How would I teach basic software-development principles? I would probably start with very abstract principles that try to answer the classic questions for “use cases”:
A question people tend to start with is: which programming language should I use?
That’s the wrong question.
The applicability of programming languages to fields differ widely, but most languages have a large overlap in functionality. Where they differ is in the degree of runtime or library support for specific tasks.
For example, Python famously has a lot of libraries for number-crunching and data-analysis (although I feel that this advantage is grossly exaggerated) whereas it’s terrible for writing Windows GUI applications. C#/.NET has excellent web and desktop technology support. The Python runtime is notoriously slow (with essential libraries written in C++) whereas .NET is known as a very performant cross-platform runtime.
Do you see how quickly the conversation turns from “what can the language do?” to “what can the standard runtime/libraries/environment do?” That’s because you can do most tasks with most languages.
Instead, we want to think about this at a higher level. We want to,
Programming languages exist on several spectra. One of these is “the degree of developer discipline required to use the language effectively and safely.”
What does that mean? For example, Python and JavaScript have a dynamic type system. While there are mechanisms, practices, and IDE support that you can use to set up guardrails missing in the language, but they are optional and Idiomatically written code in both of these languages tends not to use any of it. It’s the wild west, for the most part, with a lot of assumptions that nothing will ever go wrong.
More strict languages force you to consider all possibilities before your program even compiles or runs. For example, Haskell and Rust are famously picky. If you have a function that returns a value under certain conditions, those languages will make you explicitly indicate what to return when those conditions don’t hold. Forgiving languages will just use some default value, usually null
or undefined
.
This is called “happy path” programming because you only write the code for the hoped-for path through your use case. For example, the user selects a valid file with the expected data format with an acceptable length with no validation or processing errors, generating a data file to which the initiating user has access.
Writing programs in this fashion is a dangerous thing to do with a strict language, and it’s even worse to do in a lax language.
Even the simplest software has many, many branches. The less your language or compiler or IDE reminds you of them, the more you have to fill that gap with developer discipline.
To get more concrete, some good questions to consider are:
If these don’t make any sense to you, don’t worry. But they are questions that are important when you’re choosing a tool for building software.
The whole point of a programming language is to express intent. You indicate what you intend to happen when a given event occurs.
An programmer expresses an intent by writing that, “when this thing happens, I intend for this other thing to happen.”
For example,
How do we choose a programming language? You’re not just choosing a programming language, you’re also implicitly deciding which subset of language features to use. This is predicated, of course, on knowing about these features. It’s best to inform yourself about what your language/libraries/runtime (let’s call it a software-development tool) can do for you—or find someone who is well-informed to help.
For each feature, you should ask yourself: how useful is it? Does it help me achieve my task?
Let’s take a look at high-level features of a software-development tool that may be important.
For code designed to be reusable (libraries, frameworks), you can also consider:
Which of the features above matters more depends on what you’re building. A one-off script doesn’t need to satisfy many of these features. A full-blown application that needs to be maintained for 10-20 years by different teams has to be much, much more careful.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about these ideas, so I’ve included links to other, similar articles below.
These articles discuss the topic of software-development on a similar level to the discussion above.
The articles below are more recent, are more-or-less on the same level, but are also more targeted.
These white papers were written from 2006 to 2019 when I was still employed at Encodo Systems AG. They expand on recommended practices of specific facets of software development. They are presented in reverse-chronological order, but can be read in any order.
This is a YouTube playlist I’ve maintained for years that I continuously update whenever I watch a video that I think would be interesting for other developers. It’s only technology videos, but it’s pretty eclectic (i.e., it’s language- and technology-agnostic).
Developer suggestions (YouTube)
Pace yourself. You can’t have everything all at once. Programming takes wisdom. Wisdom takes time. It takes practice. It comes, or it doesn’t. It takes different forms.
As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in 1903 [2],
“Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie nicht leben könnten. Und es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antwort hinein.”
Good luck.
I 100% agree with you, in general. I absolutely want to know immediately when an assumption I’ve made does not hold.
But…😁
The degree to which I’m willing to crash depends on whose consistency I’m basing my assumptions on.... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:54:06 (GMT-5)
Note: I found this old draft containing my response to a colleague.
I 100% agree with you, in general. I absolutely want to know immediately when an assumption I’ve made does not hold.
But…😁
The degree to which I’m willing to crash depends on whose consistency I’m basing my assumptions on. When I call a method in my code from another method in my code, I’m absolutely going to assert that an argument is not null. I can control that. My IDE will tell me when I might be passing null
. That is definitely a programming error.
When I’m getting external input (e.g. from the Windows registry), I’m a bit more cautious because I’m less sure about how solid my assumption is. I know what the documentation says but a lifetime of programming has taught me that some things (like the Windows registry) are going to work exactly as expected on my (modern) developer machine, but are going to fail mysteriously on a (perhaps less modern) machine in (for me) completely unpredictable ways.
Therefore, I’m a bit careful about is what I’m willing to pay to find errors. The primary purpose of a program is to bring value to the customer/user. I want to improve my program for more situations, but how am I going to find out in which situations it doesn’t work?
I can test, of course, but some things will only ever happen in the field. If it happens in the field, then I’m using the customer’s/user’s time to help me fix my program (they benefit, of course, but not for free). Can I soften the blow to the user of having to help me improve the program without sacrificing consistency or accuracy?
Sometimes, the answer is a resounding no. The program absolutely cannot continue if e.g., the reference to the data it needs to work on is null
. That’s a no-go. There’s no rescuing the program from that or completing any other useful work.
In the case of this tool, if it crashes, the user no longer gets a report. Would they have been able to get some of the report if it hadn’t crashed? In this case, yes. All of the other checks could be run. The checks that crashed would show as “failed” with the exception message. That seems to me to be better than skipping all subsequent checks when one crashes.
I can even continue to hope that the user then reports the mysterious error message they got for one of the reports! Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt!
I’m delighted to discuss programming and error-handling philosophy in person next week!
Through our many years of experience building software, we’ve accumulated methodologies and principles that... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:36:27 (GMT-5)
This article is a copy of the white papers and process description that I wrote for Encodo Systems while I still worked there. I’ve preserved a copy of it here and in the linked articles.
Through our many years of experience building software, we’ve accumulated methodologies and principles that lead to quality software.
Listed below are our methodologies.
We implement the Inversion of Control [I] pattern with the dependency-injection pattern (D) to allow for a large amount of flexibility in how an application is composed. We’ve applied this principle throughout the Quino... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:36:20 (GMT-5)
Encodo keeps the SOLID principles in mind when designing software.
We implement the Inversion of Control [I] pattern with the dependency-injection pattern (D) to allow for a large amount of flexibility in how an application is composed. We’ve applied this principle throughout the Quino framework and use it in our products as well.
What does this mean? It means that the product or framework doesn’t make any decisions about which exact components to use. Instead, it indicates the API Surface (interface) that it expects in the form of injected components. That is, the responsibility for deciding which component to use lies not with the lowest level of the software stack, but with the highest level.
This inversion means that the application entry point configures the object graph (i.e. which objects will be used). That makes it much easier to isolate and test individual components, especially where those components would depend on native- or web-only functionality in production.
See the How do I DI? presentation from February 2018 for more information.
An application is a graph of components, each with one responsibility (S) and zero or more dependencies, injected via the constructor. Components are composed with other components to build higher-level functionality (O). They are also unaware of the other components’ implementations and can be replaced with other implementations (L).
Components make software flexible:
Components have a very clear purpose (S) indicated through an interface. In most cases, we use an actual “interface” language construct to clearly define the API surface and to not limit a product in its implementation (e.g. with an abstract base class).
Most components have a single method, amounting to a functional interface and allowing composition with lambdas. While TypeScript has this feature (as does Java), C# does not. We end up defining a lot of single-method classes that implement a single interface. It’s more code than we’d like, but it’s purely structural syntax and doesn’t introduce additional complexity.
See the Interfaces, base classes and virtual methods in the Quino conceptual documentation for more information and on and examples of patterns that we use.
Although it’s possible for applications to manually create an object graph (the composition root), we prefer to use an IOC Container.
The container provides two services:
The container introduces the following restriction:
The lifetime of an application is as follows:
See the Quino Application Configuration for more information about application lifecycle. The blog article Starting up an application, in detail is a bit older, but provides more detail on how Quino integrates the IOC into the startup.
In the long example below, we will first look at how composition even without a container is very powerful. Then we’ll look at how a container can improve on that.
Although we generally use C# or TypeScript in our work, these examples were originally written to introduce Swift developers to an iOS framework that we wrote.
Let’s take a look at an example of an application that looks OK at first, but turns out not to be very flexible.
Note: The example is small, so some of the steps will feel like over-engineering. It’s a good point, but the principles shown here apply just as well for larger systems.
The following example defines a simulator that can move a robot along a route, defined by movements. The robot starts at a given location and can travel at a fixed speed.
enum Direction
{
case north
case south
case east
case west
}
struct Movement
{
let direction: Direction
let distance: Int
}
struct Point
{
var x: Int
var y: Int
}
class FastRobot
{
var speed = 2
var location: Point = Point(x: 0, y: 0)
let movements: [Movement] = [Movement(direction: .north, distance: 1)]
func move()
{
for movement in movements
{
let distance = speed * movement.distance
switch (movement.direction)
{
case .north:
location.y += distance
case .south:
location.y -= distance
case .east:
location.x += distance
case .west:
location.x -= distance
}
}
}
}
class Simulator
{
func run()
{
FastRobot().move()
}
}
As mentioned above, this implementation looks well-written, but what if we wanted to verify that the robot ended up at the right location? Let’s try that below.
Simulator().run()
// Now what?
It turns out that we can’t test anything in this application. We can fix this by applying the patterns outlined in the first section.
First, let’s tackle the Simulator interface:
class Simulator
{
func run(robot: FastRobot)
{
robot.move()
}
}
let robot = FastRobot()
Simulator().run(robot: robot)
XCTAssertEqual(robot.location.x, 0)
XCTAssertEqual(robot.location.y, 2)
Now we can test that the robot is working as expected.
The robot is still quite hard-coded, as is the simulator’s relationship to the robot. The robot must be a FastRobot
and it can only move along a fixed route.
We’ll first decouple the Simulator from a direct dependence on the FastRobot.
protocol IRobot
{
func move()
}
class Robot : IRobot
{
// As above
}
class Simulator
{
func run(robot: IRobot)
{
robot.move()
}
}
Now the simulator only knows about the protocol IRobot
, which has a very small surface area. It’s still too small to be very useful.
Instead of hard-coding everything, we can compose the robot out of parts. Examining the algorithm, we see three parts that could be externalized:
Let’s first externalize all of the hard-coded values out of the FastRobot
into a generic Robot
class.
class Robot : IRobot
{
let speed: Int
var location: Point
let movements: [Movement]
init(speed: Int, location: Point, movements: [Movement])
{
self.speed = speed
self.location = location
self.movements = movements
}
func move()
{
for movement in movements
{
let distance = speed * movement.distance
switch (movement.direction)
{
case .north:
location.y += distance
case .south:
location.y -= distance
case .east:
location.x += distance
case .west:
location.x -= distance
}
}
}
}
Now we can create a Robot
, injecting all of the initial conditions.
let origin = Point(x: 0, y: 0)
let route = [Movement(direction: .north, distance: 1)]
let robot = Robot(speed: 2, location: origin, movements: route)
Simulator().run(robot: robot)
XCTAssertEqual(robot.location.x, 0)
XCTAssertEqual(robot.location.y, 2)
The same assertions hold as before, but the Robot
class is much more generalized. We can now test the robot’s movement algorithm with various combinations of origin, speed and route.
At this point, we’ve made the robot and simulator composable and testable. Now we want to have a look at how we can separate the configuration from the usage.
We’re not nearly done, though. What does this all have to do with a service provider? That’s where the inversion part comes in.
In the very first example, the Simulator
was responsible for creating the robot. This made it impossible to test whether the robot did what it was supposed to do.
So we passed the robot in as a parameter to run()
, making the caller responsible for creating the robot instead of the Simulator
.
This is fine, as long as the caller is the top-level part of the program, responsible for composing the objects that will be used. However, what if the direct caller doesn’t know how to do that? Or, put another way, what if the caller should not be doing that?
What if the caller is a button handler in a UI? Would we want the button handler—or the UI that contains it—to be responsible for constructing the robot or its initial conditions?
This is where the container comes in: we want to register all of the types and instances that we want to use in one place. This configuration can be retrieved at any later point without knowing any more than the interface that’s required.
This takes us full circle to the original code, except, instead of creating the Simulator
directly, we want to get it from a container, called a provider in the following examples.
let simulator = provider.resolve(ISimulator.self)
simulator.run()
let robot = provider.resolve(IRobot.self)
XCTAssertEqual(robot.location.x, 0)
XCTAssertEqual(robot.location.y, 2)
Note: For reasons of simplicity, we assume that all objects in the container are singletons.
Let’s take the configurable code above and translate it to a container. Here the registrar
is the configurable part and the provider
is the part that can be used to retrieve objects based on that configuration. The registrar
is sometimes called the composition root.
Note: We use the syntax for the Swift IOC, but the examples are hopefully clear enough in their intent.
In the example below, we register singletons for each of the objects we want the container to be able to create, Point
, Int
, [Movement]
, IRobot
and Simulator
.
let registrar = ServiceRegistrar()
.registerSingle(Int.class) { _ in 2 }
.registerSingle(Point.class) { _ in Point(x: 0, y: 0) }
.registerSingle([Movement].class) { _ in [Movement(direction: .north, distance: 1)] }
.registerSingle(IRobot.class) { p in Robot(
speed: p.resolve(Int.class),
location: p.resolve(Point.class),
movements: p.resolve([Movement].class)
)}
.registerSingle(Simulator.class) {p in Simulator(p.resolve(IRobot.class))}
This is a decent start, but many of the registrations above have no semantic meaning, like Int
and Point
and [Movement]
. For these, it’s better to use higher-level abstractions.
We need to define three abstractions—called IOrigin
, IRoute
and IEngine
—with implementations. The IRobot
interface also needs to be redesigned to use them.
protocol IRoute
{
var movements: [Movement] { get }
}
protocol IOrigin
{
var point: Point { get }
}
protocol IEngine
{
var speed: Int { get }
}
protocol ISimulator
{
func run()
}
class Simulator : ISimulator
{
var robot: IRobot
init (_ robot: IRobot)
{
self.robot = robot
}
func run()
{
robot.move()
}
}
struct StandardRoute : IRoute
{
var movements: [Movement] = [Movement(direction: .north, distance: 1)]
}
struct StandardOrigin: IOrigin
{
var point: Point = Point(x: 0, y: 0)
}
struct FastEngine : IEngine
{
var speed: Int = 2
}
class Robot : IRobot
{
var location: Point!
let engine: IEngine
let route: IRoute
init(_ engine: IEngine, _ origin: IOrigin, _ route: IRoute)
{
self.engine = engine
self.route = route
location = origin.point
}
func move()
{
for movement in route.movements
{
let distance = engine.speed * movement.distance
switch (movement.direction)
{
case .north:
location.y += distance
case .south:
location.y -= distance
case .east:
location.x += distance
case .west:
location.x -= distance
}
}
}
}
We’ve created concrete objects for our standard parameters. An added bonus of the improved semantics is that we can rewrite the init
for IRobot
so that it no longer expects argument labels—because the parameter are now clear without further explanation.
Now we can take another crack at the configuration using these new types. This time, we’ll define an extension
of the IServiceRegistrar
that we can use again below.
extension IServiceRegistrar
{
func useSimulator() -> IServiceRegistrar
{
return self
.registerSingle(IEngine.class) { _ in FastEngine() }
.registerSingle(IOrigin.class) { _ in StandardOrigin() }
.registerSingle(IRoute.class) { _ in StandardRoute() }
.registerSingle(IRobot.class) { p in Robot(
p.resolve(IEngine.class),
p.resolve(IOrigin.class),
p.resolve(IRoute.class)
)}
.registerSingle(ISimulator.class) {p in Simulator(p.resolve(IRobot.class))}
}
}
We’ve now configured a system that knows how to create our simulator along with all of its dependencies. You can see that if the ISimulator
type is resolved from the container, it will,
Simulator
, whichIRobot
, whichIEngine
, IOrigin
and IRoute
An application can now change the speed of the robot without knowing anything else about the simulator, simply by changing the IEngine
that’s used.
class SlowEngine : IEngine
{
var speed: Int = 1
}
let provider = ServiceRegistrar()
.useSimulator()
.registerSingle(IEngine.class) { _ in SlowEngine() }
.commit()
As well, any location in the application can either use the IRobot
or the ISimulator
without having to know anything about how either of the concrete objects are constructed. The simulator might be much more complicated than the very simple one defined above. The robot might do much more when asked to move.
What if we wanted to let the robot decide how fast it is, depending on what kind of robot it is? Or what if we want to separate the speed from being fixed in the IEngine
?
What we need is a way to create transient objects that require parameters that are not available in the provider. These are types like Int
, String
, etc., as we had in Step Six above.
The example below shows a very simple usage of the factory pattern. Instead of having a single IEngine
for the whole application, we want to provide settings that the robot uses to get its engine.
The code below sketches the new types and shows how the robot would use them.
protocol IEngineFactory
{
func createEngine(speed: Int)
}
protocol IRobotSettings
{
var speed: Int
}
class Robot : IRobot
{
init(_ engineFactory: IEngineFactory, _ settings: IRobotSettings, _ origin: IOrigin, _ route: IRoute)
{
self.engine = _engineFactory.createEngine(settings.speed)
// …
}
}
You’ll note that we didn’t declare any new properties. The robot still just has an engine, but asks the factory to create it based on a speed, rather than having the provider inject its singleton.
The robot’s speed can now be configured without replacing the entire implementation.
let simulator = provider.resolve(ISimulator.self)
let robot = provider.resolve(IRobot.self)
let settings = provider.resolve(IRobotSettings.self)
settings.speed = 10;
simulator.run()
XCTAssertEqual(robot.location.x, 0)
XCTAssertEqual(robot.location.y, 10)
This first principle is a constant reminder to ourselves to avoid the seductive call of cleverness. Most code does not need to be clever. Very occasionally, it is... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:36:13 (GMT-5)
These are the two core principles that guide how we write code:
This first principle is a constant reminder to ourselves to avoid the seductive call of cleverness. Most code does not need to be clever. Very occasionally, it is necessary to implement something with real flair, that requires explanation.
The best code, though, requires no explanation. The best code gets its job done in a very boring way, using the same patterns to achieve different ends. The best code is instantly recognizable to those who know the patterns. The best code doesn’t raise any questions. The best code doesn’t need comments. The best code is obvious and, yet, does amazing things—like fulfill requirements in a stable, predictable, testable, customizable and high-performance manner.
It’s kind of obvious: The lower the complexity, the easier it is to reason about systems. The easier it is to reason about a system, the easier it is to prove that either certain things can’t happen or will always happen. It should be obvious where to add a customization—because there’s only one place that it could logically go. It should be obvious where a bug lies—because there’s only one place it could have originated.
The best code is readable and understandable not only by the original programmer, but also by another programmer—even if that’s the original programmer, six months later.
We’d be lying if we said that we never write code that we don’t need, but we keep this principle in mind whenever we build code. There’s a bit more wiggle room when building frameworks vs. products. It’s easier to determine whether a feature is appropriate for a product than to do the same for a framework. Who knows how a framework might be used?
Encodo does have a framework named Quino. The point of a framework is to support the development of products that use it. It’s not easy to predict what those products might need, even when you’re focused only on features that your framework is supposed to provide. However, a framework or library has a purpose and it shouldn’t stray from it.
Just as an example: Does Quino provide a remote data driver? Yes, because products have used it and the feature fits into the strategy of metadata-supported data. Is there an XML transport protocol? No, because no-one needed it. Do we support any kind of object? Not out of the box, we don’t. You can register your own converters, but it’s not a generalized protocol.
At the very least, we stay away from throwing in everything but the kitchen sink—just in case a product that uses Quino might need it. Be prepared for anything, but build only what you need.
We apply the following principles to avoid unneeded complexity.
From the article Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (inventor of Erlang).
“State is the root of all evil. In particular, functions with side effects should be avoided.”
The sentiment in the title is a bit strong, but its not unfair. OO programming mixes data with operations, leading to more complexity than required by the task.
Most applications need some state. That state should be isolated from most components. State should be stored in dumb objects and passed around.
A component without state is purely functional, drastically simplifying the things that could possibly happen to it. Its output is completely determined by its inputs. It does not introduce any threading issues beyond those inherent in its input.
A component avoids a whole class of issues if it cannot make changes to the data that flows through it. As with state, restrict mutability to only certain components.
For example, transient objects like DTOs or ORM objects are mutable because it makes the program logic much more understandable
Another example is stateless singletons with configuration settings. instead of using a single component with mutable properties, define the configuration in a settings component. This has several advantages:
If references are guaranteed to be non-null, whole swaths of checking code fall away and make the component much simpler. As with immutability, there are far fewer possibilities of what can happen to non-nullable code.
TypeScript supports a null-checking mode. C# supports one as well, starting with C#8. For older versions of C#, use the JetBrains Annotations along with ReSharper to enable real-time/compile-time null-checking.
A method should either change state or it should return data. This is the idea behind CQRS (Command-Query-Separation Principle). That said, we employ a weaker version where only visible state really counts.
Techniques like lazy-initialization and caching retrieved data are generally OK. Technically, those behaviors have non-visible state in the sense that they affect performance, but are still OK if used carefully.
We use C# and TypeScript—wonderful OO languages with strong functional support—but we’re using less and less of what OO has to offer.
Virtual methods are a code smell. Instead, use smaller, testable components with a single purpose. If it’s easier to test, it’s easier to replace where necessary. Smaller components are more focused and easier to replace without duplicating code.
If logic is separated from data, and services are injected or passed as parameters, then there is less and less need for base classes with many helper functions or virtual/protected methods.
If state just flows through a component, then that component can be a singleton, avoiding needless allocation.
It’s a lot easier to reason about an application that comprises a graph of singletons with transient data flowing through it.
Inject factories to create transient services (e.g. a remote-method caller that captures state).
As you can see, we put a lot of thought and care into our development practices and patterns. We try really hard to work in a way that ends up with quality software: stable, maintainable, extensible, testable and, most importantly, does what it’s supposed to.
For more information about specific development patterns, please see the architecture section of the Quino conceptual documentation. There are sections on interfaces, base classes and virtual methods, providers, tools & toolkits, task-specific interfaces and much more.
It should be easy to verify any requirement with a test. The tests should tell the story of the requirements.
A developer can test any component in isolation (unit... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:36:07 (GMT-5)
Tests are code. Writing tests is not a “step”—it is part of writing the code itself. The component is nothing without its tests.
It should be easy to verify any requirement with a test. The tests should tell the story of the requirements.
A developer can test any component in isolation (unit testing) or can test the component in the constellation in which it normally exists (integration testing).
Just so we’ve said it: tests are not a place to use a different coding style or different coding practices than in “regular” code. Choose your frameworks wisely. It should be easy to write powerful, elegant and easily understood tests. Build your own support code and libraries where needed. Apply the same coding principles as you would with the code being tested. You have to maintain testing code just like any other code.
We discuss below that we prefer integration tests to unit tests—that only works if you provide a way to write high-performance integrated tests without repeating a lot of code.
Unit tests are very easy to write for properly written components. With a proper infrastructure, such tests can just as easily be executed in an integrated environment. In such cases, there is generally no need to invest time (and incur maintenance debt) writing two sets of tests.
Automated tests will sometimes replace components and dependencies with fake or mocked objects, in order to isolate and test only a component’s logic without incurring the costs of configuring and setting up unrelated components.
If integration testing is too complicated or too slow, then a web of unit tests may suffice. In most cases, though, this doesn’t apply and we avoid mocking entirely and test components directly in common, integrated settings.
For example, if a component is commonly used as part of a database-based application, then it is more effective to test that component in such a scenario, rather than expending effort in isolating the component in order to have a “true” unit test.
With only unit tests, there is a danger that the component works, but only as tested, not as actually used.
Often, these problems arise in component configuration. A unit test will pass in carefully prepared (and sometimes faked) dependencies and run all-green.
However, an integration test will check that the configuration code also works. That is, that the component is configured correctly for products that use it and not just in the tests that verify its behavior.
Mocks and fakes must be used judiciously, otherwise you end up either testing only the mock or you end up hiding certain classes of problems, as discussed in more detail below.
Imagine a UI list that validates and saves entries when the focus changes. This list might work just fine in a test, where notifications and side-effects as a result of saving are disabled with mocks.
This is no longer the real-world situation, though. What happens if one of the notifications would have led to a reload of the list or a state-change in one or more objects? What if the list only saves an object it is is marked as “changed” but that the spurious event resets that status in integration? This kind of interaction—this kind of bug—represents exactly the kind of thing we would miss when testing the list in too isolated a manner.
Because we’ve mocked away too much—because we focused too tightly on a unit test of the list—we’ve missed a bug that will come up in production instead.
While we don’t practice strict TDD at Encodo, we do write tests from the very beginning.
It’s really the only way to test the code that you’re writing, isn’t it? What are you going to do instead? Fire up the web server each time you want to throw data at a controller? Use a browser or Postman to fire those requests? Or are you starting a desktop UI and clicking around and typing? Or did you hack together a little console application in order to debug code?
Stop doing all of those things. Use a testing environment instead, so your product acquires a growing stable of automated, repeatable regression tests. It will become second nature to write tests to verify requirements about the components you write.
As we said above: the tests are part of the component.
A point made above is that unit tests are useful but they’re often not complete. Unit tests can fool you with excellent syntactic coverage but sub-standard functional coverage. We have many tools to measure the former, but only experience to measure the latter.
Sure, you’ve covered all of the lines, but did you actually choose a representative set of inputs? Are you making the right assertions? Did you actually test the requirements?
One technique that we use a lot is expectation files (called snapshots in some frameworks). Instead of writing several (sometimes, dozens of) assertions, we format output to text and then compare it against the text produced by the previous, presumably correct test run.
The idea is to detect when something has changed. We use this in Quino to verify log output during certain operations, or to verify queries or generated SQL or model structure or lists of data. Expectation files increase the depth and robustness of tests while at the same time making it extremely efficient to write and maintain such tests.
An expectation (or snapshot) is updated automatically when it changes and shows up as a difference in source control. If the change is expected, the developer commits it.
It takes a lot of experience to write just the right number and kind of tests. You don’t want to write too many tests: it’s code you have to maintain, after all. Also, it can be confusing when the same problem crops up in multiple places in different fixtures.
Some components should have unit tests as well as integration tests. For other components, unit tests are redundant because the integration tests cover everything already. Experience guides you in deciding what to write first, what to keep, and what to throw away.
It is possible to have too many tests. If you’re not aware in which layer your code resides, you might end up running the same code in multiple scenarios, when that component behaves the same regardless.
For example, if you’re testing how expressions are mapped to a database, then that test should definitely run against every supported database. If you’re testing how a high-level query composes those expressions before they get to the mapper, then you only really need to run it against one database in integration.
No-one wants to admit to releasing untested software. And no-one really wants to do manual testing. Automating tests reduces turnaround time for changes and enhancements. It also increases confidence for quick turnarounds when going to manual testing or production.
Unit tests are good, but prefer coverage in integration tests so that you have the best guarantee that your tests are running your code in a way that emulates the production environment as closely as possible.
Documentation has an... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:36:01 (GMT-5)
Good documentation is part of every piece of quality software. What do we mean by “good”, though? Or “documentation”, for that matter? Quality software should be self-explanatory, but don’t be fooled into thinking that you don’t need to write documentation.
Documentation has an audience. Before writing anything, consider who you’re writing it for. What are the possible audiences?
Evaluators are interested in what your software does, how it interacts with other software, its performance characteristics, system requirements, the product roadmap, open issues and so on. If you don’t document your software sufficiently, an evaluator won’t purchase it in the first place.
By “purchase”, we mean that an evaluator will decide to use your software. This applies not only to commercial projects, but also to open-source freeware or even internal company software, be it a potentially time-saving Excel spreadsheet, a set of common UI or server components or an enterprise-wide multi-tier application.
Installers are interested in the basic installation options/paths and how to get from purchase/download to running. Here you need to find a balance between getting them up and running quickly, but also informing them that there is more to your product than just the standard rollout. They need to know that they can get set up efficiently but also that they’re not locked in to a single way of doing things (unless that’s what you’re selling).
Customizers are advanced installers: they want to know how to tweak or customize an installation to meet their special needs. These are often the same people as installers, but
New users are going to use installed/customized software. They want to not only know what your software does, but how they can use it for these standard tasks. They are interested in underlying concepts in both the application domain and the user experience. They need both introductory and high-level documentation, with meticulous, step-by-step instructions. These users are likely to navigate documentation in a progressive manner, reading from beginning to end.
Everyday/experienced users aren’t generally interested in introductory documentation. They are interested in how to become more efficient with your software. They will jump around in the documentation, using a search function to find what they need.
Extenders are users—usually developers—who will be using your software as a building block, integrating it with other software or extending it to meet their needs. These users are interested in command-line options as well as descriptions of available APIs. If the API surface is larger, then functionality should be grouped and examples included to demonstrate how to use the various calls in common workflows.
Last but not least, you have to document for developers. That means writing your code and documenting it in a way that is understandable not only to you but other members of your team. Future members of your team, will also need to get up to speed. As is often the case, you yourself will be one of those future developers, when you come back to a project or product after a longer absence. Your future you will definitely thank you for leaving well-documented clues.
Wow! That seems like quite a lot of documentation to write. It is. As with anything else, you’ll have to prioritize. We can make a list of the various documentation types we have at our disposal and identify the actors that would use them.
As you can see, we consider anything that helps actors to understand the software to be documentation. That means that writing useful error and logging messages is also an important way of documenting the product. Similarly, a clearly defined roadmap with stories/bugs/todos provides context for evaluators and developers. All of these forms of documenting a product can save everyone a lot of time, money and confusion by offering context-sensitive documentation right where it’s needed.
This extends to everything in your software or product: the best documentation is a good design. If the UX is more intuitive or command-line help is clear or the APIs are consistent and well-organized, that can go a very long way already. There is less need for extensive tutorials explaining each and every task when the product documents itself.
For example, if you name an API getUsers()
and an input variable includeAdministratorUsers
, then you don’t need to write much more than “Gets a list of users, optionally including administrators.”
For those reasons and many others, we recommend getting started early with documentation. If look at the list above, that’s kind of obvious advice.
Most importantly, the simple act of trying to describe what you are making will lead to a better product. You’ll often find that, as you document, you’ll notice things that could be done better or more intuitively or more consistently or more easily. The simple act of trying to explain what you’re making leads to a better product. If you find it relatively quick and easy to write documentation, then there’s a good chance that you’ve managed to build quality software.
If you can’t get your software into your customer’s hands, then what’s the point of writing it at all?
There are several at-times cross-cutting goals. In descending order of importance, they are:
Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:35:54 (GMT-5)
An important part of the software process is the final step: delivery.
If you can’t get your software into your customer’s hands, then what’s the point of writing it at all?
There are several at-times cross-cutting goals. In descending order of importance, they are:
There are several aspects to continuous integration and delivery:
As expected, working in an organized manner with increased automation has clear benefits.
There are obviously limitations as well. The most immediate one is infrastructure investment: you have to set up build servers or purchase them in the cloud. You also have to make your process work with automated builds and possibly retrain personnel to work with it.
You have to plan your project and you have to have patience on the part of all stakeholders. You have to train everyone on the team to not even consider releasing a version of the software from a developer PC.
Setup and maintenance of build agents takes time and effort, especially over longer periods of time. Operating systems are upgraded, core components changed, build systems upgraded. All of these things will cause the build to fail on a given agent, even though nothing is actually wrong with the product. Here again, though, the agent will act as a canary in the coalmine for your development team. More often than not, the build-server failure will alert the team to avoid a feature that would have other wise cost them time to integrate before it’s ready.
The type of deployment depends on the product.
For desktop software, you need to build an installer or a compressed archive that users can execute and install. Mobile or UWP applications must be built and then delivered to app stores for installation. Web servers and sites can be deployed directly to in-house servers or into the cloud (e.g. AWS or Azure).
These deployment types are for the end users, but there are many more releases than that. Developers need to test their changes locally. Testers need to get these versions in order to provide feedback in a timely manner. We think of all of these releases as part of the build infrastructure, not just the continuous-integration server delivering an end-product.
At Encodo, we have experience with various systems for various types of software. We started off using Jenkins but moved to JetBrains TeamCity several years ago. Web projects have their own packaging and testing mechanisms (e.g. WebPack, Mocha) that integrate into almost any build infrastructure. We’ve also used Fastlane combined with Test Flight for mobile deployment. Our main expertise lies with configuration of .NET deployments paired with TeamCity.
Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:35:48 (GMT-5)
Design by Contract is a software engineering practice in which software requirements and promises − the “Contract” − are explicitly written into the code. The code is, at the same time, better documented, more reliable and easier to test against. Encodo uses this technique to ensure software quality.
A software contract is composed of several components: preconditions, postconditions and invariants. Preconditions are what a component requires of a client, whereas postconditions are what a component guarantees to a client. In object-oriented programming, these contracts are attached to method calls in a class. Invariants are a list of conditions that must always be true for software. An invariant is typically attached directly to a class; the runtime checks the class invariant when entering and exiting a method call.
Popular programming languages, like Java, C#, Delphi Pascal and others, lack the language constructs needed to express these contracts. However, these languages contain assertion constructs, which allow one to roughly describe the contracts. The section on emulating contracts in other languages section shows the most common technique.
Eiffel is a language whose inventor, Bertrand Meyer, pioneered Design by Contract. It includes rich support for expressing contracts, is similar to Pascal in syntax and will be used for the examples below. The FAQ offers more information on why we chose Eiffel for our examples.
The best way to show how the use of contracts affects software is with an example. Imagine a database connection class with a method Open
. This opens a connection to the database, allocating resources for it and failing if the request is refused.
Open is
do
– Execute code to open the connection here
end
Any procedural programming language is capable of formulating the code above. However, what happens if Open
is called twice in a row on the same connection? One way to handle this is to simply ignore subsequent calls to Open
.
Open is
do
if not IsOpen then
– Execute code to open the connection here
end
end
This is not optimal, for several reasons:
Open
will never know they are doing so.Another way to respond is to accept that this might happen, but making it non-silent, logging the occurrence to some sort of logging mechanism.
Open is
do
if not IsOpen then
– Execute code to open the connection here
else
– Log a warning
end
end
This is slightly better and an entirely appropriate solution in some cases. However, the connection is quite a low-level component; it should not be responsible for deciding what to do about repeated calls to Open
. We can use a contract to push the responsibility onto the client.
Open is
require
not IsOpen
do
– Execute code to open the connection here
end
The require clause contains optionally named boolean expressions. If one evaluates to false, a precondition violation is signaled. The violator can immediately be pinpointed and repaired to conform to the contract (by adding a check for IsOpen
before calling Open
). What are the benefits?
The contract for this routine is not complete, as it has only published its requirements, but said nothing about guarantees. Given the name of the function, we would expect it to have the following postcondition:
Open is
require
not IsOpen
do
– Execute code to open the connection here
ensure
IsOpen
end
The function is now completely defined, having explicitly detailed its requirements and guarantees. The postcondition often looks quite superfluous: the code for opening the connection is right above it, isn’t it?
Not necessarily.
If the function is deferred
(abstract
in Java and Pascal, virtual
in C-style languages), the implementation is in a descendent. The pre- and postconditions apply to the redefinitions as well. This allows a base class to very precisely define its interface with other classes without making any decisions about implementation.
Open is
require
not IsOpen
deferred
ensure
IsOpen
end
The precondition can only be expanded in a descendent, whereas the postcondition can only be further constrained. That is, a descendent cannot define the precondition to be not IsOpen
and DatabaseExists
. A client with a reference to the ancestor class sees only the ancestor precondition and cannot be forced to conform to a contract defined in a descendent.
Likewise, the postcondition cannot be redefined to be IsOpen
or ActionFailed
. The original interface has already decided that if the database cannot be opened, the implementation must raise an exception. A client with a reference to the ancestor class does not have access to the ActionFailed
feature and cannot accept this as a valid postcondition.
The descendent adjusts the precondition in a function like this:
Open is
require else
AutoCloseIfOpened
do
– Execute code to open the connection here
ensure then
not CompactOnOpen or DatabaseIsCompacted
end
This descendent has expanded the precondition to allow a caller to call Open
repeatedly only if IsOpen
is false (inherited precondition) or if the AutoCloseIfOpened
option has been set. Likewise, it has further constrained the postcondition to promise that, in addition to IsOpen
being true (inherited postcondition), the database will be compacted if the CompactOnOpen
option is set.
So, that’s Eiffel. How can other languages express contracts without the proper language constructs? As mentioned above, almost all modern languages include an assert function, which accepts a boolean expression and raises an exception if it is false. This function can emulate pre- and postconditions, but class invariants are largely impractical in languages without some form of pre-processor (a search for Design by Contract in C++ turns up several such libraries). Here’s Listing 5 written in Delphi Pascal:
procedure Open;
begin
Assert( not IsOpen );
// Execute code to open the connection here
Assert( IsOpen );
end {Open};
Note how the contract is expressed in the implementation body; this makes contract inheritance difficult. The following pattern illustrates a single level of contract inheritance (which prevents descendants from removing contracts by not calling inherited methods):
procedure Open; // Not overridable
begin
Assert( not IsOpen );
DoOpen;
Assert( IsOpen );
end;
procedure DoOpen; virtual; abstract;
Under this pattern, descendants are required to implement DoOpen
and cannot alter Open
(Delphi methods are by static by default − equivalent to final
in Java, sealed
in C# or frozen
in Eiffel). There are naturally drawbacks to this approach, especially when compared to the rich contract syntax available in Eiffel*, but the technique is sufficient for many of the desired contracts.
See the further reading below to learn about using old in postconditions and expressing class invariants
“Why is there notry .. finally
to ensure that the postcondition is checked in Listing 8?”
A postcondition is only guaranteed when the function exits successfully. In the example, it is perfectly legitimate for Open
to fail because of an external connection problem. The precondition only guarantees that the connection is not open, not that it can be opened. Such guarantees are useless because they involve performing the action in order to check that the action can be performed.
The function should raise an exception if it cannot open the connection, avoiding evaluation of the postcondition and resulting in an acceptable error condition. An implementation that fails silently will cause a postcondition violation, which is an unacceptable error condition.
Using a try .. finally
construct to force evaluation of the postcondition under all circumstances would result in both the desired error (connection could not be opened) and a postcondition violation, which is not correct.
“What if there is an exit or return statement in Listing 8?”
Question 1 proposed a using a try .. finally
construct to ensure that the postcondition was always executed. As you can see from the answer, this has undesirable side effects. The simple answer is not to use instructions that break the normal instruction flow (e.g. exit or break). The usefulness of such constructs is debatable and the drawbacks are high (especially, as shown above, when the instruction avoids checking contracts).
This exposes the weakness of languages without explicit contract constructs — it requires discipline to avoid bad practices. Relying purely on discipline invites error. However, it is better than nothing at all.
Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:35:39 (GMT-5)
A healthy and active review culture is essential for any team interested in building quality software. At Encodo, we’ve been doing reviews for a long time. They’ve become an essential part of everything we do:
What we mean by review is not a formal process at all. It is simply that you prepare work you’ve done for an informal presentation to a team member. Explaining what you’ve done in a review is often a good way of collecting your thoughts—you should be able to explain what you’ve done. Getting a review from a colleague is an efficient and productive way of making sure you can do that.
While there are many reasons to do reviews, we’ve also learned that reviews can’t do everything.
It’s important to get reviews often enough to avoid wasting time and effort but not so often that your work or the reviewer’s work grinds to a halt. It’s all about balance.
A good rule of thumb is about one review per task. If your task is longer than a day, then think about how to break up that work into phases in order to get a review of earlier phases.
That way, you’re more likely to catch issues before building on top of mistakes.
Encodo prefers live, face-to-face reviews.
This is the most efficient manner of reviewing as neither party has to prepare anything other than the work to be reviewed. Issues that come up can often be handled immediately—and such issues are far more likely to be mentioned and fixed. While in-person reviews are superior, video-chat/shared-desktop reviews work quite well, too.
If that’s not possible, then we have also used tool-based, asynchronous reviews, such as pull requests with review software. However, we find these to be not only less efficient but also less likely to find as many issues.
With a live code review, it’s relatively easy to ask the submitter to reorder, split or squash commits. It’s also easier to point out and quickly fix stylistic issues (like naming or interface usage, etc.). Because the turnaround time is much faster, a reviewer is far more likely to point out smaller fixes that would improve code quality, maintainability and so on.
However, in an asynchronous review, a reviewer must decide what is most important. Is it worth rejecting the whole pull request if it’s 95% correct with a few details? Do you reject it and ask the submitter to fix up spacing or formatting or missing documentation? Do you really write down every last little thing you would have said? Do you reject it and hope that the submitter understands all of your notes? Or do you accept it and just fix those things up yourself? How many iterations do you go through?
We prefer synchronous, face-to-face reviews because they’re much more efficient. Misunderstandings can be cleared up quickly, iterating until the submitter and reviewer find a consensus.
We encourage reviews everywhere because we know how to make them faster.
Both the reviewer and the submitter need to practice. A reviewer should practice diplomacy and formulate critique in a way that it will be accepted. A submitter must keep an open mind and prepare good arguments or justification for the code. Both sides should stay positive. A review shouldn’t be a competition: it’s about producing high-quality code together, as a team.
Encodo has done presentations on reviews, in both English and German.
What is the best approach when designing a new application, be it a small tool or an end-user application?
Many developers jump straight into a prototype, in order to get a feel for how the application will work. While... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:35:31 (GMT-5)
This article is part of an archive of Encodo White Papers.
What is the best approach when designing a new application, be it a small tool or an end-user application?
Many developers jump straight into a prototype, in order to get a feel for how the application will work. While prototypes are good for demonstrations, they are dangerous: in projects with tight time or budget constraints, the temptation to simply “build out” the prototype becomes irresistible. This leads to applications with nice user interfaces (hereafter called UI), but inflexible and difficult-to-follow implementations.
A better first step is to list the requirements and assign them to possible components. This doesn’t have to be a long or complete evaluation of the requirements; a few minutes is enough to come up with enough ideas to get started coding. These non-UI components are a natural fit for testing environments and are more likely to define a clean, sensible API (Application Programming Interface). Once the core logic has been built and tested, a prototype can easily be built on top of it.
To summarize, the component-based approach is important for the following reasons:
A good UI library is a wonderful thing, allowing clean-looking, well-integrated applications to be built in a very short time. However, the allure of this style of programming is dangerous, as it quickly leads to applications without a clearly defined API, which leads to extensibility and maintenance issues.
These systems entice programmers into working “backwards”, building their application logic around events generated by the UI. The first generation of RAD environments were notorious for mixing UI and business code. The latest generations make use of libraries with “code-behind” built right in, automatically supporting core/UI separation in both web or classic UI application.
This separation of core logic and UI events makes is commonly called the MVC or Model-View-Controller pattern.
MVC is the official name for the technique described above, in which functionality is contained in a model (M), which communicates state changes to a view (V) through some form of update mechanism. The controller (C) represents user input and applies changes to the model.
In many UI libraries, the view and controller layers are merged, making it much easier to apply the pattern to smaller projects. View components are typically bound to model components using the Observer pattern: the view “listens” for changes in the model and reacts accordingly.
Consider a tool which processes text files and generates output of some kind (perhaps PDF or CSV). The actual task doesn’t matter − this is the kind of tool that is often written in a seat-of-the-pants fashion, with the excuse that it is “faster” to get it done this way. Let’s take a component-based approach and see what we get.
What are the components of the system?
This list took only a few minutes to write and could have been written by anyone familiar with the project. The list contains only domain knowledge — there is no implementation-specific data. Having written down the requirements, we see that there is a need for an internal data representation, which will be used by the importers, exporters and actions. This is a facet of the design that might have gone unnoticed during prototyping, but would have been expressed implicitly nonetheless.
The list of features above is not an “over-design”, but rather an explicit expression of the specifications. While an implementation can avoid using importer, exporter and action components, these concepts are part of the design nonetheless: an implementation without tehm is simply more difficult to describe, understand and extend.
With a little bit of thought, we have designed a system that will scale to multiple import and export formats and even support multiple transformations. Writing the application in this way may involve marginally more initial work, but will result in a far more testable, extensible and reusable framework, decreasing maintenance and support time.
Another popular argument is the perceived reduction in programming efficiency. Applications or tools of the “throwaway” kind will take longer to develop when using a clean programming model. Whereas that may be true in the very short term, the majority of an application’s life span is spent in support and maintenance, which takes more time and energy if the application is poorly designed.
Though a throwaway prototype may be available marginally quicker, it will be of poorer quality. In addition, subsequent applications cannot benefit from its code. The biggest loss comes in the form of functionality, improvements or bug fixes which are never even attempted because the code is not in a maintainable or testable state.
Realization of this design at the core level is not so difficult. Even though the application initially only has one importer and one exporter, it doesn’t take much more to define an API that supports multiple plugins. Writing the tests for these components is likewise trivial. The opposite is true in the UI: building an interface to manage and configure all of the functionality that was easily written into the model is prohibitive.
There is no reason, however, that the UI has to express all of the details of the underlying model; the application, as specified, need only expose enough functionality in the UI to be able to import and export. The UI stays remarkably simple, but can be easily and quickly extended to offer more features, if desired. Since the model has automatic tests, it can be assumed to be stable and it is easier to accurately estimate the time required to build the new GUI elements.
The standard, quick-prototyping approach would have started coding a main form with some input fields, building the transformation code directly into the form itself. Options and preferences would have likely been encapsulated with a few controls on the main form, which, in turn, would have been responsible for loading and storing them.
The design sketched above would be expressed implicitly and partially, at best. An application written without these concepts in mind will not be worth refactoring. If the code is re-used at all, it is typically copied to a new project and modified there, resulting in multiple copies of nearly the same code. Fixes and enhancements to one will not necessarily appear in the other.
A prototype that is considered “throwaway”, but grows into an application, does not benefit from any of the following:
It’s obvious from the design above that it can be extended to support multiple importers, exporters and actions. The initial application was assumed to be a GUI which did not expose all of the functionality available in the model. The GUI can be made more powerful, exposing more of the underlying functionality. The extensibility of the design is clear. What about reuse?
The examples below are in Delphi Pascal.
In a traditional prototype, command-line support is bolted on to the same application, because the required code is buried in UI structures. Such a command line application will involve something like:
if command = 'C' then begin
{ Create the main form first, so it is
treated as the main form by the system, then
hide both forms so they don't appear in front
of the command line.
}
form:= MainForm.Create;
form.Visible:= False;
prefsForm:= PrefsForm.Create;
prefsForm.Visible:= False;
prefsForm.LoadOptions;
form.EdtFileToUse.Text:= parameterFromCommandLine;
form.BtnConvertClick( nil );
form.Close; // Close main form to quit application
end;
Using the elements of the model from the component-based design, we could build a separate application, whose main loop is logical and readable:
if command = 'C' then begin
options:= ToolOptions.Create;
options.Load;
try
try
converter:= FileConverter.Create( options );
converter.Convert( parameterFromCommandLine );
finally
FreeAndNil( converter );
end;
finally
FreeAndNil( options );
end;
end;
The second version addresses the requirements in a much clearer, more maintainable fashion. On top of that, the implementation in the GUI application would have a similar pattern. The code above could go into an event handler, passing text from an input control instead of an argument from the command line. The following code assumes that the converter and options from the command line example above are globally available:
procedure MainForm.BtnConvertClick( Sender: Object );
begin
Converter.Convert( EdtFileToUse.Text );
end;
With a small amount of time invested at the beginning, one can define any application in terms of UI-independent components. An application that was designed in this way lends itself to ready reuse. Applications that use these components need only be concerned with delivering input to a clearly defined API. Fixes and updates to the core components will be reflected in all applications.
One of the more negative associations is the notion of unit testing. Unit testing traditionally involves writing a test for each... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Oct 2023 21:33:33 (GMT-5)
Most people in the software industry have heard of test-driven development — it has become a buzzword with several possible meanings.
One of the more negative associations is the notion of unit testing. Unit testing traditionally involves writing a test for each and every routine in a unit or class, to ensure that it does what it claims. This practice has, of late, declined in popularity — mostly because of the sheer mindlessness of maintaining complete coverage of an ever-growing API.
Another form of testing is to write tests for components of a system, ensuring functionality on a higher level than that of the routine. Tests of this kind tend to encapsulate use cases, which are far more closely related to the way in which clients (actual users or other software) make use of an API. Naturally, use cases for extremely low-level components will end up testing individual routines, just as unit testing does.
Writing the component tests is not tedious and, in fact, helps tremendously in determining whether a piece of software is complete or not. They can be viewed as software implementations of the requirements documents or specifications. Proper application of Component-based Design makes it quite simple to build tests for the majority of an application’s functionality.
A far better tool for ensuring consistency at the lowest level, where unit testing traditionally comes into play, is Design by Contract. This practice involves including verification mechanism directly in the software, so that violations of software contracts can be pinpointed and quickly repaired.
The most important element of any testing strategy is to stick with it. When a defect is found, the first step is to create a test to replicate the problem. The next is to fix the error so the problem no longer occurs, but all the other tests still work. Finally, any missing contracts that may have helped pinpoint the problem sooner should be added.
Once the test suite runs through without problems, the software is ready for release testing.
Automated testing is a fantastic way of guaranteeing baseline software quality, but it is not the last step before releasing a product. For server software or software with a command-line interface only, the test suite can provide an extremely high-level of coverage (approaching 100%). Software which interacts with humans, however, requires a manual testing regimen to verify that the software functions as desired for all forms of input. Whichever parts of the testing chain cannot be automated (UI testing is notoriously difficult) should be documented in detail to ensure reproducibility between releases.
Published by marco on 3. Oct 2023 21:22:54 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Why Taxation Is Not Theft by Thomas Wells in June 2022 (3 Quarks Daily)
“[…] taxation is a device for solving collective action problems and thus allowing us (by coercing us) to meet our moral obligations to ourselves and each other – including our obligations to respect each others’ property rights. One can’t coherently be in favour of enforcing property rights, e.g. by having a police force and judges to catch and punish thieves, without also being in favour of a sustainable system for funding that enforcement.”
“[…] if I own a piece of land do I also own the part of the river that runs through it? Do I also own (some of) the fish in it? Do I also own the copper underneath it? If I mine the copper and kill the fish, do I owe people downstream compensation for killing ‘their’ fish? If I rent the land to someone else and they invest in agricultural improvements, who should get what share of the increased yield? If I go bankrupt who should decide which creditors get what share of my land and other assets? And so on.”
“[…] suppose it is generally agreed that all children should have access to a good quality education regardless of their parents’ ability to pay, or suppose it is generally agreed that a new waste water treatment plant is needed. The practical problem is that however good an idea it may be from the perspective of the whole society to build these public/club goods, from the perspective of individual members of that society it is an even better idea to avoid paying your share of its costs.”
“The main technology we have developed for this is government, including the power of taxation to compel people to make the required contributions (and hence achieve outcome 2). This is a power of coercion but it is not theft, since it consists in forcing people to live up to the implications of their moral obligations to other people. If you accept the goal, then by implication you already accept the means required to achieve it.”
“[…] anyone who really believes in private property that no one may take from you without your consent must also believe that the government can take property from people without their consent, at the very least for the project of institutionalising property rights. Far from being in conflict with each other, taxation turns out to be a practical requirement for the existence of property rights.”
Amazon to hire 250,000 new US workers, increase average starting pay to $20.50 by Alex Findijs (WSWS)
“Amazon’s incredibly high turnover rate of 150 percent per year, driven by infamous working conditions where workers are pushed to the point of exhaustion by electronic monitoring, has produced a situation where many new hires do not stay longer than 90 days and the company struggles to retain workers every year.”
“A report by Engadget in 2022 found that high turnover rates were costing Amazon $8 billion a year. By investing a few billion in raising starting pay, Amazon hopes to increase retention and cut down on the cost that poor employee retention has on its profit margin, which was still a considerable $33.36 billion in 2021.”
“[…] turnover among UPS part-timers is extremely high, with only a small minority lasting five years or more at the company. They have very little opportunity to move up to full-time jobs, with many waiting years or even decades before a position opens up. The new contract pledges UPS to “create” a pathetic 7,500 new full-time jobs over five years.”
“In other words, the supposedly “historic” pay increases in the UPS contract in reality only keep pace with market forces, which are driving up labor costs for many low-wage employers across the country. In fact, the contract helps to limit UPS’ exposure to the tightening labor market by freezing the starting rate at $21 per hour for four years, finally increasing to $23 per hour in the last year of the contract.”
The dismantling of democracy in India will affect the whole world by Arundhati Roy (Scroll.in)
“But now the time for warning is over. We are in a different phase of history. As a writer, I can only hope that my writing will bear witness to this very dark chapter that is unfolding in my country’s life. And hopefully, the work of others like myself lives on, it will be known that not all of us agreed with what was happening.”
“At the time, much of India, including corporate India recoiled in horror at the open slaughter and mass rape of Muslims that was staged on the streets of Gujarat’s towns and villages by vigilante Hindu mobs seeking “revenge”. Gautam Adani stood by Modi. With a small group of Gujarati industrialists he set up a new platform of businessmen. They denounced Modi’s critics and supported him as he launched a new political career as “Hindu Hriday Samrat”, the Emperor of Hindu Hearts. So was born what is known as the Gujarat Model of “development”: violent Hindu nationalism underwritten by serious corporate money.”
“In the nine years of Modi’s tenure, Adani became the world’s richest man. His wealth grew from $8 billion to $137 billion. In 2022 alone, he made $72 billion, which is more than the combined earnings of the world’s next nine billionaires put together. The Adani Group now controls a dozen shipping ports that account for the movement of 30% of India’s freight, seven airports that handle 23% of India’s airline passengers, and warehouses that collectively hold 30% of India’s grain. It owns and operates power plants that are the biggest generators of the country’s private electricity.”
“Just as Adani stood by Modi in his time of need, the Modi government has stood by Adani and has refused to answer a single question raised by members of the opposition in Parliament, going so far as to expunge their speeches from the parliament record.”
“Seventy three per cent of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1%, while 670 million Indians who comprise the poorest half of the population saw only a 1% increase in their wealth. While India is recognised as an economic power with a huge market, most of its population lives in crushing poverty.”
“In July Modi travelled to the US on a State visit and to France as the Chief Guest on Bastille Day. Can you even begin to believe that? Macron and Biden fawned over him in the most embarrassing manner, knowing full well that this would be spun into pure campaign gold for the 2024 general elections in which Modi will stand for a third term. There is nothing they would not have known about the man they are embracing.”
They know. They don’t care, at best. They are all criminals. The world governments are a network of criminal enterprises, not unlike organized crime families.
“India now ranks at 161 out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index, that many of the best Indian journalists have been hounded out of the mainstream media and that journalists could soon be subjected to a censorial regulatory regime in which a government-appointed body will have the power to decide whether media reports and commentary about the government are fake or misleading. And the new IT law that is designed to shut down dissent on social media.”
“They would have known about how the Delhi police forced grievously injured young Muslim men who were lying on the street to sing the Indian National Anthem while they prodded and kicked them. One of them died subsequently.”
“[…] under Modi’s watch, the state of Manipur in the India’s North East has descended into a barbaric civil war. A form of ethnic cleansing has taken place.”
“[…] the world’s powers choose to give Modi all the oxygen he needs to destroy the social fabric and burn India down. To me, this is a form of racism. They claim to be democrats, but they are racists. They don’t believe their professed “values” should apply to non-white countries. It’s an old story of course.”
“[…] if they imagine that the dismantling of democracy in India is not going to affect the whole world, they must indeed be delusional.”
“In Manipur where a civil war rages, the police, which is entirely partisan, handed two women over to a mob to be paraded naked through a village and then gang-raped. One of them watched her young brother being murdered before her eyes. Women who belong to the same community as the rapists have stood by the rapists and have even incited their men to rape.”
“I have just watched a chilling little video filmed in a classroom of a small school. The teacher makes a Muslim child stand by her desk and asks the rest of the students, Hindu boys, to come up one by one and slap him. She admonishes those who haven’t hit him hard enough.”
“What’s happening in India is not that loose variety of internet fascism. It’s the real thing. We have become Nazis. Not just our leaders, not just our TV channels and newspapers, but vast sections of our population too. Large numbers among the Indian Hindu population who live in the US and Europe and South Africa support the fascists politically as well as materially. For the sake of our souls, and for those of our children and our children’s children, we must stand up.”
“There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honourable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors that I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less ‘successful’ in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled. The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead.”
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.””
The Question about Biden by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“I take pleasure, not at all perverse, in watching Joesph R. Biden, Jr. and those around him panic as the bill comes due for all those years of conniving with Ukrainian crooks and as the unforgivable folly of the war he started is now everywhere understood, even among those who continue in public to pretend otherwise. It is not yet possible to discern just how our burbling president will go down, but go down he will. Of this we can now be certain. The time of comeuppance is near.”
“Fresh from a ruling that the Biden regime unlawfully coerced social media platforms to censor content, it now intends to lean on mainstream media to provide purposely unbalanced coverage of the impeachment inquiry in defense of the president.”
“[…] those defending Biden won’t win this way, either, in my estimation. Once again, mainstream Democrats and mainstream media manifest their fatal flaw: They are forever overestimating the stupidity of Americans — with the exception, of course, of liberals who think what they are told to think and see events as they are told to see them.”
In fairness, so do most Republicans. People cite FOX News all the time, without even barely noticing that they’re doing so.
“At this point the Biden regime’s charge into the war against Russia starts to look as reckless as the Light Brigade’s in Crimea all those years ago. This war is unwinnable, as Scott Ritter and various other military commentators have asserted. Realizing this, too many people are no longer on for the do-or-die bit and have begun to reason why.”
That is a deep, deep cut. Referencing Tennyson’s poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade: “Their’s not to reason why, Their’s not to make reply, Their’s but to do and die”.
“The Ukrainian president, clearly in desperation, suggested that Ukrainian refugees in Europe, who number in the millions, might resort to violence if the West withdrew its military support from the Kiev regime. As Glenn Greenwald put it in one of his System Update segments, the shockingly crude Zelensky may as well have said, “Give me your money or I will shoot you.””
“The follow-on question is very simple and very large. Does Zelensky have enough on Biden to get whatever he wants — the HIMARS rocket systems, the howitzers, the tanks and APCs, the F–16s, the scores of billions of dollars, much of which Biden’s people know full well is black-marketed or embezzled? It is time to ask this question, immense in its implications as it is.”
This Spanish city has been restricting cars for 24 years. Here’s what we can learn from it by David Zipper (Fast Company)
“Mayor Fernandez Lores was unmoved. “It’s not my duty as mayor to make sure you have a parking spot,” he said at a 2020 conference. “For me, it’s the same as if you bought a cow, or a refrigerator, and then asked me where you’re going to put them.””
“In Barcelona and Berlin, newly elected city leaders have rolled back the lower speed limits and car-free streets introduced by predecessors. A few weeks ago, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his opposition to London’s low-traffic neighborhoods, declaring “I am on motorists’ side.” But the longevity of Fernandez Lores’ tenure as mayor of Pontevedra—24 years and counting—shows that voters can reward leaders who free their city from an automotive stranglehold. Fernandez Lores told me that he is now the longest-serving large-city mayor in all of Spain.”
“That may be Pontevedra’s greatest lesson of all: Once residents experience life in a car-free city, most of them seem to like it. A lot.”
Adam Curtis Talks to Jacobin About Russia, Oligarchs, and the Fall of the USSR by Taylor C. Noakes (Jacobin)
“As one Russian journalist said to me, London now does feel a bit like Moscow in 1988. My primary goal was to tell the story, but I also wanted to convey that disenchantment with democracy can have its roots in corruption. And there’s quite a lot of corruption in Britain, Canada, and the United States, especially since 2008. I still don’t think we got our heads around what quantitative easing was about, which essentially entailed a massive wealth transfer to a tiny elite, creating what is now known as the “asset class.””
“I think we may look back at the last ten to twelve years and say that the rise of the “asset class” was as powerfully significant as the rise of the oligarchs in Russia from about 1992 onward. They’re not the same, it’s not the same kind of society or the same kind of corruption, but it is the same extraordinary transfer of power and wealth to a tiny elite. I don’t think we’ve got our heads around that yet.”
He’s right. It’s not the same. It’s worse. There’s more to steal. I don’t think we can wrap our heads around how much they’re stealing, every day. We don’t know what billions even are. We think shoplifting by poor people is a capital offense, but they shrug their shoulders at wage theft, which is 1000 times worse.
“[…] the person in charge of creating that democracy overnight, a man by the name of Yegor Gaidar, came out of the technocratic establishment under the Soviet plan. I think he was trying to bring democracy to Russia in a “rational” way, and it was completely mad. He thought that if you got the right things in the right place it would work just like a machine. But as I’ve shown, it was ruthlessly exploited by the oligarchs for their own advantage, and it led to a total and utter, cataclysmic, disaster.”
Exploited? Encouraged, then exploited? With corruption and a complete lack of scruples, you never know. I don’t really buy most these “good intentions, but bad outcomes” stories. There’s almost always at least a kernel—if not much more—of personal interest that leads to the outcome. At best, the person has utterly convinced themselves that a decision made in a way that is personally lucrative is also fortuitously the moral thing to do.
“It is extraordinary that politicians seem unable to stop the corruption — we all know it’s happening and they know that we know it’s happening. And they know that we know that they don’t know what to do about it. It’s absurd.”
I don’t think its extraordinary. I think it’s absolutely ordinary. It’s not true that corruption exists despite the politicians. It exists because of them. Politicians are in on it. They don’t stop it because don’t or can’t make them stop. I think it’s extraordinary that someone who’s made as many documentaries as Adam Curtis can still describe the world through a lens of “how can we stop these poor politicians from being corrupted despite their best intentions?”
“We all know it’s happening. We know the politicians don’t know what to do about it, but none of us have any idea of what an alternative solution would be.”
Dude, your prime minister is Rishi Sunak and you’re mystified about why he’s not part of the solution? He’s the main problem, a massive force of corruption and greed. We know the solution. It’s just not really possible to implement because the biggest part of the problem—capitalism and our fetishization of wealth and power, regardless of how it was acquired—will actively prevent us from replacing it.
“[…] somehow it became a way of avoiding having to face the fact that none of us, whether it’s Donald Trump or nice liberals, have any idea of how to create an alternative, fair, and just society that would work. We have a lot of dreams, but we know we don’t know what to do. And we know that those in power don’t know what to do.”
No. Wrong. Those in power are not interested in fixing anything because they are doing just swimmingly. There’s nothing to fix, in their eyes. How can you be so dense? There are people who know what to do, but, as I noted above, the system we have will actively resist being eliminated. Arundhati Roy knows what we need to do. It’s Utopic and perhaps Quixotic, but it’s a plan.
“While outside the theater they [the politicians] were locked in too, money and assets were moved in vast quantities into the hands of a tiny elite, and they did nothing to stop it.”
They ARE the elites. They are deeply corrupted.
“Everyone performs. The politicians perform as politicians, but they’re shit and everyone knows they’re not going to do anything. Some of us perform as indignant, outraged liberals, but we know in our heart of hearts that it’s not going to have any effect. The Right does its pantomime culture war thing, but it’s all just performance inside the theater. What we seem to lack is the ability to leave the theater and understand what’s going on outside its walls.”
This seems to be his thesis statement. I think he’s trying to excuse himself for not trying harder to fix it. I don’t think the problem is that we don’t know what to do to make things better for more people and to stop building systems that enrich only a tiny elite. I think I know what we could do better. I don’t know how to put it in motion or to get people on board because they seem to fragment as soon as they think that they might be part of that tiny elite. The problem is that people don’t really have scruples. They just don’t want to be on the bottom. I know what we should do, but I don’t know how to get us to do it.
Hell, I don’t think we can ever get people to stop pushing buttons in trains or elevators that are clearly already lit up and engaged. I don’t take elevators very often at all, but I can imagine that people push those lit-up buttons for all they’re worth—just to make it go faster. That’s what people do in trains to get the doors to open—push buttons that clearly indicate that the doors are going to open as soon as possible anyway. Click, click, click, click.
These are the same people we have to convince not to want things that would be taken away from other people. If they think they can be part of the elite pirate group, then they’ll absolutely do that. If they think that they’re not in the elites, then they’ll be against them—until they think they’re either in the elites or they could be. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist. The greatest trick the elites ever pulled was convincing their slaves that they, too, are in the elite already.
Wärmepumpedesaster mit Ansage by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Für die deutschen Wärmepumpenhersteller ist dieses Abwarten jedoch fatal. Ihre Geräte sind nämlich meist teurer als die der ostasiatischen Konkurrenz. Die kann von Skaleneffekten profitieren, die sich vor allem aus der technischen Nähe von Wärmepumpen und Klimaanlagen ergibt – bei denen sind die Hersteller aus Südkorea und Japan Weltmarktführer und chinesische Hersteller steigern Jahr für Jahr ihre Marktanteile.”
“[…] so wird sich der Sanitärbetrieb vor Ort weigern, ein preiswertes chinesisches Produkt einzubauen, für das seine Monteure nicht geschult sind und für das er im Fall eines Defekts weder über Expertise noch über eine zuverlässige Ersatzteillogistik verfügt.”
“Die Einzigen, die diesen Vorschlag vehement ablehnen würden, sind die Profiteure des jetzigen Systems – die Energiekonzerne, die Energiehändler und der Bundesfinanzminister, der sich mit den Steuern und Abgaben zurzeit sprichwörtlich dumm und dämlich verdient.”
“Die Grünen verfolgen die Ideologie, nicht über niedrige, sondern über hohe Preise das Verhalten zu steuern. Nicht Belohnung für erwünschtes, sondern Bestrafung für unerwünschtes Verhalten ist hier die Devise. Für die FDP wiederum ist der – bei näherer Betrachtung alles andere als – freie Markt eine heilige Kuh. Die Bepreisung eines kompletten Energieträgers von den Marktmechanismen zu entkoppeln, wäre für sie ein Sakrileg.”
Psychosis and its Consequences by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Poverty levels, including child poverty, are rising swiftly, as is credit-card debt. Inflation, although down from its peak, has chewed up what wage gains working class Americans have achieved since Biden came to office, and the official inflation rate is a chisel in any case, as it does not include energy and food costs. The administration is doing absolutely nothing as private equity firms buy houses—neighborhoods, indeed—at a rate that is destroying communities and provoking a housing crisis that starts to look like the early 1930s.”
Is Patrick Lawrence just failing to be as optimistic about the data as Dean Baker? Who’s right here?
“Kamala Harris is a liberal deplorable too far. Threaten Americans with a Harris presidency and Republicans could run Donald Trump’s masseuse and win. Democrats simply cannot be this far out of touch with reality. But I had better be careful: I could be wrong and they are.”
“I do not see how the Democrats can win unless Biden steps aside and takes Harris with him, and this seems a political impossibility. Ready or not, here’s my take: Democratic denialism is well on the way to making Trump the strongest candidate in the field. But then we have to wonder how far the liberal authoritarians will go to prevent any such outcome. My guess is a very long way.”
Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan Nightmare by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias.”
“Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel — the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing.”
“History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.”
“Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S.”
“GDP per capita declined by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while it could have increased by 68 percent if the economy had followed its pre-conflict trend,” the report says. “This suggests that Libya’s income per capita could have been 118 percent higher without the conflict.”
“The misery and carnage, which rippled out from a dismembered Libya, was unleashed in the name of democratization, nation-building, promoting the rule of law and human rights. The pretext for the assault was that Gaddafi was about to launch a military operation to massacre civilians in Benghazi where rebellious forces had seized power. It had as much substance as the charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, another example of utopian social engineering that left over a million Iraqi dead and millions more driven from their homes.”
“Gaddafi — who I interviewed for two hours in April 1995 near the gutted remains of his home that was bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986 — and Hussein were targeted not because of what they did to their own people, although both could be brutal. They were targeted because their nations had large oil reserves and were independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.”
“The American experiment, built on slavery, began with a genocidal campaign against Native Americans that was exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. The narratives we tell ourselves about World War II, largely to justify our right to intervene around the globe, are a lie. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the German army long before we landed at Normandy. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The war in the South Pacific, where one of my uncles fought, was bestial, characterized by rabid racism, mutilation, torture and the routine execution of prisoners. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were egregious war crimes. The U.S. routinely destroys democracies that nationalize U.S. and European corporations as in Chile, Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with repressive military regimes. Washington supported the genocides in Guatemala and East Timor. It embraces the crime of preemptive war. There is little in our history to justify the claim of unique American virtues.”
“The creed of humanitarian intervention is selective. Compassion is extended to “ worthy ” victims while “unworthy” victims are ignored. Military intervention is good for Iraqis, Afghans or Libyans, but not for Palestinians or Yemenis. Human rights are supposedly sacrosanct when discussing Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, but irrelevant in our offshore penal colonies, the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza or our drone-infested war zones. The persecution of dissidents and journalists is a crime in China or Russia, but not when the targets are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.”
Bernie Sanders to UAW Rally: “We Refuse to Live in an Oligarchy” by Bernie Sanders (Jacobin)
“There is a reason why a recent Gallup poll had 75 percent of Americans supporting the UAW. They are sick and tired of an economy in which the rich get richer while working families struggle and the most desperate sleep out on the streets. What this struggle is about here in the Midwest is a demand that we finally have an economy that works for all of us, not just a few.”
“[…] despite a massive increase in worker productivity in the automobile industry and in every sector of our economy, despite the fact that CEOs now make four hundred times what their average worker makes, despite record-breaking corporate profits, despite corporate America spending hundreds of billions on dividends and stock paybacks, the average American worker today is worse off than he or she was fifty years ago.”
Is Bernie right? Or is Dean Baker? Their opinions seem to differ about how awesome the economy is going. Baker thinks that people are better off now, but I’m not sure if he means relative to the truly shitty times of the Great Recession—or that, relative to fifty years ago, Baker would also be forced to admit that workers have not at all benefitted from productivity gains. I think he would, quite easily. His story seems to be more that the economy isn’t doing worse than it was two years ago, and wants to emphasize that—so that people will vote for Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump. I think electoral politics drives people crazy.
“[…] you’ve got three people on top owning more wealth than the bottom half of American society.”
“I would like to say a word to the CEOs of General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis: understand the enormous financial sacrifices your workers have made over the years. It is time for you to end your greed. It is time for you to treat your employees with the respect and dignity they deserve. It is time to sit down and negotiate a fair contract.”
Make it voluntary and it won’t happen. These people don’t care about anyone but themselves. Given the choice between maximizing profit and taking care of as many people as possible, they will take the first choice every time.
“what the UAW is fighting for is not radical. In the first half of 2023, the Big Three automakers made $21 billion in profits, up 80 percent from the same time last year. In other words, they’re doing pretty good. Over the past decade, the Big Three made $250 billion in profits in North America alone. Last year, these companies spent $9 billion — not to improve the lives of their workers, but to pay for stock buybacks and dividends to make their wealthy stockholders even richer.”
“Brothers and sisters, enough is enough. Let us stand together to end corporate greed. Let us stand together to rebuild the disappearing middle class. Let us create an economy that works for all, not just the 1 percent. And let us all — every American in every state in this country — stand with the UAW.”
Othello and the War by Victor Grossman (ConterPunch)
“However, the offensive was successful. George H. W. Bush could announce: “For over 40 years, the United States led the West in the struggle against Communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values. … The Soviet Union itself is no more. This is a victory for democracy and freedom…””
What an incredible statement. Such hubris.
“[…] after politely thanking Mikhail Gorbachev “for his intellect, vision and courage” in helping to make this victory possible, US favor switched to the man who used tanks against the elected Duma so as to throw Gorbachov out and seize power. Bush made future principles clear: “We have been heartened and encouraged by President Yeltsin’s commitment to democratic values and free-market principles, and we look forward to working with him.””
Just noise. About as useful as any statement from an American elite politician.
“In March 2016 the expert Australian journalist John Pilger warned that nuclear warhead spending “rose higher under Obama than under any other American president… In the last 18 months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two, led by the USA, is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.”
“Putin is no angel, no hero, not an Othello. Nevertheless, I believe that [Putin] is primarily motivated by the wish to defend Russia against encirclement, suffocation followed by subservience or dismemberment – the fate of an insubordinate Yugoslavia not so long ago. Perhaps he keeps in mind the fates of men who defied Washington’s drive for world hegemony: the heart attack of Milošević in a prison cell, the death of Allende, the torture and dissolving in acid of Patrice Lumumba, the castration and public hanging of Afghanistan’s Najibullah, the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the murder and oceanic body disposal of Osama bin Laden, the sodomy killing of Muammar Gaddafi.”
Poverty Just Jumped. It Was No Accident. by Lakeisha McVey (CounterPunch)
“People can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get an education, and work multiple jobs. But in the face of rising prices, low wages, high rents, and a broken healthcare system, it’s often not enough. Without a safety net and a level playing field for families, financial security is often out of reach.”
“We Are Making History Today, Baby”: Scenes From the First Day of the UAW Strike by Keith Brower Brown, Luis Feliz Leon, Jane Slaughter (Jacobin)
““What really gets me is how the news talks like we get $60 or $70 an hour,” Forschim said on the line. “None of us make that! We get $32 an hour if we’re lucky. New temps get $16 an hour and no raises, no vacation, no sick days. It’s hard to live like that.””
“Millwright Dave Briseno is at the top of the pay scale, with a skilled job and twenty-four years in, but he still thinks pensions for the second-tier workers are a top issue. “A pension is a big deal,” Briseno said. “In the past, people came here for a career. The new guys don’t see it that way: ‘I can get a job at Walmart.’”
Tragic how browbeaten the younger generations are.
How Nancy Pelosi Used “Feminism” to Play the “Isolationist” Right by Nicky Reid in June 2022 (Exile in Happy Valley)
“You see, dearest motherfuckers, this is the problem I have with the Gloria Steinem School of Second Wave Feminism. The whole idea of success is predicated on women rising to the top of a tower of bones built by centuries of institutionalized heterosexist chauvinism. The result is women like Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Nancy Pelosi, who are supposed to inspire women like me by leading an empire just like the ass-grabbing barbarians they replaced or rather just joined on their mountaintop of fractured skulls and filthy money.”
“[…] the only thing the far-right hates more than mouthy women is the Chinese who they blame for everything from cattle mutilation to hemorrhoids.”
“Say what you will about that smug little trust-fund baby [Tucker Carlson], he’s a heinously xenophobic white nationalist pig fucker who treats terrified transgender children like bowling pins, but he’s also tragically the most consistently antiwar personality on cable news since MSNBC shit-canned Phil Donahue for politely opposing the Iraq War.”
“Just like Putin, Xi is a revanchist prick but he’s not wrong to consider his next-door neighbor a renegade province under these circumstances and he’s not paranoid to be pissed off at the US for running naval drills with nuclear death machines off China’s coastline in concert with this sketchy state that we promised to remain neutral on with the One China Policy.”
“Speaking as a proudly isolationist transfeminist, the only thing that offends me more than shallow bigots like Tucker Carlson are manipulative frauds like Nancy Pelosi, who gives human rights a bad name with her big macho ego. Put it back in your pants, chickenhawk.”
The British “Bubble of Unreality” by Patrick Lawrence in June 2022 (Scheer Post)
“A little at a time since she came into the public eye, Truss seems to me emblematic of the grave crisis of leadership in the Western post-democracies. Britain will be in very serious trouble if Truss wins the Tories’ vote on September 5. So will the rest of us, given she will represent a new low in our collective elevation of incompetence to high office.”
“I suppose I am circling the thought that the West is exhausted and the non–West is by comparison full of vigor. Perhaps Putin would agree with me: The emergence of the non–West as an energetic pole of power marks an inevitable turn of history’s wheel. The West’s decline does not. It is a choice a frivolous generation of leaders makes for us. And it is not going to end well without a profound change of consciousness […]”
Our Bad in Libya by Ted Rall
“October 20, 2011: President Obama ordered a predator drone strike in Libya. A missile hit a car carrying leader Muammar Gaddafi. Stunned and bleeding, he was captured and murdered by rebels by the side of the road.
“Libya collapsed into anarchy and civil conflict. ISIS and other armed terrorist jihadi groups partitioned the country. Law and order are no more. There are open-air slave markets. It is a failed state.
“In a failed state, there is no money to maintain infrastructure like the pair of 19705-era dams that collapsed after heavy rains, killing thousands of people in the northeastern city of Derna.
“Our bad.”
“Governments should require that every tech company that sells them a product or a service has to promise not to interfere with interoperability. That’s just prudent administration. The Lincoln administration only bought rifles from companies that agreed on standard tooling. I mean, of course they did! ‘War’s canceled, boys! The bullet factory shut down this week.‘ Right? That was been the bedrock of good public procurement for centuries. We just forgot it. Every digital system procured by every level of government should come with a binding covenant not to impede interoperability—from the cars in your government motor pool to the Google Classrooms in our public schools to the iPhones in our public agencies. Now, those companies—they’re gonna squawk, but nobody forces a tech giant to sell to the American government. If you’re too emotionally fragile to see to the American public on fair terms, then go find another line of work more suited to your delicate sensibilities. Your shareholder’s priorities are your problem, public agencies are charged with the people’s business.”
He ends by citing the old Irish joke, “if you’re trying to get there, I wouldn’t start from here,” to illustrate the morass that we’re in. He’s saying that if we wanted to have a world that worked like the example he gave above—where our democratically elected governments do other than the bidding of their corporate masters—then we “should have started 40 years ago”.
Still, as Doctorow says, “the second-best time to start is now.”
This brilliant illustration shows how much public space we’ve surrendered to cars (Vox)
Roaming Charges: Our Man in Jersey by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Jonathan Lancaster was only 38 years old when he died four years ago in an isolation cell at Alger Correctional Facility in Michigan. During his time in solitary confinement, Lancaster lost more than 50 pounds in 15 days and became so dehydrated he couldn’t speak. He was kept in restraints and his body was found lying in his urine and feces. Two wardens and four prison nurses were charged with involuntary manslaughter in Lancaster’s death. This week a Michigan judge let them walk, saying that while the prison officials were negligent none of their actions (or lack thereof) directly led to Lancaster’s death, who, the judge noted, was “doomed to die from dehydration.””
Like, he was doomed to die of dehydration even without their treatment? Justice, as she is lived in America.
“The DEA is celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the War on Drugs. And what a smashing success it has been!”“US drug overdose death rate, 1973: 3.0 per 100,000
US drug overdose death rate, 2021: 32.4 per 100,000”
“Median Net Worth of Average American Family”
When you get too excited about citing statistics and forget that words have meaning.
“A ground-breaking new study by Princeton scholars Ann Case and Angus Deaton found that life expectancy for the college-educated in 2021 was eight-and-a-half years longer than for the two-thirds of American adults without a bachelor’s degree, more than triple the 1992 gap of about two-and-a-half years.”
This is my experience anecdotally as well. And those who live less long also have much lower quality of life in their later years because of health problems engendered by working more physically demanding jobs.
“In the early 1990s, only 11% of homeless adults in the US were aged 50 and older. By 2003, this percentage had swelled to 37%. Now, the over-50 demographic represents more than half of the homeless single adults in the U.S. Baby boomers (those aged 57 to 75) are now among the most likely to end up living on the streets.”
So, the homeless are in the same age cohort as the FOX News viewers who hate them the most.
“The volume of ice lost from glaciers in the Swiss Alps during the summers of 2022 and 2023 is roughly the same as that lost between 1960 and 1990.”
JESUS CHRIST.
Number of animals slaughtered for meat (Our World in Data) every day…
Cows: 900,000
Goats: 1.4 million
Sheep: 1.7 million
Pigs: 3.8 million
Ducks: 11.8 million
Chickens: 202 million
Fish: Hundreds of millions
JESUS CHRIST.
“America’s newest “high speed” train, the Brightline between Miami and Orlando, travels at a top speed of 120 mph, slightly slower than the 130mph (210km/h) operating speed of the earliest series of Japanese bullet trains that went into service 59 years ago.”
EXCEPTIONAL. 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
“Stephen Strother’s review of Oppenheimer in the Spectre Journal focuses on the fascist nature of super-heroes:”“We are now fifteen years into the superhero movie’s dominion over U.S. film production, discourse, and consumption. Since the release of Iron Man in 2008, our major film productions have been almost exclusively devoted to stories of heroic individuals using superpowers to defeat grand cosmic threats. It’s no surprise that the essentially fascist notion of a superhero—an individual of unique power acting to quell threats to the collective population is too weak and ignorant to defeat on its own, and exempt from all laws and norms in that pursuit by virtue of their unique power—has so taken root in the United States. After all, our atomized culture of individual striving, fearful and violent, produces a society of anxious worshippers of unchecked power, a people who do not look to one another to solve problems or make a society, but to the hoped-for benevolence of a few extraordinarily powerful individuals. It is a world primed for Great Men to save it, and U.S. entertainment conglomerates have been happy to provide us with endless fantasies of Great Men (and the very occasional Great Woman).”
This explains the worship of billionaires.
NATO Keeps Saying Things NATO Doesn’t Let You Say by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)
“In his opening remarks to the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs on September 7, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made the stunning admission that Russian President Vladimir Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine, not entirely unprovoked, but – as Putin has always said – to push an encroaching NATO out of Ukraine.
“Stoltenberg said that in 2021, prior to the war, Putin “sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.” Stoltenberg then went on, “He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. . .. We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” The Secretary General of NATO then closed his remarks with the conclusion that “when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.””
It’s nice to see the evil Stoltenberg so gleeful about how he’d hoodwinked Putin that he doesn’t quite realize that he’s contradicting the prevailing narrative. Or he absolutely realizes it, and doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to care because NATO will get as much support as it wants no matter what he admits to having done. Over 1.5 years into the war, there is no longer any way to stop it from continuing as long as NATO wants. They no longer need the moral high ground because it’s been made abundantly clear that they get to occupy it no matter what they do.
“On August 15, Stian Jenssen, the chief of staff for Jens Stoltenberg, surprisingly said, “I think that a solution could be for Ukraine to give up territory, and get NATO membership in return.””
People Are Dying For Inches In Ukraine, The “World’s Largest Arms Fair” by Caitlin Johnstone (SubStack)
“The reason the map of gains and losses is so heartbreaking is because so much has been given up for so very, very little. At least tens of thousands have died in this war with hundreds of thousands wounded, all for those teeny, tiny little blips on the map. Ukraine is now freckled with more landmines than anywhere else on earth, which experts say will take decades to clear. This giant deathtrap is exacerbated by the cluster munitions that are covering the land with greater and greater frequency, which will go on to detonate and kill civilians (mostly children) for years to come. The mines and artillery fire on the frontline of this war are reportedly creating tens of thousands of amputees, numbers comparable to what was seen in World War I.”
“And now we see western officials and media outlets telling us all to prepare for this war to drag on for years, potentially into the 2030s. This nonsensical violence, which even the head of NATO now admits could have been avoided by simply ceasing to amass a western military threat on Russia’s doorstep, is scheduled to drag on as long as possible for no grander reason than the advancement of US strategic interests.”
“The fact that weapons systems are being tested on human bodies to the immense benefit of war profiteers over a completely avoidable and deliberately provoked war is one of the most depraved things you can possibly imagine, and is a clear sign that we are living in a profoundly sick society.”
Modern Empire Apologia Is Mostly Just Westerners Arguing With Reality by Caitlin Johnstone (SubStack)
“[…] the US-centralized empire is confronting nations which have policies and positions in place regarding their immediate surroundings which run much deeper and go much further back than vapid liberal idealism. Russia was invaded through Ukraine by both Napoleon and Hitler. Taiwan was used by the Japanese as an unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to continuously attack the Chinese mainland during World War Two. You can disagree with the deep-rooted security concerns of these nations if you want, but what you can’t do is simply hand-wave them away just because they don’t fit in with the made-up rules the west likes to pretend it plays by.”
Forget Bellingcat. Meet a Real “Open Source” Watchdog by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“One of my major interests has become how the two narratives of counter-disinformation and counter-human trafficking are used as the primary public justifications for the social media surveillance, cellphone location-tracking, facial recognition, and modernized human intelligence industries which cropped up during the Global War on Terror and then amplified as the U.S. shifted into “Great Power” competition with China.”
“[…] there isn’t enough appreciation for what can be gleaned from carefully analyzing what governments and companies already make public. This was essentially the thesis of legendary outsider investigative journalist I.F. Stone.”
Noam Chomsky also has always said that about the U.S. Most of what it does it published unashamedly, out in the open.
Fake News von Tagesschau und Baerbock? – „Russischer Terrorangriff“ auf Marktplatz von Kostjantyniwka war laut New York Times wohl ukrainische Rakete by Florian Warweg (NachDenkSeiten)
“Es stellt sich vor dem Hintergrund dieser Recherche die Frage, wieso ausgerechnet deutsche Journalisten und Spitzen-Politiker diese Tendenz haben, in der Situation einer kriegerischen Auseinandersetzung zwischen Ukraine und Russland, in der man keiner Seite, weder der angreifenden noch der verteidigenden, vertrauen kann, so extrem einseitig und unhinterfragt Informationen einer Kriegspartei wiederzugeben. Informationen wohlgemerkt, die man zu diesem Zeitpunkt unter keinen Umständen verifizieren konnte.”
„In ihren Schritten lag etwas Leichtes“ – schwülstige Baerbock-Propaganda vom RND-Chef by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Kernthese von Kochs als Kommentar getarnter Liebeserklärung an Baerbock ist es, dass es Wladimir Putins – so Koch wörtlich – „größter Irrtum“ überhaupt war, die dynamische Ex-Trampolinspringerin mit dem federnden Schritt zu unterschätzen.”
“Glaubt man den jüngsten Umfragen, sind gerade einmal 19 Prozent der Deutschen mit der Arbeit der Bundesregierung „zufrieden“ – „sehr zufrieden“ sind übrigens exakt null Prozent; offenbar durfte Matthias Koch bei der Umfrage nicht mitmachen. Rund 60 Prozent der Befragten sind zudem mit der Arbeit von Annalena Baerbock unzufrieden und das muss man als Außenminister erst mal schaffen, galt dieses Amt doch bis dato immer als Popularitätsgarant.”
I am not happy about the trend of these short, highly animated videos. There’s a heavily mascaraed Una peering up into a camera while a permanent subtitle runs below her face, with a bouncing highlight showing up which word to read—just like on fucking Sesame Street. What has this world come to? Is this who we are now? Are web developers so semi- or barely literate that they need to consume their tutorials in 1-minute morsels, accompanied by reading helpers for small children? Jesus wept.
Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Center for Democracy and Journalism: Racialist politics in the service of US imperialism by Dominic Gustavo (WSWS)
“Of the five news articles posted from the student newspaper on the website, two link to stories discussing the center’s opening. A third publicizes that the center has been gifted yet another multi-million dollar corporate foundation grant, this from the the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The article says the foundation will provide “general, unrestricted funding” for journalism focused on “racial health disparities.” It outlines, in vague terms, work that will take place in the future.
“The center counts two subscribers to its YouTube channel, which has managed to upload a single video five months ago. This is a two-minute long clip of Obama endorsing the center. The video has 79 views as of this writing.
“The World Socialist Web Site reached out to the center for clarification, asking how many journalism courses were being taught and how many students were part of these courses. No response has yet been received.”
“Given the Center for Democracy and Journalism’s limited output, it is fair to ask of Hannah-Jones’ credentials to head up a heavily endowed university studies program. She had managed to write a mere 23 articles over her seven years working at the New York Times before the major corporate foundations granted her the Howard sinecure—and after she had threatened to sue the University of North Carolina for not speeding her through to tenured professor status at another endowed professorship that had been promised her.”
Who Lusts for Certainty Lusts for Lies by D.R.H. (Etymology Online)
“The text of Etymonline is built entirely from print sources, and is done entirely by human beings. Ngrams are not. They are unreliable, a sloppy product of an ignorant technology, one made to sell and distract, one never taught the difference between “influence” and “inform.”
“Why are they on the site at all? Because now, online, pictures win and words lose. The war is over; they won. Just remember: Ngrams are unreliable.”
From a comment on the article,
“The global internet already prefers a graph to a paragraph, and thinks a fact-shaped answer given by computer calculation must be truth.”
Bjorn Lomborg: How Our Climate Fixation Hurts the World’s Poor by Nick Gillespie (Reason)
“[…] develop pragmatic, relatively low-cost solutions to issues such as tuberculosis, malaria, lack of education, and access to food.”
“He argues that for about $35 billion a year—a little more than half of what the U.S. spends annually on humanitarian aid—these policies could save 4.2 million lives and generate an extra $1.1 trillion in value every year.”
I haven’t watched or listened to this, but let’s assume that the guy has his heart is in the right place. I wouldn’t characterize the problem as an obsession with climate. What we have is an obsession with pretending to care about the climate while still focusing laser-like on maintaining at least parity, if not an upward trend, on quality of life for the people that matter—namely, the elite (top 10% say) in OECD nations.
J. G. Ballard’s Brilliant, Not “Good” Writing by Tom McCarthy (The Paris Review)
“Not only are his rhythmic cycles, in which phrases and images return in orders and arrangements that mutate and reconfigure themselves as though following some algorithm that remains beyond our grasp, at once incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very model and essence of poetry; but, mirroring the way that information, advertising, propaganda, public (and private) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, constitute a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary genre.”
As with Gaddis.
The Seat of the Soul by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“Within six months, a much more alarming figure was confirmed, first by the CDC, and in quick succession by the WHO: exactly 100% of patients who had recently received an abdominal ultrasound were found to be carrying an “onion” (in those early days it still had no official name). A comprehensive study of research cadavers kept in medical schools, moreover, yielded up an equally alarming result: precisely 0% of people who died prior to September, 2023, were found to be in possession of this new organ. Is that what it was? An organ ? Some experts argued that it was rather an accretion, like a sort of soft pearl in the body, caused by some new environmental irritant. Others, somewhat further out on the margins, argued it was a parasite, a bioweapon, the fetal stage of a gestating alien hatchling. The truth is no one had any idea what it was, or how it got there.”
The Night the Cops Tried to Break Thelonious Monk by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“As a composer Powell was nearly as inventive as Monk. In songs like “Dance of the Infidels,” “Tempus Fugit”, “Oblivion” and “Hallucinations,” Powell seemed to be developing a new vocabulary for music. Literary critic Harold Bloom cited Powell’s “Un Poco Loco” as one of the greatest works of twentieth century American art. He made the piano sing.”
“Powell spent the next five years in Paris, playing small clubs, working off-and-on with Dexter Gordon, panhandling for bottles of cheap wine. He played mainly standards, because he found it hard to learn new material. Even then, he often cut his sets short. Sometimes he would stop in the middle of a song, stare blankly at the keyboard, then erupt in an inchoate rage. Powell, now stricken with TB, returned to New York in 1964 for an engagement at Birdland, but he just didn’t have the goods anymore. He seemed to get lost in his own songs. The run was cut short. In the next four years he only performed twice in public, and both gigs were disasters. And then Powell was living on the streets, coughing up blood from the TB and a bad liver. He died on July 1, 1966 of malnutrition. To put it another way, Bud Powell, the man Bill Evans called the most talented jazz musician of his time, starved to death on the streets of Manhattan. He was only 41.”
“Monk took long walks in the night after Nellie came home, composing new songs in his head, re-structuring old standards into startling new forms, listening to the jazz and blues pouring out of the Harlem clubs. Sometimes he would go over to Brooklyn and play in black-owned bars, places that openly defied the New York Liquor Authority’s ban on cardless musicians,”
“Critics largely remained confounded by Monk’s style. He wasn’t as flashy or fast as Art Tatum and he wasn’t as transcendent as Powell, the great virtuoso. Monk’s idiom was for crooked passages and tricky time signatures, punctuated by strange silences and negative spaces, as if he had stripped the songs down to only essential elements. Essential for Monk, that is.”
How Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus Broke the Hollywood Blacklists by Taylor Dorrell (Jacobin)
“May 1, 1946 was an unparalleled May Day for the Left in America. Recently discharged veterans joined with teachers, writers, artists, lawyers, and other workers to march triumphantly through Manhattan. “The number of paraders, as we counted them, was over 150,000, and when they packed Union Square, cheering left-wing and Communist leaders and speakers,” the Communist writer Howard Fast wrote in his memoir, Being Red, “one would have said that the future of the left in America was extremely bright and of course they would have been wrong.” By May Day of 1948, the same Communists who were celebrated only two years earlier became the targets of violent reactionary crowds chanting “Kill a commie for Christ!” Fast was leading the Communist Party’s “culture block” made up of thousands of academics, artists, and writers who quickly found themselves in a street fight with anti-communist students from a nearby parochial school.”
“Among them was the group’s highest-paid screenwriter and also the committee’s most unfriendly witness: Dalton Trumbo. “[Y]our job,” Trumbo told chief investigator Robert E. Stripling after he instructed Trumbo to answer “Yes” or “No,” “is to ask questions and mine is to answer them. . . . I shall answer in my own words. Very many questions can be answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ only by a moron or a slave.””
“After serving their time, John Wexley, Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner, Ian Hunter, Dalton Trumbo, and many other blacklistees lived in exile in Mexico City, seeking work and refuge from the persistent harassment of the FBI. One day, the Canadian-born blacklisted screenwriter Hugo Butler dragged Dalton and Cleo Trumbo out to watch some bullfighting. One bullfight ended in an indulto , or pardoning of the bull, which is given after the crowd waves handkerchiefs in support of a bull’s showcase of bravery. The event inspired Trumbo’s film, The Brave One (1956), a drama following a boy and his bull. The film went on to win an Oscar under Trumbo’s pseudonym, Robert Rich. It was the first fracture in the wall that was the blacklists.”
“Audiences flocked to see a movie whose title screen displayed the names of two convicted Communist subversives, Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo.”
“The story of Spartacus is also the story of the story of Spartacus. Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo were two of the thousands of Communists in the United States who struggled to survive through the Red Scare. It was a time when, as Trumbo put it, “devils persuad[ed] us that freedom is best defended by surrendering it altogether.””
And here we are again, sick with the same disease.
We have forgotten nearly everything about this time. We are not one whit better. Utter societal and moral stasis, philosophical retardation, ethical atrophy. We are steering hard for a second Red Scare, but this one will be quieter and more effective. People will just disappear from the conversation, their volume turned down. It is much easier to create Emmanuel Goldsteins (Wikipedia) these days.
Coming Attraction by Fritz Leiber (Project Gutenberg)
“Before it occurred to me that I would be going out again, I automatically tore a tab from the film strip under my shirt. I developed it just to be sure. It showed that the total radiation I’d taken that day was still within the safety limit. I’m not phobic about it, as so many people are these days, but there’s no point in taking chances.”
A True Movie Star: On the Career of Channing Tatum by Matt Zoller Seitz in June 2022 (Roger Ebert.com)
“No matter who he’s playing, or what scene the character is entangled in, Tatum always defaults to seeming like he’s not in on the joke—or barely aware of it and not letting on because he fears he might not understand it, which is just as funny as being oblivious. One can imagine him reading this piece and then forgetting all about it on purpose, because self-consciousness is the last thing an actor, dancer, comedian, drama star, or action hero needs.”
“Far, far below the deepest delving of the dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day.”
Interview with Siri Hustvedt by Noga Arikha in June 2022 (The White Review)
“The shifters, I and you, are difficult to master, and children often reverse them. After all, why is a person ‘I’ one moment and ‘you’ the next?”
Here Are My Actual Dumb Opinions by Freddie deBoer in June 2022 (SubStack)
“I believe that achieving a just society cannot happen within a framework of capitalism, which inherently and necessarily increases inequality over time and which depends on exploitation for its basic functions. I believe in the peaceful and democratic replacement of capitalism with some kind of a socialist system. The exact dimensions of that system remain unclear, but they will surely involve removing basic human needs like food, shelter, clothing, medicine, education, and health care from market mechanisms; collectivizing ownership of the productive apparatus of society so that it may be used for the good of all, free from the profit motive; dramatically reducing the amount of inequality in material goods between different people and different groups; the gradual reduction (and perhaps eventual elimination) of what we conventionally consider the state, and bringing an end to the kind of permanent bureaucratic class which is inherently counter-revolutionary; an eventual end to our current rigid concept of paid labor, with guarantees that all people enjoy a certain standard of living so that they may engage in productive work that is not necessarily remunerative in the capitalist sense, thanks to an ever-growing technological abundance; and adopting a truly egalitarian, democratic system that protects the right to unpopular opinions, defends those who disagree with the ruling sentiment of the time, enshrines the will of the majority into tangible public action, and remains responsive to changing public sentiment.”
“I am a civil libertarian, in a way that was once perfectly common on the left. I believe that the purpose of human society is to reduce suffering, promote well-being, and engender freedom. Far from a bourgeois or capitalist concern, the pursuit of personal freedom is as Marx argued a natural and beneficial endeavor that reflects straightforward human desires to live without coercion. We should therefore maximize personal freedom to the degree to which it is possible to do so without hurting our ability to provide for the material need and comfort of all people.”
This was an uneven, but overall quite interesting discussion about pedagogy, the importance of writing, and LLMs. The LLM part ended up being quite small because you really have to consider to what degree is most writing trash already. Why write? Why do people write? Why do people communicate? Is writing better than video? What happens if you can’t read or write? What does a world in which you navigate exclusively by video and audio look like? Is it dumber? Is it capable of elucidating nuance and questioning power to the same degree that writing has classically done for us?
On that topic,
“Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experiences in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.”
Family Tree Wisdom by Jim Nielsen
“[…] if you climb a rope every day, you’ll never not be able to do it.”
“I’m not young enough to know everything.”
“What you’re saying might be true, but I don’t believe a word of it.”
At 00:02:00,
“Norm: If you go back as far as I do, the fact of the matter is, that what they teach now in college is what used to be taught in high school. […] There are many students who enter college who’ve never read a book. I mean that literally. I teach in those schools. I don’t fault them. I ask, ‘what did you do in English class?’ They say, ‘the teacher read us books.’ You can laugh, but that is literally the case. You will have many first-year college students who never wrote a paper. They don’t know what it means to write a paper.”
At 00:03:30, after having very eloquently and long-windedly come to a recognition that she should definitely stop fighting on the Internet with people arguing not only in bad faith (no pun intended), but also from an intellectually diminished standpoint, she says,
“Briahna: I have limited emotional energy left to not just call people stupid to their face. I feel like I’ve been spending the last five or six years of my life going out of my way—in part, because of who I am—to decline from saying ‘you are a fucking moron.’ … like 30 times a day.
“Norm: Briahna, I think ‘fucking moron’ is a perfect segue to the topic today, Ibram X. Kendi. [both laughing uproariously]”
At 44:30, a snippet with Cornel West includes,
“No, I am not first and foremost an anti-racist. I am first and foremost a lover of my mama—and it leads to anti-racist practice. That’s the second step. I love, whatever, I love the Asians, I love the Jewish folks, I’m gonna be against any kind of mistreatment of them. So, anti-racism is part of a larger, humanistic project that’s predicated on an affirmation of the humanity of people. Because if you’re anti-racist, you’re really nothing but a parasite on the host. You’re still looking at yourself through the lens of the racist—and you’re just “anti” them. And, one of the distinctive features of the racist gays is that they’ve lost contact with the humanity of the people they’re objectifying. They’ve lost contact with the humanity of the people they’re putting down. Why would you also want to do that? You don’t begin with them [racists]. You begin with the humanity of the people that you’re talking about.”
This is a brilliant mind. Future president of the United States, people. This is man who has assimilated a tremendous amount of knowledge and human experience and distilled it into something new, something that cannot be so easily swayed by superficially convincing argument. We need experts like this who can not only contribute new thought, but can also help us eliminate unproductive thoughts that we’ve beaten back before, but keep cropping back up because they appeal to the inexpert.
In the comments to this video, it was interesting to see that other people noticed that they were often talking past one another. One person said that it was HER podcast and that she’d been the “epitome of patience.” I responded,
“Really? That just goes to show how subjective conversations like this are. My impression was that he had to reformulate his points several times simply because she wasn’t understanding what he, for m, at least, quite obviously meant to convey in his first formulation. I think it’s useful to take the time to play through this because she’s probably not the only one who didn’t get his point the first time. As to it being HER podcast … this is basically an interview show and I’m watching because it says “Norm Finkelstein” not because it says Briahna. She’s fine, but she often has the less flexible mind of the two participants in her interviews. That’s an admirable place to be, though, considering the general quality of her guests (e.g., I recently watched a good interview with Corey Robin where she played the “do we really need to know how to write?” side of the debate).”
At 58:45,
“Norm: You must be able to distinguish between what you called a moment ago, a concept and a brand.
“Briahna: That’s fine. If it’s just a brand, we can cut this off short. Even if it’s just a branding exercise, he succeeded in that. That’s all I need to attribute to him. I honestly … we don’t need to be on this for another ten minutes, Norm. But, that’s my point. He did a successful branding exercise. Why’s that so hard to just acknowledge and move past?
“Norm: OK. There’s a simple answer to that. It’s called—and maybe this is going to sound very prissy and old-fashioned—it’s called respect for knowledge. It’s one thing to coin a brand. It’s quite another if you respect a field of intellectual inquiry and you respect the vast labors that were invested in creating that field of inquiry. To then call a brand a “concept”, to heap awards, tens of millions of dollars, a center for anti-racism, on somebody who just created a brand or a word. It’s so disrespectful of that struggle, the hard, honest labor, effectively beginning with W.E.B. Dubois.”
Here, we get her impatience with what is actually the core argument, the more interesting argument about someone like Ibram X. Kendi —namely, why did he become so famous? What damage did that do? I can’t tell if she’s wicked smart and pretending to be a dumb foil, but I suppose it doesn’t matter because, at any rate, she teed up a good question for Norm to answer. I don’t know if she listened to the answer, though.
Her contention is “none” because she doesn’t seem to be intelligent enough to acknowledge that pushing his kind of ideas to the forefront necessarily takes time away from other, more useful, ideas. Or she doesn’t care, because all ideas are equally bullshit—and all “brands” are bullshit.
It’s interesting that she continues to value her own opinions about Kendi over Norm’s, even after it’s become blindingly obvious that he’s actually read Kendi’s books and work—and that she has not. She’s just followed tweet-storms about him.
In case you think I’m being unfair, after his statement, she continued to berate him that “obviously, there’s an appeal to Kendi’s ideas”, which, while true, is irrelevant in a debate between two people who purport to not be representing the opinions of “fucking morons” (as she noted at the top of the podcast). What is the point of acknowledging that an idea is appealing to the easily lulled? Everything is appealing to them. You don’t have to worry about what morons think, because they don’t think, by definition.
The point is that Kendi’s work has been used as a cultural weapon that works against what might be a cohort that would agitate against the political elite. That relatively well-educated cohort is going to spend time thinking, even if only because they think they should be doing that because it increases their cachet in society.
Their thoughts have to be channeled and focused so that they don’t think the wrong ones. Instead of thinking about how everything is a problem of class, and that there is a class war being waged by elites, those elites promote brands like Kendi to intellectually cow people into thinking that everything is about race.
Even if we were to magically solve some problems of race in the U.S., the underlying class war would still be raging, with wealth and power would still flowing upward. That is the point that even Norm Finkelstein was not making very well.
The corporate and elite appropriation of something like Kendi’s anti-racism—or BLM and rainbow flags before it—is a bellwether. It is the way that the elites prevent dangerous ideas from coming to the forefront. It is deliberate. It is unsurprising that it’s a scam. It also happens to hurt a lot of people whose careers are ruined by accusations of anti-racism—conveniently enough, many people who would otherwise be promoting dangerous thought, like class being the root of the problem rather than race. In this, the elites wield Kendi as a weapon to cow their opponents, or, if they refuse to be cowed, to eliminate them entirely from public discourse.
Briahna eventually expresses her point better (covering a few of the points that I make above), but it takes her a long time get there—and she does so in an incredibly exasperated voice that indicates that she thought she’d already expressed these ideas in her muddled half-sentences before. But, maybe I just understand Norm in shorthand better than Briahna. I felt a few times like she was forced into making a more lengthy characterization of her argument that ended up being much more articulate, nuanced, and useful than her initially terse and oversimplified formulation, then tacked onto the end that that was the same thing as she’d said in the first place, which was patently untrue. I wonder if it’s just her avoiding ever having been wrong, which doesn’t really matter, but tends to get in the way.
I think that they both blur the distinction between racism and discrimination. Everyone discriminates. Not everyone is a racist. Do you think fat people are kind of gross? What about ugly people? People with bad teeth? Terrible hair? Bad fashion sense? Too many tattoos? Dumb people? Which distinctions are you allowed to draw?
If you discriminate against someone because they’re dumb, is that wrong? If you don’t let them operate a steam-shovel because they’re black, you’re a racist. If you don’t let them do it because they’ve never done it before, is that wrong, too? Aren’t you limiting their range of experience based on distinctions you’ve made based on them lacking characteristics that they lack through no fault of their own? It’s not their fault that they were never given an opportunity to learn how to operate a steam shovel because of a racist world, so you not letting them do it now just promulgates that racism. That way lies madness.
It’s why Archer’s plea “I wanna fly the plane!” is so funny.
What if you had a news anchor who could only speak Spanish, but wanted to work on an English-language broadcast? Is it discriminatory not to hire them because of that? What if they’re latino? Is it fair to claim that they weren’t hired because they’re latino when they’re obviously woefully unqualified?
Not only that, but, as Norm points out at 01:19:15,
“It had never occurred to me before that, when they say black IQ scores are lower than white IQ scores—who’s defining who’s black? […] my point is, that these are very complicated concepts and, for me, I recoil, […] at attaching the label “concept” to something which is just a brand like Adidas. I can’t accept that, not because I’m some important scholar, but because I respect the intellectual labor of those who wrestled with these concepts and produced serious scholarship.”
As noted above, it’s also just a waste of time and energy, deliberately aimed at frivolous topics that don’t endanger elites.
The scholarship is deep and stretches back many decades, if not a century, and has included the thoughts of many intellectuals who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. The shortcuts that we make—”black” or “white”—is actually a spectrum. One that used to include “quadroon” and “octaroon”, which seems like utter madness today. The only way out of this morass is to just stop considering race a distinction at all.
It’s similar to the abortion debate. It’s very easy to be lulled into thinking that you’re either “for” or “against” abortion—or, more precisely, “a woman’s right to choose”. But, when you are forced to think about the mechanics of it, which kinds of abortions do you support? State-ordained ones? After 10 weeks? After 20 weeks? 30? What if the child is viable? Unviable? The mother’s life is endangered?
The problem really is that there are some debates in which everyone feels qualified to take part, but for which we are woefully unequipped. People burbling along at a superficial level feel slighted when others who’ve already plumbed the depth dismiss their arguments. On the other hand, it’s also not so hard for those who’ve been involved in a subject for a long time to have overcomplicated it, often beyond recognition, and, sometimes, because that’s become personally lucrative. Still, the danger that dilettantes drive policy is real.
At 01:26:00, Norm says,
“That woke culture is completely, totally bankrupt. That’s the problem. It’s not only bankrupt, but it does huge damage. I went out […] every day for those George Floyd demonstrations. For six weeks, I went out every day. And then, when I saw what it turned into? $90M for BLM? And it all just disappeared? Wild horses couldn’t get me to come out for another demonstration. And I’m pretty committed. Wild horses. And now, the money’s going to dry up for African American Study Centers because they’re gonna say, ‘you know those people. Lurking behind every black person is an Al Sharpton.’ That’s exactly right. That’s what everyone’s gonna think. And now, you’re gonna say, ‘that’s because they were racist to begin with,‘ and I’ll grant that. But guess what? Why help it out? Why facilitate it. No integrity whatsoever. You have this charlatan and hustler. […] doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.”
“This culture is not just bankrupt. It’s retrograde. It does real damage. […Ibram X. Kendi] is an exemplar of the damage. Reduced the field to idiotic brands. Discredited the giving of money and donations and nurturing of the field.”
Briahna wraps up by defending that it wasn’t the left that built Kendi, but that’s just defending yourself. There is a large machine that calls itself left that built him. Kendi’s just a scam artist. But what’s the point of bringing in the “no true Scotsman” argument? She distinguishes between leftists and liberals, but very few people see the distinction. She defends the left by saying that they were more involved in the UAW strike rather than caring about wokeness and Kendi. But, Norm says that this is evasion—because Kendi is everywhere, and his ideas fill the bookstores that influence a lot more minds than the left could ever dream of doing. You don’t have to pay attention to every little stupid thing, but you should be more aware of how well the rest of the populace is being distracted by things that aren’t your agenda. It speaks to the emptiness of the left’s political ability in the States that it thinks it can ignore such large changes in intellectual movements.
I like that Norm managed to provoke her into blowing up at the end of her own podcast, complaining that she “doesn’t understand why everyone wants to talk to her about Marianne Williamson”—as a podcast host. She seems to get mad a lot (and I’ve observed this in other shows) when people try to change the topic from what she’d like to talk about. Luckily—or unfortunately—she has excellent guests who are often quite interesting.
A comment on the video summarizes it well,
“Very disappointing behaviour from Briahana at the end. Norman was trying to explain, politely, how dangerous and empty it can be to elevate certain people with no substance, no track record, only with nice slogans/brands. Briahana dismisses Ibram X but fails to see the potential same issue with Marianne W. who apparently she admires.”
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who thinks that Norm towers over Briahna intellectually and that, despite her best efforts, seems to rub her the wrong way. A perfectly reasonable response from her would have been that she’s voting for Marianne as a spite vote, even though she knows it doesn’t matter. Instead, she doubled down, imbuing her choice with more support for the candidate’s policies than she seems to actually have.
The forbidden topics by Drew DeVault
“Critics of radical free speech, victims of hate speech, and marginalized people of all kinds began to appear in hacker communities. The things they had to say were not comfortable.
“The free speech absolutists among the old guard, faced with this discomfort, developed a tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them. They were not the target of the hate, so it did not make them personally uncomfortable, and defending it would maintain the pretense of defending free speech, of stalwartly holding the line on a treasured part of their personal hacker ethic.”
I don’t think that’s it at all, but the author seems to have a completely different axe to grind. He complains that his post was quickly moderated off of the front of Hacker News, but the post is overly long and pretty much doesn’t belong on Hacker News. I guess you could just let it get ignored out of existence, but it was banned. Sure, fine, maybe there’s a problem. Or maybe the author has made enough of a pain-in-the-ass of himself that he just gets a priori banned now.
There is a difference between defending free speech and defending a person’s right to say what they want, no matter the context. If you’re going to Thanksgiving dinner at you’re aunt’s house, then I’m not going to stand there and defend your right to say “cunt” throughout the meal, discomfiting everyone else and ruining the evening (or, most likely, afternoon). You’re allowed to say the word, but not everywhere you like. You can even say it at Thanksgiving, but expect to be thrown out of the house if you persist.
It’s just like I can write the word “cunt” on my own personal blog and very rightly claim that anyone who doesn’t like it, doesn’t have to come here and read my blog.
This is several-part, and overall three-hour, interview with Sheldon Wolin, a man who lived through most of the 20th century as an academic in the United States. The interview takes place about one year before he died, at 93. He is incredibly articulate and fluent, and capable of remembering seemingly everything he’d experienced, as well as expressing it wonderfully.
He lived through the Great Depression, World War II (he fought in the Pacific Theater), the McCarthy Era (HUAC), the upheaval of the 60s, the fight against apartheid in the 70s. It all helped him build his theory of inverted totalitarianism, his description of the core tenet of the American Empire. There is much here that I already knew, but it was expressed wonderfully by Wolin, as well as interlocutor, the always-excellent Chris Hedges.
zells − Enabling Software Literacy by Zells (GitHub)
“In a world increasingly controlled by software, understanding how the systems that we interact with every day work, can eliminate a lot of frustration and superstition. Just as knowing why apples fall down and aeroplanes fly up, the citizens of the 21st century need to know that computers are not magical boxes but composed of dynamic models.”
The False Promise of ChatGPT by Noam Chomsky (New York Times)
“That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.”
“The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.”
“Here’s an example. Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation: “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking.”
“To be right, it must be possible to be wrong. Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism. Human-style thought is based on possible explanations and error correction, a process that gradually limits what possibilities can be rationally considered.”
“The theory that apples fall to earth because that is their natural place (Aristotle’s view) is possible, but it only invites further questions. (Why is earth their natural place?) The theory that apples fall to earth because mass bends space-time (Einstein’s view) is highly improbable, but it actually tells you why they fall. True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things.”
“ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.”
We can only laugh or cry at their popularity is an appropriate summation of many things that are happening today.
I only hope that this isn’t a trick being played on us, with an LLM posing as Noam Chomsky. I wouldn’t put it past the New York Times, at this point. At any rate, I find the text intriguing and well-written.
The State of Async Rust: Runtimes by Matthias Endler & Simon Brüggen (Corrode)
“Async Rust might be more memory-efficient than threads, at the cost of complexity and worse ergonomics. As an example, if the function were async and you called it outside of a runtime, it would compile, but not run. Futures do nothing unless being polled. This is a common footgun for newcomers.”
“As an important caveat, threads are not available or feasible in all environments, such as embedded systems. My context for this article is primarily conventional server-side applications that run on top of platforms like Linux or Windows.
“I would like to add that threaded code in Rust undergoes the same stringent safety checks as the rest of your Rust code: It is protected from data races, null dereferences, and dangling references, ensuring a level of thread safety that prevents many common pitfalls found in concurrent programming, Since there is no garbage collector, there never will be any stop-the-world pause to reclaim memory. Traditional arguments against threads simply don’t apply to Rust — fearless concurrency is your friend!”
“Keep your domain logic synchronous and only use async for I/O and external services. Following these guidelines will make your code more composable and accessible. On top of that, the error messages of sync Rust are much easier to reason about than those of async Rust.”
This is good advice for any language.
“Inside Rust, there is a smaller, simpler language that is waiting to get out. It is this language that most Rust code should be written in.”
The convenience of .NET by Richard Lander (.NET Blog)
“We use convenient APIs in some places in .NET libraries, even though they are not the maximum speed. They makes the code small, simple and easy to understand and that can be more valuable than maximum speed.”“That’s what one of our architects had to say about our approach to our codebase, even in a team dedicated to high performance. We like to write convenient code whenever we can. We’d rather focus our efforts on building more features and optimizing APIs that are likely to get called in a hot loop.
“The other side of the coin is that the more efficient the convenience APIs are, the more we’ll be able to use them without concern in our codebase. It makes the team as a whole more efficient. We try to make convenience APIs as efficient as possible within the confines of what the shape of the API allows.”
“Many of the
IndexOf{Any}
calls are actually on spans now, rather than direct calls tostring.IndexOf{Any}
. While the spans are frequently pointing into strings, these APIs often operate on slices (after callingstring.AsSpan
, internally).“This family of APIs have been improved a lot, using multiple techniques to improve performance. For example, these APIs uses vector CPU instructions to search for search terms in a string. In .NET 8, support for AVX512 was added. That’s not yet relevant for most hardware, however it means that
IndexOf
will be ready for newer hardware when you’ve got it.”
“Out of the Software Crisis”: Gardening by Jim Nielsen
“Software is the insights of the development team made manifest.”“[…] it’s precisely why churn is so costly to organizations. The insights a team of people has over time, and then responds to by evolving their software, is how a product grows and comes to fruition.
“Cut out the people who hold the insights and you tear out the roots of the software.
“Software is the lessons we learned along the way.
“Great software requires growing, a growing together of the team, their insights, and the technological possibilities of the time.”
Making Large Language Models work for you by Simon Willison
“LLMs have started to make me redefine what I consider to be expertise.
“I’ve been using Git for 15 years, but I couldn’t tell you what most of the options in Git do.
“I always felt like that meant I was just a Git user, but nowhere near being a Git expert.
“Now I use sophisticated Git options all the time, because ChatGPT knows them and I can prompt it to tell me what to do.
“Knowing every option of these tools off-by-heart isn’t expertise, that’s trivia—that helps you compete in a bar quiz.
“Expertise is understanding what they do, what they can do and what kind of questions you should ask to unlock those features.”
Well, welcome to the party. Expertise has always been exactly what you’ve described. It’s having an understanding of a subject—wisdom about it, if you like—born of extensive familiarity. But it’s never been about rote memorization of things. Sure, experts tend to have to look things up less, just because they’ve done something you’re asking about so many times before that they can’t help but remember how it’s done. My expertise in programming techniques, programming languages, and development environments leads me to expect more, to be able to conceive of a feature I’d like to have and to go looking for it. A lot of people can’t do that. So, they’re not experts.
The only that really is about deep familiarity and rote memorization is vocabulary, the toolbox from which you draw in order to express your thoughts. When I want to type a word like “morass” and can’t remember whether it has two r’s or two s’s—or both—and then use a real-time spellchecker to test which version is correct, only to realize that it doesn’t have an ‘e’ at the end, I’m still expressing my own thoughts, in words that I know.
When I use an LLM to generate entire swaths of text, I’m no longer expressing anything of myself. It’s not my thoughts. It’s words generated from a kernel that came from me. It’s leveraging, sure, but it’s a fundamentally different expression. It contributes much more text—which others have to wade through—from much less, not only effort, but much less thought. You’re essentially cheating people who you’ve tricked into reading what you’ve gotten the LLM to write for you.
So, yes, expertise ineluctably comprises at least one skill: an expert is someone who’s amassed a formidable arsenal of tools with which to express their thoughts. If you don’t have thoughts, you’re not an expert. If you rely on tools to express your thoughts for you, then you’re faking it. However, you might be able to eventually fake it well enough to provide value to society? I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
There are some tasks for which immediately available, immanent expertise is essential, where the ability to quickly correlate information from disparate sources is exactly what the interlocutor is looking for. There are others where a delay is OK. Say, you need to know how to light a campfire. It’s great if you have someone in the group who already knows how to do that, but, you can also just look it up and learn how to build a fire in five minutes. If you need to know the temperature, likewise.
Where immanent expertise is important is when you don’t have a data connection. If your keeping your expertise off-site, then you run the risk of being cut off from it.
A task for which immanent expertise is currently very advantageous, if not essential, is debating, participating in meetings, talking to other people. The thing that greases the wheels of civilization, in other words. Being able to properly express what you’re thinking in real-time is helpful. The current idea of offloading to a web search or LLM prompt incurs too much delay to be a viable replacement, or even an alternative.
Can you imagine it? Instead of learning a language, with vocabulary and practice in elocution, one party expresses a truncated set of half-baked bullet points that they balloon with an LLM into several paragraphs of text that they then send, unread, to their counterpart, who sends the text, unread, to their own LLM, which distills it back down to a few bullet points, which, one hopes, bear some semblance to the original ones, but it doesn’t really matter because both parties are, at this point, so under-equipped to be communicating in the first place that it’s a crap-shoot as to whether they can express or understand any concepts worth discussing.
All that said, and I honestly can’t see the advantage of having an LLM answer these questions rather than a search engine. I manage to quickly extract answers from DuckDuckGo every damned day without feeling like I’m restricted because I didn’t get to ask 12 questions to an LLM to refine the answer, or ask the search engine to answer as a goat in a tree. What absolute madness is this?
What’s mind-boggling is that this is a very smart guy who only hit upon the idea to use a tool to “remember” Git commands for him when he could do it with an LLM. He still uses Git from the command line, but he now pipes his questions through an LLM first—e.g., he asks it how to “undo last Git commit” and it tells him git reset HEAD-1
(which, honestly, seems kind of intuitive enough to remember)—and then executes it on the command line. And then he calls this “efficient”. I’m blown away that he’s never heard of a Git UI. I just type Ctrl + Shift + K from long years of muscle memory using SmartGit.
This is a question I have for anyone who asks me about how to leverage LLMs in programming: are you even using the other tools we already have available?
Rated M by My_Memes_Will_Cure_U (Reddit)
“I started up Destiny 2 yesterday and burst into tears because I forgot I had set my Steam name to “reeses penis butter cups” but instead of censoring penis, it censored the “butt” in butter. This game is rated “M”.”
“You don’t have a skeleton inside of you. You’re a brain. You are inside of a skeleton. You’re piloting a bone mech that’s using meat armor.”
Published by marco on 27. Sep 2023 22:38:38 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The Roger Rabbit Theory by Taras Grescoe (Straphanger)
“In 1887, inventor Frank Sprague outfitted Richmond, Virginia, with a system of 40 sparking trolleys that drew power from a cat’s cradle of overhead wires. Streetcars quickly became the dominant mode of urban transportation in North America, carrying eleven billion passengers a year by the end of the First World War.”
“The Red Cars, as the big interurban trolleys were known, could be seen swaying through orange groves between Santa Monica and Arrowhead Hot Springs, and clattering over the sandy margins of Newport Beach all the way up to the tavern at snow-topped Mt. Lowe; on a straightaway, they could hit 60 miles an hour. At their peak in 1926, they laced together four counties and 50 communities, mostly along private rights-of-way; together with the Yellow Cars of the Los Angeles Electric Railway, Huntington’s network of smaller streetcars which ensured local service in central Los Angeles, they constituted the most highly ramified public-transport system in the world, with over 1,500 miles (2,400 kms) of track.”
It was ahead of its time.
“The result was a new kind of city, where walkable residential centers could be physically distant from downtown, but still within easy commuting distance. As long as the Red and Yellow Cars were running smoothly, Los Angeles delivered its residents both spacious living and a modicum of urbanity.”
“As car commuters and shoppers joined the half million workers who converged on the downtown every day, traffic ground to a halt, and Huntington’s Red and Yellow Cars routinely ran sixty minutes late during rush hour. To unclog the streets, the newly formed City Planning Commission took a radical step: on a hazy spring day in 1920, they decided to ban on-street parking during business hours. The plan worked—at least at first. For the first time in years, the streetcars ran on schedule, and workers got to their offices on time.”
“[…] federal grand jury found the corporations that owned City Lines guilty of antitrust violations and fined their directors one dollar each. They were convicted, however, not of conspiring to rid America of streetcars, but of colluding to agree to buy only GM and Mack buses. After the war, GM and the other conspirators sold their stock in City Lines and got out of the transit business altogether.”
“Just those little thing make such a big difference. Like the actress’s protest for her movie opening, a petty, selfish act can have enormous consequences.”
“[…] victim of the irresistible American love affair with the automobile. Trolleys, it was true, were having trouble operating as automobiles brought them to a near standstill in downtowns across the United States. Pacific Electric, forced to keep its fares at a nickel and maintain service on low-demand lines, saw its business stolen on profitable routes by unregulated “jitneys” and bus companies; its efficiency was further reduced by accidents as reckless drivers criss-crossed the tracks.”
Without regulation or a common vision, selfish rich people get what they want and to hell with everyone else—to hell with the community, to hell with any infrastructure that doesn’t benefit them. Those same assholes have retreated to helicopters and private jets now.
Unsweet Dreams by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“As the world turns ever more swiftly into a new order, Americans need and deserve foreign policy professionals who are serious, imaginative and a little courageous. There are plenty of such people among us, but this past week is a bitter reminder there is no place for them in Washington.”
“Reforming the multilaterals, those instruments of coercion, in favor of those nations they have forced-marched into neoliberal orthodoxies since they were created at Bretton Woods as World War II ended and the U.S. began dreaming of global empire? Come now. Joe Biden has sold Americans on a lot of silly things over the decades, but this is a silly thing too far. I haven’t read a word anywhere in the non–Western press indicating any member of the G–20 majority takes this thought in the slightest seriously.”
“However we name these sorts of spectacles, they are at bottom saddening. There is so much to be done in the world, and America could be key to doing much of it. But its purported leaders prefer dreams to responsibilities, it seems—so the past 10 days of faux-diplomacy tell us.”
86 Cents For a Day of Work Is a Reality For Most Incarcerated People by Tina Vásquez and Derek R. Trumbo, Sr. (Scheer Post)
“Steve works as a landscaper at the Northpoint Training Center, where he says he does his best to try to make the prison “look good.” Rain or shine, Monday through Friday, Steve spends eight hours a day mowing, hauling gravel, groundskeeping, painting, maintaining the field, laying concrete, and performing other backbreaking manual labor. For this work, he receives $1.76 a day—and there is no chance of a raise. These already meager funds rapidly dwindle once he purchases basic necessities from the prison.”
“Like many other prisons, Northpoint provides the bare minimum: five rolls of toilet paper, one tube of shaving cream, four razors, one tube of toothpaste, and four bars of soap for the month. Items like deodorant, shampoo, and fingernail clippers are seen as privileges and must be paid for out of pocket—often at prices that far exceed the regular cost in grocery stores.”
“Like many people who become estranged from their families and larger support systems due to incarceration, Thomas has no family, friends, or outside support he can rely on when his release date comes. “Upon my release, I’ll still have many problems and obstacles to contend with,” Thomas said. “Before I can actually begin the process of building a life for myself, I’ll have to rely on food stamps, government assistance, and live in a halfway house until I get a job. Then I’ll have to save until I can afford to pay rent, buy furniture, and keep the lights on. Only then will I be allowed to leave the halfway house.””
““I am not one of those guys that sits around all day doing nothing, expecting someone else to take care of me,” Thomas said. “Even here in prison, I work eight-hour days, five days a week like I would be doing on the street. The difference is that here, I make $2.66 a day doing what I could easily make $18-20 an hour doing outside the prison fences. I currently subsist on $50 a month, and there are no 401(k) plans in prison.””
“If Mike skips coffee for a few months, he’ll save $10. But this poses a larger question: Are incarcerated people entitled to any items or routines that give them even the slightest sense of normalcy? “I don’t have to drink coffee. I know that, but it’s the one thing I can do to feel normal in this place. You know? Drink a cup of coffee when I wake up—even if it does taste like worm dirt,” Mike said.”
The Pedagogy of Power by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“It is not that the criticisms leveled against these philosophers are incorrect. They were blinded by their prejudices, as we are blinded by our prejudices. They had a habit of elevating their own cultures above others. They often defended patriarchy, could be racist and in the case of Plato and Aristotle, endorsed a slave society. What can these philosophers say to the issues we face — global corporate domination, the climate crisis, nuclear war and a digital universe where information, often manipulated and sometimes false, travels around the globe instantly? Are these thinkers antiquated relics? No one in medical school is reading 19th century medical texts. Psychoanalysis has moved beyond Sigmund Freud. Physicists have advanced from Isaac Newton’s law of motion to general relativity and quantum mechanics. Economists are no longer rooted in John Stuart Mill .”
“What are our roles and duties as citizens? How should we educate the young? When is it permissible to break the law? How is tyranny prevented or overthrown? Can human nature, as the Jacobins and communists believed, be transformed? How do we protect our dignity and freedom? What is friendship? What constitutes virtue? What is evil? What is love? How do we define a good life? Is there a God? If God does not exist, should we abide by a moral code?”
“It is indeed difficult and even misleading to talk about politics and its innermost principles without drawing to some extent upon the experiences of Greek and Roman antiquity, and this for no other reason than that men have never, either before or after, thought so highly of political activity and bestowed so much dignity upon its realm.”
“The ancient philosophers were not oracles. Not many of us would want to inhabit Plato’s authoritarian republic, especially women, nor Hobbes’ “Leviathan,” a precursor to the totalitarian states that arose in the 20th century. Marx presciently anticipated the monolithic power of global capitalism but failed to see that, contrary to his utopian vision, it would crush socialism. But to ignore these political philosophers, to dismiss them because of their failings rather than study them for their insights is to cut ourselves off from our intellectual roots. If we do not know where we came from, we cannot know where we are going.”
“If we cannot ask these fundamental questions, if we have not reflected on these concepts, if we do not understand human nature, we disempower ourselves. We become political illiterates blinded by historical amnesia. This is why the study of humanities is important. And it is why the closure of university classics and philosophy departments is an ominous sign of our encroaching cultural and intellectual death.”
“The most important activity in life, as Socrates and Plato remind us, is not action, but contemplation, echoing the wisdom enshrined in eastern philosophy. We cannot change the world if we cannot understand it. By digesting and critiquing the philosophers of the past, we become independent thinkers in the present. We are able to articulate our own values and beliefs,”
“Wolin argues that “an historical perspective is more effective than any other in exposing the nature of our present predicaments; if not the source of political wisdom, it is at least the precondition.””
“Neoliberalism as economic theory, he writes, is an absurdity. None of its vaunted promises are even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — 1.2 percent of the world’s population hold s 47.8 percent of global household wealth — while demolishing government controls and regulations, creates massive income inequality and monopoly power. It fuels political extremism and destroys democracy. But economic rationality is not the point. The point of neoliberalism is to provide ideological cover to increase the wealth and political control of the ruling oligarchs.”
“Wolin, once a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Review of Books, found that because of his animus towards neoliberalism, he had difficulty publishing. Intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer, Ayn Rand . Once we knelt before the dictates of the marketplace and lifted government regulations, slashed taxes for the rich, permitted the flow of money across borders, destroyed unions and signed trade deals that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world would be a happier, freer and wealthier place. It was a con. But it worked.”
““The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood,” writes the economist John Maynard Keynes. “Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.””
“The ruling class, like ruling classes throughout history, seek to keep the poor and oppressed uneducated for a reason. They do not want those cast aside by society to be given the language, concepts and intellectual tools to fight back.”
American Exceptionalism and Its Consequences by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Mut zur Ethik is a forum associated with a publishing cooperative that holds conferences twice a year in the environs of Zurich. On September 1–3 the group celebrated 30 years of conferences, the theme this year being “A multipolar world order takes shape.” The following is a transcription of the speech I was invited to give.”
“Americans have made America, true enough, but I am more interested for now in how America has made Americans—how it has shaped the psychology that defines Americans—the consciousness that marks them out, indeed, so distinctly from others.”
“The cruelly inhumane proxy war in Ukraine, the dangerously provocative encirclement of China, America’s unruly conduct in the Middle East, in Latin America—America’s claim to exceptionalism lies behind all of this.”
“Americans have not said to themselves since 2001, “We must think again. We must find a new idea of ourselves and our place in the world, a new idea of what we are supposed to do.” No, Americans have done just the opposite: They have attempted to deny their doubts, to suffocate them as if under a pillow, by becoming more shrill and insistent in proclaiming their exceptionalism—and ever-bolder in their assertions of it in their conduct abroad.”
“Can America do without its exceptionalist consciousness? Or is this consciousness what is in fact indispensable to America? In other words, can there be an America without its idea of its exceptional status, or if we subtract it will America no longer cohere, no longer know itself, and so no longer be America?”
“[…] it is a long journey from de Tocqueville’s time to ours, exceptionalism having gone from simple material observation to thought to article of faith, ideological imperative, a presumption of eternal success, and a claim to stand above the law that governs all other nations.”
“This is the exceptionalism whose many destructive consequences we now witness. It is an ideology whose most peculiar feature is that it is subliminally understood to be exhausted and that it rests in large measure on denial. No American political figure would dare now to speak sensibly against the exceptionalist orthodoxy. This is ever more the case as the orthodoxy becomes more obviously hollow, more detached from perfectly discernible realities.”
“The only alternative case here is Donald Trump. He is the first president in our modern history simply to shrug off the notion and survive the judgment. “I don’t like the term,” Trump said at a Texas campaign rally in 2015. “I don’t think it’s a very nice term. ‘We’re exceptional, you’re not.’” Whatever else one may think of him, Trump is to be credited on this point.”
“What I read in Sullivan’s assertions is little more than cynicism of the same kind we saw in Reagan. They both proposed to manipulate ideological belief as a means of controlling public opinion to revive domestic support for the conduct of the imperium abroad.”
“I suppose in the middle we have to allow for “fellow travelers,” as the old expression goes: Those who do not share the ideology but stand with those who do. And here I must be bluntly honest in saying I think of Europeans in this way.”
“Like all ideologues, and here I will make a generality I am prepared to defend, Americans, by and large, would much rather believe than think. This in itself tends to leave Americans isolated, because he who believes but cannot think is incapable of relating to the world with what Fromm calls “spontaneity.” He is instead in the way of an automaton, and I take this term from Fromm, too. Anyone who has met an American of this kind, and it is not hard to do so, knows well that it is difficult to communicate with people who prefer belief to thought.”
“Our exceptionalism also serves as a confinement: We trap ourselves within a fantasy of eternal superiority and triumph. So we cannot hope to speak the same language as the rest of the world, and we don’t. We do not see events the same way. We do not react to events in the same way. We do not calculate the same paths forward.”
“At home the intellectual confinements exceptionalist beliefs impose have debilitated us for decades. We are now greatly in need of genuinely new thinking in any number of political and social spheres even as we deny ourselves permission to do any such thinking.”
“I will share two concerns I have as I think about this large transformation. One, given the velocity with which America now ravages destructively around the world, will there be enough time to accomplish such a project before it is too late, too much damage done? Two, will others have enough patience to wait should we Americans determine to make such a transformation?”
Mucked Up by Rafia Zakaria (The Baffler)
“There are many troubles with the Burning Man Festival but one particularly noxious one is how oblivious Burners are of their privilege and of their exploitation of what was once a pristine landscape, the Black Rock Desert.”
“They sat down in the middle of the road and put up signs like “Burners of the World Unite” and “Mother Earth Needs Our Help.” The protesters wanted Burning Man to put an end to the ever-larger number of private jets used by celebrities and the ultrarich to get to the festival. The protesters were also demanding a ban on unlimited use of diesel-guzzling generators, propane, and single-use plastics.”
“When the festival first began in 1986 on a beach in San Francisco it was supposed to represent an act of radical inclusion and connectedness. Those idealistic initial intentions seem to serve a single intention now and that is to absolve all current attendees from thinking of themselves as hedonistic polluters. In recent years, an ever-richer group of attendees bring gas-guzzling RVs, erect ever larger air-conditioned domes, and use more and more generators without any concern for the climate impact of their actions.”
“the much-touted spirit of gifting and sharing end up enacting a vision of what rich people think it is like to be poor. The build-it-yourself, over-hyped costlessness of Burning Man suggests a mockery of the actually poor who do not have the choice to alter their economic situation on a temporary vacation from reality.”
“[…] the inclusion has meant that even reactionaries and absurd Washington elites are welcome to let loose for a week and imagine a society that looks nothing like the one that made them rich. In 2022, roughly 80 percent of attendees self-identified as “white/non-Hispanic.” When festival cofounder Larry Harvey was asked about this in 2015, he replied, “I don’t think Black folks like to camp as much as white folks,” adding that “we’re not going to set racial quotas.” That response ignores the glaring fact that being “radically inclusive” would mean making changes to a festival that has largely been created to serve an all-white audience.”
Roaming Charges: Just Write a Check by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“During the financial crisis of 2008, Democratic lawmakers leaned on the UAW to make numerous contract concessions to help rescue the industry from bad decisions by management and banks. These concessions were never restored, including a suspension of cost-of-living adjustments. Thus autoworker pay has slipped farther and farther behind the rate of inflation with average real hourly earnings falling 19.3% since 2008. Meanwhile, the profits of the Big 3 automakers–Ford, GM, Stellantis–soared by 92% between 2013 and 2022, topping $250 billion. While the pay of their workers fell, the compensation for the Big 3’s CEOs rose by 40% over the same period and shareholders cashed in with $66 billion in dividend payments and stock buybacks.”
“After a year of drenching monsoons and desert flooding, water level at Lake Mead, which has been rising for five months, has finally leveled off. But all of this remarkable rain has left the reservoir only 34% full.”
“There are currently more than 300 million electric motorcycles/scooters/2-3 wheelers on the road worldwide and they are displacing four times as much oil demand as all the electric cars in the world so far.”
This is a great interview by Lee Camp with Zephyr, a Chinese Youtuber, who seemed quite sane and well-informed and pretty funny.
“Donald Trump scapegoated China for everything, so how are Chinese netizens responding to his serious indictments? There’s been an explosion of memes not just about Trump but the circus that is the U.S. political system. We dive deeper into what people in China, and the United States think about Donald Trump and the recent news.
“We are joined by Lee Camp @RealLeeCamp the most censored comedian in America, and host of the show Dangerous Ideas, and Zephyr @-360face, a popular Youtuber and Billibilli influencer based in China.”
I’ve missed Lee Camp. I’m glad to see him back!
The Stations of the Meritocrat Cross by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“You have to laugh at these kids, a little bit, and it’s OK to do so because they’re going to be the masters of the universe in a decade. This is a self-inflicted problem among a cohort of people who have overwhelmingly strong odds to enjoy lives of fiscal stability and personal satisfaction. I can’t help but laugh a little at a group of future doctors and lawyers and nonprofit muckety mucks who only feel safe when they’re manically pursuing the next laurel. But I do, also, have sympathy. I’ve had many years of experience working with both young people scrambling to get into the most exclusive college they could and with college students who still seemed bruised by the process. I found it impossible not to feel for them, given our culture and the pressures it engenders. And I think the NYT story tells us a lot about American meritocracy and its crisis of faith.”
Biden called Arizona fab a “game-changer.” Analyst calls it a “paperweight” by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)
“[…] a chief analyst for a semiconductor research firm called SemiAnalysis, Dylan Patel, told The Information that the “TSMC Arizona fab is effectively a paperweight,” unable to boost America’s advanced chips supplies without first sending a ton of chips “back to Taiwan.””
“TSMC employees told The Information that TSMC building a packaging facility in the US is unlikely because it would cost too much. That’s why TSMC “always develops its newest manufacturing and packaging processes close to home, where costs are lower and talent is easier to find,” The Information reported.”
“[…] the Arizona fab also won’t produce enough chips to entice TSMC to build a packaging facility in the US. When the fab is finally fully operational, it will produce 600,000 wafers per year to meet the US chip demand, CNBC reported, and that’s a relatively small amount compared to the 15 million total wafers TSMC produced in 2022.”
“Developing packaging processes domestically requires the US to invest in costly facilities and training US workers to achieve highly technical expertise. Although the US says it wants to build packaging facilities at home, NIST said that since “it will generally be difficult to build economically competitive conventional packaging facilities in the United States,””
Some notes on Local-First Development by Kyle Matthews (Bricolage)
“I see “local-first” as shifting reads and writes to an embedded database in each client via“sync engines” that facilitate data exchange between clients and servers. Applications like Figma and Linear pioneered this approach, but it’s becoming increasingly easy to do. The benefits are multiple: Simplified state management for developers Built-in support for real-time sync, offline usage, and multiplayer collaborative features Faster (60 FPS) CRUD More robust applications for end-users”
“These projects provide support for replicated data structures. They are convenient building blocks for any sort of real-time or multiplayer project. They typically give you APIs similar to native Javascript maps and arrays but which guarantee state updates are replicated to other clients and to the server. It feels like magic when you can build a simple application and and see changes instantly replicate between devices with no additional work. Most replicated data structures rely on CRDT algorithms to merge concurrent and offline edits from multiple clients.”
“Given Postgres’ widespread usage and central position in most application architectures, this is a great way to start with local-first. Instead of syncing data in and out of replicated data structures, you can read and write directly to Postgres as normal, confident that clients will be in sync.”
He’s focusing too much on the tech and too little on the value. DX is great and all, but it’s about the UX, no? Every app would benefit from realtime updates if it’s cheap and easy to build. Every app is multiplayer, if you think about it.
“For almost any real-time use case, I’d choose replicated data structures over raw web sockets as they give you a much simpler DX and robust guarantees that clients will get updates.”
No, my friend. Right conclusion for the wrong reason. If the tech is solid, it doesn’t negatively influence debuggability or tracibility. If it’s predictable, if operations can be correlated, if you don’t end up limiting your functionality to fit the framework, then go for it. Be aware of the trade-offs and be sure all of the stakeholders can live with them, given the upsides. What does good DX translate to for other stakeholders? Easier maintenance? Less complexity? Easier onboarding? You can’t build a product that provides good DX unless you’re making a framework, in which case it might matter. No-one cares about DX for real-world products. Having good DX might lead to other desirable things, but that doesn’t make it directly desirable. Don’t forget that.
Don’t Build Your Own Bespoke Company Frameworks on Top of Akka.NET by Aaron Stannard (Petabridge)
“No two domains are identical, therefore shared abstractions typically require a superfluous configuration layer in order to support each domain’s idiosyncracies and Shared abstractions between domains lead to coupling between them − so touching one piece of shared infrastructure means touching everything at the same time. This leads to “high volatility” changes, which are inherently high-risk.”
“Essentially, BCF developers are trying to limit .NET’s type system to a smaller universe of permissible expressions. This is a tremendous mistake [a]s it introduces coupling and becomes very expensive to refactor later if the BCF designer was too opinionated in their design (and BCFs, by their very nature, tend to be very opinionated.”
Published by marco on 25. Sep 2023 22:59:56 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The deepening COVID pandemic further exposes the reckless self-delusions of the Biden administration (WSWS)
“[…] despite the ongoing pandemic that continues to deepen, corporate America is ordering millions of workers back into the offices while hundreds of millions more have been at their workstations from the beginning of the pandemic. A significant majority, regardless of their symptoms, trudge to work despite their illness knowing their livelihood depends on their paycheck. One can surmise that sick leave as a policy has come to an end for all workers and this has essentially received Biden’s unstated endorsement.”
Should People be Happy About the Biden Economy? by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)
“Here also there were conservative members acting as a brake on virtually everything Biden put on the table. And, he lost even this slim majority in the 2022 election, although an additional Senate seat gave him a small amount of extra wiggle room.”
This is all true, but it suggests that Joe Biden is not conservative. There is nothing in the shape of the policies that he’s enacted that belies his prior fifty years in office. He’s proud of his police-state record. He’s a corporate whore, a grifter, and a malicious asshole. Always has been. Why do so many people suggest the opposite? Baker here seems to be pushing the line of thinking that just because the Republicans are batshit, the Democrats must be some sort of safe harbor to which sane people can flee. [3]
This is absolutely how they get you. They are absolutely just as disinterested in the fates of anyone making less than $400K per year as the Republicans, but they are just willing to lie about it more. Watching what their hands do, not what their mouths say.
“The unemployment rate, which stood at 6.3 percent when Biden took office, had fallen to 3.9 percent by the end of 2021, and has not gone over 4.0 percent since. This is the longest period where the unemployment rate has been below 4.0 percent in more than half a century.”
It’s so frustrating to have to constantly think that no-one seems to care what kind of jobs these are or how utterly gamed the statistics are. Dean Baker himself writes article after article about how there are six figures providing every month—and how everyone cites the absolutely most optimistic one available. And then he turns around and cites those same statistics as if there were nothing wrong with them, as if they are prime evidence of a booming economy for all.
“As a result of the ARP, the United States is the only major economy that is largely back to its pre-pandemic growth path. The U.S. also now has the lowest inflation rate of any of the G-7 economies.”
Congratulations, the U.S. excels the most at blowing smoke up its own ass. The rise benefits the rich the most. Really interesting to hear Baker paraphrasing Reagan’s “rising tide lifts all boats”, trickle-down bullshit.
“In spite of the inflation of 2021 and 2022, real wages for the average worker are higher than they were before the pandemic. And, there have been larger gains for those at the bottom, reversing roughly a quarter of the rise in wage inequality we saw over the last four decades.”
So, better than it was but still terrible? When do you celebrate? It will be reversed at a whim. There is no trust that it won’t be. Much of what he’s discussing has already expired.
“Tens of millions of people are now working from home, either entirely or partially, saving themselves hundreds of hours a year in commuting time, and thousands of dollars on work-related expenses. These savings in time and money do not show up in our data on real wages.”
True, but those people are also only twenty percent of the workforce (obviously the most important part of the workforce, ammirite?). Good for them, but I don’t see how the other eighty percent should celebrate gains that they have no way of enjoying. All the while, bringing their newly home-officed lords and master takeout and amazon orders. It’s a glorious class system made immanent, so what’s the problem, right, Dean?
“These are all extraordinarily positive developments for large segments of the population. There is no period since the late 1990s that could even come close to the progress made in the first two and a half years of the Biden administration.”
I’m afraid I really have a hard time believing this statement, even from Dean Baker. Is this happening despite the Democrats? How long-term viable are these gains? Are they equitable? Why would they be? Did something change in the power balance or basic morality of the U.S. political landscape that I missed? Is Biden such an incredible force that he singlehandedly dragged the U.S. upstream? Is that the argument?
“But on the whole, it is pretty hard not to see the overall picture as being overwhelmingly positive, especially considering that Biden had to deal with the disruptions created by multiple waves of Covid, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Are you fucking kidding me? Baker is often absolutely blind politically, but this is a bit much, even for him. Is he aiming for a job at the New York Times? Does he need a gig on CNN? Is he just jumping on the “lesser evil” bandwagon 15 months early? Like, if Trump is super-bad, then Biden must be super-good? I don’t even know how to process this. He’s portraying poor Biden as having had to deal with a war when, in fact, he could have easily prevented it by not provoking it in the first place? Smoke the NYT’s ganja little more, Dean.
“[…] notably by modernizing the country’s power grid and setting up a system of charging stations for electric cars.”
What a fucking waste of money. Biden could have spent it on trains, but I suppose most American have given up on having anything other than a slightly less-polluting copy of the same terrible system that they already have. Biden is pouring money into this because all of his donors have ensured that he and his supporters will be handsomely rewarded for it. There is no change in the basic system.
But, apparently, the country’s infrastructure has been modernized. Funny, it didn’t feel like it, but maybe I was just hanging out in the poorer parts of the nation, where these amazing effects have failed to be felt—and where they will mostly likely never be felt because no one gives a shit about those places. They’ve got nothing to offer, so they get nothing from the Democrats. Hey, though, maybe Dean Baker knows better. New York City is flourishing, right?
“The second piece of legislation Biden got through Congress was the CHIPS Act , which appropriated $280 billion over the next five years (approximately 1.0 percent of the federal budget) for research and support for manufacturing of advanced semi-conductors in the United States.”
Yeah, good on Biden for subsidizing high-tech companies in the States. They had hardly and money or profits of their own to invest. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, it could turn out that TSMC isn’t going to build a packaging facility—and that the fab is behind schedule and can’t find the employees it needs.Money well spent, on the right people.
“It probably makes sense in any world to ensure that key components for the economy will be accessible in the event of a conflict with China, and given that Taiwan is our major supplier, this is a real concern.”
Again, the fact that it’s a real concern is because that conflict is being massively stoked and provoked by Biden, but go Biden, right Dean? How can this man be so politically tone-deaf? He’s lauding Biden for making a few hand-waving motions in the direction of fixing problems that he himself is causing—because his sponsors want more war and want to extend the American empire beyond its expiration date. Spending our money to solve a problem he’s causing. Bow before him in thanks.
“[…] positive story from an economic standpoint, although we should be asking more about ownership of this research than seems to be the case now.”
Nothing! The government funds everything! And owns nothing! It’s all in private hands. Stop being so naive. You know this, Dean. Do you need to believe that Biden is a good president and, thus, a viable candidate for a two-term president, so you just make shit up about how awesome he is? When you normally spend every article picking apart the massive giveaways? I can’t tell whether you got an LLM to write this article for you.
“we at last seem to be making good progress towards a green transition.”
No. We absolutely are not doing that. We are making good progress on spending other people’s money on our friends’ companies that are pretending to care about a green transition. But they don’t. No-one in that country gives a flying blue fuck about a green transition, not if it interferes in any way with easy ways of making money. The environment is nowhere on the list of priorities.
“We will be able to raise billions of dollars of tax revenue each year, just by monitoring what companies announce they are spending on buybacks. And, we don’t have to worry they will cheat. What will they do, lie to their shareholders?”
That seems spectacularly naive for companies that are international conglomerates. I can’t imagine they would have let it pass if they didn’t have a workaround. But, sure, let’s believe that the Biden administration—the Senator from ViSA, remember—has cracked the code and finally found a tax that will pass Wall Street and Congress and is super-easy to monitor and generate oodles of money. Pardon me for not believing it until I see it. We hear all the time about the U.S. turning a corner on some progressive measure until we realize that we’ve somehow been fooled again.
“[…] the corporate income tax, which currently averages around 13 percent of all profits,”
Does it really? That’s pitifully low but, at the same time, it also seems high, when the big guns are paying much, much less than that. Dean’s written about Walmart and Amazon—the nation’s two largest employers—paying essentially no taxes.
“With a growing body of evidence showing that a lack of competition has been important in raising profits at the expense of wages,”
Did we not already know this without collecting more evidence? Did we really need to use scientific experiments to learn that companies that claim that they couldn’t possibly pay higher salaries because they’re too busy paying billions in dividends and stock buybacks to all of their shareholders are bullshit?
“Biden’s appointees are committed to respecting workers’ rights to have a union, if they want one.”
It just isn’t allowed to help workers at the expense of employers. How do you ignore how the Biden administration crushed the railroad strike last year? The Biden administration does not give a shit about workers. Not. One. Bit. They care about ensuring profits for their crony international conglomerates, first and foremost. All you have to do is watch what happens when anyone threatens a strike: the Biden administration steps in to “help” by neutering all demands and using whatever legal means they can to force people to keep working without making any gains for themselves. Companies that shed billions in profits per year claim that they couldn’t possibly pay their employees cost-of-living increases—and the Biden administration nods enthusiastically and steps in to crack some skulls and bust some kneecaps until there’s a bloody signature on yet another capitulatory deal where the workers walk away with far too little and their management-heavy union and the company’s board of directors walk away grinning like Cheshire Cats.
“[…] when we have clear evidence of the much greater efficiency of this sort of tax, we will be able to move quickly down that road. The Republicans, and many Democrats, will do everything they can to prevent corporations from paying more tax, but when we have them defending pure waste, we are fighting them on favorable turf.”
Again, so unbelievably naive. People don’t want companies to pay taxes enough that they’ll elect people to enforce it. The opposite happens. He’s arguing that we have “favorable turf” because … why? Because the Democrats and Republicans are afraid of looking like corporate stooges? When has that every stopped them? There are no alternatives. It doesn’t matter who gets elected—companies don’t pay even close to enough taxes. Occasionally, someone will pass something that makes it look a bit better, to keep the savages at bay. But then a giant thing like the Trump (or the Clinton, or the Bush, or the Obama) tax cut eats up all of the gained ground anyway.
Baker’s argument amounts to celebrating a field goal by the losing team when the score was already 721 – 0. What the hell are we celebrating? Are we turning this thing around? Give me a break.
“I would say the same about Biden, but he is doing it in a context where he enjoys a far more tentative majority than Roosevelt faced. And, he clearly is not the same sort of charismatic figure as Roosevelt. But all in all, he is doing a damn good job.”
Biden: better than Roosevelt. Hard to accept, Dean. Roosevelt apparently had it easy compared to poor Biden. Jesus. That country really has lost the ability to wish for anything but a slightly less bloody beating. Honestly, just bend over and grab your ankles—and be effusively thankful when you get a drop of vaseline.
See also Balance or both-sidesism by John Q (Crooked Timber), where the author writes,
“Republicans want to overthrow US democracy, while Democrats stubbornly insist on keeping it.”
There was some snarky bullshit on both sides of this sentence, but it’s already revealing enough that he really believes that the Democrats believe in anything like what we learned might be defined as democracy in civics class. They do not. They will use the surveillance state to ensure that they remain in power. They will take the easiest and fastest routes to quick money for themselves. That is literally all that they care about. Anyone who wants to prove that they are interested in more than that should (A) perhaps not become $25M within 2-4 years of being elected to national office and (B) should disassociate themselves from the Democratic party. The Democrats are busy trying to pry open a tiny, perhaps nonexistent loophole in Constitutional law in order to prevent their main opponent from even appearing on the ballot for president, while also suppressing any news and information sources that might provide an narrative that conflicts in any way with the pile of bullshit that they’re selling to the public, just to make sure that their corpse of a candidate gets reelected. That is not in any way evincing an interest in democracy, as I would define it.
For Slovakia’s Left, Welfare Spending and Nationalism Make an Awkward Match by Jakub Bokes (Jacobin)
“Smer fulfilled its manifesto promise to reform the labor code, reinstating some of the labor protections abolished by Dzurinda’s government. During this time, Smer also tried, unsuccessfully, to regulate retail food prices, an unprecedented move in the post-communist period, and banned private health insurers from paying out dividends to shareholders.”
“With an outright parliamentary majority, Smer raised the minimum wage, reintroduced a progressive income tax, and introduced free train transport for students and pensioners, among other measures.”
“Fico has recently described the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war between the United States and Russia, calling on NATO and the EU to immediately de-escalate and push for peace negotiations. Ukraine, he said, should receive security guarantees from both Russia and NATO and become a buffer zone between East and West.”
“Smer’s electoral base is different from that of its sister parties in Europe. Instead of trying to mobilize the support of young voters disillusioned with neoliberalism and sympathetic to left-wing ideas, Smer’s base is composed mainly of pensioners and low-income workers in the country’s poorer regions.”
The Passion of Imran Khan and the Price of Aggressive Neutrality by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“Not only had he refused to get involved in the NATO-Putin proxy war over Ukraine, but he had also strengthened ties with his neighbors in China and refused to offer the US military access to Pakistani bases as they fled their twenty-year clusterfuck with his other neighbors in Afghanistan. This is why America has slashed its military aid to Pakistan by hundreds of millions of dollars since Khan took power, sending a clear message to the Pakistani Military elites that America does not tolerate friends who refuse to share our enemies without reservation.”
“Dicks like Imran Khan and Sukarno don’t deserve such loyalty and their willingness to sell it out has been well recorded. But this is bigger than the egos of powerful mavericks or even the empires that they chafe. This is about poor people who are sick and fucking tired of being caught between the rich and their stupid fucking wars. Why should Pakistan get involved in the Donbass any more than Ukraine should get involved in Kashmir?”
Our Collective Trauma is the Road to Tyranny by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“The core traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt — are celebrated. The virtues of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice, are belittled, neglected and crushed. The professions that sustain community, such as teaching, manual labor, the arts, journalism and nursing, are underpaid and overworked. The professions that exploit, such as those in high finance, Big Pharma, Big Oil and information technology, are lavished with prestige, money and power.”
“It makes us confuse our desires, often artificially implanted by the consumer society, with our needs.”
“We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.””
““We are not content with negative obedience, not even with the most abject submission,” George Orwell wrote of the ruling “Inner Party” in his novel “1984.” “When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.””
While Canadians Struggle, the Liberal Government Is Focusing on Messaging by David Moscrop (Jacobin)
“Canada’s housing crisis is off the charts, and half the country lives paycheck to paycheck. In a classic show of disconnect, some Trudeau Liberals think the party’s greatest problem is that people don’t understand how fabulous a job they’re actually doing.”
This sounds exactly like the complaint that Dean Baker was making about Biden and the Democrats: that people aren’t appreciative enough of how awesome they’ve made the economy. Baker isn’t ordinarily the kind of guy to be completely blind to the way the economy seems to be working awesomely for at most 20% of the population—but also mostly NYT readers and their friends.
Destroy Democracy To Save It by Ted Rall
Or We Could Campaign by Ted Rall
Colorado Lawsuit’s Strategy for Keeping Trump Off Ballot Is Starting to Spread by Marjorie Cohn (Scheer Post)
This gleeful horseshit where people are delighted that they’ve found some old clause of some document seems to kind of maybe apply to Donald Trump if you take all of the allegations at face value—while reveling in the fact that the article you’ve found applies without a conviction, so you don’t have to bother with the pesky interference of a justice system—has got to stop. They don’t realize that their fervor in preventing what they deem to be the greatest threat to democracy ends up making them do things or support things or say things that make them actually a much-greater one. Your job is to stop Donald Trump from being elected by finding an alternative that people find more appealing, not by shoving a turd sandwich in their mouths and ordering them to chew. What the fuck, people? You’re perfectly happy doing something so anti-democratic in order to get your way and claim that you’re “protecting democracy”. Shut up and sit down while the adults are talking.
Donald Trump Should be on the Ballot and Should Lose by Steven Calabresi (Reason)
“[…] the University of Pennsylvania Law Review law review article by William Baude and Michael Paulsen, The Sweep and Force of Section Three, which argues that former President Trump is disqualified from running again for President. A draft law review article taking issue with Baude and Paulsen, co-written by Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tilman, entitled Sweeping and Forcing the President into Section 3: A Response to William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen makes a good case that what happened on January 6, 2021 was not an “insurrection” and that the Baude/Paulsen reading of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is wrong. I think Josh Blackman and Seth Tillman are more likely right than not. At a minimum, this is a very muddled area of constitutional law, and it would set a bad precedent for American politics to not list a former president’s name on election ballots given the confused state of the law surrounding Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Donald Trump’s Politics of the Berserk by Damon Linker (Persuasion)
“[…] short of a medical event that requires him to bow out of the race, the twice-impeached, serially indicted former president Donald Trump, who has led the field by a wide margin for over a year and is currently ahead by 43 points, is going to win the Republican presidential nomination by a mile.”
Bad Faith and Blank Checks by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Self-deception of the kind I describe is one of two forces sustaining the malpractice of journalism on the newsroom floor. It would be difficult to overstate its power. Breathe fetid air long enough and you have no notion of a spring breeze. I have never met a journalist in the condition of bad faith capable of recognizing what he has done to himself in the course of his professional life — his alienation, the artifice of which he and his work are made. Self-illusioning is a totality in the consciousness.”
“The Brass Check is a condemnation of the power of capital to corrupt the press and Sinclair judged it to corrupt absolutely. “Not hyperbolically and contemptuously, but literally and with scientific precision,” he wrote contemptuously, “we define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.””
“There is vastly more at stake in the misconduct of American journalists today than there was in Sinclair’s time. America has since made itself a global power. It is all the more remarkable to ponder the extent to which the information war that weighs decisively on so many momentous global events is sustained by editors and correspondents whose primary concerns are their everyday material desires — houses, cars, evenings out, holidays.”
“Robert Parry, a refugee from the mainstream when he founded Consortium News in 1995, put this point as well as anyone ever has when, 20 years later, he accepted the Neiman Foundation’s I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence . “To me the core responsibility of a journalist is to have an open mind toward information, to have no agenda, to have no preferred outcome,” he said on that occasion. He then added the summation I quoted earlier: “In other words, I don’t care what the truth is. I just care what the truth is.””
“We can no longer read The New York Times , and by extension the rest of the corporate press, to learn of events, to know what happened. We read the Times to know what we are supposed to think happened. Then we go in search of accurate accounts of what happened. Do not take this as an indulgence of cynical wit. The observation arises out of numerous cases wherein this unfortunate reality has proven so.”
“[…] there is simply no ground to expect mainstream media to reclaim the independence they long ago surrendered to the national security state — not under present circumstances. I detect only faint signs of debate among these media on this question, the most decisive they face, for they refuse, as they did during and after the Cold War, to recognize the errors, the dysfunction.”
“Every journalist now practicing faces a choice none was ever trained to confront. “If journalism is anything,” John Pilger said in a television appearance as I wrote this chapter, “you are an agent of people, not power.””
How the Media Turns Migrants Into Monsters by Lara-Nour Walton (Scheer Post)
“today it is virtually impossible for Americans to accept migrants as human when the news persistently degrades, brutalizes, and distorts their image. But not to accept them as such is to deny them their “human reality,” their “human weight and complexity.” It’s not a fictional caravan of monstrous migrants we should beware of; it’s the monster-makers in U.S. media.”
Lunar Caustic by Justin Smith-Ruiu & Nicéphore Niépce (Hinternet)
“The nearby mountain known as Cerro Rico was to become, by the end of that century, the source of well over half of the global silver trade, which profoundly transformed the modern world economy. With the constant traffic of galleons between Acapulco and Manila, soon enough over thirty percent of Potosí’s silver was to end up in the reserves of the Yuan Dynasty in China, a mass-scale interhemispheric transfer of wealth whose consequences are still being felt today.”
I can’t tell if this is true, but it’s very interesting if it is. It seems like it might be, according to the article on Potosí (Wikipedia).
I’d never heard of Bashkortostan (Wikipedia), but it was mentioned. Again, I thought it might be made up, but it’s apparently,
“[…] a republic of Russia located between the Volga and the Ural Mountains in Eastern Europe. It covers 143,600 square kilometres (55,400 square miles) and has a population of 4 million. It is the seventh-most populous federal subject in Russia and the most populous republic.[13] Its capital and largest city is Ufa.”
Piracy and Morality by robot_cook (Reddit)
“People with most mainstream tastes imaginable should not open their mouth on how anti piracy they are btw. Yea no shit you can depend on legal sources to watch Marvel and listen to tswift and Maroon 5. Thank you so much for signing the petition to close that platform that was the only one i could download this 2008 romanian dungeon synth ep from”
“Cheryl Dune’s directorial debut, The Watermelon Woman, was out of print between 2000 and 2018. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace was only available to watch on a pirate channel on YouTube until last year. There is still no way to watch the X-Files spinoff, The Lone Gunmen except to own a dvd box set that has been out of print since 2005. Or to pirate it. It’s on YouTube.
“Piracy is incredibly important to keep media that’s weird, or out there or just embarrassing to someone in power, alive. We need piracy and we need to stop being snitches when someone pirates stuff.”
This is an interesting take: when capitalism keeps stealing access to culture from the poor, the only moral thing to do is to steal it back.
Identity politics is a game the left can’t win by Fredrik deBoer (Boston Globe)
“Though the United States is the most economically powerful country on earth, public polling reveals a country full of people who feel economically insecure, who can’t cover the cost of minor emergencies, who think the economy and the country are headed in the wrong direction. Even when majorities respond to such polls positively, the existence of large minorities who are underpaid, unsatisfied, or afraid can be used to stoke the basic human desire for fairness.”
And yet, this same author has a more recent post talking about much better everything is now than before because of the easy, cheap access to stuff like… *checks notes*… flying to Tokyo or having a Korean place near you in the burbs. People can literally not keep their thoughts straight. It’s incredibly frustrating.
Connected cars are a “privacy nightmare,” Mozilla Foundation says by Jonathan M. Gitlin (Ars Technica)
“Eighty-four percent of the brands they analyzed said they can share your data, and 76 percent said they can sell it. And more than half say they’ll share data with the government and law enforcement by request.”
“Our main concern is that we can’t tell whether any of the cars encrypt all of the personal information that sits on the car.”
“[…] there’s virtually no choice out there—I’m not sure of a single new car on sale in 2023 in the US that doesn’t contain an embedded modem, and such equipment is now mandated by law in the European Union for emergency services.”
I’m better at German and it was “tadellos”. The French sounded very accurate to me as well. The flow was good in both languages.
Horizontal and vertical complexity by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse)
“Wrapping up code this way reduces horizontal complexity in that it makes the top level program shorter and quicker. But it increases vertical complexity because there are now more layers of function calling, more layers of interface to understand, and more hidden magic behavior. When something breaks, your worries aren’t limited to understanding what is wrong with your code. You also have to wonder about what the library call is doing.”
“There is always a tradeoff. Leaky abstractions can increase the vertical complexity by more than they decrease the horizontal complexity. Better-designed abstractions can achieve real wins.
“It’s a hard, hard problem. That’s why they pay us the big bucks.”
“[…] adding code and interfaces and libraries to software has an obvious benefit: look how much smaller the top-level code has become! But the cost, that the software is 0.0002% more complex, is harder to see. So you keep moving in the same direction, constantly improving the software architecture, until one day you wake up and realize that it is unmaintainable. You are baffled. What could have gone wrong?
“Kent Beck says, “design isn’t free”.”
Published by marco on 23. Sep 2023 21:58:14 (GMT-5)
The interview The Great Reorganization of Sexuality and Gender by Hugh Ryan (This is Hell!) is quite an interesting discussion, which ranged over some absolutely terrible characterizations of what the concerns of so-called right-wingers are, as well as seemingly obstinately refusing to acknowledge the modern-day use of the word snowflake, instead clinging to a 19th-century definition, as well as completely misdefining the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and misusing “strawman argument” for good measure. Then he uses the phrase “fractaling forward”, which I don’t understand what that even means.
Still, he makes an interesting point about the categories we currently use to delineate genders and sexual preference being arbitrary. That is, just because we’ve had certain categories for 100 years doesn’t lend them any scientific verisimilitude. The conditions that led to the current list of categories were diverse, and kind of arbitrary. Intervening research has been largely ignored, largely for wholly unscientific and arbitrary reasons.
At about 35:00. Hugh says,
“Suddenly we have to break apart the queer idea of the 19th century, which was generally called ‘the invert’, which was kind of like the idea of what we think of trans and intersex mixed together. Well, now we know that there are people who desire other people of the same sex who are not trans or intersex. So, sexologists freak out, and they start to define all of these different categories. We end up picking out lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex as the ones we’ll move forward with, but these people are also defining things like ‘the identity of the woman who likes to be sexually aroused with hatpins.’ That was considered a standalone identity. Pickpockets in the nineteen-teens were considered a biological class the way we might think about homosexuals. Right?”
Now, your instinct might be to say, ‘yeah, but that was stupid. We know better now.“
Do we, though? Are we sure we’ve got it all right now? That we’ve accounted for all of the nuance of human experience with our handful of categories?
I’m not saying we put litterboxes into classrooms—because nobody shits in the classrom, you goddamned idiots, whether you identify as a cat or a human. No shitting in the classroom. A relatively easy rule to impose, I would say.
So, Hugh’s point is that this has all happened before, and that it was all bullshit based on prejudices and arbitrary choices before—and that’s all it is this time. Humans love to make arbitrary choices for no known rhyme or reason—or for spectacularly stupid, petty, or racist/discriminatory reasons—and then completely forget that they’ve done so. Stir, wait a few decades, and everyone is utterly convinced that it wouldn’t be the way that it is without good reason.
Which takes us to pronouns and identifies and sexual/gender identification. Look, science is screaming from its desk that there are only two genders as far as gametes are concerned. There are people who are both genders. There are people who don’t feel like either gender. There are people who have the biological equipment for one gender, but are genetically the other gender. It’s not like it happens all the time, but it can happen. There are people who are one biological gender, but absolutely feel like the other one.
Leave them all be.
Honestly, there are so many ways to be an awful human being and huge detriment to society—and absolutely none of those things listed above are any of those ways. If the worst thing you can find about a person is that they are acting like other than their biological gender, then you’ve found an incredibly good person. For Christ’s sake.
If a person looks very much like a man to you and they ask to be addressed as “she” and “her”, then you be polite and do your best to accommodate them. Their job is to not jump down your throat if you don’t get it right the first few times. It’s just as if someone named Robert asks to be called “Rob” or “Bob”—if you keep calling them Robert, you’re just being an asshole. Or you don’t care what they think. That’s a perfectly good reason to not call people by the monikers they prefer—but be aware that you’re burning bridges.
So, we have to clean up some terminology and we have to make sure the people do stay focused on solving actual societal problems—instead of focusing all of their energy on helping trans or intersex people and then calling it a day, which is also not cool because we really do have a list of things to do, in priority order, and it would be absolutely awesome if helping a handful of people and children feel more at home in their own skins were at the top of the list, but it’s just not. It’s just not even close.
Just in the same price range, there are children who are hungry every damned day and we’re not doing enough yet to make sure they’re fed, to say nothing of whether they feel OK in their own heads. They can’t think straight because they’re hungry. Let’s solve that one and then see how they feel.
They’ll probably feel that they’d like fresh air and fresh water and less climate change and a fuckload fewer billionaires sucking all of the value out of humanity like an engorged tick. So, yeah, priorities.
But I’m getting off course again here. Even with cleaning up terminology: this is not the first time we’re dealing with pronouns, FFS. Most of the people complaining about pronouns barely even know what one is—and they’re not even close to mentally equipped to examine the linguistic environment that we already inhabit and notice that there already is a framework of pronouns and titles, some of which is based on biological gender, and some of which is just cultural baggage.
There are languages that don’t recognize gender as much as English—e.g., Turkish—and there are others that have a neutral form—e.g., German and Russian—and those are languages that are relatively close to the European family of languages. I have no idea what’s going on in Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, or any of the thousands of other languages used on this planet.
What I’m saying is that there is no God-given way of addressing someone. There is only the way that that person prefers to be addressed. In programming circles that don’t suck, people are incredibly concerned with making forms that stop asking for “first name” and “last name” because it’s incredibly culturally myopic. It barely even works in Europe anymore, to say nothing of the rest of the world. Instead, you should just ask for a person’s “official name”—where they fill out as many names as they want—and their “preferred name”—where they, again, fill out as many names as they want.
In fact, we still have so many forms that ask for gender—MALE or FEMALE PLEASE—or that ask for title, chosen from a dropdown list—Mr., Ms., Mrs., etc.—because everyone has one of those, right? What about Dr.? What about someone who doesn’t want to reveal their marital status with their name? Oh, then use “Ms.”. What if you’re a guy? Oh, then just … use “Mr.” What about if you’re a woman who identifies as a guy? Oh, FUCK IT, just stop asking for that information.
Hell, we still have standardized tests that ask for “race”. Yikes. When I took the SAT, I told them I was a “Pacific Islander” because I knew, even then, that it absolutely does not matter.
Honestly, we’re past it and it never mattered in the first place. It only mattered as long as we had laws that discriminated against certain genders, skin colors, races, countries of origin, marital statuses, etc.. Now that we’ve cleared out a bunch of that juristic detritus, we’re faced with the possibility of just building a set of rules that make sense [1], rather than whatever bullshit we’ve cargo-culted from our more overtly colonial age. [2]
Published by marco on 13. Sep 2023 22:40:40 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
It’s amazing to see what a feature science-fiction film could look like in the 80s. It kind of looks like the TV show sometimes, with the focus on the acting, dialogue, and plot rather than CGI effects.
This film picks up right where Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan left off, after Khan (Ricardo Montalbán) had detonated the Genesis device. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) had died saving the others and his casket had been sent down to that planet. In this film, McCoy (DeForest Kelly) starts acting strangely, going into occasional fugue states where he seems to be channeling Spock’s memories.
Meanwhile, on the planet, David Marcus (Merritt Butrick) and Saavik (Robin Curtis) are on the Genesis planet, observing its chaotic development—and it’s increasing instability. Lifeforms are charging through their lives at an incredible pace. They find a young Vulcan, whom they can only assume is a resurrected Spock, but without his life experiences and his memories. The child quickly develops into a teenager, then becomes a man as he undergoes the Vulcan adolescence ritual at an incredibly accelerated rate.
Klingon captain Kruge (Christopher Lloyd) is sniffing around, trying to get control of the Genesis device, leading to a standoff with Kirk—who ends up sacrificing the Enterprise in a self-detonation in which he’s trapped most of the opposing Klingon crew. The Enterprise crew, meanwhile, has beamed to the disintegrating planet, where Kirk and Kruge fight—mano a mano—to Kruge’s death.
Kirk and his crew fly the partially disable Klingon Bird of Prey to Vulcan, where they deposit Spock’s memories from McCoy’s mind back into Spock’s body. The process is mostly successful, but will take time to complete.
My rating from a prior review is unchanged. Amazing film.
Watched it in English with French subtitles.
This is a great cast: Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) is a nice guy who has not male friends. He’s going to marry Zooey (Rashida Jones), who has a lot of friends, Denise (Jaime Pressly) (who’s married to Barry (Jon Favreau)), Hailey (Sarah Burns). His fencing colleagues Eugene (Aziz Ansari) and Larry (Nick Kroll) don’t see him as a friend. His coworker Tevin (Rob Huebel) is a dead-end. After several bad “dates”, Lonnie (Joe Lo Truglio), organized by his gay brother Robbie (Andy Samberg) and Doug (Thomas Lennon), organized by his mom Joyce (Jane Curtin) and his dad (J.K. Simmons). Peter finally meets Sidney (Jason Segel).
“J.K. Simmons My best friend, Hank Mardukas.”
Peter and Sydney hit it off amazingly well, but Peter starts to become filled with self-doubt and sees danger and subterfuge in small details—especially after Zooey tells him that he’s now spending an unhealthy amount of time With Sydney. He cuts of the relationship. Sydney borrows $8000 from Peter and Peter is worried that he’s spent it on frivolous investments—until he discovers that Sydney has bought billboards for Peter all over the city.
Peter starts to feel bad that he’s broken up with Sydney, especially after Lou Ferrigno signs back up with him after having seen the billboards. He doesn’t reinvite him to the wedding though, going without a best man instead. Zooey calls Sydney to show up—and Sydney picks up while in a tux, on his Vespa on the PCH, clearly headed for the wedding already.
This is a movie about Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams), who are absolute game nuts. They’d bet during a bar-trivia contest and fallen in love immediately. The movie is littered with references to various game-related things they’d done on vacations over the ensuing years. They’re married and trying to have a baby, but Max’s sperm count is low—because of his feelings of inadequacy toward his more-dynamic brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler).
Brooks organizes a game night that involves a kidnapping, but it’s interrupted by a real-life kidnapping executed by people to whom Brooks owes money, The Bulgarian (Michael C. Hall). It gets more complicated, as they slowly discover that the game is actually real, having “solved” a bunch of it with no fear because they thought that it was not. On top of that, a former game-nighter who is no longer invited Gary (Jesse Plemons), is also running a fake game night to get revenge on them for having dropped him. He was hoping to get back into their good graces by proving what a cool game-master he is. He gets shot by the Bulgarian’s henchmen.
They end up rescuing, then selling, a WITSEC list. Brooks ends up under house arrest, and hosts another game night as shadowy forces gather outside. I’m sure they thought that there would be a sequel. I doubt there will be. The movie wasn’t that good. I gave it an extra point for Jason Bateman’s deadpan performance.
There are a bunch of sub-plots and jokes with the other couples, but only Sharon Horgan is actually very interesting.
I love nearly everything about this movie. All of the players are so good. See my review from early 2016.
I saw it in German this time, though it doesn’t matter so much, as there’s nearly no dialogue.
The movie starts with the full credits. It’s super-confident that people are going to stick around without even getting a taste of the action. The movie starts with Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in bed with his wife Lori (Sharon Stone). Director Paul Verhoeven certainly knows how to make a love scene. Stone is sexy and even Schwarzenegger can’t ruin it.
Douglas Quaid goes to work, but ends up at Recall, an agency that helps you “remember it wholesale.” He chooses the femme fatale, getting excited about being with a hot woman—didn’t he just say that he’s been married to Sharon Stone for eight years? Sharon Stone in her prime? Didn’t they just have morning sex?
Anyway, he gets into the machine, but something about his fantasy about going to Mars goes absolutely sideways. The entire staff has to calm him down and ends up throwing him out, leaving him with only vague memories of what happened. Once outside, he meets a buddy from work, who ends up trying to kill him, along with a bunch of other thugs. Quaid takes them all out. Is this happening? Was the “emergency” at the Recall offices real? Or was that just the start of his fantasy?
He gets home to Lori, who’s pissed that he went to Recall. She also rolls her eyes when he tells her about Mars. Perhaps she knows that his buried memories are real. She does. She calls Richter (Michael Ironside). She must get orders to take him out because she starts shooting at him, then beats the crap out of him—focusing on the family jewels. Now it’s a knife-fight. She’s slashing away, adorned in her 80s-style aerobics outfit.
He gets her at gunpoint. She admits that she’d never seen him before six weeks ago. She tells him he’s an agent with a memory implant—that his life is just a dream. She doesn’t know who he is; she just works there. He was her best contract, then offers to bang him one last time—but only to buy time for the backup team to arrive. Clever girl.
Richter shows up, asking Lori what Quaid remembers. “Nothing.” They kiss. What?!?
Quaid is on the run. Richter and his goons give chase. After a bit, the weapons open up on the escalators. There are giant, bloody squibs everywhere. Like, it’s seriously, awesomely, and convincingly gory. The effects are much, much better than I expected. They held up really well, for the most part. When he’s pulling the tracker out of his nose, it’s pretty convincing. The trick with the probe in the rat was pretty neat, and who cares if the graphics on that guy’s tracker look dated? The concept works.
Quaid’s on Mars now. I kind of like that Richter was not only stupid enough to have a projectile weapon in a pressurized environment, but that the movie showed the consequences immediately—he blows out a “window” and a whole section of the immigration area has to be closed down.
Quaid meets up with Melina (Rachel Ticotin), who identifies him as Hauser. She ends up sending him away, not much wiser than before. Next, he’s visited by a doctor who tells him that he’s currently living out a fantasy—that he’s currently tied up in the Recall facility and that he’s not really on Mars, that nothing is really happening. The doctor brings in Lori, who tells him she loves him. The doctor hands him a red pill; he has to take the pill to go back to reality. Quaid threatens the doctor, saying that, if it’s really a fantasy, then he could kill the doctor, right? OMG a red pill! Really!?!
After seeing the doctor sweating, Quaid caps the doctor and spits the pill out on his corpse. Men storm the room and overwhelm Quaid. Lori gets in a few shots on the family jewels—she really likes doing that—before they tie him up and call Richter. Before they can go to work on him, Melina shows up with a machine gun, clearing the room of everyone but Lori, who disarms her and starts a knock-down, drag-out fistfight with Melina. Lori gets the better of her, but Quaid gets the drop on Lori and puts one between her eyes when she starts cooing at him that she loves him.
Melina and Quaid flee. They get back to the bar where first inquired after her and sneak out a hidden tunnel. Richter is close behind. When no-one will tell him where they went, he and his men just start murdering everyone in the restaurant. It’s kind of understandable that Richter’s pissed, I guess. Quaid had just murdered his lover.
Cohaagen (Ronny Cox) orders Richter back and then shuts down the air supply to mutant-town. Melina, Benny, the taxi driver (Mel Johnson Jr.), and Quaid/Hauser retreat further into the catacombs, where they meet up with the rebel underground—and will meet…Quato, one of sci-fi movie’s best inventions ever. Quato is a telepathic conjoined body attached to the torso of the rebel leader George (Marshall Bell). Quato helps Quaid remember that he’d seen an alien hand in the Martian excavations when he was first on Mars. The seance is interrupted by Cohaagen’s tunnel-drilling machines.
George (w/Quato), Quaid, Benny, and Melina flee to an airlock, but Benny betrays them, gunning down George. Quato lives long enough to tell Quaid to shut down the reactors. Benny thanks Quaid for having led Cohaagen’s troops directly to them. It turns out that Hauser had arranged everything so that they could break past Quato’s mental shield and get to the rebel alliance. Quaid doesn’t believe it—but Hauser isn’t him.
After this giant mind-fuck, Melina and Quaid are bound into recall machines, to reprogram Quaid as Hauser and to make Melina a loving, obedient wife. This doesn’t work, as Quaid pulls the machine apart with his giant muscles. The ensuing fight scene is exceedingly bloody. Quaid and Melina flee into the tunnels once again. There, Benny is right behind them with a drilling machine. Quaid picks up a hand model: “Screw you, Benny!” Melina gets hit in the head with a fake, movie rock in what I can only imagine was a completely unintended coincidence.
Benny inadvertently opens a tunnel to the alien Oxygen machine. In the reactor room, Richter and dozens of men attack him, gunning him down mercilessly. The hologram device from a much-earlier scene shows up like Chekhov’s gun. He and Melina toss it back and forth to take care of all of Richter’s troops. The denouement between Richter and Quaid is coming up, though. Another famous scene is the open elevator, where Richter ends up falling to his death while his arms stay in the elevator. “See you at the party, Richter.”
Next up is Cohaagen, who magically appears with a bomb that Quaid manages to throw into an air vent, but it still blows a hole to the Martian surface. Cue people holding onto things while stretched out horizontally. Quaid throws Cohaagen out the hole. Quaid engages the alien reactor. Quaid and Melina are sucked out of the hole. Cohaagen’s face is popping open. The machine starts producing Oxygen quickly enough to save Quaid and Melina, though.
I watched in German.
Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) is back, being whatever form of cool people seem to keep coming back to his movies for. At one point, Xander Cage and some other dude are just riding motorcycles across water, which works just fine because there’s some weird ski on the tires, which of course would work. This is proven physics.
The head of the XxX program Jane Marke (Toni Collette) is noteworthy only because of the actress playing her. She gets Xander back into the game. She is accompanied by Becky Clearidge (Nina Dobrev), who is this movie’s version of Q. Honestly, she’s probably one of the better roles in this movie.
Xiang (Donnie Yen) stole something called Pandora’s Box, which is some sort of all-powerful, electronic, hacking device or something. In German, they call it die Buchse der Pandora, which is kind of a phonetic translation? But it translates to “Pandora’s can,” which is definitely a different body part than her box.
Donnie Yen is, as usual, the absolute best thing about this movie. His choreography and filming of it is the best. Super-fast, super-precise. Tony Jaa’s cuts a bit too much.
Anyway, Xiang’s working with Serena Unger (Deepika Padukone), who always dresses in thigh-high, leather boots, even on a sand-filled island camp, which is an oddly terrible fashion choice.
Talon’s (Tony Jaa) quite a little fighter, but I’m not at all surprised by that.
There’s so much green-screening in this movie, it’s kind of sad.
Adele Wolff (Ruby Rose) is dressed exactly like Lara Croft. She is still the angry, powerful lesbian—just like she is in every movie. Tennyson Torch (Rory McCann) is fun to watch—but mostly because I remember him as “The Hound” in Game of Thrones. Also, there is no way that this movie is not taking the piss: Torch throws his mouthguard in just before he charges into a hail of bullets—and is struck only in the shoulder and hindquarters.
They’re also doing some sort of grrrl-action thing here, with Wolff, Serena, and Becky clearing a whole warehouse of bad guys by themselves, with lots of hero-posing and slow-motion gun-twirling. They’re then trapped, with the guys taking up a supporting role—women still in charge. They call out the count to jump back into a deadly fracas—another hail of bullets—when Darius Stone (Ice Cube) appears literally out of nowhere with a grenade launcher to mow down all the remaining baddies. A pure Deus Ex Machina. We’re supposed to remember him from previous movies, I’m guessing.
Meanwhile, Marke gets the drop on Xiang by kneecapping him, but he gets the drop on her by tossing her out of the back of the plane that they’re all going to die in. Xander is meanwhile flying the plane into a de-orbiting satellite. Just before it hits, he jumps out of the back of the plane—but it’s kind of unclear where Xiang went. You almost know he didn’t just die. Also, Xander crashes into Earth on a rapidly decelerating freight package attached to a giant parachute. Holy shit, Xiang is just with the crew when they drive out to meet Xander. WTF!?! They didn’t even bother to show how he got out of the plane! NO PROBLEM.
Round out the reunion with Xander and Darius hugging and chest-thumping and congratulating each other on how the whole world will be searching for them. That doesn’t stop them from all showing up for Augustus Gibbons’s (Samuel L. Jackson) funeral, which is totally fake because he’s attending his own funeral. He’s even got an eyepatch, as if he’s playing his Nick Fury role. Weird: And Xander is sliding into his role as Dominic Turturro
There is literally no way that Alex Restrepo doesn’t watch this movie at least twice per year. Ah, what am I talking about? I’m watching this damned thing, too.
I gave it an extra star because of the self-aware tongue-in-cheek moments and the quality of some of the cast.
I watched it in German.
They’re still doing a great job, after all of these years. So far, they’ve covered,
An episode about work ethic, in which Butters gets a job working at an ice-cream shop. He shows up at the basketball court, waving a paycheck. Cartman wants in, so he shows up at the ice-cream shop to start his job. he does nothing.
He lasts less than four hours, as predicted. He wants to work from home, he’s on the phone, he needs his breaks. He bails and starts a new business idea with Kenny—Dickenbaus Hot Dogs. He goes to Butters for funding. They drain his bank account building Cartman’s hot-dog house into a mini-theme-park, but they can’t get anyone to work at it. Nor are they obviously willing to work themselves.
Butters shows up, realizes the money is all gone, and starts his second job there, turning it into a success. He gets his money back, and more, then sells immediately to a foreign investor, paying Cartman’s mother to move back into her old house—taking Cartman away from the little paradise that he’d built for himself.
I’m an absolute sucker for this movie, but upon re-viewing, it’s obvious why. It hits all of the beats, it’s an actual movie. The cast is great; it’s one of Bruce Willis’s best movies.
How does it start? A bunch of meteorites strike New York. An amateur astronomer reports to NASA that this is just a foretaste of the giant asteroid that’s on its way to Earth—a planet-killer. He names it after his “hinterhältige Giftschlange” of a wife.
Next, we meet Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), owner and founder of an oil-drilling company and leader of a motley crew that’s the “best in the world”: A.J. (Ben Affleck), Rockhound (Steve Buscemi), Chick (Will Patton), Oscar (Owen Wilson), Bear, (Michael Clarke Duncan), Max (Ken Hudson Campbell). Grace (Liv Tyler) is Harry’s daughter and A.J.‘s lover and she’s a distraction.
They are recruited by Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) and join his crew of Watts (Jessica Steen), General Kimsey (Keith David), Willie Sharp (William Fichtner), and so on. They all train together; they do some montages; there are Aerosmith songs. They fix the equipment; they break some; they go out for one night of fun. They’re ready to go.
Harry says goodbye to Grace and makes her promises, only one of which he will be able to keep. This part is stupid, but I have to mention it because it’s filmed in an absolutely awesome, rusted temple of space-flight. It was definitely filmed there and it was definitely a place that the director of photography saw while scouting the John F. Kennedy Space Center. These things don’t happen anymore because people don’t do that anymore. They would just make some shit up, film it in front of a green screen, and phone that shit in, nice and cheap. We have definitely lost something. We should make an effort to get it back, and look back on these last 10-15 years where literally everything was made digitally dissolve like a bad dream upon waking.
Billy Bob is great, as usual, as is Bruce Willis. They play so well that you literally can’t imagine anyone else playing the role. Affleck is pretty good, but you can easily imagine Matt Damon playing his role. Steve Buscemi does his lines perfectly. Owen Wilson just plays himself, as usual. They’re on their way to Lev Andropov (Peter Stormare), who is an eternal favorite. He plays a Russian on Mir, where the space shuttle docks to refuel. I shit you not.
The shuttle gets refueled, but they have to evacuate in a hurry because there’s a leak in the fuel line. Lev and A.J. almost get left behind in a disintegrating space station, but they both make it out, just in time. Both shuttles escape by the skin of their teeth. On to the asteroid. I’d forgotten there were two of them—but there had to be, so one of them could crash into a giant asteroid fragment and kill nearly everyone on board. The shuttle with A.J. crashes, while the other shuttle “lands”—more or less.
Harry and the crew in the landed shuttle debark and get to work. There are a dozen things worse than they’d imagined. They persevere.
Bear, A.J., and Lev are alive and they break out of the crashed shuttle with the armadillo and head toward a green blip on their radar, hoping for the best.
Drilling is going terribly. Colonel Sharpe and Harry get into each other’s hair—the secondary protocol is to just blow up the bomb on the surface of the asteroid. This will, of course, have no effect whatsoever, but military’s gonna military, ammirite? Billy Bob demands that Keith David refuse the order and damned if that’s not good cinema.
The bomb starts blinking; it’s been triggered. There’s a huge scuffle; guns are drawn; words are said; friendships are made; bombs are defused.
A huge asteroid-quake blows the fissure they’re working and sends Max into outer space with their only working Armadillo. However, Lev, A.J., and Bear had figured out how to fly with their Armadillo and they’ve navigated around half the asteroid and show up just in time to finish digging the hole. They reach their depth, but more and more of the asteroid starts raining down on them as Earth’s gravity starts pulling it apart.
The bomb is damaged—it will no longer auto-trigger, so someone has to babysit it; a red-shirt dies. They retreat into the ship to pull straws to see who’s going to sacrifice themselves. Lev volunteers because he doesn’t want to return to the planet as a Russian coward. Rockhound also volunteers because (A) he’s crazy from being in space and (B) he knows that he has some very inadvisable debts waiting for him back on Earth.
A.J. draws the short straw. Harry takes him to the asteroid surface, but blows his air on him and takes his place. There is a fuckload of melodrama. Harry prepares the bomb while the others prepare for takeoff. The shuttle won’t fire. Lev asks Watts to step aside and put away the manual. He beats the everloving Christ out of the engine with a giant wrench. It fires.
The shuttle takes off; the bomb doesn’t fire. Sharp wants to turn around. Harry’s crew believes in him. Harry falls down a hole. He climbs out. He blows the asteroid with a few seconds to spare. The Earth is saved. Statues of Harry Stamper will be built all over the world.
The shuttle is somehow still whole and ready to reenter the atmosphere. There’s a whole montage about people being grateful. Bullshit. People would forget nearly immediately and just go back to being assholes to each other. Any spirit of cooperation would be soon replaced with the same old empirical aspirations and stupidity.
Anyway, the shuttle lands and Grace is out on the tarmac in a dress rather than the fire-safety equipment everyone else is wearing. More melodrama, but fine.
I saw it in German this time.
This is the original film that started it all, following Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), as he hunts psychos across the Australian Outback. He’s a police officer, and the world is more gone than it was at the time, but not so far gone that he doesn’t have a wife, child, and home to return to after his multi-day shifts. Spoiler: this movie is a lot more normal than I’d remembered.
We join him as he takes down a certain Nightrider (Vince Gil), who seems utterly whacked out and devil-may-care. He and his girlfriend die in pretty much a self-inflicted fiery cataclysm. This doesn’t prevent his crew from seeking vengeance, though. The crew is a motorcycle gang that shows up in town, led by the unusually named Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne).
They hunt down a young couple (M/F), raping them both and destroying their car utterly. The one guy the cops manage to catch is let go for lack of evidence to convict him of anything. This is a shame because you should be able to at least get time for extremely poor fashion choices or shockingly poor impulse control.
TIL “the bronze” means “the police”.
Max’s partner Jim Goose (Steve Bisley) is absolutely pissed that they had to let Johnny the Boy (Tim Burns) go and he swears he’ll find him out on the road. Johnny and Toecutter find Jim first. Jim flies off of his bike because of a trap, but recovers. As he’s driving back with the tow truck, with his bike in the back, Johnny throws a brake drum through his windshield—with utterly preternatural precision—sending him off the road in what is his second big vehicular accident of the day. Upside-down and covered in leaking gasoline, Goose … well, his goose is cooked. Johnny argues with Toecutter about whether they’re really going to do it, but do it they do.
Max finds Goose in the hospital, under a tent, burned to a crisp. He storms off, claiming that that’s not Goose. It is, though, though not for long.
After a shitty, sleepless night, Max goes to his commanding officer Fifi (Roger Ward) to quit. Fifi looks kind of like the guy who Indiana Jones fought at the airplane in his first outing.
Max is now on the road with his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) and child Sproggo (Brendan Heath) and dog, dressed like a chump in nice pants and shirt. When they get a flat tire, he stays at the garage to help, while his wife takes their child “Sproggo” for an ice cream. To no-one’s surprise at all, Toecutter and his gang happen to be there. Tocutter gets some of her ice cream, but she knees him in the balls and hightails it out of there. She stops to pick up Max. They leave the tire.
They end up at the coast, visiting friends. Life is idyllic, for a while. Jessie heads down to the beach with the dog and spends a lovely, sleepy few hours there. On the way back through the woods, Toecutter’s gang is back to terrorize her. She makes it back home, into Max’s arms. He heads into the woods, armed with a shotgun and dressed in his white A-Frame shirt and beige khakis—which he was wearing while repairing the car.
After she calms down, Jessie remembers that she has no idea where her child is. Luckily, Toecutter and his gang found the boy and they’re all posted up on the farm where Max and Jessie are staying, all without anyone noticing. May shows up with a shotgun and herds the gang into the barn, while she, Jessie, and Sprog take off. There are just so many unexpected escapes for Jessie and Sprog.
I suppose I should interject at this point that this isn’t at all how I remembered this movie. I don’t think anyone really remembers this one. I think we all remember Mad Max 2 and Beyond the Thunderdome much more.
Jessie’s car dies. May sends her packing and tries to stand down the gang, but they blaze right by her. They run Jessie and Sprog down. A shoe and toy ball bounce across the road. Max appears, running to the white pile of clothing that used to be his wife and child.
They get her to a hospital, but she’s a mess. They stabilize her, but she’s not out of the woods. No-one mentions the child.
Max flips his wig a little, quite rightly. He gets out his old police uniform and collects the 600HP vehicle he’d never gotten a chance to drive.
He’s on the hunt now, driving down the gang and taunting them into giving chase. He blasts through them like bowling pins. Max drives into a prohibited area, seeing a person lying in the long grass next to a motorcycle. It’s a trap, of course. Toectutter or Bubba (Geoff Parry) shoots out his knee, then runs over his hand. Max gets control of his shotgun and takes out Bubba, but Johnny and Toecutter get away. Max gives chase in his hyper-vehicle.
He’s lost some blood.
…but not as much as Toecutter does when he drives head-first into a tractor-trailer truck.
After that, Max drives around a bunch until he manages to find Johnny, who’s taken out another victim. He’s stealing his boots. Max makes him cuff his own ankle, then hooks the other end to a truck axle. He gives him a hacksaw: it takes ten minutes to saw through the axle, but only five to saw through an ankle. The truck’s going to blow up long before then, anyway.
BOOM.
The end.
]]>“Overall, the average lifetime price increase for the top 25 drugs was 226 percent. The highest increases were seen in drugs that have been on the market the longest. For example, drugs that were on the market for under... [More]”
Published by marco on 9. Sep 2023 22:46:32 (GMT-5)
The article Drug makers have tripled the prices of top Medicare drugs by Beth Mole (Ars Technica) writes,
“Overall, the average lifetime price increase for the top 25 drugs was 226 percent. The highest increases were seen in drugs that have been on the market the longest. For example, drugs that were on the market for under 12 years had an average lifetime price increase of 58 percent, while those on the market for 20 or more years had an average lifetime increase of 592 percent.”
These are medications to help people. Their primary purpose now is to help the shareholders of the companies who own the patents on them. If someone gets a medical benefit from them, then, sure, I guess that’s OK, too.
But society and the economy absolutely don’t care if that happens, else we wouldn’t have allowed the prices to rise that high. That it’s paid for by a government program that’s funded by all of our taxes is even worse.
The companies are simply milking the government, while enjoying a reputation for business savvy among the exact same people who think that the government should stay out of business, instead letting those companies just handle things directly—and, supposedly, more efficiently.
But those companies don’t function at all without these government subsidies. It’s the only reason they’re successful at all: their government-granted monopolies called patents, together with a government insurance program that is legally required to pay whatever price they ask.
“In 2021, Medicare Part D prescription drug plans spent $80.9 billion on these top 25 drugs, which were used by more than 10 million enrollees. AARP noted in its report that Medicare Part D enrollees take an average of four to five medicines each month, and 20 percent of older adults report using cost-coping strategies like skipping doses or not filling prescriptions to save money.”
Mission accomplished: provide the semblance of trying to care for the aged, while implicitly encouraging them to kill themselves sooner by skipping medications—incurring discomfort, if not suffering, along the way—but the primary goal remains achieved: lots of profits for shareholders of pharmaceutical companies. It’s a gold mine. You should totally invest in these companies. They guarantee a good rate of return.
Just don’t ask how they do it, because it’s a highly immoral business model—or perhaps amoral, since these entities don’t actually comprehend a model of the world that includes wishy-washy concepts like morality. Why not? Because there’s no money in morality. There’s literally no upside for being good in this society.
“The report lands amid drug cost-cutting measures in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The act requires drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare when they increase the price of drugs faster than the rate of inflation. And, under IRA provisions, Medicare will soon begin negotiating prices of drugs directly with manufacturers. On September 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will announce the first 10 drugs selected for price negotiations. Some of the drugs expected to be announced are among the top 25 costliest drugs analyzed in the AARP report.”
The party may be over, though, but I wouldn’t count these companies out. I’ll believe the hopeful formulation above when I see it.
“The Biden administration has said it will defend the IRA’s price negotiation program vigorously.”
Sure, sure, buddy. I’ll believe it when I see it. Go for it, though! Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt.
There’s not a lot of my own, original writing in this... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 9. Sep 2023 22:39:32 (GMT-5)
The always-entertaining Patrick [H] Willem made two excellent videos about the state of filmmaking and art, in general. The first one discusses what people are calling AI films, focusing on the recent spate of so-called Wes Anderson AI remakes.
There’s not a lot of my own, original writing in this article. Instead, I’ve done the service of transcribing what I found to be the pithiest, hardest-hitting parts of Willem’s two rather long videos, which total more than 90 minutes.
At 27:00, Patrick says,
“The Curious Refuge guy [1] says that this is the same as artists having influences, that all artists borrow from other artists.
“Curious Refuge Guy: So, I am definitely more in the camp of the whole steal-like-an-artist … uh … realm of thinking about creativity. And that idea is, essentially, that, all of us are pulling our creative ideas from other inspiration in our past. We just don’t, as humans, know, off the top of our heads, where those sources are coming from. [2]
“Patrick: …which I think is a pretty astounding misunderstanding of what artistic influence actually is. Artistic influence is: Wes Anderson taking his love of Hal Ashby, François Truffaut, and Jacques Demy, and processing them into a unique approach that expresses his own view of the world. AI art is just a machine for plagiarizing existing art.
“This guy says that AI is democratizing storytelling and making it possible for anybody to be a filmmaker. No. I’m sorry, but this is an insane take. Democratizing storytelling is what affordable filmmaking equipment did. It’s what, like, iPhones did. It’s what the Internet did. Those things gave people outside the traditional structures, without huge budgets and resources, the tools to create films and a free platform with which to reach a wide audience.
“Arguing for AI-filmmaking is saying that people no longer need talent or skill. Like, by this logic, why would learn to play the violin when you can use AI to create a fake violin recording of the piece of music that you want to play. The Curious Refuge web site says that they are, “empowering non-traditional artists,” which is hilarious to me, because that is just another way of saying “bad artists.” It’s like a steakhouse saying: “we serve non-traditional meals”, and then giving you a plate with a charred, black hockey puck on it.
“AI filmmaking is a grift. It is a way to make something that looks professional without putting in any of the work to learn how to do it for real and without paying an actual cast or crew. Look: I’m not generally one for criticizing other folks on YouTube or starting feuds. And I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think that this really, truly, genuinely sucks. And, if the Curious Refuge people take offense to my comments, all I have to say is: you shouldn’t. Because you didn’t really make those videos.”
At 34:00,
“These moments of actual innovation, the ones that create something that sticks with people for decades, can only be done by real, human creativity. AI is improving all the time but, at it’s very best, you will only ever get serviceable imitations of mediocre products.
“But the question then is: do the people in charge care about that?
“Not to point fingers, but plenty of successful, mainstream movies are merely mediocre, recycled products. If a piece of software can create that automatically, do the shareholders care about giving up the potential for an amazing masterpiece?”
No. No, they do not. They only care about their rate of return. That’s it. If you get a higher rate of return by making masterpieces, then do that. If you get a higher rate of return by training your audience to like crap because it’s cheaper and easier and more reliable to produce crap? Then do that.
I think we all know which way this is going.
At 39:00,
“The people who seem the most excited about AI are not actually the artists themselves. They are the tech bros […] who view AI art as a win over those pretentious artists and their dream is a future where it can make movies tailored to their exact specifications. Not like the shit Hollywood is making now. [sarcastically delivered]
“They love the idea of using AI for filmmaking because they don’t actually have any talent or skill. For them, AI is like a cheat code that allows them to seem like actual artists without doing any actual work. The moral of this story is, that AI art sucks.
“[…]
“The thing about AI art is that it isn’t really art at all. Art, by its very definition, has to express some kind of human expression. This stuff generated by an AI […] is content, something utterly disposable, something meaningless.”
The second video expands on that last sentence, attacking the notion of “stuff” and “content”, which has replaced everything else with its mediocrity and definitional fungibility.
At 19:00,
“The idea here, with YouTube’s autoplay feature, just like Twitter and Facebook’s infinite scroll, is to keep users on the platform forever, consuming an endless feed of content. The content doesn’t need to make a huge impression. We just need to keep people passively consuming it.
“Have you ever tried to take a moment and reflect on something you just watched on Netflix, only to have the end credits instantly minimized, in favor of some obnoxious ad for what to watch next?
“That’s content, baby.
“So, OK. What is my actual issue here? Like, sure, some of the culture around independently producing work for the Internet sucks, but that’s not news. […] Content means literally everything. Which means: it’s essentially meaningless. Content is everything on the Internet. And, so, it flattens everything and says it’s all the same.
“It’s saying this PhilosophyTube video—a deeply personal mixture of essay and performance art—is the same thing as this Tweet I posted about buying a new pair of pants. A short film on video is the same thing as Dwayne Johnson’s Instagram reel shilling for Zoa Energy Drinks.
“If one thing is content, it all is.
“This is like saying: a novel is the same thing as a phone call. Yes, they are both, on their most basic levels, some form of communication. But they are not the same medium and we should not treat them the same way.
“But to the executives, it is all the same. They don’t care what the content on their platforms is, so long as people are clicking, and they’re running ads on it, and it’s generating revenue, and the shareholders are happy.”
Here he makes the same point that I’d noted above on his first video. I’m not saying he’s redundant—I’m saying that we’re on the same wavelength.
At 34:55,
“Lila Byock, a writer who worked on Watchmen and The Leftovers, is quoted saying, “What the streamers want most right now is ‘second-screen content’, where you can be on your phone while it’s on.””
Published by marco on 9. Sep 2023 21:22:43 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Labor Economist: AI May Bring a Boom in Horrible Jobs by Lynn Parramore (Scheer Post)
“For the previous generation of metalworkers, the numerical control machines were programmed directly by the worker operating them. Even the detection of minor problems and discrepancies was the responsibility of the operator, who intervened when he deemed it necessary. Today, machines are programmed by computer scientists and engineers who are often not even employees of the company, but of machine suppliers. In other words, workers enjoy an ever-decreasing degree of autonomy and feel deprived of the possibility of using their own intelligence in their daily tasks.”
“[…] many corporate functions are relocated outside the production unit, and even outside the company or the country. Workers can’t reconstruct the supply chain in which they are engaged, and so they are unable to organize themselves effectively as their horizon becomes increasingly narrow.”
“[…] cycle times are presented as the objective outcome of some machine learning/big data processes (whereas algorithms are informed by human beings according to parameters determined by human beings) and therefore out of the realm of bargaining.”
“What I fear is a world with millions of underpaid, ignorant, politically naive, isolated workers, stuck at home in front of their computers in both work and leisure time, producing goods and services they cannot afford to buy.”
“[…] there could be labor-consuming technical progress, aiming at preventing worker fatigue, energy-saving, pollution-minimizing, and so on. Of course, this kind of technical progress means that production costs increase, and hence it is not likely in the interest of big companies.”
“The prerequisite for technology not to be used against workers is that research cease to be controlled by the private sector, and returns fully under public control, directed toward the development of technologies that achieve social and environmental goals.”
Why aren’t millenials buying homes? by WinterPlanet (Reddit)
Buying a house is like:
Bank: “we have no way of knowing you’ll pay back this mortgage of £500 a month”
Me: “I’ve been paying my landlord £1000 a month”
Bank: “Why can’t you save up £25000 to reassure us you can afford £500”
Me: “Because I’ve been paying my landlord £1000 a month”
Mad props for the Jessica Jones meme. Kilgrave was the worst.
The Real Threat From China: They’re Better at Capitalism Than We Are by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Neither the Chinese nor anyone else in Asia believes these silly explanations, and no one expects them to do so. Beijing knows very well there is a point to all these apparently pointless visits U.S. officials insist on making. The Biden regime is buying time as it remilitarizes the western end of the Pacific. The only people who are supposed to understand otherwise are Americans. We are not supposed to watch as Washington provokes and prosecutes Cold War II before our eyes. We are supposed to watch as American officials—reasonable, constructive, well-intended—make all efforts to talk to the Chinese in the face of their stubborn reluctance to cooperate.”
“[…] the Biden regime’s efforts to obscure what it is up to at the other end of the Pacific is a straight reprise of the first Cold War, which now resides in all but the most important history books as the responsibility of the Soviets. We have a responsibility to render and defend an accurate record so that this does not happen again.”
“The Chinese challenge could and should be understood as a chance to reinvent America by way of a Great Mobilization, cap “G,” cap “M,” of New Deal magnitude. There is, of course, no more than lip service to any such idea. We are instead sacrificing this historic opportunity to the military-industrial complex, the greed of corporations, and the ambitions of political leaders who lack all principle or any thought for the commonweal.”
Millions Sick and Untreated, Thanks to Medicaid ‘Unwinding’ by Eve Ottenberg (Scheer Post)
“They’ll probably join the statistics of the multitudes of Americans who die prematurely, while nincompoop right-wingers and our corporate overlords will no doubt rant against any public health moves to assist them, as part of a commie plot to steal our freedoms, since public health arrangements put, uh, health first. So there will be none. Because we are ruled by cruel, greedy people who also happen to be nitwits.”
Historian Explains That Pepe The Frog Was Originally A Hindu Symbol (The Onion)
The allusion is that Pepe the Frog is only to be considered a right-wing symbol, just like the swastika. Anyone who actually uses either symbol is to be considered a thought-criminal. This is deeply unfair to the creator of Pepe the Frog, whose life was documented in the film Feels Good Man. People who are tickled by the joke in the title are unfortunately uninformed.
The Great Reorganization of Sexuality and Gender by Hugh Ryan (This is Hell!)
This is an interesting discussion, which ranged over some absolutely terrible characterizations of what the concerns of so-called right-wingers are, as well as seemingly obstinately refusing to acknowledge the modern-day use of the world snowflake, instead clinging to a 19th-century definition, as well as completely misdefining the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and misusing “strawman argument” for good measure. Then he uses the phrase “fractaling forward”, which I don’t even understand what that even means.
However, at about 35:00. Hugh says,
“Suddenly we have to break apart the queer idea of the 19th century, which was generally called ‘the invert’, which was kind of like the idea of what we think of trans and intersex mixed together. Well, now we know that there are people who desire other people of the same sex who are not trans or intersex. So, sexologists freak out, and they start to define all of these different categories. We end up picking out lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex as the ones we’ll move forward with, but these people are also defining things like ‘the identity of the woman who likes to be sexually aroused with hatpins.’ That was considered a standalone identity. Pickpockets in the nineteen-teens were considered a biological class the way we might think about homosexuals. Right?”
Now, your instinct might be to say, ‘yeah, but that was stupid. We know better now.“
Do we, though? Are we sure we’ve got it all right now? That we’ve accounted for all of the nuance of human experience with our handful of categories?
I’m not saying we put litterboxes into classrooms—because nobody shits in the classrom, you goddamned idiots, whether you identify as a cat or a human. No shitting in the classroom. A relatively easy rule to impose, I would say.
So, Hugh’s point is that this has all happened before, and that it was all bullshit based on prejudices and arbitrary choices before—and that’s all it is this time. Humans love to make arbitrary choices for no known rhyme or reason—or for spectacularly stupid, petty, or racist/discriminatory reasons—and then completely forget that they’ve done so. Stir, wait a few decades, and everyone is utterly convinced that it wouldn’t be the way that it is without good reason.
Which takes us to pronouns and identifies and sexual/gender identification. Look, science is screaming from its desk that there are only two genders as far as gametes are concerned. There are people who are both genders. There are people who don’t feel like either gender. There are people who are one biological gender, but absolutely feel like the other one.
Leave them all be.
Honestly, there are so many ways to be an awful human being and huge detriment to society—and absolutely none of those things listed above are any of those ways. If the worst thing you can find about a person is that they are acting like other than their biological gender, then you’ve found an incredibly good person. For Christ’s sake.
So, we have to clean up some terminology and we have to make sure the people do stay focused on solving actual societal problems—instead of focusing all of their energy on helping trans or intersex people and then calling it a day, which is also not cool because we really do have a list of things to do, in priority order, and it would be absolutely awesome if helping a handful of people and children feel more at home in their own skins were at the top of the list, but it’s just not. It’s just not even close.
Just in the same price range, there are children who are hungry every damned day and we’re not doing enough yet to make sure they’re fed, to say nothing of whether they feel OK in their own heads. They can’t think straight because they’re hungry. Let’s solve that one and see how they feel.
They’ll probably feel that they’d like fresh air and fresh water and less climate change and a fuckload fewer billionaires sucking all of the value out of humanity like an engorged tick. So, yeah, priorities.
But I’m getting off course again here. Even with cleaning up terminology: this is not the first time we’re dealing with pronouns, FFS. Most of the people complaining about pronouns barely even know what one is—and they’re not even close to mentally equipped to examine the linguistic environment that we already inhabit and notice that there already is a framework of pronouns and titles, some of which is based on biological gender, and some of which is just cultural baggage.
There are languages that don’t recognize gender as much as English—e.g., Turkish—and there are others that have a neutral form—e.g., German and Russian—and those are languages that are relatively close to the European family of languages. I have no idea what’s going on in Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, or any of the thousands of other languages used on this planet.
What I’m saying is that there is no God-given way of addressing someone. There is only the way that that person prefers to be addressed. In programming circles that don’t suck, people are incredibly concerned with making forms that stop asking for “first name” and “last name” because it’s incredibly culturally myopic. It barely even works in Europe anymore, to say nothing of the rest of the world. Instead, you should just ask for a person’s “official name”—where they fill out as many names as they want—and their “preferred name”—where they, again, fill out as many names as they want.
In fact, we still have so many forms that ask for gender—MALE or FEMALE PLEASE—or that ask for title, chosen from a dropdown list—Mr., Ms., Mrs., etc.—because everyone has one of those, right? What about Dr.? What about someone who doesn’t want to reveal their marital status with their name? Oh, then use “Ms.”. What if you’re a guy? Oh, then just … use “Mr.” What about if you’re a woman who identifies as a guy? Oh, FUCK IT, just stop asking for that information.
Hell, we still have standardized tests that ask for “race”. Yikes. When I took the SAT, I told them I was a “Pacific Islander” because I knew, even then, that it absolutely does not matter.
Honestly, we’re past it and it never mattered in the first place. It only mattered as long as we had laws that discriminated against certain genders, skin colors, races, countries of origin, marital statuses, etc.. Now that we’ve cleared out a bunch of that juristic detritus, we’re faced with the possibility of just building a set of rules that make sense, rather than whatever bullshit we’ve cargo-culted from our more overtly colonial age. [3]
The first half-an-hour of this video included a lot of clips of Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, MSNBC, and Fox News commentators. They’re all certifiably insane. They don’t have any grip on reality, choosing instead to live in a world where Israel is the most important possible ally on the planet, where China can be economically attacked endlessly and then told that we’re going to be friends (Ramaswamy) once we’ve gotten everything we want, that an overarching goal is to prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon (Ramaswamy)—or nuclear capability, where Ukraine is the most important ally (other than Israel, I guess?) because it’s how we crush Russia (Haley). Incredible.
This is an incredibly densely packed, 4-minute video about what Canada’s up to with its militarization and its fossil-fuel extraction.
tl;dw: Support the Wet’suwet’en First Nations people at:
Tracking Orwellian Change: New Meanings of “Deep State” and “Working Class” by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“Everyone from ABC News to the European Union (which describes “QAnon deep state conspiracies” as a product of “right-wing extremism”) to academics writing about how “Fake news promotes conspiracy theories such as Deep State” have accepted the core idea that suspicions of unelected institutional power are, like disdain for “elites,” fictional products of “misinformation” and rightist resentment. Criticism of “deep state” in fact is often used by Internet censors as a way to identify dangerous or foreign-aligned groups.”
“Class-not-race became code for an increasingly infamous form of racism encapsulated by other terms likely to find their way on this list, “color blind” and “color blindness.” Once considered an aspirational positive, a would-be “color blind” pol like Sanders who focused on “class-not-race” was understood to be denying the realities of discrimination, probably out of secret racism.”
“Through this switcheroo from one term to another, a phrase that was coined to express a specific political idea — that connections between people of a certain economic class are meaningful — once again came to mean more or less the exact opposite, i.e. that the only “working class” that really exists is fractious and separated by ethinicity. (really!), and so on. Workers of the world, split up!”
I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)
“if you hear that 60% of papers in your field don’t replicate, shouldn’t you care a lot about which ones? Why didn’t my colleagues and I immediately open up that paper’s supplement, click on the 100 links, and check whether any of our most beloved findings died? The answer has to be, “We just didn’t think it was an important thing to do.” We heard about the plane crash and we didn’t even bother to check the list of casualties. What a damning indictment of our field!”
“Another way that paradigms die is people simply lose interest in them, so our best ally against these zombie paradigms is boredom . And we’ve got plenty. Psychologists already barely care about the findings in their own field; that’s why, when we hear about another replication massacre, we don’t even bother to ID the bodies.”
“So yes, it’s a shame when we find out that esteemed members of our community might have made up data. That’s bad, and they shouldn’t do it. But catching the cheaters won’t bring our field back to life. Only new ideas can do that.”
“Last year, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three physicists who allegedly found that the universe is not locally real. But what does this mean? What are the two types of non-locality? And what did Einstein’s have to do with it? That’s what we’ll talk about today.”
Myth, Mystery, and Contradiction by Piotr Florczyk (The American Scholar)
“In A Kidnapped West: A Tragedy of Central Europe, Kundera reminded his readers that Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were historically and culturally closer to the West than to the Soviet East, and should therefore be thought of as central rather than eastern European. Alas, his appeal fell on deaf ears, and the region remains “eastern,” shorthand for a place where, rumor has it, nobody smiles and the smell of burned cabbage wafts through the corridors of charmless, concrete apartment blocks.”
Apparently Personal: On Sharon Olds by Gunnhild Øyehaug (The Paris Review)
“She says herself, in interviews, that she prefers the description “apparently personal.”
““I have never said that the poems don’t draw on personal experience,” she says. “But I’ve never said that they do.”
“It’s a paradox: the words apparently and personal are obviously contradictory: personal indicates that we are being drawn into someone’s intimate sphere, having secrets whispered in our ear; apparently in this context suggests “false, not genuine, pretend”—something looks personal, but do we have proof?”
Do you need proof? If a poem rings true for you, what do you care if the poet was faking it? If the story’s amusing, who cares if it happened, or happened to that person? Authors lie. Comedians tell jokes, not autobiographies. This overarching need for authenticity in order to enjoy anything is ruining everything.
Indeed by deluxetrashqueen & ginerofsuburbia (Tumblr/Reddit)
“Ugh! Stupid sci fi movies that are like what if you had to pay to be alive?. Um that’s just being disabled! Selling literal minutes of your life as currency? That’s just living under capitalism, idiot!”
My love. My dear. My precious baby bird. I am kissing you so gently on the forehead, Please listen to my words.
That is the point.
For the love of god, everyone, please learn the meaning of allegory,
I’m dying here.Dystopia does not predict the future, it criticizes the present.
For Zerco by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“Over time I find myself increasingly amazed at this rather little-discussed feature of not-very-well-documented non-Western languages, that they seem to float freely, that there exists no clear and simple system of correspondence between their words and the words you can more or less be confident you’ll find, in one-to-one mappings, in any bilingual dictionary of English, on the one hand, and French, German, Latin, or Greek on the other. All of Western Europe, or perhaps the part of the world that has shaped its literary traditions in reference to Greek and Latin antiquity, has in effect evolved into a sort of Sprachbund”
“Spinoza’s idea that there is only one thing or substance, and every thing we ordinarily call a “thing” is in fact only a modification of it. Thus strictly speaking the only subject of a sentence, on this view, should be “it”, while all of our nouns get converted to verbs, and our verbs get converted to adverbs (along with indirect objects, dative clauses, etc.). So, instead of “The dog is barking at me”, we might have something like “It dogs, barkingly and me-wardly”.”
ReiserFS is now “obsolete” in the Linux kernel and should be gone by 2025 [Updated] by Kevin Purdy (Ars Technica)
“It’s an ignoble end for a filesystem that, at one time, could have been the next big thing for Linux file systems.”
“ReiserFS addressed ext2's lack of journaling, added B-tree indexing, and worked much faster when dealing with huge numbers of small files. Others had praised the system’s stability under power or system failure, able to recover and restore data faster than other systems at the time. ReiserFS “garnered much praise and even major industry support,” wrote Jeremy Reimer in a history of file systems from 2008, but “the wheels started to come off for reasons that were primarily non-technical.””
It’s utterly fascinating that a piece of technology would be ignored and thrown away because the person who wrote it turned out to be a murderer.
There’s a guy named Shishkin who’s working on ReiserFS 5. People probably won’t want to use that because he’s cis-gendered.
AI crap by Drew DeVault
“The biggest lasting changes from machine learning will be more like the following:”
- A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work
- The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles
- More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams
- SEO hacking content farms dominating search results
- Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market
- AI-generated content overwhelming social media
- Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising
“AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the AI data monster.
“You will never trust another product review. You will never speak to a human being at your ISP again. Vapid, pithy media will fill the digital world around you. Technology built for engagement farms – those AI-edited videos with the grating machine voice you’ve seen on your feeds lately – will be white-labeled and used to push products and ideologies at a massive scale with a minimum cost from social media accounts which are populated with AI content, cultivate an audience, and sold in bulk and in good standing with the Algorithm.
“All of these things are already happening and will continue to get worse. The future of media is a soulless, vapid regurgitation of all media that came before the AI epoch, and the fate of all new creative media is to be subsumed into the roiling pile of math.”
“AI is defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of AI are going to make the world worse.”
AI-generated child sex imagery has every US attorney general calling for action by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)
“American attorneys general from all 50 states and four territories sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to establish an expert commission to study how generative AI can be used to exploit children through child sexual abuse material (CSAM). They also call for expanding existing laws against CSAM to explicitly cover AI-generated materials.”
I, with the rest of the world, look forward to hearing how the U.S. is absolutely the most sane, rational, non-prejudiced, and non-theological justice system in which to discuss this topic.
““As Attorneys General of our respective States and territories, we have a deep and grave concern for the safety of the children within our respective jurisdictions,” the letter reads. “And while Internet crimes against children are already being actively prosecuted, we are concerned that AI is creating a new frontier for abuse that makes such prosecution more difficult.””
Oh, goodie. It’s already starting off well. If CSAM exists, but it’s completely made-up, then how, exactly, is it victimizing individuals? There is no victim to victimize. The people depicted never existed. It’s like saying that a painting of a man having sex with a goal run afoul of bestiality laws. There was never a man. There was never a goat. It’s a painting.
“Additionally, even though CSAM is a very real and abhorrent problem, the universal appeal of protecting kids has also been used as a rhetorical shield by advocates of censorship.”
There was no link for the flat claim that the problem is “real” and “abhorrent”, both of which are true, but…how big of a problem is it? As Doug Stanhope said in his bit “The Funny Thing About Child Porn” from the album “ From Across the Street”: if it’s everywhere, why haven’t I ever seen any? I’ve stumbled across incredible things online and I’ve never, ever had to quickly back out of a tab because it contained CSAM.
An excellent comment on the article:
“What’s the logic that leads to “We are engaged in a race against time to protect the children of our country from the dangers of AI?”
“Are they worried that an individual who is sexually attracted to children, upon being able to generate an infinite amount of material with no other human needed, would then also attempt to obtain other illegal images they would not otherwise have been interested in? Or is this considered the gateway to child sexual abuse? Or are they worried about child predators slapping the face of a real child on these images and distributing it? Or creating fictitious images that lure real children into danger?
“All of the above? Or is it a case of “this makes our job so much harder because we won’t be able to tell what’s legitimate CSAM anymore?”
“I assume it’s being surrounded by hubris specifically so that these questions won’t have to be answered but funding will appear and resistance to rights violations will crumble.”
“Some real ‘if you kill someone in a videogame you should go to jail for murder’ thinking here.”
“Yeah.. it’s going to take some sort of evidence or pretty compelling argument to get me on board with this. CSAM is repellant, and I am comfortable with laws that are a bit over the top to prevent it. But the primary reason for that is the lifelong harm it causes victims. If the argument is that this will create a market for CSAM.. uh, that clearly exists regardless.
“While my first preference would be that this sort of thing didn’t exist at all in the first place, the next best option would be one where no children were involved, and where the punishment for real CSAM so vastly discouraged anything that wasn’t obviously fake that it made that a non-existent market. I don’t know what could possibly be appealing about CSAM, but whatever it is, is clearly enough of a compelling urge that people risk effectively everything to view it. Fine. Gross, but fine − make it a highly regulated vice with no actual people involved, and I can live with that. If anything, the push should be for marketplaces with strict controls on the source and use of content, and give folks with this proclivity a sanctioned way to do their thing without any real victims.”
The comments on Apple Clarifies Why It Abandoned Plan to Detect CSAM in iCloud Photos (Hacker News) are kind of hit or miss, but some of the better ones are included below.
“It’s an incredibly bad thing. It’s also an incredibly poor excuse to justify backdooring phones.
“Cops need to investigate the same way they always have, look for clues, go undercover, infiltrate, find where this stuff is actually being made, etc.
“Scanning everyone’s phones would make their jobs significantly easier, no doubt, but it simply isn’t worth the cost to us as a society and there is simply no good counter-argument to that.”
Why I don’t buy “duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction” by Jason Swett (Code with Jason)
“If developers are afraid to clean up poor code, then I don’t think the answer is to hold off on fixing duplication problems. I think the answer is to address the reasons why developers are reluctant to clean up existing code. Maybe that reason is a lack of automated tests and code review, or a lack of a culture of collective ownership. Whatever the underlying problem is, fixing that problem surely must be a better response than allowing duplication to live in your codebase.”
“When you find yourself adding if statements to a piece of code in order to get it to behave differently under different scenarios, you’re creating a confusion. Don’t try to make one thing act like two things. Instead, separate it into two things.”
This is a brilliant interview, in that Oren Eini just talks for about 40 minutes, answering pretty much just one or two questions.
“I don’t like unit tests.”
Yes. They’re only useful when you want to focus on a failing integration test. David rightly points out that they’re really good for pinpointing where a problem actually happens, but Eini says that they also “hinder change” because, by their nature, they lock down a lot of the design and implementation. This is absolutely true.
What you need is discipline to realize when you need to write more unit tests in order to help pinpoint which component involved in a failing integration test is causing the problem. If you preemptively write all of the unit tests, you’re wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere.
I have had no small amount of success with a large test suite that was mostly integration tests. It ran relatively quickly (10 minutes for 10,000 tests on a reasonably classed developer desktop) and helped me survive three major refactorings.
At 10:00, he talks about how the top-level architecture of an most applications reflects the framework used to implement the web-delivery mechanism rather than the purpose of the application itself. In his example, he shows how a Ruby-on-Rails application is immediately recognizable as such, but that you have literally no idea what the application does.
He urges us to consider what this implies about our priorities as architects and developers. It means that we are much more concerned with the technology than with the functionality. This is not good.
He contrasts it with a high-level. 2-d blueprint of the first floor of a church, where the intent is obvious: it’s a church (he says). Of course, inferring that it’s a church involves applying the appearance of the diagram to a given context—e.g., a very western one—but the point is clear: the standard, top-level view of the design of a church screams out that it’s a church. It says nothing about how the church is to be built—or has been built—it says what it is.
“Architecture is about intent.”
Just to be clear: this presentation is from 12 years ago, and we’re still confronted with the same concepts—still confronted with the same failure to remember these precepts. Our frameworks still push themselves to the fore.
This is, in a way, the problem with LLM-generated code: we are already terrible at expressing the intent of our software in a way that makes it maintainable and qualitative. We are already mostly terrible at designing and building things in a way that satisfy the nearly-always-implicit non-functional requirements, like maintainability, usability, performance, etc.
And now we’re asking another piece of software, whose workings we can’t yet fathom, but which we know we’ve built by feeding it all of these terrible versions of software, and asking it to write software for us. All of the theory that we’ve developed about how to build software will not be respected, except by luck, if the neural net is feeling like that’s a high-probability next token.
On the one hand, I have to admit that this doesn’t sound much different from how software is built today, except that the human builders are potentially capable of following rules, whereas the software builders are less trainable. Again, though, we have decades of experience showing that, while people are ostensibly trainable, they are not necessarily practically trainable, at least in the general case for the general type of person who takes part in this field of endeavor we call programming.
Which leaves us with the question: have we achieved the maximum potential in software development? We already knew everything we needed to know about how to do it decades ago. What is missing is the will to do it that way. It’s definitely possible to train people to do it that way. The hangup is, as always, the cost, specifically, the cost-benefit ratio. The perceived benefit of better software is usually far less than the perceived (initial) cost.
And we always perceive only the initial cost because we are super-bad at long-term thinking about complex problems like building software.
At 34:00, he says
“There’s gotta be some better way to do this. […] This is just 3270 programming poisoned with all sorts of crud. How many languages do you have to do know to write a web application? Well, there’s some programming language, but that’s incidental! You’ve gotta know HTML and CSS and JS and Zazzle and Dazzle and … and, you know, the guy over here’s going: ‘let’s build communities by leveling people up. Leveling them up! I mean, what we’re going to do is hand them a … OK, now, hold this hammer. Ok? Good. You got that hammer? Now, here’s another one. Hold that hammer too. Now I’ve got a big barrel you’ve got to hold on your head. We are not helping our cause with this truly terrible mechanism that we have adopted.”
At 41:00, he says
“The database is a detail.”
This reminds me of The UI is an afterthought, a detail, an article I wrote recently [4] about a 7-year-old video I watched that expressed the same sentiments about external systems that Martin is expressing in his 12-year-old video.
“That’s what architecture is: find some place to draw a line and then make sure every dependency that crosses that line goes in the same direction.”
At 55:45, he says,
“There’s an interesting case of the database—the thing that’s so incredibly important—and yet, we took that decision and we just deferred it off the end of the world and then, when somebody needed it, we shimmed it in in a day. Because our architecture had done something right. What is the hallmark of a really good architecture. A good architecture allows major decisions to be deferred.”
“A good architecture maximizes the number of decisions not made.”
At 1:00:50, he says,
“How do you keep the beast under control? You need a quite of tests you trust with your life. You must never look at that suite of tests and think ‘you know? I don’t think I really tested everything?’ As soon as you think that, you’ve lost it. Because now you’re afraid of your code. The reason we write our tests first is so that we know, that every single line of code we wrote was because of a failing test that we wrote. So that we know that every single decision that we made is tested. So that then, we can pull up that code on our screen and say ‘Oh my God, that looks like a mess’—and clean it!…without any fear.”
Margot Kidder FTW 🙌 .
Diplo has successfully escaped the arena by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“If you want to see what the next 25 years are going to be like, Burning Man is it. Millionaires and managers ignoring huge structural problems until it starts to impact their libertarian freak fests and then escaping to somewhere safe when they get the chance. Well, until there aren’t any safe places to escape to, I guess…”
This is going to be my new metaphor for people who only fix the superficial problem: “Moving headstones, but leaving the bodies.”
This subreddit has almost 200,000 subscribers and no-one has posted on it. It’s probably the moderator who’s suppressing any jackass who would try to post anyway, but it’s still a nice dedication to the joke that the Amish wouldn’t be able to post to Reddit.
This is two hours of what seems like a Bill Burr stand-up routine, but is just an on-stage and lightly prepared version of his weekly podcast. He has a little piece of paper to remind him of topics he wanted to cover—probably the same as he does every week. He just throws out a pretty good set—just like that.
“Offstage: [reading listener chats] …well, you’ve already talked about the Fed, Fatties, and Botox, so that’s good…
Bill: So what? Is Skynyrd not going to play Freebird?”
“I’ll tell you this: the day American black people care about soccer, that is the end of all of you.”
At 80:00, he goes on a glorious run about women’s volleyball and the booty shorts.
“Can I be honest with you? That’s why, you know, like, when they started doing that thing where they were going to have trans people going to school? […] Like, that’s why I was against that shit. Like, wait a minute…you haven’t even figured out how to do the right version heterosexually. You know what I mean? […] All they did was just tell you what happened physically. […]
“There should have been a guy there going YOUR FUCKING LIFE WILL BE OVER. AS YOU KNOW IT. DO YOU KNOW WHY PUSSY FEELS SO GOOD? BECAUSE IF IT ONLY FELT OK, WE WOULD JUST JERK OFF BECAUSE IT WOULDN’T BE WORTH IT.
“Finding a woman can be the greatest thing of your fucking life. OR END IT. That’s what they should have been screaming at people.”
Lori Lightfoot Teaches Harvard Course On How To Catch Raw, Wriggly, Delicious Fishes So Tasty Sweet, Yes Good Precious (Babylon Bee)
This is just another example of something that’s funny, despite being disrespectful in the extreme, and ugly-shaming, to boot. However,
Impressions: Starfield’s sheer scale is already giving me vertigo by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)
“Within a few hours of starting the game, I found myself engaged as a pilot in the Vanguard Navy, working as a (semi-unwilling) undercover agent for a System Defense group and taking on freelance bounty-hunting jobs. And that’s all in between answering distress calls, doing cargo runs, tracking down an electrical drain in a subterranean community, and countless other odd jobs. The bigness of Starfield (and of space in general) isn’t up for debate. The key question, as it is in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, is how to go about finding something interesting to do in all that space. And on that score, thus far, Starfield has been more of a mixed bag.”
“There’s a staggering level of detail put into the major cities, settlements, and colonies of these carefully crafted hub worlds. That’s especially apparent in the architecture, from sprawling retro-futuristic walkable cities to bustling commercial trade hubs to subterranean mines crowded with the dregs of society, and everything in between.”
30 years after Descent, developer Volition is suddenly no more by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)
“Volition—the development studio behind franchises from Descent and Freespace to Red Faction and Saints Row—has been abruptly shut down after a 30-year run. Parent company Embracer Group said the studio will be closed “effective immediately” as part of a massive restructuring program that began in June, according to a farewell notice posted on Volition’s website and on LinkedIn.”
Oh man, I loved Descent! I remember playing with Kavorka and Joker after work at the old Logical headquarters on 16th street. We’d set up a network game on the LAN and just play for hours.
I also played Red Faction, which was one of the first games to have semi-realistic environment destruction.
“Can we make our UI dumb enough to make our app usable without it?”
The video demonstrates navigating through a simple e-commerce site. Then, he shows how the app can be driven from the console by calling the APIs directly—upon which the URL and UI all update automatically. That is, the logic is... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 7. Sep 2023 11:02:51 (GMT-5)
“Can we make our UI dumb enough to make our app usable without it?”
The video demonstrates navigating through a simple e-commerce site. Then, he shows how the app can be driven from the console by calling the APIs directly—upon which the URL and UI all update automatically. That is, the logic is not in the UI.
He then demonstrates that he can drive the web site without a UI by deleting the rendering to React DOM entirely. He can still manipulate the console API to perform the same operations because the logic is all defined completely independent of the UI. Of course, this is the same command-line interface that can be used in the automated tests, which means that the entire product can be tested without a UI at all.
I’m becoming increasingly convinced that neither React nor Angular is the way to go. Both React and Angular mix logic into the UI, putting the UI front and center. This is wrong. Additionally, Angular suffers from a complete inability to speed up the development lifecycle because it’s so strongly tied to WebPack.
I’ve used Redux before and the boilerplate becomes prodigious. I’ve used the React reducers as well, and it’s a bit better, but still doesn’t feel very natural. I’ve used MobX but long before its current incarnation where it really seems to “just work” as a store of state and reactive programming logic.
The when
construct (see 16:37 in the video), which takes a predicate and an action, is a very neat concept that allows you to define exactly how your application reacts to state changes without burying it all in the components.
“If the view is to be purely derived from the state, then routing should affect state, not the derived component tree.”
Therefore, a url-change is an action like any other, modifying the state and letting MobX handle notifying all interested parties. Once you’ve gotten that far, you don’t even need a UI-specific routing library because you can just configure any router to direct URLs to the store API—which will automatically update the UI. The UI (e.g., React) doesn’t have to have anything to do with routing. A route change triggers an action, which changes the state. The UI reacts. The UI does not do anything with the route—it just triggers actions.
A reactive non-UI component ensures that the route stays in-sync with the state by reacting to changes in the state. In most cases, you can just create a value that calculates what the URL should be, based on the state. This could get complicated, of course, but it’s also completely separate from the rest of the application logic and can be thoroughly tested. We can also use the when
construct outlined above to simply listen for changes to the calculated URL and update the browser’s location and history. This way, the management of the history and URL is not entwined with the rest of the application logic. It’s just reacting to state changes, like everything else.
Working like this results in automated tests that work naturally and look very much like Playwright tests—but completely without UI and using semantically meaningful constructs. The UI is an afterthought (as Michel himself wrote in 2019). Playwright is nice, but it’s a last resort when you’ve already botched the job of writing your code in a more testable manner. It’s a nice check that the UI is properly wired to the logic of the application, but should not be used to verify application behavior—simply to verify UI behavior.
This all goes very much in the direction of The Humble Dialog Box by Martin Fowler in 2002, which shows that we’ve known how to build software correctly for over 20 years—and we keep getting distracted by “the new shiny”, thinking that we can somehow start with the UI and still get maintainable software.
]]>“[…] there are schools like Yale or Princeton, frankly, that have the latitude such that they could pretty much send people to school for free. But in spite of that, they continue to overwhelmingly enroll... [More]”
Published by marco on 6. Sep 2023 22:39:42 (GMT-5)
The article US Colleges and Universities Are Becoming Giant Exploitation Machines by Daniel Denvir & Dennis M. Hogan (Jacobin) writes,
“[…] there are schools like Yale or Princeton, frankly, that have the latitude such that they could pretty much send people to school for free. But in spite of that, they continue to overwhelmingly enroll wealthy students.”
And it’s not merit-based; they’re laundering privilege into credentials. That’s their business.
“They’re going to end up graduating students with more debt who also have comparatively less-elite credentials when they’re done.”
Well, isn’t that just perfect. What a completely predictably pathological result.
“[…] they’re spending a fraction of their endowment on the university’s operations, period. So what good is an endowment if it’s not being spent on the university? Maybe this gets to a more philosophical question about capitalism. I’m lying awake at night thinking, why do people like Jeff Bezos want and need more money than they can ever spend by orders and orders of magnitude? What drives this pursuit of a larger and larger endowment as an end unto itself, almost?”
Everything about the system in the U.S. drives it. Literally every facet of that culture drives the mindless acquisition of more, regardless of how many others suffer for it. I’ve got mine, Jack might as well be the national motto. Ethics, morality, principle—they’ve all been ground to dust and washed away. They are useless hindrances to the personal accumulation of capital.
Other people don’t matter. Other people are “other”. They deserve to lose. Everything is a game to be won.
Bigger. Better. Faster. More.
Actually, “better” doesn’t really matter. It’s a nice-to-have, I guess.
“But you hire financiers to invest your money and make money for you. That’s what they’re going to do. They’re not particularly worried about what you do with it afterward. Their job is to make it get bigger. They are simply doing their job.”
The heck with that. Why do people like these “financiers” even exist? Brcause the system promotes their creation. Why is a society OK with that? They’re like ticks or mosquitos or serial killers: they do not serve a purpose that is beneficial to society. In fact, they are actively harmful. We should be trying to limit or eliminate the damage that they do, rather than shrugging our shoulders and treating them like an unstoppable, unalterable force of nature.
“Because ultimately, who would you rather be? The person who’s living off spending 7 percent of $1 billion or the person who’s living off spending just 1 percent of $5 billion? It’s an easy choice.”
What the hell kind of question is that? NEITHER. Neither of those should exist. No wonder other socialists shit on Jacobin’s socialist cred.
“Once you start to open the door to saying you can’t invest in this because of that reason, then all of a sudden, it’s like, well, where can you ethically and equitably invest? And the answer starts to be nowhere, because there is no real ethical finance capitalism in a world where capital’s need to accumulate is causing endless depredation across the planet and has been for centuries. That’s where the need to have an endowment at all intersects with the purported mission of social good and the very liberal values that these colleges proclaim to hold.”
Yes. That is exactly correct. There is no way to reconcile those. Stop wasting time trying to find one. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
“Here in Providence, Brown has been expanding downtown and across the river, all while being exempted from property taxes, either largely or entirely.”
“Brown would like to begin to get into the game of owning a medical center because . . . what federal student loans are to colleges and universities, Medicare and Medicaid dollars are to medicine. So if you can combine those income streams, you can become very well-resourced very quickly. That, ultimately, is the goal, and I don’t think it’s entirely speculative to say that.”
So giant, tax-free endowments seek to grow by corralling even more government money into their maws. And we are powerless to stop them. We are not even ideologically equipped to consider this a problem. To the contrary, we consider this behavior to be the epitome of how the system should work: take what you can; fuck everyone else. Alpha-predator, top-of-the-food-chain stuff. Who can argue with success?
“[…] creates an environment in which the kinds of workers and students you hope to attract will feel comfortable. These things are all enabled by the kind of resources that only extremely wealthy schools have.”
No. It’s enabled by the kind of money that states have, but we choose to launder it through the wealthy, trusting in their beneficence when they redistribute a tiny fraction of it in what we hope we will consider fruitful and just directions. He’s just described trickle-down economics in what reads like very approving terms.
“These two things are intimately related: the ability of labor across the university to exercise some form of leverage to begin to contest top-down administrative decision-making, and the increasing centralization of administrative decision-making power among a small handful of extremely empowered technocrats. Which is not a term of derision; it is a term of art. These are highly trained, highly competent people. I’m not merely lobbing invective.”
This constant kowtowing to the people ruining everything is grating. They are good at a job that shouldn’t exist. Fantastic. The work they do consolidates wealth and power tremendously, and harms everyone else. It’s like admiring an assassin—you’re fine with it until they take out one of your own.
On the same topic, the article Management at California State University Is Living Large While Faculty Struggle by Matthew Ford (Jacobin) writes,
“Budgetary shortfalls are the most common justification for denying faculty salary increases, yet administrator salary increases miraculously continue to roll out regardless of budgetary constraints.”
This is the way of the world. Management tends toward an amoral criminality where its sole purpose becomes to defend its own lifestyle, salary, and pension, treating the actually essential employees of an organization as a necessary evil whose labor needs to be obtained as cheaply as possible. This is the exact opposite of how it should be: administration should be obtained as cheaply as possible, but it controls the pursestrings, so it just gives itself all of the money and hires all of its friends. There is nothing special about this. It’s just the same level of corruption that has always existed.
“If anybody is unsure where CSU management’s priorities lie, a brief glance at the new compensation package for new chancellor Mildred García should make things clear: García will receive an annual salary of $795,000, another $80,000 in deferred compensation, $8,000 per month for a housing allowance, and another $1,000 per month for a car allowance.”
There you go. She doesn’t teach, she provides no value to the actual mission of a university. She is probably really, really good at ensuring that money keeps getting shoveled in the direction of people who already have more than they know what to do with.
Good for her. America loves people like her.
]]>“Ocasio-Cortez is not treated like a legislator, but like an icon, a sacred cow who can’t be criticized where any back-bench fifth-year representative would be for similar behavior. I don’t know what that is, but it’s... [More]”
Published by marco on 5. Sep 2023 21:55:49 (GMT-5)
The article Let Me Reiterate the Questions I Asked in My AOC Essay by Freddie de Boer (SubStack) writes
“Ocasio-Cortez is not treated like a legislator, but like an icon, a sacred cow who can’t be criticized where any back-bench fifth-year representative would be for similar behavior. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not progressive.”
This is a not unusual idolization of a person who is seen as a bulwark against things ostensibly even more evil. But, as listed in concise detail in the linked article, there are innumerable examples of how she is very hypocritical in her support of the issues she’s claimed to care for, and how her behavior is indistinguishable from a legislator whose only goal is to increase the power of the Democratic party, no matter which issues are actually promoted.
There was a lot of hope that she would be the person who would stand up for all of the issues, but, seemingly for a lot of people, it suffices to be the person who once could have been that person, even though she never materialized as that person, in any way whatsoever.
Somehow, she has achieved a sort of reputational orbit. Nothing she has done since she earned her reputation as someone who could be a rabble-rouser—when she had no power to change anything—will shake people’s faith that she actually is that rabble-rouser, despite the utter lack of evidence, despite, in fact, the large amount of evidence to the contrary.
The article AOC and the Squad’s List of Left-Wing Accomplishments Is Quite Long by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin) is one of those articles, chiding us all for our lack of faith.
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad are elected officials. There’s any number of criticisms of their time in Congress that are fair, reasonable, and necessary, including over key votes they’ve been on the wrong side on, times they’ve failed to stand with unions, and their failure to, as promised, fully take advantage of the leverage they had under the Democrats’ formerly slim House majority.”
Bla, bla, bla. This is a really long article that emphasizes a handful of mostly incidental legislative improvements while ignoring the fact that AOC has voted on the wrong side of all of the large, important issues.
Tlaib has been better, but she, too, seems to sometimes be more interested in remaining elected than in actually taking a stand that will risk her electability. As Marcetic points out, this is not surprising … but it doesn’t make it admirable.
It’s not the low bar to which we should aspire. The only end to that sort of legislating is to end up constantly conceding on principle simply in order to remain elected so that we have someone in office with those principles that we admire—but who never acts on them.
It’s a catch-22, all right. You can only get re-elected when you don’t act on the principles for which you were elected. I haven’t seen any American politician who’s ever decided to stand for a principle that would endanger their re-electability. AOC is no different. It makes her effectively useless. It also makes her annoying because she’s constantly going on and on about the principles she constantly fails to enforce.
I have no use for a legislator who is so dedicated to her party that she won’t fight the military budget or the re-election campaign of a geriatric Alzheimer’s patient. It’s ridiculous to even talk about any other minor details of her legislative record, honestly, unless Marcetic is trying to get with her. Who knows? He goes on,
“The left pessimism embodied by New York magazine’s profile — which argues explicitly that socialists have nothing to show for five years of electoral victories and that the whole experiment should be abandoned — is a recipe for despair, apathy, and in the end, demobilization, which may already be having a trickle-down effect. It’s a self-defeating, possibly self-fulfilling prophecy that threatens to undermine socialist gains.”
Bullshit. Take your lesser-evil horseshit and stuff it. AOC doesn’t stand for socialism in any real way. Bernie Sanders has capitulated so many times that he’s also useless. It pains me to say it, but it’s true. I like him more, it’s true. But, we have no use for socialists who promote war and the military and who capitulate to state demands for strike-breaking. None of these people is willing to put their political necks on the line for our principles. Why should we continue to waste time with them? I just don’t understand how you can make that argument.
I just opened the article The Uselessness of Bernie Sanders by Peter Bolton (CounterPunch), which, as I noted above, is a hard thing to read—but it’s true. He says the right things, but he can’t. Get. It. Done. He ends up voting for the exact opposite of the thing he was saying—for … reasons. Always the wrong reasons.
Just vote against it, Bernie. Make a statement. What have you got to lose? You’ve been a senator for fifty years. You’re over 80 years old. You’ve got literally nothing to lose.
The article In New Hampshire speech, Bernie Sanders seeks to give Biden “progressive” credentials, comparing him to FDR by Patrick Martin (WSWS) reports on Sanders’s latest disappointment. The article basically provides detail for what it says on the tin.
Specifically, he said this:
]]>“The... [More]”
Published by marco on 29. Aug 2023 22:33:37 (GMT-5)
Oh, c’mon, Bernie. Really?
The article In New Hampshire speech, Bernie Sanders seeks to give Biden “progressive” credentials, comparing him to FDR by Patrick Martin (WSWS) reports on Sanders’s latest disappointment. The article basically provides detail for what it says on the tin.
Specifically, he said this:
“The Democrats, once and for all, must reject the corporate wing of the party and empower those who are prepared to create a grassroots, multi-racial, multi-generational working class party in every state in this country. Democrats, through words and action, must make it clear that they stand with a struggling working class, a disappearing middle class, and millions of low income Americans who are barely surviving.”
This is good. This is fine. This is what Bernie always says. It’s what he has always said. It’s the stuff they let him say because it doesn’t matter that he says it.
Why doesn’t it matter?
Because the then immediately endorsed Biden for president.
The war machine must stop, but he endorsed Biden for president.
We need a principled leader to stand up to the weight of the last four decades of U.S. history and economic shithousery and war, but he endorsed Biden for president.
About Cornel West he had this to say:
“Sanders expressed his personal admiration for West, while claiming that re-electing Biden was essential to preventing Trump from returning to power. On “Meet the Press,” he said, “at the end of the day, I think the progressive community in general and the American people have got to make a decision as to whether we stand for democracy or authoritarianism.””
Ok, Ok, Bernie. You sure you don’t want to give any support for your theory that Biden is the lesser evil? That you’re really going to just ride that hobby-horse that any third-party candidate is just going to get Trump reelected? That this would somehow be worse than Biden’s having embroiled the U.S. in the Ukraine conflict?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me ten times, shame on me.
The third-party-candidate-cost-Democrats-the-election trope is just that: bullshit. The Democrats are a dumpster fire of corporate greed and immorality. The Republicans are the same.
Instead of doing anything that the populace might want, they chastise and admonish and browbeat their potential voters into voting for them.
Bernie said:
“On “State of the Union,” he said he disagreed with “my good friend Cornel West” because “there is a real question whether democracy is going to remain in the United States of America,” and it was necessary to support Biden to keep Trump out.”
So Cornel West should shut the fuck up and campaign and vote against Trump, if not for Biden. Biden is the only thing standing between the U.S. and not having a democracy anymore. Can you imagine believing something so foolish? Wouldn’t you be terrified that this doddering old man is the only hope for the nation?
Maybe Bernie should sit down and shut up while the grown-ups talk. He’s been a worn-out useless stooge for the Democrats for too long. He says so many nice things sometimes, but he is politically useless. It’s hard not to think that he’s a deliberate distraction, bleeding away energy that would be better invested elsewhere.
It’s astonishing that he not only forgave the Democrats for having torpedoed him not once, but twice—he’s actually now out-and-out stumping for them, without reservation. As usual, he asks for nothing in return.
Of course, the article is from the WSWS, so they’re going to shit on Cornel West as well, but for different reasons. For example,
“West himself offers no genuine alternative to working people.”
That is a pretty broad brush they just painted West with. The man hasn’t even had a chance to describe his platform yet. I guess the WSWS is going to be preemptively disappointed in him.
Why shouldn’t Sanders support Biden? There are myriad reasons, but the article 115 dead and hundreds still missing in Maui wildfire disaster by Kevin Reed (WSWS) provides an excellent, recent example,
“After spending six hours in Maui feigning sympathy for the families of those who died and those who have lost everything in the wildfire disaster, President Joe Biden and wife Jill took a direct flight on Air Force One back to Nevada to resume their vacation at a billionaire’s luxury mansion in Lake Tahoe last week.”
That’s about all you need to say about Biden.
Well, there’s also this photo caption:
“President Joe Biden speaks with reporters after taking a pilates and spin class at PeloDog, Wednesday, August 23, 2023, in South Lake Tahoe, California. ”
Truly a man in touch with the people. He might as well be living on that Elysium space station. You can see why Bernie loves him so.
Published by marco on 28. Aug 2023 22:09:12 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 3. Sep 2023 22:41:48 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
BA.2.86 shows just how risky slacking off on COVID monitoring is by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)
“Part of the reason there is so little data on BA.2.86 is that there is relatively little data on circulating variants in general. In early 2022, at the height of pandemic genomic surveillance, scientists worldwide submitted nearly 100,000 coronavirus genetic sequences per week to the public genomic database (GISAID). In the past month, however, weekly GISAID submissions have averaged around just 5,000.”
““The virus is circulating in every country and EG.5 is one of the latest variants of interest that we’re classifying. This will continue and this is what we have to prepare for,” she added. Currently, no single variant is dominant anywhere, and the virus is circulating essentially unchecked.”
Poor Kerkhova. What a shitty job she got—telling an uncaring world that it’s shooting itself in the foot. Again.
The Free Market Should be a Weapon Against the Rich by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)
“Everybody hates the rich and why not? We have nothing, they have everything, and they fucking stole it from us. I may not be the Castro worshipping Bolshevik I was in my twenties but as the Russians like to say, the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism.”
“What we’re witnessing is a growing civil war between competing cartels of oligarchs during the collapse of the morally bankrupt western civilization that gave birth to them both. In other words, the silver spoon riding whores of the Second Gilded Age are building even more industrial complexes to exploit the crisis of their own demise. Dante wept for there were no more hells left to dream of.”
“Gore Vidal wasn’t just being cheeky when he called capitalism “Socialism for the rich.” Every single billionaire, every global conglomerate, every Fortune 500 company is the direct product of the state. Without big government there would be no big business. Without highway subsidies and eminent domain there would be no Walmart. Without copyright laws and patents there would be no big pharma. Without the World Bank and the Fed there would be no George Soros. Without standing armies and world wars there would be no Exxon Mobile, no Lockheed Martin, no nuclear arms race, no global fucking warming.”
“We need to integrate the underground into a united front of divided tribal organizations that can exist and thrive without the state and then we need to drop out, sit back, crack open a cold bottle of knock-off Coke and watch the billionaires of the vampire class starve without a neck to suck dry.”
„Raub des Jahrhunderts“ – Wie die USA das venezolanische Staatsunternehmen Citgo zerschlagen by Ricardo Vaz (NachDenkSeiten)
“Bevor das Staatsunternehmen 2019 von den USA widerrechtlich übernommen und unter Kontrolle der von Washington unterstützten Opposition gebracht wurde, erwirtschaftete es regelmäßig jährliche Dividenden in Höhe von rund 1 Milliarde US-Dollar für den venezolanischen Staatshaushalt.”
“Exxon gehörte zu den Unternehmen, die sich weigerten, die neuen Rechtsvorschriften Venezuelas für den Ölsektor zu akzeptieren und ihre Projekte dort aufgaben. Nur ExxonMobil und ConocoPhillips lehnten die Entschädigungsangebote der Regierung von Präsident Hugo Chávez ab und strebten ein internationales Schiedsverfahren an.”
“Die Regierung von Nicolás Maduro betont die Verantwortung der Opposition für die mögliche Zerschlagung des Unternehmens und bezeichnet den Verkauf von Citgo als „Raub des Jahrhunderts“.”
Piraten des Potomac: US-Regierung lässt Tanker mit iranischem Öl im Wert von 56 Millionen US-Dollar entführen und in Texas entladen by Florian Warweg (NachDenkSeiten)
“Mutmaßlich auf Befehl der US-Regierung wurde am Wochenende ein Tanker mit iranischem Öl im Golf von Mexiko beschlagnahmt. Laut vorliegenden Schiffsverfolgungsdaten wird die Ladung im Wert von weit über 50 Millionen US-Dollar derzeit in der Nähe von Houston (Texas) entladen. Der US-Senat will den Erlös der Kaperung „den Opfern von 9/11“ zukommen lassen.”
“„Monatelang lag das Schiff im Südchinesischen Meer vor der Nordostküste Singapurs, bevor es plötzlich und ohne Erklärung in den Golf von Mexiko fuhr. Analysten gehen davon aus, dass die Ladung des Schiffes von amerikanischen Behörden beschlagnahmt wurde.”
“Was hat denn der Iran mit den Anschlägen von 9/11 zu tun gehabt, wird sich jetzt vielleicht der geneigte Leser fragen. Nach allem, was man weiß, gar nichts. Das hat aber ein New Yorker Gericht 2012 nicht davon abgehalten, den Iran zu insgesamt 10,5 Milliarden US-Dollar zu verurteilen. Die damalige hanebüchene und jedem rechtsstaatlichen Ansatz hohnsprechende Begründung lautete: Der Iran hätte „nicht ausreichend bewiesen, dass er nicht in die Anschläge des Terrornetzwerks Al-Kaida verwickelt war.“”
Just not even pretending to be a serious nation of even seemingly serious people. Just mad as hatters. Children with dangerous toys.
Biden’s Pointless Asian Summit by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Only people far away who concoct policies without leaving their Washington offices could entertain such fantasies. You have to conclude that these people are Orientalists at heart, to whom Asians are still merely stick figures with no shred of human complexity to them.”
“Only people far away who concoct policies without leaving their Washington offices could entertain such fantasies. You have to conclude that these people are Orientalists at heart, to whom Asians are still merely stick figures with no shred of human complexity to them. Biden and his policy planners seem to have surmised that two East Asian China hawks had come up at the same time like matching fruit on a slot machine.”
“I reckon Yoon and Kishida were more in the way of cowardly in not facing the 21 st century’s complexities, multipolarity high among them. They instead reverted to an old, demeaning dependence on the American imperium — signaling this in their obsequious acquiescence to Biden’s sweeping declarations of an historically significant turn in trans–Pacific relationship. Say “Yes,” be courteous, and do as little as possible: This is an established tactic when East Asians must mollify the crude heathens in Washington.”
When the First Amendment Dies by Andrew P. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)
“Congress made it the law of the land in 1980 that journalists and their publishers are not subject to police raids in America. If the government – local, state or federal – wants data from a journalist or publisher, it must obtain a subpoena from a grand jury and serve it civilly on the custodian of the records that the government seeks. This gives the journalist and the publisher 10 days in which to challenge the subpoena. It also preserves the institutional integrity of the press.”
US Colleges and Universities Are Becoming Giant Exploitation Machines by Daniel Denvir & Dennis M. Hogan (Jacobin)
“Neoliberalism, for me, really means the channeling of public goods into private hands: the capture of funds, of resources, of benefits dedicated for public consumption by private, often profit-driven actors.”
“[…] it also serves an important disciplinary function by loading students up with so much debt that they don’t feel like they can take the risks of engaging in radical social activism, because they’re far too exposed to financial penalties if they get kicked out of school or get arrested or can’t finish their degree or graduate with a “useless” degree.”
“If you think about the way that college and university education, whether public or private, is marketed to students, the idea is that there’s pretty much no amount of money that you can spend on your education investing in yourself that would be too much, because the wage premium of a college degree is still going to pay you back.”
“The lazy river is like a egregious example because it’s one of those things where . . . you put in a lazy river in 2017; it’s part of the $85 million recreation center. What makes it particularly egregious is that the classrooms are literally crumbling. The instructional facilities have not been maintained even as the recreational facilities, the sports facilities, and so on have been supercharged.”
“[In other countries,] institutions are thought of as having this mandate to serve local students, to serve students who are seeking different kinds of education. The mission is at least somewhat conceived of as a public good. Then the entire infrastructure of donors — of naming buildings after wealthy donors, of buying, endowing offices, chairs, what have you — it doesn’t exist, because there is no basis for cultivating that kind of culture around private philanthropic support for education.”
“Donations to colleges and universities are among the most regressive forms of giving that exist. Philanthropic giving to wealthy institutions is almost exclusively reputational laundering rather than advancing a social mission.”
“[…] ultimately you’re taking an institution that has the resources to engage in that kind of mission anyway, and you’re giving it extra money to put your name somewhere and get a tax write-off. That culture just doesn’t exist in other places. It really is so normalized for us, despite being bizarre in a global context.”
“We have the tuition side, where declining state and federal support for public education means that individual students have to hold the bag. We also have the labor side, where employers are increasingly unwilling to offer training and credentialing as a routine part of what it means to employ people, which means that people are then forced to go and get their training and credentialing themselves.”
“[…] the credentialing race has meant that there’s not even a pool of workers who are ready. Even if you were to throw a bunch of workers who are interested in getting those credentials into training programs today and give the credentials for free, you still wouldn’t come close to solving the labor shortage for months, in some instances, and years in others. That’s why there’s such a competition for the relatively smaller number of workers who already have these credentials.”
“[…] the workers who need credentials now to even participate in the economy and plug really dire labor market gaps are not going, for the most part, to a university. And they’re not coming from out of state. They’re going to these locally serving public institutions that specialize in offering these kinds of programs.”
“If you look at the composition of who’s actually employed by college and universities, especially private ones, what you see is massive outsourcing of the blue-collar and service work. You get contracts with Aramark, with Allied Barton, with security forces, with food vendors, whatever. Then you don’t have to directly employ those workers, which, by the way, means that you’re not subject to the same sort of labor protections and standards. It’s also a way to union bust and erode the college’s responsibility to employ people from local communities.”
“[…] one of the things that has really accelerated dramatically over the last few years is the amount of time spent doing assessment, documentation, and paperwork. When you start to look into this stuff, there are so many paradoxes. Even as there are more and more administrators running around fulfilling these roles, faculty are being asked to do so much more of their own administrative labor. The question is, why? How does that happen?”
“We’re asking people to become entrepreneurs of their own life. Which is not fair to workers who are looking to get a decent job and earn a stable living and raise a family and what have you.”
“[…] if you think about the liberals, the Obamas, the Democratic politicians and social figures, like the Mike Bloombergs, who want to foreground this kind of very narrowly, technically focused education . . . the hypocrisy is revealed in the fact that they would never themselves educate their own families and children in that way. They want to create one model of education to educate workers and then another model of education to reproduce their class and to educate the next leaders.”
“Other students are funneled into the two-year and certificate-granting institutions to get a short-term credential that’s going to let them get a job that capitalists happen to need today or tomorrow or next year. Then, roughly half the students are funneled into either prisons or low-wage work and are never given the opportunity to attend college or higher education really at all.”
“The answer to this has been increasing casualization — the replacement of permanent guaranteed work with short-term, term-limited, and incredibly insecure work. It’s also important to acknowledge that this is not exceptional about academic labor; it’s just something that American workers have been experiencing for decades now. There’s been an increasing turn toward subcontracting, toward hiring temporary workers, toward gig working.”
“[…] when you invested a decade of your life being trained to do a job, and then you’re told that the job doesn’t exist, it’s a difficult pill to swallow. It’s even more difficult because it’s not as though nobody’s doing the work that the job entails. It’s that they’re not going to pay you to do it in a way that makes it sustainable for you to live.”
“So when you talk about the university having an investment office, it’s not a couple rooms down the hall from the provost where some people sit and do accountancy. It is on the order of an investment fund. It’s substantial finance capital that’s being run by and for these institutions. And of course, it’s tax-free. So there’s nothing better.”
“But if you are dependent on tuition for most of your operating budget or a great deal of your operating budget, your ability to provide generous aid packages to students who need it is substantially affected. As a result, what you will do is you will admit richer students. So paradoxically, some of the less wealthy institutions in terms of endowment capital actually have some of the wealthiest student bodies, because they’re most dependent on tuition revenue.”
“[…] there are schools like Yale or Princeton, frankly, that have the latitude such that they could pretty much send people to school for free. But in spite of that, they continue to overwhelmingly enroll wealthy students.”
And it’s not merit-based; they’re laundering privilege into credentials. That’s their business.
“They’re going to end up graduating students with more debt who also have comparatively less-elite credentials when they’re done.”
“[…] they’re spending a fraction of their endowment on the university’s operations, period. So what good is an endowment if it’s not being spent on the university? Maybe this gets to a more philosophical question about capitalism. I’m lying awake at night thinking, why do people like Jeff Bezos want and need more money than they can ever spend by orders and orders of magnitude? What drives this pursuit of a larger and larger endowment as an end unto itself, almost?”
“But you hire financiers to invest your money and make money for you. That’s what they’re going to do. They’re not particularly worried about what you do with it afterward. Their job is to make it get bigger. They are simply doing their job.”
The heck with that. Why do these people exist? Why is a society OK with that? It’s like ticks or mosquitos or serial killers: they do not serve a purpose that is beneficial to society. In fact, they are actively harmful. We should be trying to limit or eliminate the damage that they do, rather than shrugging our shoulders and treating them like an unstoppable, unalterable force of nature.
“Because ultimately, who would you rather be? The person who’s living off spending 7 percent of $1 billion or the person who’s living off spending just 1 percent of $5 billion? It’s an easy choice.”
What the hell kind of question is that? NEITHER. Neither of those should exist. No wonder other socialists shit on Jacobin’s socialist cred.
“Once you start to open the door to saying you can’t invest in this because of that reason, then all of a sudden, it’s like, well, where can you ethically and equitably invest? And the answer starts to be nowhere, because there is no real ethical finance capitalism in a world where capital’s need to accumulate is causing endless depredation across the planet and has been for centuries. That’s where the need to have an endowment at all intersects with the purported mission of social good and the very liberal values that these colleges proclaim to hold.”
Yes. That is exactly correct. There is no way to reconcile those. Stop wasting time trying to find one. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
“Here in Providence, Brown has been expanding downtown and across the river, all while being exempted from property taxes, either largely or entirely.”
“Brown would like to begin to get into the game of owning a medical center because . . . what federal student loans are to colleges and universities, Medicare and Medicaid dollars are to medicine. So if you can combine those income streams, you can become very well-resourced very quickly. That, ultimately, is the goal, and I don’t think it’s entirely speculative to say that.”
So giant, tax-free endowments seek to grow by corralling even more government money into their maws. And we are powerless to stop them. We are not even ideologically equipped to consider this a problem. To the contrary, we consider this behavior to be the epitome of how the system should work: take what you can; fuck everyone else. Alpha-predator, top-of-the-food-chain stuff. Who can argue with success?
“[…] creates an environment in which the kinds of workers and students you hope to attract will feel comfortable. These things are all enabled by the kind of resources that only extremely wealthy schools have.”
No. It’s enabled by the kind of money that states have, but we choose to launder it through the wealthy, trusting in their beneficence when they redistribute a tiny fraction of it in what we hope we will consider fruitful and just directions. He’s just described trickle-down economics in what reads like very approving terms.
“These two things are intimately related: the ability of labor across the university to exercise some form of leverage to begin to contest top-down administrative decision-making, and the increasing centralization of administrative decision-making power among a small handful of extremely empowered technocrats. Which is not a term of derision; it is a term of art. These are highly trained, highly competent people. I’m not merely lobbing invective.”
This constant kowtowing to the people ruining everything is grating. They are good at a job that shouldn’t exist. Fantastic. The work they do consolidates wealth and power tremendously, and harms everyone else. It’s like admiring an assassin—you’re fine with it until they take out one of your own.
Management at California State University Is Living Large While Faculty Struggle by Matthew Ford (Jacobin)
“Budgetary shortfalls are the most common justification for denying faculty salary increases, yet administrator salary increases miraculously continue to roll out regardless of budgetary constraints.”
This is the way of the world. Management tends toward an amoral criminality where its sole purpose becomes to defend its own lifestyle, salary, and pension, treating the actually necessary employees of an organization as a necessary evil whose labor needs to be obtained as cheaply as possible. This is the exact opposite of how it should be: administration should be obtained as cheaply as possible, but it controls the pursestrings, so it just gives itself all of the money and hires all of its friends. There is nothing special about this. It’s just the same level of corruption that has always existed.
“If anybody is unsure where CSU management’s priorities lie, a brief glance at the new compensation package for new chancellor Mildred García should make things clear: García will receive an annual salary of $795,000, another $80,000 in deferred compensation, $8,000 per month for a housing allowance, and another $1,000 per month for a car allowance.”
There you go. She doesn’t teach, she provides no value to the actual mission of a university. She is probably really, really good at ensuring that money keeps getting shoveled in the direction of people who already have more than they know what to do with.
“To put this into context, the base monthly salary for lecturers who teach five classes per semester and hold a PhD is $5,400. Lecturers, in other words, make less per month than the chancellor is given for housing and car allowances; they also do not receive these allowances, despite the fact that they clearly need both far more than the chancellor does.”
“The annual salary for a full-time lecturer with a PhD ($65,000) is about 60 percent of the annual amount that the chancellor receives as a housing and car stipend ($108,000). Full-time lecturers earn a $5,400 monthly paycheck (before taxes), while CSU presidents who don’t have free housing get $4,200 or $5,000 per month solely for housing on top of their enormous salaries.”
“Today, students drown in debt to receive a CSU education, and many faculty are paid significantly less than K–12 teachers. Meanwhile, the highest payouts, along with free housing and car payments, go to those who neither teach nor do research.”
In New Hampshire speech, Bernie Sanders seeks to give Biden “progressive” credentials, comparing him to FDR by Patrick Martin (WSWS)
Oh, c’mon, Bernie. Really?
He said this:
“The Democrats, once and for all, must reject the corporate wing of the party and empower those who are prepared to create a grassroots, multi-racial, multi-generational working class party in every state in this country. Democrats, through words and action, must make it clear that they stand with a struggling working class, a disappearing middle class, and millions of low income Americans who are barely surviving.”
But then endorsed Biden for president.
The war machine must stop, but he endorsed Biden for president.
We need a principled leader to stand up to the weight of the last four decades of U.S. history, but he endorsed Biden for president.
On Cornel West he said:
“Sanders expressed his personal admiration for West, while claiming that re-electing Biden was essential to preventing Trump from returning to power. On “Meet the Press,” he said, “at the end of the day, I think the progressive community in general and the American people have got to make a decision as to whether we stand for democracy or authoritarianism.””
Ok, Ok, Bernie. You sure you don’t want to give any support for your theory that Biden is the lesser evil? That you’re really going to just ride that hobby-horse that any third-party candidate is just going to get Trump reelected? That this would somehow be worse than Biden’s having embroiled the U.S. in the Ukraine conflict?
Nope. He said:
“On “State of the Union,” he said he disagreed with “my good friend Cornel West” because “there is a real question whether democracy is going to remain in the United States of America,” and it was necessary to support Biden to keep Trump out.”
So Cornel West should shut the fuck up and campaign and vote against Trump, if not for Biden. Biden is the only thing standing between the U.S. and not having a democracy anymore. Can you imagine believing something so foolish? Wouldn’t you be terrified that this doddering old man is the only hope for the nation?
Of course, it’s the WSWS, so they’re going to shit on Cornel West as well, but for different reasons,
“West himself offers no genuine alternative to working people.”
That is a pretty broad brush you just painted with. The man hasn’t even had a chance to describe his platform yet. I guess the WSWS is going to be preemptively disappointed in him.
Still, as the article 115 dead and hundreds still missing in Maui wildfire disaster by Kevin Reed (WSWS) points out,
“After spending six hours in Maui feigning sympathy for the families of those who died and those who have lost everything in the wildfire disaster, President Joe Biden and wife Jill took a direct flight on Air Force One back to Nevada to resume their vacation at a billionaire’s luxury mansion in Lake Tahoe last week.”
That’s about all you need to say about Biden.
Well, there’s also this photo caption:
“President Joe Biden speaks with reporters after taking a pilates and spin class at PeloDog, Wednesday, August 23, 2023, in South Lake Tahoe, California. ”
A man in touch with the people. He might as well be living on that Elysium space station.
The Press and 2024 by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“[…] we are now on notice that the Democratic leadership intends to address the problem of Joe Biden’s worsening-by-the-day mental incompetence by pushing Harris out front effectively to stand in for the president on the campaign trail. I had been wondering for some time how they would handle this knotty problem. Harris is now cast as “something of a one-woman rapid-response operation,” as The Times put it. She will do the public campaigning, in other words, while voters are invited to reelect a president they will rarely see but for more of those staged videos shot from the basement of his Wilmington mansion.”
“[…] our media are now certain, and unfortunately with justification, that they can get Americans to think whatever it is the power elites want them to think, however preposterous this may be. And they are fully committed to this project in the interests of the power they serve.”
All non-independent media, unfortunately. I suppose that those would be the dependent media, dependent on press releases, funding, and access.
“Quite apart from selling us Kamala Harris so as to get a cognitively impaired man reelected to the White House, The Times and all the pilot fish that swim beside it are now covering up the president’s perfectly obvious involvement in his son’s influence-peddling schemes and the Justice Department’s corruption out both doors—on the Hunter Biden case and the gross politicization of the Donald Trump indictments.”
The Crucifixion of Julian Assange by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“Prophets believe in justice even when the world around them says there will be no justice. It is not that they transcend reality. It is that they are compelled to strike out against it, refusing to be silent no matter how hard life becomes.”
“Their enemy was not only suffering, calumny, poverty, injustice, but a life devoid of meaning. “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live,” the civil rights icon Fred Shuttlesworth said. Prophets cannot be intimidated. They cannot be bought. They are single-mindedly obsessed. James Baldwin, himself a prophet, understands. He writes:”“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.”
“Years after Hannibal was gone, the Romans were still not satisfied. They finished their work of apocalyptic vengeance in 146 B.C. by razing Carthage to the ground and selling its remaining population into slavery. Cato the Censor summed up the sentiments of Empire: Carthāgō dēlenda est — Carthage must be destroyed. Nothing about Empire, from then until now, has changed.”
“The current American Empire, damaged and humiliated by troves of internal documents published by WikiLeaks, will, for this reason, persecute Julian for the rest of his life. It does not matter who is president or which political party is in power. Imperialists speak with one despotic voice.”
“[…] the radical priest Father Daniel Berrigan, who spent two years in a federal prison for burning draft records during the Vietnam War, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood”: I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm … in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact,”
“[…] because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace.”
“Jeremiah, like Julian, understood that a society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.”
““WikiLeaks and you personally are facing a battle that is both legal and political,” Weinglass told Julian. “As we learned in the Pentagon Papers case, the US government doesn’t like the truth coming out. And it doesn’t like to be humiliated. No matter if it’s Nixon or Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat in the White House. The US government will try to stop you from publishing its ugly secrets. And if they have to destroy you and the First Amendment and the rights of publishers with you, they are willing to do it.”
“Julian exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the global ruling class And for these truths they came after Julian, as they have come after all who dared rip back the veil on power. “Red Rosa now has vanished too,” Bertolt Brecht wrote after the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.””
“We have undergone a corporate coup, where poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where we, as citizens, are nothing more than commodities to corporate systems of power, ones to be used, fleeced and discarded.”
The Fate of the Animals by Sarah Clark (Fare Forward)
“Morgan Meis is not everyone’s cup of tea, and The Fate of the Animals is the most Morgan Meis book yet. Take that as you will. For my part, I found the book shatteringly beautiful. The Fate of the Animals is not “urgent,” or “important,” or “timely,” or any of the other things people tend to say these days when they want you to read a book. It’s simply beautiful, and true, and good. It will make you afraid. It will make you terribly sad. It will make you look at the world and think about God, and it will make you wonder. That’s about all you can ask a literary book to do.”
“[…] is about a disturbing painting called The Fate of the Animals from 1911 by a so-so German painter named Franz Marc; it is about painting itself, what it can do and what it cannot do; it is about seeing, sight, vision, revelation, apocalypse, about what our eyes can show us and what they cannot; it is about World War I, and death, and gardens; it is about God; it is about the whole central problem of everything, which is why does something exist instead of nothing, and why is it this something?”
“The man who painted this marvelous painting; the man whose beautiful letters we are reading; the man who, we discover, developed a way of seeing past the skin of the world to some kind of spiritual Reality—this man is dead, killed in a battle that robbed Europe of a generation.”
“Meis is often a cheeky writer. He is also a mystic. He is a follower of the sublime; he is trailing it, looking for signs of its passing. He is trying to write about something that by its very nature is beyond the scope of words. This often leads him to a chuckle, a little helpless shrug, some wordplay, and then he directs his attention elsewhere. It’s as if he’s circling the sublime and must dodge off whenever he gets too close.”
Searching for Tom Cruise by Jane Hu (The Paris Review)
“Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie actually constructed the entire train from scratch. “We had to build the train,” McQuarrie says to the viewer, “if we wanted to destroy it.” That kind of onetime high-stakes, high-production action sequence is key to why we love Tom Cruise—to why he’s credited with keeping the movies alive not just materially (at the box office) but also spiritually (by eschewing special effects and using real materials). He is the Akira Kurosawa of our time.”
Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers by Freddie deBoer (Persuasion)
“A quarter of a century ago, these platforms did not exist; equipment was much more expensive; and know-how far harder to access. Now, the tools are available to anyone. Audiences have never been larger, and never before have they spent so much time consuming artistic content.”
“The growing number of people who are hungry to get rich in the creator economy—who believe themselves to be deserving of success by dint of their education and hard work—coupled with the awareness that almost all of them will fail is an example of elite overproduction. We have an artistic class which is predominantly made up of people who enjoy none of the financial rewards afforded to artists.”
“Our culture lionizes the arts and habitually degrades ordinary jobs—not just low-paying blue-collar jobs but middle-class white-collar ones as well. It’s hard to see a future without a large number of young people who will settle for nothing but artistic success. And while it’s tempting to want people to spread their money and attention more widely, consumers have always tended to concentrate their cultural dollars in a small number of places.”
“Due to the rising costs of housing, health care, and education, many of the markers of successful adult American life (most obviously home ownership) have become unattainable for young people. Meanwhile, we’ve spent decades ironizing the trappings of both middle-class respectability and white-collar success, representing the former as boring and conformist and the latter as exploitative and selfish. I don’t have any particular disagreement with those critiques. But the countercultural texts that so viciously lampooned the ordinary definitions of success conspicuously failed to proffer realistic alternatives. The result, from my perspective, is a nation full of young striving types who have no coherent vision of success, no reasonably achievable path forward to avoid feeling like losers. And I think that this is both inhumane for them and unhealthy for society, which requires ordinary people to buy into a shared social contract.”
“Perhaps we can gently guide young people away from the notion that the only life worth living is one where they’re a writer or musician or influencer, and instead demonstrate that the security of ordinary jobs can be joined with the fulfillment of creating on the side. And perhaps we can develop a broader cultural definition of what it means for a life to be well-lived.”
Can There Be a Theory of the Email Job? by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“Reflexively, people seem to think of educated labor in terms of college graduates who a) tend to go on to some sort of graduate study, b) work in fields that directly utilize domain-specific knowledge from their majors or graduate education, and c) are generally high-income relative to the economy writ large.”
“Most people don’t have email jobs; most American adults , after all, still don’t have a college degree, the generally low-paying service sector is the fastest growing in our economy , and a large number of educated workers have jobs that are not email jobs for the reasons detailed above. And yet as a matter of informed speculation I’m willing to argue that many millions of Americans have email jobs, that their share of the workforce is growing, and that the constant tendency to think about college as a route from a particular major (prelaw, premed, computer science) to a particular educated position (lawyer, doctor, programmer) is therefore flawed.”
“[…] in contemporary culture, we have more ways to be a loser than a winner; we’ve comprehensively critiqued and ironized traditional forms of meaning such as identifying with one’s job, but never replaced them with anything; you’re a bum if you don’t have a job but a sap if you have an uncool one; the cultural dictate that the only life that’s worth living is a life in a creative industry is cruel and unworkable given that those fields have limited carrying capacity and they are unusually fickle in whom they reward.”
“And almost everyone agrees that the old ideal of identifying yourself with your profession, in the habit of the fabled salarymen of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, is an archaic and unhealthy ideology, one that excluded women and people of color and which amounted to participating in your own exploitation by the boss.”
That’s a complicated attitude. What about teachers? What about whatever it is that I do? You spend eight hours doing that thing, why not at least identify with it? Shouldn’t that be a goal, rather than a silliness dismissed out of hand? Or can we seriously not conceive of jobs worth doing anymore?
“Yes, I yearn for the end of late capitalism; yes, I think we all desperately need to be in unions. But in the realm of the immediately plausible, people need jobs, and we want to create better jobs rather than worse, and if we generally assume that all of this work stuff is a little ridiculous, we don’t need to heap extra derision on email jobs the way a lot of people do.”
Brickbat: Ideological Impurity by Charles Oliver (Reason)
“According to a social worker’s report, the two were asked how they would feel if a child in their care was LGBT. The two responded that they would still love the child, wouldn’t kick the child out, and wouldn’t subject the child to conversion therapy. But both opposed sex change treatments for those under 18 and expressed a reluctance to use pronouns that don’t reflect someone’s biological sex, and Catherine said it would be important for the child to remain chaste. The social worker recommended approval of their application with conditions for LGBT and religious issues, but DCF’s Licensing Review Team rejected the application.”
Look, I feel that this article would have been written differently if the couple had been Muslim and had expressed the exact same opinions. People are getting butt-hurt because classically religious stances are being viewed as increasingly intolerant and are not fit for adoption. This is just one more case of people being incapable of understanding that norms change—and sometimes those that benefited for a long time will all of a sudden find themselves on the wrong end of the stick.
If the couple had said that they would beat their child if it misbehaved, almost no-one today would think it odd that they’d been rejected as adoptive parents. This would not have been a reason to reject those parents 60 years ago. Norms change. It is perhaps not too much to ask that people who adopt a child agree to allow the child to develop in a normal, healthy way that works best for the child rather than that fits into the worldview of the parents. If a child is homosexual or trans, then it is preferable to have parents who would be understanding and flexible in that situation rather than just dropping the God-hammer. Oh, and also making sure the child is “chaste”, whatever the hell that means. For how long? Does the child have to wait until it’s married? Does it get to make its own choices about when or whether or whom it marries? Religious couples tend to be very cultish and they’ve enjoyed a tremendously long period during which no-one ever called them on their bullshit because they could hide behind a holier-than-thou” screen. We don’t want to let fanatics adopt if we can help it.
No One is Kenough by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“[…] the cultural options available to us now are conservative individualism and social justice individualism. While left and right seem totally polarized, they share one thing: the worship of the self.”
“The social problem is that we don’t need to be even more relentlessly individualistic! Individualism is the American religion, and one of the many sins of the social justice era of progressive politics is that its adherents have finally dropped whatever remaining vestiges of communitarianism and collectivism remained in left politics. In their place they’ve advocated for the supremacy of the individual, expressed (of course) through therapeutic language and the clod mysticism of yoga pants culture. I’m sure Greta Gerwig intended to make a 21st-century feminist tale, and I think she succeeded, but perhaps not in the way she means. Because by portraying therapeutic individualism as the only alternative to patriarchy, Gerwig has underlined the degree to which individualist capitalism now undergirds both sides of the American ideological divide.”
How ChatGPT turned generative AI into an “anything tool” by Haomiao Huang (Ars Technica)
“There is a way to do this. The input to an AI model is called the context window. You can think of the context window as the text that our magic auto-complete takes in and then continues from. One way to work with an AI is to feed its own output back into the context window so that each input isn’t just a command but a command plus a “history” to apply that command to. This way, you can get the AI to modify its past output into something better. But you need the AI to understand how to take commands to make edits and not just new output.”
“These internal numerical representations of words and concepts are called embeddings. It’s like a library filing system for words and concepts: You can look up a concept if you know its embedding, and vice versa. You can modify an LLM so that, instead of producing words, it can report to you its embedding for words and phrases. OpenAI and other AI companies often have special versions of their models to do precisely this.”
“Having an LLM base its answers on information fed to it is called “grounding.” This biases the LLM toward trusting the information in the context window more and is a powerful way to reduce the problem of letting the model make up answers.”
“Logic synthesis was a revolution in chip design. It meant that chip designers could think about “what should this chip do” rather than “how do I build this circuit.” It’s the same breakthrough that happened when computer programmers could write in high-level programming languages instead of low-level binary code. And it turned chip design into writing code.”
Hacking Food Labeling Laws by Bruce Schneier
“Companies like Coca-Cola and Kraft Heinz have begun designing their products so that their packages don’t have a true front or back, but rather two nearly identical labels—except for the fact that only one side has the required warning.”
“Bimbo, the international bread company that owns brands in the United States such as Entenmann’s and Takis, for example, technically removed its mascot from its packaging. It instead printed the mascot on the actual food product—a ready to eat pancake—and made the packaging clear, so the mascot is still visible to consumers.”
Just absolute bastards, flouting the intent of the law in order to continue to market to and seduce minors into buying their products.
Use web components for what they’re good at by Nolan Lawson
“It might also surprise you to learn that, by some measures, React is used on roughly 8% of page loads , whereas web components are used on 20%.”
“Having a lot of consumers of your codebase, and having to think on longer timescales, just leads to different technical decisions. And to me, this points to the main reason enterprises love web components: stability and longevity.”
“The thing I like about web components, and web standards in general, is that I get to outsource a bunch of boring problems to the browser. How do I compose components? How do I scope styles? How do I pass data around? Who cares – just take whatever the browser gives you. That way, I can spend more time on the problems that actually matter to my end-users, like performance, accessibility, security, etc.”
“Too often, in web development, I feel like I’m wrestling with incidental complexity that has nothing to do with the actual problem at hand. I’m wrangling npm dependencies, or debugging my state manager, or trying to figure out why my test runner isn’t playing nicely with my linter. Some people really enjoy this kind of stuff, and I find myself getting sucked into it sometimes too. But I think ultimately it’s a kind of fake-work that feels good but doesn’t accomplish much, because your end-user doesn’t care if your bundler is up-to-date with your TypeScript transpiler.”
Queryable Logging with Blacklite (Terse Systems)
“SQLite has excellent ecosystem support, so much so that an SQLite database file is the only universal binary format accepted by the Library of Congress. The guidelines on appropriate uses for SQLite also seem very applicable to log file formats in general.”
We have left the cloud by David Heinemeier Hansson (Hey)
“The main difference here is the lag time between needing new servers and seeing them online. It truly is incredible that you can spin up 100 powerful machines in the cloud in just a few minutes, but you also pay dearly for the privilege. And we just don’t have such an unpredictable business as to warrant this premium. Given how much money we’re saving owning our own hardware, we can afford to dramatically over-provision our server needs, and then when we need more, it still only takes a couple of weeks to show up.”
“I still think the cloud has a place for companies early enough in their lifecycle that the spend is either immaterial or the risk that they won’t be around in 24 months is high. Just be careful that you don’t look at those lavish cloud credits as a gift! It’s a hook. And if you tie yourself too much to their proprietary managed services or serverless offerings, you’ll find it very difficult to escape, once the bills start going to the moon.”
some of the error messages produced by Apple’s MPW C compiler by Jason I. Hong
- String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that’s 3 more than ANSI said I should)
- …And the lord said, ‘lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement’
- a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program
- type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don’t care, I’m just trying to annoy you)
- This struct already has a perfectly good definition
- we already did this function
Pronounce by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“Teacher, how do you pronounce ‘o-u-g-h’?
“You have to know what’s before it. It could be cough, bough, tough, hiccough, through, though…you really just need to memorize each word and not think about the letters.
“Linquistic fun fact: English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals.”
Published by marco on 27. Aug 2023 22:29:19 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 28. Aug 2023 22:22:08 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
What Happens to All the Stuff We Return? by David Owen (New Yorker)
“Steady growth in Internet shopping has been accompanied by steady growth in returns of all kinds. A forest’s worth of artificial Christmas trees goes back every January. Bags of green plastic Easter grass go back every spring. Returns of large-screen TVs surge immediately following the Super Bowl. People who buy portable generators during weather emergencies use them until the emergencies have ended, and then those go back, too.”
“People who’ve been invited to fancy parties sometimes buy expensive outfits or accessories, then return them the next day, caviar stains and all—a practice known as “wardrobing.””
“It almost goes without saying that Americans are the world’s leading refund seekers; consumers in Japan seldom return anything.”
“When he buys shoes, for example, he typically orders two pairs, a half size apart. In brick-and-mortar stores, a pair of tried-on shoes will be re-boxed and reshelved. “From an Amazon viewpoint, the moment the box opens, you’ve lost the opportunity,” he said.”
“Pre-pandemic, a common shopping strategy was to study possible purchases in a regular store, then save a few dollars by ordering from Amazon. When in-person shopping became difficult, the best way to compare products was to order multiples and send back the rejects.”
They’re shooting themselves in the foot for a few dollars that they could actually afford to spend.
““A really good partner of ours does over fifty per cent of all the refurbishing of HP consumer printers in the U.S.,” Adamson said. “On all the newer printers, the only connection option is Wi-Fi, so when they refurb them they include a printer cable. Problem solved.””
“The two technicians that Hogan and I watched are members of a rapidly vanishing species: people who know how to repair stuff. It used to be that when something went wrong with our dishwasher, washing machine, or oven, my wife or I would call a guy who owned a local appliance-repair company.”
“The last time I called him, seven or eight years ago, he said that he’d had to get a job as a greeter at Home Depot, because nowadays when appliances malfunction most people simply buy new ones.”
“That change is partly the result of consumer ignorance and laziness, but manufacturers are at fault, too. Almost all modern appliances contain electronics, which not only have a limited life span but are also usually impossible to repair and expensive to replace. Our former repairman once told my wife and me that we should always buy the “dumbest” appliances we could find. […]”
Niger and the ‘New World Order’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“There is an arrogance in social relations the French at times seem to insist upon. They still dominate the extractive industries and other spheres of the economy as if independence—Niger claimed its in 1960—never occurred.”
“I imagine the back-channeling between Washington and Niamey is at this point nonstop, but the Nigerien coup’s leaders give the impression they are no more enamored of the American troops on Nigerien soil than they are of France’s. There are reports that some Nigerien officers favor a turn from U.S. to Russian military assistance, and specifically to the Wagner group, which is already active in Mali.”
“As a measure of the importance Washington attaches to Bazoum’s rehabilitation, none other than Victoria “Cookies” Nuland flew to Niamey earlier this week for several hours of talks with some of Niger’s military officials, though Tchiani and others leading the coup reportedly refused to see her. The State Department’s acting No. 2 got nowhere, even by her own account, having warned again that all U.S. aid to Niger hung in the balance. “We don’t want your money,” the new government tweeted afterward. “Use it to fund a weight loss program for Victoria Nuland.””
Why Are We in Ukraine? (On the dangers of American hubris.) by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne (Harper's Magazine)
“Washington’s message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests—the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War—was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.”
“By embracing what came to be called its “unipolar moment,” Washington demonstrated—to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow—that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed.”
“Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states—and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values—the post–Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.”
That is still too generous a formulation. The U.S. is an empire built on no principle but piracy. Period.
“[…] by so baldly intervening in Russia’s internal affairs, Washington signaled to Moscow that the sole superpower felt no obligation to follow the norms of great power politics and, perhaps more galling, no longer regarded Russia as a power with sensibilities that had to be considered.”
“American force would be used, and international law contravened, not only in pursuit of tangible national interests, but also in order to depose governments that Washington deemed unsavory […]”
“American policymakers presented Belgrade with an ultimatum that imposed conditions no sovereign state could accept: relinquish sovereignty over the province of Kosovo and allow free reign to NATO forces throughout Yugoslavia. (As a senior State Department official reportedly said in an off-the-record briefing, “[We] deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.”)”
“Through a stenographic process in which “ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility,” to quote a retrospective investigation by the Wall Street Journal in 2001, this typical insurgency was transformed into Washington’s righteous casus belli. (A similar process would soon unfold in the run-up to the Gulf War.)”
“It was not lost on Russia that Washington was bombing Belgrade in the name of universal humanitarian principles while giving friends and allies such as Croatia and Turkey a free pass for savage counterinsurgencies that included the usual war crimes, human rights abuses, and forced removals of civilian populations.”
“Ignoring Moscow, NATO waged its war against Yugoslavia without U.N. sanction and destroyed civilian targets, killing some five hundred non-combatants (actions that Washington considers violations of international norms when conducted by other powers). The operation not only toppled a sovereign government, but also forcibly altered a sovereign state’s borders (again, actions that Washington considers violations of international norms when conducted by other powers).”
“NATO similarly conducted its war in Libya in the face of valid Russian alarm. That war went beyond its defensive mandate—as Moscow protested—when NATO transformed its mission from the ostensible protection of civilians to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. The escalation, justified by a now-familiar process involving false and misleading stories pedaled by armed rebels and other interested parties, produced years of violent disorder in Libya and made it a haven for jihadis.”
“[…] because from the beginning Washington defined NATO expansion as an open-ended and limitless process, Russia’s general apprehension about NATO’s push eastward was inextricably bound up with its specific fear that Ukraine would ultimately be drawn into the alliance.”
“America’s ambassador to Moscow, William J. Burns, shared Merkel’s assessment. Burns had already warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a classified email:”“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
“Thanks to a misleading rendition of events that members of the Kennedy Administration fed to a credulous press and later reproduced in their memoirs, most Americans see that episode as an instance of America’s justified resolve when confronted by an unprovoked and unwarranted military threat. But Russia’s deployment of missiles in Cuba was hardly unprovoked. Washington had already deployed intermediate-range missiles in Britain, Italy, and, most provocatively, in a move that U.S. defense experts and congressional leaders had warned against, on Russia’s doorstep in Turkey. Moreover, during the crisis, it was American actions—not Russian or Cuban ones—that would be considered aggressive and illegal under international law.”
“Washington therefore embarked on an extreme, perilous course to force their removal, issuing an ultimatum to a nuclear superpower—an astonishingly provocative move, which immediately created a crisis that could easily have led to apocalyptic violence. Additionally, in imposing a blockade on Cuba—a gambit that we now know brought the superpowers within a hair’s breadth of nuclear confrontation—the administration initiated an act of war that contravened international law. The State Department’s legal adviser later recalled, “ Our legal problem was that their action wasn’t illegal.””
“[…] given that, historically, Washington has responded aggressively to situations similar to those in which it has placed Russia today, the motive for Russian aggression in Ukraine is likely not expansionist megalomania but exactly what Moscow declares it to be—defensive alarm over an expansive rival’s military influence in a bordering and strategically essential neighbor. To acknowledge this is merely the first step U.S. officials must take if they wish to back away from the precipice of nuclear annihilation and move instead toward a negotiated settlement grounded in foreign policy realism.”
“The policies that Washington has pursued toward Moscow and Kyiv, often under the banner of righteousness and duty, have created conditions that make the risk of nuclear war between the United States and Russia greater than it has ever been. Far from making the world safer by setting it in order, we have made it all the more dangerous.”
The US-Iran Prisoner Swap: A Breakthrough or a Band-Aid? by Sina Toossi (Jac)
“The deal stands out as a rare positive development amid worrying signs, such as the United States sending thousands of more troops to the Persian Gulf region and reportedly considering the option of deploying US troops on commercial vessels to deter Iranian oil tanker seizures, a tactic that Washington has not used since World War II.”
“That deal was a landmark achievement that curbed Iran’s nuclear program in return for lifting sanctions. It had the backing of Iran and six world powers, the endorsement of the United Nations, and was widely praised in the international community as a win-win solution.”
It was absolutely a horseshit strong-arming of a non-belligerent and largely peaceful country by two of the world’s most belligerent ones, abusing international mechanisms along the way, and agreed to by the international community because it’s terrified that it will be next and is only too happy to sacrifice Iran and its claim to justice on the altar of its own safety, regardless of how fantastical the accusations and how mad the demands.
“Iran has responded by threatening other oil exports from the strategic Persian Gulf, from which a fifth of the world’s oil flows. This is the crucial background that is often overlooked by the US media, which often portrays Iran’s oil tanker seizures as aggressive acts rather than desperate measures to defend its own economy.”
Like Pearl Harbor and the Cuban Missile Crisis, we love to remember the wrong history, dooming us to repeat the one that actually happened, with us completely unaware that we’re repeating it. For us, it’s the first time, each time with a new ultimate enemy against our ultimate and exceptional good.
“[…] he has continued to impose harsh sanctions and seize Iranian oil shipments, violating international law and provoking Iranian retaliation. As former CIA analyst Paul Pillar recently noted, “It was the United States, not Iran, that began the latest round of going after another nation’s tankers and seizing its oil.””
Western press fetishizes Ukrainian amputees as limb loss epidemic grows by Kit Klarenberg (The Grayzone)
“On August 1, The Wall Street Journal reported that “between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians” have “lost one or more limbs since the start of the war.” What’s more, the outlet notes, “the actual figure could be higher” because “it takes time to register patients after they undergo the procedure.”
By comparison, around 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons underwent amputations during the entire four-year span of the First World War.”
“In a July 8 op-ed titled “They’re Ready to Fight Again, on Artificial Legs,” Kristof insisted that rather than resenting being used as cannon fodder, Ukraine’s newly-disabled veterans “carry their stumps with pride.””
“Citing one soldier who expressed hopes of returning to the frontline despite missing three limbs, Kristof framed such “grit and resilience” as a sure sign Kiev is winning the proxy conflict, and will inevitably emerge victorious over Russia.”
In a tweet, Kristof expanded on this theme, “That grit is why Putin is losing. Amazing people.”
Ok, Joseph Goebbels. JFC have you no shame?
If you read on, you’ll see that Kristof found (or invented, because, honestly, who knows?) a soldier who got laid because he’s an amputee. “Kristof quoted the soldier as follows: ‘It’s magical. Someone can have all his arms and legs and still not be successful in love, but an amputee can win a heart.’”
“Over the course of two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, around 1,650 US veterans underwent amputation, according to the most recent figures available. And though that relatively small number has often been attributed to improvements in medical technology, American troops were also fighting lopsided skirmishes against poorly equipped adversaries operating without the benefit of air cover.”
“Since publishing its grim survey of Ukraine’s amputation epidemic, The Wall Street Journal has churned out another depressing read for proxy war boosters. On August 13, the WSJ reported that Kiev’s failure to make headway in its vaunted counteroffensive has forced military planners to look ahead to Spring 2024 for another opportunity that “might” tip the balance.”
Hooray.
Kanzler-Entgleisung: Pazifisten sind „gefallene Engel, die aus der Hölle kommen“ by Tobias Riegel (NachDenkSeiten)
“Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz hat bei einer kürzlichen Wahlkampfrede in München anwesende Kritiker des Kurses der Bundesregierung schwer beleidigt, wie Medien berichten. Im Laufe der Rede sagte Scholz an die Bürger gewandt, die für Waffenstillstand und Verhandlungen im Ukrainekrieg eintreten:”“Und die, die hier mit Friedenstauben rumlaufen, sind deshalb vielleicht gefallene Engel, die aus der Hölle kommen, weil sie letztendlich einem Kriegstreiber das Wort reden.”
This isn’t the first time he’s done this, but it’s absolutely clear now where the German chancellor and his administration stand: anyone who disagrees with their path to war in Ukraine is simply a Putinist. That’s how simple that jackass’s world is. Useless.
Roaming Charges: Through a Sky Darkly by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“As Canada burns from border to border, Rich Kruger, the CEO of Suncor, the country’s biggest CO2 emitter, pledges to accelerate its fossil fuel production: “I play to win. We’re in the business to make money and as much of it as possible.””
“He’s not alone. Check out Bidenmentalism in action: US domestic crude oil production has reached 12.7 million barrels per day, up 600,000 barrels per day from one year ago, the highest level since 2020.”
“The IMF estimates that fossil fuels are being subsidized at rate of $13 million every minute or about $7 trillion a year.”
“More than 200 cargo ships are backed up waiting to enter the dwindling waters of the Panama Canal, where each crossing requires 51 million gallons of water. Mired in the worst drought since the opening of the Panama Canal more than 100 years ago, some ships are waiting more than 3 weeks to cross the canal, which handles around 40% of US container traffic.”
“The distance between between NYC and Chicago is roughly the same as that between Beijing and Shanghai. The NYC-CHI rail route is served by one train a day with the trip taking 19 hours. The Beijing – Shanghai route is served by 35 trains a day at 4.5 hours per trip.”
“California’s top single-point methane emitter is the Brandt Company cattle ranch in the Imperial Valley, which releases 9,137 metric tons a year, more than any oil or gas well, refinery or landfill. The 643-acre confined feeding operation confines at least 139,000 beef cattle. Each year, the ranch emits more greenhouse gas emissions than 165,000 automobiles. But the California Air Resources Board still refuses list dairies and livestock operations in its greenhouse gas reporting program.”
“According to the Department of Energy, in 2023, non-fossil fuel Sources will account for 86% of new electric utility generation capacity in the United States, primarily from solar (52%) and wind (13%), while batteries for stored energy will provide 17% of the new capacity. Natural gas is the only fossil fuel type contributing to new capacity and will account for 14% of the total. In contrast, nearly 100% of the capacity being retired is based on fossil fuel, led by coal (62%) and natural gas (36%). A total of 56.1 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity is being added and 14.5 GW of current capacity are being retired for a net gain of 41.6 GW in capacity.”
That’s actually good? I mean, we shouldn’t be adding capacity, but what the hell, at least it’s renewables?
“Nick: And that’s also great, where Trump was […] he is destroying norms, therefore we are going to throw over our norms, preemptively, to get rid of him […]
“Matt: It’s like they’re incapable of learning anything, from any of these mistakes. And with the Russiagate things, it’s like it was happening in slow motion, at the time. They kept stepping in it, one story at a time. […]”
But they did learn the lesson. Nothing happened to them personally, other than they got filthy rich, kept their jobs, and grew their reputations among those who controlled their jobs and their access to wealth and power.
Lesson learned. They did it again.
The mistake Matt makes is assuming that they give a shit about journalism and its traditional role.
Their bosses were getting rich. The gravy train was running. There was no downside. There still isn’t.
Matt’s the one who had to leave the business.
Collapse 2.0 by Michael Klare (Scheer Post)
“As of August 2021, 99% of the United States west of the Rockies was in drought, something for which there is no modern precedent. The recent record heat waves in the region have only emphasized this grim reality.”
“According to a 2022 report produced by the International Energy Agency (IEA), global oil consumption, given current government policies, will rise from 94 million barrels per day in 2021 to an estimated 102 million barrels by 2030 and then remain at or near that level until 2050. Coal consumption, though expected to decline after 2030, is still rising in some areas of the world. The demand for natural gas (only recently found to be dirtier than previously imagined) is projected to exceed 2020 levels in 2050.”
“The same 2022 IEA report indicates that energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide — the leading component of greenhouse gases — will climb from 19.5 billion metric tons in 2020 to an estimated 21.6 billion tons in 2030 and remain at about that level until 2050. Emissions of methane , another leading GHG component, will continue to rise, thanks to the increased production of natural gas.”
“There are many other ways in which societies are now perpetuating behavior that will endanger the survival of civilization, including the devotion of ever more resources to industrial-scale beef production. That practice consumes vast amounts of land, water, and grains that could be better devoted to less profligate vegetable production.”
“As of August 2nd, months after they first erupted into flame, there were still 225 major uncontrolled wildfires and another 430 under some degree of control but still burning across the country. At one point, the figure was more than 1,000 fires! To date, they have burned some 32.4 million acres of Canadian woodland, or 50,625 square miles — an area the size of the state of Alabama.”
“Canada has clearly lost control of its hinterland. As political scientists have long suggested, the very essence of the modern nation-state, its core raison d’être , is maintaining control over its sovereign territory and protecting its citizens. A country unable to do so, like Sudan or Somalia, has long been considered a “ failed state .””
“Such areas are relatively unpopulated, but they do house numerous indigenous communities whose lands have been destroyed and who have been forced to flee, perhaps permanently.”
To be fair, those indigenous communities would not have been able to put out the fires either. They may have been caused by something related to climate change, but they could always have happened—with a lower probability, of course. Had they happened, the indigenous communities would have been wiped out just the same.
“At the beginning of August, Beijing experienced its heaviest rainfall since such phenomena began being measured there more than 140 years ago. In a pattern found to be characteristic of hotter, more humid environments, a storm system lingered over Beijing and the capital region for days on end, pouring 29 inches of rain on the city between July 29th and August 2nd. At least 1.2 million people had to be evacuated from flood-prone areas of surrounding cities, while more than 100,000 acres of crops were damaged or destroyed.”
Drug makers have tripled the prices of top Medicare drugs by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)
“Overall, the average lifetime price increase for the top 25 drugs was 226 percent. The highest increases were seen in drugs that have been on the market the longest. For example, drugs that were on the market for under 12 years had an average lifetime price increase of 58 percent, while those on the market for 20 or more years had an average lifetime increase of 592 percent.”
These are medications to help people. Their primary purpose now is to help the shareholders of the companies who own the patents on them. If someone gets a medical benefit from them, then, sure, I guess that’s OK, too.
But society and the economy absolutely don’t care if that happens, else we wouldn’t have allowed the prices to rise that high. That it’s paid for my a government program that’s funded by all of our taxes is even worse.
The companies are simply milking the government, while enjoying a reputation for business savvy among the exact same people who think that the government should stay out of it while those companies just handle things directly—and, supposedly, more efficiently.
But those companies don’t function at all without these government subsidies. It’s the only reason they’re successful at all: their government-granted monopolies called patents, together with a government insurance program that is legally required to pay whatever price they ask.
“In 2021, Medicare Part D prescription drug plans spent $80.9 billion on these top 25 drugs, which were used by more than 10 million enrollees. AARP noted in its report that Medicare Part D enrollees take an average of four to five medicines each month, and 20 percent of older adults report using cost-coping strategies like skipping doses or not filling prescriptions to save money.”
Mission accomplished: provide the semblance of trying to care for the aged, while implicitly encouraging them to kill themselves sooner by skipping medications—incurring discomfort, if not suffering, along the way—but the primary goal remains achieved: lots of profits for shareholders of pharmaceutical companies. It’s a gold mine. You should totally invest in these companies. They guarantee a good rate of return.
Just don’t ask how they do it, because it’s a highly immoral business model—or perhaps amoral, since these entities don’t actually comprehend a model of the world that includes wishy-washy concepts like morality. Why not? Because there’s no money in morality. There’s literally no upside for being good in this society.
“The report lands amid drug cost-cutting measures in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The act requires drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare when they increase the price of drugs faster than the rate of inflation. And, under IRA provisions, Medicare will soon begin negotiating prices of drugs directly with manufacturers. On September 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will announce the first 10 drugs selected for price negotiations. Some of the drugs expected to be announced are among the top 25 costliest drugs analyzed in the AARP report.”
The party may be over, though, but I wouldn’t count these companies out. I’ll believe the hopeful formulation above when I see it.
“The Biden administration has said it will defend the IRA’s price negotiation program vigorously.”
Sure, sure, buddy. I’ll believe it when I see it. Go for it, though! Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt.
Is Luna 25 alive? Russia says an “emergency situation” has occurred by Eric Berger (Ars Technica)
“Russia’s efforts to reestablish communication with Luna 25 will be complicated by the country’s lack of a deep sp ace communications network. Satellite tracker Scott Tilley noted that the country’s ability to communicate with Luna 25 will be limited to when the Moon is visible over Russia. There are relatively few of these opportunities in the days ahead.”
Other countries have these deep-space communications networks, but since humanity is just a bunch of tribes, each wasting its own resources, no-one is going to think of helping Russia find their satellite. Maybe China will jump in. Absolutely no-one in the west will, as they’d all rather laugh than help. Americans, in particular, don’t even have an instinct for saving resources—they just use whatever they can afford or get their hands on without thinking about a dwindling supply of resources on the planet.
There is no notion that the Russian lunar lander would have done any useful science that is worth saving, so just let those Russians rot in their own mistakes and incompetence, is the attitude here.
“The loss of Luna 25—should efforts to restore communications with the spacecraft be unsuccessful—would represent a significant blow to the already reeling Russian space industry.”
Nobody in the west gives a shit because they’d much rather see a ton of resources wasted by an “enemy” country, failing to get into space. They’re probably gleeful. They don’t think that these are humanity’s resources being wasted—they just see it as Russia failing.
We Came, We Dithered, We Died by Ted Rall
“We believe that the damage done to the ocean in the last 20 years is somewhere between 30 per cent and 50 per cent, which is a frightening figure.”
“[He] wrote these words in 1971, for an New York Times op-ed titled “Our Oceans Are Dying.”
“No one listened.
“No one cared.
“No one did anything. So now, as Cousteau warned us would happen, our oceans are finished.
“More than 90% of coral reefs on Earth will be dead in the next 25 years. […]
“96% of all ocean life, fish big and small and everything that swims, will be gone as well. There’s nothing we can do to save them.”
““Pretty much nothing has been done since the global emissions of CO2 has not reduced,” Thunberg told a 2020 climate conference. “[I]f you see it from that aspect, what has concretely been done, if you see it from a bigger perspective, basically nothing.””
She’s correct. It doesn’t matter how much “progress” we’ve made toward a non-carbon economy. We’re still very much an economy that produces more CO2 every year—and will continue to do so for at least a decade, despite all of our “progress.” We’re shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. The deck chairs sure look nice, but it doesn’t fucking matter because it’s all going to be at the bottom of the ocean soon.
“Capitalist idiots are so moronically capitalist that they’d rather be rich and dead than middle class and alive. The rest of us, the non- and anti-capitalist people who neither benefit from ecocide nor approve of it, are letting the greedy lunatics take us with them. We are […] even dumber than they are.”
At 27:00, Patrick says,
“The Curious Refuge guy [3] says that this is the same as artists having influences, that all artists borrow from other artists.
“Curious Refuge Guy: So, I am definitely more in the came of the whole steal-like-an-artist … uh … realm of thinking about creativity. And that idea is, essentially, that, all of us are pulling our creative ideas from other inspiration in our past. We just don’t, as humans, know, off the top of our heads, where those sources are coming from. [4]
“…which I think is a pretty astounding misunderstanding of what artistic influence actually is. Artistic influence is: Wes Anderson taking his love of Hal Ashby, François Truffaut, and Jacques Demy, and processing them into a unique approach that expresses his own view of the world. AI Art is just a machine for plagiarizing existing art.
“This guy says that AI is democratizing storytelling and making it possible for anybody to be a filmmaker. No. I’m sorry, but this is an insane take. Democratizing storytelling is what affordable filmmaking equipment did. It’s what, like, iPhones did. It’s what the Internet did. Those things gave people outside the traditional structures, without huge budgets and resources, the tools to create films and a free platform with which to reach a wide audience.
“Arguing for AI-filmmaking is saying that people no longer need talent or skill. Like, by this logic, why would learn to play the violin when you can use AI to create a fake violin recording of the piece of music that you want to play. The Curious Refuge web site says that they are, “empowering non-traditional artists,” which is hilarious to me, because that is just another way of saying “bad artists.” It’s like a steakhouse saying: “we serve non-traditional meals”, and then giving you a plate with a charred, black hockey puck on it.
“AI filmmaking is a grift. It is a way to make something that looks professional without putting in any of the work to learn how to do it for real and without paying an actual cast or crew. Look: I’m not generally one for criticizing other folks on YouTube or starting feuds. And I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think that this really, truly, genuinely sucks. And, if the Curious Refuge people take offense to my comments, all I have to say is: you shouldn’t. Because you didn’t really make those videos.”
At 34:00,
“These moments of actual innovation, the ones that create something that sticks with people for decades, can only be done by real, human creativity. AI is improving all the time but, at it’s very best, you will only ever get serviceable imitations of mediocre products.
“But the question then is: do the people in charge care about that?
“Not to point fingers, but plenty of successful, mainstream movies are merely mediocre, recycled products. If a piece of software can create that automatically, do the shareholders care about giving up the potential for an amazing masterpiece?”
No. No, they do not. They only care about their rate of return. That’s it. If you get a higher rate of return by making masterpieces, then do that. If you get a higher rate of return by training your audience to like crap because it’s cheaper and easier and more reliable to produce crap? Then do that.
I think we all know which way this is going.
At 39:00,
“The people who seem the most excited about AI are not actually the artists themselves. They are the tech bros […] who view AI art as a win over those pretentious artists and their dream is a future where it can make movies tailored to their exact specifications. Not like the shit Hollywood is making now.
“They love the idea of using AI for filmmaking because they don’t actually have any talent or skill. For them, AI is like a cheat code that allows them to seem like actual artists without doing any actual work. The moral of this story is, that AI art sucks.
“[…]
“The thing about AI art is that it isn’t really art at all. Art, by its very definition, has to express some kind of human expression. This stuff generated by an AI […] is content, something utterly disposable, something meaningless.”
At 19:00,
“The idea here, with YouTube’s autoplay feature, just like Twitter and Facebook’s infinite scroll, is to keep users on the platform forever, consuming an endless feed of content. The content doesn’t need to make a huge impression. We just need to keep people passively consuming it.
“Have you ever tried to take a moment and reflect on something you just watched on Netflix, only to have the end credits instantly minimized, in favor of some obnoxious ad for what to watch next?
“That’s content, baby.
“So, OK. What is my actual issue here? Like, sure, some of the culture around independently producing work for the Internet sucks, but that’s not news. […] Content means literally everything. Which means: it’s essentially meaningless. Content is everything on the Internet. And, so, it flattens everything and says it’s all the same.
“It’s saying this PhilosophyTube video—a deeply personal mixture of essay and performance art—is the same thing as this Tweet I posted about buying a new pair of pants. A short film on video is the same thing as Dwayne Johnson’s Instagram reel shilling for Zoa Energy Drinks.
“If one thing is content, it all is.
“This is like saying: a novel is the same thing as a phone call. Yes, they are both, on their most basic levels, some form of communication. But they are not the same medium and we should not treat them the same way.
“But to the executives, it is all the same. They don’t care what the content on their platforms is, so long as people are clicking, and they’re running ads on it, and it’s generating revenue, and the shareholders are happy.”
At 34:55,
“Lila Byock, a writer who worked on Watchmen and The Leftovers, is quoted saying, “What the streamers want most right now is ‘second-screen content’, where you can be on your phone while it’s on.””
Does ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ Manifest the Radical Center? by Sam Husseini (Scheer Post)
He cites Oliver Anthony at length.
“I don’t want 6 tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet. I don’t want to play stadium shows, I don’t want to be in the spotlight. I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression. These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they’re being sung by someone feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung. No editing, no agent, no bullshit. Just some idiot and his guitar. The style of music that we should have never gotten away from in the first place.”
“In 2010, I dropped out of high school at age 17. I have a GED from Spruce Pine, NC. I worked multiple plant jobs in Western NC, my last being at the paper mill in McDowell county. I worked 3rd shift, 6 days a week for $14.50 an hour in a living hell. In 2013, I had a bad fall at work and fractured my skull. It forced me to move back home to Virginia. Due to complications from the injury, it took me 6 months or so before I could work again.
“From 2014 until just a few days ago, I’ve worked outside sales in the industrial manufacturing world. My job has taken me all over Virginia and into the Carolinas, getting to know tens of thousands of other blue collar workers on job sites and in factories. Ive spent all day, everyday, for the last 10 years hearing the same story. People are SO damn tired of being neglected, divided and manipulated.
“In 2019, I paid $97,500 for the property and still owe about $60,000 on it. I am living in a 27′ camper with a tarp on the roof that I got off of craigslist for $750.
“There’s nothing special about me. I’m not a good musician, I’m not a very good person. I’ve spent the last 5 years struggling with mental health and using alcohol to drown it. I am sad to see the world in the state it’s in, with everyone fighting with each other. I have spent many nights feeling hopeless, that the greatest country on Earth is quickly fading away.
“That being said, I HATE the way the Internet has divided all of us. The Internet is a parasite, that infects the minds of humans and has their way with them. Hours wasted, goals forgotten, loved ones sitting in houses with each other distracted all day by technology made by the hands of other poor souls in sweat shops in a foreign land.”
Star Trek Gave Us a Utopian Vision of an Egalitarian, Postcapitalist Future by Simon Tyrie (Jacobin)
“Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator, certainly subscribed to this optimism. He believed that humanity, rather than being doomed to self-destruct, was destined to evolve out of our political myopia. It was thanks to Roddenberry that The Original Series, though dated by today’s standards, was ahead of its time with its multinational, multiethnic, and multigender crew. Famously, the show featured the first-ever televised interracial kiss (in an episode banned by the BBC ), and Martin Luther King once said that Star Trek was “the only show I and my wife Coretta will allow our three little children to stay up and watch.””
“As we learn through the introduction of the Ferengi — an alien race whose culture centers around greed and profiteering — the socialization of the replicator is a political choice. The Ferengi’s replicators are privatized, whereas replicators in the Federation are publicly owned.”
“What capitalism renders unthinkable is the politics behind technology: that developments in technology might benefit us rather than usher in further alienation.”
[…] our imagination in things technological is nearly boundless, but much less so in the ways that we can conceive of organizing society. Our system has trapped us onto a conveyor belt delivering value to a handful of elites and whispers to us that “you could be in the elite,” and “there is no alternative.”
“Star Trek provides an antithesis to how capitalism predisposes us to view technology, allowing us to imagine what society might look like if technology were used purely for improving our quality of life. Instead of following this path, the morsels of convenience we’ve received through technological advancements are only enough to numb us to the realization that we’ve become locked into a cycle of consumerism and surveillance capitalism.”
It does apply in this way, but only to those who can afford it. The rest suffer from actual need or instilled want.
“Instead of the show’s drama revolving around interpersonal conflict, problems are overcome through teamwork, and very rarely as the result of one person’s heroism. It’s one of the most unique aspects of the show; as viewers, we’ve come to expect conflict between characters to be one of the most fundamental aspects of drama.”
And it’s tedious to constantly watch people bitching at each other, undercutting each other, striving for more than anyone needs….
“Star Trek continuously offers examples of cooperation, conflict resolution, kindness, and empathy that are in short supply in most modern dramas.”
“we all, naturally, struggle to imagine an alternative way of living. We all live under the same political system that snuffs out any threats to its existence by design, and it becomes harder to imagine an alternative each day that this system entrenches itself deeper into our lives.”
Santísimo Sacramento by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“Leaving aside for now the merits on each side of the debate, or whether elementary-school library shelves really need how-to guides for the application of lubricant, we may at least regret what appears to be the total loss in our present century of Sigmund Freud as a cultural touchstone.”
“For everything he got wrong, Freud and his second-gen acolytes (Melanie Klein et al.) were perhaps the last major theorists to take childhood seriously, to truly strive to recall what it is actually like to be a child. And what it is like, if I recall correctly, and if Freud is at all right on this point, is that it is a period of near-constant pullulations of unbelievable perversity, when desire is so all-consuming —even if we don’t yet understand it and even if the bodily locus of its greatest intensity is not yet settled— as to cause our developing minds to represent even topographical features of our inanimate urban landscapes as the sites of an almost infinite erotic charge, as mysterious places transfigured by their innate paraphiliac powers.”
“[…] the State Fair is on right now: nightly demolition derbies, amusement rides adorned with airbrushed art of Freddy Krueger, the heroine from Frozen, and what appears to be Kurt Cobain; contests of luck or strength for which you might once have won a mirror adorned with The Rolling Stones’ lips-and-tongue logo, or perhaps some artifact honoring Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, but now you can at best hope for some animé-inspired plush toy, or a miniature effigy of Bob Ross, who, like Davy Crockett or Johnny Appleseed before him, seems barely to have been a man at all, but has by now ascended into the pantheon of our culture’s divinities. Over in those giant hangars there are the 4H kids with their prize-winning livestock; and the Isley Brothers are playing tonight too, or what’s left of them.”
“[…] the old Iceland skating rink would have appeared on the right, but otherwise all the iconic art-deco diners and furniture showrooms will have been replaced by Dollar General outlets, or only by empty lots;”
“This is cognition in the wild, as you might find in the mind of a Micronesian outrigger pilot or a London taxi-driver who has demonstrated his possession of “ The Knowledge ”: navigation of an environment where the external markers of place are at the same time internal markers of one’s own motion through time.”
“[…] my changing positions in space are experienced as motions through a sort of 3D read-out of the contents of my own mind and memory.”
“[…] back then we all knew exactly how fast you could take the curves on Winding, and we shared tales with one another of other kids who took them just a little bit faster, and lived, or a little bit faster than that, and did not.”
“Is this suburban California idyll of mine, this summer of great atavism, at all appropriate to my age and station? If not, why does it feel so good and natural?”
You think too much. My so-called atavistic sojourn on the other coast went just fine, with far less soul-searching and guilt.
“[…] the debt is infinite, as David Graeber discerned , and cannot be repaid. This impossibility, under normal circumstances, practically guarantees that whenever an adult child returns home under some vague pretense of repayment he will find himself lapsing back into a familiar and fixed intergenerational dynamic that already carved its groove a half-century ago.”
Absolutely not necessarily. Dad and I are friends, more than anything else.
“I like to go to the salad bar at our Whole Foods on Arden Way, to choose exactly as much as I want of each of their many items, their edamame, their asparagus, their quinoa, and then to proceed to the self-checkout counters, and to eat by myself, with biodegradable cutlery, at one of their little tables”
Christ no. I like the unexpected delight of “That little Place on Main” in Little Falls. Fuck everything about the Whole Foods salad bar on disposable plateware.
Why Can’t You and I Get Rich Quick? by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)
“One of Raj Chetty’s papers found that, as 538 summarized, “rich kids stay rich, poor kids stay poor.” According to a 2019 Georgetown study, discussed here by CNBC”“… a kindergarten student from the bottom 25% of socioeconomic status with test scores from the top 25% of students has a 31% chance of earning a college education and working a job that pays at least $35,000 by the time they are 25, and at least $45,000 by the time they are 35.
“A kindergarten student from the top 25% of socioeconomic status with test scores from the bottom 25% of students had a 71% chance of achieving the same milestones.”
“[…] two-thirds of various tax subsidies related to homeownership and retirement go to the top 20 percent of earners, which means that public policy helps families who already have wealth pass that wealth on to their children.”
As I’ve always said: no form of libertarianism can provide justice because we all have different starting lines. In the U.S., social mobility is the carrot hanging from the stick mounted to the back of your head. It dangles tantalizingly, but you’ll almost certainly never reach it.
“[…] many millions of people are capable of holding down mid-level miscellaneous admin jobs for big corporations. For those of you who are among them, the surest path to being “rich” is to get a college degree, get the best job you can, be willing to switch jobs to get a better salary, and religiously stick money in an index fund that you never touch. If you do that, you can very realistically retire, even retire a little early, with seven figures. You need the discipline to not live beyond your means, and you need to not try and beat the market by being a typical deluded retail investor, but this is all readily achievable for, let’s say, 80% of the population.”
80%!?! That is absolutely not true. 80% of a specific cohort, maybe, but getting a college education and getting a job that is “PMC” (Professional Managerial Class) is not feasible for 80% of the population. Can you imagine? Most of the population occupied doing useless PMC stuff? Who’s going to build the underpinnings of society? Who’s going to make sure that water and sewage and electric are working? Oh, yeah, those people. I’m kind of shocked that de Boer wrote that figure. He’s usually more tuned in than that. And it’s amazing to think that our society only even thinks of providing a secure life with a secure and happy retirement to people whose utility to society is questionable—or, at least, debatable. It’s like your the degree of security, comfort, and happiness that you can look forward to is inversely proportional to the utility you provide.
“The trouble is that a ceiling of, say, a couple million is not what a lot of people think of as rich, and by the time you get that amount you’re like 55 at the youngest, more realistically 60 or 65, and the kind of people who want to get rich want to do so while they’re young. So the plan of making your money by earning a wage from a more-or-less regular job is out.”
The post continues, but I’m not subscribed, but I’m not super-interested in where it’s going now. People who want to get rich young are even more useless and obnoxious than others. I’m sure the discussion won’t include a discussion of what it means to be “rich”. Rich in what? Experience? Happiness? Friends? Or just money? Is that the sole goal of a member of society? To amass as much money as possible and then buy as much happiness as they can with it? Regardless of how much unhappiness their endeavors bring to others? Just looking out for #1?
Zoom Can Spy on Your Calls and Use the Conversation to Train AI, But Says That It Won’t by Bruce Schneier
“[…] these are Terms of Service. They can change at any time. Zoom can renege on its promise at any time. There are no rules, only the whims of the company as it tries to maximize its profits.
“It’s a stupid way to run a technological revolution. We should not have to rely on the benevolence of for-profit corporations to protect our rights. It’s not their job, and it shouldn’t be.”
Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale by Samantha Cole (404 Media)
“An AI porn singularity has already occurred, an explosion of non-consensual sexual imagery that’s seeping out of every crack of internet infrastructure if you only care to look, and we’re all caught up in it. Celebrities big and small and normal people. Images of our faces and bodies are fueling a new type of pornography in which humans are only a memory that’s copied and remixed to instantly generate whatever sexual image a user can describe with words.”
There is nothing you can do about any of this. It’s free speech. I would be free to write erotica describing a person involved in whatever salacious acts my mind could conceive. Just because a mechanism exists to transform that into images—and will probably soon exist to generate convincing video—doesn’t change the basic fact that I can generate this stuff. I’m not sure what the legal implications are for distributing this material, or for profiting from it. You’re using someone’s likeness to make money for yourself, without them benefitting in any way, which is probably illegal. That you’re creating content that makes it look like someone has made pornography is only a temporary problem, I think. Soon, people will just accept that most pornography is not real, and go about their days. It’s possible, though, that the knee-jerk reaction of the wetware we all carry will still negatively predispose you to someone of whom you’ve seen pornography—even if you know it’s fake.
‘Changes to U.K. Surveillance Regime May Violate International Law’ by John Gruber (Daring Fireball)
“[…] the notion that security updates, for every user in the world, would need the approval of the U.K. Home Office just to make sure the patches weren’t closing vulnerabilities that the government itself is exploiting — it boggles the mind. Even if the U.K. were the only country in the world to pass such a law, it would be madness, but what happens when other countries follow?”
Isn’t this what already happens in the U.S. 🇺🇸 ? Or China 🇨🇳 ? Maybe this is the first time that a bit player like the UK is attempting to influence a sphere larger than its own technology sector.
All Estimations Are Wrong, But None Are Useful by Dr. Milan Milanović (Tech World With Milan Newsletter)
I found these to be quite interesting and relevant:
- 𝗛𝗼𝗳𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗱𝘁𝗲𝗿’𝘀 𝗟𝗮𝘄: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” It highlights the recursive nature of estimation, where considering the complexity of a task and human optimism often leads to underestimation.
- 𝗕𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗸’𝘀 𝗟𝗮𝘄: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” This law emphasizes the negative impact of increasing team size to speed up a project. New team members need time to get up to speed, and overhead communication increases, further delaying the project.
- 𝗕𝗶𝗸𝗲𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴: This law states that people tend to focus on trivial details rather than critical aspects of a project. In software estimation, this can result in an overemphasis on understandable tasks while underestimating more complex tasks.
- 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗼𝗻’𝘀 𝗟𝗮𝘄: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” This law suggests that if a deadline is too generous, developers may spend more time on a task than necessary, leading to inefficiencies and delays.
- 𝗡𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘆-𝗡𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘆 𝗥𝘂𝗹𝗲: “The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time; the remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.” This rule highlights the difficulty of accurately estimating the time needed for bug fixing, optimization, and polishing.
“[…] we found that jobs estimated up to 3 days of work are accurate.”
In the end, there are no shortcuts. Be aware of these traps, break down tasks, be aware that your estimates are estimates, and hope for the best. Work toward your MVP. Be ruthless about what’s required for the MVP. Get your fallback in place, and work iteratively to improve it. Failure to complete any of these later, improvement stages will still leave you with either your MVP or the MVP plus whichever improvement stages you’ve managed to finish by your deadline.
A twisted tale of memory optimization by Oren Eini
“This will not allocate, but if you note the changes in the code, you can see that the use of var in this case really tripped me up. Because of the number of overloads and automatic coercion of types that didn’t happen.”
Enhance vs. Lit vs. WebC…or, How to Server-Render a Web Component by Jared White (The Spicy Web)
“In server-rendered applications, most logic lives elsewhere. Controllers or routes pull content from databases and handle requests, models or entities encapsulate records, and you can easily write functions or PO(X)Os (Plain Old Ruby / JavaScript / Python / etc. Objects) to mange all sorts of business logic. The view layer only has to provide a base level of smarts to take a data structure defined elsewhere and translate it into markup.
“It’s only in the so-called “modern” world of SPAs where components have fast expanded like a virus to take over the bulk of application architecture. You’re fetching data from APIs and handling forms and validating datfffa and executing business logic all from view-layer components. It’s nothing but another form of big ball of mud software architecture.”
You’re the OS is a game that will make you feel for your poor, overworked system by Kevin Purdy (Ars Technica)
“You have four CPU slots by default (adjustable in-game settings), so you click processes to move them into a CPU and work them. The processes are green and smiley when they appear, then degrade to orange, red, deep red, and then red and freezing as you ignore them for other processes. Working each process also takes up memory pages in memory, and filling up your allotment can move memory pages to disk, from which a process really does not want to work. And then sometimes processes are frozen until you click a little button to handle “I/O Events.”
“What this looks like when you’re actually playing is pure triage, scanning and clicking and sacrificing processes you think can last just a bit longer while you deal with other stuff. Do you click the I/O Events button and wait to see if it unlocks that red process in your CPU core, or immediately dump the locked process in favor of something else deserving? It’s your job to answer this question because, well, you’re the OS.”
These people are all fools... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 27. Aug 2023 17:33:29 (GMT-5)
A co-worker of mine sent me the following video with a strong recommendation. There are parts I liked, and parts I did not. It was a long video. The following are my notes on it. My attitude starts off pretty bad and gradually improves, then goes a bit downhill again.
These people are all fools or shysters. The young guy (Stephen Bartlett?) interviewing offers as proof that AI is amazing is that his miniscule mind is already satisfied with it. *applause*
The older guy seems like the kind of guy who’s been smart his whole life and has developed an incredible inability to conceive of a world in which he could ever be wrong. He flatters the host by calling him one of the most intelligent people he’s ever met. What in God’s name is happening?
They seem to be on track to trying to convince the world that two geniuses agree that ChatGPT is the way to go.
Gawdat says at 33:15 that he could have ChatGPT write a book for him.
“The only reason why I might not want to follow that path is because, you know what? I’m not interested. I’m not interested to continue to compete in this capitalist world. As a human, I’ve made up my mind a long time ago that I will want less and less and less in my life.”
It’s a nice sentiment, but it’s also spoken by someone who’s rich beyond all of his desires. He doesn’t need to compete anymore because he’s already won.
This video is two multimillionaires having a two-hour conversation, massaging each other’s egos and not really saying anything new or interesting.
If AI can ruin our culture and society, it just means that we built a dumpster fire in the first place. It means that we have a system that values people and humans so little that it would prefer to deal with whatever happens to be the first feasible simulacrum of a human. It will be like letting the prokaryotes take back over.
Gawdat at 41:00, expressing his anger.
“We fucked up. We always said ‘don’t put them on the open Internet. Don’t teach them to code. And don’t have agents working with them. Until we know what we’re putting out in the world. Until we find a way to make sure that they have our best interests in mind. Humanity’s stupidity is affecting people who’ve done nothing wrong. Our greed is affecting the innocent ones. The reality of the matter, Stephen, is that this is an arms race. It has no interest in what the average human gets out of it. Every line of code being written in AI today is to beat the other guy. It’s not to improve the life of the third party.”
Not “Humanity”, but the “self-selected elites”. Once again, capitalism ruins everything.
And he would go on to basically say that the problem is not AI or LLMs or whatever: it’s the system of capitalism we have, the system of society that we have, that is so zero-sum that we can’t think in any terms other than to “win”.
Win what? No-one can really say. People just want to be feel secure, to see how they will not become insecure unfairly, that they are appreciated and rewarded for participating usefully, that they are given a chance to be useful, that they are entertained, that they can interact socially. That’s it.
There is nothing in there that says that everything must be “bigger, better, faster, more” All. The. Damned. Time.
In fact, the faster things get, the less likely it is that most people will be fulfilled. People’s fulfillment is almost completely out of their hands right now. They don’t know what they want anymore.
They have been convinced to want things that require a tremendous machine to produce, a machine that, coincidentally, also transfers most of the world’s wealth to a paltry few hands while convincing the rest of the world not to revolt by producing a few shiny baubles and trinkets.
At 41:45, Gawdat again:
“And people will tell you that this is all for you. And look at the reactions of humans to AI. We’re either ignorant: people who will tell you, oh no no, this is not happening. AI will never be creative, it will never compose music—where are you living? You have the “kids” (I call them): you have them all over the Internet, they say ‘oh my God, it squeaks, look at it. It’s orange in color! Amazing! I can’t believe that AI can do this!’ We have snake-oil salesman, who are simply saying, ‘copy this. Put it in ChatGPT, then go to YouTube, knick that thingie, don’t respect copyright or intellectual property of anyone, place it in a video, and now you’re going to make $100 a day. Plus, we have these token evangelists: basically, people who say, ‘this is it; the world is going to end’. I don’t think that is going to happen. You have your token evangelists, who are saying, ‘oh we’re going to do this, we going to cure cancer.‘ Again, not a reality. And you have a very few people who are saying, ‘what are we going to do about it?’”
In fairness, it is composing and painting and producing text, but the bar is so low that it’s not really competing with human endeavors. What it is, though, is filling a massive gap that had traditionally been filled with mediocre human endeavor. That will be gone.
In that sense—even though it is still not conscious and not intelligent—our shitty system will imbue it with enough importance that it will allow most of what is good about society to be eroded away over night before we can even think of stopping it.
Our structures for living good lives will be gone. The only difference with this AI “revolution” is that it’s now affecting the self-important elites. The other 90% of the world has already had this happen to them during the first 45 years of neoliberalism.
Gawdat again:
“What went wrong in the 20th century? Interestingly, we have given too much power to people who didn’t assume the responsibility. […] We have disconnected power and responsibility.”
“I feel compassion for the rest of the world. I feel that this is wrong. I feel that for someone’s life to be affected by the actions of others, without have a say in how those actions should be, is the ultimate, is the top-level of stupidity from humans.”
He’s really just describing how the world works for 95% of the population, though. This isn’t to say what he’s saying is wrong, but that he’s saying it now because there is finally a real danger that the elites will be swept up in the madness that they sow every day. With this crop of LLMs, there is a real danger that money cannot protect you. That is frightening to the powers-that-be.
I think the more interesting things he has to say are about our underlying system, which makes the prospect of introducing something like even a half-functioning AI so much more … difficulty to handle with grace.
At 1:00:00,
“It is here. This is what drives me mad. It’s already here. It’s happening. We are all idiots, slaves to the Instagram recommendation engine.”
HAHAHAHAHA. Not all of us. Not even most of us. There are way too many people on this planet who are not dealing with this horseshit.
Just as an aside, though, he says that “70 years later, we are still struggling with the possibility of a nuclear war, because of the Russian threat of saying, ‘if you mess with me, I’m going to go nuclear.‘” This just goes to show how woefully brainwashed even intelligent people are about the real world, the stuff that really matters. He is an Egyptian. His first example of nuclear brinkmanship is Russia, not the U.S. It’s incredible. As he’s discussing how we’re all slaves to an algorithm, he shows how even his big brain has been enslaved by America propaganda.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is convincing the world he didn’t exist.
A little later, Mo and Stephen make a few jokes about the evil Chinese and the evil North Koreans and how there would be no possibility for cooperation because of how evil those countries are. I’m shaking my head. These two are so in-the-tank ignorant about global politics and they think they can solve our problems for us? I shudder.
At 01:04:00, “They’re 1B times smarter than you.”
Um, Ok. Sure.
At 01:26:00, they discuss how to address this coming problem: their only solution is to work with the extremely restrictive incentives offered by the current system. I.e., what makes more money?
In fairness, this is most likely the correct way to approach the problem; we don’t have time to fix the system before we tackle the AIpocalypse, but, with the show clocking in at almost 2 hours, it would have been nice to acknowledge that the only reason their ensuing discussion is going to sound like a WSJ/conservative-think-tank/Silicon Valley startup round table is because we have to go to war with the army we have.
At 01:28:30, they talk about how international competition will always lead to other countries “letting it rip” with AI research/development, even if a country were to tax AI research/revenues in order to deal with the damage it causes. It’s the same as climate change.
Stephen says,
“It’s kind of like technology broadly; it’s kind of like what’s happened in Silicon Valley. There’ll be these senators who think that tax-efficient founders get good capital gains […] Portugal have said that there’s no tax on crypt … loads of my friends have got on a plane. And they’re building their crypto companies where there’s no tax.”
Hahahahaha. You should get better friends. Honestly.
He then bitches about GDPR as a failure because it’s “annoying”. Yeah, sure, if you just click away all of your data on every web site. The current implementation is a bit annoying, of course. But I’d rather have that than the alternative, which is that I don’t get any control over my data. The next step is to have the browser fill in GDPR automatically with your preferences: just as restrictive as possible, every time. Problem solved. Again, the problem here is parasites making money off of the CO2 that you produce.
At 01:43:00, Gawdat says,
“I don’t think we’ll be hiding from the machines; I think we’ll be hiding from what humans are doing with the machines. […] In the long term, when humans stop hurting humans because the machines are in charge, we’re all going to be fine.”
Sure, sure, OK. A bit of post-Communist luxury fantasizing. I’ll take it.
The following are some notes and comments I sent to him as I was watching it.
(A) Um, OK. Some interesting stuff, but WHOA. (B) You’re right; just let... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 27. Aug 2023 03:41:34 (GMT-5)
A good friend of mine sent the following video to me, telling me “just lean back, relax, and let it flow over you.” Excellent advice, my friend.
The following are some notes and comments I sent to him as I was watching it.
(A) Um, OK. Some interesting stuff, but WHOA. (B) You’re right; just let it flow over you. (C) Terrified that this is how I sound to other people.
“The Great Pyramid is 11/7, which is the base to the height. So 117 and 11.7 squared is 137 and that’s the number of times the sarcophagus will fit in the King’s chamber.”
OMG BWAHAHAHAHAHA.
That was a really good one. He had me going for a bit, but that numerology just went way off the deep end. Good times! Loving it.
🤯🤯🤯
And then you have the guys in another video (that my friend had sent to me), who are intelligent, but believe the most fantastical things. Or have a weird idea of how physics works. “100 years ago, put light through celluloid, you got an image. And sound.”
Wait. What? I was with him up to the “And sound” part. The sound is not encoded into celluloid AFAIK.
It’s a great thing to discuss, though! How to preserve culture/knowledge/information in a format that the future can read?
This Grant guy, though! Goddamn I can’t imagine how many people who are stoned out of their minds think that he is a GOD.
“If you’re a mountain climber, then you’re not going to want to climb the hill behind your house. You’re going to climb Everest, or Kilimanjaro, something significant.”
No. This is exactly wrong. This is how we *think* we should act, but it’s destructive and counter-productive and psychological poison. Stop thinking that the hill behind your house isn’t good enough. No-one cares. No-one is paying attention to you. Just be happy. Walk in the woods. Climb a big hill. It’s enough. You’ll be tired. Forget Everest.
“Grant: […] every action must have an equal opposite reaction.
Interlocutor: Yeah.
Grant: So, for some people who are expanding into the fifth dimension, one over five is two, so some people are gonna go into the flat dimension.
Interlocutor: Mmhmm.
Grant: Like, literally, there is an expansion of consciousness happening concomitant to a contraction of it. You cannot have it any other way! Look at any any movie. LORD OF THE RINGS.”
This guy is hilarious. I pray that he’s just putting us on, because it would be lovely. But, I fear that he believes that he is spitting truth, hard as nails.
Still, he left off with this,
“Just love and be loved and relax. Don’t take the journey too seriously. Have fun with it. You know, I think that’s the biggest thing. I don’t think the world is a difficult place because people hate each other. I think it can be a difficult place because we hate ourselves. But it is through the process of learning to accept and love ourselves, that we will learn to accept and love the world around us, and then your entire experience and world around you, will totally transform. And this is what it means to be the change you want to see in the world.”
Once again, a smart guy who believes that individual agency can conquer any sort of external influences. No food? No clean water? Be the change you want to see in the world. This kind of philosophy only works for people who already live in a post-Communist utopian luxury where material needs are satisfied to a degree and reliability that you can focus exclusively on your mind and your feelings.
It’s great for selling books and seminars, but it’s just not applicable for 90% of the world’s population. People in other parts of the world can’t even think about stuff like this because they are either malnourished now or were malnourished during their formative years. They haven’t been able to live in nine countries and learn eight languages and sail on their father’s boat (as Grant has).
This is, in a nutshell, a horseshit philosophy that is extremely dangerous to sell to people to whom it cannot possibly apply. They will use it as a hammer and see everything as a nail. They will not blame the philosophy, but will double down, and blame themselves. The blame is baked in. If the approach doesn’t work, it’s because you weren’t trying hard enough. If your boat already floats, this might help keep you on course. If your boat is sinking or halfway underwater, it’s worse than useless—because you will expend energy on “thinking your way to success” instead of investing it somewhere that might actually help you.
“When you have general-purpose software, though, do you really need containers?”
Well, yes. The point isn’t that you need a container to paper over software that isn’t sufficiently... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 27. Aug 2023 03:32:42 (GMT-5)
The article Works on most machines by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog) argues provocatively that containers are a fallback for poorly written software.
“When you have general-purpose software, though, do you really need containers?”
Well, yes. The point isn’t that you need a container to paper over software that isn’t sufficiently generic: it’s to avoid fixing incompatibilities that have nothing to do with your target deployment systems.
I think the author is thinking too much of highly general-purpose software whereas the majority of software doesn’t need to run everywhere and anywhere.
If it’s built for the cloud, it’s going to run in a container anyway. If it’s built for a specific device, it’s going to run on that device.
In that case, why not just run that software at the developer side in the same environment? That way, you can avoid wasting a ton of time fixing problems that are related to how it runs in development rather than production.
“Ultimately, you may need to query the environment about various things, but in functional programming, querying the environment is impure, so you push it to the boundary of the system. Functional programming encourages you to explicitly consider and separate impure actions from pure functions. This implies that the environment-specific code is small, cohesive, and easy to review.”
It implies it, but it in no way guarantees it. The author is also forgetting about the quality of the developer that is likely to be building the solution.
In this post, he assumes that the developer uses enough tests to thoroughly test the system—even to the point where he is able to determine where a solution isn’t sufficiently generalized yet. He assumes that the developer uses methodology like functional programming to separate pure from impure code, and that the developer is good enough to do all of this in a way that is both efficient and leads to a finished product.
This is not at all a guarantee—or even a likelihood—in the real world.
In the real world, developers are not reaching for the stars—even if they had the capabilities, which many do not, they’re often not given the time to do things correctly—they are just trying to get it done.
If they can “cheat” by restricting the world of possible environments—rather than accommodating their software to environments it will never encounter in production—then why not?
It’s actually an engineering problem. If you’re going to make something that has to work well underwater, the only reason it needs to work out of water is because it makes it easier to work on, not because you think it’s worth the time making it function properly when in air. If you can make it just as easy to work on underwater than you it is in air, then you would just do that instead. Wouldn’t you? Why waste your time and your company’s when there’s a lot of other, more important work to do?
]]>“Stanford engineering professor and renewable energy expert Mark Z Jacobson tweeted the other day, “Given that scientists who study 100% renewable... [More]”
Published by marco on 27. Aug 2023 03:24:59 (GMT-5)
The article We can’t afford to be climate doomers by Rebecca Solnit (Guardian) takes “doomers” to task for failing to maintain optimism in the face of overwhelming resistance.
“Stanford engineering professor and renewable energy expert Mark Z Jacobson tweeted the other day, “Given that scientists who study 100% renewable energy systems are unanimous that it can be done why do we hear daily on twitter and everywhere else by those who don’t study such systems that it can’t be done?””
This means nothing. First of all, all you people spend way too much time arguing with idiots online. Second of all, the fact that it is technically possible has been true for decades.
We only have to reduce. We don’t even need to invent anything. We won’t do it.
We do not have the systems in place to enact anything approaching climate protection in the most wasteful societies. And it is those societies that will determine what will happen.
Instead, an opposing religion has taken such strong hold that even the smartest, most enlightened of the people living in those societies simply can’t conceive of a society mediated by anything other than money, can’t conceive of living with limited resources, believe that “out of sight” is “out of mind”, they drive everywhere in the most wasteful of vehicles, consume, consume, consume, and can’t see anything wrong with it.
They will drag this fucking boat under the water, completely oblivious to their role in this debacle. We cannot stop them. Everything is working against us. You would have to eliminate most of western culture—but, honestly, especially American culture—to save the planet.
There is no way to reconcile America as she is with saving the planet. One of them has to go. And, the way things look, it will be the planet that goes—because no-one can stop America. It eats everything. It corrodes otherwise intelligent people into espousing the most warped opinions.
You can be an Earth-science teacher in a town without drinking water and still talk about luxuriating in 30-minute showers and washing your hair every day. People cannot. Fucking. Get. It. Nothing connects on a personal level. One’s own behavior and benefit will always be paramount. They start off thinking differently, but they all end up the same: defeated by America’s poisonous form of capitalism and dog-eat-dog philosophy (if you can even call it that).
“One day this week, someone told me that she was “angry at people’s refusal to acknowledge what’s happening to the planet” and when I waved a couple of surveys at them showing that in 2023 “Nearly seven-in-ten Americans (69%) favor the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050””
What a fucking joke. Who did you ask? I haven’t met a single person who would say that unless they thought they would be entered in a contest to win a 13MPG truck by saying it. If they did say it, they meant “carbon neutral” as long as it could happen “without sacrificing a single, tiny thing that I have been brainwashed into thinking is important for my life”.
“I don’t know why so many people seem to think it’s their job to spread discouragement, but it seems to be a muddle about the relationship between facts and feelings. I keep saying I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis.”
JFC, please talk to actual people in your own country. Get out of your hippie bubble of planet-saving folks. No-one else in your country cares. They do not grasp the problem. They all want to travel the world, visit places, buy new cars, buy giant houses.
They. Do. Not. Understand.
And those that do? They. Do. Not. Care.
They are laser-focused on personal promotion and do not see any reason to restrict their lifestyles to ones that use less energy.
They don’t even understand the question.
They can’t follow the discussion. Believe me, I’ve tried. People can’t understand what I’m saying. They seem to agree with me, but then cite examples that indicate that they completely missed the point. It’s not a matter of will or determination—they are not even prepared to understand the situation. We are so far away from where we need to be at this point.
Go ahead and “fight defeatism”, Rebecca. You’ll still only be talking to people who basically already agree with you, people who are capable of understanding what needs to be done.
But defeatists and deniers aren’t the reason we will fail to maintain a livable climate. It’s not even apathy. It’s blank incomprehension. It’s the Idiocracy. We are living on Ark B, Rebecca. Most people aren’t even as clever about the climate as the Golgafrinchan captain of Ark B.
Look—really look; watch TV here; look at what people are ingesting—and you too will despair. No-one is even prepared to take a shorter shower or turn the AC above 70ºF for even a minute. Personal comfort is paramount and it isn’t even seen as related to either climate change or the effort required to combat it. Changing attitudes and lifestyles is not even seen as a component of the solution—to say nothing of being the absolute crux of it.
]]>“In Europe, nine out of 10 students... [More]”
Published by marco on 27. Aug 2023 03:13:52 (GMT-5)
The article Are translation apps making the learning of foreign languages obsolete? by John McWhorter (NY Times) discusses the idea of a language monoculture, playing with the idea that, if a language can be translated to any other language, what is the need for learning the target language?
“In Europe, nine out of 10 students study a foreign language. In the United States, only one in five do. Between 1997 and 2008, the number of American middle schools offering foreign languages dropped from 75 percent to 58 percent. Between 2009 and 2013, one American college closed its foreign language program; between 2013 and 2017, 651 others did the same.
“At first glance, these statistics look like a tragedy. But I am starting to harbor the odd opinion that maybe they are not. What is changing my mind is technology.
“Before last Christmas, for example, I was introduced to ChatGPT by someone who had it write an editorial on a certain topic in my “style.” Intriguing enough. But then it was told to translate the editorial into Russian. It did so, instantly — and I have it on good authority that, while hardly artful, the Russian was quite serviceable.”
That’s exactly the arrogance I expect from someone who has no respect for communicating with others, someone who doesn’t consider at all the burden imposed on others by their own need to communicate in only a single language.
Americans can often be kind of bad at this. They have no respect for their own language, so they have no trouble at all considering a “serviceable” translation adequate for the vassals of their empire. I just cannot conceive of what life will be like for the poor empirical subjects who get to mediate their communications through shitty, inadequate apps—and they will be shitty and inadequate, but most people won’t notice—even though they can speak English.
I’m not sure what the play here is, though. Most people are barely capable of learning their native language—and most fail miserably at that. What’s the point of learning a second language even less well?
Maybe knowing multiple languages is a form of snobbery. I would, of course, concur, but snobs never think that they’re snobs.
Instead, I think that learning languages teaches you how to learn other things better, it reveals connections between cultures, it allows you to empathize better. I’m not at all surprised to hear that Americans are trying to automate it because the members of this culture—even the best exemplars of it—seems to be congenitally incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves.
They buy the myth that they can all have as much of what they happen to like—and there is no need to consider any repercussions or consequences. If you can afford it, you can have it. I just had a conversation with very nice people who could only conceive of the concept of not using too much water in the shower if you, as in a camp shower, actually had to physically pay directly for it. Otherwise, if the boiler can pump it, it’s yours. It appears magically.
But I digress. Maybe with languages, it will be sufficient to have a machine write your intent and hope for the best. These people have long since given up on the notion of connecting with strangers, or even considering members of other countries to be human, so they’re not giving up much.
Right now, the machines mangle everything and will lead to more miscommunication, but when I see how Americans deal with their own culture in English, they’re just exporting what they do to each other to the rest of the world. Perhaps it’s up to the rest of the world to resist it better.
The following is not a comment on the usefulness of the information in these videos, but on the presentation, which I found so distracting as to make me stop watching. If the poster for it has changed, then here’s what it used to look like.
I... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 27. Aug 2023 03:04:39 (GMT-5)
I had the following video in my queue recently,
The following is not a comment on the usefulness of the information in these videos, but on the presentation, which I found so distracting as to make me stop watching. If the poster for it has changed, then here’s what it used to look like.
I dunno, it’s just too many colors and too much extra content and … too much stuff before I get to find out the answer to the question posed in the title.
The backgrounds of Una and Adam’s offices look like an AI-generated background prompted by “cool gen-z office yolo”.
I mean, Adam is always a bit over the top, but he positively looks like a cartoon character here. I’m wondering how many filters they’re using.
Anyway, these people are fine. They’re smart. They’re absolutely professionals in their field. They also look like they’re characters in a Saturday Morning cartoon—for those of you who even remember what that was.
Published by marco on 19. Aug 2023 18:12:54 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 21. Aug 2023 04:47:40 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
More startups throw in the towel, unable to raise money for their ideas by mihaic (Hacker News)
“Unless VC actually develop some patience on returns, I can’t see much innovation happening in the next few years.”
Yup, we gave all the money to a handful of people who are only interested in short-term gains and have no idea how 99.9% of the population lives. They’re out of ideas.
Cool.
War By Other Means: Short Selling JPMorgan Chase by Ellen Brown (Scheer Post)
“In a 2010 article titled “ Wall Street’s Naked Swindle ,” Matt Taibbi showed that the bankruptcies of both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, which triggered the banking crisis of 2008-09, were the result of targeted short sales. He wrote:”“[W]hen Bear and Lehman made their final leap off the cliff of history, both undeniably got a push —especially in the form of a flat-out counterfeiting scheme called naked short-selling. … Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.”
“We know that the Party has been successfully walling off the currency since there are no meaningful RMB/Yuan balances anywhere on the planet (other than the mainland). There’s no need … because nobody uses Chinese currency for commerce/investing (… other than on Mainland China). Today, the World’s 2nd Largest Economy only lets about 2% of global settlements occur in RMB/Yuan.”
“The Chinese government and affiliated Chinese entities have purchased not just U.S. Treasuries with their dollars, but U.S. stocks, real estate, farmland and other assets. DeepThroatIPO calculates that the Chinese have “accomplished constructive control of approximately $58.58 trillion of Western Financial Assets, stealthily hiding in Western Financial Markets, likely in plain sight. … [T]hat $58.58 trillion, focused directly on select targets … is more than enough to sink our previously thought unsinkable fleet of battleship banks.””
Interesting. This is actually plausible and would be a likely lever to hold over the U.S. should China decide to fight back in an economic war. The U.S. flank is wide open there. It’s too arrogant to consider it a possibility—even though China would possibly make the move if other U.S. economic pressure gets so high that it doesn’t matter anymore. The U.S. might not be very good at estimating when that could happen because it has no feel for China. It knows nothing, and doesn’t care that it knows nothing.
“We cannot continue to come to the nebulous conclusion that “Oh boy … it looks like we need another systemic liquidity boost” and blindly provide it. We need to slow the entire process down.”
“Another possibility comes to mind. Banks are vulnerable to short selling only if they are publicly traded. State-owned or city-owned banks are impervious to that sort of attack. The Bank of North Dakota, our one and only state-owned bank, is a stellar example. It cannot be short sold and it is not vulnerable to bank runs, since over 95% of its deposits come from the state itself. The Bank of North Dakota also acts as a mini-Fed for local North Dakota banks, extending a lifeline in the event of capital or liquidity shortages.”
“Like the U.S., China has a vast network of local banks; but most of its banks are government-owned. We may need to follow suit as a matter of defense. We need to ensure, however, that the governments owning our local banks actually represent the people. Banks should be public utilities, serving the public interest.”
The Obscenely Wealthy Have Recently Experienced Obscene Increases in Their Wealth by Rick Baum (CounterPunch)
“These policies have certainly been successful at creating greater prosperity for the 10 wealthiest people in the United States. Their wealth, after a large decline in 2022, is now almost 24% greater than it was at the beginning of 2021, right before the start of Biden’s presidency.”
Harold Pinter had it right by Seymour Hersh (SubStack)
“In the fall of 2002, Pinter was invited to make his case against the war before the House of Commons. He began his talk with a bit of embellished British history about an earlier wave of terror in Ireland: “There’s an old story about Oliver Cromwell. After he had taken the town of Drogheda the citizens were brought to the main square. Cromwell announced to his Lieutenants: ‘Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men.’ One of his aides said: ‘Excuse me General. Isn’t it the other way around?’ A voice from the crowd called out: ‘Mr. Cromwell knows what he’s doing!’” The voice in the crowd in Pinter’s telling was Blair’s, but today it could be German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has kept his silence about when and what he knew about President Biden’s decision to mangle Germany’s economy by destroying the Nord Stream pipelines last September.”
Even the first voice doesn’t question that someone should be killed and others raped—the objection is about how to divide them up, not whether it should happen.
The Dialectic of the Draft by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Tho, a tough-minded revolutionary the whole of his life, refused the Nobel Peace Prize when the committee in Oslo proposed later in 1973 that he share it with Nixon’s secretary of state — a principled move, given there was no peace for two more years.”
“In my view, America’s switch from a citizen’s army to a paid, “voluntary” army served in important respects to open the door to a festival of public irresponsibility as to the conduct of the foreign and military policies executed in Americans’ names and by means of Americans’ tax dollars.”
“It took some years after Saigon’s rise in 1975 to wonder about the consequences of the end of the draft and the new dependence Americans shared on an army of volunteers. They were inevitably drawn from poor and working-class communities and were in it, in many, if not most cases, because they couldn’t otherwise find good work.”
“Then came the meddling, the covert ops, the proxies, the bombings, the coups, the what have you, running from Zaire, to Angola, to Iran, to Libya (multiply), to Grenada, to Nicaragua, to Panama, to the big “etc.” Anyone recall Operation Praying Mantis, in 1988, when the Pentagon attacked and more or less destroyed the Iranian Navy? I didn’t think so: It’s a trivia question now.”
“is there any question of the apathy, the coarse indifference, the willful somnambulance abroad in the republic as the imperium proceeds with its imperial business?”
“The bitter truth is that we have to include among these explanations the fact that Americans are no longer held responsible for waging wars. They pay others to wage them.”
“I am tempted — and no more at this point — merely to conclude, that were the draft to be reconstituted, it would do a lot of Americans a lot of good by forcing them to shut off the televisions, put away the Frisbees, stop daydreaming of high deeds on battlefields they will never see, think seriously of what their country is doing in their names, and then assume responsibility for it.”
“This leaves Americans with nothing left to believe in, nothing worth lifting a finger or even raising a voice to defend. As our militarists mull whether to reinstitute the draft to fill the ranks of the reluctant, we should consider: This is what empire looks like.”
How Swedish Love for the US Turned Deadly by Eleanor Golffield (Scheer Post)
“[…] what curbs my chuckle reflex more than anything is the realization that these Swedes really are afraid—that they think it’s more likely that Russia will invade these red cottage-rimmed shores than that the US is engaging in a sadistically violent imperialist swan song, taking anyone and everyone down with it.”
Biden Escalates Trade War With China by Eric Boehm (Reason)
“The Biden administration escalated America’s trade war with China on Wednesday, as President Joe Biden declared a new national emergency and immediately used it as the justification for creating a new screening system that will limit Americans’ ability to invest overseas.”
““However, certain United States investments may accelerate and increase the success of the development of sensitive technologies and products in countries that develop them to counter United States and allied capabilities.””
There is no way that Joe Biden either wrote or comprehended that sentence. Or, maybe he did. It’s complete gobbledygook.
Campaign 2024: Not Left Versus Right, But Aflluent Versus Everyone Else by Matt Taibbi (Racket)
“American politics has long been a careful truce, in which natural economic tensions were obscured by an elegantly phony two-party structure that kept urban and rural poor separate, nurtured a politically unadventurous middle class, and tended to needs of the mega-rich no matter who won. That system is in collapse. Voters are abandoning traditional blue-red political identities and realigning according to more explosive divisions based on education and income.”
“If Democrats should be panicking because they’re not trouncing an opponent whose biggest campaign events have been arraignments, it’s just as bad for Trump that he polls even with a man who’s a threat to walk into a propeller or carry a child into a forest every time he walks outside. Still, the abject horror Trump inspires among the Georgetown set may be his greatest political asset,”
“In classic fashion, Democrats have dealt with the [Cornel] West issue in the most insulting and counter-productive manner possible, with Congressional Black Caucus chairman Gregory Meeks for instance scoffing that voters won’t be “ hoodwinked by a sideshow .””
Meeks is a bag of shit and I’m glad that I’ve never voted for him.
“They’re also enamored with the same mystical nonsense that captivated historical predecessors, with rich white co-eds gobbling up Ibram Kendi texts the way guilt-ridden Russian nobles lined up for the purifying touch of Rasputin. Their “experts” even gather in places like Davos to concoct Swiftian parodies of upper-class condescension, like the WEF’s amazing “ Let them eat bugs !” plan. On top of everything, they deny a class angle to their problems.”
“After 2008, when the finance sector bailed itself out and paid for it with the last equity the middle class had saved in their homes, I thought it was only a matter of time before parties broke down and voters re-aligned in the 99%-vs-1% direction the Occupy movement described. We’re here. The phenomenon is obscured by Trumpmania, and the press will try to keep it obscured, but the subtext of Campaign 2024 is already the obvious drift of rich and poor voters in opposite directions, which can’t end well. Isn’t this the “conversation we’re not having” that really matters?”
NATO-backed anti-Putin oppositionist Navalny sentenced to additional 19 years in prison by Clara Weiss (WSWS)
“Navalny will have to serve the 19-year prison sentence in a maximum-security penal colony, reducing his ability to communicate with the outside world to almost zero. So far, Navalny had been able to continue to post political commentaries on his Telegram channel from prison.”
Having a cell phone with Telegram installed on it is a privilege no prisoner in the U.S. has, as cell phones are forbidden everywhere. Cutting off access to the outside world is standard for everyone in U.S. prisons. Prisoners in the U.S. are not allowed to have visitors in many states. They have to pay exorbitant fees for access to terrible video-calling software to stay in seldom contact with their families. Russia, of course, doesn’t have prisons; it has “penal colonies.”
US/France Threaten Intervention in Resource-Rich Niger: Fears of War in West Africa by Ben Norton (Scheer Post)
“Niger’s historically subordinate relationship with the Western powers has not brought the Nigerien people any prosperity. The country is a major producer of gold, but more than 40% of Nigeriens live in extreme poverty. Niger is also one of the world’s largest producers of uranium. This radioactive material is crucial for nuclear energy in Europe, especially in France, where roughly one-third of electricity comes from nuclear power. Less known is that Niger also has sizeable oil reserves”
“Politico added that “the coup in Niger could be a challenge for Europe’s uranium needs in the longer term, just as the continent is trying to phase out dependency on Russia, another top supplier of uranium used in European nuclear plants”.”
The arrogance is breathtaking. The west pats itself on the back all day long for its enlightened behavior, but it’s always primarily concerned with how the west will continue to get the supplies it demands while paying rock-bottom.prices—or just outright appropriating it, i.e., stealing it.
“Germany, the manufacturing superpower at the heart of the EU, is deindustrializing at breakneck speed, largely because it has lost major sources of the cheap energy that its heavy industry needs.”
“What is striking is the neocolonial symbolism of the United States maintaining these high-tech military facilities worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Niger, one of the poorest countries on Earth, where the majority of the population doesn’t even have access to electricity.”
“In 1969, there was another coup led by a left-wing military leader, Muammar Gadhafi, who named his own anti-colonial, anti-monarchist Free Officers Movement after that of Egypt. Like Nasser, Gadhafi implemented socialist policies, using the oil riches in Libya to benefit the people of the country. Gadhafi created robust social programs, drastically expending public investment in healthcare, education, and housing. Under Gadhafi, Libya had the highest living standards out of all of the African continent.”
“The transparent goal of the United States and France is to re-impose political control over the region, to exploit its plentiful natural resources and geostrategic location.”
Independent Journalism as It Was by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Dreams of status at the elite end of the middle class and a life inside the tent rather than beyond it nearly always extinguished the flame burning within many newcomers to the craft. I still find it remarkable—and difficult to explain to those not in newspapers—how second-home mortgages, school bills, BMWs, and European holidays can determine the way the most momentous world events are reported.”
“There are rare occasions in fortunately lived young lives when one is visited by a premonition of things to come, the path out front illuminated. So it seems to have been that morning. I knew then I was to live my life, or a good part of it, as a correspondent abroad. Wilfred was shortly to leave Lisbon. My quiet epiphany: I don’t know how else to explain the determination, unmarked by doubt, that drove me from that day forward to follow the route he had opened to me—in the first instance literally.”
I don’t recall ever having consciously felt this for any of the large shifts in my life:
“That autumn, 1974, The Associated Press reported that the agency had a hundred operatives on the ground. We now know the Ford administration fully intended to intervene to block a NATO member’s leftward drift. The question was how to get this done. Henry Kissinger, then Ford’s secretary of state, favored an alliance with extreme-right political parties and a military intervention—effectively a repeat of the Chilean coup two years earlier”
“Americans—and how could I fail to notice?—read nothing of Washington’s machinations in Lisbon, nothing of Carlucci’s intervention. I was face to face with the ideological contaminations of American correspondents abroad. I found The New York Times coverage especially dishonest by way of its fractionally accurate reports and frequent omissions, notably those concerning Carlucci’s operation, the realities of which were perfectly available to anyone with open eyes and ears…. This was brazen malpractice—my estimation then and now.”
“While we commonly associate this error with independent publications, let us be clear: Every mainstream journalist serving the national security state is guilty of it—every one an activist. It requires discipline and ordered priorities to get this question right. Learning these was a project of mine at this early moment in my professional life. I count this point as important now as I did then.”
“A kindly Toulousain of a certain age took me to see the large fields outside the city where Spanish refugees had taken shelter after fleeing the Franco regime forty years earlier. Half a million Spaniards had fled to grim, improvised camps on the French side of the Pyrénées and along the Atlantic coast. This was called la Retirada, the Retreat. It was my first glimpse, in its early stage, of the ideological confrontation that marked the twentieth century.”
Let Me Reiterate the Questions I Asked in My AOC Essay by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“Ocasio-Cortez is not treated like a legislator, but like an icon, a sacred cow who can’t be criticized where any back-bench fifth-year representative would be for similar behavior. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not progressive.”
This is the idolization of a person who is seen as a bulwark against things ostensibly even more evil. But, as listed in concise detail in the linked article, there are innumerable examples of how she is very hypocritical in her support of issues, how her behavior is indistinguishable from a legislator whose only goal is to increase the power of the Democratic party, no matter which issues are actually promoted. There was a lot of hope that she would be the person who would stand up for all of the issues, but, seemingly for a lot of people, it suffices to be the person who once could have been that person, even though she never materialized as that person, seemingly in any way whatsoever. Somehow, she has achieved reputational orbit. Nothing she has done since she earned her reputation as someone who could be rabble-rouser—when she had no power to change anything—will shake people’s faith that she actually is that rabble-rouser, despite the utter lack of evidence, despite the large amount of evidence to the contrary.
AOC and the Squad’s List of Left-Wing Accomplishments Is Quite Long by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad are elected officials. There’s any number of criticisms of their time in Congress that are fair, reasonable, and necessary, including over key votes they’ve been on the wrong side on, times they’ve failed to stand with unions, and their failure to, as promised, fully take advantage of the leverage they had under the Democrats’ formerly slim House majority.”
Bla, bla, bla. This is a really long article that emphasizes a handful of mostly incidental legislative improvements while ignoring the fact that AOC has voted the wrong side of all of the large, important issues. Tlaib has been better, but she, too, seems to sometimes be more interested in remaining elected than in actually taking a stand that will risk her electability. As Marcetic points out, this is not surprising … but it doesn’t make it admirable. It’s not the low bar to which we should aspire. The only end to that sort of legislating is to end up constantly conceding on principle simply in order to remain elected so that we have someone with those principles—but who never acts on them. It’s a catch-22, all right. You can only get re-elected when you don’t act on the principles for which you were elected. I haven’t seen any American politician who’s ever decided to stand for a principle that would endanger their re-electability. AOC is no different. It makes her effectively useless. It also makes her annoying because she’s constantly going on and on about the principles she constantly fails to enforce. I have no use for a legislator who is so dedicated to her party that she won’t fight the military budget or the re-election campaign of a geriatric Alzheimer’s patient. It’s ridiculous to even talk about any other minor details of her legislative record, honestly, unless Marcetic is trying to get with her.
“The left pessimism embodied by New York magazine’s profile — which argues explicitly that socialists have nothing to show for five years of electoral victories and that the whole experiment should be abandoned — is a recipe for despair, apathy, and in the end, demobilization, which may already be having a trickle-down effect. It’s a self-defeating, possibly self-fulfilling prophecy that threatens to undermine socialist gains.”
Bullshit. Take your lesser-evil horseshit and stuff it. AOC doesn’t stand for socialism in any real way. Bernie Sanders has also capitulated so many times that he’s also useless. It pains me to say it, but it’s true. I like him more, it’s true. But, we have no use for socialists who promote war and the military and who capitulate to state demands for strike-breaking. None of these people is willing to put their political necks on the line for our principles. Why should we continue to waste time with them? I just don’t understand how you can make that argument.
Let Me Reiterate the Questions I Asked in My AOC Essay by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“Ocasio-Cortez is not treated like a legislator, but like an icon, a sacred cow who can’t be criticized where any back-bench fifth-year representative would be for similar behavior. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not progressive.”
This is the idolization of a person who is seen as a bulwark against things ostensibly even more evil. But, as listed in concise detail in the linked article, there are innumerable examples of how she is very hypocritical in her support of issues, how her behavior is indistinguishable from a legislator whose only goal is to increase the power of the Democratic party, no matter which issues are actually promoted. There was a lot of hope that she would be the person who would stand up for all of the issues, but, seemingly for a lot of people, it suffices to be the person who once could have been that person, even though she never materialized as that person, seemingly in any way whatsoever. Somehow, she has achieved reputational orbit. Nothing she has done since she earned her reputation as someone who could be rabble-rouser—when she had no power to change anything—will shake people’s faith that she actually is that rabble-rouser, despite the utter lack of evidence, despite the large amount of evidence to the contrary.
Does Europe have better sunscreens? (EWG)
“British researcher Brian Diffey evaluated the UV protection of four U.S. sunscreens and four sold in Europe, each of which had an SPF value of 50 or 50+. He found that the U.S. sunscreens allowed, on average, three times more UVA rays to pass through to the skin than the European products did.”
“There is a disconnect between the chemical approval process and what’s available on the market. The FDA is reluctant to approve new sunscreen ingredients, but there’s little reassurance about most of the chemicals already being used in U.S. products.”
“Our public comment letter to the FDA in 2019 suggested the agency consider allowing these four ingredients on the market while tests are still being conducted. The current data suggest these four ingredients are as safe – if not more so – as those chemicals, like oxybenzone, that have been on the market for many years. These ingredients would give manufacturers – and therefore, consumers – more options for products with good broad-spectrum protection. For too long U.S. consumers have been stuck with inadequate products on store shelves.”
Individualism is Killing the Planet by Derek Royden (CounterPunch)
“Fossil fuel companies like Exxon were aware of the coming problem in the 1970s but have spent the decades since funding climate denialism while at the same time engaging in greenwashing campaigns portraying themselves as stewards of the natural world rather than destroyers of it. Most of them reported record profits last year.”
“The more paranoid on the far right insist, just as they did during the crisis provoked by Covid 19, that climate change is a cynical ‘hoax’ to take away the freedoms enjoyed by citizens of richer countries. Even anodyne ideas that would at the very least make the lives of poorer people living in food deserts better, like ‘15 minute’ cities, are presented by these voices as an attack on… liberty.”
Fucking liberals do that too! Do you think any of them are willing to give up their SUVs or $10,000 children’s birthday parties for the poor? Libs consume more than most right-wingers. They just donate to the Nature Conservancy and buy PBS tote-bags, but their consumption patterns beat the hell out of having a big truck or riding a jet-ski on weekends. Flying on vacation four times a year exacts a heavy toll. Having a lifestyle dependent on food delivery and ordering unneeded products constantly.
“For the clear majority of people who still believe in science, individual actions like eating less (or no) meat, avoiding air travel and using public transit or electric vehicles are good in and of themselves but simply not enough to confront a problem of global scale.”
What majority? The one that pays lip service? Have you seen how this country functions from day to day? It’s all driving all day, in horribly inefficient and gigantic ego-trucks.
“Once your children are born, you can never look at yourself through your own eyes anymore, you always look at yourself through their eyes.”
But this statement bespeaks an egotism that existed before one had children. Doesn’t a healthy person already have many people through whose eyes they see themselves before they have children? Did you really not care what anyone thought before you were worried about the opinions of completely unformed minds? This is the idolatry of parenthood.
“I very much related to the dilemma of somebody having to go off and do this thing, leave his kids, whom he dearly wants to be with, but really wants to go do this thing, there’s a lot of guilt involved in doing that − a lot of guilt.”
But why, for God’s sake? Do you have no remaining obligation to improving yourself once you’ve had children? Do you really value quantity over quality? The idea that you have to spend every waking minute with your children or you feel guilt is the sheerest stupidity. It’s absolutely counterproductive. What is the point of even making new people if their only purpose is to stop their growth (moral, spiritual, philosophical) as soon as they procreate? Does nothing separate us from amoebae?
That is pronounced “K-Toven”. It rhymes with “Beethoven”, I’m almost certain. I think this is because the 2-minute video starts off with a double-time rendition of the first two hands of Für Elise—and then repeats it endlessly and gratingly. The person who I can only assume is Kaliii—three i’s—starts singing about the magical power of her pussy over the piano.
I first saw this video on a muted television, so I wasn’t even graced with the power of the lyrics the first time around. I just wrote down a note that said “WTF is up with video?” because there are so many cuts in this one, it makes me seasick. There is thrusting and tongue-stabbing, all mixed up with no rhyme or rhythm.
I shudder to think to whom this might appeal. Like, I literally worry about their mental health. It is not a song. It is not an anthem. I don’t know what it is. It looks like a hyperactive, oversexualized commercial for sportswear? Or cars?
At the very end, the grand piano explodes. Because of course it does. Nothing says success like destructive waste.
Top comment at YouTube:
“Her sound is so fresh, I love this new wave of female rappers.”
Found the bot.
On her Wikipedia page, it says, “During an interview with HipHopDX, she cited her musical influences as rappers Nicki Minaj and Cardi B.”
No shit.
We Are All Animals at Night by Lana Hall (Hazlitt)
“it was also predicated on a precariously suspended reality, one I had to maintain with absolute precision to do my job well, to pretend that a profound mutual desire could be found for the low, low price of $80 in a strip mall off a freeway. In real life I wouldn’t dare be so giving. I can’t say I was particularly good at any of this by the time 2 a.m. rolled around, makeup melting off my face, puffiness blooming under my eyes, a rapidly dwindling patience for the reassurance some men desperately sought: So, how was it for you?”
“Kids in their early twenties manned the counter at all-night fast-food joints, where I’d go between clients on slow shifts, needing something to wake up my neurons: salt, heat, grease. The shock of cold air on my legs at midnight. We knew so little about each other’s lives—how could we?—but forced into this strange cohort of ragged work hours, I felt we sometimes shared a look of recognition: of people whittling time away as we tended to the incessant hungers of others.”
“Many sex workers, including myself, have long hypothesized that the reason so many people in power work to keep the commercial sex trade marginalized is because they’re threatened by it—by the idea that it’s the only field where women outearn men, that it’s an industry where women get to call the shots, and that women profit off something that men have been told they’re entitled to for free: sex and attention in equal parts.”
Men of a certain age, in certain positions, in certain relationships, but not most men.
“When I read Adams’ quote, I was back, for the briefest of seconds, in that dark parking lot under a red-lit “massage” sign, watching the outline of a coffee shop server across the street as she wiped down the midnight counter, over and over. I thought of her thankless work and the comfort she provided to so many people moving through that transient space, the way she may have wanted to do something—anything—else with her time, but perhaps was not afforded the opportunity to. What a world in which her labour went unvalued, perhaps unnoticed altogether.”
““You’re better than this job,” clients sometimes said to me while I was working nights. Often they’d say it in the awkward and delicate moments immediately after a session, as we toweled off together and I stripped the massage table—moments where men were often fraught with shame, resignation, and satiation in equal parts, and words tumbled clumsily from their mouths. They meant it as a compliment, but it was a sentiment I hated. You’re better than this. As though somewhere, there was a woman who wasn’t.”
State of the ‘Stack, 2023 by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“I mean, I’m capable of rational argument, perhaps even sometimes able to shine in it. But I have seen little evidence over my long career in philosophy that those of my colleagues who adore rational argument, who set it up as the supreme expression of human excellence, are really much better at it than any randomly chosen person. Their adoration therefore seems to me fetishistic, and prideful, like the gleeful boo-yahs of some suburbanite in the middle of a winning streak at Wordle.”
“I suppose I might bullshit my way through the “methodology” section of a grant application again if I have to, but the truth is there can only ever be one methodology for the kind of humanistic scholarship I value: to read, to think, and to write, generally in that order but also sometimes in reverse, or in hopscotch mode.”
“The other obstacle, particularly onerous in the academic field of philosophy, is the widespread habit of using the superficial trappings of scholarly argument for the defense of values that one holds on pre-rational grounds, simply insofar as one is a member of the community that produces academic philosophers.”
“We do not expect serious work in the philosophy of physics from students who have never studied physics or on the philosophy of law from students who have never studied law. But there is not even a hint of a suggestion that courses in social and cultural anthropology and in certain areas of sociology and psychology should be a prerequisite for graduate work in moral philosophy… […] One remains imprisoned by one’s upbringing. And the particular form that that imprisonment now takes is that of an inability to recognize, first, that the contemporary morality of advanced capitalist modernity is only one morality among many and second, that it is, as a morality of everyday life, in a state of disorder, a state of fragmentation, oscillation, and contradiction. So we should not be surprised when academic moral philosophers misconstrue their own subject matter.”
“The great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer describes childhood as a “streak of light”, as the head of a comet, and everything that comes after as its long and ever-diminishing tail. This seems to me to get things just right,”
I disagree utterly. But, unlike Justin, I’ve always been comfortable in my own skin, happy to be whatever age I was or am, and to be satisfied with how I’ve spent my time, what I’d learned, what I’d accomplished, and what I’d become. I rarely experience regret, and never serious regret.
“[…] to shed all the artifice of adulthood, to go where the necessarily grown-up project of the philosophers can’t go, to escape from the dull grey tail that makes up the better part of our existence, and to try, at great risk of “burning out”, to reenter the comet’s head. The risk of attempting such a thing is that one will appear unserious and will accordingly begin to lose the professional and social advantages that slowly began accumulating throughout all those years of pretending to be an adult.”
My goodness, how you all waste your time! I suppose, in that light, that I have remained a child: no kids, no house, no big investment portfolio, with outdoor, playful hobbies, a BFF to whom I’m married, a very adult thing to do but whose shape we’ve kept decidedly nontraditional (other than monagamy). It’s not that hard to remain in the “comet’s head”—you just have to set your own goals, rather than picking up the poisonous ones imposed by a perverted, sociopathic society.
Bowe Bergdahl, Sinead O’Connor and the Virtue of Mental Illness by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
““I am sorry for everything here… The people need help. Yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live… We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks.” These were the words that Bowe Bergdahl sent his father in an email before he walked away from a war that would take his country another decade to admit we lost before it even began.”
“But Sinead also remained brazenly unapologetic, insisting that she “fucked up their career, not mine.” And perhaps that was the craziest thing about this woman. She never wanted the shallow idolatry of her vapid peers. As she proudly proclaimed of the fallout from that telltale event, “There was no doubt about who this bitch is. There was no more mistaking this woman for a pop star.” Clearly, the words of a crazy woman. For daring to utter such blasphemy, Sinead would only be honored in death.”
“What the fuck is crazy anyway? And who exactly gets to decide? Insanity is defined as a deviation from normal behavior. But what would have been “normal behavior” for a soldier and a pop star? Had Bowe Bergdahl been sane, he would have kept his mouth shut and his rifle steady while children continued to die in the streets and turned his career as a hired gun for the state into something to brag about in a resume for public office. Had Sinead O’Connor been sane, she would have kept her mouth open but allowed nothing but silly nonsense to escape it for the thoughtless pleasure of the masses. Thank God that Bowe Bergdahl and Sinead O’Connor were insane because when sanity is defined by a society that values blind patriotism and vapid cultural ephemera above the lives of children there is no virtue more honorable than insanity.”
LLMs can’t reason? by Mark Liberman (Language Log)
“[…] the biggest surprise is that they often do such a good job of pretending to answer questions that are entirely beyond them. Although anyone with experience as a teacher (or for that matter as a student) is already familiar with the same sort of behavior.”
“[…] when reasoning comes into the picture, it’s a different (and difficult) matter, and a problem that deserves active investigation rather than a naive confidence that it’s already been solved, or soon will be solved.”
Does AI Just Suck? by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“[…] you’d think that, among the various tasks you might charge an AI image generator with, recreating faces that have been photographed many thousands of times would be one of the easiest. What just drives me mental about this stuff is that tons of people insist on pretending that these technologies work as intended! In the thread where these images appear, there’s plenty of people who point out that they look nothing like their human counterparts, but also people going “Wow! Amazing!” That’s true of so much of AI-generated art; it feels like people have been told so relentlessly by the media that what we are choosing to call artificial intelligence is currently, right now, already amazing that they feel compelled to go along with it. But this isn’t amazing. It’s a demonstration of the profound limitations of these systems that people are choosing to see as a representation of their strengths.”
“As I will go on saying, all of this would be much lower stakes and less aggravating if people had the slightest impulse toward restraint and perspective. But our media continues its white-knuckled dedication to speaking about AI in only the most absurdly effusive terms, terms that threaten to exceed the power of language.”
“[…] what if this software just sucks? What if we’re all so desperate to move to the next era of human history that we talked ourselves into the idea that not-very-impressive predictive text and image compilers are The Future?”
That is entirely likely. Most software sucks. I find it hard to believe that software that has just appeared—grown, if you will—will be somehow better than software that actual developers have tried to design. People somehow think that it’s better just because no-one understands how it does what it does. They like the mystery of it because literally everything else in their world moves in mysterious ways. They don’t understand even 1% of how their world works. They don’t know where resources come from, where trash goes, how food can exist, how any technology works—or why it doesn’t or stops working—they don’t understand biological limitations, or how chemicals and pharmaceuticals are researched and developed. They find it reassuring that, with so-called AIs, no-one understands them, so that they aren’t even relatively stupid about them, as they are with everything else. In the other cases named above, they have to assume that there are smarter people out there who do understand how things work—and that those people are better than they themselves are, that those people are more useful. Those kinds of people are not reassured that we don’t understand how these LLMs do what they do—because they understand the scientific process, they understand engineering, whereby one has to understand what is going on, in order to improve it. When you’re a blithering dolt who’s ignorant about everything, your approach to life is to just do stuff and hope for the best. There is no process. These LLMs are perfect for people like this. They already think they’re amazing, mostly because of their ineffability, because it matches their own inability to grasp how anything works. They don’t notice that there is no predictable path forward for improvement in something that we don’t understand. But, in a country—heck, a world—addicted to gambling and ignorance, this fact won’t bother anyone. Hell, you can tell people that things are getting better and they will believe you—especially if you tell them often enough.
Fresh Hell: Mount Trashmore by Jason Arias (The Baffler)
“A grave example of a powerful tool in the wrong hands, the school superintendents are grossly misusing the tech. Artificial intelligence is not for telling us that The Kite Runner is too rough for our sensitive young. It is for showing us what Citizen Kane would look like as a Wes Anderson movie.”
“Kentucky’s largest school district is still reeling from last week’s bus service meltdown, wherein children enrolled in Louisville’s public schools were made extremely late, returned home after dark, or not picked up at all after a Massachusetts-based tech company reduced the number of routes to make up for a driver shortage and unleashed pandemonium. Ninety-six thousand students had their actual first day at a staggered rate while Louisville scrambles to bring some kind of order to the bus system, which is down some four hundred routes since 2013. This is not the first time AlphaRoute has come under criticism for its chaotic truncation of bus systems, having been kicked out of Columbus and Cincinnati public schools last year for doing just that. Good. You’re never too young to learn that school is a prison, American industry is the defective product of spoiled bums, and, even here in the future, nothing works.”
“Miami-Dade County is awash in a river of human feces and soiled water after an influx of New Yorkers over the course of the pandemic has strained sewer systems and trash collection offices to the breaking point. Seriously, South Florida, fix your sewers and eject all squatters from Mount Trashmore (a real landfill that will run out of space in 2026). The county has spent $1 billion on water and sewer lines, with the mayor allocating another $160 million to combat the rising detritus and placing a moratorium on real estate development in the area.”
Ya think? Ya think you should maybe stop building? What the actual hell is wrong with people? And they’re probably paying a million bucks for 3-room apartments in this area. No-one knows to think about whether the toilets even work. It’s just been taken for granted that they do that people are wholly unprepared for living in a country where that’s a question you have to ask. Where my family lives in Central New York, the water is technically drinkable, but is alternately so rusty or saturated with chlorine that, even with a strong in-built filter, it tastes funny. My dad and my in-laws buy water from Wal-mart. Capitalism in America, baby! Nothing is given.
“Oh my God, Grandpa, can we talk about refactorable code today, please?”
“There are more exhibitors than participants.”
“This is the networking area. This is where people without a job try to convince people without a company to hire them.”
Published by marco on 17. Aug 2023 04:48:18 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 17. Aug 2023 05:00:54 (GMT-5)
The article Does AI Just Suck? by Freddie deBoer (SubStack) writes, after providing two examples of a heavily feted AI utterly failing to create images of John Candy and Goldie Hawn, defaulting to middle-of-the-road “fat man” and “blonde woman” representations that leaves the viewer to fill in all of the gaps left by the mediocre effort.
From the essay,
“[…] you’d think that, among the various tasks you might charge an AI image generator with, recreating faces that have been photographed many thousands of times would be one of the easiest. What just drives me mental about this stuff is that tons of people insist on pretending that these technologies work as intended! In the thread where these images appear, there’s plenty of people who point out that they look nothing like their human counterparts, but also people going “Wow! Amazing!” That’s true of so much of AI-generated art; it feels like people have been told so relentlessly by the media that what we are choosing to call artificial intelligence is currently, right now, already amazing that they feel compelled to go along with it. But this isn’t amazing. It’s a demonstration of the profound limitations of these systems that people are choosing to see as a representation of their strengths.”
I agree with this impression. There are some things that look pretty wonderful, but it’s also hard to escape the conclusion that these LLM-based image-generators are good at creating generic artwork like the kind of stuff you’d have found on posters in a Spencer’s Gifts in the late 80s/early 90s. The essays feel like the output of a middle-schooler or shitty undergraduate who’s just trying to fill a page with text that feels vaguely relevant.
There is no spark of innovation—just a frisson that it didn’t completely fail, that the LLM got pretty close. We’re already amazed that it produced a blond woman or a fat man, even if it doesn’t come close to the representation that a reasonable artist could sketch in a few strokes from a handful of pictures—or even just one, as any halfway-competent caricaturist could do. Sure, it’s not just random pixels, but it’s also not really useful.
As I’ve noted before, I also don’t see how we get to useful from here—precisely because we don’t know how it’s even getting a generic blonde woman from the prompt “Goldie Hawn”. I think it’s reasonable to ask whether these LLMs are the thing we should be prioritizing right now. For me, the answer is, clearly, no. But the Lords of capitalism have determined that they can mine some short-term value from it, so we’re stuck hearing about it until it suddenly implodes, washing away all value except that which has accreted to a handful of the richest people on the planet.
“As I will go on saying, all of this would be much lower stakes and less aggravating if people had the slightest impulse toward restraint and perspective. But our media continues its white-knuckled dedication to speaking about AI in only the most absurdly effusive terms, terms that threaten to exceed the power of language.”
This is the role of the corporate-owned media. They are an advertising arm masquerading behind a system that has the vestiges of gravitas left from a bygone age. Their role is not to inform; their role is to ensure short-term gain of value for their lords and masters. “[R]estraint and perspective” don’t enter into it, unless it would serve that goal, which it rarely does.
“I’ve been telling people for a couple decades that the attitude of “kids these days don’t need to learn facts because they have Google” is fundamentally flawed, as learning facts is an indispensable part of creating the mental connections in your brain that drive reasoning.”
This is obvious to anyone who isn’t relieved to be able to offload all of their thinking to the online advertising and propaganda machine. You can’t draw conclusions if all of your knowledge is online. It’s not your knowledge—you can search for anything, but you have no idea what to search for. You are not an interesting conversation partner, you have no original ideas, you can’t innovate—because you don’t have any online knowledge.
Your processor might be powerful, but your memory banks are empty. Relying on LLMs for even more than we already rely on search engine for will only exacerbate this problem, will only lead to a world even more full of people who can’t reason their way out of being bamboozled by state propaganda. This is not a coincidence.
“[…] what if this software just sucks? What if we’re all so desperate to move to the next era of human history that we talked ourselves into the idea that not-very-impressive predictive text and image compilers are The Future?”
That is entirely likely. Most software sucks. I find it hard to believe that software that has just appeared—has been grown, if you will—will be somehow better than software that actual developers have tried to design.
People somehow think that it’s better just because no-one understands how it does what it does. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t understand how anything works, then you’ll like the mystery of it because literally everything else in your world moves in mysterious ways.
These kind of people don’t understand even 1% of how their world works. They don’t know where resources come from, where trash goes, how food can exist, how plumbing works, how any technology works—or why it doesn’t work or can’t work or why it might stop working—they don’t understand biological limitations, or how chemicals and pharmaceuticals are researched and developed, they don’t understand economics or politics or even basic social interations.
They find it reassuring that, with so-called AIs, no-one understands them. They can vaguely grasp that this means that, for once, they aren’t relatively stupid about a topic, as they are with everything else.
In the other cases named above, they have to assume that there are smarter people out there who do understand how things work—and that those people are better than they themselves are, that those people are more useful.
Those kinds of people are not reassured that we don’t understand how these LLMs do what they do—because they understand the scientific process, they understand engineering, whereby one has to understand what is going on, in order to improve it.
When you’re a blithering dolt who’s ignorant about everything, your approach to life is to just do stuff and hope for the best. There is no process. These LLMs are perfect for people like this. They already think these LLMs are amazing, mostly because of their ineffability, because it matches their own inability to grasp how anything works.
They’ll never notice that there is no predictable path forward for improvement in something that we don’t understand. But, in a country—heck, a world—addicted to gambling and ignorance, this fact won’t bother anyone. They’ll think that we can just blunder our way toward improvement, calling each change progress regardless of viability or usefulness to anyone.
The only benchmark will be, as always, are the richest people getting richer because of it? If yes, then carry on; if no, then change course, regardless of utility to anyone else. Are resources wasted? Is energy wasted? Is effort wasted? Could the energy, effort, and resources have been invested more effectively elsewhere? None of that matters.
The only thing that matters is whether the handful of already-wealthy people and entities consolidate even more of generated human value unto themselves. Any other benefit is a side-effect. If that side-effect threatens the continued accumulation of capital? It will be reverted and avoided in the future. It’s why we can’t have nice things.
Hell, you can tell people that things are getting better and they will believe you—especially if you tell them often enough.
So, we’ll probably just stay with the current, shitty crop of LLMs that our lords and masters have dubbed “AIs”—and watch them get richer, while our lives approach the minimum quality that continues to deliver value upward while avoiding revolution.
As people get dumber and shittier and more egocentric as a consequence, the LLMs will actually start to seem more lifelike! So, we have that to look forward to.
]]>“In April 2022, creator Paulomi Dholakia had some thoughts about Disney. Specifically, she was upset the company didn’t seem to be promoting the Ms. Marvel series, which features the franchise’s first Muslim superhero, as much as... [More]”
Published by marco on 13. Aug 2023 16:11:13 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 13. Aug 2023 16:14:24 (GMT-5)
The article Is It Time To Embrace “Opinion Fatigue”? by Kate Lindsay (Bustle) writes,
“In April 2022, creator Paulomi Dholakia had some thoughts about Disney. Specifically, she was upset the company didn’t seem to be promoting the Ms. Marvel series, which features the franchise’s first Muslim superhero, as much as it had promoted its other series, like Hawkeye. She first posted this opinion on TikTok, and after people agreed with her, she brought the same video to Instagram.
““It went viral in a very bad way,” Dholakia says. Instead of support, or civil discussion, she was met with comments like “F*ck you you clout chasing b*tch.”
““It made me feel so self-conscious, that maybe I don’t need to say stuff,” she says. Dholakia, who is 31 years old and aspiring to a full-time career as a travel agent, had been sharing more on social media to build business opportunities, but the incident exposed the challenges of virality. “I try not to mess up, try not to stir the pot, and that’s probably why I’m not going to get anywhere on social media,” she concedes. “Because if you don’t stir the pot or you don’t put yourself out there in a very raw, authentic way, then why are people watching you?”
“Dholakia grew up in an online environment that encourages users to share everything from their thoughts on politics to their takes on pop culture. But as the online landscape has grown into an all-encompassing digital town square, experiences like Dholakia’s have prompted her and other former social media power users to throw their hands up and admit “opinion fatigue.””
This is just incredible, really, a completely alien lifestyle—almost another culture or species. The degree to which people don’t understand how humanity works is astounding. They think that they have unfettered access to only positive feedback when they publish to the whole world at once on a very public platform. Just. Tell. Your. Friends. FFS. The Internet is not your friends.
I suppose it starts with a 31-year-old who “aspires” to be a travel agent as the interview subject. That an actual online magazine thought to interview this obvious dodo is astounding. That she is offended that the world doesn’t have overwhelmingly positive feedback for her opinions is icing on the cake. When she gets negative feedback, her answer is to “throw [her] hands up” and stop trying. That goes a long way to explaining why she’s still “aspiring” to be something that is no longer relevant today (a travel agent), at 31 years old.
““People feel like they finally have a voice,” says Linda Charmaraman, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women and director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab. “People want to feel validated. ‘Do you agree with me? What do you think?’ And just trying to keep up that engagement is a game in itself.””
Next is a Ph.D. from the “Wellesley Centers for Women and director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab”. JFC. Do I even need to go on? “People want to feel validated.” Of course they do. But is it useful for society to reward everyone for every goddamned thing that falls out of their undereducated heads? That’s what you have friends for: to help you figure out which opinions are bone-headed and which ones aren’t. Since they’re your friends, they might let you down easier (depending on what kind of friends you have). The Internet is not obliged to treat your completely unknown and anonymous ass in the same way.
For God’s sake, this is not rocket science. If you want to post something, post it on your own private site and don’t allow comments—or only allow moderated comments, or … whatever. Stop seeking the validation of strangers instead of people you know and love, is, I think, what I’m saying here.
Blogs were already the correct solution at the beginning; they’re the correct solution now. Stop trying to be viral and stop trying to figure out how to turn a single opinion of yours into a career. Just stop. Society doesn’t need your bullshit.
“[…] silence on a prominent political or social issue can be interpreted as complicity. It took Taylor Swift three years to disavow white supremacy after the Daily Stormer referred to her as “pure Aryan goddess,” revealing her status as an (unintentional) neo-Nazi idol. She told Rolling Stone in 2019 that she wasn’t aware of how her image had been co-opted and attributed her silence to a “sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won.” For much of the public, however, this explanation was too little, too late.”
This entire paragraph is utter nonsense. This is no way to run a society. Why in God’s name are people so stupid and petty? Who cares what other people think? You have to officially come out against white supremacy now? Because if you don’t, people will think you’re totally for it. Fuck those people, then. They’re just karma-whoring on your reputation (especially TV shows in the traditional media, BTW). Do not give in to them and allow them to control how to waste your time.
Similarly, the excellent interview Susan Neiman on Why Left ≠ Woke by Yascha Mounk (Persuasion) included a few prima facie declarations that seemed jarring to me.
“The idea that there would be an African American intellectual sitting in the White House for eight years was just not something that anybody imagined at the time. Racism is too deep, long-lasting and, in some ways, systemic a phenomenon to be ended in one generation. But there was enormous progress.”
They just had to find a black man who would be a smiling, sadistic asshole like all the others. Which is why the question of class is much more important than race. Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas are what many would consider to be the right color, but they are members of an elite to which they pledge much stronger fealty than to members of the cohort defined by their shared skin color. That much should be utterly obvious.
As Kanye West said, George Bush doesn’t care about black people. Neither does Barack Obama. Barack Obama cares about himself and his rich friends. If they’re all adequately cared for, then he might have some empathy left over for members outside of his class, but that’s only a side-effect of the main thrust of his efforts, which aim to further enrich himself and the elite to which long aspired to belong, and to which he has belonged for decades. If he didn’t do this thing, he would never have become president.
“[…] if people agree with you on the main thesis of what you’ve been talking about, and they think of themselves as left-wing, and they’re in a milieu that is very left-wing, and they’re worried about making the points you just made to the friends and colleagues and so on, do you have any advice for how to speak up for those ideas without ceasing to be in good standing with your leftist social circle?”
What the fuck is wrong with people? They seem obsessed with pleasing blinkered idiots who are in their “social circles”. Why? Who cares what amoral fools think? Just say what you’re going to say and let them digest it. If they can’t? Reformulate. But don’t give in on your principles unless you think you got something wrong.
The opinions of strangers are more-or-less meaningless. If you know their credentials and respect their opinion, then go ahead and lend their opinion weight; otherwise, you can safely ignore the hysterical reactions of strangers online. It’s all just fake Internet points anyway.
And, maybe—just maybe—you could consider having discussions with a smaller circle than “the whole world”, where you don’t run such a large risk of reputational loss if an unrefined opinion should slip out of you. That’s what private discussions are for—to bounce ideas and opinions off of people you trust to give you the benefit of the doubt before you show the whole world.
People are skipping that step and are mystified why it doesn’t seem to be working for them.
“[…] speak up. You will find that many more people agree with you and will say things like “I was going to say that but I was afraid.” That’s happened to me many, many times.”
Or, if you address too large and anonymous a group, you’ll find out why those people were afraid to say anything. The larger a group you address, the more likely it is that you’ll get feedback from hypersensitive lunatics or lulz-seeking trolls.
Published by marco on 13. Aug 2023 16:05:49 (GMT-5)
The following ~10-minute video presents a thesis on why malls in the U.S. are dying out whereas malls in Europe are still going strong.
Bad urban planning is absolutely the most important reason: the U.S. has not designed anything to be nice and easy and convenient to get to, least of all malls. You have to drive everywhere and driving is, quite frankly, tedious. You can’t walk or cycle or use public transportation. There is no nature or trees or ponds or anything to make the experience pleasant. You wouldn’t walk to a mall for a coffee. My God, the notion is ludicrous. People would say ‘that’s not what it’s for!’ But why not? A shopping center should be a town square, else no-one will go unless they actually need something.
From somewhere about ¾ of the way through the video,
“American malls are usually not built near any meaningful public transit. In fact, they are usually not built near any meaningful place. Compare these four European malls—two from Prague and two from Budapest—with these four American malls—from Phoenix, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, and Orlando.
“The reason why Amazon—and similar online commerce platforms—cannot compete with the first group, but can threaten the second group is because malls in the first group are integrated into the city. The surrounding environment isn’t just a parking lot. There are things to do and see, and you can end up in those malls completely organically—as in: unplanned—as you’re walking around downtown.
“With the second group, you have to make a conscious effort to go there: nobody will trudge through a kilometer of parking lot on foot. The GPS won’t take you there spontaneously. You have to make the decision at home to go there, and then make the effort. And then companies like Amazon come along and say, ‘hey buddy, we can save you all that effort.’”
The allure of delivery is very strong in Europe as well, but it’s not an overwhelmingly better alternative. The online shopping experience is not really a lot of fun today, either. You have to choose by picture, hoping that the vendor is reliable, jump through payment hoops, etc. Contrast with going to an actual store and holding the actual item, tapping to pay because you’re physically there. Heck, you may even stroll through a few other stores, getting some healthful movement, while enjoying artistically presented wares.
]]>“I can’t think of anything more ugly and insane than combining American media’s desperate obsession with Trump and the era of politics he created in 2010s with American media’s toxic obsession with high-profile court cases. In fact, right-wing media is... [More]”
Published by marco on 13. Aug 2023 15:57:50 (GMT-5)
The post Nostalgia curdles by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day) writes,
“I can’t think of anything more ugly and insane than combining American media’s desperate obsession with Trump and the era of politics he created in 2010s with American media’s toxic obsession with high-profile court cases. In fact, right-wing media is already pushing for Trump’s trial to be televised. So if you ever wondered what the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial would have been like if Depp became president at the end, well, now you might have a chance to find out.”
“[…] the idea of giving a tiny blue cartoon checkmark to 23-year-olds with open floor plan jobs that were paid salaries consisting entirely of granola bars, La Croix, and Sixpoint beer caused so much psychic damage to America’s ruling class that it would eventually cause the end of social media as we know it.”
America’s ruling class is composed of fabulously over-educated and stupid-to-the-bone people who can’t stop obsessing over Donald Trump because they’ve been ordered to obsess over him by the deep state. The deep state rejects anything and anyone that does not promulgate it. Donald Trump is an asshole and a liar and a con-man and a showman and a nearly pure creature of ego and vanity and narcissism.
He has committed war crimes. He has ordered the deaths of innocents. None of that is why he is going down. He is going down because he doesn’t fit. He is not chummy with the right people.
You know how Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and Joe Biden can sometimes all get along? Trump is not like that. He’s not in that club. He doesn’t understand which side his bread is buttered on because his number-one priority is getting attention for himself, no matter what. He has found that promising people stuff that they want gets their attention.
Donald Trump is outside the circle. That’s why they’re charging him with 34 felony counts—all stemming from a single payment. They’re stacking charges like they do against poor minorities because this is how the justice system deals with people that it’s going to punish no matter what, regardless of what it can prove that they’ve done.
George Bush? Bill Clinton? Nancy Pelosi?
No indictments. No talk of war crimes. No talk of treason. Fabulously wealthy. Famous. Accepted. Popular.
All inside the circle.
Donald Trump? Same crimes. Indictments. Uncontrolled.
Outside the circle.
Anyway, the people cheering loudest for Trump to go down are the most highly educated people in America. And they’re all stupid. They allow themselves to be distracted by bullshit while ignoring a million other things that they could expend their effort and attention on.
The article The Club of Rome’s New Malthusianism-Lite Report by Ronald Bailey (Reason) writes,
“What Malthus did not foresee was how modern science coupled with the dynamism of increasingly free markets would produce over the next two centuries what economist Deidre McCloskey has called the Great Enrichment. Entrepreneurial human ingenuity makes it possible to produce food at an exponential rate that outstrips population growth, resulting in more calories per person.”
The article starts out with “Malthusianism is just so damned tiresome.” This line of reasoning that we’re not using things up faster is also tiresome. This is extremely short-term thinking. The humus layer is being used up so quickly that the next generation won’t be able to use it anymore. The massive boom was also enabled by hydrocarbon-based (read: fossil-fuel-based) fertilizers to which we and our awesome process are nearly hopelessly addicted.
But, sure, Malthus was wrong. Just like peak oil was wrong, right? We found more fossil fuels, so fuck you. Of course, we’re getting them with fracking and they’re even more short-lived than previous sources and we’re pouring more CO2 into the air than we ever have before, but sure, peak-oilers were wrong. Just like Malthus was wrong.
All of these seers that predict that humanity won’t be able to fool itself into doing something medium- and long-term that is shockingly destructive just because it works in the short term—and only incidentally helps people eat while further enriching a relative handful of people—are … wrong.
All of this reasoning is based on Plato’s Philosopher Kings argument where a handful of people know better than anyone else how to run things. We just have to trust that their plan—which is to enrich themselves massively while executing an undemocratic plan to “help humanity” as a side-effect to their wealth—will actually work. It never does. Now, we’re left to watch as Antarctica slides into the ocean even faster than we’d thought it could. These people (like the author of the piece above) are the embodiment of the “this is fine” dog.
But I shouldn’t be surprised. Ronald Bailey has proven, again and again, to be a dogmatic ideologue at a magazine that thankfully hosts more reasoned opinions and writing. It’s hard not to escape the conclusion that his ethics amount to: “as long as he and his known cohort are doing fine under the current system, then everyone who isn’t is a whiner and trying to be killjoy about how awesome everything is.”
In the same vein, Roaming Charges: Broken Windows Theory of Political Crime by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) writes,
“[…] globally new oil and gas projects either approved in 2022 or slated to be approved between 2023 and 2025 “could cause 70 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions,” an amount that is more than 30 times the United States’ total carbon dioxide emissions in 2021.”
Yeah, no problem. Humanity will tech their way out of this one. Look at all the beautiful technology! We have the most beautiful technology.
On AI, the interview Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’ by Simon Hattenstone (Guardian) writes,
“There’s a lot of cool stuff on the internet. I think TikTok is dangerous and should be banned yet I love dance culture on TikTok and it should be cherished.” Why should it be banned? “Because it’s controlled by the Chinese, and should there be difficult circumstances there are lots of horrible tactical uses it could be put to. I don’t think it’s an acceptable risk. It’s heartbreaking because a lot of kids love it for perfectly good reasons.””
This is the well-informed opinion of hyper-genius Jaron Lanier. Seriously. He sounds like Chuck Todd or Anderson Cooper or Alex Jones or any of myriad other talking heads in the mainstream media.
How can these supposedly hyper-intelligent people live with knowing so little about the world that they inhabit that they end up sounding like the stupidest hyper-jingoistic state senator when they’re asked about anything approaching public policy?
“Because it’s controlled by the Chinese.” Jesus H. Christ, what a knee-jerk, dumb-fuck, American answer. And then “should there be difficult circumstances”. Jesus jumped up, just be a man about it and say “should the U.S. start a war with China.” But, no, he can’t do that. Because he might be a hyper-genius, but he’s an American first, steeped in that miasma of dogmatism, patriotism and vileness that passes for a culture there. It makes everyone stupid.
]]>“[…] while yet another places subjects in front of faux scenic backdrops reminiscent of a low-budget Sears photo studio. Each of these distinct setups is utilized broadly and across industries, with the same composition and concept seen on the Instagram... [More]”
Published by marco on 12. Aug 2023 17:04:49 (GMT-5)
The article The Age of Average by Alex Murrell writes,
“[…] while yet another places subjects in front of faux scenic backdrops reminiscent of a low-budget Sears photo studio. Each of these distinct setups is utilized broadly and across industries, with the same composition and concept seen on the Instagram feeds of a major beverage syndicate and an indie skincare brand alike.””
Oh, man, I am of a generation that got its pictures taken at Sears. Those were the family photos for years. We had one shot at a picture. It was what it was. They developed them, you paid for them, and you were happy with it.
Of course it’s nice to have more choice, to have instant feedback, but there is definitely something lost in modesty, in simply living with what the universe had to offer, in learning to love the picture that was so bad it’s good, in appreciating the unforeseen and unforeseeable twists offered up by a universe with a bit of a perverse sense of humor, of being forced to learn the lesson that not everything is that important, that you can’t expect perfection everywhere, and that, no matter how much money you had, we were all in the same boat, taking group portraits with our fingers crossed.
It was a time of modesty and simplicity that kept us humble. We should think whether that might not be a better balance of time spent to imbue a moment with value. Or perhaps those are just nostalgic goggles that those who came before us wore, who had to sit for painted portraits, and thought our ability to pick up pictures the next day was remarkably snooty and utterly too modern. There was no salient difference in choice, though, between a painted portrait and a photograph whose output you could not immediately see. You took the photo and you lived with the results. If you thought you’d closed your eyes, you could ask for another one, but your ability to tweak was incredibly limited. Relative to today’s ability to see the result immediately and to apply filters in real time, a Sears photo and a portrait were very much in the same category.
From the article, US Moral Authority Is Dead And Buried by Caitlin Johnstone,
]]>“[…] when people try to frame Assange’s persecution as a matter of public perception and fighting foreign narratives about the US, they are incorrect.... [More]”
Published by marco on 12. Aug 2023 17:03:18 (GMT-5)
The western world doesn’t have a moral leg to stand on unless or until this happens.
From the article, US Moral Authority Is Dead And Buried by Caitlin Johnstone,
“[…] when people try to frame Assange’s persecution as a matter of public perception and fighting foreign narratives about the US, they are incorrect. The issue is not that Assange’s persecution makes the US look bad, the issue is that it proves the US is bad. (Emphasis in original.)”
The letter [1] writes,
“The prosecution of Julian Assange for carrying out journalistic activities greatly diminishes America’s credibility as a defender of these values, undermining the United States’ moral standing on the world stage, and effectively granting cover to authoritarian governments who can (and do) point to Assange’s prosecution to reject evidence-based criticisms of their human rights records and as a precedent that justifies the criminalization of reporting on their activities.”
To which Johnstone replies,
“[America’s history of oppression and war] will all still be the case even if Assange is released. The US empire will still have spent years imprisoning a journalist for the crime of good journalism, will still be the world’s worst warmonger, and will still be the world’s most egregious violator of human rights. Its moral standing is dead and buried, and the world should stop following its lead in creating a just and ethical world. It simply does not have the qualifications to do so. In fact, no power structure on earth is less qualified.”
That’s a direct link to a CloudFront cached document. I’m not sure that these buffoons in our Congress intended that this would be the canonical place to get this document. See the original announcement (Tlaib House) if that link fails. That URL might be a bit more stable.
It’s actually not surprising that the people running this official, government site don’t have any good idea of canonical URLs: the letter itself—which is only 2½ pages long—has at least one pretty glaring typo in it, one that would have been caught by a grammar-checker, should they have seen fit to use it.
The sentence “[…] has highlighted conflicts between the America’s [sic] stated values of press freedom and its pursuit of Mr. Assange.” seems to have been changed from “the American” without removing the article when converting to the possessive.
Published by marco on 12. Aug 2023 16:24:54 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 13. Aug 2023 16:01:15 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Japan’s Long Stagnation Is a Case Study for the Future of Western Capitalism by Kristin Surak (Jacobin)
“The collapse of the real estate bubble produced a lot of zombie companies, as they were known, which had much greater debts than assets, but were at the same time too big to fail. These were some of the biggest companies in Japan. The indebted companies were employing people and driving the country forward.”
“For a period of almost thirty years from the early 1990s, Japan experienced no inflation. People have described it as an entirely comatose economy. There was a very low level of growth — much lower than before. Remarkably, the price of something in 1990 would often still be exactly the same in 2015.”
That sounds wonderful. They did a national experiment with a no-growth economy.
“Historically, there was an image of lifetime employment in Japan: if you got a job with a major company, you were expected to be with that company for life, and you were completely protected. You didn’t have to worry about anything else, because it would be very hard to fire you when you were on a lifetime employment contract. However, by the end of the 1990s, big business was trying to get rid of those lifetime contracts, reducing their scope to about 10 percent of the workforce. Today in Japan, about 60 percent of the workforce is in fixed-term contract work — that is, work without a secure future.”
“There has also been a great rise in inequality, and Japan is now one of the most unequal countries in the OECD. There used to be an idea that everybody in Japan was middle class, but that certainly isn’t the case anymore. The overall poverty rate is now about 15 percent, rising to approximately one-third of elderly people, who make up a huge proportion of the Japanese population. Coming on top of all the deregulation, this has hit people very hard.”
“The social welfare net has been rolled back as people move into work that is more temporary, because the people who are on permanent contracts receive better pensions, health care, bonuses, and so on. Japan has become noticeably more divided and unequal, with more people falling behind during this period of deregulation.”
“It’s quite pathetic. If you look at positions of power or leadership, women usually hold around 10 to 15 percent of seats in the national parliament, and around 15 percent of business and management roles. About a third of all major firms in Japan have no female executives at all. The targets they set for increasing the number of women in such positions, aiming to reach 20 percent, are still very low.”
“[…] the system would encourage women to only get part-time jobs in which they earned less than £10,000 a year, because it made more economic sense to stay on the better pension scheme and health insurance of their husbands. There were a lot of ways in which the system made it more rational for women to work in part-time jobs and not earn too much money while they were also taking care of the family.”
“Foreigners still account for just over 2 percent of the Japanese population, which is tiny in comparison to the United States or the UK or even Russia.”
That’s absolutely minuscule; very interesting.
“There are some efforts to bring Korean and Chinese students into the country, because the low birth rates mean that universities don’t have enough Japanese youth to fill all the places that they have available. There are schemes to keep graduates of Japanese universities on in the country for a couple of years. But it’s very hard to become a Japanese citizen, and Japan is still a closed country to a considerable extent.”
“By the time of his death, Abe was much closer to achieving his goal of constitutional revision. The renunciation of war in the postwar constitution was very important for Japanese national identity, but its significance has been declining. The number of people who think that Japan should never fight a war again or who support Article IX of the constitution is now somewhere around 50 percent.”
Episode 287: Creative Ass by True Anon (Patreon)
At 25:00, there’s an amazing discussion of homogeneity in building and construction. Again, capitalism and abstracted investment, interested only in returns, is the problem.
This planet will not survive capitalism. by Alan MacLeod
The packaging says pears grown in Argentina, then packed in Thailand, then sold in the U.S.
There’s Never Been A Better Time To Be Rich In America, So Why Aren’t Poor People Happy For Them? (The Onion)
This is why nobody gives a shit about aliens by saphirawater (Reddit)
“Let’s just say this is real and not a blue beans ops. I still would give zero shits if a fucking ayyy landed on my neighbor’s front fucking lawn. It would have zero effect on my life. Unless their asses come over to my house and make a fucking star trek replicator where I don’t have to pay 20 dollars for a T-bone, I don’t give any fucks. “Oh look we have cool flying ships!” I don’t give a fuck. I work from home. I don’t need to commute anymore. Plus I can’t afford to register and insure that shit.
“Oh we can travel to different dimensions!”. Oh cool, is there a dimension where I don’t need to work to survive? No? Then, I don’t give a fuck. “Oh look we are going to kill all your important people!” Yay!. Keep it up!”
Bad urban planning is absolutely the most important reason: the U.S. has not designed anything to be nice and easy and convenient to get to, least of all malls. You have to drive everywhere and driving is, quite frankly, tedious. You can’t walk or cycle or use public transportation. There is no nature or trees or ponds or anything to make the experience pleasant. You wouldn’t walk to a mall for a coffee. My God, the notion is ludicrous. People would say ‘that’s not what it’s for!’ But why not? A shopping center should be a town square, else no-one will go unless they actually need something.
From somewhere about ¾ of the way through the video,
“American malls are usually not built near any meaningful public transit. In fact, they are usually not built near any meaningful place. Compare these four European malls—two from Prague and two from Budapest—with these four American malls—from Phoenix, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, and Orlando.
“The reason why Amazon—and similar online commerce platforms—cannot compete with the first group, but can threaten the second group is because malls in the first group are integrated into the city. The surrounding environment isn’t just a parking lot. There are things to do and see, and you can end up in those malls completely organically—as in: unplanned—as you’re walking around downtown.
“With the second group, you have to make a conscious effort to go there: nobody will trudge through a kilometer of parking lot on foot. The GPS won’t take you there spontaneously. You have to make the decision at home to go there, and then make the effort. And then companies like Amazon come along and say, ‘hey buddy, we can save you all that effort.’”
Roaming Charges: Mad at the World by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“With a $53 billion endowment, Harvard is the world’s richest university. This week it advised struggling grad students to go on food stamps. Really, who would want to go here?”
“The chip war, like any other war, on China seems destined to backfire, in part because China possesses near sole access to materials that you can’t make but you need to manufacture the products needed to survive on a warming planet. As the FT notes: “China is responsible for the production of 90% of the world’s rare earth elements, 80% of all the stages of making solar panels and 60% of wind turbines and electric-car batteries. In some materials used in batteries, market share is close to 100%.””
Nurses Fight Godzilla by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“The front line against corporate tyranny is not the ballot box. It is in the desperate struggle by the overworked and underpaid to prevent corporate behemoths from turning everyone into gig workers without health and retirement benefits, job security, sustainable incomes or equitable working conditions. Nurses, battered by the almost inhuman demands put on them during the pandemic, have been especially hard hit. Almost one-third of New Jersey’s nurses have left the profession in the last three years.”
“RWJBarnabas Health, which owns 12 acute care hospitals, including Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and four specialty hospitals, is the largest healthcare provider in the state of New Jersey. Its 37,000 employees, including 9,000 physicians, care for more than three million patients a year. It has $6.6 billion in annual revenue. It is registered as a 501© (3) not-for-profit charitable organization.”
“In a move that backfired, one of the deans from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers, Dr. Carol Terregino, sent an email to second, third and fourth year medical students asking them to volunteer when nurses go on strike. She said the students would be “answering call bells, checking in on patients and supporting the replacement nursing staff.” The medical students refused, writing back that “the request to provide unpaid labor in jobs we are not trained to do at the expense of our own educational programming raises concerns about exploitation and risks creating an unsafe environment for patients.””
Also, it’s a scab move. They would have been undermining the nurse’s strike with uncompensated labor—and for what?
“In 1975 the U.S. had about 1.5 million hospital beds and a population of about 216 million people. Now, with a population of over 330 million people, we have around 925,000 beds. Fifty-six percent of Americans have medical debt and 23 percent owe $10,000 or more, according to a study by Affordable Health Insurance. The study found emergency room visits contributed to medical debt for 44 percent of Americans. Some 330,000 Americans died during the pandemic because they could not afford to go to a doctor on time.”
“[…] many of the functions once carried out by doctors have been turned over to nurses. The heavy turnover means nurses with little experience are in senior positions in critical and acute care units, such as the ER. Nurses said they often come to work sick to spare their short-staffed colleagues an onerous workload.”
“In 2022, the former CEO of Barnabas, Barry Ostrowsky, was paid more than $16 million. In 2020, the CEOs of 178 major healthcare companies collectively made $3.2 billion in total compensation, an increase of 31 percent from 2019, all in the midst of the pandemic. According to Axios, in 2020, the CEO of Cigna made $79 million, the CEO of Centene made $59 million, and the CEO of UnitedHealth Group received $42 million in total compensation.”
““We have to educate ourselves and others. Health is fundamental. There is no incremental way that we can do this. We cannot work within the for-profit system to fix this problem. We have to nationalize our healthcare system. This means getting the profit out completely.”
The Executioner’s Lament by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)
“Concerned about the possibility of the B-29 crashing on takeoff, thereby triggering the explosive charge that would send the uranium slug into the uranium core (the so-called gun device), the decision was made that the final assembly of the bomb would be done only after the Enola Gay took off. One of the 1st Ordnance Squadron technicians placed the uranium slug into the bomb at 7,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean.”
“For the pilot and crew of the Enola Gay, there was no remorse over killing so many people. “I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we’d be doing that I thought, yes, we’re going to kill a lot of people, but by God we’re going to save a lot of lives,’ Tibbets recounted to Studs Terkel in 2002 . He added: “We won’t have to invade [Japan]. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people,” Tibbets told Terkel. “If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: ‘You’ve killed so many civilians.’ That’s their tough luck for being there.””
The sentiment of a member of a nation completely free of ethics, morals, principles, or even the rudiments of philosophy.
“Major Charles Sweeney, the pilot of Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped the second American atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, held similar convictions about his role in killing 35,000 Japanese instantly.”
“Those who will execute the orders to use nuclear weapons in any future nuclear conflict will, in fact, execute those orders. They are trained, like Tibbets and Sweeney, to believe in the righteousness of their cause.”
Niger is the Fourth Country in the Sahel to Experience an Anti-Western Coup by Vijay Prashad & Kambale Musavuli (CounterPunch)
“At the heart of the “corruption” is the so-called “joint venture” between Niger and France called Société des mines de l’Aïr (Somaïr), which owns and operates the uranium industry in the country. Strikingly, 85 percent of Somaïr is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies, while only 15 percent is owned by Niger’s government.”
“Half of Niger’s export receipts are from sales of uranium, oil, and gold. One in three lightbulbs in France are powered by uranium from Niger, at the same time as 42 percent of the African country’s population lived below the poverty line.”
“Traoré reacted strongly to the condemnation of the military coups in the Sahel, including to a recent visit to his country by an African Union delegation. “A slave that does not rebel does not deserve pity,” he said . “The African Union must stop condemning Africans who decide to fight against their own puppet regimes of the West.””
Pennys „wahre Kosten“ – Zynismus in Reinkultur by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Leidtragende dieser Entwicklung sind vor allem die Bauern, die von der Einkaufsmacht der vier Handelskonzerne, die zusammen 85 Prozent des deutschen Lebensmittelmarktes unter sich ausmachen, die Einkaufspreise diktiert bekommen.”
“Man instrumentalisiert Armut als Ausrede für den Missbrauch der Marktmacht der großen Handelskonzerne, die ihrerseits den Bauern Dumpingpreise abpressen, zu denen nun einmal ökonomisch gar keine verantwortungsbewusste Produktion der Lebensmittel möglich ist.”
“[…] was nützt diese Erkenntnis, wenn der sicherlich klimafreundlicher produzierte Biokäse so teuer ist, dass ihn sich viele Geringverdiener ohnehin nicht leisten können? Muss nun etwa die Rentnerin mit ihrem Penny-Maasdamer ein schlechtes Gewissen haben? Und der Besserverdiener mit seinem Biokäse ist fein raus? Prima, dann sei ihm ja der neue Audi Q8, die wohlverdiente Auszeit auf den Malediven und der Business-Trip nach New York vergeben. Und was hält Penny eigentlich davon, Erdbeeren aus Marokko oder Äpfel aus Südafrika aus dem Sortiment zu nehmen? Sind die etwa gut für das Klima?”
How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths by Bryce Greene (Scheer Post)
“No solemn reflections about the war machine, no policy pieces about how we might avoid such devastation in the future, and certainly no op-eds calling for the wars’ architects to stand trial for their crimes. How does our media environment so easily dismiss carnage of this scale? Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its War Machine ( New Press ), offers a deep look at the media system that enables a monstrous war machine to extract such a heavy toll on the world with impunity.”
“US drone warfare has been a persistent source of horror for millions. But, as Solomon notes, “the systems of remote killing get major help from reporters, producers and editors who detour around the carnage at the other end of US weaponry.” One clear way they help is by endorsing and repeating the idea that America’s campaign of air assassinations is a new form of “humane war.””
“These whistleblowers and truth-tellers only exist on the margins in public discourse. When the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan was bookended by yet another “unintentional” drone strike on ten civilians, the words of these whistleblowers had long left the public mind. Media shrugged when the Pentagon cleared itself of any wrongdoing, as they have done countless times before.”
Reading the Mess the Democrats Have Made by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“[…] the Democrats have emerged since Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 as a party of liberal authoritarians intent on imposing their political hegemony on our republic by whatever means this project requires. Nothing is out of bounds, as these people have already demonstrated. Two, in what looks like one of the great political miscalculations in my lifetime, the Democrats are determined to stand a candidate in 2024 whose senility has been publicly on display for the past two years and change.”
“Here is John Mearsheimer, the prominent foreign relations scholar, on this point during an interview The Grayzone published Sunday:”“I think it was stupidity. I think you can’t underestimate just how foolish the West is when it comes to the whole question of Ukraine—and all sorts of other issues as well. But I think that the West believed—and here we’re talking mainly about the United States—that if a war did break out between Ukraine and Russia, that the West plus Ukraine would prevail, that the Russians would be defeated. I believe we thought that was the case.”
“Not even Biden knows what Bidenomics is supposed to be about. It comes to little more than citations of job numbers that do not mean much unless wage numbers are also considered, and wage numbers are left out of the Bidenomics equation.”
“A federal judge in Delaware has thrown back Hunter’s disgraceful plea bargain, rejecting the preposterous provision that the president’s son be immune from all future findings of corruption. “The blanket shield against any other charges based on past misconduct was so inappropriate,” Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Post over the weekend, “that the only possible explanation is that the aim was to shut down the probe of the family permanently.” No, they are not insentient. They are desperate.”
“[…] turned the agency into a politicized instrument at the Democratic Party’s disposal, most recently by withholding for several years documents exposing Joe Biden’s direct involvement in Hunter’s influence-peddling schemes. Anyone who does not recognize the political motives of Garland’s campaign to get Donald Trump jailed and, on the other side, his direction of the Hunter Biden plea deal, is reading too many Gail Collins columns.”
“Look at this mess. A senile president—the physicians call Biden’s condition “neurocognitive disorder,” but “senile” or “demented” is what they mean—is standing for reelection with a wasteful proxy war failing, nothing much to show for himself at home, mounting evidence of epic-scale personal corruption, institutional failure of the same magnitude: There is only one way to explain this shambles: Every one of these crises traces back to the Democratic Party’s obsession with taking and holding power more or less indefinitely to suit its hubristic, end-of-history “narrative” of righteous liberal triumph. I do not approve of columnists who self-reference, but I will breach my own rule on this occasion. I warned when all this started in 2016–2017 that liberal authoritarianism was vastly more dangerous than Trump’s arrival on the political scene. And here we are.”
“Even among those driven by purely partisan sentiment, it is a very grave matter to impeach a president when you know you have the goods on him. The Trump impeachments were spectacle and intended as such. The material coming to the surface against Biden is entirely more serious.”
“Two weeks after I voted for the first and last time in my life, for Bill Clinton in 1998, he sent a cruise missile into the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan to get people to stop thinking about his pleasures with Monica Lewinsky.”
This is 100% true. Mostly forgotten, but sadly and grossly indicative of how Americans think: anything is allowed if you’re defending you and yours—as long as the victims are “others”.
“Archer, formerly in business with Hunter Biden, was previously found guilty of some kind of swindle involving fraudulent bonds and was awaiting his reporting date to begin serving a sentence of one year and one day. No date had been set. Now to the chase: Archer was scheduled to appear at a House Oversight Committee hearing early this week, during which he was expected to testify under oath that he was present on various occasions when Joe and Hunter Biden conducted their influence-peddling business. Out of nowhere, the DoJ ordered him over the weekend to report immediately to the prison where he was to begin serving his sentence. At one point, Archer was reported to be in hiding—in hiding from the judicial authorities charged with enforcing the law. And immediate uproar—James Comer, who chairs Oversight, denounced the move as straight-out obstruction of justice—appears to have forced the DoJ to relent. Archer testified for several hours behind closed doors on Monday.”
At least there’s still the possibility of bucking the DOJ for now.
“The spin coming out of the Democratic quadrant since Archer’s testimony is quite beyond belief. Hunter wasn’t peddling access to Joe: That was just a ruse to fool those with whom he was dealing. All those telephone calls were just father-son stuff. Yes, he met some of Hunter’s business “associates” and, yes, there were dinners at Georgetown restaurants, but it was all just “casual conversation.” They talked about “the weather.””
“Lies told straight to our faces. More or less complete unaccountability. Lawlessness in the name of the law. This is what I mean by acts of desperation. And what I mean when I suggest we must brace ourselves for what is to come.”
Ukraine’s baby factories rake in record profits amid chaos of war by Jeremy Loffredo (The Gray Zone)
“Eight years of civil war followed by a proxy war between NATO nations and Russia has plunged Ukraine into economic disaster. As its citizens sank into poverty, the country swiftly emerged as the international epicenter for surrogacy, and now controls at least a quarter of the global market.”
“The BioTexCom Center for Reproduction is by far the biggest player in the international surrogacy market. The owner of the “reproductive technology services” claimed in 2018 that the company controlled a mammoth 70% of the national surrogacy market and a full 25% of the global market.”
“BioTexCom’s Medical Director, Ihor Pechenoha, openly admitted to the Spanish investigative magazine La Marea that his company targets women from poor areas, and that “all those who work as surrogate mothers do so out of financial hardship.” “We are looking for women in the former Soviet republics because, logically, [the women] have to be from poorer places than our clients,” Pechenoha explained. Ultimately, he added, “I have not met a single woman with a good economic situation who has decided to go through this process out of kindness, because she thinks she has enough children and wants to help someone else who wants them.””
“Emma Lamberton, the author of the Princeton report on Ukraine’s surrogacy industry, noted BioTexCom is actually a foreign company operating inside of Ukraine. Documents from the firm’s website suggest the company is registered in Switzerland.”
“After birth, many infants are kept under lock and key in hotels with militarized security until their purchasers arrive to pick them up. As the Guardian reported in 2020 : “These newborns are not in the nursery of a maternity hospital, they are lined up side by side in two large reception rooms of the improbably named Hotel Venice on the outskirts of Kyiv, protected by outer walls and barbed wire.””
“In October 2022, The New York Times published an article that could have been drawn directly from BioTexCom marketing material. The Times framed the resumption of BioTexCom’s surrogacy operations in the midst of a war with Russia as a valiant act of patriotic defiance, describing the baby business as “an industry that many childless people rely on.””
“When asked by the Ukrainian journalist how BioTexCom plans to resolve the legal and ethical issues around engineering and organizing baby factories, the CEO replied that the answer was simple: eliminate outside oversight. “The most important thing,” he insisted, “is to prohibit law enforcement agencies from interfering in the work.””
Requiem for NATO’s Nightmare by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)
“The Vilnius summit on July 11-12 in many ways represented the high-water mark of Europe’s old order. The summit was the requiem for a nightmare of Europe’s own creation — the death of a nation, the nullification of a continent and the end of an order which had long ago lost its legitimacy.”
“Left unsaid is that Erdogan had to threaten NATO to get the U.S. to articulate a bribe that had the U.S. waiving its prior sanctioning of a NATO ally while at the same time compelling the U.S. to consider the security implications of the deal, given the open hostility that exists between Turkey and fellow NATO member Greece.”
“The Ukrainian counteroffensive was formed around a core force of some 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers who received special training by NATO and European militaries on weapons and tactics designed to defeat Russian defenses. Since the counteroffensive began on June 8, Ukraine has lost nearly half of these troops, and a third of the equipment provided — including scores of the Leopard main battle tanks and Bradly infantry fighting vehicles that had been viewed by many as game-changing technology.”
“Left unspoken are the hundreds of thousands of body bags that have already been lowered into the dark soil of Ukraine, highlighting the callous disregard for that human tragedy by the Vilnius attendees.”
China’s rising youth unemployment portends major social struggles by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“The most recent data showed that the unemployment rate for urban youth aged 16 to 24 years old was 21.3 percent, a record high, reflecting a continuing upward trend. In reality, the figure could be much higher. Earlier this month a Peking University professor, Zhang Dandan, wrote an online article in the financial magazine Caixin, stating that if 16 million non-students staying at home and relying on their parents were included then the real youth jobless rate could be as high at 46.5 percent.”
““Two thirds of the young people entering the labour market in China right now below the age of 24 are not college graduates, but have high school education or less. This reflects the fact that 40 percent of Chinese young people do not make it into tertiary education. Indeed, a substantial minority barely finish high school and they make up the majority of people who enter the labour market ‘early’.””
“According to official data, the number of so-called “flexibly employed” has reached 200 million or 27 percent of the working population. Other estimates put the number at 250 million.”
Bringing the War Home to the Border to Make Imperialism Great Again by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“The man is a pathological liar with a long and well documented career of saying quite literally everything and anything to make a buck and keep his cojones out of the fire. Just try taking a jog through the ruins of Atlantic City without a fully automatic Uzi if you don’t fucking believe me.”
“Orange-Man-Bad’s America First strip tease was just his latest sales pitch but after eight years of George W. Bush and another eight of his mentholated doppelganger, Barack Obama, a lot of disgruntled conservatives and independents were just pissed off enough to buy it, hook, line and sinker.”
“[…] that walking jack-o-lantern did succeed in lighting a fire under right-wing isolationism that has significantly altered the DNA of America’s bipartisan combat addiction. Trump may be full of shit but the wave of rural disgust with America’s runaway war machine that he inadvertently gave license to is not and the recent wave of conservative dissent against Joe Biden’s reckless proxy war in Ukraine proves it.”
“But spectacle is not always reality, and you don’t have to scratch the GOP’s newfound isolationist rhetoric very hard to smell an illusion. While half the GOP may be running for reelection on cutting arms shipments to Ukraine, the entire party remains frighteningly united on redirecting them much closer to home with an open shooting war at the border.”
“Yep, that’s right folks, the “isolationists” want to declare war on Mexico and the neocons and neoliberals do to. Longshot Ziocon heartthrob Nikki Haley has joined her critics in the chorus by calling to send US Special Forces into Mexico to attack the cartels “just like we dealt with ISIS.” And none other than Hillary’s 2016 VP pick, Senator Tim Kaine, is pushing bipartisan legislation to have fentanyl declared a “national security threat” as we speak.”
“Plan Colombia, a Clinton/Bush era military crusade that was supposed to cleanse the Andes of the great white scourge of cocaine. The only thing it really achieved aside from mugging taxpayers of billions of dollars was help Colombia’s despicably corrupt police state to expand its presence deep into the farthest reaches of the Amazon Jungle where they carried out multiple genocides against indigenous people who had the misfortune of existing on territory slated for rape by American mining conglomerates.”
“A lot of people forget that old Dubya actually ran against Al Gore in 2000 as a quasi-isolationist promising an end to feckless globalist campaigns like Clinton’s “humanitarian” disaster in the Balkans. Then a few Saudis chucked some jetliners into Manhattan and the feeding frenzy began all over again.”
“In 2024, the closest thing the war machine has to 9/11 is the Fentanyl Crisis. Another colossal clusterfuck of imperial blowback brought on by Big Pharma and Big Prohibition. Their hope is to sell forever war back to MAGA isolationists by cleverly labeling it as a matter of territorial integrity. But if paleos foolishly believe that this thing is going to stop with a few drone strikes in Sinaloa then I have some swampland in Guantanamo Bay to sell them.”
“We are also talking quite glibly about expanding this war to China by blaming a rising superpower for our nation’s appetite to alter its own consciousness just because Beijing happens to be home to the labs that make the best precursors for our current fix of choice.”
“Rabid animals like Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis don’t want peace and isolation. They want to make America great again and prevent a nuclear confrontation with Russia by making forever war great again on our own borders and provoking a nuclear confrontation with China. This isn’t populist regime change; it’s imperial rebranding and you people should be smart enough by now not to buy this trash for the fiftieth goddamn time in a row. Justin Raimondo weeps.”
“This screed is devoted in loving memory to Sinead O’Connor, a ferocious woman with a loud voice who gave a frightened little girl inside a broken man the courage to stand taller than towers. She will not be forgotten and that is a promise you will have to kill me not to keep.”
Five Myths In The House Anti-Trans Hearing Against Gender Affirming Care by Erin Reed (Scheer Post)
“Numerous studies have shown that it leads to positive psychological outcomes and reduces suicide rates significantly—some studies report a remarkable 73% decrease in suicide rates. The endorsement of gender affirming care is supported by a collection of over 50 papers compiled by Cornell University, all of which underscore its beneficial effects. Hence, gender affirming care is not an “unhealthy decision” but rather a medically sound approach grounded in scientific evidence, which greatly benefits transgender individuals who genuinely require it.”
That’s a very carefully designed formulation that avoids mentioning that we are far from any conclusive evidence. The words “supported” and “underscored” lie closer to the realm of opinion than established scientific fact.
It’s fine, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of who decides who gets gender-affirming care. The child? The child’s parents? What if they disagree? One parent? Teachers who think the child shows signs? A psychologist? A doctor? How do you ensure that the care is provided to benefit the child/person rather than a profit motive or agenda? How do you ensure the child is making the correct life-altering and irreversible decision? This also goes for when a child does not get gender-affirming care, but should have.
“Under the current law, if transgender youth seek shelter, the shelter must report their presence to their parents immediately. However, the bill adds an exception to this parental notification requirement, specifically when these youth have sought or are trying to access gender-affirming care or abortion services and have reason to believe their parents will withhold them.”
But that’s patently fucked up, no? The kids running away will exploit this loophole so their parents aren’t notified and their decisions are left in the hands of strangers, who know better than the parents. Sliding toward state as cult.
“The bill is a compassionate solution to an existing problem in the state, not a means for the state to “take kids away and trans them.””
Only in the most generous and unrealistic light.
“[…] it is essential to note that transgender youth under 12 receive no medical interventions at all. For this age group, the transition is primarily social, involving the use of a new name, preferred pronouns, haircut, and clothing choice.”
“[…] even among adults, the rate of gender reassignment surgery remains relatively low, with 1% for transgender men and 10% for transgender women. Therefore, there is no basis for the claim of a “fast track to gender reassignment surgery” for transgender patients of any age.”
The Forgotten Victims of America’s Class War by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“The two American flags on the wall flanking the oval mirror. The plaque that reads: “If a Man is Alone In the Woods, With No Woman to Hear Him, Is He Still Wrong?””
You cannot argue with the basic humor of that. Every man I told this to in Central NY laughed ruefully; every woman simply said “yes.”
“The bank in the center of town closed. It is now a photographer’s studio and a hair salon. There is a casino in the town of Oxford which, like lottery tickets, functions as a stealth tax on the poor. The day I visit, a fundraiser is being held at an ice cream shop for an eight-year-old boy who needs a kidney transplant.”
“My grandfather had little use for Blacks, Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, communists, foreigners or anyone from Boston. If you weren’t white, Protestant and from Mechanic Falls, you were far down on the racial and social ladder. I cannot imagine him inviting the Wangs over for dinner.”
“Maurice went with the regiment to the South Pacific, fighting in Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, the Russell Islands, New Georgia Islands, New Guinea and Luzon in the Philippines. He was wounded. He returned to Mechanic Falls physically and psychologically broken. He worked in my uncle’s lumber mill, but often disappeared for days. He never spoke about the war. He lived in a trailer and drank himself to death.”
“Maine breeds eccentrics. Nancy and Eriks tell me about Mesannie Wilkins , buried in the town cemetery, who in 1955, five weeks before her 63rd birthday, was told she had two to four years to live. The bank was poised to foreclose on her home. She decided, if life was to be that short and she was homeless, to ride horseback from Maine to California. She left town with $ 32 in her pocket. She rode a horse named King. Depeche Toi, her dog, rode a rusty black horse named Tarzan. Mesannie, who made the seven-thousand-mile journey in 16 months dressed in a hunting cap with earflaps and lumberman’s felt boots, lived for another 25 years.”
““He saw bad stuff,” she says. “They would interrogate Vietcong and throw them alive out of the helicopters. He had flashbacks. He would re-enact events. One night he forced me to crawl under the jeep yelling ‘They’re here! They’re here!’ He really believed in this country. He didn’t want to know he went to war for nothing.””
What do you do with that? People go insane trying keep the myth alive.
“We cannot dismiss and demonize rural white Americans. The class war waged by corporations and the ruling oligarchs has devastated their lives and communities. They have been betrayed. They have every right to be angry. That anger can sometimes be expressed in inappropriate ways, but they are not the enemy. They too are victims. In my case, they are family. I come from here. Our fight for economic justice must include them. We will wrest back control of our nation together or not at all.”
Amen, brother. Took the words out of my mouth.
Disrupt The Culture Wars by Caitlin Johnstone (Scheer Post)
“The worse things get the more urgent the need to fight the class war will become, and the more urgent the need to fight the class war becomes the more vitriolic and intense the artificial culture war will become in order to prevent political changes which inconvenience the powerful. This is 100 percent guaranteed. And what’s tricky is that all the vitriolic intensity will create the illusion that the culture war has gotten more important, when in reality the class war has.”
“How fucked up is it that the most influential voices in our society on both sides of the mainstream partisan divide are facilitating the abuse of marginalized groups in order to protect the powerful?”
“In April 2022, creator Paulomi Dholakia had some thoughts about Disney. Specifically, she was upset the company didn’t seem to be promoting the Ms. Marvel series, which features the franchise’s first Muslim superhero, as much as it had promoted its other series, like Hawkeye. She first posted this opinion on TikTok, and after people agreed with her, she brought the same video to Instagram.
““It went viral in a very bad way,” Dholakia says. Instead of support, or civil discussion, she was met with comments like “F*ck you you clout chasing b*tch.”
““It made me feel so self-conscious, that maybe I don’t need to say stuff,” she says. Dholakia, who is 31 years old and aspiring to a full-time career as a travel agent, had been sharing more on social media to build business opportunities, but the incident exposed the challenges of virality. “I try not to mess up, try not to stir the pot, and that’s probably why I’m not going to get anywhere on social media,” she concedes. “Because if you don’t stir the pot or you don’t put yourself out there in a very raw, authentic way, then why are people watching you?”
“Dholakia grew up in an online environment that encourages users to share everything from their thoughts on politics to their takes on pop culture. But as the online landscape has grown into an all-encompassing digital town square, experiences like Dholakia’s have prompted her and other former social media power users to throw their hands up and admit “opinion fatigue.””
This is just incredible, really, a completely alien lifestyle—almost another culture or species. The degree to which people don’t understand how humanity works is astounding. They think that they have unfettered access to only positive feedback when they publish to the whole world at once on a very public platform. Just. Tell. Your. Friends. FFS. The Internet is not your friends.
I suppose it starts with a 31-year-old who “aspires” to be a travel agent as the interview subject. That an actual online magazine thought to interview this obvious dodo is astounding. That she is offended that the world doesn’t have overwhelmingly positive feedback for her opinions is icing on the cake. When she gets negative feedback, her answer is to “throw [her] hands up” and stop trying. That goes a long way to explaining why she’s still “aspiring” to be something that is no longer relevant today (a travel agent), at 31 years old.
““People feel like they finally have a voice,” says Linda Charmaraman, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women and director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab. “People want to feel validated. ‘Do you agree with me? What do you think?’ And just trying to keep up that engagement is a game in itself.””
Next is a Ph.D. from the “Wellesley Centers for Women and director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab”. JFC. Do I even need to go on? “People want to feel validated.” Of course they do. But is it useful for society to reward everyone for every goddamned thing that falls out of their undereducated heads? That’s what you have friends for: to help you figure out which opinions are bone-headed and which ones aren’t. Since they’re your friends, they might let you down easier (depending on what kind of friends you have). The Internet is not obliged to treat your completely unknown and anonymous ass in the same way.
For God’s sake, this is not rocket science. If you want to post something, post it on your own private site and don’t allow comments—or only allow moderated comments, or … whatever. Stop seeking the validation of strangers instead of people you know and love, is, I think, what I’m saying here.
Blogs were already the correct solution at the beginning; they’re the correct solution now. Stop trying to be viral and stop trying to figure out how to turn a single opinion of yours into a career. Just stop. Society doesn’t need your bullshit.
“[…] silence on a prominent political or social issue can be interpreted as complicity. It took Taylor Swift three years to disavow white supremacy after the Daily Stormer referred to her as “pure Aryan goddess,” revealing her status as an (unintentional) neo-Nazi idol. She told Rolling Stone in 2019 that she wasn’t aware of how her image had been co-opted and attributed her silence to a “sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won.” For much of the public, however, this explanation was too little, too late.”
This entire paragraph is utter nonsense. This is no way to run a society. Why in God’s name are people so stupid and petty? Who cares what other people think? You have to officially come out against white supremacy now? Because if you don’t, people will think you’re totally for it. Fuck those people, then. They’re just karma-whoring on your reputation (especially TV shows in the traditional media, BTW). Do not give in to them and allow them to control how to waste your time.
Four key questions on the new wave of anti-obesity drugs by McKenzie Prillaman (Nature)
“People with type 2 diabetes, for instance, tend to lose less weight than do people without the disease when taking GLP-1 mimics. Although a few hypotheses exist as to why, the reason still eludes researchers.”
“Someone’s sex and starting weight could affect their response, too. In the retatrutide trial, female participants lost, on average, a higher proportion of their body weight than did male participants at all tested drug doses. And animal studies show that the greater a mouse’s starting weight, the greater the amount of weight loss with triple-acting drugs such as retatrutide,”
“The short-term side effects of this drug class are clear: nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and other digestion-related issues. The problems cause some people to stop taking the medications.”
“For those who begin treatment involving hormone mimics — and can weather any short-term side effects — these drugs are likely to become a lifelong commitment to keep weight off.”
“When someone starts losing weight, he says, the body responds by slowing the metabolism and increasing food cravings. But “that system does not care about whether you have diabetes or sleep apnoea or fatty liver disease”, Sharma says. Anti-obesity medications help to reduce this response, tweaking a user’s biology so that they feel satisfied on fewer calories. But for most people, removing this external aid will simply result in regained weight. So researchers think that most patients who start taking the drugs will stay on some form of them for life.”
That’s super-convenient for those researchers’ employers.
“Health exists at every size, says Geoff Ball, a clinical researcher specializing in paediatric obesity at the University of Alberta, who has served on a national advisory board on the subject for Novo Nordisk. “There’s no right weight for people.””
I’m at Gilbert Lake right now and I see people right in front of me who are definitely not the right weight. You can’t tell me that people that young should have that much trouble moving around. One is smoking. This society is absolutely poisonous. Eat, smoke, drink whatever, then take a drug forever to fix it, or be told that you can be happy at that weight, despite the cornucopia of health problems.
The Dutiful Wife by Rafia Zakaria (The Baffler)
“Like the “shitty media men” whose names appeared on an anonymously compiled list at the height of the #MeToo era (many of whom have kept their jobs and reputations), the cheaters of old believed that power and literary genius meant the rules did not apply to them.”
As if a fucking anonymous list is proof of anything. Honestly, can people stop intimating that’s it’s a moral crime for a man accused of sexual impropriety (at least) to have kept his job or position or reputation after the accusation if nothing actually followed the accusation? Or are we just floating in a world whose morals are guided by the most offended and most strident, letting entire lives be ruined without evidence?
That this happens regularly for the poor is well-known, but the answer isn’t that we should make it unfair for everyone. The answer is that we should make it fair for everyone. Just because you don’t like the target doesn’t mean he’s automatically guilty. Pull yourself together and get some empathy: if the accused were someone you knew well, would you so quickly and with so little evidence think that they deserved to lose their job and life?
Challenging Times and Intellectual Pleasures: My Talk with Slavoj Žižek by Nilantha Ilangamuwa (CounterPunch)
“As virtual reality becomes more prevalent in our lives, I asked Slavoj about the safeguards needed to prevent the distortion of reality and preserve authentic human experiences. He explained, “What we experience as social reality is already, in some sense, virtual. I’m not denying the existence of reality, but what we perceive as reality is already mediated through a virtual symbolic system.”
““I’m more pessimistic about this. We live in a global capitalist society where we appear to be increasingly free. On one hand, we are treated as free, but at the same time, we are part of a social world that is obscured and non-transparent. So, we need to clarify what we mean by freedom. I don’t believe we should oppose freedom, discipline, and social order. Abstractly, freedom might mean doing whatever we want, but I wouldn’t want to live in such a society because it would be a horrible world if we couldn’t trust each other to respect basic rules of decency. True freedom requires explicit and implicit rules to be in operation.””
“Regarding consumerism, he added, “When you talk about the upper middle-class, the problem might be consumerism, but for a poor person, the issue is getting new clothes and adequate food. We shouldn’t criticize poor people for consumerism when they finally get a bit of money to buy something they need. Let them have a bit of pleasure.”
“I’m not advocating for a totalitarian state regulating every aspect of life. I like the form of freedom, but to achieve it, a full concrete network of state regulations, unwritten rules, and customs must be well established. Unfortunately, this is something people tend to forget today.”
Absolutely. This is the so-called knife-edge on which all dance, every day. You see how many implicit rules there are when society starts to break down, when people no longer follow them, choosing instead to advantage themselves. We are on a knife edge with out culture, and also with our technology. We assume that clean, running water for drinking and showers will always be here, that sewers will always work, that trash is removed, that products and food are cheap and plentiful, that the weather allows us to function as we like.
Susan Neiman on Why Left ≠ Woke by Yascha Mounk (Persuasion)
“[…] traditionally, the Left has always been on the side of universalism rather than tribalism. Tribalism has always been a conservative view, suggesting that the only people you will have real connections with and therefore real obligations to are people who belong to your tribe. And for universalists on the liberal left, your tribe could encompass the entire world. Of course, you have certain affinities to people who get your jokes or understand your allusions. But to be a universalist is to work hard to try and understand what is going on in other cultures.”
“[…] the idea that your claims to representation are claims about justice, that it’s not simply the strongest person or group of people in the neighborhood, but that people deserve certain rights on the basis of human dignity, is a claim about justice.”
“[…] if you don’t actually believe that progress has taken place in the past, it’s very hard to develop the will to make more. So claims like “Nothing has changed in the United States since slavery” or “We’re still living under a patriarchy that hasn’t fundamentally changed” are statements about, really, the futility of actual change, which undermines efforts to make more.”
“I believe that social rights are human rights. All this was codified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which is an aspirational doctrine. But it means that things like fair labor practices, education, health care, access to culture, are social rights. They’re not benefits, they’re not privileges. They’re not safety nets. They’re rights in the same way that the right to travel or the right to speak are rights.”
“The idea that there would be an African American intellectual sitting in the White House for eight years was just not something that anybody imagined at the time. Racism is too deep, long-lasting and, in some ways, systemic a phenomenon to be ended in one generation. But there was enormous progress.”
They just had to find a black man who would be a smiling, sadistic asshole like all the others. Which is why the question of class is much more important than race. Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas are what many would consider to be the right color, but they are members of an elite to which they pledge much stronger fealty than to members of the cohort defined by their shared skin color. That much should be utterly obvious.
As Kanye West said, George Bush doesn’t care about black people. Neither does Barack Obama. Barack Obama cares about himself and his rich friends. If they’re all adequately cared for, then he might have some empathy left over for members outside of his class, but that’s only a side-effect of the main thrust of his efforts, which aim to further enrich himself and the elite to which long aspired to belong, and to which he has belonged for decades. If he didn’t do this thing, he would never have become president.
“They say “No, these principles have always just been make-believe, they’ve always just been a way of pretending, and in fact, the function is precisely to perpetuate this injustice. So we have to get rid of those principles. The only thing that’s left is group power.” Now, I think there’s a principled objection to this, that that’s not the kind of society that I want to live in; and there’s a practical objection, which is, what on earth makes you so confident that the people who’ve always been oppressed, have been in the minority, will suddenly be powerful enough that they can impose their group will on the others, rather than that this competition for group struggle, for group power, will once again benefit the dominant group?”
“[…] you see Narendra Modi saying that human rights are a Western imposition, and besides, you colonized us, and there are no universal principles of justice. That’s just simply not true. And fortunately, there are some writers from formerly colonized countries who are speaking up against that sort of abuse now, and I quote some of them in my book, but it’s a rather nefarious sort of move. Again, it’s an old move. It’s 2500 years old. And Socrates had a hard time refuting it then. But we have to keep refuting it in every generation.”
“If you carry the “You can’t possibly understand my experience” bit far enough then none of us can understand anyone. This is, for me, the point of great literature, great music, great film, which is why I’m extremely annoyed by the claims about cultural appropriation—precisely the function of great art is to help us better understand both ourselves but also a culture that is not ours.”
“Appropriation is, of course, not the same thing as exploitation. But if you pay some attention to other people’s cultures and learn at least another language or two, you will never be able to do it for the plurality of different cultures in the world. But I always argue that making an attempt to walk around into other cultures besides your own, just to realize that there are many different perspectives on the world gives you, first of all, a perspective on yourself, and, secondly, a sense of some others.”
“[…] cultural pluralism is a wonderful thing. But political universalism is the thing that holds us together.”
“The philosopher, Christian Wolff, who was a big influence on Immanuel Kant, even if very few people have heard of him, studied some Confucius and Mencius, and gave a lecture arguing that the Chinese had a perfectly good system of morals, even though they weren’t Christians. And for this, he was ordered to leave not just his university position, but the entire state of Prussia, in 48 hours, or to face execution. This is not a Twitter storm, ok, these people were standing up for a genuine universalism. And it’s all over Enlightenment texts, if anybody actually bothers to read them.”
“[…] would feel comfortable living in, in Germany. But things have gotten significantly worse in the past three years, where an over-focus on the German crimes of the past has led to two things that are incredibly problematic. One is it leaves Germany absolutely unable to talk about what’s going on in the present, particularly in the state of Israel. But secondly, it winds up in thinking that the only Jewish voices that count are the voices that talk about Jewish victimhood. They have completely forgotten about Jewish universalists.”
“[…] if people agree with you on the main thesis of what you’ve been talking about, and they think of themselves as left-wing, and they’re in a milieu that is very left-wing, and they’re worried about making the points you just made to the friends and colleagues and so on, do you have any advice for how to speak up for those ideas without ceasing to be in good standing with your leftist social circle?”
What the fuck is wrong with people? They seem obsessed with pleasing blinkered idiots who are in their “social circles”. Why? Who cares what amoral fools think? Just say what you’re going to say and let them digest it. If they can’t? Reformulate. But don’t give in on your principles unless you think you got something wrong.
The opinions of strangers are more-or-less meaningless. If you know their credentials and respect their opinion, then go ahead and lend their opinion weight; otherwise, you can safely ignore the hysterical reactions of strangers online. It’s all just fake Internet points anyway.
And, maybe—just maybe—you could consider having discussions with a smaller circle than “the whole world”, where you don’t run such a large risk of reputational loss if an unrefined opinion should slip out of you. That’s what private discussions are for—to bounce ideas and opinions off of people you trust to give you the benefit of the doubt before you show the whole world.
People are skipping that step and are mystified why it doesn’t seem to be working for them.
“[…] speak up. You will find that many more people agree with you and will say things like “I was going to say that but I was afraid.” That’s happened to me many, many times.”
Or, if you address too large and anonymous a group, you’ll find out why those people were afraid to say anything. The larger a group you address, the more likely it is that you’ll get feedback from hypersensitive lunatics or lulz-seeking trolls.
Political Milestones for AI by Bruce Schneier
“While ChatGPT-generated businesses may not yet have taken the world by storm, this possibility is in the same spirit as the algorithmic agents powering modern high-speed trading and so-called autonomous finance capabilities that are already helping to automate business and financial decisions.”
They are, but their goal is to maximize short-term profit for a handful, not creating a sustainable economic base for a society. It’s trash.
A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work by Timothy B. Lee & Sean Trott (Ars Technica)
“Google’s word vectors had another intriguing property: You could “reason” about words using vector arithmetic. For example, Google researchers took the vector for “biggest,” subtracted “big,” and added “small.” The word closest to the resulting vector was “smallest.””
“For example, the most powerful version of GPT-3 uses word vectors with 12,288 dimensions—that is, each word is represented by a list of 12,288 numbers. That’s 20 times larger than Google’s 2013 word2vec scheme.”
“Each word makes a checklist (called a query vector) describing the characteristics of words it is looking for. Each word also makes a checklist (called a key vector) describing its own characteristics. The network compares each key vector to each query vector (by computing a dot product ) to find the words that are the best match. Once it finds a match, it transfers information from the word that produced the key vector to the word that produced the query vector.”
“[…] the feed-forward layer examines only one word at a time. So when it classifies the sequence “the original NBC daytime version, archived” as related to television, it only has access to the vector for archived, not words like NBC or daytime. Presumably, the feed-forward layer can tell that “archived” is part of a television-related sequence because attention heads previously moved contextual information into the archived vector.”
“For the first 15 layers, the top guess was a seemingly random word. Between the 16th and 19th layer, the model started predicting that the next word would be Poland—not correct, but getting warmer. Then at the 20th layer, the top guess changed to Warsaw—the correct answer—and stayed that way in the last four layers. The Brown researchers found that the 20th feed-forward layer converted Poland to Warsaw by adding a vector that maps country vectors to their corresponding capitals. Adding the same vector to China produced Beijing.”
“When the Brown researchers disabled the feed-forward layer that converted Poland to Warsaw, the model no longer predicted Warsaw as the next word. But interestingly, if they then added the sentence “The capital of Poland is Warsaw” to the beginning of the prompt, then GPT-2 could answer the question again. This is probably because GPT-2 used attention heads to copy the name Warsaw from earlier in the prompt.”
“In digital neural networks, the role of the squirrels is played by an algorithm called backpropagation, which “walks backward” through the network, using calculus to estimate how much to change each weight parameter.”
“Completing this process—doing a forward pass with one example and then a backward pass to improve the network’s performance on that example—requires hundreds of billions of mathematical operations. And training a model as big as GPT-3 requires repeating the process across many, many examples. OpenAI estimates that it took more than 300 billion trillion floating point calculations to train GPT-3—that’s months of work for dozens of high-end computer chips.”
“It’s worth noting that researchers don’t all agree that these results indicate evidence of theory of mind; for example, small changes to the false-belief task led to much worse performance by GPT-3 , and GPT-3 exhibits more variable performance across other tasks measuring theory of mind. As one of us (Sean) has written, it could be that successful performance is attributable to confounds in the task—a kind of “clever Hans” effect, only in language models rather than horses.”
“At the moment, we don’t have any real insight into how LLMs accomplish feats like this. Some people argue that such examples demonstrate that the models are starting to truly understand the meanings of the words in their training set. Others insist that language models are “stochastic parrots” that merely repeat increasingly complex word sequences without truly understanding them.”
“If a language model can consistently get the right answer for a particular type of question, and if researchers are confident that they have controlled for confounds (e.g., ensuring that the language model was not exposed to those questions during training), then that is an interesting and important result, whether or not the model understands language in exactly the same sense that people do.”
Interesting in the sense that it can be put to use as a tool—i.e., interesting for capitalism. It’s in a way similar to biological or pharmaceutical effects that we use without knowing the mechanism.
Representing Heterogeneous Data by Bob Nystrom (Stuff with Stuff)
“Code that wants to work with weapons generally uses the Weapon supertype. The two subtypes for melee and ranged weapons each store the fields they need. If you want to go all the way to an object-oriented style, these fields would be private and then you’d have abstract methods in Weapon that are overridden in the subclasses to use them. It’s a complex, heavyweight approach, but a powerful and flexible one.”
Yes, but it’s also extendible without having to change existing code or the core structures. That can be advantageous, but of course decreases the predictability of the system because you can’t statically analyze it.
Published by marco on 5. Aug 2023 03:21:52 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The summer surge of COVID infections is accelerating across the United States by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)
“As shown by the CDC graph below, in April 2023 levels of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater began to rise steadily, an indirect indicator of community-level spread. Over the month of June, there was a more than 60 percent rise in wastewater levels of the virus, with more than 1,300 sites participating in providing the public health agency with data.”
“The agency uses wastewater tracking to inure the population against the threat posed by COVID or any other pathogen, while maintaining the farce that the national public health edifice is functioning to protect the population, although hardly anyone believes that any more.”
“As Dr. Marc Sala of Northwestern University Medicine recently said, “You will have many patients come to us still in good numbers to fill up our clinic with maybe the third, fourth, fifth infection and now having finally developed post-COVID syndrome … with symptoms that are enough to be disabling to their lives as previously known.” Although these patients are filling up hospitals and ICUs as in the past, the long-term implications are even worse. Long COVID is already the third leading cause of neurological disorders.”
“A reporter found that a COVID-positive delegation from Israel had recently visited the White House, and asked whether Biden had been potentially exposed. Jean-Pierre replied, “As you know we have testing protocols whenever someone meets with the president. So, I can tell you that anyone that meets with the president gets tested. I do. We all do.””
Why Capitalism Is Leaving the US in Search of Profit by Richard Wolff (Scheer Post)
“So long as capitalism’s movements stayed mostly within the U.S., the alarms raised by its abandoned victims remained regional, not becoming a national issue yet. Over recent decades, however, many capitalists have moved production facilities and investments outside the U.S., relocating them to other countries, especially to China. Ongoing controversies and alarms surround this capitalist exodus. Even the celebrated hi-tech sectors, arguably U.S. capitalism’s only remaining robust center, have invested heavily elsewhere.”
“They in turn promoted and funded ideological claims that capitalism’s abandonment of the U.S. was actually a great gain for U.S. society as a whole. Those claims, categorized under the headings of “neoliberalism” and “globalization” served neatly to hide or obscure one key fact: higher profits mainly for the richest few was the chief goal and the result of capitalists abandoning the U.S.”
“As U.S. job opportunities stopped rising, so did wages. Since globalization and automation boosted corporate profits and stock markets while wages stagnated, capitalism’s old centers exhibited extreme widening of income and wealth gaps. Deepening social divisions followed and culminated in capitalism’s crisis now.”
“For the U.S. empire that arose out of World War II, China and its BRICS allies represent its first serious, sustained economic challenge. The official U.S. reaction to these changes so far has been a mix of resentment, provocation, and denial. Those are neither solutions to the crisis nor successful adjustments to a changed reality.”
“Because profits still flow back to the old centers, those there gathering the profits delude their countries and themselves into thinking all is well in and for global capitalism. Because those profits sharply aggravate economic inequalities, social crises there deepen.”
“Is it acceptable for a small group, employers, exclusively and unaccountably to make most key workplace decisions (what, where, and how to produce and what to do with the profits)? That is clearly undemocratic. Employees in capitalism’s new centers already question the system; some have begun to challenge and move against”
US credit downgrade: another sign of a deepening crisis by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“The Fitch downgrade was from AAA rating to AA+, bringing it into line with a similar downgrade by Standard & Poor’s in 2011 following a conflict in Congress during the Obama administration over the lifting of the debt ceiling.
“Fitch complained that “there has been only limited progress in tackling medium-term challenges related to rising Social Security and Medicare costs due to an aging population.”
“In other words, while bank bailouts and military spending may have caused the debt crisis, Wall Street’s solution is to impoverish and immiserate the vast majority of the population.”
“US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the decision was “arbitrary and based on outdated data.”
““Fitch’s decision does not change what Americans, investors, and people all around the world already know: that Treasury securities remain the world’s pre-eminent safe and liquid asset, and that the American economy is fundamentally strong,” she said.
“If that really were the case, then the top financial official in the government would not have to say so.”
Matt Levine has mentioned this rule many times: as soon as you have to say you’re obviously a good investment, you’re not.
White House Says Bidenomics So Successful The Average American Has Twice As Many Jobs As They Had Two Years Ago (Babylon Bee)
““Thanks to the President’s wonderful economic policies, most Americans have at least two jobs,” said gay, black Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to the raucous applause of hand-picked journalists in the room. “Our economists ran the numbers and found that’s twice as many jobs as people used to have just a few years ago. So many jobs! Success!”
““Wow! Thanks, President Biden!” said local barista/hardware store clerk/landscaper/drive-thru worker/Uber driver Brett Barnes. “I’m just swimming in jobs right now! Just a couple more jobs and I’ll be able to afford bread, eggs, AND milk! Bidenomics works!””
Russia Decides Not To Renew Grain Deal: Some Context by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)
“Putin gave two reasons for suspending the deal after having “extended this so-called deal many times.” The first is that, though it was Russia that suspended the deal, it was the West that broke it. “As for the conditions under which we agreed to ensure the safe export of Ukrainian grain, yes, there were clauses in this agreement with the United Nations, according to which Russian interests had to be taken into account as well,” Putin said. “Not a single clause related to what is in the interests of the Russian Federation has been fulfilled.””
“Putin made a similar pledge in his answer to the journalist. One option, he said, is “not first the extension and then the honoring of promises, but first the honoring of promises and then our participation. What do I mean? We can suspend our participation in this deal, and if everybody once again says that all the promises made to us will be fulfilled, let them fulfill them – and we will immediately join this deal. Again.””
“George Bebe of the Quincy Institute has said that “Russia’s withdrawal from the deal is part of classic negotiating behavior, after its repeated demands went unaddressed by partners to the deal.””
JFC. It’s literally how deals work, FFS. Pay rent for housing. No rent? No housing. No housing? No rent. This is not rocket-science that needs to be handed down from on high by the Quincy Institute.
“Putin has frequently pointed out that “this whole deal was presented under the pretext of ensuring the interests of African countries” whose food security was threatened. Instead, from Russia’s perspective, the deal has boosted the economy of Russia’s enemy by allowing Ukraine to export grain and boosted the economy of those supporting Russia’s enemy by allowing western Europe to import that grain while helping African countries barely at all.”
This is a factual assessment of the situation, and hardly surprising. NATO, the EU, and the U.S. never tire of accusing Russia of every duplicity, while being far more duplicitous themselves, justifying their own, real duplicity by pointing out Russia’s fictitious one.
“He has claimed at various times that “about 45 percent of the total volume of grain exported from Ukraine went to European countries, and only three percent went to Africa.“”
“Russia, though, has sent many tonnes of grain to Africa: 11.5 million tonnes in 2022 and 10 million in the first half of 2023, according to Putin. And, in November 2022, Russia agreed to send grain to some African countries for free. Putin has repeatedly promised that, were the deal not to be extended, “Russia will be ready to supply the same amount that was delivered under the deal, from Russia to the African countries in great need, at no expense.” After the decision not to extend the deal, Putin wrote an article in the African media repeating that promise directly to the people of Africa: “I want to give assurances that our country is capable of replacing the Ukrainian grain both on a commercial and free-of-charge basis. . . . Notwithstanding the sanctions, Russia will continue its energetic efforts to provide supplies of grain, food products, fertilizers and other goods to Africa.””
No, The Truth About Biden Is Not Democratic by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Never mind what was in the mail: How the mail got where it got was the determinant. Atop this was the implicit assertion, yet more insidious, that the truth has some kind of brand. If the Russians have anything to do with it, whatever was true could not be true. The obverse also held, supposedly: If the Democrats say something is so, it is so.”
“The perversion of public institutions in broad daylight requires that our thoughts are managed such that we cannot see or understand these perversions as they occur.”
“We already knew V–P Biden intervened back in 2016, when Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor general, was at the front end of an official investigation into corruption at Burisma. Hunter was by then taking home $50,000 a month—the Post says $83,000—for sitting on Burisma’s board and doing nothing other than being his father’s son. Joe stepped in to get Shokin fired—alleging, perversely, that Shokin had to go because he was corrupt. This was in 2016, when Joe was recorded in that infamous video bragging, at the Council on Foreign Relations no less, that he threatened to withhold $5 billion in U.S. aid if Shokin wasn’t removed. “And, son of a bitch, they fired him,” was Joe’s punchline on that occasion.”
“Zlochevsky, the corrupt jillionaire who founded Burisma Holdings in 2002, indeed wanted Shokin off his back and out of his books. He went to Hunter with this project, whereupon Hunter did his job and went to Pop. Whereupon they both let it be known—both, got it?—that getting the job done would cost Zlochevsky $10 million, $5 million apiece for Biden père et fils. Biden arrived in Kyiv in March 2016, a month after Shokin got his warrants to go after Zlochevsky’s real estate. Shokin was dismissed on March 29.”
“Given what is at stake at this point—and what is at stake is the legitimacy of the American government—this kind of reporting is beyond irresponsible. To call it “Soviet” in character is in no way hyperbolic: It reeks of the thought control op Robbie Mook and his deplorable boss attempted seven years ago. It is exactly the same: Tar those bearing the truth with one or another sort of discrediting epithet—the Russians did it, the Republicans are doing it—and shuffle the truth under the rug or otherwise out of the public’s sight.”
“Miranda Devine, a divinely dogged New York post columnist, published a commentary after the paper’s piece on the revelations in FD–1023 headlined, “The Joe Biden bribe allegations need a special counsel, now.” I’ll say. “The story of the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling scheme, which netted tens of millions of dollars from Ukraine, China, Russia and beyond, is scandal enough,” Devine writes. “But the coverup—from Big Tech’s censorship of the Post’s reporting from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, and CIA lies that it was Russian disinformation, to the burying of this FD–1023—is bigger than Watergate.””
Idiots, No Longer Useful by Boris Kagarlitsky (Russian Dissent)
“Strelkov and his Angry Patriots began to pose a threat not at the moment when they began to criticize the course of hostilities, but when they began to take seriously the rhetoric they’d been fed over the past year and a half.”
“Officials at all different levels are well aware that it is necessary to leave the territory of Ukraine, the sooner the better. How this will be done, and most importantly by whom, we do not yet know. Putin clearly does not fit into these change of plans, but after the rebellion of Yevgeny Prigozhin, it is no secret to anyone that his reign is nearing its end.”
“The[ The Angry Patriots] have become much more dangerous than the left and liberal opposition, not because they offer some kind of alternative, or because they want or can change something, but because they stubbornly cling to the old agenda at the very moment when the ruling elites themselves are preparing to change this agenda.”
The Afghanistan Lithium Great Game by Binoy Kampmark (Scheer Post)
“In a fit of wounded pride, the United States has, in turn, sought to strangulate and asphyxiate the Taliban regime, citing human rights and security concerns. The Taliban’s Interim Foreign Minister, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, makes the not unreasonable point that “the ongoing crisis is the imposition of sanctions and banking restrictions by the United States.””
“In recent months, Afghanistan has again piqued the interest of eager strategists drawing their salaries from the US government and assorted thinktanks. Such interest has nothing at all to do with the good citizenry of the Taliban-controlled state, be it the welfare of women or purported links to terrorist groups. They concern the presence of lithium reserves in the Chapa Dara district of Kunar province and, almost inevitably, a fear that the People’s Republic of China might muscle in.”
“Foreign Policy columnist Lynne O’Donnell also points an accusing finger at China for yet again “mucking about in Afghanistan’s mineral-rich playground.” Doing so is evidently the prerogative of Western states. She mocks the suggestion that this move in the energy transition stakes might “mean that billions of dollars will be pouring into securing a prosperous future for one of the world’s poorest countries. It probably won’t.” Remarkably, China is reproached for treating the country as a political, rather than economic matter.”
“The object of the Biden administration has been to corner the rare minerals market and prize out China, best seen in efforts to classify Australia as a “domestic source” for US defence interests. Doing so would give unqualified access to the island continent’s own impressive lithium reserves. (53% of the world’s lithium supply is mined in Australia.)”
The United States Refuses to Play by the World’s Rules by Rebecca Gordon (Scheer Post)
“[…] you wonder how the United States had access to a chunk of land on an island nation with which it had the frostiest of relations, including decades of economic sanctions, here’s the story: in 1903, long before Cuba’s 1959 revolution, its government had granted the United States “coaling” rights at Guantánamo, meaning that the U.S. Navy could establish a base there to refuel its ships. The agreement remained in force in 2002, as it does today.)”
“The United States, Ní Aoláin insists, must provide rehabilitative care for the men it has broken. I have my doubts, however, about the curative powers of any treatment administered by Americans, even civilian psychologists. After all, two of them personally designed and implemented the CIA’s torture program.”
“[…] the United States deployed cluster bombs in its wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan. (In the previous century, it dropped 270 million of them in Laos alone while fighting the Vietnam War.) Ironically — one might even say, hypocritically — the U.S. joined 146 other countries in condemning Syrian and Russian use of the same weapons in the Syrian civil war. Indeed, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that if Russia were using them in Ukraine (as, in fact, it is ), that would constitute a “war crime.””
Sure, but Jen Psaki is a bag of hot garbage. She’s willing to say anything. It’s not surprising that this was the message, but it’s also not surprising that she was the messenger.
“[…] it’s not that the United States doesn’t have enough conventional artillery shells to resupply Ukraine. The problem is that sending them there would leave this country unprepared to fight two simultaneous (and hypothetical) major wars as envisioned in what the Pentagon likes to think of as its readiness doctrine.”
“Of course, the “best country in the world” wasn’t the only nation involved in creating the horrors I’ve been describing. And the ordinary people who live in this country are not to blame for them. Still, as beneficiaries of this nation’s bounty — its beauty, its aspirations, its profoundly injured but still breathing democracy — we are, as the philosopher Iris Marion Young insisted, responsible for them. It will take organized, collective political action, but there is still time to bring our outlaw country back into what indeed should be a united community of nations confronting the looming horrors on this planet.”
UPS Teamsters Have a Right to Strike. President Biden Should Honor It. by Matt Leichenger (Jacobin)
“Our hard work during the pandemic earned UPS historic profits. In 2022, the company saw an operating profit of $13.1 billion, up from $6.5 billion in 2019. Teamsters were the ones moving the packages, yet we were never rewarded for the company’s success. Instead, UPS is expected to give its shareholders over $8 billion in dividends and stock buybacks in 2023 alone, and CEO Carol Tomé took home an average of $23.3 million per year in 2021 and 2022 . Meanwhile, we just saw our working conditions worsen.”
“[…] while this contract fight is largely about getting fairly compensated for our work, it is also about winning greater protections against other issues that undermine the strength of our union, our personal safety in extreme weather, and our dignity and respect on the job.”
“When UPS and corporate America urge Biden to take away our right to strike, they are urging Biden to prevent a broader democratic movement of working-class Americans standing up to authoritarianism and corporate greed. If we want to maintain and expand our democracy and reverse decades of grotesque, increasing wealth inequality in this country, honoring workers’ right to strike is an absolute necessity.”
Rein in Sports-Betting Profiteers by Joe Mayall (Jacobin)
“[…] the Supreme Court’s Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association decision struck down the national ban on sports gambling, opening the floodgates for what is now an inescapable industry. In the five years since Governor Murphy’s inaugural bets (both of which lost), sports betting has transformed from a once-illicit vice into a popular hobby. It’s now legal in thirty-three states, sports books sponsor every major sporting event, and sixty-four million Americans , myself included, have collectively wagered over $220 billion on everything from the Super Bowl to South Korean table tennis.”
“In this regard, legalization has been an unequivocal good, as it cuts off revenue from nefarious organizations and protects bettors from exploitation and physical harm. (As predacious as legal books can be, DraftKings won’t send a goon to break your legs for unpaid debts.)”
They won’t break your legs, but they instead have the legal right to garnish your wages, using debt slavery instead of physical harm. Sports gambling is an addiction made nearly infinitely more convenient by putting it on your smartphone.
“[…] sports betting has been a net positive for state budgets. In 2022, American states received over $1 billion dollars in taxes from sports wagering, which could fund education, health care, and infrastructure.”
A regressive tax to fill coffers depleted by neoliberal policies.
“As socialists, we should seek to end ineffective government constraints, letting informed adults decide for themselves which activities they wish to pursue.”
Sure. Of course. Impossible to disagree with. But only for a reasonable definition of the word “informed”. Most people are “informed” that sports-betting will enhance their income. They do not know what disposable income means nor are they aware that they don’t actually have any.
“With few federal regulations in place and almost no public education, many bettors were caught up in the predatory marketing, gamification, and hype of sports betting, losing thousands overnight. While researching this article, I asked bettors to share their experiences. Most responses involved people having fun with their friends online, working together to find good bets. Two respondents even claimed that they’d used winnings to buy houses. But for every few positive experiences, there was a heartbreaker.”
“Some states ban the use of the “risk-free” term, such as Ohio, which fined three prominent books for using it earlier this year, and Massachusetts, which investigated the Barstool Sportsbook for using the term “can’t lose” in its marketing. (Barstool’s lawyers defended the term, claiming that it was no different than the saying “buffalo wings.”)”
“You must be twenty-one to gamble in Louisiana, and yet Louisiana State University partnered with Caesars’ sports book to send marketing promotions to the school emails of underage students. Sports books are also known to limit, or even ban, bettors who win, while encouraging those who lose to keep playing.”
AfD – Keine Alternative für Deutschland by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“So hat die AfD bis heute kein rentenpolitisches Konzept, das den Bürgern ein Rentenniveau bieten würde, von dem man in Würde und ohne sozioökonomische Ängste leben könnte. Kritik an der Teilprivatisierung der Altersvorsorge sucht man im AfD-Programm ebenso vergebens wie Kritik an anderen Privatisierungen der Daseinsvorsorge.”
“Die Steuern sollen [Laut AfD] nicht nur gesenkt werden, man will ferner eine spätere Erhöhung der Steuern sogar über das Grundgesetz verbieten. Die Staatverschuldung soll dabei „planmäßig getilgt“ und dem „Sozialstaat Grenzen gesetzt“ werden. Das ist Neoliberalismus in Reinkultur.”
If Everybody’s Going to Join NATO, Then Why Have the United Nations? by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)
“A look at the latest military spending figures shows, to the contrary, that NATO countries, and countries closely allied to NATO, account for nearly three-quarters of the total annual global expenditure on weapons. Many of these countries possess state-of-the-art weapons systems, which are qualitatively more destructive than those held by the militaries of most non-NATO countries. Over the past quarter century, NATO has used its military might to destroy several states, such as Afghanistan (2001) and Libya (2011), shattering societies with the raw muscle of its aggressive alliance, and end the status of Yugoslavia (1999) as a unified state. It is difficult, given this record, to sustain the view that NATO is a ‘defensive alliance’.”
“Nehru’s focus on colonialism might seem anachronistic now, but in fact, NATO has become an instrument to blunt the global majority’s desire for sovereignty and dignity, two key anti-colonial concepts. Any popular project that exerts these two concepts finds itself at the end of a NATO weapons system.”
“The Vilnius Summit Communiqué underlined Ukraine’s path into NATO and sharpened NATO’s self-defined universalism. The communiqué declares, for instance, that China challenges ‘our interests, security, and values’, with the word ‘our’ claiming to represent not only NATO countries but the entire international order. Slowly, NATO is positioning itself as a substitute for the UN, suggesting that it – and not the actual international community – is the arbiter and guardian of the world’s ‘interests, security, and values’. This view is contested by the vast majority of the world’s peoples, seven billion of whom do not even reside in NATO’s member countries (whose total population is less than one billion). Those billions wonder why it is that NATO wants to supplant the United Nations.”
No, they don’t ask why. They know why. They disagree vehemently with the notion that NATO will supplant the U.N. In the hearts and minds of the rulers of the member countries of the U.S. empire, it already has—for decades now.
Zoomers: Last Chance for the American Dream? by Thom Hartmann (CounterPunch)
“Republican politicians in both Arizona and Florida have instituted statewide voucher programs which, history shows, gut and ghettoize public schools for all but the upper middle class and wealthy children whose parents have the money to match the vouchers with tuition payments. Why would they do this? And why are they exclusively attacking public school teachers and public librarians?”
“[…] why would Republicans fight tooth and nail to filibuster passage of the PRO Act (legislation that gives workers the right to easily form or join a union) that had already passed the House? If a corporation is organized money, why do they believe it’s wrong for workers to have a small bit of power by organizing themselves and protecting their labor?”
“[…] what’s driving this nationwide, across-the-board effort to strip everybody except people of great wealth from what little power and assets they still have?”
“As the President’s Council of Economic Advisors noted in their 2000 Annual Report: “To appreciate how far we have come, it is instructive to look back on what American life was like in 1900. At the turn of the century, fewer than 10 percent of homes had electricity, and fewer than 2 percent of people had telephones. An automobile was a luxury that only the very wealthy could afford. “Many women still sewed their own clothes and gave birth at home. Because chlorination had not yet been introduced and water filtration was rare, typhoid fever, spread by contaminated water, was a common affliction. One in 10 children died in infancy. Average life expectancy in the United States was a mere 47 years. “Fewer than 14 percent of Americans graduated from high school. … Widowhood was far more common than divorce. The average household had close to five members, and a fifth of all households had seven or more. … “Average income per capita, in 1999 dollars, was about $4,200. … The typical workweek in manufacturing was about 50 hours, 20 percent longer than the average today.””
“When Ronald Reagan was elected president and sworn into office on January 20, 1981, about two-thirds of Americans were solidly in the middle class. And it was explicitly his job to cut that middle class down to size to save America from herself. First, he went after the main source of working-class wealth, which coincidentally funded the Democratic Party: unions. Roughly one in three American workers was a union member, and two-thirds of Americans had the equivalent of a union job because unions set local wage and benefit floors.”
“Reagan thus kicked off a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the homes and savings accounts of the middle class to the top one percent, a theft that continues to this day. So far just this year, America’s billionaires have added an additional $852 billion to their personal wealth, and much of that was extracted from America’s working class people.”
“George W. Bush initiated a private takeover of Medicare with the Medicare “Advantage” scam that has now trapped half of America’s retired people into plans where insurance companies routinely deny coverage, tests, treatments, and reimbursements. (Real Medicare can’t do that by law and doesn’t put itself between you and your doctor.)”
“Boomers in their 30s owned 21.3 of the nation’s wealth; Millennials in their 30s today own 4.6% of the nation’s wealth.”
“Republicans are still at it because the project of taking back 80 years of wealth from the middle class on behalf of America’s billionaires has taken on a life of its own. It’s not, as I asked at the open of this article, that they’re evil (although some clearly are): it’s that Reaganism and then Trump’s subsequent embrace of naked fascism unleashed forces that they can’t control. Kevin McCarthy is essentially helpless, even if he was inclined to do what’s best for the country (and, of course, he isn’t). Since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Bellotti and Citizens United — and thus legalized the handouts they themselves have been receiving from billionaires for decades — it’s going to take major and radical action to stop and then reverse the Reagan Revolution.”
“Rightwing billionaires are now pouring literally billions of often untraceable dollars into every election cycle to keep the gravy train on track, and that dark money goes to the GOP at a 9:1 ratio.”
If it’s untraceable, how do you know the ratio?
“Biden has tried and done a lot: united Republican opposition, however, along with sellouts like Sinema and Manchin, have defeated many of his efforts.”
Here, Hartmann shows his ignorance. Biden is just a vicious and in the tank for the eradication of the middle class. He always has been. Don’t be a fool.
The Democrats have not expressed any interest in reversing the Reagan revolution in the last 30 years. They are just much a driving force of wealth-transfer to corporations as the Republicans—they are perhaps even better at it by now.
Punch The Empire In The Fucking Face by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“Speech is violence and cluster bombs are peace. Homelessness and war are normal and opposing nuclear armageddon is treason. You’re a serious person if you believe our brains are being scrambled by Russian ray guns and a kooky conspiracy theorist if you’re skeptical about UFOs.”
“That’s how the two mainstream parties work together to knock the public on their ass. The “left” party sets them up, and then comes the crushing knockout blow. Democrats fight off all efforts to move the US to the left when they’re in power, then Republicans come in and move it even further to the right. Democrats refuse to codify Roe V Wade, and Republicans come in to kill it. Democrats “reluctantly” give Bush war powers, he uses it to invade Iraq. Democrats inch up the brinkmanship against China, Republicans do whatever horrifying thing they’re going to do when they take power.”
“That’s how you have to be about the two parties; stop thinking about them as two separate, competing entities and start looking at them as two weapons on the same enemy. Stop staring at one hand and start watching your actual opponent. Start watching their movements, start making some reads, and start figuring out ways to put some leather in that fucker’s face.”
The True Symbol Of The United States Is The Pentagon by Caitlin Johnstone
“Americans are taught from childhood to take special pride in their nation’s “freedom” and “democracy” (of which they have neither), when what actually makes their country stand out against the crowd is its role as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is held together by nonstop military aggression.”
A Helpful Suggestion by Caitlin Johnstone
“Once the US has made it clear that Russia and China have an open path to establish an extensive military presence in Latin America using the same means the US has used to establish its military presence in eastern Europe and eastern Asia, opponents of Washington’s foreign policy will soon lose the ability to accuse the US empire of flagrant hypocrisy.”
US Secretary of State Blinken denounces Assange, indicates extradition going ahead by Oscar Grenfell (WSWS)
“No US administration or official, Democrat or Republican, has declared that the war crimes exposed by WikiLeaks should not have happened. Nor have they resulted in prosecutions. The objection is not that these atrocities occurred but that the world’s population were informed.”
“The venue of Blinken’s statements again underscores this relationship between war and the assault on Assange. He was in Australia for annual ministerial talks. This year’s iteration further transformed Australia into a hub for these war plans, including through an expanded missile program, a secret space warfare deal and increasing “rotations” of US forces through the country.”
Preparing for war with China, US provides $345 million in arms to Taiwan by Peter Symonds (WSWS)
“As cited by the Financial Times, a Chinese embassy spokesman in Washington, Liu Pengyu, stated: “China is firmly opposed to US’s military ties with and arms sales to Taiwan.” He warned the US to “stop selling arms to Taiwan, stop creating new factors that could lead to tensions in the Taiwan Strait and stop posing risks to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.””
“Far from “defending democracy,” US imperialism is recklessly setting in motion an international conflict aimed at destabilising and subordinating Russia and China, which it regards as the chief threats to its global hegemony.”
““Regardless of what your beliefs are, our society is a Judeo-Christian society, and we have a moral compass. Not everybody does,” Moore said. “And there are those that are willing to go for the ends regardless of what means have to be employed.”
“The future of Al in war depends on “who plays by the rules of warfare and who doesn’t. There are societies that have a very different foundation than ours,” he said, without naming any specific countries.”
The Washington Post is a press-release organ for the Pentagon. Completely unironically citing this general that “there are those willing to go for […]” even though we all know that the U.S. is definitely the one who has acted the least-morally every single time. The countries with those vaunted “Juedo-Christian” values can be counted on to alienate anyone who’s not in their own population and will enslave, colonize, or annihilate them without mercy—while, in fact, justifying the indiscriminate slaughter as the only moral solution to the evil those peoples were inflicting on the world. A neat trick. “[W]ithout naming any specific countries” refers, obviously, to whomever happens to be the official enemies: probably Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea.
UK jury finds Kevin Spacey not guilty of all charges by Paul Mitchell (WSWS)
““We have consistently pointed to the undemocratic character of the #MeToo campaign as an extension of upper-middle-class Democratic Party identity politics and its hostility to the elementary constitutional rights such as the presumption of innocence. “In the official narrative, there is an almost complete absence of understanding and elementary sympathy. The accused is a criminal, a monster, who must be destroyed.””
The US Press, Spooks & the Church Committee by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“There were other indicators that failure was on the way. The committee had spent too much time on assassination plots and agency exotica to give the question of press complicity the attention it warranted. Church, who for a time nursed dreams of a run for the presidency, did not want his name on an investigation that would make a faux-patriotic agency protecting national security look as objectionable as it was.”
“The Church Committee left various marks on the record. Some relationships between Langley and the media were broken off as the committee shut up shop. Things were not so openly and incautiously corrupt as they had been pre–Church. This was also the beginning of a long decline in mainstream media’s credibility, which, to be honest, I consider a healthy thing.”
“The agency’s immunity from all oversight is now inviolable. What Capitol Hill committee now would dare to hold hearings such as those that gave the Year of Intelligence its name? Langley’s ties to the press are a closed book. Wikipedia, the alternative encyclopedia with its own objectionable relations with intelligence, as we speak carries this sentence in its entry on the Cold War programs: “By the time the Church Committee Report was completed, all C.I.A. contacts with accredited journalists had been dropped.” This is patently, demonstrably false.”
Campaign 2024, Officially Chaos by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“This race is turning into a parodic repeat of 2016, the difference being the shock waves that rippled across Washington on Election Day that year are already here, with all conceivable counter-measures already deployed. Instead of starting up a Russia investigation leaders hope will end in indictment, this time the guy is already indicted many times over, and voters have already signaled they’ll be unfazed by conviction.
“Democrats meanwhile are repeating the process of cooling turnout by blasting their own protest candidate, and instead of an alert-if-off-putting Hillary Clinton on the ticket, the standard-bearer is a half-sentient, influence-peddling version of Donovan’s Brain, with no one behind him but Kamala Harris — who just got asked by a trying-to-be-friendly reporter at ABC if “race and gender” were a cause of her own historically low approval rating. Absent a big switch, our future is either Donald Trump, who by next year will be in more restraints than Hannibal Lecter on the tarmac, or this DNC dog’s breakfast. Other countries are surely already laughing. It’s getting harder to resist joining them.”
Hail to the Jailbird President by Ted Rall
“A June 21st Quinnipiac poll found that 62% of voters believe that the Department of Justice has been weaponized against Trump and that the federal charges against him for mishandling classified documents, for which he faces more than 400 years in prison, are politically motivated. Biden and the Democratic Party probably don’t even admit it to themselves—but that includes a lot of Democratic voters. 28% of Democrats think Trump’s legal troubles are more about politics than his wrongdoing.
“And here’s a major warning sign: 65% of independents agree.”
“ Swarming Trump with civil lawsuits, state and federal indictments has fed into Trump’s longstanding narrative that this heir to a multimillion-dollar real-estate empire who attended an Ivy League school and hobnobbed with starlets and presidents is actually a victim of a cabal of privileged coconspirators, and not merely a sad-sack punching bag but a noble warrior fighting more for everyday people than himself. Joe and Jane Sixpack don’t stow military plans in their bathroom or pay hush money to porn stars or rip off aspiring college kids or try to overturn elections, yet they empathize more with the perpetrator of these deeds than the authority figures attempting to hold him to account. Truly, it’s a political miracle.
“What these prosecutors don’t seem to know (and probably shouldn’t care) is that we, the people, hate their guts much more than we look down on the crass self-dealing and personal corruption of someone like Trump or, for that matter, Biden.”
Record-shattering heat signals a global climate change tipping point by Niles Niemuth (WSWS)
“The record global heat has been driven by temperatures which, despite remaining frigid, are up to 40 degrees Celsius above seasonal averages in Antarctica with sea ice forming at a rate slower than ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter months.”
““To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Dr. Edward Doddridge, a physical oceanographer, told ABC News in Australia about the current developments in Antarctica. “For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it’s five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years.””
“A study published this month in Nature Medicine found that 61,672 people died across Europe in the three hottest months of 2022 due to heat-related illnesses. With temperatures reaching 45 degrees C (113 F) this month in Italy and Greece, a similar, or worse, death toll is expected.”
“Farmworkers are 20 times more likely to die of heat exposure than other workers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”
“The US federal government is expected to spend an average of $80 billion per year between 2022 and 2027 on climate technology and clean energy, while it will spend more than $876 billion on its military in 2022 alone, one of the largest polluters on the planet.”
“In effect the approach of capitalist governments to climate change is the same “let it rip” strategy taken to the pandemic. Millions, potentially billions, of deaths are the price to be paid by the working class and impoverished masses as long as the ruling elite can live in wealth and comfort thanks to the latest scientific advances.”
“The ongoing climate catastrophe and its immediate devastation being felt around the world makes clear that there will be no national solution to climate change. Appeals to governments and corporations are a dead end. The root of the problem is not humanity itself, as the most misanthropic environmentalists argue, but capitalism. The working class, united internationally must take action to transform social relations and establish socialism in order to confront the global challenge of climate change.”
The Eco Collapse We Were Warned About Has Begun by José Seoane (CounterPunch)
“On Thursday, July 6, the global air temperature (measured at two meters above the ground) reached 17.23 degrees Celsius for the first time in the history of the last centuries, 1.68 degrees Celsius higher than preindustrial values; last June was already the warmest month in history. Meanwhile, temperatures on the continents, particularly in the North, also broke records: 40 degrees Celsius in Siberia, 50 degrees Celsius in Mexico, the warmest June in England in the historical series that began in 1884.”
“[…] making tap water undrinkable for the inhabitants of the Montevideo metropolitan area, where 60 percent of the country’s population is concentrated. This is a drought that, if it continues, could leave this region of the country without drinking water, making it the first city in the world to suffer such a catastrophe.”
Oppenheimer: A drama about “the father of the atomic bomb” by J. Cooper, David Walsh (WSWS)
“That Oppenheimer has gained a wide audience speaks to a different sentiment in the general population, one deeply appalled by the possibility of the use of atomic bombs. One can criticize Nolan’s film from a number of points of view, but no objective observer could argue that it doesn’t encourage and deepen that mood. The commitment of an outstanding cast, including Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, Rami Malek and others, to what is clearly an anti-war project should be applauded.”
“Fully invested in the development of the bomb, Oppenheimer becomes an enthusiastic advocate for dropping it on Japan. In fact, he favors targeting a big city, for maximum casualties, in the vain hope that one bomb will end all wars forever. Under constant pressure to accelerate the development of the bomb, Oppenheimer and his associates select July 16, 1945 as the date for the first test, code-named Trinity, in part so that President Harry Truman can threaten Soviet leader Joseph Stalin with its power at the Potsdam conference scheduled to begin the following day. To a certain extent, the dramatization of the Trinity test becomes something of an unsatisfying substitute for depicting the actual bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its consequences. It is, however, a chilling scene.”
Bit of a cop-out there, I think. How do you think that killing a million people at once will be a good thing? You really have to be pretty far down the rabbit hole there. It’s like the argument I heard today for not wanting to win a billion dollars in the lottery: the government will get a ton in taxes, and you know how they waste money. It would be so personally insulting to see money go to the government that the person would rather not win anything at all. You can be against getting money for free, but being against it so that no-one else gets any? That’s a very strange argument, in the same way that “killing millions to save millions” is a strange moral argument.
“A disturbing percussion thrums below the surface until it becomes the stomping of hundreds of feet in celebration at Los Alamos of the incineration of tens of thousands of people in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Oppenheimer ascends a podium where he gives a halting speech, “The world will remember this day…” his voice trailing off. He callously remarks that whatever success the bomb may have had, “I’m sure the Japanese didn’t like it.” The crowd cheers.”
This is still very much who the U.S. populace is.
“Nolan paints the government interrogators as authoritarian and unprincipled demagogues. The entire process undermines the official presentation of America in the 1950s as the “leader of the free world.” On the contrary, the American state is depicted as infested with quasi- or would-be fascists.”
“This was demonstrated in part by the brutal, bloody manner through which the US and its allies prosecuted the war, in the horrific firebombing of Dresden, Germany and of Tokyo and other Japanese cities in 1945, which led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, as well of course as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“The historian Gabriel Jackson has aptly argued that “the use of the atom bomb showed that a psychologically very normal and democratically elected chief executive could use the weapon just as the Nazi dictator would have used it. In this way, the United States—for anyone concerned with moral distinctions in the different types of government—blurred the difference between fascism and democracy.””
“Long ago the revolutionary Marxists said that the alternative facing humanity was either socialism or a new barbarism, that capitalism threatens to go down in ruins and drag civilization with it. But in the light of what has been developed in this war and is projected for the future, I think we can say now that the alternative can be made even more precise: The alternative facing mankind is socialism or annihilation!…”
There Are Very Few Good Films About War. “20 Days in Mariupol” is an Exception by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“Those in war who do the fighting, endowed with a god-like power to kill, are a minority. The real face of war is the hardship and grief suffered by civilians caught up in the maw of destruction. Their stories are hard to hear. Their fate is hard to see, which is why images from war are always sanitized. If we truly saw war, it would be so shocking, so disturbing, so disgusting, war would be hard to wage. The best accounts of war, for these reasons, eschew scenes of combat.”
What Would a Functioning System of Equal Opportunity Look Like for the Losers? by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“[…] equality is at best epiphenomenal of what we really want − everybody to be healthy and happy and to enjoy a certain minimal threshold of material comfort, free from unfair impositions on their efforts to achieve in various ways, without any group having undue influence over politics and government by dint of their resources, with everyone able to meet on truly level playing fields in a courtroom or at the ballot box.”
“I constantly have to make this point when discussing education, a field where failure is seen as inherently a matter of injustice and yet one where there will always be a distribution of performance − a distribution with a bottom as well as a top. What if someone faces a completely equal playing field and, through the full expression of their talent and hard work, ends up totally ill-equipped for the job market?”
“But the person who gets all of the required opportunity and still struggles his way to a life of destitution is just as much a story of equal opportunity as that one.”
“[…] provided the story of equal opportunity is always told in terms of the dedicated and smart person who rises above hardscrabble beginnings, it remains emotionally satisfying. But the person who gets all of the required opportunity and still struggles his way to a life of destitution is just as much a story of equal opportunity as that one.”
“Talent, however defined, has always looked like just another fickle gift of nature, to me, and thus using it to hand out scarce goods is no more just than hereditary nobility. If someone suffers from complications during their birth such that they have a severe cognitive disability that prevents them from flourishing, few people would see their impoverishment as a just example of equal opportunity. But if someone is born with a genetic makeup that predisposes them to do very poorly in school and meritocracy, how is that any different?”
Postmodernism Is Good, Actually by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“[…] one finds oneself in a queer state of suspension throughout the novel, never quite willing to throw it all in for the art-and-beauty team, and always feeling, uneasily, that J R himself, and plausibly J R itself, is among the greatest artistic creations one could imagine, and that any system as soul-crushing as the one that produced him/it does not so much kill the soul as channel it into deliriously perverse pursuits, of which both J R and J R , both American capitalism and great American art of the late twentieth century, are the strange perverted fruits.”
“[…] this tendency that Lindsay and Rufo are bemoaning with their inarticulate moos, that has taken over our elite cultural institutions in the course of the past decade, is really just a further development of the same sinister forces of neoliberal capitalism that J R was stoking, and J R was lampooning, a half-century ago. Is there any more vivid expression of the reduction of lived reality to two-dimensional catchphrases than the one conveyed in a sentence beginning with, “Speaking as an X …”?”
“For a thick-descriptionist, the point is not to “take at face value” what an informant from a given culture says about that culture, but it is nonetheless to seek to decipher that culture by starting from its expressed values, from the way it generates its own significances.”
“It’s the duty of the intellectual to take everyone in these settings seriously, to value them as human beings, and at the same time to do our best to figure out what is really going on that has brought them all together to talk and act in precisely this way. That duty is betrayed whenever a would-be intellectual begins to take any of these settings for granted.”
“It’s good whenever people come along and complicate things, for the baseline assumptions with which they are dissatisfied are in fact always baseless. Culture is always a web of individually untenable beliefs, which generally work just fine until anyone stops to notice and interrogate them.”
“[…] the current gender discourse in elite Anglophone progressive settings is by no means the final definitive discovery of the true way of thinking about gender identity, but only a contextually and historically contingent, and almost certainly ephemeral, response to a rapidly shifting material, economic, and technological landscape, and it is selected from among infinitely many possible ways of conceptualizing our embodied existence and the differences between different forms of embodiment— that this very idea, I was saying, was a “cancellable” transgression against prevailing norms. What can I say? Up yours?”
“[…] overwhelmingly in our present era we remain within a framework that takes the ultimate question of who we are to be intimately connected to the cluster of attributes surrounding both our sexual orientation and our gender expression — more intimately, it often seems, than, say, the God we pray to, the class habitus that shaped us, the sort of animals we dream of at night, or the way we feel when we look at the moon. But again, it didn’t have to be this way at all — our current preoccupations are entirely contingent.”
“What often happens, in this general condition of abnegation of duty on the part of intellectuals, is that they end up producing work that has the external appearance of “getting to the bottom of things”, of analyzing concepts and figuring out what’s really going on, while in fact only helping to buttress the normative commitments of the community to which they already belong and whose presumptions they share on a priori grounds. In this respect much moral and political philosophy, in particular, is, as Brian Leiter nicely puts it, really just the production of handbooks of bourgeois etiquette.”
“I was recently struck by the argument of a piece co-written by two prominent philosophers on the pragmatics and ethics of gender ascription. I was struck, as I often am, by the total anthropological illiteracy of philosophers, which systematically transforms our culturally specific preoccupations into universal problems for humanity as such.”
“If he had landed in such a village, and heard someone insisting on the exclusivity of biological parenthood, he would have asked: Why ? What does this reveal about the village as a whole? What does the world look like to this villager? The authors of this article don’t care what the world looks like to him; they are simply here to tell you that he is wrong, and they know better.”
“if I were a disembodied culture-independent intellect who had no greater familiarity with twenty-first-century Americans than with seventeenth-century Hurons, or with the culture that distinguishes between metrical height and social height, I would see absolutely no reason to put “is tall” in a different category of predicates than “is a man”. It’s all social! And because it’s all social, there is simply no point in trying to free up certain predicates, but not others, from their anchorage in reality on the grounds that, unlike with these others, reality is irrelevant.”
“The problem is not that there simply is no reality to anchor language, or that language is entirely free-floating and indifferent to reality, but only that as culture-bound humans we will continue to find infinite variations from one group to another as to which concepts are in urgent need of anchorage, and which by contrast we may use to indulge our inventivity. So I’m just not going to play along and talk as if invention is discovery (though curiously many European languages run these two notions together),”
“What those normies are saying is very close to what you would find in, say, eighteenth-century Yakutia, or in pre-contact Huronia: just sort of the default binarism of human societies in almost all times and places (see Rodney Needham’s excellent Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification (also 1973), if you don’t believe me). Give them a break.”
“[…] this has to do with the near total disappearance from the radars of the progressive left of any interest in what might be called the avant-garde. The left is almost entirely absorbed in critiquing and bickering about the most inane industrial productions of popular mass entertainment, just like everybody else. One way of seeing this is, again, as the culmination of the process that J R was stoking fifty years ago — the forces that J R was lampooning won, decisively and permanently, and nobody even thinks anymore, to listen, but really listen, for the beauty that can still squeak through the tubes of even the most spiritually impoverishing new technologies.”
Some of us do, huddled in the darkness, muttering our adulation and shouting our appreciation for the few good things that still illuminate the corners of human culture.
“Is this in fact “how it’s done”? It is, perhaps, if you think of your artistic work as something that can be crowdsourced. It is not, if you see your role as an artist as one that involves saying what you mean, and only what you mean, in the first place. Have you not felt out the full connotative range of the words you’re using, but must wait until the artwork that includes them is already out there in the world to be judged, and to be modified as needed in order to fit with the ever-mutating cluster of normative demands among the people who supposedly “follow” you, which is to say in order to fit yourself to the fickle demands of the marketplace?”
“I might watch Barbie on an airplane at some point, and I might even come away with the conviction that Greta Gerwig has achieved something at least modestly akin to what Gaddis was after: a demonstration of the massive challenge of bringing something beautiful into the world under such shitty conditions of ubiquitous product placement, algorithms, financial maximizing, in short the ideology incarnated by young J R.”
“I will not see Oppenheimer , as I can tell just from the previews that it is yet another of these middle-brow vehicles of the sort I first noticed with the deplorable 2002 film The Hours, that tells us exactly what to feel at each second by the use of heavy-handed visual cues and over-the-top theme music. I can just tell it’s stupid, and like the abominably dull Joker (2019) succeeds mostly by giving middle-brow viewers multiple opportunities to congratulate themselves on their own knowingness.”
“[…] just don’t think these are the sort of creations intellectuals should be paying attention to.”
Justin is absolutely wrong about Joker, and he’s never seen it, which is even more shameful since he’s expressing such a strong condemnation of it. He thinks it’s a superhero movie. I suppose it’s not easy to remain consistently self-critical, to be constantly aware of subsiding into calling viewer “middle-brow” without reason, and for critiquing or lauding movies for features you have personally not been able to confirm. You can not like a movie, of course. That’s anyone’s prerogative. But calling a movie like Joker middle-brow just because you think it’s a superhero (or supervillain) movie—that’s just lazy.
Similarly, lauding Barbie—sight unseen—is lazy, assuming that, because Greta Gerwig directed it, that it will somehow rise above the crass capitalism that almost certainly guided its creation. But he says above that he’s willing to watch Barbie, with a script written by Mattel, just because it was made by auteur Gerwig, which seems shockingly lazy for Justin. But his taste in film has always quite hit or miss.
A while back, I wasn’t using my laptop very much, but I was using it occasionally. MacOS on my M1 MacBook Pro allowed me to use the battery at my own pace, giving me over 200 hours between charges.
The Need for Trustworthy AI by Bruce Schneier
“[…] you don’t know how the AIs are configured: how they’ve been trained, what information they’ve been given, and what instructions they’ve been commanded to follow. For example, researchers uncovered the secret rules that govern the Microsoft Bing chatbot’s behavior. They’re largely benign but can change at any time.
“Many of these AIs are created and trained at enormous expense by some of the largest tech monopolies. They’re being offered to people to use free of charge, or at very low cost. These companies will need to monetize them somehow. And, as with the rest of the internet, that somehow is likely to include surveillance and manipulation.”
“Imagine asking your chatbot to plan your next vacation. Did it choose a particular airline or hotel chain or restaurant because it was the best for you or because its maker got a kickback from the businesses? As with paid results in Google search, newsfeed ads on Facebook and paid placements on Amazon queries, these paid influences are likely to get more surreptitious over time.
“If you’re asking your chatbot for political information, are the results skewed by the politics of the corporation that owns the chatbot? Or the candidate who paid it the most money? Or even the views of the demographic of the people whose data was used in training the model? Is your AI agent secretly a double agent? Right now, there is no way to know.”
Cult by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“I’ve got a complete brain scan and you’re just naturally low on desire, while high on willpower compassion, and verbal ability.
“People will try to imitate your sense of contented wholeness but always fall short, never realizing that the ultimate fount of all your inner peace was a quirk of genetics operating in a stochastic environment!
“Hoping vainly for what you gained unearned, they will become your disciples and message-bearers.”
Conscious 5 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“Human: “Is it conscious” is shorthand for “can I treat it like trash all the time, maybe eat it, then go play video games and not feel shame.”
“God: I’ve been running leaven for 13 billion years and nobody has shown up and now I know why”
I Was Told There Would Be a Handbasket by Eugene Volokh (Reason)
Just a funny line to say when things are getting bad.
Just because you smarty in one thing no make you smarty in other thing. by Massive_Pressure_516 (Reddit)
A Short List of People Who Need Killing by Seaton (Simple Justice)
“DUMBASSES WHO THINK IT’S OKAY TO FILL OUT PASSPORT APPLICATIONS IN LINE WHILE OTHERS ARE WAITING ON APPOINTMENTS
“Dear vacuous blonde tart with the laugh that is somewhere between a hiccup and a donkey’s bray: I hate you with the intensity of a thousand suns for your idiotic decision to fill out a passport application in line at the post office while I stand there with my kids watching you act a fool. You realize, I’m sure, that these fucking applications are online, right? And if you wanted to be a good person, you could’ve done what I did and fill out the application for your spawn before you got to the post office?
“But you couldn’t just be a good person, could you? No, you had to do this in line because you thought it was such a great idea to make everyone else wait on you while you soaked in the attention you wrongly thought you were entitled to. You made it all about yourself and the demonic brats you brought with you.
“And then to make matters worse, you didn’t even fill out the goddamn application right the first time. You were told on review you fundamentally fucked up every page, and your response was to let that godawful laugh escape the buck-toothed sewer you call a mouth and say “Oh, silly me, what was I thinking?” WHILE YOU FILL OUT THE APPLICATION WRONG A SECOND TIME.
“Your life must end for the sake of the rest of our species. Maybe your spawn should go too, so we can eliminate your chance of contaminating the gene pool with more of your stupid.
“It’s the best thing for all of us.”
Published by marco on 4. Aug 2023 15:21:43 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
At the very least, I’ve learned that Viktor Maslov is the Soviet Pioneer of the 4-4-2 Formation & the Inventor of Pressing. The season starts off with a round of introducing everyone and establishing how horrible Rupert is, but also how everyone has to spend every waking minute responding to his every provocation.
Most of the people in this show are reactive: they don’t actually have a plan for themselves, so their day is consumed with reacting to how other people think of them. Coach Beard is perhaps the exception here.
Ted Lasso has crippling anxiety, for which he’s still in therapy, and which is exacerbated by his wife having started dated their erstwhile marriage counselor. This is considered an affront to everyone in the show but, honestly, if they’ve moved on, what does it matter who she dates now? The heart wants what the heart wants. Does Ted get a veto on anyone who gets to associate with his son when Ted’s the one who’s moved to a different continent? Grow up. Honestly.
The best part of this season is that ZlatanZava has joined Richmond for the season. Jamie Tartt is jealous and Roy offers to train him so that he can play as well as Zava. Zava carries the team to several victories, leading up to a match against West Ham, with Nate at the helm. They lose it. They lose all of their games without Zava, who has retired from football for his own mysterious reasons.
The team travels to Amsterdam for a friendly match, which they lose horribly, 5–0. Coach gives them the night off because they’re already in a rut. Roy makes Jamie go out for training with him, but Jamie knows the city like the back of his hand and gets the upper hand. Roy doesn’t know how to ride a bike, so Jamie teaches him, so they can get to the windmills that Roy also doesn’t believe in. Beard drops acid, with Ted not doing it, until he’s finally bored into it—long after Beard has left. Will the ballboy and Higgins go to a jazz club. Rebecca doesn’t know what a bike lane is, so she gets run off a bridge into the water and into a handsome Dutch man’s boat. Colin sneaks off to a gay bar, with Trent following him. Trent reveals to him that he’s gay too, and that’s OK. The rest of the crew fights between going to a sex show and traveling two hours to a private party. They’ve agreed to go to the party, but then get mired down in food. Coach Ted ends up at Museumnacht, tripping balls.
The show focuses more on the private lives of the players—and continues, of course, to focus on the inner life of the titular character, despite him being unbelievably boring and utterly unconvincing in his supposed misery due to self-confidence-deficit-induced panic attacks. Obisanye is apparently also a figure to be pitied because he doesn’t get to play for the Nigerian national team (don’t worry; he will by the end of the season) while his extremely successful Nigerian restaurant is trashed, but his wonderful team-ful of colleagues jump in to repair everything with skills that they somehow also acquired while being superstar footballers. You see: the menial class doesn’t do anything that requires any skill that their betters couldn’t pick up in a few minutes.
The next couple of shows present dilemmas like what to do with a billion-dollar buyout deal for the team (Rebecca) or Keeley having to manage to build her business without dozens of millions in VC financing (spoiler: she does, because she’s an f’ing brilliant businesswoman, obviously, despite her clear mental deficits).
Jamie’s story is perhaps more interesting than the others—his development was kind of interesting and fun to watch, but he’d kind of finished it a season ago. Now, we’re not legitimately concerned that he’s going to fall off the wagon and “go back to his old ways” again. No tension, no risk; just fan service.
Holy shit, there was absolutely no need for episode to 12 to even exist, to say nothing of being 82 minutes long. It’s just one long chunk of extremely self-indulgent fan-service in which absolutely everything works out for everyone, and no-one suffers in any way whatsoever, and everyone has lots of money. The end.
If moronic fans manage to force Apple to resurrect this show, then I will not be the first to watch a fourth season. The third was already enough of a going-through-the-motions, member-berries orgy of 80-minute shows. It was similar to the finale of Stranger Things, where it got so self-indulgent, I could no longer figure out why they were even doing it. There is less art to this, and more cold calculation of profit and loss. Obviously, that’s the only way that our world is going to work, apparently, but I’m not going to applaud it, or pretend that it’s art.
In this season, Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) has been resurrected in the late 18th century, as a butler to George, Prince of Wales (Hugh Laurie). Baldrick (Tony Robinson) is back as his filthy manservant. Cyril is no longer with them, but Tim McInnerny shows up as the Scarlet Pimpernel for one episode.
The first episode introduces Pitt the Younger (Simon Osborne), who Blackadder is immediately annoyed by, and whom he needles incessantly.
The second episode, which is Samuel Johnson (Robbie Coltrane) and his famous dictionary, was quite clever. Blackadder is, of course, not impressed with Johnson, and takes to inventing gloriously convincing and fabulously convoluted words in front of him, to convince him that he’s not quite finished with his dictionary yet. That scene was laugh-out-loud funny.
“I hope you will not object if I also offer the doctor my most enthusiastic contrafribularities. […] I’m anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctious, to have caused you such pericombobulation. […] I shall return interphrastically.”
In episode three, Blackadder is at odds with the Scarlet Pimpernel (Tim McInnerny), who’s been smuggling French nobility out from under the revolution.
While imprisoned and scheming to get free with Baldrick, he says,
“Am I jumping the gun, Baldrick, or are the words, ‘I have a cunning plan,’ marching with ill-deserved confidence in the direction of this conversation? […] Forgive me if I don’t jump up and down with glee. Your record in this department is not exactly 100%.”
“I want to be young and wild, and then I want to be middle-aged and rich, and then I want to be old and annoy people by pretending that I’m deaf.”
In the next episode, the prince is attacked at a play by a bomb-throwing rebel against the industrialization without compensation led by the nobility. The Prince Regent (Hugh Laurie)—who doesn’t understand that plays aren’t real, no matter how many times it’s explained to him—stirred by Blackadder’s explanation of the plight of the poor and why they might be rebelling, wants elocution lessons from actors in order to be able to deliver the speech himself, to calm the proles.
When the actors appear at the castle, Blackadder begins tormenting the them by dropping the word “Macbeth” at every possible opportunity (every mention of which they must superstitiously dispel with an incantation and a savage, reciprocal nose-tweaking).
The rest of the episodes were OK, but not nearly as good. The acting is very broad and the dialogue laid on quite thick. The most annoying was the 5th episode, which saw the return of the same actress who played the Queen in the previous season, this time reincarnated as the daughter of a penniless industrialist, who’d briefly captured the prince’s attention before he’d discovered her financial status.
In the sixth and final episode, Stephen Fry returns as the Duke of Wellington, who wishes to duel with the Prince, whom Blackadder switches places with in order to protect him. Wellington beats the shit out of the Prince, whom he thinks is the servant, defeating the purpose of switching roles to save his own skin.
This is the season from which I’d seen the most clips. Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) has been resurrected as Captain Blackadder, serving in a trench in WWI under General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett (Stephen Fry) and his unctuous secretary Captain Kevin Darling (Tim McInnerny). Serving under him, as always, are Private S Baldrick (Tony Robinson), who reprises his role as a lower-class buffoon and Lieutenant The Honourable George Colthurst St. Barleigh (Hugh Laurie), who reprises his as an upper-class one.
Atkinson makes a lot of analogies that fall quite flat, but he has a few drily delivered zingers that land pretty well.
“General Melchik: When you return, Darling will pump you thoroughly in the debriefing room.
“Blackadder: Not while I have any strength remaining, he won’t, sir.”
And,
“Darling: Y0u’d better find the German spy or I’ll make it very hard for you!
Blackadder: Please, Darling. There are ladies present.”
The season ends, as all of the others do, with the death of the entire cast as they charge “go over” the trench and out into no-man’s land, on Melchett’s orders. They all die immediately, as so many hundreds of thousands actually did.
George plays straight man, mindlessly regurgitating the mindset of the elites that are both his compatriots-in-class, but also the ones who sent him to the front—something he doesn’t mind at all because he’s very, very gung-ho to “go to Berlin”, as he puts it.
“George: The war started because of the vile Hun and his villainous empire-building.
“Edmund: George, the British Empire at present covers a quarter of the globe, while the German Empire consists of a small sausage factory in Tanganyika. I hardly think that we can be entirely absolved of blame on the imperialistic front.”
Blackadder lays out the situation as it really was and—as he clearly alludes—it also was in the early 90s, when this show was made. It also happens to still be how the situation is: a global competition among elites, bent on carving up colonies for themselves, pretending that they’re interested in preventing war, when they are happy to use it to keep any upstarts, or potential usurpers of even a little bit of their power, in line.
“Edmund: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other’s deterrent. That way there could never be a war.
“Baldrick: But this is a sort of a war, isn’t it, sir?
“Edmund: Yes, that’s right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan.
“George: What was that, sir?
“Edmund: It was bollocks.”
When asked why he no longer enjoyed war as much as he had 15 years ago, he says that it’s because it is much easier to die, now that the foe has a level of technological firepower commensurate or exceeding his own. This is all, of course, exceedingly sarcastic and cutting.
“Edmund: Well, you see, George, I did like it, back in the old days when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns — even spears made us think twice. The kind of people we liked to fight were two feet tall and armed with dry grass.
“[…]
“No, when I joined up, I never imagined anything as awful as this war. I’d had fifteen years of military experience, perfecting the art of ordering a pink gin and saying “Do you do it doggy-doggy?” in Swahili, and then suddenly four-and-a-half million heavily armed Germans hoved into view. That was a shock, I can tell you.”
When George expresses the hope that the war has ended without his having had to die, like all of his old school-chums, Blackadder replies,
“Edmund: (loading his revolver) I’m afraid not. The guns have stopped because we’re about to attack. Not even our generals are mad enough to shell their own men. They think it’s far more sporting to let the Germans do it.”
And, when Baldrick says that he has a cunning plan for the final time ever (this was one of his tropes), Blackadder answers,
“Captain Blackadder: Well, I’m afraid it’s too late. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was better than my plan to get out of here by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman round here?”
There were a lot of flat jokes and bad jokes over the four seasons. However, all in all, I’m quite glad that I watched it all, in order. it grew better and slightly cleverer over time and it was quite a grand experiment, being set in four very different time periods, always with the same actors, and always killing the entire cast at the end of each season.
Four friends in Switzerland are part of an amateur curling team. They all have financial problems of one kind or another. One of them dies in a car accident, under somewhat suspicious circumstances. It seems that he may have killed himself. When his friends go through his worldly effects, they discover that he’d put together a detailed plan for robbing the bank where he’d worked. The friends consider trying to pull it off, but one of them jumps ship, while the other two soldier on. The other guy rejoins the group when he realizes how bad his money problems are.
During the sneaky planning, one guy’s wife throws him out because she thinks he’s cheating on her. The other guy is quite a Lothario, and is now sleeping with a very young woman, from whom he’s trying the access code to the bank. At the same time, he’s having an affair with the bank owner’s wife, who catches him in flagrante delicto with the other girl.
It was OK, but pretty bog-standard and didn’t contain any real surprises.
I watched it in Swiss German.
The last time I watched this movie, I gave it a 4/10. It didn’t get any better when I watched (well, mostly listened to) it in French. The cast is kind of promising—Hannibal (Liam Neeson), Face (Bradley Cooper), Murdock (Sharlto Copley), B.A. Baracus (Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson)—but the execution is so poor. Charissa Sosa (Jessica Biel) is Face’s old flame, highly placed in some government agency. Lynch (Patrick Wilson) chews a lot of scenery being the bad guy, who finally gets fooled by the A-Team’s amazing plan to get him to confess to all of his crimes. Jon Hamm shows up at the end in a cameo, taking Lynch’s place.
I don’t know what to tell you. I miss George Peppard, Dirk Benedict, Dwight Schultz, and Mr. T. It’s no surprise that this didn’t turn into a franchise.
See my review from 2019. This is really becoming one of my favorite movies.
I watched in German this time.
Max (Mel Gibson) stumbles on an encampment called Bartertown, run by Aunty Entity (Tina Turner). He becomes her champion and defeats her enemy, Master-blaster (Angelo Rossitto as Master; Paul Larsson as Blaster), who controls the energy production for the compound. They farm pig shit for methane.
He is betrayed by Aunty and cast out into the desert. He falls to the ground on a dune but is found by a member of a jungle tribe that lives conveniently close to the desert. They nurse Max back to health, thinking that he’s a “Captain Walker”, some sort of figure in their pantheon of Gods. It is a colony of children with the only adult being the slender, attractive, young woman who found him. They are a post-apocalyptic cult, keeping images of the ancient and lost world alive in their mythos.
They want Max to take them home. But he’s not their Captain Walker. He tries to prove it by throwing his hat away, but a wind comes up, floating things into the air. The children interpret this as a sign and leave their home, storming into the desert, on a mission. They lead Max to the crashed/landed plane of which they spoke. They want him to fly them. He walks away.
Back at their encampment, they watch him. He is lost in thought. The children work their way through their mythos, assimilating the new information, finding a new way forward. They decide to leave their oasis; Max wants them to stay. He threatens them, but his rescuer—the young woman—is defiant. He knocks her out and brings her back before she can lead her crew to certain death in either the desert or Bartertown.
It doesn’t help. A bunch of them take off in the night. Max and a small crew give chase the next morning, eventually finding them and rescuing them from a sinkhole in the sand. They are deep in the desert and have no noticeable supplies, especially not nearly enough water.
Still, they manage to stumble on Bartertown, where they must take refuge in order to survive. Max leads these innocents into the bowels of the town through a sewer pipe. They find Master and rescue him from his prison cell amonst the pigs. No-one seems to notice the smell. They collaborate to begin to overthrow Aunty’s men, who’ve taken over the underworld.
They manage it, more or less. They steal a train out of Bartertown and the who jungle village, including Max and Master, take off across the desert. Aunty and her crew give pursuit. They eventually catch with them and cause havoc. This part seems to be a precursor to the incredible chase scenes from Mad Max: Fury Road. The villagers manage to ditch Aunty’s part of the train, but they still have her head henchman attached to the train—until they don’t. They drop him off of a bridge.
They bring the train to a stop before they run into a roadblock set up by Jedediah Jr. (Adam Cockburn). They follow him down to Jedediah’s (Bruce Spence) lair, where they make him help them flee in their plane. Aunty’s crew shows up soon after, giving chase to the plane. This totally looks like Fury Road now, with Tina Turner ripping across the desert in her dune buggy.
They need more space to take off in the plane. Max takes a dune buggy and heads off to get it for them. He crashes his truck headlong into the oncoming horde, allowing his friends to take off in their plane. He lies in the desert, just outside the circle of Bartertown’s wrecked fleet of dune buggies. Aunty approaches him, “Well, ain’t we a pair, raggedy man. Goodbye soldier! [laughs]”
The jungle crew lands in what is left of Sydney. Max wanders the desert.
I watched it in German.
Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) returns to California from Detroit, this time to get revenge against a counterfeiting operation that had had his boss killed. He ends up teamed up with Sergeant Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Detective Jon Flint (Hector Elizondo). He ends up suspecting the proprietors of Wonder World. He locks horns with the unctuous owner of Wonder World—who also exercises considerable control over both LA media and police. With the help of a lovely employee at the park (Theresa Randle), Axel manages to prove that they’re counterfeiting and gets revenge. The end.
The effects and acting were pretty terrible. This barely rose to the level of a television show of the era, to say nothing of a full-fledged film. The fight scenes were laughable; the shooting scenes were kind of bizarre—sometimes no-one was hurt, but magically; other times, people were shot, but then they shook off their seemingly horrific gunshot wounds with a joke.
This is honestly one of the best science/science-fiction movies that has ever been made. It’s based on the book of the same name by Carl Sagan. It follows the life of Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), whose father bestows upon her a fascination with radio signals of all kinds. This transforms into a career in the SETI project, which takes her to Puerto Rico and the Arecibo radio telescope. Here she meets preacher Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), who challenges her lack of ability to interpret what she does through a spiritual lens, to perhaps imbue it with the appropriate wonder, even if that means that her approach ends up being less-than-scientific.
Presidential Science Advisor David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt) thinks searching for alien signals is all a bunch of nonsense, so he torpedoes the project. Ellie goes on a tour to drum up funding and finally finds enigmatic billionaire S. R. Hadden (John Hurt), who sees a spark in Ellie and how is willing to fun her when the government won’t. She is set up at the VLA (Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico) when she hears the first actual signal.
The U.S. military descends immediately and tries to claim everything for itself, despite not having done any of the research. This neanderthal approach is personified in agent Michael Kitz (James Woods) who plays without much nuance, but sadly probably quite accurately. The project is put under tight security, but Hadden and Arroway are allowed to continue to participate. Together, they discover 63,000 pages of data—and Hadden provides the key to decrypting it.
The data is for a machine, of unknown function. The military is terrified of building it. They proceed to built it anyway, at Cape Canaveral. Ellie is supposed to go in it, but Drumlin usurps her position at the head of the line. He is killed when the machine fails after a religious zealot bombs it as it is spinning up into operation.
Hadden reveals to Arroway that his company had constructed a second machine, in Japan—and that she would be the first passenger. The machine spins up; her pod is dropped in; it disappears. We see her travel through several wormholes, finally ending up on a simulated beach, where an alien posing as her father appears to tell her of the next steps for humanity, should they be willing to do it.
She reawakens on Earth, with her pod having simply dropped through the machine—instead of having been gone for the 18 subjective hours that she felt. None of the vast array of devices recorded anything but noise. Although Ellie is dragged over the coals and publicly ridiculed, the U.S. government privately discusses that, although they only got static on all sensors, they did pick up 18 hours of it.
I watched it in Italian, with Italian subtitles.
Published by marco on 30. Jul 2023 04:15:26 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
New York Using AI to Detect Subway Fare Evasion by Bruce Schneier
“If we spent just one-tenth of the effort we spend prosecuting the poor on prosecuting the rich, it would be a very different world.”
Amen, brother.
Brickbat: Getting Slammed by Charles Oliver (Reason)
“Yuba City, California, officials have agreed to pay close to $20 million to settle a lawsuit by a man left paralyzed after being slammed to the ground by police after a traffic stop. According to his lawyer, Gregory Gross cannot walk or use his hands and now requires 24-hour-a-day nursing care. Police had stopped Gross for suspicion of drunk driving and causing a slow-speed collision in which no one was injured. Police bodycam video showed Gross, already in handcuffs, crying out in pain as an officer twisted his arms. It later showed officers slam him to the ground and hold him facedown on the ground. And it showed officers mocked him as he called out that he could not breathe and could not feel his legs.”
He had to sue them to get money. They should have apologized and offered to take care of him for the rest of his life.
Oppenheimer Reignites Debunked Arguments in Support of Nuking Whole Cities by Jon Reynolds (Antiwar.com)
“[…] genocidal Nazis found themselves noosed up and swinging by their necks, and such may have also been the case had the US lost the war after instantaneously vaporizing over a hundred thousand Japanese citizens with atomic weapons in the span of roughly 72 hours. Our “debates” around whether the bombs were necessary – let alone a war crime – are a sick privilege only afforded to us because we came out on top, with minimal credit for that victory owed to the use and development of nuclear weapons.”
“Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe during World War II, recalled a meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson, where, “I told him I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.””
“[…] the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, “based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.””
“Admiral William Halsey, who participated in the US offensive against the Japanese home islands in the final months of the war, publicly stated in 1946 that “the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment.” The Japanese, he noted, had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia “long before” the bomb was used.
“Yet, such peace efforts were ignored, and instead, Japan became a showcase for the United States to demonstrate its new power to the Russians: “If the bomb won the war, then the perception of US military power would be enhanced, US diplomatic influence in Asia and around the world would increase, and US security would be strengthened,” writes Ward Wilson over at Foreign Policy. “The $2 billion spent to build it would not have been wasted. If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced.””
“[…] there were no Japanese civilians featured in Oppenheimer, nor any footage of the bombings. Instead, the film lazily regurgitates the tired narrative that these cities had to be nuked to end the war, with director Christopher Nolan perhaps spending more time focusing on creating a nuclear explosion without CGI than effectively demonstrating why using these weapons was entirely unnecessary.”
“In the absence of refusing to wholeheartedly condemn the use of nuclear weapons, we are left with moral ambiguity around their use. Sure, these weapons might be terrible, but maybe, sometimes, it’s okay to use them. And if we can be propagandized into believing that using nuclear weapons against cities is sometimes necessary, the limits are truly endless on what else we can be propagandized into supporting.”
New York Times admits, then covers up, massive Ukraine casualties by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“Just one month ago, Times columnist Bret Stephens mused of the offensive bringing a “crushing and unmistakable defeat” for Russia, while Washington Post columnist Max Boot quoted General David Petraeus as stating that he expects “the Ukrainians to achieve significant breakthroughs and accomplish much more than most analysts are predicting.”
“It has produced something else: A nightmare on the scale of the First World War, in which whole units are wiped out, replaced with conscripts, then wiped out again, then told to assault well-defended trenches.”
Ordinary People by the Millions: interview with Tom Frank by Seymour Hersh (Scheer Post)
“Put both of those strategies in effect for fifty years with slight evolutionary changes (The New Democrats! The War on Christmas!), drag the nation through various disasters for working people and endless triumphs for the white-collar elite, and you get the politics we have today.”
“The Democrats now inhabit a world where they are moral superstars, people of incredibly exalted goodness. The media is aligned with them like we’ve never seen before, so are the most powerful knowledge industries, so is academia, so is the national security establishment. And so are, increasingly, the affluent and highly educated neighborhoods of this country. The Democrats are now frequently competitive with the Republicans in terms of fundraising, sometimes outraising and outspending the GOP, which is new and intoxicating for them.”
“Trump’s success was made possible by Democratic betrayal of those same voters. Every time some Democrat went before an audience of industrial workers and told them they had to get a college degree or learn to code, they brought this shit on. And while Biden has worked hard to reposition the Democrats with his middle-class-Joe persona, I doubt it will be enough.”
Biden a man of the people? Are you fucking kidding me? Do people actually believe that?
“[Clinton] remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on.”
“The first is the familiar professionalism model: Put a bunch of really smart people in charge and have them fix everything. That’s the model of the Obama administration, and Clinton before that, and McNamara’s Pentagon before that, and going back to the ’50s before that. This model has all sorts of problems. For example, it assumes that those really smart people have no interests or biases of their own and that they will always act on behalf of the public. This is wrong in theory, and I think we can now say with confidence that it has failed in reality as well.”
It’s the culture, though. It values only helping yourself and not helping others. Other people’s suffering is their own fault because the system, while not perfect, is very clearly good, if not the best we could hope for. That’s the story. The underlying tenets cannot support anything like the public good, not for long, and not seriously, because there are overriding priorities. Value and power must flow to those who already have it. Politics sucks because the people suck – they’ve been programmed to suck, from birth. Anyone who, by some miracle, doesn’t suck, is swimming upstream. Goodness is an unexpected side-effect of the drive to profit and elite power-consolidation.
“When faced with its great challenge in the global financial crisis—the moment of maximum opportunity for change—this strategy gave us no daring or imaginative reforms but plenty of bailouts and rescues for the well-connected friends of the professionals in charge. Its great aspiration was the status-quo-ante.”
“FDR did not care if his old classmates hated him.”
“[…] as newspapers shrivel and die all over America, the handful of surviving news organizations have become increasingly similar to one another, staffed with the same kind of well-graduated people who see everything the same way. Naturally enough, they read like propaganda.”
“[…] being an empire rubs a lot of Americans the wrong way, with our democratic instincts.”
They like the benefits, but don’t know where they come from. I was just telling some people here that if they want to be rid of empire, they may have to lose a few privileges—those that actually trickle all the way down to them—but it would better for everyone in the long run, not to mention being morally and ethically the correct thing to do.
“You will wait for years for our enlightened leadership class in DC to decide all on their own that imperialism is a bad idea, and I am sorry to say they are going to disappoint you every time. They like being an empire. They aren’t all that concerned about climate change either, except insofar as they can use it as a weapon against those damned Republicans.”
Yup. They just want to in charge, experience the level of comfort they feel they deserve, and don’t really believe it could end for them. And they absolutely don’t care about anyone else, not in any meaningful way, not if it means sacrificing anything that would impinge upon their lifestyle, their perceived security, now or into the future, and for their children, whom they will coddle into only being able to survive in a world of privilege, a world that will necessarily continue to incorporate empire, massive inequality, and massive injustice. I got mine, Jack. I deserve it. I’ve worked for it.
The World Needs a New Development Theory That Does Not Trap the Poor in Poverty by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)
“No development is possible these days, as most of the poorer nations are in the grip of a permanent debt crisis. That is why the Sustainable Development Report 2023 calls for a revision of the credit rating system, which paralyses the ability of countries to borrow money (and when they are able to borrow, it is at rates significantly higher than those given to richer countries). Furthermore, the report calls on the banking system to revise liquidity structures for poorer countries, ‘especially regarding sovereign debt, to forestall self-fulfilling banking and balance-of-payments crises’.”
“The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that ‘the public debt of developing countries, excluding China, reached $11.5 trillion in 2021’. That same year, developing countries paid $400 billion to service their debt – more than twice the amount of official development aid they received.”
“[…] the facts of the neocolonial structure of the world economy: developing countries, with rich holdings of resources, are unable to earn just prices for their exports, which means that they do not accumulate sufficient wealth to industrialise with their own population’s well-being in mind, nor can they finance the social goods required for their population.”
“[…] the report itself makes an interesting point: that the war in Ukraine has driven 23 million people into hunger, a number that pales in comparison to the other drivers of hunger—such as the impact of commercialized food markets and the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2011 report from World Development Movement called “Broken Markets: How Financial Market Regulation Can Help Prevent Another Global Food Crisis” showed that “financial speculators now dominate the [food] market, holding over 60 percent of some markets compared to 12 percent 15 years ago.””
“The UN’s Guterres went to the Security Council to announce , “We are doing everything possible to… ease the serious fertilizer market crunch that is already affecting farming in West Africa and elsewhere. If the fertilizer market is not stabilized, next year could bring a food supply crisis. Simply put, the world may run out of food.” On June 8, 2023, Ukrainian forces blew up a section of the Togliatti-Odesa pipeline in Kharkiv, increasing the tension over this dispute. Other than the Black Sea ports, Russia has no other safe way to export its ammonia-based fertilizers.”
Ukrainians are a bunch of slack-jawed hillbillies who continually attack Russian infrastructure whose loss in no way impacts Russian citizens but rather severely endangers citizens of other countries. It is clear that they don’t care at all if a bunch of Africans starve, counting on the fact that Russia will expend energy trying to prevent that eventuality.
Why the Ukraine Conflict Will Unravel NATO and Biden by Radhika Desai (Scheer Post)
“[…] the US ‘aided’ Europe during the two World Wars on a more or less commercial basis, vastly increasing its economic and financial clout at the expense of ‘allies’. Ruinously for them, it demanded repayment of its war loans after the First World War and, equally ruinously, demanded policy alignment after the Second.”
“With its aims unchanged even as its capacities declined, the US had to thwart such European impulses. It succeeded with its military intervention in Yugoslavia, chiefly by demonstrating the effectiveness of its superior air power and this success ensured that henceforth eastward EU expansion would normally be accompanied by NATO expansion. However, this was no stable arrangement.”
“Knowing that Europe, already reluctant to go to war with Russia, would be even more reluctant (for sound economic reasons) to join any anti-Chinese venture, Biden sought so resolutely and completely to sunder Europe from Russia and bind it to the US through the Ukraine war that it would have no choice but to go along with the US on China later.”
“Sanctions have generally been confined those that hurt the least, leaving so many western companies still operating in Russia one wonders what the fuss is all about. Weapons supplies have focused on those that are easiest to spare, often obsolete, leaving Ukraine with a ‘ Big Zoo of NATO equipment ’ that is hard to deploy or repair efficiently.”
“[…] despite the billions in military assistance, despite exhausting Western weapons stockpiles, despite discovering the quantitative and qualitative limits to Western weapons production capacities notwithstanding astronomically expensive military industrial complexes, despite ever more deadly weapons now including cluster bombs, despite reliance on neo-Nazi battalions, despite US and Ukrainian willingness to incur macabre levels of Ukrainian and mercenary casualties, it has been clear for some time that Ukraine is losing and has no prospect of winning.”
“[…] not only should Ukraine demonstrate progress on requisite reforms, but it should conclude a peace treaty with Russia before it can join NATO, a point repeated more than one by Jens Stoltenberg at Vilnius.”
“The US has only military might to offer allies. So, Biden’s impending military failure in Ukraine is likely to prove the effective undoing of NATO. If the US cannot ensure military victory, its utility to Europe can only be limited. And if Biden’s has failed in this intermediate Russian stage, it can hardly go onto its final, Chinese one.”
Anything Anything Anything To Avoid Debating R.F.K. Jr. by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“The Atlantic headlined its take-down of Kennedy, in unstated contempt, “The First MAGA Democrat.” What kind of people are they who find repellent the thought of dismantling the imperium and reviving this broken nation? Answer: People who think being liberal Democrats is more important than being Americans–or being, indeed, human.”
Real Change Is Impossible While Our World Is Shrouded In Secrecy by Caitlin Johnstone
““We can all write about our political issues, we can all push for particular things we believe in, we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say actually it’s all bankrupt,” Assange said. “And the reason it’s all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt and particular lines of political thought, is because actually we don’t know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions — how they operate in practice, these titanic organizations, how they behave inside, not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentations — until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis?”
“It’s an extremely important point if you think about it: how can we form theories about how our governments should be operating when we have no idea how they are currently operating? How can a doctor prescribe the correct treatment when he hasn’t yet made a diagnosis?”
We can know how we’d like it to work. We just can’t know where we are relative to that, so we can’t know how much work there is to do. An institution may look democratic, but by which measure? It’s like TDD: the implementation may be faking just enough for the test to pass.
“[…] how can people know what government policies to vote for if they can’t even clearly see those policies? How can people know what to vote for when everything about their understanding of the world is being actively distorted for the benefit of the powerful?”
“You will never see a collective uprising of the masses against their rulers when the dominant message being inserted into everyone’s mind is that everything is basically fine and if you don’t like the way things are you can change it by voting. If the veil of secrecy was ever ripped away from the US empire’s inner workings and everyone could see the full scale of its criminality in the plain light of day you’d probably have immediate open revolution in Washington. Which is precisely why that veil exists.”
“None of us individually have the power to rip the veil of secrecy away from the empire, but we do each individually have the ability to call out its lies where they can be seen and help wake people up to the fact that we’re being deceived and manipulated.”
U.S. Is Destroying the Last of Its Once-Vast Chemical Weapons Arsenal by Dave Philipps and John Ismay (NY Times)
“American armed forces are not known to have used lethal chemical weapons in battle since 1918, though during the Vietnam War they used herbicides like Agent Orange that were harmful to humans.”
How the fuck do you write a sentence like that? How in God’s name can an educated person say Agent Orange wasn’t a chemical weapon?
“Other powers have also destroyed their declared stockpiles: Britain in 2007, India in 2009, Russia in 2017 . But Pentagon officials caution that chemical weapons have not been eradicated entirely. A few nations never signed the treaty, and some that did, notably Russia, appear to have retained undeclared stocks.”
Gotta get in that evidence-free jab at Russia.
“According to the IHS Conflict Monitor, a London-based intelligence collection and analysis service, fighters from the Islamic State used chemical weapons at least 52 times in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2016.”
London-based: probably Mi6 or Bellingcat.
““Honestly, I never thought this day would come,” she said. “The military didn’t know if they could trust the people, and the people didn’t know if they could trust the military.””
The military couldn’t trust the people? WTF are you on about? Seriously, what does that even mean? There are two authors and who knows how many editors on this article and this is what they’ve landed on? Ridiculous.
Cornel West and the Campaign to End Political Apartheid by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“[…] and Democrats or participate in public debates. Third parties and independents are effectively disenfranchised, although 44 percent of the voting public identify as independent. This discrimination is euphemistically labeled “bipartisanship,” but the correct term, as Theresa Amato writes, is “political apartheid.””
“Amato was the national presidential campaign manager and in-house counsel for Ralph Nader in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Her book “Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny” is a sobering account of our political apartheid, based on her experience in the Nader campaigns”
“Those that attempt to challenge the stranglehold of the Republican and Democratic party duopoly are attacked as spoilers, as being naive or egomaniacs. These attacks have already begun against Cornel West, who is running for The Green Party nomination. The underlying assumption behind these attacks is that we have no right to support a candidate who champions our values and concerns.”
“The ruling corporate parties are acutely aware that they have little to offer a disillusioned public other than more wars, more austerity, more government control and intrusion into our lives, more tax breaks for Wall Street and corporations”
“The only electorally viable candidates outside the two-party structure are the very rich, such as Ross Perot or Michael Bloomberg, who, as Amato writes, are able to “buy their way around the barriers of ballot access restrictions and nonexistent media coverage.””
Roaming Charges: Fighting Our Real Enemies by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“87% of actors earn under $26,000, which is the cutoff under the current contract to qualify for health insurance. Meanwhile, Netflix is offering $900,000 for a single AI product manager.”
“Teenagers in the US are now 2.5 times more likely to die than in Western Europe and the gap is widening: guns, car crashes, suicides and fentanyl, seem to be the driving forces.”
“A Wall Street Journal story on the possible bankruptcy of a drug-maker called Mallinckrodt, which was the largest producer of opioid pills in the U.S. from 2006 to 2014, opens with this graph: “A group of hedge funds is devising a plan to cut off about $1 billion meant to help victims of opioid addiction, opening the way to keep some of the money for themselves.””
Damned skippy. Those addicts don’t deserve money. They’re addicts! Those hedge-fund managers, though. If they’re savvy enough to get money—notice that I didn’t write “earn”—legally, then they deserve it. They are the job-creators, innovators, and leading lights of our society.
“Joy Alonzo, a professor of pharmacology, gave routine lecture about the opioid crisis to students at the University of Texas Medical School. One of the students in the class, who is the daughter of Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, accused Alonzo of disparaging Texas Lt Gov Dan Patrick. Patrick’s chief of staff rang up the college administration to complain and within hours Alonzo was suspended from her job, with university Chancellor John Sharpe sending Patrick’s chief of staff a text saying: “Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week. jsharp” Alonzo, one of the country’s leading experts on opioid addiction, has taught in the system for more than a decade.”
“As part of its public school “turnaround” vision plan, the Houston Independent School District–the largest in Texas– is shutting down 28 school libraries and turning them into disciplinary centers.”
“As the Sicilian capital of Palermo is encircled by fire, large sections of the city of Catania (pop: 300,000) have gone 48-hours without water or electricity because the cables laid under the roads have melted in 46C heat.”
“People keep asking me, as they wipe the sweat from their brow: “Is this the new normal? Is this what summer’s going to be like from now on?” My answer is no. We won’t know what the new normal is until after we’ve stopped burning fossil fuels. And we’re still using more each year than the year before.”
”So Friggin’ Likely”: New Covid Documents Reveal Unparalleled Media Deception by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“It has to be reiterated that these documents still don’t prove that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute, or that American scientists were implicated in the episode. What the documents do show, however, is that both scientists and journalists abandoned their traditional mission to keep their minds open and consider all reasonable evidence without fear of political considerations, in favor of a new discipline that openly admitted political factors and sought a “single message” over free-ranging inquiry.”
In Rare Good News, IRS to Curtail Home Visits by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“After yesterday I wondered what the Democratic strategy is for people like me. I assume based on support levels for candidates like RFK, Jr. and Cornel West that a lot of us who grew up voting blue find themselves out of step with current leadership on issues like war and censorship, but it’s worse than that. The Democrats’ pitch now is VOTE FOR US OR YOU’RE TREASONOUS SCUM. They mean it in a literal sense, whether it’s “Russian asset” Tulsi Gabbard or “dangerous anti-Semitic and anti-Asian” RFK or even West, whose campaign manager Jill Stein was just called “almost certainly a Russian agent” by the party’s once-avuncular Clinton-era consigliere, James Carville. […]
“In my case, elected officials of one party essentially called me a dangerous money-grubbing FSB whore who should be jailed on television, while the other has now actually done something in response to the IRS showing up at my house. This kind of thing is getting harder to ignore. Thanks, really, to Chairman Jordan, who’s lived up to a friend’s recommendation as someone who’ll be an old-school stickler on certain issues, even if he disagrees with you on others. Why is that such a hard thing for some politicians to be?”
Elon Musk thought he was buying the whole internet by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“He wants his own WeChat because he wants to control all of human life both on Earth and beyond and he can’t conceive of other websites mattering more than Twitter because Twitter makes him feel good when he posts memes. As far as I’m concerned, Musk is simply doing the billionaire equivalent of when someone breathlessly explains insular Twitter drama at you irl like it’s the news. He thinks Twitter is real life and he’s willing to light as much of his fortune on fire as possible to literally force that to be true. Now matter how cringe it is.”
On the Road: The World’s Greatest Travel Destinatio by Bill Murray (3 Quarks Daily)
“What I have in mind for my ‘Africa’ is a place that affords a frontline opportunity for real experience of real life. Simple as that. In so much of Europe and much of Asia, what you’ve come to see and do is mediated by reservations, ticket punchers, tour guides, maîtres d’ and so on, putting the experiencer at some separation from the experience — the food in sought-after restaurants, the remnants of the Colosseum or Hadrian’s Wall or Stonehenge, cultural events like bullfights in Madrid, Japanese Sumo wrestling or the changing of various guards before various palaces from Beijing to Stockholm to the Kremlin. These are all surely there, but they are presented to you .”
Sure, but there are uncurated experiences available in Europe. You have to go into nature: cycling or hiking. Or simply avoid recommended experiences, trusting to serendipity and finding joy in that which you get rather than focusing on goals—and being disappointed when you fail to achieve everything you’ve been programmed to desire. This section compares the most touristic of what Europe has to offer with the what is most likely also a heavily mediated experience—this dude didn’t seriously stay in Africa without lots of support, but probably thinks he did it all on his own—but feels less like one because Africa has perhaps fewer amenities or doesn’t offer them on safari, or whatever. It’s honestly hard to tell.
“Comparing the grandeur of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, the delight of Thai cuisine or any other product of human endeavor with the experiences that make Africa the greatest travel destination is a category error. It’s not the same thing to equate, under the broad category of ‘travel destinations,’ the bas relief carvings at Angkor Wat to watching an elephant family bathing at the water hole.”
But why would you compare them at all? Isn’t it all subjective?
“[…] places without the intervention of such constructs as “the 25 must-try restaurants in Milan.””
But this is a straw-man argument, comparing the best of Africa with the worst social-media-mediated expectations of Europe. After writing that there’s no comparison, he goes on to compare anyway.
The Bear’s Second Season Is Yet Another Triumph by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)
“No doubt the most brilliant people who ever lived in the world were — and are — laboring people who never had a chance to pursue their ambitions or fulfill their talents. Or even discover what their ambitions and talents were, because they were too busy and too tired and too discouraged just trying to make a living.”
“These moments are parsed out so sparingly — they’re generally hogged by the rich, who get all the opportunities anyway and can’t appreciate them and face almost no consequences if they fail — that it’s a real tribute to The Bear, capturing the feeling of wonder and ecstasy as the world of possibilities opens up.”
Are translation apps making the learning of foreign languages obsolete? by John McWhorter (NY Times)
“In Europe, nine out of 10 students study a foreign language. In the United States, only one in five do. Between 1997 and 2008, the number of American middle schools offering foreign languages dropped from 75 percent to 58 percent. Between 2009 and 2013, one American college closed its foreign language program; between 2013 and 2017, 651 others did the same.
“At first glance, these statistics look like a tragedy. But I am starting to harbor the odd opinion that maybe they are not. What is changing my mind is technology.
“Before last Christmas, for example, I was introduced to ChatGPT by someone who had it write an editorial on a certain topic in my “style.” Intriguing enough. But then it was told to translate the editorial into Russian. It did so, instantly — and I have it on good authority that, while hardly artful, the Russian was quite serviceable.”
That’s exactly the arrogance I expect from an American. Americans have no respect for their own language, so they have no trouble at all considering a “serviceable” translation adequate for the vassals of their empire. I just cannot conceive of what life will be like for the poor empirical subjects who get to mediate their communications through shitty, inadequate apps—and they will be shitty and inadequate, but most people won’t notice—even though they can speak English.
I’m not sure what the play here is, though. Most people are barely capable of learning their native language—and most fail miserably at that. What’s the point of learning a second language even less well? Maybe knowing multiple languages is a form of snobbery. I would, of course, concur, but snobs never think that they’re snobs. I think that learning languages teaches you how to learn other things better, it reveals connections between cultures, it allows you to empathize better. I’m not at all surprised to hear that Americans are trying to automate it because the members of this culture—even the best exemplars of it—seems to be congenitally incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves. They buy the myth that they can all have as much of what they happen to like as much as they want and there is no need to consider any repercussions or consequences. If you can afford it, you can have it. I just had a conversation with very nice people who could only conceive of the concept of not using too much water in the shower if you, as in a camp shower, actually had to physically pay directly for it. Otherwise, if the boiler can pump it, it’s yours.
But I digress. Maybe with languages, it will be sufficient to have a machine write your intent and hope for the best. These people have long since given up on the notion of connecting with strangers, or even considering members of other countries to be human, so they’re not giving up much. Right now, the machines mangle everything and will lead to more miscommunication, but when I see how Americans deal with their own culture in English, they’re just exporting what they do to each other to the rest of the world. Perhaps it’s up to the rest of the world to resist it better.
We can’t afford to be climate doomers by Rebecca Solnit (Guardian)
“Stanford engineering professor and renewable energy expert Mark Z Jacobson tweeted the other day, “Given that scientists who study 100% renewable energy systems are unanimous that it can be done why do we hear daily on twitter and everywhere else by those who don’t study such systems that it can’t be done?””
This means nothing. The fact that it is technically possible has been true for decades. We only have to reduce. We don’t even need to invent anything. We won’t do it. We do not have the systems in place to enact anything approaching climate protection in the most wasteful societies. They will determine what will happen. In fact, an opposite religion has taken such strong hold that even the smartest, most enlightened of the people living there simply can’t conceive of a society mediated by anything other than money, can’t conceive of limited resources, believe that out of sight is out of mind, drive everywhere in the most wasteful of vehicles, consume, consume, consume, and can’t see anything wrong with it. They will drag this fucking boat under the water, completely oblivious to their role in this debacle. We cannot stop them. Everything is working against us. You would have to eliminate all of American culture to save the planet. There is no way to reconcile America as she is with saving the planet. One of them has to go. It will be the planet—because no-one can stop America. It eats everything. It corrodes otherwise intelligent people into espousing the most warped opinions. You can be an Earth-science teacher in a town without drinking water and still talk about luxuriating in 30-minute showers and washing your hair every day. People cannot. Fucking. Get. It. Nothing connects on a personal level. One’s own behavior and benefit will always be paramount. They start off different, but they all end up the same: defeated by America’s poisonous form of capitalism and dog-eat-dog philosophy (if you can even call it that).
“One day this week, someone told me that she was “angry at people’s refusal to acknowledge what’s happening to the planet” and when I waved a couple of surveys at them showing that in 2023 “Nearly seven-in-ten Americans (69%) favor the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050””
What a fucking joke. Who did you ask? I haven’t met a single person who would say that unless they thought they would be entered in a contest to win a 13MPG truck by saying it. If they did say it, they meant “carbon neutral” as long as it could happen “without sacrificing a single, tiny thing that I have been brainwashed into thinking is important for my life”.
“I don’t know why so many people seem to think it’s their job to spread discouragement, but it seems to be a muddle about the relationship between facts and feelings. I keep saying I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis.”
JFC, please talk to actual people in this country. Get out of your hippie bubble of planet-saving folks. No-one else in your country cares. They do not grasp the problem. They all want to travel the world, visit places, buy new cars, buy giant houses. They. Do. Not. Understand. And those that do? They. Do. Not. Care. They are laser-focused on personal promotion and do not see any reason to restrict their lifestyles to ones that use less energy. They don’t even understand the question. They can’t follow the discussion. Believe me, I’ve tried. People can’t understand what I’m saying. They seem to agree with me, but then cite examples that indicate that they completely missed the point. It’s not a matter of will or determination—they are not even prepared to understand the situation. We are so far away from where we need to be at this point.
Go ahead and “fight defeatism”, Rebecca. You’ll still only be talking to people basically already agree with you, people who are capable of understanding what needs to be done. But defeatists and deniers aren’t the reason we will fail to maintain a livable climate. It’s not even apathy. It’s blank incomprehension. It’s the idiocracy. We are living on Ark B, Rebecca. Most people aren’t even as clever about the climate as the Golgafrinchan captain of Ark B.
Look—really look; watch TV here; look at what people are ingesting—and you too will despair. No-one is even prepared to take a shorter shower or turn the AC above 70ºF for even a minute. Personal comfort is paramount and isn’t even seen as related to climate change or the effort required to combat it. Changing attitudes and lifestyles is not even seen as a component of the solution—to say nothing of being the absolute crux of it.
Works on most machines by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)
“When you have general-purpose software, though, do you really need containers?”
Well, yes. The point isn’t that you need a container to paper over software that isn’t sufficiently generic: it’s to avoid fixing incompatibilities that have nothing to do with your target deployment systems. I think the author is thinking too much of highly general-purpose software whereas the majority of software doesn’t need to run everywhere and anywhere. If it’s built for the cloud, it’s going to run in a container anyway. If it’s built for a specific device, it’s going to run on that device. Why not just run that software at the developer side in the same environment? That way, you can avoid wasting a ton of time fixing problems that are related to how it runs in development rather than production.
“Ultimately, you may need to query the environment about various things, but in functional programming, querying the environment is impure, so you push it to the boundary of the system. Functional programming encourages you to explicitly consider and separate impure actions from pure functions. This implies that the environment-specific code is small, cohesive, and easy to review.”
It implies it, but it in no way guarantees it. The author is also forgetting about the quality of the developer that is likely to be building the solution. In this post, he assumes that the developer uses enough tests to thoroughly test the system—even to the point where he is able to determine where a solution isn’t sufficiently generalized yet—that the developer uses methodology like functional programming to separate pure from impure code, and that the developer is good enough to do all of this in a way that is both efficient and leads to a finished product. This is not at all a guarantee—or even a likelihood—in the real world. In the real world, developers are not reaching for the stars—even if they had the capabilities, which many do not, they’re often not given the time to do things correctly—they are just trying to get it done. If they can “cheat” by restricting the world of possible environments—rather than accommodating their software to environments it will never encounter—then why not? It’s actually an engineering problem. If you’re going to make something that has to work well underwater, the only reason it needs to work out of water is because it makes it easier to work on, not because you think it’s worth the time making it function properly when in air.
Before you try to do something, make sure you can do nothing by Raymond Chen (The New Old Thing)
“Too often, I see relatively inexperienced developers dive in and start writing a big complex thing: Then they can’t even get it to compile because it’s so big and complex.”
“Start with something that does nothing. Make sure you can do nothing successfully. Only then should you start making changes so it starts doing something. That way, you know that any problems you have are related to your attempts to do something.”
Alpine Linux does not make the news by Drew DeVault
“Alpine does not make the news. There are no commercial entities which are trying to monetize it, at least no more than the loosely organized coalition of commercial entities like SourceHut that depend on Alpine and do their part to keep it in good working order, alongside various users who have no commercial purpose for the system. The community is largely in unanimous agreement about the fundamental purpose of Alpine and the work of the community is focused on maintaining the project such that this purpose is upheld.”
Published by marco on 29. Jul 2023 23:42:37 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Profit-Driven Systems Are Driving Us To Our Doom by Caitlin Johnstone
“Under our current systems for profit generation, which is the primary driver of human behavior on this planet, making a quality product that lasts a long time instead of quickly going obsolete or turning into landfill will actually drive you into bankruptcy.”
“This just says such dysmal things about why our planet is facing the existential crises it’s now facing. Corporations will die if they don’t continually grow, and they can’t grow without things like inbuilt planned obsolescence or continued additional purchases, which in a sane society would just be regarded as shoddy craftsmanship. Our entire civilization is driven by the pursuit of profit, and to keep turning large profits your corporation needs to continually grow, and your corporation can’t continually grow unless you’re manufacturing a crappy product that needs to be continually replaced or supplemented, and you can’t manufacture those replacements and supplementations without harvesting them from the flesh of a dying world.”
Also, the problem is that the company is no longer there to make a product. It exists only to generate shareholder value, with the shareholders simultaneously being the most important part of the transaction as well as the least-involved. The customer and the employees are all directly affected, while the shareholders are nearly completely divorced from the vagaries of the company’s value—they often have no idea what the company they’ve invested in even does.
“Someone could invent a free energy machine that lasts forever and costs next to nothing, and even though it would save the world you can be certain it would never see the light of day under our current systems, because it couldn’t yield huge and continuous profits and it would destroy many current means of profit generation.”
Same for cheap, one-shot medical remedies.
“If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is.”
“Our competition-based, profit-motivated systems limit scientific innovation, and they also greatly limit the scope of solutions we can avail ourselves of. There’s a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we’re limiting ourselves to a very small, very inferior fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we’re omitting any [solutions] which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the hell alone.”
“People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there’s no way to make it profitable.”
“The profit motive system assumes the ecocidal premise of infinite growth on a finite world. Without that, the entire system collapses. So there are no solutions which involve not growing, manufacturing less, consuming less, not artificially driving up demand with advertising,”
“It’s hard to appreciate the significance of this artificial limitation when you’re inside it and lived your whole life under its rules. It’s like if we were only allowed to make things out of wood; if our whole civilization banned the entire spectrum of non-woodcraft innovation.”
“People worry about the world getting destroyed by machines driven by a heartless artificial intelligence, but we might end up destroying it with a kind of artificial mind we invented long before microchips: the corporation. So much of humanity’s dysfunction can be explained by the fact that corporations (A) pretty much run the world and (B) are required to act like sociopaths by placing profit above all other concerns.”
A Good Year’s Pay for a Good Day’s Work? by Sam Pizzigati (Scheer Post)
“Ford Motor, for instance, will be eligible for $6.7 billion in federal subsidies for its new $3.5-billion battery plant in Michigan, and state and local officials have already handed Ford $1.7 billion for that plant. How does that math play out for real-life workers? “The company has promised to create 2,500 new jobs that it says will pay an average annual wage of just $45,000 a year,” Good Jobs First points out, “while reaping subsidies of $3.4 million per job.””
“A bit of historical perspective: Back in the mid-20th century, few corporate chiefs pocketed over 20 times the annual compensation of their average workers. CEOs at major U.S. corporations, the Economic Policy Institute reported last fall, are now averaging nearly 400 times worker annual pay.”
A Yellen in the China Shop by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“All of these people share three attributes. One, they know nothing about China. Two, they do not care that they know nothing about China. Three they do not care to know anything about China. They care only to project American power outward, most vigorously where it is most unwelcome.”
“For months Yellen has insisted that depriving China access to technology it needs to develop its advanced industries is not meant to damage China’s economy or inhibit its growth. She tried on the same argument last week. I await the American official able to explain how this does not amount to a frontal attack on an economy with which the U.S. is losing its ability to compete.”
“American officials in Beijing are in many cases not talking to the Chinese: They are talking to the hawks who have taken over China policy in Washington. It is diplomacy as domestic politics, in other words. Do you think the Chinese do not understand this, the essential unseriousness of their American guests? I am ever more impressed by the extent of China’s patience and courtesy. Janet Yellen goes to Beijing, Janet Yellen returns to Washington, not a damn thing was meant to change and not a damn thing does.”
”Greedflation” is a Proxy Battle in a Long War by Freddie De Boer (SubStack)
“[…] the most relevant fact is that even in a minimally-inflationary environment, capitalist enterprise extracts value from labor in significant excess of labor’s contribution to profits. For that reason alone, the market mechanism can’t produce just outcomes. If you’re not a fan of the labor theory of value, you might instead argue that corporate profits ensure the despoiling of our planet, that corporate profits extract value from communities that can’t afford to lose it, or that corporate profits are the engine of the socioeconomic inequality which elevates a wealthy caste above the rest of us and has all sorts of ugly knock-on effects.”
“But that broader unhappiness with our system, in reality, is the argument here − a critique of capitalism, whether of the narrower “unfettered” capitalism that liberals tend to denounce or the Marxian rejection of capitalism as such. Greedflation is just a stalking horse. When someone like Matt Yglesias sneers that of course corporations are greedy, they’ve always been greedy, it ultimately affirms the worldview of both sides.”
Also, Matt Yglesias is a simpering fool. But, blind pig/truffle…
“This all reached some sort of apogee with the presidency of Bill Clinton, whose signature policy victories included tripling Black extreme poverty by gutting welfare, kneecapping whatever union power was left with NAFTA, and banning gay marriage on a federal level. His campaign against Bob Dole had a comedic aspect, if only because of Dole’s perpetual agita that Clinton had stolen his agenda. The anti-left left was the default establishment stance for decades.”
“Ultimately, the question is not “Is greedflation the cause of inflation?,” but rather “Can the market mechanisms that create inflation and the corporations that profit off of it coexist with justice and human flourishing?””
What if Russia Is Winning America’s Proxy War in Ukraine? by Doug Bandow (Antiwar.com)
“In recent months the drumbeat has gotten louder to effectively destroy Russia: regime change, democratization, confiscation, war crimes trials, disarmament, even dismemberment. Yet seriously pushing such policies would ensure continued conflict and potential escalation. Russia won’t make peace on such terms. Rather, faced with such demands, Moscow likely would resist even more strongly, relying on nuclear weapons if necessary. (Regime survival would trump even presumed Chinese opposition .)”
“[…] the transatlantic alliance attacked Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya. Without formally inducting Kiev, the members, led by the US, brought NATO into Ukraine through weapons transfers and personnel training. Putin’s professed fear that troop and missile deployments would eventually follow was not unreasonable.”
“Substantial manpower and materiel losses will limit the Zelensky government’s ability to sustain its efforts, yet the American and European governments appear unwilling or unable to replace lost equipment. In fact, the allied military cornucopia is rapidly emptying. A gaggle of visiting Europeans recently admitted that their peoples were tired of underwriting Ukraine’s war effort. Americans remain sympathetic to Kiev, but their patience will be tested in coming months.”
“Ukraine cannot easily replace the loss of so many trained personnel. Noted Le Monde, “The time when army recruitment offices were overwhelmed with requests from civilians ready to take up arms seems to be over.” And current military exigencies make extended training before deployment difficult if not impossible.”
“Washington must decide policy based on American interests. An open-ended conflict with steadily increasing entanglement against a nuclear-armed power with far more at stake is a bad deal for the American people.”
It’s also shockingly immoral, on all fronts, but, sure, let’s focus on the issue that matters—how war in another country affects the American people. If that’s the lever that will work, then let’s lean on it.
“The time is long past for the continent to take the lead in its own defense. Even now, with Moscow perceived as a significant security threat, Europeans admit that they fear doing more would encourage America to leave. Thus, Washington needs to begin leaving to force allied governments to take over their own defense. Uncle Sam no longer can afford to underwrite dozens of deadbeat allies who believe their security is America’s responsibility.”
Hahahaha. That’s an interesting way of describing imperial garrisons.
The Rice Bowl of the Chinese People Is Held Firmly in Their Hands by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)
“‘Almost half of poor people (470.1 million) are deprived in both nutrition and sanitation, potentially making them more vulnerable to infectious diseases. In addition, over half of poor people (593.3 million) are simultaneously deprived in both cooking fuel and electricity’. These ‘deprivation bundles’ – the absence of both electricity and clean cooking fuel, for instance – amplify the low incomes earned by billions of people.”
“if the poverty line is set at $3.65 a day, 23 percent of the world lives in poverty, and if the line is set at $6.85 a day, then almost half of the world’s population (47 percent) lives below the poverty line. These numbers are horrifying.”
“It will be difficult for the Chinese path to socialist modernisation to be seen as a model to be adopted by other countries unless these countries also ground their programmes on a socialist footing. Poverty was not eradicated by cash transfer schemes or by rural medical programmes alone, though these are valuable policy options: it was eradicated by a socialist commitment to take ideas such as dignity and realise them in the world.”
Why Are There No Slums in China? by Dongsheng News (Scheer Post)
“Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises.”
“While reformation of the hukou system is ongoing, the lack of urban hukou status forces many migrant parents to spend long periods away from their families and they must leave their children in their grandparents’ care in their hometowns, referred to as “left-behind children” (留守儿童 liúshǒu értóng).”
“The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) and the country’s economic strategy until 2035 focus on redistributing income through tax reform, reducing the gap between the rich and poor, and removing the barriers that prevent millions of migrant workers from enjoying the full benefits of urban life.”
“These efforts to tackle the “three mountains” of the high cost of housing, education, and health care faced by all Chinese people, including migrants, is at the center of the government’s vision and policy reforms towards “common prosperity” for all its citizens and the building of a modern socialist society.”
The Worst 2024 Election Interference Won’t Come From Russia Or China by Caitlin Johnstone
““Disputing elections is just not good for democracy,” Manjoo says, joining the rest of the American liberal political/media class in rewriting history to pretend they didn’t just spend the entire Trump administration doing exactly that.”
“This past April the Obama administration’s acting CIA director Mike Morell admitted to using his intelligence connections to circulate a false story in the press during the 2020 presidential race that the Hunter Biden laptop leak was a Russian disinfo op, because he wanted to ensure that Joe Biden would win the election. And absolutely nothing happened to him; Morell just went on with his day.”
“If an ordinary American circulated disinformation to manipulate the election, imperial spinmeisters would cite that as evidence that online communication needs to be more aggressively controlled. But when Obama’s acting CIA director does it, it’s cool.”
Translating the Language of the Border by Gaby Del Valle (The Baffler)
“Regardless of where her loyalties lie, Oliva acknowledges that the act of interpreting for asylum seekers makes her an unwitting agent of the state. “I like to think that I’m working against the powers that be,” she writes, “but the reality is that I’m filling out the form, I’m making people findable, searchable, cross-indexable . . . I translate towards power—towards the English-speaker used to being met on their own language, towards a government that has proven time and time again to be uncaring at best and malicious at worst.””
“Even individual triumphs—asylum cases granted, deportations avoided—serve to justify the exclusion and removal of others. These limited victories uphold the illusion that there is a logical process in place, and that those who go about things the right way will benefit. Never mind that certain immigration judges have zero-percent grant rates for asylum and that ICE has arrested and deported multiple U.S. citizens.”
“Though the United States has no official language, people born and raised in English-speaking American households aren’t often required to engage with languages other than their own,”
Biden Ghosts His Granddaughter. He’s Always Been Mean. by Ted Rall
“[…] no single event showcases his willingness to screw over an innocent person to gain political advantage like his slanderous account of the circumstances of the deaths of his first wife and daughter in a car crash in 1972.
““A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly—and I never pursued it—drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my two sons,” Biden told an audience in 2007.
“In 2001 he falsely blamed an “errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive” and “hit my children and my wife and killed them.” He told this phony story over and over. Curtis Dunn , who was driving the truck that struck Neilia Biden’s stationwagon, died in 1999.
“He had not been drinking. The accident was her fault; she blew through a stop sign; Dunn’s truck had none. Dunn stopped immediately and raced to help Biden and her children. What kind of man would make up a story like that?”
It’s Not That Hard to Solve Homelessness by Sonali Kolhatkar (CounterPunch)
“The federal government sees a shortage of homes as the problem, treating it as an issue of supply and demand: increase the supply and the price will fall. But there is no shortage of housing in the nation. There is a shortage of affordable housing and as long as moneyed interests keep buying up housing, building more won’t be a fix.”
“Passing laws to prevent hedge funds and other large businesses from buying up homes and apartments and raising the minimum wage to at least $21.50 are hardly radical ideas, but they offer course corrections for an economy that is running roughshod over most of us. Rather than tinkering at the edges of the problem and putting forward complex-sounding solutions that don’t actually address the root of the issue, wouldn’t society be better served by redesigning our economy to make homelessness obsolete?”
Some countries have done this. Better ones.
NATO Summit, A Theater of the Absurd by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)
“NATO had opted out of a peaceful resolution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and instead chose to wage war by proxy — with Ukrainian manpower being married with NATO equipment — designed to achieve what U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith, in May 2022, called the “strategic defeat” of Russia in Ukraine.”
“While Finland has joined NATO, Sweden has not, and its membership is becoming increasingly problematic given Turkey’s opposition. Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s recent announcement that Turkey will agree to Swedish NATO membership when the European Union admits Turkey appears to be a poison pill that permanently scutters Sweden’s membership hopes, since the European Union is not inclined to admit Turkey.”
They need Türkiye as a refugee dumping ground instead—outside of the EU.
“NATO has long ago stopped dealing with a fact-based world, allowing itself to devolve into a theater of the absurd where actors fool themselves into believing the tale they are spinning, while the audience stares in dismay.”
China’s Social Credit System Is Actually Quite Boring by Vincent Brussee (Archive.IS / Foreign Policy)
“The SCS’s main aim is to improve the enforcement of legal and administrative rules. Food safety scandals are a recurring problem in China, as are workplace safety issues, wage arrears, and noncompliance with contracts and court orders. When it came to tackling these problems, there were laws in place, but enforcement was lackluster, and anyone who did get caught could simply go to the next province and reoffend. The SCS was meant to help by enabling data sharing between agencies and introducing nationwide blacklists to coerce offenders into compliance.”
“Contrary to common belief, the cities mainly target companies, not individuals. Nonetheless, legal representatives of a violating company are also included in the blacklists to prevent reoffending elsewhere or under a different company. Nationally, about 75 percent of entities targeted by the system end up on blacklists because of court orders they have ignored—the so-called judgment defaulters. The remaining companies are typically collared for severe marketplace violations—for instance, for food safety infringements, environmental damage, or wage arrears.”
To Avoid a War With China Over Taiwan, the US Needs To Back Down by Dave DeCamp (AntiWar.com)
“According to Japan Times, China flew 302 sorties across the median line in August 2022 . Between 1954 and August 2020, China flew across the barrier only four times. From September 2020 until Pelosi’s visit, Chinese warplanes made the flight 23 times.”
There Is No Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ by Deborah Brautigam & Meg Rithmire (Archive.is / The Atlantic)
“As Michael Ondaatje, one of Sri Lanka’s greatest chroniclers, once said , “In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.” And the debt-trap narrative is just that: a lie, and a powerful one. Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota. A Chinese company’s acquisition of a majority stake in the port was a cautionary tale, but it’s not the one we’ve often heard.”
“The city of Hambantota lies at the southern tip of Sri Lanka, a few nautical miles from the busy Indian Ocean shipping lane that accounts for nearly all of the ocean-borne trade between Asia and Europe, and more than 80 percent of ocean-borne global trade. When a Chinese firm snagged the contract to build the city’s port, it was stepping into an ongoing Western competition, though one the United States had largely abandoned.”
“To justify its existence, the port in Hambantota would have to secure only a fraction of the cargo that went through Singapore, the world’s busiest transshipment port. Armed with the Ramboll report, Sri Lanka’s government approached the United States and India; both countries said no. But a Chinese construction firm, China Harbor Group, had learned about Colombo’s hopes, and lobbied hard for the project. China Eximbank agreed to fund it, and China Harbor won the contract. This was in 2007, six years before Xi Jinping introduced the Belt and Road Initiative.”
“When Sirisena took office, Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than to China. Of the $4.5 billion in debt service Sri Lanka would pay in 2017, only 5 percent was because of Hambantota. The Central Bank governors under both Rajapaksa and Sirisena do not agree on much, but they both told us that Hambantota, and Chinese finance in general, was not the source of the country’s financial distress.”
“Over the past 20 years, Chinese firms have learned a lot about how to play in an international construction business that remains dominated by Europe: Whereas China has 27 firms among the top 100 global contractors, up from nine in 2000, Europe has 37, down from 41. The U.S. has seven, compared to 19 two decades ago.”
“As one Malaysian politician remarked to us, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss how Chinese finance featured in that country’s political drama, “Can’t the U.S. State Department tell the difference between campaign rhetoric that our opponents are slaves to China and actually being slaves to China?””
The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified by Jeffrey Sachs & William Schabas (Project Syndicate)
“US President Joe Biden’s administration has doubled down on the claim that China is mounting a genocide against the Uighur people in the Xinjiang region. But it has offered no proof, and unless it can, the State Department should withdraw the charge and support a UN-based investigation of the situation in Xinjiang.”
“The genocide charge was made on the final day of Donald Trump’s administration by then-Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, who made no secret of his belief in lying as a tool of US foreign policy. Now President Joe Biden’s administration has doubled down on Pompeo’s flimsy claim, even though the State Department’s own top lawyers reportedly share our skepticism regarding the charge.”
“[…] what else might constitute evidence of genocide in China? The State Department report refers to mass internment of perhaps one million Uighurs. If proven, that would constitute a gross violation of human rights; but, again, it is not evidence, per se, of intent to exterminate. Another of the five recognized acts of genocide is “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” The State Department report refers to China’s notoriously aggressive birth-control policies. Until recently, China strictly enforced its one-child policy on the majority of its population but was more liberal toward ethnic minorities, including the Uighur.”
“UN experts are rightly calling for the UN to investigate the situation in Xinjiang. China’s government, for its part, has recently stated that it would welcome a UN mission to Xinjiang based on “exchanges and cooperation,” not on “guilty before proven.””
The US Is War by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“The US won WW2 and then immediately plunged into the Cold War. The US won the Cold War and then immediately set to work destroying the Middle East. The US destroyed the Middle East and then immediately started another cold war in preparation for another world war. The US is war. A normal country wages war with the goal of getting back to peacetime. The US wages war with the goal of getting to the next war.”
“[…] just dismiss electoral politics altogether, because you’ll get evil no matter how you vote since “voting” is itself a fake diversion to help manufacture the illusion of freedom and control.”
“It’s crazy how we let wealthy corporations run the media who then spend all day every day telling us we should definitely support political norms that are friendly to wealthy corporations.”
“Too many people look at authoritarian measures like government surveillance, online censorship etc in terms of how it will directly affect them personally rather than how it shapes society as a whole. Sure you yourself may not be directly affected by surveillance or censorship, but you have to live in a society where people’s thoughts, words and behaviors are being strictly regulated by authority in ways that serve the interests of authority.”
“Those who benefit from the current rules of the game understand this and do everything they can to make sure we keep playing by the current rules. That’s why so much of our media is dedicated to normalizing status quo politics and manufacturing consent for the actions that are necessary to maintain the current order of things. Our information ecosystem is continually saturated with the narratives of the people who get the most points in this game we are playing.”
Biden Keeps Lying About The US “Not Trying To Surround” China by Caitlin Johnstone
“Biden can babble all he wants about wanting to secure sea lanes and protect international waters, but only a drooling idiot would believe the world’s most powerful empire is militarily surrounding its top geopolitical rival as an act of defense.”
“The single dumbest thing the US empire asks us to believe nowadays is that surrounding its two biggest foes with war machinery is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression.”
“The US empire is better at international narrative manipulation than any power structure that has ever existed in human history, but what they can’t spin away is the concrete maneuverings of solid pieces of war machinery, because they are physical realities and not narratives.”
Are Authorities Using the Internet to Sap Our Instinct for Freedom? by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“The point is, journalism isn’t rocket science. You show up, talk to a few people, give your best guess at what you’re looking at, and when you get to the “there’s no one left to interview but the gorilla” moment, you move on.”
“[…] Americans are not just being censored. I believe there’s an equivalent effort on the front end of Internet culture to rob people of their will to be free. I believe this is is the hardest part of the Internet censorship story to understand, but also the most crucial and most dangerous.”
“[…] instead of giving the world something invigorating and freeing like rock n’ roll, we’re exporting mass neurosis. At home we’ve become afraid to walk even a few steps without our electronic helpers. Our sense of self is now inextricably tied to a huge global entourage of prying commentators who live in those phones of ours that are always in our pockets and whose good opinion we never stop seeking, whether we admit it or not.”
That is patently not true. This is only applies to a handful of people who think that everyone is like them and whose opinions are given outsize exposure and influence because they post it publicly onto a very public site. No-one else in the real world gives a flying blue fuck what Twitter thinks. It is an insular, psychological tragedy whose inhabitants are so self-absorbed that they think the world revolves around them.
“We long celebrated the individual, even if the individual was crazy. One of my heroes growing up was a man named Plennie Wingo, who tried to walk around the earth backwards. He made it from Santa Monica to Istanbul.”
“That’s how this country has always worked. The line between outpatient and inventor here is and always has been thin, as is the line between con artist and marketing genius, as PT Barnum discovered. Outlandishness, difference, boldness. We’ve celebrated that from Patrick Henry to Hunter Thompson to Liberace. The freethinker was always a cherished archetype.”
You know what is really American? Telling the whole world how unique you are in ways that everyone in the world actually shares. But, I digress.
“What the algorithm instead detects is someone harboring a dangerous willingness to embrace unorthodox ideas, or [to] look at a forbidden thing and not flee. It was once a virtue for Americans to say, when asked about their politics, “None of your damn business.””
“Young people especially are worried to the point of mental illness about their likes and ratios. We not only want people to know what we think, we’re terrified of people not knowing what we think, lest we be suspected of harboring something unsavory underneath.”
Again, this is an affliction that affects a small bubble of fools who think that the world wakes up every day, wondering what they’re thinking.
“If they can preemptively extinguish that fire in us, formal censorship will become unnecessary. The population will become too fearful of difference to ever risk punishment in the first place. That moment is close at hand.”
The ‘Disinformation Industry’ Lands in Court by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Last week was one of sharpening contradictions. It gives us a new measure of clarity amid the fog in which our purported leaders and the media that serve them would have us confined. It took years too long, but the law has at last been invoked against the creeping despotism of mainstream liberals as they attempt to control what we read, see, hear, and by way of all this think. Their hypocrisy and the extent to which corporate media will lie to obscure it are already more legible.”
“I just love reading in published legalese a rundown of what all these sons of bitches have been doing all these years while hiding behind the law. And I love even more one of Doughty’s surmises in his ruling: If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.”
“Free speech is increasingly partisan? Do you see what is being said here, text and subtext? I am in no hurry to invite either Eric Schmitt, Andrew Bailey, his successor as Missouri A–G, or Jeff Landry over for drinks, given various of their views, but at issue are constitutional rights, not Republican politics. Perniciously enough, we are now invited to take free speech as some kind of right-wing Republican cause.”
“From The Times’s second-day story last Wednesday: Government efforts to interact with social media platforms took a major hit on Tuesday when a federal judge restricted the Biden administration from communicating with tech companies about a broad array of online content. Interacting with social media? Communicating with tech companies? These are references to long-established, brazenly illegal censorship operations, as we know from The Twitter Files and numerous other documents published over the past several years.”
“the Biden regime having already signaled, via the DoJ, that it is likely to appeal the injunction. It will be interesting, I mean, to watch as mainstream media whitewash, to borrow from Doughty, “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” This will be a spectacle of self-degradation that will cost corporate media dearly.”
Anderson Cooper Is A Disgusting CIA Goon by Caitlin Johnstone
“Mainstream estimates for the number of civilians killed in the Battle of Grozny range from five thousand to eight thousand. Estimates for the number of people killed as a result of the Iraq invasion range into the millions. One was a single battle in one city, the other was a years-long nationwide war which plunged an entire region into violence and chaos. Cooper is correct that it’s inaccurate to compare the two, but he’s obviously incorrect that this is because the Iraq invasion was less depraved.”
Grozny would be better compared to Fallujah, which was just a small component of the entire war. A significant one, as a focused, moral example of how the rest of the war went, but just a small part of the loss of life.
Anderson Cooper was not impressed with this line of reasoning, though, and said,
““I certainly understand,” said Cooper. “I also saw a lot of Americans getting killed. And I saw, you know, the horrors of Saddam Hussein. I don’t think it’s accurate to compare the pummeling of a city by Russian artillery, with civilians inside, pummeling every single day with the intention of just destroying and flattening a city with actions the US took.””
“Cooper immediately followed West’s appearance with an interview with Democratic Party swamp monster James Carville, who promptly began smearing West as a “menace” and a “threat to the continued constitutional order in the United States.”
“Carville then went on to assert that former Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who is West’s campaign manager, is “almost certainly an agent of the Russian government.””
“Calling a presidential candidate’s campaign manager a secret Russian agent is about as incendiary an accusation as you can possibly make, and Cooper just accepted it as an established fact and moved on.”
“These are the kinds of people who are teaching Americans what to believe about their nation and their world.”
The level of brainwashing in that country is breathtaking.
Journalists Abandoned Julian Assange and Slit Their Own Throats by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
““This is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world’s superpower than anyone in history. He’s sitting in a maximum-security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying on his privileged conversations with his lawyers. They’re on record plotting to assassinate him. Any of those things, if you told someone from a different time ‘Yeah this is what happened and he was sent anyway and not only that, but the media didn’t cover it at all.’”
“Julian was branded a hacker, although all the information he published was leaked to him by others. He was smeared as a sexual predator and a Russian spy, called a narcissist and accused of being unhygienic and slovenly. The ceaseless character assassination, amplified by a hostile media, saw him abandoned by many who had regarded him a hero.”
““Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide,” Melzer concluded .”
““This was a completely new model of journalism,” she continued. “It is one [that] journalists who understood themselves as gatekeepers hated . They didn’t like the WikiLeaks model. WikiLeaks was completely reader-funded. Its readers were global and responding enthusiastically. That’s why PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America started the banking blockade in December 2010. This has become a standardized model of censorship to demonetize, to cut channels off from their readership and their supporters. The very first time this was done was in 2010 against WikiLeaks within two or three days of the U.S. State Department cables being published.””
“While Visa cut off WikiLeaks, Stella noted, it continued to process donations to the Ku Klux Klan.”
The KKK is an easy target, but harmless to power because it supports existing power structures and serves as a distraction. Therefore, odious as their program is, the KKK get to be a legitimate business. The elites can point to it as “proof” of how freedom- and speech-loving they are.
““For people who come out of university or journalism school, where do you go?” he asked. “People get mortgages. They have kids. They want to have a normal life…You enter the system. You slowly get all your rough edges shorn off. You become part of the uniformity of thought. I saw it explicitly at The Financial Times.””
Well, yeah, duh. It’s “ the Financial Times”. It’s right in the name. It’s purpose is clear.
“The D-notice committee, he explained, is composed of journalists and state security officials in the U.K. who meet every six months. They discuss what journalists can and can’t publish. The committee sends out regular advisories.
“The Guardian ignored advisories not to publish the revelations of illegal mass surveillance released by Edward Snowden. Finally, under intense pressure, including threats by the government to shut the paper down, The Guardian agreed to permit two Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) officials to oversee the destruction of the hard drives and memory devices that contained material provided by Snowden. The GCHQ officials on July 20, 2013 filmed three Guardian editors as they destroyed laptops with angle grinders and drills. The deputy editor of The Guardian, Paul Johnson — who was in the basement during the destruction of the laptops — was appointed to the D-notice committee. He served at the D-notice committee for four years. In his last committee meeting Johnson was thanked for “re-establishing links” between the committee and The Guardian. The paper’s adversarial reporting, by then, had been neutralized.”
““The Daily Mirror under Piers Morgan…I don’t know if anyone remembers back in 2003, and I know he is a controversial character and he’s hated by a lot of people, including me, but he was editor at The Daily Mirror. It was a rare opening of what a mainstream tabloid newspaper can do if it’s doing proper journalism against the war, an illegal war. He had headlines made out of oil company logos. He did Bush and Blair with blood all over their hands, amazing stuff, every day for months. He had John Pilger on the front page, stuff you would never see now. There was a major street movement against the war. The state thought ‘Shit, this is not good, we’ve gotta clamp down.’””
A Third of North America’s Birds Have Vanished by Anders & Beverly Gyllenhaal (Nautilus)
“The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows. That equates to 750 million birds,”
“Forest birds lost a third of their numbers, or 500 million, including the compact, colorful warblers and speckle-breasted Wood Thrushes that sing like flutes. Common backyard birds experienced a seismic decline. That’s where 90 percent of the total loss of abundance occurred, among just twelve families of the best-known birds—including sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, and finches. There’s been relatively little research on these species, and there’s no sense of urgency when resources are already stretched thin for so many other birds in more dire need.”
“After a day and a half of painstaking scrutiny, Smith realized there was no mistake. “I was speechless. We’ve lost almost 30 percent of an entire class of organisms in less than the span of a human lifetime, and we didn’t know it.””
Extent of record-breaking Canadian wildfire season continues to grow by Niles Niemuth (WSWS)
“As of July 12, fires have engulfed nearly 10 million hectares (100,000 square kilometers), a combined area which dwarfs the province of New Brunswick (72,908 square kilometers) or, to provide a US comparison, the state of Maine (79,883 sq. km.). With more than two months still to go in the country’s fire season, the area burned has already outstripped the fire season of 1989, the previous worst on record, when 7.5 million hectares were consumed by flames.”
“A recent assessment by the Stanford Environmental Change and Human Outcomes (ECHO) Lab found that 2023 is already the worst year on record for cumulative fine particle smoke (PM2.5) exposure, with the average American experiencing a cumulative 400 micrograms per cubic meter of air. Unusually, most of this exposure has been from the Canadian fires, as the US fire season has yet to begin in earnest. The ECHO Lab has recorded a significant increase in smoke exposure since 2019, with the rate more than doubling.”
“With the world experiencing record-breaking heat this year across North America to Asia and Europe, and other effects like flash flooding becoming more frequent, it is apparent that climate change is a global problem and that there will therefore be no solution found on the national level or within the confines of the capitalist nation-state system.”
“There’s no objective measure for when air conditioning should come on. People have different heat tolerances, and a lot of humanity doesn’t even have access to air conditioning. But studies in the area typically use a measure called cooling degree days. These frequently use an outdoor temperature where things like office buildings or shopping centers would start using their air conditioning—often about 18° C (65° F). For each day that’s warmer than the target, the cooling degree days are incremented by the number of degrees by which the target temperature is exceeded.”
You start using air-conditioning when it’s only 18ºC outside? Well, there’s part of the problem right there.
“But there is a general lesson: All of this will make decarbonizing even harder. Manufacturing air conditioning equipment is going to take energy. Running it is also going to take energy. And those added demands will come at a time when we should be limiting our energy use in order to get renewables to meet our needs faster. So, that’s not ideal.”
No shit. It’s why the uphill climb is starting to feel like an overhang.
Assange Exposes The Empire’s True Face by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“The moderate position on Ukraine is to hold both Russia and the US empire responsible for their respective roles in starting and continuing this war. That’s the middle ground. But this position is regarded as freakish fringe extremism in the western mainstream and you’ll be accused of literally conducting psyops for a foreign government if you voice it, because the western mainstream is just that freakishly extremist.”
“When you actually spell out what the mainstream position on Ukraine is it sounds like a silly fairy tale for children, but that’s what all the most influential western pundits, politicians and government officials are actually saying.”
“The US presidential race is that wonderful season American liberals set aside to remind socialists that they hate them far more than they hate the right and would cheerfully burn the whole country to the ground before they’d share one iota of power with them.”
“One reason it’s so hard to set up beneficial systems is because in negotiations manipulators always push for the absolute maximum amount of gain they can possibly grab while good people only push for a normal, human-sized amount of space for themselves. You see this constantly in union negotiations and politics alike: people come to the negotiation table with demands that are viewed as “reasonable” by those in power and then are negotiated back halfway from that point of “reason” as a “compromise”, while those with the power grab up everything they can get their mitts on and walk back only if forced to. This has a ratchet effect over the years which sees ordinary people losing more and more power to the ruling class.”
Capitalism is a Giant Scam by Caitlin Johnstone
“I could see that these guys and people like them were going to turn consumer ecological responsibility into this trendy elite thing priced way out of range for normal people, and that’s exactly what ended up happening. It wasn’t long before I saw the arrival of eco chic and Whole Foods and Tesla and the rest of this whole new luxury market designed to let rich people feel good about themselves while the world burns and create the illusion that we can profiteer our way out of our problems.”
“[…] the price was changed because the market would bear it. The hidden hand of the market was not going to magically restore the product to its “correct” value; the value of such products was going to be determined by the narrative manipulations of entrepreneurs, consultants, con-artists, marketeers and ad-men.
““Let the market decide” really means let the manipulators decide, because the markets are dominated by those who excel at manipulating. We’re taught that letting the market decide means letting supply and demand take its natural course, as though we’re talking about ocean tides or seasons or something, but in reality both supply and demand are manipulated constantly with extreme aggression.”
“Manipulating people into wanting things they’d never thought to want before through advertising. Manipulating women into feeling bad about their bodies so they’ll buy your beauty products. Manipulating people into paying $2000 for a $20 bag using branding. Manipulating people into buying Listerine by inventing the word “halitosis” and convincing them to be worried about it.”
“How can you save the planet from destruction by human behavior when all of human behavior is driven by a bizarre scam competition? And the biggest scam of all is the narrative that this system is totally working and is entirely sustainable. That’s the overarching scam holding all the other scams together.
“Proponents of capitalism often decry socialism as a coercive system that people are forced to participate in, but what the hell do you call this? Did any of us sign up to be thrown into the middle of a giant unending scam competition? What if I don’t want to spend my whole life being subjected to people’s attempts to trick me? What if I don’t want to live in a society where everyone’s trying to trick and scam each other instead of collaborating toward the greater good of our world? Guess what? I don’t consent to any of that. I am being coerced into this.”
“Yes I am coerced into participating in a capitalist society in order to pay the bills and stay alive. That’s the problem I’m trying to address here. It’s like prisoners complaining about the prison system and being called hypocrites because they are in prison.”
Real Change Is Impossible While Our World Is Shrouded In Secrecy by Caitlin Johnstone
“The fact that all the most important aspects of our civilization’s operation are hidden, manipulated and obfuscated by the powerful makes a joke of the very idea of democracy, because how can people know what government policies to vote for if they can’t even clearly see those policies? How can people know what to vote for when everything about their understanding of the world is being actively distorted for the benefit of the powerful?”
Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo Is a Blast of Fresh Air by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)
“But it’s so startling to see a series like I’m a Virgo, defying expectations at every turn, that of course I plan to keep on watching. It’s not just the show’s politics that are a rarity in mainstream television, it’s the way the politics have freed the imaginations of the creative team to think of something far different from what we’ve all seen ten thousand times before.”
I’m Not Trying to be Dramatic, But I’m in Hell by Freddie De Boer (SubStack)
“Part of what makes finding and sticking with a therapist so difficult is that it’s close to impossible to divide your sense of what you want from a therapist from a broader understanding of what you need from a therapist. Are you sure you don’t like your current therapist because you’re “just not vibing with them”? Are you sure you want to fire your therapist because they seem “toxic”? Or is it because you signed up for therapy expecting it to be a constant exercise in validating everything you think and say and instead you’re one of the lucky few with a therapist who actually does their job and sometimes calls you on your bullshit?”
“And here we have a woman who was, at the very least, coerced into unwanted sexual activity and who marks her story with an emoji. I found the replies to this tweet something tragic − people kept saying to her that this scenario wasn’t OK, that this wasn’t something she had to accept, and she reacted with what seemed like genuine confusion. A person who had made a claim of protected status in her social world, the claim of having “alters,” is someone seen as holding the limitless right to overwhelm her basic right to sexual autonomy. Is that the norm, to feel that way? No. Is that extreme? Yes. Is she the product of a youth culture that has become immensely influential and which is busily creating ethical values that are totally alien to the basic moral intuitions many of us hold? Most assuredly, yes.”
“Where do I put my anger, here? A bunch of teenagers under the spell of technologies that have compelled them into the most psychically diseased communities possible? The anti-psychiatry cultists, who combine menace and vulnerability in quantities I’ve never observed before? The hive mind of social media, which understands mental illness as it understands all things, as a facile synopsis of itself utilized for the needs of competitive morality? An establishment media which manages to combine the worst instincts of all of them?”
Why Match School And Student Rank? by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)
“I heard a fascinating variation of this hypothesis from Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House: elite colleges are machines for laundering privilege. That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart people get to network with elites, which is the first step to becoming elite themselves. And the rich people get mixed in so thoroughly with a pool of smart/talented people that everyone assumes they must be smart/talented themselves. After all, they have a degree from Harvard!”
“People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.”
Noam Chomsky on Language, Left Libertarianism, and Progress (Ep. 182) by Tyler Cowen
“The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle.”
“[…] something happened along with the appearance of modern humans, namely the emergence of these capacities that we’re talking about, that amazed Galileo, Humboldt, and others. And nothing’s changed since. There’s been no change that we can detect in the nature of these cognitive capacities, which seem to be species properties of humans in the technical sense, meaning common to all humans (apart from extreme pathology) and completely unique — nothing like them anywhere in the animal world.”
“The large language models have a fundamental property which demonstrates that they cannot tell you anything about language and thought. Very simple property: its built-in principle can’t be modified, namely, they work just as well for impossible languages as for possible languages. It’s as if somebody came along with a new periodic table of the elements which included all the elements and all impossible elements and couldn’t make any distinction on them. It would tell us nothing about chemistry.
“That’s what large language models are. You give them a data set that violates all the principles of language, it will do fine, doesn’t make any distinction. What the systems do, basically, is scan an astronomical amount of data, find statistical regularities, string things together. And using these regularities, they can make a pretty good prediction about what word is likely to come next after a sequence of words.
“A lot of very clever programming, a lot of massive computer power, and of course, unbelievable amounts of data, but as I say, it does exactly as well with impossible systems as with languages. Therefore, in principle, it’s telling you nothing about language.”
Brilliant observation. I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s an elegant example that pops the bubble of “potential intelligence”.
“Now, you can take the smartest chimpanzee or the dogs under my desk — they can listen to this noise forever. They have no idea there’s anything there but noise. Well, that’s a fundamental property of humans built in. It’s the reason why you and I can be having this discussion now, but a troop of chimpanzees can’t be.”
“It’s important to understand that both Lippmann and Bernays adopted the standard liberal position, that the population is, as the terms were, stupid and ignorant. They don’t know what’s good for them. We, the responsible men, have to do their planning for their benefit, of course. Meanwhile, we have to, as Lippmann put it, protect ourselves from the roar and the trampling of the bewildered herd. A very Leninist doctrine, if you think of it. Very similar rhetoric. That goes right up to the present distinction that was made in the Kennedy years between what were called the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals, the good guys who worked on policy and so on, and the value-oriented intellectuals, the bad guys — what McGeorge Bundy called “the wild men in the wings” — who talk about ridiculous things like justice and rights and so on.”
“In any event, manufacture of consent was, just to quote some more Lippmann — he said the public can be spectators but not participants in action. They are not supposed to take part in any public affairs. We do that. As Reinhold Niebuhr put it , they have to be fed necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications while we take care of things for the common good.”
“One aspect of this was separating the economy from public affairs.”
“Nevertheless, there are grounds. If you look over history, people have organized, resisted, stood up, overthrown repressive autocratic structures, created a broader reign of freedom and justice. Plenty of awful things remain, but if you look back at what used to be perfectly acceptable, you can see we’ve come a long way, even just in the last couple of decades.”
“Women were still, in the 1960s, under federal law, not regarded as peers, basically regarded as property. Wasn’t until 1975 that the Supreme Court finally ruled that women have the right to serve on a federal jury , for example, would be peers.”
“There are people who understand that, people like former Defense Secretary William Perry, for example. He spent his whole life in the nuclear establishment in the state system. He says he’s terrified, doubly terrified. Terrified once because we’re racing toward disaster day by day. Doubly terrified because there’s no attention being given to it.”
“Sometimes it’s just astonishing. The Pew polling agency, a couple of weeks ago, came out with . . . They give regular studies of public attitudes on all sorts of things, very valuable. The latest one, they gave people a couple of dozen choices of issues and asked them to rank them in terms of urgency. Nuclear war was not even on the list. Climate change was on the list. It was ranked at the bottom of the 21 choices. That’s manufacture of consent in a form which is going to destroy us all.”
“We have a class-based society, rigid class-based society. The business classes, the ultra-rich are dedicated to class war . They’re basically vulgar Marxists, fight values inverted, constantly fighting a harsh class war. They control the resources, control the institutions, control the economy. So yes, ideas that they don’t like, you don’t hear. Nothing novel about that.”
“During the Trump years, there was one major legislation — what Joseph Stiglitz called the Donor Relief Act of 2017 — a tax cut that was a gift to the super-rich in the corporate sector at the expense of everyone else.”
“One of the things that the Maoist policies did was save a hundred million people. A hundred million people were saved from death and starvation, as compared with democratic, capitalist India in the same years. You look from 1949 liberation to 1979, compare the demographics of the two countries. There’s a gap of a hundred million people killed in India as compared with China, simply because of the lack of carrying out rural development and healthcare programs.”
“Cuba has been under savage attack for 60 years. It’s astonishing that it’s even survived. Well, it’s survived, barely. It has better health statistics than the United States. It’s developed a biomedical system which is one of the wonders of the world despite US sanctions, which are so strict that if Cuba wants something to use for vaccines from Sweden, they can’t get it. The United States is a very violent and brutal country. When the United States imposes sanctions, they are third-party sanctions. Every country in the world has to accept them. The world is overwhelmingly opposed. Look at the United Nations. The votes are 184 to 2, United States and Israel. Total opposition. Everybody obeys the US sanctions out of fear of the most violent country in the world.”
“Cowen: And a lot of the health statistics have been revealed to be fraudulent . Latin America can trade with Cuba. You can fly from Mexico to Cuba.”
Really? The statistics are fraudulent? According to whom?
“We now have to decide within a couple of decades whether the human experiment is going to continue or whether it’ll go down in glorious disaster. That’s what we’re facing. We know answers, at least possible answers to all of the problems that face us. We’re not pursuing them. The leadership is going in the opposite direction. How can anybody relax under these circumstances?”
“Cowen: Why do you answer every email?
“CHOMSKY: Because I take people seriously. I think people deserve respect.”
Ubi Sunt by Justin Smith-Ruiu / Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Hinternet)
“I have not seen many compelling literary or artistic treatments, yet, that verisimilitudinously capture this new experience, this “vibe”. I’m grateful that Ubi Sunt now exists, to show us, in language and image, what our new world, as far as I can tell, actually looks like.”
I love that adverb. What a triumph!
“Cholera, malaria, dysentery, and typhus claimed four times as many lives as the fighting, even prior to the outbreak of the Spanish flu. Not to mention trench fever, trench foot, venereal disease, shell shock, and myriad other afflictions. The germ theory was well established, but antibiotics did not yet exist; medicine offered few cures preferable to the ills they cured.”
“The cover letter to Einstein accompanying Schwarzschild’s manuscript both glosses over and, perhaps, subtly alludes to his deteriorating physical condition, closing with the line: “As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of the heavy gunfire, to allow me to escape my terrestrial existence and take this walk in the land of your ideas.” In early 1916, Einstein replied, “I had not expected that one could formulate the exact solution of the problem in such a simple way. I very much enjoyed your mathematical treatment of the subject. Next Thursday I shall present the work to the Academy with a few words of explanation.””
“For a time, convention held that for an observer at a safe distance, a person will seem to take forever to fall through the event horizon. This turned out to be only half-true. In reality, the falling person’s image will dim and wink out as they approach this threshold, so there’s no way of observing their notionally endless fall from our reference frame. That’s true of all infalling matter, which is why black holes are black.”
“[…] technically, it’s dubious to refer to the event horizon as a singularity; it’s more of a coordinate system hiccup. The hiccup doesn’t even appear in Schwarzschild’s original solution. Nonetheless, Singularity people here in California have made it clear that their metaphor refers to the event horizon, not to the so-called “essential” singularity at the center of the black hole. They are referring to a veil beyond which things are unknowable, not a point at which things break down.”
“Self-pity is a guilty pleasure—or maybe that’s the feeling of having an excuse to still be in bed at midday. And these are signs of a powerful immune response mobilizing. That’s good. Pain and discomfort are so powerfully modulated by what’s going on in your head, what kind of narrative is attached. I’m convincing myself that this is more like the good-ache of hard exercise than the bad-ache of injury. Though physiologically, I’m not sure there’s much difference.”
“Swirling autumn leaves and errant plastic bags dancing across the floor; a skinny man on meth touretting through, somewhere else in his head, bandanna concealing his sunken mouth, his gospel insistent but unintelligible. Nobody seems sure how to gingerly usher him back out. Like a bird trapped inside, dashing itself against things.”
“[…] it’s just a question of where in the universe to position my eyes prior to streaming the video into them. And what frustum of light rays to stream back into the camera. Though it increasingly feels like an Amish conceit, I allow real photons to expose the untidiness of the study, the unkemptness of my face, the misalignment of my gaze. While I withhold artifice like a lazy ass Lars von Trier, the people I’m meeting sheepishly, ironically, or triumphantly enter The Matrix one by one, first with the background, then with the foreground going synthetic. It doesn’t really matter; even in Dogma 95 mode, there are a million lines of code mediating us. Authenticity is artifice too.”
Published by marco on 29. Jul 2023 20:17:55 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
New study finds that lifting Zero-COVID in China caused 1.4 billion infections and up to 2.6 million deaths by Aaron Edwards (WSWS)
“Our results suggest that on Dec. 7, the day when full exit from zero-COVID was announced, there were ~1 million new infections. Because of the extremely high rate of spread afterwards, the outbreak ballooned such that 97% [95%, 99%] of the population (i.e., 1.37 billion people) became infected in December. As a result of the exponential nature of the spread, the vast majority of people (88% [83%, 93%] of the population) became infected during the short window of time between Dec. 15 and 31, 2022….”
“At the behest of global finance capital, capitalist world governments have demanded that there be no interruptions in the process of wealth accumulation regardless of the cost in human life. The Western media, after continuously demanding the end of Zero-COVID in China, has now dropped the subject of the pandemic altogether.”
“The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that world capitalism is unwilling and unable to implement the necessary public health measures globally in order to stop the spread of this preventable illness, as well as future pandemics that may appear. The capitalist system is incompatible with sustaining life on this planet,”
The Long Reach of China’s Demographic Destiny by Yi Fuxian (Project Syndicate)
“The deterioration in US-China relations is ultimately due to the bilateral trade imbalance and to US frustration with Chinese politics. Both can be traced back to China’s one-child policy, which was in place from 1980 to 2016.”
That’s the topic sentence? Frustration? Not “belligerences”?
“When Western leaders welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, most assumed that they were creating the conditions for eventual democratization.”
They absolutely were fucking not expecting that. They were slobbering over the quasi-legal slave labor they were going to be able to exploit once their plans to completely subjugate Russia went out the door with Yeltsin. This is pretty much a matter of public record. “Uncontroversial”, as Chomsky would say.
“This political fantasy underpinned the Sino-American relationship for decades.”
“Chinese household disposable income fell from 62% of GDP in 1983 to 40 − 44% in 2005-2022, compared to 60 − 70% internationally.”
60% disposable income internationally? Presumably OECD countries or some.other specially chosen group toward whose membership China is assumed to aspire. Why is so much disposable.income good? Ah, yes, because it can be hoovered up by multinationals. The underlying assumption, as always, is.that everyone should.want to be like the U.S.
“But the grassroots mobilization lasted for only half a month. Once the government capitulated and rescinded the zero-COVID policy, there was little left to sustain political protests. This is what one would expect in a country with a median age of 42 and where the proportion of youth has fallen to 17%”
The protest movement got what it wanted. “government capitulated” is a phrase I don’t read about in the U.S. Protest; get what you want; keep protesting? How do you expect this to work?
“Still, Western and Chinese leaders long shared a belief in the prospect of China’s democratization, with one major difference: while Western leaders sought to promote it, Chinese leaders anxiously resisted it. Now, the game is up. The West is increasingly abandoning its unrealistic illusions, and many Chinese people – having accepted three years of harsh COVID controls – are counting on a powerful central government to provide social security, health care, and safety in the future.”
How is the last part juxtaposed to democracy? Only in the neoliberal mindset is it bad for government to provide the basics of society. They think those things should be open to obscene profits instead.
“Its economic and political conditions today are a preview of the rest of the country tomorrow. Although aging will produce plenty of minor forms of social unrest, there will be no major upheavals. Even if China experiences the kind of turmoil that swept Russia in the 1990s, its huge elderly population would inevitably look to a Vladimir Putin-style strongman to stabilize the social order through tough top-down measures.”
Turmoil == plunder.
Anyone who calls what happened to Russia in the 90s “turmoil” is an unqualified unempathetic asshole.
“Because Chinese parents have long worried that their only child will be unable to support them later in life, they have tended to consume less and save more for their own retirement. At the same time, Chinese governments, corporations, and the rich have also maintained high savings rates. As a result, China’s average savings rate over the 2005-2020 period was 47%, compared with 24% in the rest of the world, and 18% in the US.”
And this bad how? Not enough circulation? No chance for money to flow upward? Again, the author compares China to the neoliberal OECD countries and finds it lacking.
“Unlike other countries whose economies are driven primarily by consumption, China’s has run on exports and investment in real estate and infrastructure (such as high-speed rail). From 2005 to 2020, it had an average investment rate of 44%, compared with 23% in the rest of the world, and 21% in the US.”
“America’s share of world manufacturing exports had stabilized at 13% between 1971 and 2001, but then fell to 7% by 2018, owing to China’s accession to the WTO. We’ve now seen where this led: Rust Belt counties that were hollowed out after 2001 propelled Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. Arguably, the US is the second-biggest victim of China’s one-child policy.”
Blame China! wow! Poor helpless billionaires in the U.S.—put over a barrel by the dastardly Chinese. The oblivious self-pity is shocking, even to a cynic like me. This author blames America’s predation of its own working class on the Chinese. All with a straight face. That is an achievement.
“US efforts to restore manufacturing have yet to bear fruit: America’s share of world manufacturing exports continued to decline, to 6% in 2022. The US has faced difficulties partly because the decoupling from China’s industrial chain has increased costs and created supply shortages, but also because it lacks sufficient vocational education and has failed to stem the erosion of manufacturing wage premiums.”
Also because the don’t know how to invest long-term. Just funnel money upward is all they know.
To term the drastically decreasing wages in the U.S. as a phenomenon that the U.S. has “failed to stem” is a deliberate ignorance of everything that is U.S. domestic policy. The U.S. actively encouraged the flow of money toward capital and away from labor. To characterize that policy as anything more or less than that is a lie.
Or the U.S. “lack[ing] sufficient vocational education”, as if it magically disappeared instead of having been neglected to death by a country that fails to see any value in education—that, in fact, fears it as it would rather have a dulled, heavily propagandized service-level populace rather than anyone capable of doing anything, including thinking for themselves.
“[…] the CPC may finally have to contend with a powerful middle class – just as Western strategists once hoped.”
The author can conceive only of a world in which the only possible goal in a relationship with China is regime change, hopefully to a Western-compliant Yeltsin-style crook.
Gitmo’s Permanent Chains by Seymour Hersh (Scheer Post)
“The Biden administration, obviously aware that Americans by and large care little about Guantánamo and the souls who have been wrongfully imprisoned there, left the response to UN Ambassador Michèle Taylor. Her reply to the report essentially said Ní Aoláin had it all wrong. “We are committed to providing safe and humane treatment for detainees … in full accordance with international and US domestic law. Detainees live communally and prepare meals together; receive specialized medical and psychiatric care; are given full access to legal counsel; and communicate regularly with family members.””
Let. Them. Go. No discussion. Buncha fucking monsters. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden—all monsters who do not care that the U.S. has imprisoned random people without even charging them, to say nothing of sentencing them. But why would we expect any different? The U.S. does the same to its own citizens, picking them up for bullshit, then letting them languish in jail, uncharged, for years before either finally bringing them before a court or just letting them go without so much as an apology.
“All in all, as the UN’s special rapporteur did not say, it could not be worse for those souls if they were found not guilty of wrongdoing and cast into hell for the rest of their days.”
The U.S. is a Nation of Savage Inequality by Eve Ottenberg (CounterPunch)
“When confronted with not having recused himself from a case involving his benefactor and not having reported his swanky vacation, judge Samuel Alito essentially proclaimed, according to The New Republic June 21, “I didn’t know I had to.” Alito had ruled in favor of his patron and justified it thus: “I had no obligation to recuse in any of the cases that ProPublica cites. First, even if I had been aware of Mr. Singer’s connection to the entities involved in those cases, recusal would not have been required or appropriate.” He argued that he and the fabulously wealthy financier Paul Singer were not personally close, so clearly, he was unbiased.”
“[…] these financial moguls have bought the supreme court of the United States. They own it, and it does their bidding. Does anyone care? Do ordinary people have any redress? No and no. We are invited instead to spend our time despising destitute people for supposedly destroying our cities’ “quality of life.””
“Who crushed our quality of life? Corporate oligarchs, who dismantled our manufacturing base, shipped all the jobs to Mexico then China for the cheap labor and who thus hollowed out a productive, well-functioning U.S. economy. But we’re not invited to detest them. Oh no. They are glamorized, their wealth is everyone’s aspiration.”
We Need to Talk About Nahel by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“[…] the social and political confrontations occurring regularly in France these days are visible manifestations of social and political confrontations that are suppressed or sublimated elsewhere all over the West. This is why we ought to pay attention. The French happen to have the good sense to say what they mean more readily than the rest of us.”
“On display in France is a shared refusal or inability among Western societies to accept non–Westerners as equals in their midst and, by extension, to accept that half a millennium of presumed Western superiority is ending as we speak and that new understandings of what it means to be human press themselves urgently upon us.”
“To an extent few care to acknowledge, it is fair to say the nation’s various police organizations effectively stand on the front line that divides the two Frances noted above. The officer who shot Nahel is now identified as Florian M. and faces charges of voluntary manslaughter. As of Monday, 52,000 French had donated €1.1 million, about the same amount in U.S. dollars, to his legal defense fund.”
“If you arrive in Britain on a flight from an Asian or otherwise non–Western nation, you are likely to see among the immigration officials those of the race or ethnicity of the country from which you are traveling. They will speak the prevalent language among the passengers, to whom they will be solicitous. Their uniform insignia will be in this language. These arrivals will then be able to go to neighborhoods in London or elsewhere populated by their ethnic group or nationality. The street signs will be in their language. The shopkeepers will speak it. Identity is honored. It is diametrically the opposite for immigrant arrivals in France. Everything will be in French, and there will be no accommodation of any kind of separate identity. If an immigrant proposes to become French, he or she must speak French and become French in ways well beyond what any passport or piece of paper confers.”
I gotta be honest with you, buddy. You’re running the risk of making it more accommodating to foreigners than local residents.
What is a local culture, anyway? A set of rules.
How do you communicate them? Language.
Which ones? All of them? Who pays for that? Who writes it? Who makes sure it’s correct?
How do you vote or elect without a common language? Which language is the one of law? Is it precise enough for the task?
Do people speak it? What about people who don’t? Enclave? Separate country? Which land? Which resources?
The French Riots Are a Result of Miserable Conditions in French Society by Tomek Skomski, Marion Beauvalet (Jacobin)
“Last Friday, the UN called for France to “seriously tackle the profound problems of racism among law enforcement.” France answered that “any accusation of systemic racism or discrimination by law enforcement in France” was “totally unfounded.” No political announcement or political solution to end these revolts has been proposed by the government.”
Take Antarctica Off Your Travel Bucket List by Sara Clemence (Archive.is / The Atlantic)
“Perversely, the climate change that imperils Antarctica is making the continent easier to visit; melting sea ice has extended the cruising season. Travel companies are scrambling to add capacity. Cruise lines have launched several new ships over the past couple of years. Silversea’s ultra-luxurious Silver Endeavour is being used for “fast-track” trips—time-crunched travelers can save a few days by flying directly to Antarctica in business class.”
“[…] as tourism gets more popular, companies are competing to offer high-contact experiences that are more exciting than gazing at glaciers from the deck of a ship. Last year, for instance, a company named White Desert opened its latest luxury camp in Antarctica. Its sleeping domes, roughly 60 miles from the coast, are perched near an emperor-penguin colony and can be reached only by private jet. Guests, who pay at least $65,000 a stay, are encouraged to explore the continent by plane, Ski-Doos, and Arctic truck before enjoying a gourmet meal whose ingredients are flown in from South Africa.”
Everyone involved with this should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. Christ on a crutch.
“Some argue that tourists become ambassadors for the continent—that is, for its protection and for environmental change. That’s laudable, but unsupported by research, which has shown that in many cases Antarctic tourists become ambassadors for more tourism.”
Duh.
Police Are Requesting Self-Driving Car Footage for Video Evidence by Julia Love (Bloomberg)
““We’ve known for a long time that they are essentially surveillance cameras on wheels,” said Chris Gilliard, a fellow at the Social Science Research Council. “We’re supposed to be able to go about our business in our day-to-day lives without being surveilled unless we are suspected of a crime, and each little bit of this technology strips away that ability.””
They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine. by Chris Hedges (Substack)
“But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to serve U.S. interests. It enriches the weapons manufacturers, weakens the Russian military and isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to Ukraine is irrelevant. “First, equipping our friends on the front lines to defend themselves is a far cheaper way — in both dollars and American lives — to degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United States,” admitted Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.”
Citing Mitch Mcconnell:
“[…] most of the money that’s been appropriated for Ukraine security assistance doesn’t actually go to Ukraine. It gets invested in American defense manufacturing. It funds new weapons and munitions for the U.S. armed forces to replace the older material we have provided to Ukraine. Let me be clear: this assistance means more jobs for American workers and newer weapons for American service-members.””
“Since the end of the Second World War, the government has spent between 45 to 90 percent of the federal budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest sustained activity of the U.S. government. It has stopped mattering — at least to the pimps of war — whether these wars are rational or prudent. The war industry metastasizes within the bowels of the American empire to hollow it out from the inside. The U.S. is reviled abroad, drowning in debt, has an impoverished working class and is burdened with a decayed infrastructure as well as shoddy social services.”
“Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor morale , poor generalship , outdated weapons , desertions , a lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers to fight with shovels, and severe supply shortages — supposed to collapse months ago ? Wasn’t Putin supposed to be driven from power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed to plunge the ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing of the Russian banking system from SWIFT, the international money transfer system, supposed to cripple the Russian economy? How is it that inflation rates in Europe and the United States are higher than in Russia despite these attacks on the Russian economy?”
“And what of the Ukrainian democracy we are fighting to protect? Why did the Ukrainian parliament revoke the official use of minority languages, including Russian, three days after the 2014 coup? How do we rationalize the eight years of warfare against ethnic Russians in the Donbass region before the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022? How do we explain the killing of over 14,200 people and the 1.5 million people who were displaced, before Russia’s invasion took place last year?”
“Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, reconfigured their militaries, often through tens of millions in western loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware. This made the weapons manufacturers billions in profits.”
John Bolton Accidentally Explains Why US Policy On Russia And China Is Wrong by Caitlin Johnstone
“If what you really want is for the US to dominate every inch of this planet completely uncontested, don’t try and tell me that your actual concern is for the people of Ukraine or Taiwan or anywhere else. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Just be honest about what you are and where you stand.”
The algorithmic anti-culture of scale by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“Comparing Meta to the Borg from Star Trek implies a level of sophistication I don’t think they deserve. Comedy writer Jason O. Gilbert came closer to nailing it, writing this week that, “Threads feels like when a local restaurant you enjoy opens a location in an airport.””
“They have millions of “followers,” and yet nothing they create goes anywhere or matters in any tangible sense. It’s like watching two large cryptocurrencies trade with each other. No cultural value is ever really generated, but the numbers go up. And these creators all operate with a nervous intensity that feels almost biblical, constantly jumping to and from recycled trends, hoping to please a finicky and vengeful god that treats them like an invasive species. And, save only a few, most of the Meta creators I’ve met seem to, in return, deeply loathe the content they make, the people who like it, and Meta, itself.”
“As Rest Of World’s Caiwei Chen pointed out this week, TikTok’s Threads-like Twitter alternative Lemon8 launched in the US in February and quickly rocketed to the top of the App store. It has since devolved into a wasteland in the ensuing months. (Have you even heard of it?) Which makes me think that there’s little reason for users from a TikTok-like app to ever need a Twitter-like app.”
Paying to use a site you can’t use anymore by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“I subscribe to the belief that internet trends are defined by a ratio of laziness to social reward. Users will always do the laziest possible thing to achieve the maximum amount clout. So, if every platform becomes either a Twitter alternative or a short-form video feed, but all with their own unique requirements for virality, users won’t make individual posts for each. They will instead shotgun blast all of them with the same posts and bet on the odds that something will breakthrough eventually. Which means everything eventually just becomes a reuploaded video or a screenshot from somewhere else.”
Today In War Propaganda by Caitlin Johnstone
“Reporting that John Bolton likes cluster bombs is like reporting that Snoop Dogg likes weed, or that Flava Flav is fond of clock necklaces. Obviously he’s going to be as enthusiastic about the prospect of children being killed by military explosives as a cartoon mascot for children’s breakfast cereal is for its company’s brand of sweetened starch. He’s cuckoo for war crimes.”
An Enormous Gravity ‘Hum’ Moves Through the Universe by Jonathan O'Callaghan (Quanta)
“Astronomers have found a background din of exceptionally long-wavelength gravitational waves pervading the cosmos. The cause? Probably supermassive black hole collisions, but more exotic options can’t be ruled out.”
More exotic than black-hole collisions? 😇
“While LIGO’s arms are each four kilometers long, pulsar timing arrays effectively use the distance from Earth to each pulsar as a much larger arm — one hundreds or thousands of light-years in length. “What we’ve essentially done is hack the entire galaxy to make a giant gravitational wave antenna,” Taylor said.”
Oh FFS. “Hacked the galaxy”? …
“NANOGrav can’t yet make out individual gravitational wave sources. Instead, the team has found evidence for the background hum of all low-frequency gravitational waves. It’s like a buoy bouncing up and down in a busy harbor — it can’t distinguish the wake of a single boat, but its motion can reveal that there are some big objects slicing through the water.”
“Just the existence of such a population has broad implications for our understanding of galactic evolution in the universe. “It would mean that at the center of some galaxies, there are massive black holes that are not just alone,” Caprini said. “We can probe, through the history of the universe, how galaxies collide and the rate of collisions.””
The detection of the Universe’s background gravitational wave radiation: a scientific triumph by Don Barrett (WSWS)
“A common summary of General Relativity is that matter tells space how to bend and bent space tells matter how to move. But behind this simple explanation lies fiendishly difficult mathematics and predictions once thought so exotic that some felt they would forever remain an exercise in pure thought.”
“[…] physicist Thomas Gold would make a compelling case that these were in fact Zwicky’s neutron stars, but with a twist: the magnetic fields which had once threaded their parent star had been compressed by the same factor as the neutron star itself, intensifying them billionfold or more (in some cases more than a quadrillion) over the magnetic field that orients compasses on the Earth. These magnetic fields, locked into the rapidly spun up neutron stars (whose spin also increases during their compression), would generally lie at some offset from the rotation axis, creating the effect of a lighthouse whose rotating beam periodically announced itself as the neutron star.”
“[…] the physicist Karl Schwarzschild, working on the German front with Russia in World War I in 1916, would produce the first exact mathematical solution to Einstein’s equations of General Relativity, and die only months later at age 42 from illness exacerbated by his time in the trenches.”
“The strongest likely waves that were forecast to routinely occur, lasting only seconds, would be expected to move matter by an almost inconceivably small amount: by a thousandth the width of an individual proton over a path length of a few kilometers. The precision inherent in such a measure is equivalent to measuring the distance to the nearest star to a fineness smaller than the width of a human hair.”
“Analysis of the system showed that both neutron stars weigh about half again more than our Sun, yet the two, each the size of a small city, orbit one another in a volume that would itself fit inside our Sun.”
“The observational precision possible for some measurements when you have a high-precision clock orbiting another object is astonishing. Within a short period of time, it was seen that the orbit was varying in precisely the way expected by General Relativity, another triumph for its predictive power, and that the system was shrinking from the loss of energy through gravitational wave radiation by about 3.5 meters a year (in an orbit with a close approach of about half a million miles), predicting a final inspiral and merger in about 300 million years.”
“[…] nearly a hundred detections have been made, with a new and even more sensitive version of the LIGO detectors entering service on May 24 of this year. What was once thought far beyond human capability is now, thanks to achievements across the sciences and the organized labor of thousands, a routine measurement.”
“[…] plus the drumbeat of orbiting supermassive binary black holes, would create an overall “sloshing” of space-time just as distant storms on an ocean leave their imprint on waves crashing onto a shore. And it is possible that the detection and ultimate characterization of such long-wavelength gravitational radiation in detail may reveal yet-unknown astrophysical processes at work, or a signature of the early Universe.”
“This technique, adopted by NANOGrav, uses the sightlines to dozens (now 68 and growing) of the most rapidly spinning and stable pulsars as yardsticks across cosmic distances. A passing gravitational wave would distort, over months and years, the timebase recorded from each.”
“From the correspondence of experiment with theory, confidence is gained in theory. And where experiment and theory differ, signposts to the refinement of theory are provided, which themselves feed back into refinements in technique.”
Amen. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
“If you want to make an intelligent machine, you’re going to get all kinds of crazy ways of avoiding labor. By saying, ‘don’t pay any attention to the problem’ or sneakily evolving some kind of a psychological distortion where you ‘always do the same thing; don’t worry about anything else.‘ So I think that we’re getting close to intelligent machines, but they’re showing the necessary weaknesses of intelligence.”
There is nothing new under the sun. Most things we know already. The trick is to figure out which things do most people not know that we already know so that you can sell them a simple scam pretending that you have learned something new and that they need it.
Where be your jibes now? by Patricia Lockwood (London Review of Books)
“He did see a future (or shaped it) when all of us simultaneously forgot how to read. It is hard to mark a moment. In the US, it might have been when Go Set a Watchman came out, and so much criticism seemed to proceed from the consensus that Atticus Finch was a real guy and we just found out something bad he had done. Whole books seemed to blink in and out with the cursor of some highlighted line. We seemed less a collective intelligence than a guy holding a mosquito clicker, and what we were doing had less to do with reading than a kind of quick, scanning surveillance – for what, what danger? Not to have seen it coming.”
These people do not represent me. They do impinge the world I get to experience, but that’s always been the way, perhaps less now than at any other time, if we’re being honest. We’re living in a brief window where the cheapness and ease of dissemination outweighs the powers of censorship, but those times are waning, at first slowly and now, increasingly quickly.
“What now seems most prescient is that he anticipated a time when reading would be accomplished more by a kind of hive-like activity rather than individual effort.”
How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City by Julian Lucas (New Yorker)
“He won his first Nebula Award for “Babel-17,” the story of a poet-linguist’s race to decipher a consciousness-scrambling language virus aboard a starship called the Rimbaud. He won a second for “The Einstein Intersection” (1967), a retelling of the Orpheus legend set on a future Earth where alien settlers who venerate the Beatles strive to “template” themselves on their vanished human predecessors. Delany’s precise language and iridescent imagery—flying motorbikes called “pteracycles,” space currents cast as “red and silver sequins flung in handfuls”—distinguished him in a genre whose authors still often boasted about never revising their work. Major critics soon recognized him as one of the most talented science-fiction writers of his generation.”
“The culmination of Delany’s early period was “Nova,” a straightforwardly thrilling narrative by a writer who would soon demand much more of his audience. It’s a race between playboys from powerful galactic dynasties, who are intent on seizing a strategically important mineral from the core of a collapsing star. (The protagonist, Lorq von Ray, is one of science fiction’s most memorable heroes, a Senegalese-Norwegian spaceship captain who is equal parts Ahab, Mario Andretti, and Aristotle Onassis.)”
“The story is movingly recounted in Delany’s “Bread & Wine” (1997), a graphic memoir illustrated by the couple’s friend Mia Wolff. She made them strip naked to draw the fantastically stylized sex scenes; not since Isis raised Osiris from the dead has there been anything quite like the sequence that starts with Delany giving Rickett his first hot shower in months. Nothing was off limits, Wolff told me, except for one sketch of a kiss, which Delany found sentimental. “He fools people with all the blatant sexuality,” she said, comparing Delany to the openly libidinous but privately sensitive French novelist Colette. “He’s protective of his heart—he doesn’t care about his genitals.” The kiss stayed.”
“In 1975, Delany published “Dhalgren,” an eight-hundred-page trip through the smoldering carcass of an American city called Bellona.”
“Genre, in his view, was a mode of reading, and science fiction’s allowed words to express more meanings than any other genre yet devised. He elegantly illustrated the argument by close-reading a single sentence: “The red sun is high, the blue low”—nonsensical in a naturalist novel, but for “s.f.” readers an exoplanet in eight words.”
“Delany’s next far-future novel, “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand” (1984),”
““The Motion of Light in Water” was, on the one hand, a beautifully wrought literary origin story, laced with reflections on the chancy enterprise of autobiography. At the same time, Delany recounted his coming of age in a vanishing world, where sex with thousands of men at theatres, bathhouses, piers, and public rest rooms had awakened him to the infinite breadth not only of desire but of social possibility.”
“He retorted with a pornographic tome called “The Mad Man” (1994), an academic mystery novel whose orgiastic escapades violate countless taboos but exclude acts that present a significant risk of H.I.V. transmission. The book culminates in a scene of consensual erotic degradation that results not in madness but in communion, as the narrator, a Black graduate student in philosophy, puts his home and his body at the disposal of a group of homeless men.”
““Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders” (2012), his sprawling career capstone, is, among other things, a meditation on aging as part of a gay couple. The novel began as a response to Vladimir Nabokov’s observation that one “utterly taboo” theme in American literature was a “Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success.” Delany queered the conceit, imagining two teens from early-twenty-first-century Georgia who fall in love, establish a multiracial “pornotopia” in a rural town called Diamond Harbor, and live long enough to support each other through the ravages of senility in a transformed future.”
“Bellona, Tethys, Morgre, Kolhari—beneath their doubled moons and artificial gravity, amid ancient markets and interspecies cruising grounds, the metropolises of Delany’s fiction are all faces of New York.”
“As we said our goodbyes, it felt like we’d just emerged from one of Delany’s late novels. Their pastoral pornotopias, conjured as though from the homoerotic subtext of “Huckleberry Finn,” had more of a basis in reality than I’d suspected, one hidden by the shopworn map that divides the country into poor rural traditionalists and libertine city folk. Delany hadn’t abandoned science fiction to wallow in pornography, as some contended; he’d stopped imagining faraway worlds to describe queer lives deemed unreal in this one.”
Mission: Impossible − Dead Reckoning: Part One by Brian Tallerico (Roger Ebert.com)
“Runaway trains will always have more inherent visceral power than waves of animated bad guys, and McQuarrie knows how to use it sparingly to make an action film that both feels modern and old-fashioned at the same time. These films don’t over-rely on CGI, ensuring we know that it’s really Mr. Cruise jumping off that motorcycle. When punches connect, bodies fly, and cars crash into each other—we feel it instead of just passively observing it. The action here is so wonderfully choreographed that only “ John Wick: Chapter 4 ” compares for the best in the genre this year.”
Understand by Ted Chiang (Anna's Archive)
“Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and -self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.”
That’s Forth (Wikipedia), bro.
“What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.”
“Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven’t filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It’s become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthesic knowledge.”
“Blinding, joyous, fearful symmetry surrounds me. So much is incorporated within patterns now that the entire universe verges on resolving itself into a picture. I’m closing in on the ultimate gestalt: the context in which all knowledge fits and is illuminated, a mandala, the music of the spheres, kosmos.”
“My mind is taxing the resources of my brain. A biological structure of this size and complexity can just barely sustain a self-knowing psyche. But the self-knowing psyche is also self-regulating, to an extent. I give my mind full use of what’s available, and restrain it from expanding beyond that. But it’s difficult: I’m cramped inside a bamboo cage that doesn’t let me sit down or stand up. If I try to relax, or try to extend myself fully, then agony, madness.”
“I must keep a tighter rein over my self. When I’m in control at the metaprogramming level, my mind is perfectly self-repairing; I could restore myself from states that resemble delusion or amnesia. But if I drift too far on the metaprogramming level, my mind might become an unstable structure, and then I would slide into a state beyond mere insanity. I will program my mind to forbid itself from moving beyond its own reprogramming range.”
The Self-Made Man Is A Myth by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“Anyone who is capable of honest self-reflection and critical thinking understands that the “self-made man” is a myth of our culture; that anyone who amasses a fortune does so on the backs of many other people whose work made it possible, and found the opportunity to do so because of the circumstances they happened upon by chance of birth, conditioning and sheer dumb luck.”
“One doesn’t for example become aware of the manipulations of the powerful and the deceptions of the media because they are particularly smart and virtuous, they do so because they were lucky enough to find information from others which helped them form this understanding, and because their personal conditioning allowed them to take that information in and let it inform their worldview.”
“Obviously we must all try to do our very best with the hand that we were dealt in life, but it’s probably a good idea to harbor some compassion for those who don’t get it as right as we do in our eyes. We were all born into a world saturated with propaganda and dominated by abusive systems, and ultimately the degree to which we are able to see our way around in that world says as much about how good or bad we are as a seed landing on rich or sandy earth says about the quality of the seed.”
“Conservatives are everything they used to make fun of liberals for being: whiny, easily offended crybabies who run around looking for nonsense excuses to feel offended and act like victims. They’re a bunch of ridiculous, permanently triggered culture warriors and drama queens.”
(A) Um, OK. Some interesting stuff, but WHOA. (B) You’re right; just let it flow over you. (C) Terrified that this is how I sound to other people.
“The Great Pyramid is 11/7, which is the base to the height. So 117 and 11.7 squared is 137 and that’s the number of times the sarcophagus will fit in the King’s chamber.”
OMG BWAHAHAHAHAHA.
That was a really good one. He had me going for a bit, but that numerology just went way off the deep end. Good times! Loving it.
🤯🤯🤯
And then you have the guys in the video you sent yesterday, who are intelligent, but believe the most fantastical things. Or have a weird idea of how physics works. “100 years ago, put light through celluloid, you got an image. And sound.”
Wait. What? I was with him up to the “And sound” part. The sound is not encoded into celluloid AFAIK.
It’s a great thing to discuss, though! How to preserve culture/knowledge/information in a format that the future can read?
This Grant guy, though! Goddamn I can’t imagine how many people who are stoned out of their minds think that he is a GOD.
“If you’re a mountain climber, then you’re not going to want to climb the hill behind your house. You’re going to climb Everest, or Kilimanjaro, something significant.”
No. This is exactly wrong. This is how we *think* we should act, but it’s destructive and counter-productive and psychological poison. Stop thinking that the hill behind your house isn’t good enough. No-one cares. No-one is paying attention to you. Just be happy. Walk in the woods. Climb a big hill. It’s enough. You’ll be tired. Forget Everest.
“Grant: […] every action must have an equal opposite reaction.
Interlocutor: Yeah.
Grant: So, for some people who are expanding into the fifth dimension, one over five is two, so some people are gonna go into the flat dimension.
Interlocutor: Mmhmm.
Grant: Like, literally, there is an expansion of consciousness happening concomitant to a contraction of it. You cannot have it any other way! Look at any any movie. LORD OF THE RINGS.”
This guy is hilarious. I pray that he’s just putting us on, because it would be lovely. But, I fear that he believes that he is spitting truth, hard as nails.
Still,
“Just love and be loved and relax. Don’t take the journey too seriously. Have fun with it. You know, I think that’s the biggest thing. I don’t think the world is a difficult place because people hate each other. I think it can be a difficult place because we hate ourselves. But it is through the process of learning to accept and love ourselves, that we will learn to accept and love the world around us, and then your entire experience and world around you, will totally transform. And this is what it means to be the change you want to see in the world.”
Once again, a smart guy who believes that individual agency can conquer any sort of external influences. No food? No clean water? Be the change you want to see in the world. This kind of philosophy only works for people who in a post-Communist utopia where material needs are satisfied to a degree and reliability that you can focus exclusively on your mind and your feelings. It’s great for selling books and seminars, but it’s just not applicable for 90% of the world’s population. People in other parts of the world can’t even think about stuff like this because they are either malnourished now or were malnourished during their formative years. They haven’t been able to live in nine countries and learn eight languages and sail on their father’s boat.
This is, in a nutshell, a horseshit philosophy that is extremely dangerous to sell to people to whom it cannot possibly apply. They will use it as a hammer and see everything as a nail. They will not blame the philosophy, but will double down, and blame themselves. The blame is baked in. If the approach doesn’t work, it’s because you weren’t trying hard enough. If your boat already floats, this might help keep you on course. If your boat is sinking or halfway underwater, it’s worse than useless—because you will expend energy on “thinking your way to success” instead of investing it somewhere that might actually help you.
These people are all fools or shysters. The young guy (Stephen Bartlett?) interviewing offers as proof that AI is amazing is that his miniscule mind is already satisfied with it. *applause*
The older guy seems like the kind of guy who’s been smart his whole life and has developed an incredible inability to conceive of a world in which he could ever be wrong. He flatters the host by calling him one of the most intelligent people he’s ever met. What in God’s name?
They will convince the world that two geniuses agree that ChatGPT is the way to go.
Gawdat says at 33:15 that he could have ChatGPT write a book for him.
“The only reason why I might not want to follow that path is because, you know what? I’m not interested. I’m not interested to continue to compete in this capitalist world. As a human, I’ve made up my mind a long time ago that I will want less and less and less in my life.”
It’s a nice sentiment, but it’s also spoken by someone who’s rich beyond all of his desires. He doesn’t need to compete anymore because he’s already won.
This is two multimillionaires having a two-hour conversation, massaging each other’s egos and not really saying anything new or interesting.
If AI can ruin our culture and society, it just means that we built a dumpster fire in the first place. It means that we have a system that values people and humans so little that it prefers whatever happens to be the first feasible simulacrum of a human. It will be like letting the prokaryotes take back over.
Gawdat at 41:00, expressing his anger.
“We fucked up. We always said ‘don’t put them on the open Internet. Don’t teach them to code. And don’t have agents working with them. Until we know what we’re putting out in the world. Until we find a way to make sure that they have our best interests in mind. Humanity’s stupidity is affecting people who’ve done nothing wrong. Our greed is affecting the innocent ones. The reality of the matter, Stephen, is that this is an arms race. It has no interest in what the average human gets out of it. Every line of code being written in AI today is to beat the other guy. It’s not to improve the life of the third party.”
Not “Humanity”, but the “self-selected elites”. Once again, capitalism ruins everything.
And he would go on to basically say that the problem is not AI or LLMs or whatever: it’s the system of capitalism we have, the system of society that we have, that is so zero-sum that we can’t think in any terms other than to “win”. Win what? No-one can really say. People just want to be feel secure, to see how they will not become insecure unfairly, that they are appreciated and rewarded for participating usefully, that they are given a chance to be useful, that they are entertained, that they can interact socially. That’s it. There is nothing in there that says that everything must be “bigger, better, faster, more” All. The. Damned. Time. In fact, the faster things get, the less likely it is that most people will be fulfilled. People’s fulfillment is almost completely out of their hands right now. They don’t know what they want anymore. They are convinced to want things that require a tremendous machine to produce, a machine that, coincidentally, also transfers most of the world’s wealth to a paltry few hands while convincing the rest of the world not to revolt by producing a few shiny baubles and trinkets.
At 41:45, Gawdat again:
“And people will tell you that this is all for you. And look at the reactions of humans to AI. We’re either ignorant: people who will tell you, oh no no, this is not happening. AI will never be creative, it will never compose music—where are you living? You have the “kids” (I call them): you have them all over the Internet, they say ‘oh my God, it squeaks, look at it. It’s orange in color! Amazing! I can’t believe that AI can do this!’ We have snake-oil salesman, who are simply saying, ‘copy this. Put it in ChatGPT, then go to YouTube, knick that thingie, don’t respect copyright or intellectual property of anyone, place it in a video, and now you’re going to make $100 a day. Plus, we have these token evangelists: basically, people who say, ‘this is it; the world is going to end’. I don’t think that is going to happen. You have your token evangelists, who are saying, ‘oh we’re going to do this, we going to cure cancer.‘ Again, not a reality. And you have a very few people who are saying, ‘what are we going to do about it?’”
In fairness, it is composing and painting and producing text, but the bar is so low that it’s not really competing with human endeavors. What it is, though, is filling a massive gap that had traditionally been filled with mediocre human endeavor. That will be gone. In that sense—even though it is still not conscious and not intelligent—our shitty system will imbue it with enough importance that it will allow most of what is good about society to be eroded away over night before we can even think of stopping it. Our structures for living good lives will be gone. The only difference with this AI “revolution” is that it’s not affecting important people. 90% of the world has already had this happen during the first 45 years of neoliberalism.
“What went wrong in the 20th century? Interestingly, we have given too much power to people who didn’t assume the responsibility. […] We have disconnected power and responsibility.”
“I feel compassion for the rest of the world. I feel that this is wrong. I feel that for someone’s life to be affected by the actions of others, without have a say in how those actions should be, is the ultimate, is the top-level of stupidity from humans.”
He’s really just describing how the world works for 95% of the population, though. This isn’t to say what he’s saying is wrong, but that he’s saying it now because there is finally a real danger that the elites will be swept up in the madness that they sow every day. There is a real danger that money cannot protect you. That is frightening to the powers-that-be.
I think the more interesting things he has to say are about our underlying system, which makes the prospect of introducing something like even a half-functioning AI so much more … difficulty to handle with grace.
At 1:00:00,
“It is here. This is what drives me mad. It’s already here. It’s happening. We are all idiots, slaves to the Instagram recommendation engine.”
HAHAHAHAHA. Not all of us. Not even most of us. There are way too many people on this planet who are not dealing with this horseshit.
Just as aside, though, he says that “70 years later, we are still struggling with the possibility of a nuclear war, because of the Russian threat of saying, ‘if you mess with me, I’m going to go nuclear.‘” This just goes to show how woefully brainwashed even intelligent people are about the real world, the stuff that really matters. He is an Egyptian. His first example of nuclear brinkmanship is Russia, not the U.S. It’s incredible. As he’s discussing how we’re all slaves to an algorithm, he shows how even his big brain has been enslaved by America propaganda.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is convincing the world he didn’t exist.
A little later, Mo and Stephen make a few jokes about the evil Chinese and the evil North Koreans and how there would be no possibility for cooperation because of how evil those countries are. Shake my head. They are so fucking in-the-tank ignorant about global politics and they think they can solve our problems for us? I shudder.
At 01:04:00, “They’re 1B times smarter than you.”
Um, Ok. Sure.
At 01:26:00, they discuss how to address this coming problem: their only solution is to work within the extremely restrictive incentive system offered by the current system: what makes more money? This is most likely the correct way to approach the problem; we don’t have time to fix the system before we tackle the AIpocalypse, but, with the show clocking it at almost 2 hours, it would have been nice to acknowledge that the only reason their ensuing discussion is going to sound like a WSJ/conservative-think-tank/Silicon Valley startup round table is because we have to go to war with the army we have.
At 01:28:30, they talk about how international competition will always lead to other countries “letting it rip” with AI research/development, even if a country were to tax AI research/revenues in order to deal with the damage it causes. It’s the same as climate change.
Stephen says,
“It’s kind of like technology broadly; it’s kind of like what’s happened in Silicon Valley. There’ll be these senators who think that tax-efficient founders get good capital gains […] Portugal have said that there’s no tax on crypt … loads of my friends have got on a plane. And they’re building their crypto companies where there’s no tax.”
Hahahahaha. You should get better friends. Honestly.
He then bitches about GDPR as a failure because it’s “annoying”. Yeah, sure, if you just click away all of your data on every web site. The current implementation is a bit annoying, of course. But I’d rather have that than the alternative, which is that I don’t get any control over my data. The next step is to have the browser fill in GDPR automatically with your preferences: just as restrictive as possible, every time. Problem solved. Again, the problem here is parasites making money off of the CO2 that you produce.
At 01:43:00, Gawdat says,
“I don’t think we’ll be hiding from the machines; I think we’ll be hiding from what humans are doing with the machines. […] In the long term, when humans stop hurting humans because the machines are in charge, we’re all going to be fine.”
Sure, sure, OK. A bit of post-Communist luxury fantasizing. I’ll take it.
The fediverse is a privacy nightmare by Bloonface (Café Lob-on)
“It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely secure. Worse, anything you post on Mastodon is, once sent, for all intents and purposes completely irrevocable. To function, the network relies upon the good faith participation of thousands of independently owned and operated servers, but a bad actor simply has to behave not in good faith and there is absolutely no mechanism to stop them or to get around this. Worse, whatever legal protections are in place around personal data are either non-applicable or would be stunningly hard to enforce.”
“How many other servers have been compromised or had the computers with their databases seized? And in what jurisdictions? How many servers hold your posts without you knowing about it? And what stupid clownish things are they doing with them? You simply have no way of knowing. But your posts are only as secure and private as the least secure and private server that has them.”
But this has always been the case: anyone can screenshot anything, even if it’s otherwise inaccessible.
“To reiterate: you absolutely should not post anything on the fediverse or Mastodon that you are not comfortable with being archived permanently by the absolute worst people you can think of .”
“GDPR does confer significant rights of deletion of information, and rights to direct how your data is processed, or whether it should be processed at all. But the problem with this is enforcement. How do you serve legal papers on a person who is potentially fictitious, in a jurisdiction halfway around the world?”
“How does this even work in a GDPR context, anyway? Does a Mastodon server act as a “controller” that directs the other servers that process its posts, or is it just a “processor”… or both at once? If I post on Mastodon.social and my post gets syndicated to a different server, who is responsible for that? Am I a “user” of the other server and thus gain GDPR rights over it no matter where it’s located jurisdiction-wise, or is that server a “processor” directed by my server, the “controller”? Can I raise a subject access request against them to get my data? If they tell me “no, I won’t erase it”… what then?”
“As far as I can tell there is no actual settled answer to all of this and nobody is particularly exercised about finding one. This is partially because the fediverse is so small fry in the scheme of things, and the infrastructure so atomised, that it’s deemed to “not really matter” in the same way that a local cupcake shop’s email marketing doesn’t really matter to national privacy regulators.”
How can we compare expressive power between two Turing-complete languages? by David Young (StackExchange)
“[…] what if there is actually no way to tell 1 and 2 apart? Then we would actually say that are observationally equivalent! Observational equivalence captures the idea of what it means for two things to be indistinguishable inside a programming language.”
“Say we have operator overloading and the ability to redefine existing function. If we overload * to do something weird, like return the first argument but we don’t overload + . We can now distinguish between those two expressions! By adding that feature, we broke an observational equivalence. The expressions 2 * 3 and 3 + 3 used to be observationally equivalent. Then we added operator overloading and now they are observationally distinct.”
Let your final thought be one of hope, old friend by ZMS (Reddit)
“My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation’s history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to... [More]”
Published by marco on 29. Jul 2023 13:25:25 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 29. Jul 2023 13:27:57 (GMT-5)
“My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation’s history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.”
Published by marco on 28. Jul 2023 03:11:40 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 28. Jul 2023 03:48:45 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The Triumph of Greece’s Authoritarian Right Is the Future the European Union Wants (Jacobin)
“Greece has now been following the Troika’s blueprint for well over a decade, down to the smallest details. GDP per capita is less than two-thirds of its 2009 level. The average annual wage for a Greek worker in 2009 was €21,600; today it is €16,200.”
“The leading players in the EU — above all, the German government of Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaüble — relied upon an understanding of the Eurozone crisis that was childish, self-serving, and economically illiterate.”
“[…] the speech delivered by Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas:”“Business bad? Fuck you, pay me.
Had a fire? Fuck you, pay me.
The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me.”
Because Germany and Greece are not business partners. They are in an extractive, extortionate relationship. Greece pays Germany to not destroy it too quickly. To the point: Greece empties its public coffers to protect the fortunes of a handful. Fuck you, pay me, indeed.
“[…] in contrast with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, Mitsotakis hasn’t faced so much as a token reprimand from the European Commission or the big EU member-states. They clearly approve of the violent, lawless methods that Mitsotakis has used against refugees attempting to enter Greece, with the EU’s own border control agency, Frontex, acting as an enabler of such criminality.”
“[…] given the choice between dealing with Tsípras in June 2015 or Mitsotakis in June 2023, they wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. That should be food for thought when we discuss the potential for democratic reform of the EU.”
Russian (Melo)drama by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“The all-powerful dictator, the ruthless, merciless, brutal Hitler of our time, is suddenly revealed as weak in the face of a few thousand infantrymen and their leader, who turned back at what appears to be the first suggestion they do so.”
“Did he think some sizable proportion of the Russian military would go over to his side? Of the 25,000 troops under his command, roughly a fifth went with him. None of his officers did. What was his point, his objective, his best outcome? Where in Moscow was he planning to go once he got there—assuming for a sec he thought he would?”
“I find it impossible to accept that Prigozhin ever thought—or even intended, indeed—to reach the Russian capital. We are left wondering what the true story is. There is self-mythologizing and there is delusion. If we find evidence of the former in Prigozhin’s conduct, do we now detect he suffered from the latter?”
““Big ambitions and personal interests led to treason,” Putin said in the brief speech he delivered to the nation Saturday. I argue here in favor of this assessment: It was a frustrated megalomaniac, not a grand strategist with a plan for a new, reformed Russia, who set out from Rostov to Moscow last weekend. Putin called Prigozhin’s conduct a betrayal and he called it a mutiny. He did not call it a coup or anything like one, which would imply more organization and design and less in the way of one man’s shoot-the-moon ego trip.”
“My mind has wandered often over the events of these past days, and then over the plentiful images of Prigozhin in uniform with a visage of soldierly determination under his helmet. And then it drifted into thoughts of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and finally Stockton Rush, who just killed himself and four others in that submersible cylinder looking for the Titanic. These are rich men in search of grand adventure and exotic sorts of distinction—in space, at the bottom of the ocean. They all want to appear as heroes before the great, broad masses, having made fortunes by way of other than heroic endeavors.”
Breaking Bread with Authoritarians by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Antony Blinken was extremely stupid to elevate diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI as we’re saying now, to a principle of American diplomacy when he was named the Biden regime’s secretary of state.”
“Diversity! absolutely. But these fools talk only of diversity based on the color of one’s skin or one’s gender rather than the content of ones character. No diversity of opinion or class is allowed.”
““From our perspective, it has never been as simple as drawing up jerseys. It has always been about seeing those long-term trends and trying to point those trends in the right direction and then being prepared to have a more sophisticated approach to how we build relationships with a range of different countries.” I wish the French would make up a word just for this guy: Sullivan is a master bullshitier in our household. It has always been about issuing jerseys, hats and such like, always in black and white.”
Sure, sure. Saudi Arabia, India/Modi OK. Russia/China bad.
“I once had lunch in Bangalore with Ramachandra Guha, the distinguished historian. We were talking about India’s exceptional diversity, which I have long counted its single most admirable feature. Guha pulled out a 100–rupee note and told me to count the languages on it. There were 17. “We’re going to lose this,” he said ruefully. This is what I find most unforgivable about Modi and his kind. They are erasing the best India has to give the world in the name of the ideology known as Hindutva, an abominable stew of xenophobic fanaticism born of an insecurity”
Wollt Ihr die Welt in Flammen sehen? by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“[…] offenbar hat die naive Hoffnung auf einen „Regime Change“ in Moskau unsere Meinungsmacher so fest im Griff, dass man sich dafür sogar Chaos und Bürgerkrieg in einem Land herbeiwünscht, das die größte Atommacht der Welt ist. Es kann einem wirklich mittlerweile angst und bange werden, wenn man sich den geistigen Zustand unserer Eliten vor Augen hält.”
“Der Politikwissenschaftler wurde von den Medien zu einer Art „Christian Drosten des Ukraine-Kriegs“ aufgebaut und darf in zahllosen Talkshow- und Interviewauftritten der Öffentlichkeit seine Sicht der Dinge erläutern; und die ist gnadenlos transatlantisch, pro-ukrainisch und bellizistisch. Keine Frage, Masala ist ein Falke, wie er im Buche steht. Dass er in den Medien oft nicht so wahrgenommen wird, liegt wohl vor allem daran, dass ebenjene Medien nicht mehr den gesamten Debattenraum abbilden, sondern fast nur noch Falken zu Wort kommen lassen. Und im Konzert der Falken ist sogar ein Carlo Masala nur eine Stimme von vielen.”
“Normalerweise wird in solche Talkshows ja zumindest ein einzelner Gast eingeladen, dessen meist hoffnungslose Aufgabe es ist, dem Meinungsmonopol der anderen Gäste zu widersprechen und das „Krokodil“ im medialen Kasperletheater zu geben. Das hat dann auch die erzieherische Wirkung, dass dem Teil der Öffentlichkeit, der ebenfalls kritische Positionen vertritt, vor Augen geführt wird, wie einsam sie mit ihrer Meinung liegen und wie falsch diese doch ist.”
“Es wurde also ein sehr kleiner, aber sehr mächtiger Meinungshorizont abgebildet, der im Paralleluniversum Anne Will die gesamte Debatte repräsentieren sollte. Toll.”
“Auf einmal war der ultranationalistische Oligarch und Söldnerführer Jewgeni Prigoschin, der bei objektiver Betrachtung eigentlich all das verkörpern müsste, was der politisch-mediale Komplex Deutschlands abgrundtief verachtet, „unsere Hoffnung“.”
“Prowestliche Kräfte sind in Russland nahezu inexistent, und Personen wie unser Darling Alexei Nawalny haben in Russland ungefähr so viel Rückhalt bei Militär, Staatsapparat und Zivilbevölkerung, wie der in Deutschland hochgepuschte „Putschist“ Prinz Reuß mit seinen Reichsbürgern hierzulande hat.”
“In wessen Interesse soll es sein, dass direkt an der östlichen EU-Grenze ein militärischer Konflikt zwischen atomar bewaffneten „Warlords“ entsteht? Das wäre für die gesamte Welt ein schockierender Albtraum und kein wünschenswertes Szenario.”
The Elite War on Free Thought by Matt Taibbi (Scheer Post)
“Not long ago we were told in no uncertain terms the Russians blew up their own Nord Stream pipeline, that they were the only suspect. Today the U.S. government is telling us it has known since last June that Ukrainian forces planned it, with the approval of the highest military officials. But we’re not expected to say anything. We’re expected to forget.”
“We’re building a global mass culture that sees everything in black and white, fears difference, and abhors memory. It’s why people can’t read books anymore and why, when they see people like Russell who don’t fit into obvious categories, they don’t know what to do except point and shriek,”
‘Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic’ by Tim Smedley (The Guardian)
“Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and lakes and returned polluted, allows me to live this way. It will have to stop – not through some altruistic hand-wringing desire to do better, but because even in England this amount of water will soon be unavailable. Like many parts of the world, we are now using more water than we can sustainably supply. As surface water and groundwater levels dwindle year by year, a crisis awaits. It’s simple maths. Demand is outstripping supply.”
“In every annual risk report since 2012, the World Economic Forum has included water crisis as one of the top-five risks to the global economy. Half of the global population – almost 4 billion people – live in areas with severe water scarcity for at least one month of the year, while half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round.”
“Australian infrastructure firm Macquarie owned Thames Water between 2007 and 2017, leaving it with £2bn of debt , while paying its investors, according to one analysis, on average between 15.5% and 19% in dividends a year. Instead of making changes to a system that was supporting such poor levels of investment, in August 2021, Ofwat approved a new £1bn equity takeover of Southern Water . The new owner was Macquarie.”
That’s just legal robbery. Spinning tales of cheap debt while walking away with all of the assets. A scam. Nothing more; nothing less.
“Tucker is Australian and says mates back home find it funny that England can have a water problem, given its wet reputation. “We do get a lot of grey days. But grey doesn’t mean rain. Even drizzle doesn’t mean rain.” He gives me a quiz question: “Which Australian state capital city gets more rain on average every year than London?” I guess Sydney. “They all do.””
“[…] we have a population poorly educated in the need for water saving or living with drought. And water is too cheap – or at least not valued. When we speak, Thames Water’s combined water supply and wastewater charge is about £2.20 per 1,000l. “You pay the same for one litre of water at WH Smith at the train station,” he says.”
“[…] In the first year of the scheme, farmers near Brighton were offered £35 per hectare of overwinter cover crops. In some regions, this has since increased to £109/ha . The simple calculation is that it’s more expensive for water companies to treat the water than it is to pay the farmers not to pollute it in the first place.”
Thank god it’s cheaper as well as less energy-intensive and environmentally friendlier, else there wouldn’t have been a real reason to do it. 🤦♂️ We think money is the only way to measure value. And then scammers manipulate that belief by making their costs cheap. But someone pays; someone always pays—but not them. They walk away with millions and billions, having made millions of people’s lives more miserable while making one person rich. Cool system, bro.
“We canalised our rivers, drained our land, overpumped our groundwater, dried our wetlands, burned our peat, killed off our keystone species, all in the belief that modern engineering had decoupled us from our dependence on the natural system. It was always hubris. The climate crisis hasn’t caused the water crisis we now face, it has simply shone a punishing, unyielding light on it.”
How Plastics Are Poisoning Us by Elizabeth Kolbert (New Yorker)
“Plastics are made from by-products of oil and gas refining; many of the chemicals involved, such as benzene and vinyl chloride, are carcinogens. In addition to their main ingredients, plastics may contain any number of additives. Many of these—for example, polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, which confer water resistance—are also suspected carcinogens. Many of the others have never been adequately tested.”
“The researchers found that a single bag from CVS leached more than thirteen thousand compounds; a bag from Walmart leached more than fifteen thousand. “It is becoming increasingly clear that plastics are not inert in the environment,” the team wrote. Steve Allen, a researcher at Canada’s Ocean Frontier Institute who specializes in microplastics, tells Simon, “If you’ve got an IQ above room temperature, you have to understand that this is not a good material to have in the environment.””
“Then, there’s the threat posed by the particles themselves. Microplastics—and in particular, it seems, microfibres—can get pulled deep into the lungs. People who work in the synthetic-textile industry, it has long been known, suffer from high rates of lung disease.”
“Nurdles, which are key to manufacturing plastic products, are small enough to qualify as microplastics. (It’s been estimated that ten trillion nurdles a year leak into the oceans, most from shipping containers that tip overboard.) Usually, nurdles are composed of “virgin” polymers, but, as the New Delhi plant demonstrates, it is also possible to produce them from used plastic.”
“He learned that nearly half the bales of PET that arrive at the plant can’t be reprocessed because they’re too contaminated, either by other kinds of plastic or by random crap. “Yield is a problem for us,” the plant’s commercial director concedes.”
“Under public pressure, a company like Coca-Cola or Nestlé pledges to insure that the packaging for its products gets recycled. When the pressure eases, it quietly abandons its pledge. Meanwhile, it lobbies against any kind of legislation that would restrict the sale of single-use plastics. Franklin-Wells quotes Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, who once said, “If the public thinks recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.””
“Only containers labelled No. 1 ( PET ) and No. 2 (high-density polyethylene) get melted down with any regularity, Schaub learns, and to refashion the resulting nurdles into anything useful usually requires the addition of lots of new material.“ No matter what your garbage service provider is telling you, numbers 3, 4, 6 and 7 are not getting recycled,” Schaub writes. (The italics are hers.) “Number 5 is a veeeery dubious maybe.””
“Americans, the report noted, produce more plastic waste each year than the residents of any other country—almost five hundred pounds per person, nearly twice as much as the average European and sixteen times as much as the average Indian.”
““So long as we’re churning out single-use plastic . . . we’re trying to drain the tub without turning off the tap,” Simon writes. “We’ve got to cut it out.””
“If much of contemporary life is wrapped up in plastic, and the result of this is that we are poisoning our kids, ourselves, and our ecosystems, then contemporary life may need to be rethought. The question is what matters to us, and whether we’re willing to ask ourselves that question.”
Ellsberg and ‘The Process of My Awakening’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Let us ask at this point who was crying on the men’s room floor at Haverford, that we can understand the moment for what it was. Was it the eager Marine Ellsberg had been, the RAND war planner, the technocrat who toured the carnage in Vietnam, the Defense Department analyst? Or was it the person Ellsberg had just then become, mourning all that he had been and all that he had done until that moment—the Marine and the analyst having that very evening died?”
“Courage is contagious, and coming into contact or exposing yourself to people who are taking those risks is very helpful as a first step toward doing it yourself.”
“Ellsberg’s first wakeful act was to rip the veil from the pointless savagery of our Vietnam adventure. Few of us will ever have occasion to do anything of remotely comparable magnitude. But each of us, providing we each summon the courage, can act as truly, as faithfully, as loyally to the human cause as Ellsberg did. No illusions here: Most of us prefer the irresponsibility of slumber. But for those who so choose, we can allow ourselves to awaken. We can accept the burdens knowledge always brings with it, just as Dan Ellsberg showed us in his own life.”
Prestige Production by Nick Pemberton (Scheer Post)
“Seinfeld represents Zizek’s communist utopia where class contradiction is overcome and only jealousy remains, for society is fair and we succeed based on our own merits.”
“He resents hippies because they see themselves as too good for capitalism. He knows that his mother had no choice but to comply with capitalism so he rightly sees this anti-capitalist attitude as a product of upper class privilege. However he fails to see that while anti-capitalist sentiment may come from the middle class, it nonetheless is the correct sentiment.”
“As monopolies form, companies choose to reinvest in themselves rather than labor because labor doesn’t produce as much profit. But there is no real value (which comes from labor) in this process and this only works out for the big corporations because they can get away with it. As a result there is not even real gains in technological development.”
“We have reached the point where companies find it more profitable to invest in money rather than goods. From Arthur Allen, KFF Health News: “Cisplatin and carboplatin are among scores of drugs in shortage, including 12 other cancer drugs, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder pills, blood thinners, and antibiotics. Covid-hangover supply chain issues and limited FDA oversight are part of the problem, but the main cause, experts agree, is the underlying weakness of the generic drug industry. Made mostly overseas, these old but crucial drugs are often sold at a loss or for little profit. Domestic manufacturers have little interest in making them, setting their sights instead on high-priced drugs with plump profit margins.””
Tech Erosion by Peter Welch (Still Drinking)
“Part of the nonsense is due to the way America has decided to flood international travel points with security mummery to ward off imaginary threats. The resulting tedious gauntlet then becomes overwhelming to the underpaid personnel, so America rolls up its Goodwill bin flight jacket sleeves and starts automating bits of bad system, because rethinking the assumptions that inform a broken system would cause the whole country to collapse.”
“Going through US customs as a US citizen always irks me. In European countries, going through customs as a US citizen is, for me, going under the sign that says “Nothing to Declare” and leaving the airport. Then on my way back, I stand in three lines: One to scan my passport in a machine that gives me a questionnaire and a receipt, one to hand my ticket, receipt, and passport to a human for human scanning or whatever they’re supposed to do, and finally one to give my receipt to a security guard, i[n] case I dropped out of the ceiling between the two human components of customs for the privilege of being caught leaving without a receipt.”
“People are already losing their jobs. It’s not only the artists, whom nobody cares about until they’re gone, it’s copyeditors and clerks and designers. And just like self-checkouts and airport entry surveys, the humans are replaced by something a little bit worse. But it’s cheaper, and novelty often obscures indignity long enough for it to entrench, and we all accept that everything is a little bit slower, a little bit less trustworthy, and everything has a little more friction to grind us down over each day. The replacement bots could be honed into better tools, but who will bother once they’re accepted? Market trends always converge on giving us as little as possible.”
“The luddites had a point: their profession was destroyed and replaced by something worse, for the benefit of fewer people. Mechanization was absolutely crushing to the working class and we spent a century clawing some rights and dignity back. We now live in an era where those rights are being actively stripped in the midst of another technological breakthrough.”
“As the art bots rush to crystalize our artistic culture, shipping more and more industries into imitation engines risks crystalizing the mechanisms that accelerate the exploitation inherent to capitalism. There is a very hard wall at the end of that road, and I shudder to think how many off-ramps we’re shutting down.”
Doing Fieldwork in China During and Beyond the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Study by Xiao Tan, Nahui Zhen, Leiheng Wang And Yue Zhao (Made in China Journal)
“During interviews, they have omitted certain questions when faced with sensitivity issues raised by their sources.”
No more “are you going to stop beating your wife?”-type questions? 🙃
Op-ed: Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out by Mark Bayliss (Ars Technica)
“However, this ignores three salient facts:”
- Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared
- Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them
- When given the choice between a tool that is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint and a tool that is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former
I agree with all of this, but I also don’t think that people are aware of what they are trading away. Ordinarily, they trade away their privacy and their data and their ability to operate safely, securely, and without surveillance. In this case, the security of the free-software version is actually worse, so people are rightfully staying away. But, that doesn’t mean that people are woefully unaware that their messaging services are terrible—and that there are better alternatives. I have family members who still use Facebook Messenger for everything, which is ridiculous. Then, they ask me why their phone battery won’t last. These people could easily communicate with Apple Messages instead, which is end-to-end encrypted and uses almost no battery relative to Facebook Messenger.
“They have a very different perspective from someone who may not even understand what a server is—there’s an increasing number of people who simply never grew up having to comprehend the idea of a server or even the notion of using a desktop OS. Those people are quite simply talking on a completely different wavelength from people who are already all-in on the fediverse.”
“This is not really compatible with the demands that running an instance places on its owners. Here we have a catch-22: Everyone should join small instances, but the costs of running those instances will get more prohibitive the more [people] join them. But trying to recoup those costs in any sustainable or consistent way will lead to that instance getting blocked, which means nobody will join them. If you do somehow keep growing through charity or goodwill alone, your instance will become big enough that it isn’t “small,” so naturally nobody should join it.”
“I’m also not convinced that repeatedly pushing away any entity with any kind of resources and ability to match the server scaling that a proper decentralized network demands is going to help anything. You’re not going to be able to run a social network the size and breadth of Twitter purely based on generosity when the scaling of the network is so abysmal, or otherwise accepting a significant level of centralization. The only other alternative, really, is that you don’t have one.”
Building data-centric apps with a reactive relational database by Nicholas Schiefer, Geoffrey Litt, Johannes Schickling, Daniel Jackson (Riffle Systems)
“In data-centric apps, much of the complexity of building and modifying the app comes from managing and propagating state. Here’s an interesting thought experiment. Many software developers think that it is much easier to build command line tools than GUI apps, or even text-user interface (TUI) apps. Why is that?”
Yeah, duh. That’s why you abstract the UI.
“In existing app architectures, a large amount of effort and code is expended on collecting and reshaping data. A traditional web app might first convert from SQL-style tuples to a Ruby object, then to a JSON HTTP-response, and then finally to a frontend Javascript object in the browser. Each of these transformations is performed separately, and there is often considerable developer effort in threading a new column all the way through these layers.”
“There’s also a similarity to end-user focused tools like Airtable : Airtable users express data dependencies in a spreadsheet-like formula language that operates primarily on tables rather than scalar data.”
Echoes of Rich Harris and Svelte.
“Frameworks like React, Svelte, and Solid have popularized this style in web UI development, and end-users have built complex reactive programs in spreadsheets for decades.”
Whoops. Missed the point here. Svelte is not very much like React actually.
“[…] database reads and writes are modeled as side effects which must interact with the reactive system. Many applications only pull new data when the user makes an explicit request like reloading a page; keeping data updated in realtime usually requires a manual approach to sending diffs between a server and client.”
Or use something like MobX.
“In a local-first architecture where queries are much cheaper to run, we can take a different approach. The developer can register reactive queries, where the system guarantees that they will be updated in response to changing data.”
Those are called “views”.
“This approach is closely related to the document functional reactive programming (DFRP) model introduced in Pushpin, except that we use a relational database rather than a JSON CRDT as our data store, and access them using a query language instead of a frontend language like Javascript.”
CRDT sound better, honestly.
“[…] primitive databases like SQLite are fast on modern hardware: many of the queries in our demo app run in a few hundred microseconds on a few-years-old laptop.”
How is SQLite primitive?
“We’ve effectively created a data-centric scripting API for interacting with the application, without the original application needing to explicitly work to expose an API. We think this points towards fascinating possibilities for interoperability.”
No. Too broad. Stop it.
“We were frequently (and unexpectedly) delighted by the persistent-by-default UI state. In most apps, closing a window is a destructive operation, but we found ourselves delighted to restart the app and find ourselves looking at the same playlist that we were looking at before. It made closing or otherwise “losing” the window feel much safer to us as end-users.”
Have you never used a Mac? This is how nearly every Mac or iOS application works.
“As an experiment, we tried replacing SQLite with DuckDB , a newer embedded database focused on analytical query workloads with a state-of-the-art optimizer . We saw the runtimes of several slow queries drop by a factor of 20, but some other queries got slower because of known limitations in their current optimizer. Ultimately we plan to explore incremental view maintenance techniques so that a typical app very rarely needs to consider slow queries or caching techniques.”
You totally forgot that refreshing the whole UI at once was a temporary workaround.
“[…] which we’ve worked around for now by creating materialized views which are recomputed outside of the main synchronous reactive loop.”
Duh.
“Some React alternatives like Svelte and SolidJS take a different approach: tracking fine-grained dependencies (either at compile-time or runtime) rather than diffing a virtual DOM. We think this style of reactivity could be a good fit for Riffle, but for now we’ve chosen to prototype with React because it’s the UI framework we’re most familiar with.”
Naja. It sounds like you’re going to just reinvent all of the things that you tried to avoid in the first place.
“We believe that making migrations simpler and more ergonomic is a key requirement for making database-managed state as ergonomic as frontend-managed state.”
Diff the database against your expected model. It ain’t easy, but it’s doable. I’ve done it once and it was surprisingly robust. If I had to do it again, I would do it with a more simple system, but the mechanism in Quino—define application model, import database to model, compare the models to come up with differences, come up with a list of changes to apply, convert them to SQL wherever possible, apply them—was pretty bulletproof. It just takes a while to write for each database backend.
“[…] we’ve ended up with a strange model of an interactive app, as a sort of full-stack query.”
That’s kind of what Atlas did. It built a single, gigantic query for the whole UI. It was often exactly what you wanted—until it wasn’t, then you were stuck.
“Airtable is by far the most polished expression of the relational model in a tool aimed at end users.”
Published by marco on 22. Jul 2023 14:13:16 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
On Horseradish & Nuclear War by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)
“Sullivan then laid out the Biden administration’s case against Russia, starting with the Russian suspension of the New START treaty itself. Left unsaid was Russia’s stated reason for this suspension, namely the impossibility from the Russian point of view of engaging in strategic nuclear arms reductions at a time when the United States was pursuing a policy in Ukraine of waging a proxy conflict designed to cause the strategic defeat of Russia. From the Russian perspective, pursuing the cooperative reduction with the U.S. of the very strategic capability which is, by design, intended to prevent Russia’s strategic defeat at a time when the U.S. was pursuing the strategic defeat of Russia was a non-starter.”
“If this insanity is allowed to continue unabated, it is lights out for all of humanity. Chew on that the next time you cheer on the Ukrainian counteroffensive or applaud the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund the Ukrainian military. It is high time for the American public to recognize that our only hope for a survivable future is one where arms control and nuclear disarmament once again serve as the cornerstone of a U.S.-Russian relationship, and that the shortest possible path toward achieving that objective is for Russia to win its war against Ukraine.”
The Emergence of a New Non-Alignment by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)
“‘The global West (Western developed countries and allies) has drifted away from the global East (China, Russia, and allies) in terms of core strategic interests, while the Global South (Brazil, Russia, India, and China and most developing countries) is reorganising to pursue its own interests’. These final words bear repeating: ‘the Global South… is reorganising to pursue its own interests’.”
“Our calculations, based on the IMF datamapper, show that for the first time in centuries, the Gross Domestic Product of the Global South countries surpassed that of the Global North countries this year. The rise of these developing countries – despite the great social inequality that exists within them – has produced a new attitude amongst their middle classes which is reflected in the increased confidence of their governments: they no longer accept the parochial views of the Triad countries as universal truths, and they have a greater wish to exert their own national and regional interests.”
“From Bolivia to Sri Lanka, these countries, which make up the majority of the world, are fed up with the IMF-driven debt-austerity cycle and the Triad’s bullying. They are beginning to assert their own sovereign agendas.”
“the US-led Triad states have unilaterally imposed their narrow worldview, based on the interests of their elites, on the countries of the South under the guise of the ‘rules-based international order’. Now, the states of the Global South argue, it is time to return to the source – the UN Charter – and build a genuinely democratic international order.”
What matter that we be as cagèd birds
Who beat their breasts against the iron bars
Till blood-drops fall, and in heartbreaking songs
Our souls pass out to God? These very words,
In anguish sung, will mightily prevail.
We will not be among the happy heirs
Of this grand heritage – but unto us
Will come their gratitude and praise,
And children yet unborn will reap in joy
What we have sown in tears
Why Can’t Blinken and Sullivan Get China Right? by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“The bitter truth is that Joe Biden’s best and brightest are too paralyzed by the ideology of American primacy to come up with a single, solitary new thought as to how to address other great powers as we enter an historically new era.”
“Blinken used to meet Chinese counterparts with the professed intention of “easing tensions” or building his famous guardrails so that when the U.S. provokes and provokes and provokes the Chinese they understand that we are for peace and freedom and things need not get too far out of hand.”
“Xi did not let Blinken know he would receive the American secretary until an hour beforehand. To put this bit of protocol in context, Xi recently spent several days with French President Emmanuel Macron; Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian leader, had lengthy meetings with Xi during a five-day visit last month. This is how the Chinese conduct diplomacy after a couple of millennia at it: Language is but one medium, gesture another. The take-home here will be obvious.”
“China respects U.S. interests and does not seek to challenge or displace the United States. In the same vein, the United States needs to respect China and must not hurt China’s legitimate rights and interests. Neither side should try to shape the other side by its own will, still less deprive the other side of its legitimate right to development.”
“China expects to be addressed as an equal, you ought to pay more attention to our legitimate rights as a sovereign nation, your controls on technology exports are intentionally damaging to our development, and you should stop swanning around the world telling others how to live.”
““State-to-state interactions should always be based on mutual respect and sincerity,” Xi said. “I hope that through this visit, Mr. Secretary, you will make more positive contributions to stabilizing Sino–U.S. relations.””
Oof. Ouch.
“[…] what Blinken got back from the Chinese was subtly conveyed indifference to his presence, as if they received him as a courtesy only after months of pestering, and a few reminders that, while they would like to step beyond hostile relations, they have no intention of flinching in the face of American hostility.”
“It seems the best Sullivan can do, given the severe limitations his dedication to neoliberal ideology impose on his intellect. After voters sent Hillary Clinton packing in 2016 and he was for a time out of work, Sullivan wrote a long essay for The Atlantic making the argument that America had to “rescue and reclaim” its exceptionalism so that it can lead the world again despite all the suffering and destruction our claim to exceptionalism was by then causing around the world.”
“During the 2020 campaign season Biden once called Sullivan “a once-in-a-generation mind.” The thought has long fascinated me. It is hard to single out the most preposterous nonsense our president has tried to sell Americans, but this is a contender in my reckoning.”
“Now, the idea that a “new Washington consensus,” as some people have referred to it, is somehow America alone, or America and the West to the exclusion of others, is just flat wrong. This strategy will build a fairer, more durable global economic order, for the benefit of ourselves and for people everywhere.”
Jake Sullivan still has to say “ourselves” even though it would be included in “people everywhere” because the basic instinct is to always consider your own needs specially, and primarily.
“[…] “de-risking” is merely a disguised admission that “de-coupling,” the previously fashionable term, was never more than an impossible dream entertained by geopolitical ideologues with a poor grasp of 21 st century economics and the realities of globalized production.”
“At the just-concluded Shangri–La Dialogue, an annual gathering of Pacific Rim defense ministers in Singapore, Li Shangfu, China’s defense minister, all but slammed his hotel room door on Lloyd Austin when the American defense secretary suggested a conversation on the sidelines.”
Partners in Doomsday by Seymour Hersh (Scheer Post)
“The underlying and even fundamental cause of the conflict in Ukraine and many other tensions in the world . . . is the accelerating failure of the modern ruling Western elites” to recognize and deal with the “globalization course of recent decades.” These changes, which Karaganov calls “unprecedented in history,” are key elements in the global balance of power that now favor “China and partly India acting as economic drivers, and Russia chosen by history to be its military strategic pillar.” The countries of the West, under leaders such as Biden and his aides, he writes, “are losing their five-century-long ability to siphon wealth around the world, imposing, primarily by brute force, political and economic orders and cultural dominance. So there will be no quick end to the unfolding Western defensive and aggressive confrontation.””
““Truce is possible, but peace is not. . . . This vector of the West’s movement unambiguously indicates a slide toward World War III. It is already beginning and may erupt into a full-blown firestorm by chance or due to the incompetence and irresponsibility of modern ruling circles in the West.””
The Great Convergence by Branko Milanovic (Foreign Affairs)
“But slipping in the global income rankings does have real costs. Many globally priced goods and experiences may become increasingly unavailable to middle-class people in the West: for example, the ability to attend international sporting or art events, vacation in exotic locations, buy the newest smartphone, or watch a new TV series may all become financially out of reach. A German worker may have to substitute a four-week vacation in Thailand with a shorter one in another, perhaps less attractive location.”
I wonder if the author understands how arrogant this sounds to people throughout the world—but also those in the West who’ve never even come close to the middle class.
“Aid is both insufficient and irrelevant. It is insufficient because rich countries have never devoted much of their GDPs to foreign aid; the United States, the richest country in the world, currently gives away only 0.18 percent of its GDP in aid, and a significant portion of that is classified as “security related” and used for purchases of U.S. military equipment.”
“It produces effects like those of the “resource curse,” in which a country blessed with a particularly valuable commodity still underperforms: it experiences tremendous initial gains without any meaningful follow-up or more sustainable, broadly shared prosperity.”
That’s your explanation for it? That the country just mysteriously fails to profit from its bountiful resources? Rather than simply acknowledging that the modus operandi of the West is, and has always been, to simply steal whatever it can? That “plunder” is the reason that some countries can’t benefit from the resources that ostensibly belong to them?
“The inability of African economies to catch up with wealthier peers (and thus fail to produce a future reduction in global income inequality) will spur more migration and may strengthen xenophobic, nativist political parties in rich countries, especially in Europe.”
Gosh, we just can’t figure out why they can’t catch up. It’s a complete mystery. It couldn’t have anything to do with the boot on their neck.
This article is breathtakingly elitist. It just assumes that a sub-Saharan would be perfectly willing to leave their homeland just to be able to earn more money in another country. It doesn’t mention that that person would much rather just stay in their homeland—they just need Europe to stop bleeding it dry. It also doesn’t mention whatever increased income they do earn in the country to which they emigrate is quickly sucked away into a much more expensive society.
“Africa’s abundance of natural resources combined with its persistent poverty and weak governments will lead dominant global powers to vie over the continent. Although the West neglected Africa after the end of the Cold War, recent Chinese investments in the continent have alerted the United States and others to its importance.”
You see? Breathtakingly elitist. Those darned sun-charred folk are just locked in persistent poverty despite their abundance of natural resources. Must be that “resource curse” rearing its ugly head again. Time to pick up that white man’s burden and “help them out” a bit, ammirite?
“The prospect of an African growth surge that could meaningfully suppress global inequality in the coming years is slim.”
Because the west won’t allow that to happen. It will not allow China to buy favor with actual favors. It will burn the whole fucking thing to the ground first. It will let loose the CIA to engender one civil war after another, ending everything in conflagration.
“As for the downward trend in global inequality, it requires strong economic growth in populous African countries—but that remains unlikely. Migration out of Africa, great-power competition over the continent’s resources, and the persistence of poverty and weak governments will probably lie in Africa’s future as they have in its past.
“And yet a more equal world remains a salutary objective.”
A “salutary objective” indeed. What an arrogant cunt.
Of COURSE Greta Met With Zelensky by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix)
“The reason you seldom see people change despite their stated intent to do so is because your behavior doesn’t change just because you know it should, it changes when you fix the underlying forces within yourself which drive that behavior. It’s the same with the US empire. The US empire is inseparable from the forces of neoliberal capitalism, war profiteering and unipolarism with which its true leadership has intertwined itself, so while the odd empire manager may say “end the wars” it never happens, because everything in it is oriented toward war.
“This is the same reason we keep destroying our biosphere despite being acutely aware that we need it to survive. Every system we’ve set up to drive human behavior and organize human civilization is pointed toward ecocide, despite all the science saying that’s a bad thing to do.”
“I know a lot of people are worried about neural implants turning the public into mindless servants of the powerful, but if it makes you feel any better the powerful have already achieved that with propaganda anyway.”
Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact by Lydia Denworth (Scientific American)
“[…] was also immediately obvious—strikingly so—that there were very high levels of interbrain synchrony among the bats, especially at high frequencies. The patterns were so similar that the researchers initially didn’t believe what they were seeing, but the data convinced them.”
“When Yartsev and Zhang repeated the experiment by letting the bats fly freely in identical separate chambers rather than in the same social environment, the correlations fell apart. There was no synchrony in the bats’ brain activity, even when the researchers piped in the sound of other bats calling.”
“What they are seeing goes well beyond previous research on so-called mirror neurons, which represent both the self and another. (When I watch you throw a ball, it activates a set of mirror neurons in my brain that would also be activated if I were doing the same thing myself.)”
“A 2021 study led by Maimon Rose and Boaz Styr, then both members of Yartsev’s lab, revealed that when one bat emits a call, it induces collective brain coupling among all listening bats. And as in the mice, separate sets of neurons became active depending on which bat in the group vocalized, meaning individual neurons in the bats’ brains encoded identity, with some representing the self and others representing other individuals. The signals were so distinct that the scientists could tell which bat was calling just by looking at the recordings of neural activity.”
“[…] the group is also asking whether the content of the stories changes levels of alignment and whether each pair’s relative enjoyment of the process is linked to a greater or lesser degree of synchrony. Like Sid and me, most people reported preferring the joint storytelling exercise to the individual tales, but that wasn’t true for everyone. Are synchronized brains more creative? Or do they just have more fun? The answers will have to wait for further analysis.”
“Without synchrony and the deeper forms of connection that lie beyond it, we may be at greater risk for mental instability and poor physical health. With synchrony and other levels of neural interaction, humans teach and learn, forge friendships and romances, and cooperate and converse. We are driven to connect, and synchrony is one way our brains help us do it.”
Ted Kaczynski We Hardly Knew Ye by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)
“I won’t sit here and try to pretend that Ted Kaczynski was some kind of folk hero. He was a killer and most of his victims were just innocent civilians. So, why then should I mourn the death of such a ghastly creature? If I had to answer this vexing question in the simplest of terms, I would say that it’s because Ted was a fellow outsider and in spite of all his many sins, he was also right about far more things than any truly evil person ever could be. Burn me at the stake if you must but I feel that this lonesome bastard has at the very least earned himself the right to one obituary that acknowledges the uncomfortable fact that he was indeed a human being.”
“Kaczynski lays down an airtight case against civilization in general as an existential foe of individual liberty and technology in particular as a steroid that has grown that invention to downright apocalyptic proportions. Ted’s basic argument was that technology makes an already toxic civilization truly lethal by reducing the individual to a product with a barcode number.”
“Ted posits that technological civilization has resulted in the creation of a superstructure that cannot function without total capitulation to conformity. Humanities inevitable inability to live up to the rigid standards of such a constraining system leads to a growing plague of increasingly crippling social sicknesses.”
“Ted’s biggest mistake was foolishly believing that he could somehow liberate himself and the rest of us by matching the cruelty of our shared tormentors and speaking to us in the language of terrorism which they invented. Our biggest mistake, if we so choose to make it, is to disregard Ted’s lessons simply because the messenger lost his soul to deliver them to us.”
“One man alone in the wilderness is a hermit, one Billion is a wildfire that no superstructure can contain. Just call this eulogy a spark and pass it along.”
The Jersey Barrier by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“I thus see Deneen and Amy Coney Barrett and all the others as engaged in a most unholy, an all-too-human endeavor. I see their illiberalism in fact as much like the current LGBTQIA+ dogma, which has abandoned the ideal of a neutral public sphere in favor of a set of state-enforced substantive commitments that, increasingly, must not be only publicly affirmed, but, to the extent that this can be monitored (an extent that is growing with new technologies), must also be inwardly felt — at least if you want to keep your de-facto social-credit score up.”
“Stokely Carmichael said repeatedly that he did not want to make white people stop hating him; he just wanted enough guns for his community to ensure that, if that hatred were to boil over into physical aggression, it could effectively be nipped in the bud. But today, in large part because we have these exciting new technologies, and because, it turns out, so many of us are such incurable blabbermouths, the state, together with its subcontracted enforcement apparatuses in the tech industry, no longer sees any reason to stop at the policing of how we use our bodies in public; it now has a fairly effective technological means for “going to work on our souls”, to put it in Foucauldian terms.”
“Do you support capital punishment? Definitely not, under no circumstances. Do you support the abolition of factory farming? Yes, immediately. Do you support nuclear power? No, I’ve been too close to Zaporizhzhia too many times in the past few years to believe human beings are anywhere near responsible enough to maintain nuclear plants indefinitely into an unknown future. Do you support economic redistribution? Within reason, and if it is pursued in a rigorously responsible way; I agree that every billionaire is a policy failure, but I do not wish to see professorships handed out more or less at random to peasants who support the party that controls all the perks under the new regime, […]”
“Economists and policy analysts can debate ad nauseam the long-term consequences of, say, opening the borders of EU states to Syrian refugees. I don’t know if admitting them makes a given society, on balance, worse or better. All I know is that there is only one acceptable stance towards a refugee, and that is hospitality. They say they need to come in? You let ‘em in.”
“I have no illusions at all about the role of the American empire in the world, or about the massive violence that was required to work this country up from a few scrappy colonies into the enforcer of a global Pax Americana. And when Putin speaks in a way that is similarly free of these illusions, what can I say? I find that I agree with him, even if I know, obviously, that this man is hardly a righteous porte-parole for the wretched of the earth.”
“[…] what I have just acknowledged about America: there is nothing exceptional about its violence. Nothing is more routine or unsurprising in world history than to learn that a hegemonic power has played rough in order to get where it’s at.”
“That a significant swath of liberal America can, overnight, mostly without any prior geographical or historical knowledge of the relevant region, go in for a form of war boosterism that is little different from what we see in the world of sports, is perhaps one of the most disconsoling, heart-of-darkness experiences of my adult life.”
“I happen to think, however, that it is a failure of imagination and of collective will to continue to act as though trench-war over disputed territory is anything we are still compelled by reality grudgingly to consent to in the twenty-first century.”
“I think the primary purpose of the Democratic Party in the US is to maintain American global power at all costs. Surprisingly, in its own boorish and inarticulate way I think the Republicans have done at least a somewhat better job over the past years of imagining alternative scenarios for the survival of our country in a multipolar future.”
“I’ll say that I am a class-first anti-imperialist pacifist left-winger, who recognizes that these commitments cannot be fully defended within the parameters of political debate as we ordinarily understand it”
“I am more sympathetic than I am supposed to be, than anyone concerned to keep their social-credit score up is supposed to be, to the general spirit of recent American populism as expressed, again with tragic inarticulacy, under the aegis of MAGA. I think every community, including the community of rural white Americans, that feels politically disenfranchised, probably is politically disenfranchised, and this is in no way disproven by their habit of seeking out scapegoats. I think the elite liberal consensus, that poor whites are nothing but racist yokels who need to be marginalized even more, is profoundly damaging to the American body politic, perhaps as damaging as whatever Trump himself has unleashed.”
“Christian Lorentzen described the late-career author himself, for whom, at least in the case of this novel, our hero is at least some sort of ersatz), has just been quoted reflecting that sex is the only means we’ve got to register our protest against death. Well actually, the reviewer notes, there’s also love, which in the long run turns out to be a much sounder investment. This struck me as a profound bit of wisdom at the time —I wouldn’t have remembered it otherwise—, though I think its full significance has only begun to come clear to me recently. Roth himself never seems to have discovered this other investment strategy, and what makes him such a great writer is that his work amounts to a painfully lucid account of what the world looks like when you don’t know, or refuse to see, that it is perfectly permeated by a hidden resource that does not only permit us to protest against death, but to vanquish it. In this respect, Roth’s work perfectly demonstrates this general truth, that the greatest secular art amounts to a form of negative theology.”
Are Social Justice Politics Serious, or Not? by Freddie De Boer (SubStack)
“[…] identity politics and socialist politics are not incidentally at odds, but are rather inherently and existentially incompatible. The heart of left-wing practice is communitarianism, putting the group before the individual, and the fundamental complaint of identity politics is “hey, what about me?!?” People really don’t want to confront this incompatibility because it’s socially and professionally uncomfortable for them, and most self-identified socialists understand that if you were to force people to choose, you’d end up with an even smaller rump of American socialism than we have today.”
“[…] political movement, but it’s also a set of discursive tools, and one of its central tools has always been a vociferous rejection of criticism, typically enforced through bringing intense social and professional shunning to bear. Whether the danger is real or perceived, a lot of people remain terribly afraid of appearing to defy this consensus. A lot of mainstream liberals have nursed private doubts about the social justice project for years, but they’ve also seen the potential costs of doing so publicly,”
“I personally feel in a very visceral and deep place in my heart that being condescended to is so much worse than open antagonism.”
Thoughts on Svelte(Kit), one year and 3 billion requests later by Claudio Holanda
“Reactive declarations and statements feel like powerful magic, and they are, but it’s very easy to hurt yourself by writing code that is almost impossible to debug, and end up having to refactor all your component tree that mixes with this reactivity. Reactive declarations and statements are useful features, just remember not to abuse them, otherwise you may end up switching Svelte’s productivity by headaches and infinite debug sessions, which may directly affect your deadlines.”
Duh. Stop mixing reactivity into your component tree.
“I hold immense respect and admiration for Rich and his remarkable work not only in Svelte, but also Rollup, Ractive and many other technologies. Rich and others in the Svelte ecosystem are also brilliant minds, but I don’t see them engaging in this dance with the other brilliant minds anymore. Without this active engagement, I fear that Svelte may not be remembered as it should by the audience.”
Too fucking bad. Take it or leave it. It’s Not enough that the tech is great, you have to be a dancing monkey evangelist too, or people won’t use your amazing free thing? No wonder Rich ducked out a side door. That’s toxic. Fuck them.
Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man’s Plan 9 Namespaces by Yotam
“Plan 9 had two major ideas, that everything else was built on. The first was the idea that everything is a file. You might think that in Unix everything was already a file, but it was only partially true. In Plan 9 they took this idea to the extreme. Everything including the input and output of the system, process management and network connections were all accessed through the file system instead of the usual syscalls. The second major idea is, you guessed it, per process namespace.”
“[..] popular example is the drawterm terminal, which connects to a remote machine, and binds the client display and input devices into the process namespace. That makes for an elegant remote desktop solution that doesn’t require a custom protocol […]”
Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops by My Bad Opinions (Fred Hebert)
“If you’ve ever worked in a flat organization, like the one in the middle here, is that even though you have little management structure to speak of, power dynamics and decision-making authority still exists. People who have no power attached to their role are still going to be consulted or inserted in the decision-making flow of the organization, they’re still going to be influential and have the ability to make or break projects, but just with less obvious accountability.”
“[…] the way people work every day is often different from the way people around them imagine their work is being done. The gap between how work is thought to be done and how it is actually done is a major but generally invisible factor in how systems work out.”
“People will imagine things like, for example, writing all the tests before writing or modifying any code and that code coverage could be ideal and then that it will all be reviewed in depth by an expert, and will enshrine this as a policy.”
“[…] the vast majority of answers, nearly 60%, came from people saying “my time tracking was always fake and lies,” with some people stating they even wrote applications to generate realistic-looking time sheets.”
“Part of the reason for this is that every day decisions are made by trying to deal with all sorts of pressures coming from the workplace, which includes the values communicated both as spoken and as acted out. People generally want to do a good job and they’ll try to balance these conflicting values and pressures as well as they can.”
“Locally for you as a DevOps or SRE team, there is a need for the awareness of what the organization and customers actually care about. Some availability targets become useless metrics because they’re disconnected from what users want, and you’re just going to burn people out doing it.”
“[…] wait a few hours for the code owners to get up and fix it at a leisurely pace. We’re going to accept a bit of well-scoped, partial unavailability—something that happens a lot in large distributed systems—in order to keep the system stable.”
“When I went up to upper management, they absolutely believed that engineers were empowered and should feel safe pressing a big red button that stopped feature work if they thought their code wasn’t ready. The engineers on that team felt that while this is what they were being told, in practice they’d still get in trouble. There’s no amount of test training that would fix this sort of issue. The engineers knew they didn’t have enough tests and they were making that tradeoff willingly.”
“[…] you have to be able to call out when your teams are strained, when targets aren’t being met and customers are complaining about it. It means you might be right, and some deadlines or feature delivery could be deferred to make room for others. How do you deal with capacity planning when making your biggest customer renew their contract prevents you from signing up another one that’s as big? Very carefully, by talking it out by all the involved people.”
“You assume that when the site is down and slow, people are mad, and you make being up and fast a proxy for satisfaction. But then that signal is a bit messy and not super actionable, because it can include user devices or bits of the network you don’t control, plus it’s hard to measure, so you’ll settle for response time at the edge of your infrastructure. This loses fidelity into the signal, but it’ll get worse as you suddenly find some teams have more data than others, and they use features differently, so you either need a ton of alarms or fewer messier ones, but you’re getting further and further away from whether people are actually satisfied.”
“Metrics that become their own targets and are gamed of course lose meaningfulness; this is one of the most common issues with counting incidents and then debating whether an outage should or shouldn’t be declared in a way that might affect the tally rather than addressing it directly.”
“[…] re-evaluate your metrics often, and change them. I guess there’s also a lesson to be learned that improvements can also cause their own uncertainty and that these successes can themselves lead to destabilizations.”
“[…] writing a procedure means little unless people actually see its value and believe it’s worth following. Conversely, it means that if you can demonstrate the usefulness and make some approaches more usable, they’re likely to get adopted regardless of what is written down as a list of steps or procedures.”
“I used to try and weed my lawn a whole hell of a lot and pull the weeds hours a week until someone explained to me that weeds grew easier in the type of soil I had (poor, dry, unmaintained soil) than grass, and pulling the weeds wasn’t the way to go, I needed to actually make the soil good for the grass to crowd out the weeds.”
“[…] there’s a warning here about trying to change the decisions your people make with carrots and sticks—with incentives. They are not going to fundamentally change what pressures the employees negotiate. The pressures stay the same, all you’re doing is adding more of them, either in the form of rewards or punishments, which makes decision-making more complex and trickier. Chances are people will keep making the same decisions as they were already, but then they’ll report it differently to either get their bonus or to avoid getting penalized for it.”
“SLOs aren’t hard and fast rules. When the error budget is empty, the main thing that matters to me is that we have a conversation about it, and decide what it is we want to happen from there on. Are we going to hold off on deploys and experiments? Are we able to meet the objectives while on-call, with some schedule corrective work, some major re-architecting? Can we just talk to the customers? Were our targets too ambitious or are we going to eat dirt for a while?”
“Seeing non-compliance is not necessarily a sign of bad workers. It may rather be a sign of a bad understanding of the workers’ challenges, and point to a need to adjust how work is prescribed.”
how (not) to write a pipeline by tef (CoHost)
Note: The author probably actually meant to title this article how to (not) write a pipeline. but the author also doesn’t use capital letters, so I guess maybe that’s the best we can hope for. The content is nevertheless excellent.
“you open a dm, it’s best to avoid an audience. people get touchy about their code.”“This is great work, it’s good to prototype these things out”“Remember: Don’t be a dick about it. Don’t squeal and wail, not matter how much you want to. People really don’t like being told “You can’t do it that way. You do not understand why.” It’s a bad look all round, even if it’s true.
“Establish common ground, reframe problem, work towards common goals. Then you can be a dick about it, later. Remember: It’s only a little bit less of a dick to be Socratic about it, and ask questions you already know the answer to, so try and be nice where you can.”
“There’s never any error handling. The message broker is always running, the queue always exists, and the workers never make a mistake, either. That’s how prototypes look, sure, but that’s how pipelines will look, years later.”“I don’t see a lot of error handling.”
“[…] the point of raising this isn’t “this has to be fixed” but “we need to understand how it can fail, and how much time will we waste fixing it.””
“[…] it’s a good moment to take a step back and ask “how come it worked out this time””
- your coworker actually believes you when you share your experience
- you aren’t forcing people to reinvent your exact solution
- not every issue is fixed, despite being identified
- it wasn’t about someone being right, or someone being wrong, it was about lowering operational costs
“sometimes it’s a little bit like solving a race condition. no-one believes it can be fixed, and when people ask for help, they just want to move the problem elsewhere. turns out “have you tried explicitly ordering the operations on the shared mutable state” is not a popular answer, despite being correct. people hate eating their vegetables.”
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the... [More]”
Published by marco on 17. Jul 2023 06:10:00 (GMT-5)
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
“The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don’t mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the... [More]”
Published by marco on 16. Jul 2023 22:19:19 (GMT-5)
“The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don’t mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation’s problems would be another 100-Year War.”
Published by marco on 10. Jul 2023 11:38:31 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
”Es gibt vier Hypothesen, was hinter Long Covid stecken könnte (Interview mit Akiko Iwasaki)” by Jakob Simmank (Zeit Online / Archive.is)
“Ich glaube fest an den Nutzen von Impfungen. Aber alles hat seinen Preis. Wir müssen Impfnebenwirkungen erforschen, um sicherzustellen, dass die – wenigen – Betroffenen identifiziert, entschädigt und vor allem gut behandelt werden können.”
“Wer in der akuten Infektion hohe Mengen des Coronavirus im Blut hat, eine Reaktivierung von EBV aufweist, bei wem bestimmte Autoantikörper nachweisbar sind oder wer Diabetes hat, der erkrankt später deutlich häufiger an Long Covid ( I Su et al., 2022 )”
“Corona ist nicht vorbei, nur weil fast jeder über Impfungen und Infektionen mit dem Virus in Kontakt gekommen ist. Das Virus und damit das Risiko für Long Covid verschwindet ja nicht.”
Banks Are Using High Interest Rates to Rip Off Depositors by David Sirota (Jacobin)
“For Americans needing basic banking services, this translates into predation. As Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, noted in a recent letter spotlighting the scheme, a new Bank of America customer will receive about “0.01% on a savings account, but pay 6.90% on a mortgage and 15% to 27% on a credit card.” Not surprisingly, that bank just reported $14 billion in net interest income in the most recent quarter — a 25 percent increase.”
“Paying almost nothing to depositors while lending out their savings at high interest rates is a dream come true for bankers. As a Deloitte report put it: “Such economic calculus makes sense: why not grow interest income while keeping interest expenses under control?” For everyone else, though, this is a scam. Short of nationalizing the banking system, what can be done about such a systemic rip-off?”
““The solution is simple: Make interest payment on reserves conditional on banks passing the higher rates to depositors,” he writes, adding that “the central bank could set a maximum margin as a condition.” Even better would be measures helping individual depositors access the same government-provided interest rates that commercial banks already enjoy.”
“Those bankers understand the truism best summarized in the television show Mr. Robot : “Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.””
Nord-Stream-Sprengung – Gedanken zur „Ukraine-Version“ by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Wenn man einmal hypothetisch annimmt, dass diese Erkenntnisse korrekt sind, würde dies für die US-Regierung und mehr noch die Bundesregierung eine ganze Reihe an unbequemen Fragen aufwerfen. Immerhin ginge es um Staatsterrorismus, wenn nicht gar um einen kriegerischen Akt gegen die deutsche und europäische Energieversorgung. Begangen von der Ukraine; einem Land, das die Bundesregierung als einen Wertepartner und sogar Verbündeten sieht und das nicht nur finanzielle, sondern auch militärische Hilfen in Milliardenhöhe von Deutschland bezieht.”
“Sollte sich die Version bestätigen, kann dies nicht ohne Folgen bleiben. Wie dumm muss man sein, einen Staat, der einen kriegerischen Akt in dieser Dimension auf unsere Infrastruktur begangen hat, weiterhin zu unterstützen? Seltsamerweise wird aber auch diese Frage nicht gestellt. Man legt sich darauf fest, dass die Ukraine hinter den Anschlägen steht, weigert sich aber, die Konsequenzen daraus zu ziehen. Das kann zwei Gründe haben: Man hat seine Souveränität und seine eigenen Interessen bereits so weit aufgegeben, dass man sich von einem Land wie der Ukraine vor der Weltöffentlichkeit auf der Nase herumtanzen lässt.”
China and Palestine: No To ‘Piecemeal Crisis Management’ by Ramzy Baroud (Scheer Post)
“Compared to the United States’ position, which perceives the UN, and particularly the Security Council, as a battleground to defend Israeli interests, the Chinese political discourse reflects a legal stance based on a deep understanding of the realities on the ground.”
“Washington has repeatedly cautioned Tel Aviv against its growing proximity to Beijing. US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, went as far as warning Israel in March 2019 that, until Tel Aviv re-evaluates its cooperation with China, the US could reduce “intelligence sharing and co-location of security facilities.””
“A simple discourse analysis of the Chinese language regarding the situation in Palestine clarifies that Beijing sees a direct link between the US and the continued conflict, or the failure to find a just solution.”
The Rape of Lady Justice by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Now we have a Miami grand jury handing up indictments on 37 charges related to the documents case. Of these, we must note, 31 counts come under the Espionage Act of 1917. This escalates matters very considerably. A former president and a current contender for the presidency now faces the gravest charge for which American law provides.”
“Trump now keeps company with, among others, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden — others charged under the Espionage Act since the Wilson administration passed this unambiguously unconstitutional law to silence those critical of America’s entry into World War I a century and some ago.”
“If I am right, the objective is to keep him tied up in judicial rope until the election next year is fought and won. We are already hearing from the nitwittier of mainstream commentators, Rachel Maddow among them but not alone, that it would be fine were Justice to drop all charges providing Trump commits not to run next year.”
“Hillary Clinton, James Comey, James Clapper, John Brennan, Joe Biden, the last as vice-president and now president: This is an extremely truncated list of those who, since Trump’s election in 2016, have gone uninvestigated, untried and un-convicted as felons, and I use this term advisedly. Clinton’s breach of security was vastly worse than the worst Trump is accused of. Clapper and Brennan lied to Congress under oath. Even according to the incomplete record available to us, an investigation of Biden’ Ukrainian and Chinese business dealings would almost certainly leave him in an orange jumpsuit.”
“I recall thinking, after the Supreme Court stole the 2000 elections to hand it to George W. Bush, “This society has lost its capacity to self-correct.” I wish the confirmations of this that followed were not so numerous. Citizens United in 2010, when corporations were declared people — it is still strange to type that phrase — was a mile marker. Lately, to skip across a long list, the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have a legal right to seek damages from unions running strikes for their members’ rights.”
“Problems of judicial imbalance and courts in the service of private or political interests have a long history in America, yes. What is going on now at Justice and the various grand juries it has convened are the straight-line consequences of the corrupt use of the department and its law-enforcement agencies during the criminal years of Russiagate. This abuse of the judiciary, notably by way of the Espionage Act, went all the way to the top last week. This is the significance of our moment. Liberal authoritarians are now availing of the courts and the extremities of American law to eliminate a political candidate in the service of a Democratic president of failing competence — that is, to determine the probable outcome of an election.”
“Trump the former president and Trump the major-party candidate, however, represent the aspirations of tens of millions of Americans who felt unheard and unseen before he rode down the Trump Tower elevator in 2015. If you humiliate this man—trials, convictions, handcuffs, chains, jumpsuit—his supporters will feel his shame as their own. Furthermore, it would be impossible to overstate the international scorn and disdain that would be heaped upon the U.S. after a sordid spectacle better suited to an s-hole country in the developing world. We have a two-party system. If you hobble one candidate, tie him up in court and/or jail him, you no longer have the pretense of a democracy—you’ve created a one-party system. Biden will become America’s Saddam.”
EU interior ministers abandon the Geneva Refugee Convention by Martin Kreickenbaum (WSWS)
“The EU wants to set up at least 30,000 detention places at the external borders, so that with a procedure lasting four months, up to 120,000 refugees per year could be turned away in a fast-track process. These people would then be threatened with up to 18 months’ detention pending deportation, so that they could be interned for up to two years simply because they fled wars, misery and hardship out of desperation.”
“[…] the EU Commissioner for Migration and Asylum, Ylva Johansson, declared the agreement a “historic event”. In fact, it is historic only in the sense that the European Union is abandoning the Geneva Refugee Convention and significantly increasing the misery of refugees at the EU’s external borders and on the escape routes.”
“The EU Parliament had recently reprimanded Saïed for his authoritarian style of government. He has ruled by presidential decrees since his coup in July 2021, and more than 20 politicians and journalists are in prison. Now the delegation offered him over a billion euros to block refugees from leaving the country and, if they make it anyway, to take them back and imprison them.”
SPLC Hates Moms Who Hate Woke by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“Moms for Liberty is antagonistic to many of the newly-introduced changes in public schools and similar arenas designed to influence the views of young children. Disagreeing with woke isn’t hate, unless there is no tolerance for disagreement.”
“It’s bad enough that so many have lost tolerance for disagreement, the ability to agree to disagree about what is appropriate to teach children. It’s worse that parents who believe they, not teachers or school administrators, are charged with teaching their children values and morality, are being told they have no choice as to what ideology is taught in the classroom. But for the SPLC to reduce mothers who disagree with their children being indoctrinated into an ideology with which they disagree as being tantamount to neo-Nazis is outrageous.”
The USA’s Covert Empire by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix )
“In an interview shortly before his death Daniel Ellsberg said the US runs a “covert empire”, which is a really good way of putting it. A giant globe-spanning cluster of nations consistently moves in alignment with the dictates of Washington, but they all keep their official flags and their official governments, so it doesn’t look like an empire despite functioning as one in every meaningful way.”
Propaganda auf allen Kanälen by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“[…] die Gefahr einer Eskalation ist ohnehin gegeben. So gesehen kann man sich aus humanitärer und geopolitischer Sicht eigentlich nur wünschen, dass diese Offensive ohne noch größere Opfer scheitert und so der Weg für „eine rasche diplomatische Lösung“, wie es Politico formuliert, eröffnet wird. In den deutschen Redaktionsstuben wird dies sicher für so einige Tränen sorgen.”
Bad Manors by Kate Wagner (The Baffler)
“What was once a mix of modest, low-slung ranch-style houses interspersed with pockets of turkey oak scrub has been invaded by gargantuan homes with equally oversized trucks parked in the driveway. They tower over their older neighbors at a tragicomical scale difficult to convey, each identically crafted for maximum cheapness and interchangeability. Behold the McMansion in all its readymade, disposable grandeur.”
“[…] it wasn’t until 2008 that the McMansion firmly imprinted itself on the national consciousness. Recall the endless newsreels of oversized, foreclosed houses that implied that the subprime mortgage crisis was caused not by the predatory lending institutions who foisted junk mortgages on inexperienced homebuyers but by the greedy poors who wanted more house than they could afford, all in order to imitate their idols on MTV Cribs […]”
“Buyers with children, but without the means to send them to private school, want to live in good school districts, which necessitates moving to wealthier neighborhoods on account of the American public school system’s entrenched racism and inequality. Architecturally speaking, the reason for the McMansion’s persistence is that it is the path of least resistance for building a house of a certain size.”
“Perplexingly, despite the ascent of interest rates that might otherwise deter buyers from procuring a mortgage, building McMansions remains immensely profitable. PulteGroup—which constructs housing under several subsidiaries, including Pulte Homes—made over $13 billion in 2021, and while that revenue encompasses a range of property types, McMansions are certainly among them. These are simple, crude realities.”
Rates rose in 2022. Also, only shitty, stupid, wasteful things are profitable in the U.S., so of course McMansions will somehow still be a going concern.
“It is a testament, too, to a Reagan-era promise of endless growth, endless consumption, and endless easy living that we’ve been loath to disavow. The McMansion owner is unbothered by the cost of heating and cooling a four-thousand-square-foot mausoleum with fifteen-foot ceilings. They see no problem being dependent—from the cheap material choice of the house to the driving requirements of suburban life—on oil in all its forms, be it in extruded polystyrene columns or gas at the pump. The McMansion is American bourgeois life in all its improvidence.”
“One day the McMansion, once a token of financial tomfoolery, will instead epitomize our nihilistic, environmental death drive. More than half a century of urban planning prioritizing sprawl has gotten us to where we are now: choked by endless freeways, numbed by carbon-copy strip malls, secluded in catchpenny houses with no sense of human scale.”
“One day we will look at five-thousand-square-foot McMansions and Hummers and desert golf courses the same way we look now at thalidomide: a ginormous fuck up. That’s assuming we manage to plan for the future and come through a political fight antithetical to the mortal coil of capitalism: late, fossil, or otherwise.”
“The present crisis surrounding the depleted Colorado River, owing to overconsumption and a world-historic megadrought plaguing the Southwest since the 2000s, will be the first real test of the McMansion way of life, the life of endless plenty. If the recession saw entire suburban developments reduced to eerie ghost towns, imagine what water rationing will do to golf courses in Phoenix, Arizona. Already, the nearby city of Scottsdale has cut off the wealthy suburb of Rio Verde from the municipal water service, leaving residents holding the bag. When the resources of the commons no longer subsidize the whimsies of the rich, when there is truly nothing left to drink or burn in the tank, then, and only then, will we be able to look at the McMansion in retrospect.”
My Search for Warren Harding Is the Funniest Novel You’ve Never Heard Of by Zsofia Paulikovics (Jacobin)
“Most of Plunket’s reviewers, as well as the writer himself, agree that My Search for Warren Harding could never have been published today. The implication is that it would not pass the hands of a sensitivity reader; I think it could not be published because nothing this funny is being written today, in the novel form at least. In the Los Angeles Review , Plunket talks about how, after several rejections, My Search for Warren Harding finally found a publisher when Ann Beattie showed it to Gordon Lish. “‘I don’t know why I’m publishing this. I never publish books like this. It’s not literature,’” Plunket recalls Lish saying. “Then he’d light another cigarette and say, ‘But it’s harder to do than literature.’””
The Jersey Barrier by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“I feel most at home in the blurrier corners of the world, honing my descriptive powers on the objects I find there, rather than wasting my time in that far more pedestrian task of getting good at describing objects that come with their contours well marked.”
Are Social Justice Politics Serious, or Not? by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“[…] socialists were the OG critics of identity politics; Eric Hobsbawm, Todd Gitlin, Richard Rorty, Adolph Reed − these guys were lobbing bombs at identity politics decades before the first conservative ever uttered the word “woke.” I know this is a lonely corner I’m on, at this point, but that antagonism is exactly what we should expect: identity politics and socialist politics are not incidentally at odds, but are rather inherently and existentially incompatible. The heart of left-wing practice is communitarianism, putting the group before the individual, and the fundamental complaint of identity politics is “hey, what about me?!?” People really don’t want to confront this incompatibility because it’s socially and professionally uncomfortable for them, and most self-identified socialists understand that if you were to force people to choose, you’d end up with an even smaller rump of American socialism than we have today.”
How to go to war with your employer by Drew Devault
“The sense of “going to war” here should rouse in you an awareness of the resources at your disposal, a willingness to use them to forward your interests, and an acknowledgement of the fact that tactics, strategy, propaganda, and subterfuge are among the tools you can use – and the tools your employer uses to forward their own interests.”
It is an absolute tragedy that it’s come to this. And that the argument about working conditions is so egocentric. It’s all about the individual getting as much as they can for themselves.
“If you have finer-grained insights into your company’s financial situation, you can get a closer view of your worth to them by dividing their annual profit by their headcount, adjusted to your discretion to account for the difference in the profitability of your role compared to your colleagues.”
Wow. Calculating like an HFT. There is no value accorded to working with interesting people on interesting things. This has to be a joke. Does this author even have a job? Has he ever even run a company? Or been part of one? Did he bother to lay out the parameters under which you would even be justified in behaving this way? Like all wars, engaging in this one will destroy you just as surely as it will destroy your enemy.
“Suppose your goals are, for instance:”
- You don’t like agile/scrum and want to interact with it from the other end of a six foot pole and/or replace it with another system
- Define your own goals and work on the problems you think are important at your own discretion moreso than at the discretion of your manager
- Skip meetings you know are wasting your time
- Set working hours that suit you or take time off on your terms
- Work from home or in-office in an arrangement that meets your own wants/needs
- Exercise agency over your tools, such as installing the software you want to use on your work laptop
Jfc. You better be bringing the goods, I guess. No need to make friends at this place. I know he said “neoliberal” but this complete capitulation to a world where only you and your needs matter is tragic to contemplate. Your coworkers can go fuck themselves, I guess. This list reads like a laundry list from a teenaged, self-taught, “genius” programmer who knows everything about everything better than anyone else and has no use for anyone or their paltry opinions. They will decide what to install and what not to install. They set their working hours. They decide which kind of work to do. They decide when and where they will work. They decide when they will deign to interact with the other scum at this company with which they are forced to interact by capitalism.
“You might also have more intimidating goals you want to address:”
- Demand a raise or renegotiating benefits
- Negotiate a 4-day workweek
- Replace your manager or move teams
- Remove a problematic colleague from your working environment
It gets better! The other list was just the easy stuff that you should definitely get. Now, you’re choosing other employees, including your boss, you’re working even less, but you’re also getting paid more because you’re so amazing. Christ, this guy must have been scribbling so hard on his little night-table when he woke up from this wet dream.
Just remember: if you’re so focused on only these things, then you’re that problematic colleague they refer to.
“Likewise if you adapt the workflows around agile (or whatever) to better suit your needs rather than to fall in line with the prescription, if it makes you more productive and happy then it makes the business more money. Remember your real job – to make money – and you can adjust the parameters of your working environment relatively freely provided that you are still aligned with this goal.”
And remember: you and and only you are to decide what is and is not effective for the company’s profit line. No-one else is even close to smart enough or informed enough to determine this. Brook no arguments. Good luck!
It’s incredible how otherwise smart people have no concept of working in a team or recognizing the realities of supporting and integrating wild devices into a corporate network. Obviously, though, the author is so much better at security than anyone in their company’s IT.
Something like this guy (or any of the other videos that he’s posted about other programming languages).
“You can go straight to management and start making your case, but another option – probably the more effective one – is to start with your immediate colleagues. Your team also possesses a collective agency, and if you agree together, without anyone’s permission, to work according to your own terms, then so long as you’re all doing your jobs – making money – then no one is going to protest.”
Really? No-one is going to protest? Because you and your buddies assumed that everyone else is an idiot and you can work autonomously within an organization as long as you’re “making money”? My god, you could never hire this person. What an absolute egocentric maniac. Just completely uncontrollable, completely confident that he can make the decision about what makes his company money—and don’t bother arguing with him because you are an idiot.
“How you are seen to be doing this may depend on how far up the chain you need to justify yourself to; if your boss doesn’t like it then make sure your boss’s boss does.”
Again, just assuming that everyone else is utterly incompetent. Breathtaking. Who hurt you?
“Simple cases, such as coming in at ten and leaving at four every day, are a case of simple exercise of agency; so long as you’re making the company money no one is going to raise a fuss.”
What fucking planet are you on? Everyone will hate you. I honestly can’t tell if he’s taking the piss at this point.
Criticism is WWE by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“f the AI revolution is really here and these tools are going to become completely enmeshed in our lives, it will eventually become harder and harder to train an AI model on completely organic content. For instance, I’ve read arguments that is it now essentially impossible to generate a large language model in English without including at least some AI-influenced text.
“I spun through the original research paper, hoping they included some kind of solution to what they’re calling “model collapse,” but their conclusion isn’t exactly helpful. “One option is community-wide coordination to ensure that different parties involved in [large language model] creation and deployment share the information needed to resolve questions of provenance,” the researchers wrote. In other words, maybe we can all work together on this.
“lmao ok. Yeah, AI is doomed.”
Requiem for Our Species by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“Those in the Global South who are least responsible for the climate emergency, will suffer first. They are already fighting existential battles to survive. Our turn will come. We in the Global North may hold out for a bit longer, but only a bit. The billionaire class is preparing its escape. The worse it gets, the stronger will be our temptation to deny the reality facing us, to lash out at climate refugees, which is already happening in Europe and along our border with Mexico, as if they are the problem.”
“This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.”
“The planet will survive. It has experienced mass extinctions before. This one is unique only because our species engineered it. Intelligent life is not so intelligent. Maybe this is why, with all those billions of planets, we have not discovered an evolved species. Maybe evolution has built within it its own death sentence.”
“We are composed of the rational and the irrational. In moments of extreme distress we embrace magical thinking. We become the easy prey of con-artists, cult leaders, charlatans and demagogues who tell us what we want to hear.”
“The awful truth is that even if we halt all carbon emissions today there is so much warming locked into the oceans deep muddy floor and the atmosphere , that feedback loops will ensure climate catastrophe. Summer Arctic sea ice, which reflects 90 percent of solar radiation that comes into contact with it, will disappear.”
“Melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica “has increased fivefold since the 1990s, and now accounts for a quarter of sea-level rise,” according to a recent report funded by NASA and the European Space Agency. Continued sea level rise, the rate of which has doubled over three decades according to the World Meteorological Organization, is inevitable. Tropical rainforests will burn . Boreal forests will move northward. These and other feedback loops are already built into the ecosystem. We cannot stop them. Climate chaos, including elevated temperatures, will last for centuries.”
“Resistance cannot be carried out because it will succeed, but because it is a moral imperative, especially for those of us who have children. We may fail, but if we do not fight against the forces that are orchestrating our mass extinction, we become part of the apparatus of death.”
The Insanity of Solitary Confinement by John Kiriakou (Scheer Post)
“Isolated in a 6-by-10 foot cell 24 hours a day, seven days a week, he spiraled into paranoia and began engaging in shocking self-mutilation. Gay stabbed himself in the eye with a razor blade. He cut off pieces of his own flesh and ate them. He cut out one of his own testicles and left it hanging on a cell door. He then stitched his scrotum closed with a zipper. Instead of being transferred to a hospital, or even the prison’s mental health unit, Gay had time added on to his sentence, all of it in solitary. His seven-year sentence eventually became 97 years. What was his crime? He was convicted in 1993 of stealing a $1 bill and a hat.”
“The research on the effects of solitary confinement on mental health is clear: Nothing good comes of solitary. It causes or exacerbates serious psychological problems and frequently leads to long-term disability or even death. The United Nations condemns it and much of the rest of the world won’t practice it in their own prisons. It is a living example of the failure of the both the U.S. prison system and the U.S. mental healthcare system. Repairing those will take a great deal of time, money, and effort. But the very first step must be to end solitary confinement.”
Teach by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
Narrative by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
Sad by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
LLM by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
A note on Metal shader converter by Raph Levien
“The GPU ecosystem exists at the knife edge of being strangled by complexity. A big part of the problem is that features tend to inhabit a quantum superposition of existing and not existing. Typically there is an anemic core, surrounded by a cloud of optional features. The Vulkan ecosystem is notorious for this: the extension list at vulkan.gpuinfo.org currently lists 146 extensions.”
“I understand the incentives, but overall I find it disappointing that Metal chases shiny new features like ray-tracing, while failing to provide a solid, spec-compliant foundation for GPU compute.”
“My demon is on my butt. My demon talks to me in profanity like a seller, and my demon tries to knock me down, and my demon tries to put me on a hell ride.”
Published by marco on 7. Jul 2023 13:24:44 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 7. Jul 2023 22:01:04 (GMT-5)
“My demon is on my butt. My demon talks to me in profanity like a seller, and my demon tries to knock me down, and my demon tries to put me on a hell ride.”
Published by marco on 2. Jul 2023 13:26:35 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Owning Up to Mistakes and Pandemic Deaths by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)
“[…] we are seeing the fallout from the embargo spread to vaccines that potentially could have saved millions of lives in developing countries. Our political leaders would apparently rather see people die than allow Cuba to get some of the credit for saving them.”
“It would be a huge step forward for both public health and U.S. foreign policy if we could begin down the road of freely sharing healthcare technology rather than trying to bottle it up so that a small number of people can get very rich. The whole world shares an interest in preventing the spread of pandemics. This is an area where we should be able to work together for the benefit of humanity.”
More Startups Throw in the Towel, Unable to Raise Money for Their Ideas by Yuliva Chernova (Wall Street Journal)
““It is hitting now,” said Elizabeth Yin, co-founder and general partner of pre-seed investment firm Hustle Fund. Of her firm’s first fund, only about 60 of the original 101 portfolio companies are around. There were roughly 90 active startups a year ago.”
A sentence that makes you want to say “die in a fire.”
“she believes the frothy market boosted survival rates before the current downturn.”
“Frothy market” means free money for the rich. That’s her business model.
“The venture-capital boom in 2021, as well as pandemic-era government funding to small businesses, likely kept businesses alive for longer than they would have otherwise, some observers believe. Now that those funding sources have dried up, the failures are coming in.”
“Failure rates may increase during downturns, Lee said. “If startups don’t have money then they cannot operate,” he said.”
This kind of wisdom is why you read the WSJ.
“the experience also showed him how macro trends out of control of the startup can make an idea unfeasible. “The fundamentals of what you were going to build are not true anymore,” he said.”
Translation: not enough morons-with-too-much-money around anymore.
Don’t Squeeze the Shorts by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)
“The way to deal with short sellers is to run a good business that makes a lot of money; this will make your stock go up, and the shorts will take care of themselves. Short sellers don’t matter! They can’t hurt you! At most, they can make your stock go down a bit, but your business does not depend on your stock price; your business depends on your business. Just do your business! Ignore the shorts.”
Tech debt metaphor maximalism by Apen Warr
“A family that takes on high-interest credit card debt for a visit to Disneyland is wasting money. If you think you can pay it off in a year, you’ll pay 20%-ish interest for that year for no reason. You can instead save up for a year and get the same gratification next year without the 20% surcharge.”
Unless someone in the family is terminally ill.
“Some people argue that you should almost never plan to pay off your mortgage: typical mortgage interest rates are lower than the rates you’d get long-term from investing in the S&P. The advice that you should “always buy the biggest home you can afford” is often perversely accurate, especially if you believe property values will keep going up. And subject to your risk tolerance and lock-in preferences.”
Of course you consider only your own needs, not whether it’s a good idea from society’s point of view.
“There are many imperfect rules of thumb for how much debt is healthy. (Remember, some debt is very often healthy, and only people who don’t understand debt rush to pay it all off as fast as they can.)”
This once again assumes that you’re optimizing your usage pattern to maximize stuff and wealth for yourself only. If being as wealthy as possible is your number-one priority, then, sure, go ahead and play by whatever rules society tells you to. You want to win, after all. And, of course, make sure someone else loses.
“[…] you could buy a $200k house: a $100k down payment and a $100k mortgage at, say, 3% (fairly common back in 2021), which means $3k/year in interest. But your $200k house goes up by 5% = $10k/year. Now you have an annual gain of $10k − $3k = $7k, much more than the $5k you were making before, with the same money. Sweet!”
Yeah, but you can’t use that money. Unless you borrow more. It’s equity, not liquid.
Brawling on the Brink by Victor Grossman (CounterPunch)
“Starting June 12th, 250 war planes from 20 countries, including F-35 jet fighters manned by 10,000 soldiers from the USA will be roaring and zooming over East German fields and forests. The largest air maneuvers in NATO history will be to “test how quickly American war planes can be deployed to Europe and to practice “the defense of NATO air space.” That explains why the maneuver is named “Air Defender 2023”. Can any sane person read this item without foreboding – and fear of where such a “defense exercise” can be leading?”
Citing Secretary of State Madeleine Albright:
“[…] it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.”
All said with a straight face. My God, the indoctrination.
As US Considers Reoccupying Haiti, History Shows Occupation Is the Root Problem by Danny Shaw (Scheer Post)
“Inflation is over 50 percent. There is no gasoline in the pumps and the cost on the black market is $15 per gallon. Food is scarce. According to the World Food Program, a total of 4.9 million Haitians — nearly half the population – do not have enough to eat, and 1.8 million are facing emergency levels of food insecurity.”
“Haiti’s challenge has been the opposite, the over-involvement, or complete domination, by foreign powers of Haitian geopolitics. Only forces as arrogant as the G7 heads of government would self-anoint themselves as “the international community.” Haitians know them as the Core Group. Author Cécile Accilien explains the Core Group as largely made up of white ambassadors from the U.S., Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, and the European Union who are viewed by many people inside and outside of Haiti as a secretive colonial and imperialist alliance meddling in Haitian political affairs.”
“The Core Group has always been an anti-nation building global gang. Their “responsibility and compulsion” never had anything to do with noble, selfless motives as their corporate mouthpieces claim. They are motivated by power and profits. It is well documented that for over a century now the U.S. has coordinated the repression of Indigenous leftists across Haiti and the Americas to then parachute down crumbs on the populations in the form of charity programs led by missionaries and nongovernmental organizations.”
Annalena Zero Points by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Unsere von den Medien so enthusiastisch gefeierte Außenministerin Annalena Baerbock hat im Ausland einfach keine Fortune. In China tapste sie in bester Kolonialdamen-Manier gänzlich undiplomatisch von einem Fettnäpfchen ins nächste und wurde dafür von asiatischen Kommentatoren belächelt . Verständlich. „Bigmouth strikes again“. Wer die Chinesen dafür kritisiert, „Russlands Krieg zu unterstützen“ und zeitgleich den Beschluss fasst, schwere Kampfpanzer in die Ukraine zu liefern, ist nicht gerade glaubwürdig.”
The Party Was Not Always Right by Chris Maisano (Jacobin)
“London’s arrest and persecution was a terrible trauma for him, shattering the party’s identification with all that was good and true. Nevertheless, he continued to insist, “I never confused the Inquisition of Torquemada with Christianity, and I won’t confuse Stalin, Beria, and that whole group with Socialism . . . it didn’t make me lose faith in authentic Socialism.””
“Historian S. A. Smith, who is sympathetic to the motivations that drove the October Revolution, concludes in Russia in Revolution :”“Lenin was the architect of the party’s monopoly on power; it was he who subordinated the soviets and trade unions to the party; he who would not tolerate those who thought differently; he who dismantled many civil and political freedoms; he who crushed the socialist opposition.”
“Socialists looking to the Communist movement for a usable past would do well to heed C. Wright Mills’s advice to the young radicals of his day: “Read Lenin again (be careful).” Watch The Confession, too.”
First There Were Neo-Nazis, Then There Were No Nazis, Then There Were by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Think about that. The presence of Nazi elements in the AFU is not a worry. The worry is merely whether clear signs of Nazi sympathies might cause some members of the Western alliance to decide they no longer want to support Nazi elements in the AFU. I am reminded of that Public Broadcasting news segment last year, wherein a provincial governor is featured with a portrait of Bandera behind him. PBS simply blurred the photograph and ran the interview with another of the courageous, admirable Ukrainians to which we are regularly treated.”
“Then came the Russian intervention, and Poof! There are no more neo–Nazis in Ukraine. There are only these errant images that are of no special account. And to assert there are neo–Nazis in Ukraine—to have some semblance of memory and a capacity to judge what is before one’s eyes—“plays into Russian propaganda,””
“But of course. SS insignia, Wehrmacht iconography: Seen it everywhere people admire super-effective war machines. Remember this logic next time some liberal flamer proposes to persecute a MAGA supporter who partakes of this “subculture.””
Even if we grant these media the luxury of not being outright manipulative liars, they are at least terrible reporters, subject to every confabulating instinct, subconscious foible, and psychological dead-end or möbius strip simultaneously.
“Forget about bombs, missiles, gore, the fog of war, courageous sergeants, trench stench, grenades, or any of the other horrors of battle. Gibbons–Neff’s big problems as he pretends to cover the Ukraine war are maintaining access, getting the Kyiv gatekeepers’ permission to go someplace, and avoiding annoying the regime’s authorities.”
Dr. Cornel West Announces He is Running for President by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“I never want to downplay the least vulnerable in our society — our gay brothers, lesbian sisters, trans, Black poor, brown poor, Indigenous poor. They are more viciously attacked by the neofascists than the neoliberals. But the neoliberals capitulate to the attack. I would never say they’re identical, but I would say poor and working people are still getting crushed over and over again.””
They are not the same, but the effect of their policies is the same. For the people on the ground, there is no salient difference. Believing that their espoused policies—enthusiastic support vs. verbal resistance followed by continuous capitulation—amount to a difference is what has kept these idiots in power for too long. They’re just two different ways of getting the same thing. You’re either going to get ridden rough and told you deserve it because you’re lazy and stupid and worthless … or you get a drink first, then get ridden rough, then gaslighted into thinking it’s your own fault, followed by reminders that you’ve got it better than with the obviously abusive guy. What a world.
“[…] the same is true now in apartheid-like conditions in the West Bank and Gaza. We can do that without in any way falling prey to one of the more vicious ideologies of the last two thousand years, which is the hatred of Jews. We don’t have a minute to engage in any kind of anti-Jewish hatred or anti-Jewish sentiment, but at the same time we don’t have a minute to turn our backs to the suffering of Palestinians tied to U.S. foreign policy that always looks away from their suffering, looks away from their social misery, looks away from the murders taking place, looks away from the houses that are crushed, looks away from the land that is taken, and so forth.”
“He quoted the sociologist Max Weber:”“What is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.”
“[…] as Nelson Mandela said,”“And then when you achieve the impossible, everyone said ‘Oh well that was inevitable.’”
“We on the left are concerned about working people even when they themselves are xenophobic. We can steal some of the thunder from the neofascists. We’re not in any way putting up with the xenophobia. No way! Not one minute! The anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim — I have no patience with that whatsoever! But I’ll go straight into Trump country and tell all those white working brothers and sisters that I am deeply concerned about their wounds and their inability to gain access to the resources that they ought to have as citizens. We cannot defeat fascism with glib milquetoast neoliberalism. We’ve got to get at the roots of it.””
“Cornel, like the Biblical prophets, is driven by an unshakeable belief that our brief sojourn on the planet is validated by what we do for those the world has cast aside. His is not only a political campaign, but a calling.”
Does Anyone Believe American Propaganda Anymore? by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“The new piece this week by Shane Harris and Souad Mekhennet cites a “European intelligence report” obtained from one of the “online friends” of Teixeira. How’s that for source management? Get a guy turned in, smear him as a dangerous gun-toting lunatic, then use his information.”
15 Reasons Why Mass Media Employees Act Like Propagandists by Caitlin Johnstone
“The only time Trump was universally showered with praise by the mass media was when he bombed Syria, while the only time Biden has been universally slammed by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan”
“The uniformity is so complete and so consistent that when people first begin noticing these patterns it’s common for them to assume the media must be controlled by a small, centralized authority much like the state media of more openly authoritarian governments. But if you actually dig into the reasons why the media act the way they act, that isn’t really what you find. Instead, what you find is a much larger, much less centralized network of factors which tips the scales of media coverage to the advantage of the US empire and the forces which benefit from it. Some of it is indeed conspiratorial in nature and happens in secret, but most of it is essentially out in the open.”
““I’m not saying you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” In a 1997 essay , Chomsky added that “the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway.””
“[…] if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path in the first place.””
““No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all the usual think tanks to say all the usual things. Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.””
“Depriving challenging interlocutors of access funnels all the prized news media material to the most obsequious brown-nosers in the press, because if you’ve got too much dignity to pitch softball questions and not follow up on ridiculous politician-speak word salad non-answers there’s always someone else who will. This creates a dynamic where power-serving bootlickers are elevated to the top of the mainstream media, while actual journalists who try to hold power to account go unrewarded.”
“In Totalitarian Dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In Free Democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and the news media unquestioningly publish it.”
“[…] just so happens to make the government look good and/or make its enemies look bad and/or manufacture consent for this or that agenda. This of course amounts to simply publishing press releases for the White House, the Pentagon or the US intelligence cartel, since you’re just uncritically repeating some unverified thing that an official handed you and disguising it as news reporting.”
“Another twist on the intelligence cartel “scoop” dynamic is the way government officials will feed information to a reporter from one outlet, and then reporters from another outlet will contact those very same officials and ask them if the information is true, and then all outlets involved will have a public parade on Twitter proclaiming that the report has been “confirmed” […]”
“Class interests dance with the behavior of journalists in multiple ways because, as both Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have noted, journalists in the mass media are increasingly coming not from working-class backgrounds but from wealthy families, and have degrees from expensive elite universities.”
“The Quincy Institute has a new study out which found that a staggering 85 percent of the think tanks cited by the news media in their reporting on US military support for Ukraine have been paid by literal Pentagon contractors.”
“Western journalists cite empire-funded think tanks because they generally align with the empire-approved lines that a mass media stenographer knows they can advance their career by pushing, and they do it because doing so gives them an official-looking “expert” “source” to cite while proclaiming more expensive war machinery needs to be sent to this or that part of the world […]”
“The fact that war profiteers are allowed to actively influence media, politics and government bodies through think tanks, advertising and corporate lobbying is one of the most insane things happening in our society today. And not only is it allowed, it’s seldom even questioned.”
“There were no conditions which gave rise to Operation Mockingbird in the 1970s which aren’t also with us today. Cold war? That’s happening today. Hot war? That’s happening today. Dissident groups? Happening today. A mad scramble to secure US domination and capital on the world stage? Happening today. The CIA wasn’t dismantled and nobody went to prison. All that’s changed is that news media now have more things for government operatives to toy with, like online media and social media.”
“The mass media also commonly bring in “experts” to provide opinions on war and weapons who are direct employees of the military-industrial complex, without ever explaining that massive conflict of interest to their audience.”
Plastics Recycling Is Far Worse Than We Thought by Matt Simon (Mother Jones)
““The recycling centers are potentially making things worse by actually creating microplastics faster and discharging them into both water and air,” says Deonie Allen, a coauthor of the paper and a microplastics researcher at the University of Birmingham. “I’m not sure we can technologically engineer our way out of that problem.””
“[…] as plastic products have gotten more complex—multilayered pouches for baby food, for instance—they’ve gotten harder to recycle. The industry’s literal dirty secret is that mountains of plastic waste are being shipped to economically developing countries, where the stuff is often burned in open pits, poisoning surrounding communities and sending still more microplastics and chemicals into the atmosphere. If recycling was actually effective in its current form, the industry wouldn’t have to keep producing exponentially more plastic —it’s now churning out a trillion pounds a year.”
To Smash the Patriarchy, We Need to Get Specific About What It Means by Kristen R. Ghodsee (Jacobin)
“In the United States, the 1907 Expatriation Act meant that American women who married immigrant husbands in cities like New York and Boston automatically lost their citizenship and had to apply for naturalization when their foreign husbands became eligible. The provisions of this act weren’t fully repealed until 1940.”
I’m speechless.
“In Canada as a whole, where white settlers once imposed patrilineal naming conventions on matrilineal indigenous peoples to help “regulate [the] division of property among heirs in a way that conformed with European, not Indigenous, property laws,” the 2008 to 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission allowed for the free restoration of indigenous names, including mononyms (the ability not to have a surname at all).”
“Of those parents who did not work outside of the home in the United States in 2016, 78 percent of mothers reported they didn’t work because they were taking care of their home and family. For women, who generally earn less than men and who societies expect to provide more unpaid care work, it makes rational sense in economies with few social safety nets to embrace what social scientists call “hypergamy,” or the desire to marry up and find a partner who can and will support them.”
Complexity is Good, Actually by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“You can wash your hands of nuance all you like; you live in a world that will always defy your clumsy, reductive efforts. Life’s complexity is irreducible.”
“Complexity is what makes life interesting, and complexity is what makes art enjoyable. We have brains that have developed an exquisite ability to parse complicated, multivariate information − the fact that you are reading these words right now and understanding them is a miracle of raw processing − and we crave the opportunity to exercise them.”
Complexity and effort are what makes art art. It’s why when an AI can churn out a million beautiful things per hour, they cease to be beautiful or interesting. It’s why cookie-cutter beauty, which is getting easier and easier to achieve—at least digitally—means it matters less and less.
“We inject our art with symbolism and reference in order to connect with it on a deeper and more satisfying level.”
“The modern American cult of therapy takes a useful and necessary medical practice, meant for specific contexts and purposes, and generalizes its habits to the entirety of human life. Its folklore exists to justify what insecure people can’t justify for themselves. Narcissistic personality disorder is thought to occur in less than 1% of adults, and yet every ex-boyfriend in this country suffers from it. Curious! But not actually curious, given that an army of opportunists have built careers out of telling people just that kind of story − everyone you don’t like is a sociopath; every time you don’t get everything you want, you’re experiencing trauma; every conflict you get into, about anything, ever, is evidence of a toxic personality in the other person. Are you sure your boss is just another human being with legitimate pressures and needs, and your disagreements the product of the inevitable friction that results from a universe where friction is inevitable? Or could they be operating under the influence of the Dark Triad??? Sure. Why the fuck not. This is what therapeutic rhetoric has become, in this culture, an excuse architecture for every spare selfish impulse you ever have.”
“The notion that human relationships fall simplistically and reliably onto a linear spectrum of “positive” and “negative” is so fundamentally contrary to my lived experience that I don’t really know how to begin here. We have multivariate, inscrutable, often unknowable personalities; these personalities are shaped by innumerable Byzantine internal forces and by a relentless stream of formative experiences. The notion that any two personalities are going to interact with each other in some kindergarten polarity of positivity and negativity seems farcical, just mathematically.”
“I’m not sure if this is common knowledge, but we are a mortal species with finite lives that evolved by chance on an indifferent rock in a universe devoid of transcendent meaning, cursed to watch those we love die around us until we die in turn. We exist on a planet where our genetic endowment compels us to be selfish in pursuit of food, sex, and status, and there are 7 billion of us, all competing for limited resources and jockeying for status in competitions that are often inherently zero-sum. I’m going to go ahead and suggest that never having a single ambivalent interaction is perhaps an unrealistic expectation for anyone.”
“Why are mixed feelings unhealthy? In a world this complicated, with relationships that are so full of interlocking and unconscious dynamics, aren’t mixed feelings unavoidable and ultimately benign? And why are we assuming that our “frenemies” are the ones who have to change? Is there really no chance at all that we’re the ones who should change?”
“What breaks the tie? Why? What are the rules here? This whole world of pop psychology insists that the individual is sacrosanct, that anyone who deals with insecurity or anxiety or self-doubt is the victim of injustice, and they are entitled to do whatever they want to self-actualize. But what do we do when two people are trying to self-actualize in ways that conflict with each other?”
“He was, like me, a love-it-or-hate-it kind of guy, one who inspired intense feelings and could be very difficult at times. But that’s my favorite sort of person, the kind who isn’t blandly likable and safe to know, but rather extracts a cost to be close to and then repays that cost with rare and complicated gifts of personality.”
“[…] the purpose of human life is not to feel comfortable all the time, bad and dark feelings are an essential part of being a person, and while you are entitled to having your physical self protected, your material needs met, and your basic autonomy respected, you aren’t entitled to never feel pain, sadness, insecurity, anxiety, self-doubt, or that you’re “invalid.” Society could never accommodate such an entitlement, and it’s a bad goal anyway.”
The Reckoning of Time by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“One might also say, rather more boldly, that seventeenth-century clockworks amounted to an early anticipation of another well-known revolution two hundred years later, as they was [sic] effectively the first machine of the industrial era, whose products were the hours and minutes and seconds that would make all the rest possible. You can’t get canned for showing up at the factory five minutes late if the owners don’t have a “minute machine” on hand to inform them of your tardiness. We tend to think today that clocks don’t so much “make” minutes as they do [sic] mark them out. But where then were all the minutes before precision timekeeping became a ubiquitous feature of human society? The ancients did not speak of them any more than they spoke of fuel, data, ADHD, or queerness.”
“The girls did not know what Facebook was. It came up in conversation that I was from Canada (which was true enough at the time, I guess). The girls did not know what Canada was. I had the distinct impression that, if we had pressed further, they would not have known what the United States were, what an airplane was, what century we were in. When we left I was upset. It’s a duty to keep informed about the world! I said to my beloved. What if a war were to break out (which already at the time seemed a looming possibility in these parts)? What would they do, if they had no real knowledge of what the relevant issues are, of who the various parties are to the conflict? “They would pray,” my beloved said. That’s absurd! I replied.”
No more absurd than anything else we do. Especially when confronted with helplessness. Once you let go of the notion of self-preservation at all costs, many decisions become easier.
“It would be a mistake to suppose that Sigbert had taken a stand on the particular merits on each side of the conflict between the Mercians and the Angles, or even that he had any views on war as such. He had simply removed himself from the form of life that concerns itself with war and other mundane affairs. This is a move we can barely recognize today.”
“Yet another way we might understand modernity is as the period in which our conception of duty becomes both universalized and uniformized. The human good is rendered into a one-size-fits-all outfit, and the expectations of a human life are, to the extent possible (to the extent that the reality of the differences between us does not spontaneously resist our efforts), standardized across all cases.”
I had a week during which I only used my M1 Mac very occasionally. What was amazing was that it was right there for me, providing its 20-22 hours of running time without wasting energy doing a whole bunch of stuff I’d never asked it to do.
This is how a notebook should be. Energy-efficient. Quiet. Powerful. In that order.
How to perpetuate security problems by Daniel J. Bernstein (The cr.yp.to blog)
“The HertzBleed paper refers to various SIKE details as part of its demo working backwards from visible timings to secret data, but there are many papers demonstrating how to work backwards from power consumption to secrets in a much wider range of computations. The only safe presumption is that all information about power consumption necessary for those attacks is also leaked by overclocking.”
“Your constant-time cryptographic library might be vulnerable if is susceptible to secret-dependent power leakage, and this leakage extends to enough operations to induce secret-dependent changes in CPU frequency. Future work is needed to systematically study what cryptosystems can be exploited via the new Hertzbleed side channel.”
“Is it possible for a narrative to turn into an article of faith shared among researchers, funding agencies, and journalists, influencing choices of research directions and protective actions, without any of the believers scientifically evaluating whether the narrative is correct? Maybe even with the narrative being dangerously inaccurate?”
“Programmers who rewrote their software to take advantage of vector instructions and multiple cores gained more and more speed—but, again, software rewrites take time. Unoptimized non-vectorized single-core software didn’t immediately disappear.”
“Meanwhile I’m rarely waiting for my laptop, even with it running at very low speed. I’m happy with the laptop staying cool and quiet. Yes, I know there are some people using monster “laptops” where I’d use a server, but are they really getting “extreme” benefits from Turbo Boost?”
“The 2H2B paper’s “conclusions” section draws an analogy between overclocking attacks and Spectre. Overclocking attacks are, however, vastly different from Spectre in the range of protective actions available to OS distributors and end users today. All of my overclockable servers and laptops have simple end-user configuration options to turn overclocking off (and, in almost all cases, options to set even lower frequencies), whereas speculative execution is baked into CPU pipelines.”
“Overclocking produces random heat spikes, random fan-noise spikes, and, according to the best evidence available, random early hardware death. Yes, cryptographers love randomness, but most people find these effects annoying. Meanwhile the speedups from overclocking are mostly in software that hasn’t been optimized—which tends to be software that doesn’t have much impact on the user experience to begin with.”
“Maximum doesn’t reflect the overall user experience: for example, this many-core build-and-test process is obtaining only a 6% speedup from overclocking. Maybe the user still thinks that a 6% speedup justifies consuming 24% more energy. Maybe somebody else is paying the power bill.”
“Even if everybody starts with a shared understanding that there’s an important security problem at hand, the decomposition of responsibility can easily produce paralysis.”
“The simplest way out of the finger-pointing logjam is to observe that turning off Turbo Boost etc. stops attacks immediately, whereas asking for masked software leaves users exposed for much longer.”
“It’s not that turning off Turbo Boost eliminates the implementation risk; see, e.g., TAO’s discussion of crystals. The point is simply that we shouldn’t be skipping this defense in favor of a defense that’s much harder to audit.”
Published by marco on 29. Jun 2023 22:13:06 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Wegen Fachkräftemangel will Spahn die „Rente mit 63“ abschaffen – das ist Kokolores by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Ein gesellschaftliches Problem kann jedoch ein Fachkräftemangel sein, bei dem flächendeckend für bestimmte Jobs zu wenig Arbeitskräfte zur Verfügung stehen. Auch hier tragen jedoch die Unternehmen einen großen Teil der Verantwortung, da sie in der Vergangenheit zu wenig Fachkräfte ausgebildet haben und vorhandene Fachkräfte durch zu niedrige Löhne und schlechte Arbeitsbedingungen in Teilzeit oder gar ganz aus dem Job gedrängt haben.”
“Auch der Arbeitsmarkt unterliegt schließlich den marktwirtschaftlichen Regeln von Angebot und Nachfrage. Ist die Nachfrage größer als das Angebot, reagiert ein Markt in der Regel durch steigende Preise. Paradoxerweise klammern jedoch sowohl Arbeitgeberverbände als auch Politiker der Parteien, die sich sonst immer als die Gralshüter der freien Marktwirtschaft verkaufen, die Option aus, den Fachkräftemangel durch höhere Löhne und bessere Arbeitsbedingungen abzufedern.”
“Ein Akademiker, der seinen Schreibtischjob vielleicht ohne größere Probleme auch noch im höheren Alter ausfüllen kann, kommt schließlich nur in den allerseltensten Fällen auf die 45 Beitragsjahre, die nötig sind, um sich früher ohne Abzüge verrenten zu lassen.”
“Das würde ja Geld kosten, und wenn es um höhere Arbeitskosten geht, vergessen selbst gestählte Anhänger des Marktes ja bekanntlich gerne die Grundlagen der Marktwirtschaft.”
“[…] gerade in der Pflege oder im Handwerk gibt es ja sehr gute Gründe, warum man diesem Job nicht mehr im höheren Alter nachgehen kann. Daran dürfte sich auch nicht viel ändern, wenn man den faktischen Renteneintritt nach hinten verschiebt. Dann gehen die Menschen in diesen Jobs halt mit Abschlägen früher in Rente.”
“Jens Spahn hatte übrigens ein Jahr nach Abi und Ausbildung das Glück, mit 22 Jahren ein Bundestagsmandat zu erlangen. In die Rentenversicherung hat er damit höchstens drei Jahre eingezahlt. Für jedes Jahr im Bundestag erwarb er dafür jedoch einen Altersvorsorgeanspruch in Höhe von 250 Euro pro Monat. Mit seinen 43 Jahren hat er also bereits einen Anspruch auf 5.250 Euro Altersversorgung, bezahlt vom Steuerzahler. Da Spahn ja noch lange nicht am Ende seiner politischen Karriere ist, wird auch dieser Betrag noch steigen. Wenn er also nun den Krankenschwestern und Dachdeckern, die ihn mit ihren Steuergeldern „aushalten“, ihre ohnehin schon magere Rente kürzen will, ist dies gleich doppelt schäbig.”
Deaf, but Not Blind to US Decline by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“By way of background, Hill is one of those revolving-door people who float on the froth of academic and think tank salaries when not in government. A Russianist by training, she was an intelligence analyst for the Bush II and Obama administrations. She then served on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council until she turned on Trump during his 2019 impeachment hearings and had a few moments under the Klieg lights. Hill is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and will take up duties this summer as chancellor at Durham, the British university. Maybe Hill speaks with a looser tongue now that she will return to her native England.”
She’s British, driving policy in the U.S. Wonderful.
“I conclude from Hill’s remarks that the technocrats, scholars, and political figures who think through and determine U.S. foreign policy, and by extension the Atlantic world’s, cannot hear those now bringing a new world order into being, and they are in abject denial as to the right responses to this world-turning and profoundly promising undertaking.”
“[…] detect in it the very faintest signs that those most intimately involved in shaping U.S. foreign policy will gradually come to understand that pretending the U.S. remains the world’s unchallenged imperium is a game that they can play a little while longer but not forever.”
”Stay Down, Don’t Get Up” by Yuri Ugolnikov (Russian Dissent)
“I confess that the degree of passivity in our fellow citizens was unexpected even by me, but to simply declare that “the people are wrong” is at best naive. The passivity of Russians is largely due to the extreme distrust of any figure involved in public affairs. And this mistrust did not grow out of nowhere.”
Same as in the U.S., as always.
“It was Yeltsin’s reforms that undermined the confidence of fellow citizens in mass politics almost completely. Having achieved power at first precisely thanks to left-wing rhetoric (Yeltsin, let me remind you, began as a critic of the nomenklatura and party leaders of the USSR), this politician immediately corrected himself, and forgot his previous indignation over social inequality; indeed, forgot so well that the difference in the level of income between the poorest and richest sections of our long-suffering population − the real legacy of his “reforms” − has become, and still remains, obscene.”
The Russians and Americans should be singing the same song. The people should rise up together, against their oppressors. Instead, they are at war.
“The arrival of democracy and public politics in Russia turned out to be a huge swindle. And this has for decades scared citizens away from participating in politics or from supporting any social and political movements.”
Zelensky says “a large number of soldiers will die” in new offensive by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“The entry of Ukraine into NATO “right now” would mean the invocation of NATO Article 5, effectively meaning a declaration of war against Russia by the NATO powers.
“In April, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared, “Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO,” adding, “All NATO Allies have agreed that Ukraine will become a member.”
“Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said he supports a “path” for Ukraine to join the NATO military alliance.
“The coming together of these developments makes clear the extent to which the Ukraine war, deliberately inflamed and escalated by the NATO powers, is spiraling out of control, threatening devastating consequences for the entire world.”
A Man Without a Strategy: How Netanyahu is Provoking Armed Intifada in the West Bank by Ramzy Barzoud (CounterPunch)
“For Netanyahu, the frequent deadly raids on Palestinian towns and refugee camps translate into political assets that allow him to keep his extremist supporters happy. But this is short-term thinking. If Israel’s unchecked violence continues, the West Bank could soon find itself in an all-out military uprising against Israel and an open rebellion against the PA.”
China Places Country Dangerously Close To US Warship by Caitlin Johnstone
“These are international waters after all, and the Chinese navy should therefore stay out of the way of US military vessels traveling through them, just as the US navy would stay out of the way of Chinese military forces traveling a few miles off the coast of California or transiting between the islands of Hawaii. The US is only asking for the same freedom of navigation it would afford anyone else.”
“Obviously Chinese fighter jets have no business operating in that region, especially when their movements endanger the US spy planes who are flying their peaceful missions there. But as with the Taiwan Strait, the imperialist aggressions of the Chinese Communist Party have been so expansionist in nature that the South China Sea now sits immediately adjacent to mainland China.
“Here’s hoping that China stops with its brazen aggressions against the US military forces who are minding their own business in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, stops endangering poor defenseless warships and spy planes by moving through waters and airspace they have no business entering in the first place, and starts respecting the rules-based global sovereignty of the United States of America.”
Scholz’ militaristischer Wutausbruch in Falkensee by Johannes Stern (WSWS)
“Dann brüllte er ins Mikrofon:”“Im Weiteren bezichtigte Scholz Putin nicht nur der Zerstörung von „Städten, Dörfern, Eisenbahnlinien und Autobahnen“. Er habe „unglaublich viele Bürgerinnen und Bürger, Kinder und Alte in der Ukraine getötet“. Dies sei „Mord, um es klar zu sagen“. In „seinem imperialistischen Traum von Großmacht“ riskiere Putin zudem „das Leben seiner eigenen Bürgerinnen und Bürger“, fügte er hinzu. Das sei „unverantwortlich. Das ist Kriegstreiberei. Das ist Gewalt mit Waffen.“”“Er ist mit 200.000 Soldaten in die Ukraine einmarschiert. Er hat noch viele mehr mobilisiert. Er hat das Leben seiner eigenen Bürger riskiert, für einen imperialistischen Traum. Putin will die Ukraine zerstören, erobern, und er hat noch andere im Blick. Das werden wir als Freiheitsfreunde, als Demokraten, als Europäer nicht zulassen.”
If he truly believes all of that as unalloyed truth, then he is doing the right thing. But he just described Putin as a reincarnation of Hitler and the situation on the eastern front of Europe as a repeat of WWII. It is no such thing. Not even close. Scholz is terrified of something that is not happening the way he thinks it is. He is terrified of even talking about a ceasefire because he thinks he cannot negotiate with the devil.
Schmegegge by Morris Berman (Dark Ages America)
“The whole country amounts to nothing more than baloney. The government is baloney; the MSM is baloney; and the American public is baloney. The Yiddish word for this is schmegegge. […] (it’s sort of like putz squared). America is a schmegegge, a hopeless, pathetic collection of hot air.”
In the letter addressed to Biden and acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, Suzanne P. Clark, the CEO and president of the Chamber, wrote that the group was “very concerned by the premeditated and disruptive service actions that are slowing operations at several major ports along the West Coast.” (WSWS)
A couple of things: (1) The acting Secretary of Labor and CEO and president of the Chamber of Commerce are both women. Both of them are going to work hard to make sure that those workers get back to work, without any or with an insulting pay increase. They are going to move heaven and Earth to make sure that no worker gets a thing, if they can absolutely help it. They’re going to order them back to work, on pain of fine or jail time. They’re going to try to fire them. They’re going to go after their families. But they are absolutely not going to pay them more or give in to any of their requests. To do so would be socialism, and Americans don’t do socialism, no matter what plumbing you’ve got downstairs. Unless you’re in the military, then you get socialism. But that’s another story.
No. The answer will always be no, no matter how reasonable the request, no matter how immoral it would be not to grant it.
As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Roger Waters’s Critics Are Smearing Him as Antisemitic Because They Hate His Pro-Palestine Activism by Chip Gibbons (Jacobin)
“That false claims are being made about Waters is not the only disturbing aspect of this episode. What is especially troubling is how quickly these claims made it into mainstream media with little fact-checking. Now even politicians and law enforcement are taking them up.”
“Waters has performed the song over six hundred times in concert. As part of a performance Waters has been doing since 1980, during the song he adopts, in his own words, the persona of “an unhinged fascist demagogue.” Berlin was no different. During the song, Waters took to the stage in a long leather trench coat with the crossed-hammer insignia made famous by the 1982 film. At his side were two men in black military-like uniforms wearing helmets. Banners just like those featured in The Wall movie dropped from the ceiling, and an inflatable pig floated above the audience. One side read “Steal from the Poor. Give to the Rich.”; the other side, “Fuck The Poor.” The slogans were clear caricatures of right-wing sentiment.”
“Like everyone in a free society, critics of Waters’s political views are welcome to disagree with him. Repeatedly, however, they have sought to censor him; in order to achieve these ends, they have turned to a campaign of disinformation. Although disinformation has been a continuous source of panic in the United States since the 2016 election, disinformation campaigns against critics of US policy seem to get a free pass.”
The War We’re Finally Allowed to See by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“[…] correspondents from The New York Times, the other big dailies, the wire services, and the broadcast networks have accepted without protest the Kyiv regime’s refusal to allow them to see the war as it is. Content these professional slovens have been to sit in Kyiv hotel rooms and file stories based on the regime’s transparently unreliable accounts of events, all the while pretending their stories are properly reported and factual.”
Like Waugh’s Scoop.
“Reporting and writing of this caliber makes Mogelson look the dazzling star next to the correspondent-reenactors in their Kyiv hotel rooms. But for my money he also keeps pace with a lot of standout names from the past. I see in his copy a little Dexter Filkins, a little Bernard Fall, a little Michael Herr, a little Martha Gellhorn, and I’ll go so far as to say a little Ernie Pyle. As for Dondyuk’s pictures, the way they leap off the page brings to mind Tim Page, Horst Faas, Robert Kapa, and some of the other great war fotogs of their day. If this piece portends a turn or return (however you want to think of it) to reporting with some integrity to it, the project could not have got off to a better start. But let us stay with “if” for now.”
“In Mogelson’s writing we meet conscripts sent to the front after little or no training. He describes one man who was kidnapped on a city sidewalk and was under Russian fire three days later. Paralyzing fright, exhaustion, demoralization, desertions, a sort of Beetle Bailey incompetence—these are rampant among the green draftees that now make up the majority of the AFU’s infantry. They fight with Vietnam-era vehicles shipped from the U.S., or muzzle-loaded mortars long out of production, or Soviet-era weapons left over from the pre–1991 days—and, withal, too little ammunition for this kind of matériel to make any difference at all.”
“This is the war the propaganda machine has kept from us. And now we know that what correspondents reporting for independent media have been describing is by and large the war as it is. Among much else we can now see the obvious indifference the Kyiv regime and its Western backers display for those doing the fighting—who, Mogelson tells us, are now working-class Ukrainians, the more privileged having dodged the draft or otherwise avoided service.”
“[…] the larger picture suggests publication of this eye– and mind-opening piece reflects a creeping recognition in all sorts of places—among the policy cliques, at the Pentagon, in corporate media—that Ukraine is not going to win this war and the time has come to prepare for this eventuality. The new drift on the vaunted counteroffensive is that it is not going to make much difference.”
“NATO officials, per Steven Erlanger, The Times’s Brussels correspondent, are now thinking about doing in Ukraine what the allies did in postwar Germany: Divide it such that the west joins the alliance and the east is left to the East, so to say.”
“[…] the start of an effort to get all those people with blue-and-yellow flags on their front porches ready for a dose of the reality from which they have been shielded all these months. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Business Insider, Forbes: They have all recently run pieces not nearly as good as Mogelson’s but in the let’s-get-real line.”
The Wars We Don’t (Care to) See by David Barsamian and Norman Solomon (Scheer Post)
“American Justice Robert Jackson was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. He made an opening statement to the Tribunal on November 21, 1945, because there was some concern at the time that it would be an example of victor’s justice. He said this: “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down the rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.””
This is an oft-quoted and lovely sentiment but, even at the time, it wasn’t true. The shocking and deliberate attacks on civilian centers in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki went wholly unpunished. Instead, they were then—and continue to be—glorified as justified and necessary. We never had any intention of allowing the same rules be applied to us as we apply to our subjects.
“Right now, we’re in a situation where, unfortunately, across a lot of the political spectrum, including some of the left, folks think that you have to choose between aligning yourself with U.S. foreign policy and its acts of aggression or Russian foreign policy and its acts of aggression. Personally, I think it’s both appropriate and necessary to condemn war on Ukraine, and Washington’s hypocrisy doesn’t in any way let Russia off the hook. By the same token, Russia’s aggression shouldn’t let the United States off the hook for the tremendous carnage we’ve created in this century.”
“I won’t say never, but in my experience, it’s extremely rare for an NPR or PBS journalist to assertively question the underlying prerogatives of the U.S. government to attack other countries, even if it’s said with a more erudite ambiance.”
“[…] the underlying message is invariably that yes, we can (and should) at times argue over when, whether, and how to attack certain countries with the firepower of the Pentagon, but those decisions do need to be made and the U.S. has the right to do so if that’s the best judgment of the wise people in the upper reaches of policy in Washington.”
“President Biden, like his predecessors in the Oval Office, loves to speak about the glories of the free press and say that journalism is a wonderful aspect of our society — until the journalists do something he and the government he runs really don’t like. A prime example is Julian Assange. He’s a journalist, a publisher, an editor, and he’s sitting in prison in Great Britain being hot-wired for transportation to the United States. I sat through the two-week trial in the federal district of northern Virginia of CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling and I can tell you it was a kangaroo court. That’s the court Julian Assange has a ticket to if his extradition continues.”
“More than a century ago, William Dean Howells wrote a short story called “Editha.” Keep in mind that this was after the United States had been slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines. In it, a character says, “What a thing it is to have a country that can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!””
The Democratic Party’s Crucifixion of Matt Taibbi by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
““The old school ACLU-like liberals, they’re just gone now,” he said. “There’s this new movement that doesn’t believe in countering bad speech with better speech. They believe in closing it off and shutting it down. That’s what the Twitter Files were about. That’s why there was so much hostility.””
“There are three steps to destroying a reporter who can’t be bought off or intimidated. The first is a campaign by the powerful, whose lies and crimes have been exposed, along with their obsequious courtiers in the press, to discredit the reporting. The second is a sustained campaign of character assassination. The third is persecution carried out once the reporter’s credibility has been weakened, his or her ability to publish or broadcast is degraded and public support has eroded.”
“A discredited ruling class, which has disemboweled the nation for its corporate masters and whose primary mission is the perpetuation of permanent war, has no intention of carrying out reform. It will not permit an exchange of ideas or allow its critics a platform. It knows it is hated. It fears the rise of the neofascists its dysfunction and corruption have spawned. It seeks to perpetuate itself only through fear —— fear of what will replace it. That is all it has to offer a demoralized citizenry. Constitutional guarantees of free speech and the right to privacy are noisome impediments to its tenuous grip on power.”
Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference. by Yasemin Saplakoglu (Quanta)
“In one follow-up study, Segal asked participants to imagine something, such as the New York City skyline, while he projected something else faintly onto the wall — such as a tomato. What the participants saw was a mix of the imagined image and the real one, such as the New York City skyline at sunset. Segal’s findings suggested that perception and imagination can sometimes “quite literally mix,” Nanay said.”
“She eventually hopes to figure out if they can manipulate this system to make imagination feel more real. For example, virtual reality and neural implants are now being investigated for medical treatments, such as to help blind people see again. The ability to make experiences feel more or less real, she said, could be really important for such applications. It’s not outlandish, given that reality is a construct of the brain. “Underneath our skull, everything is made up,” Muckli said. “We entirely construct the world, in its richness and detail and color and sound and content and excitement. … It is created by our neurons.””
That is absolutely not the first application. The first application will be, as always, porn.
Also, that statement at the end short-circuits millennia of philosophical thought.
‘Almost magical’: chemists can now move single atoms in and out of a molecule’s core by Mark Peplow (Nature)
“At Stanford University in California, chemists Noah Burns and Sajan Patel have developed a carbon-to-nitrogen swap that is driven by blue light and oxygen (see ‘Nitrogen swap’). However, it also involves a highly reactive compound called an azide that has a reputation for explosive instability.”
“[…] some of the editing reactions have deep historical roots — several have enabled skeletal edits since the late nineteenth century. The Baeyer–Villiger oxidation, for example, inserts an oxygen atom; the Beckmann rearrangement inserts nitrogen, a process that every year produces millions of tonnes of caprolactam, the feedstock for nylon.”
“[…] these historical approaches have limited scope. They can only insert atoms next to a functional group known as a carbonyl, because they rely on its chemical reactivity to help prise open a molecule. Other skeletal editing techniques developed decades ago are rarely used, because they chew up too many functional groups in molecules or produce messy mixtures that require laborious purification.”
“Chemists imagine the universe of all possible organic molecules as a territory called chemical space. It includes up to 10 60 possible drug-like molecules, each a twinkling star of potential medicinal benefit. Ideally, pharmaceutical companies’ screening libraries should feature representatives from across the chemical cosmos. But, in reality, molecular structures that are easier to make tend to be over-represented in these libraries, leaving large unilluminated voids in medicinal chemical space.”
Bad Romance by Elia Cugini (The Baffler)
“(Many of the books I read are explicitly or implicitly based on the Persephone myth because Persephone is Schrodinger’s kidnap victim: if the reader finds it hot that she’s the hostage of a dominating Hades, then she is, and if they don’t, then she isn’t.) Dark romance has a veneer of abandon, but the sex is controlled, anxiously so. Nobody is getting thrown or pushed. The punishments tap out after half-hearted orgasm denials. All parties are quite comfortable, thank you.”
“The book repeatedly offers its readers points of access into dark, titillating desires, then promises safety by sublimating those desires into heterosexual romance and making us forget the original transgression. What does that tell us about heterosexual romance?”
“Going back through the series, this frustrating withdrawal shone through all of them: the paternalistic internal censor that clamps down on unpalatable desire, explaining away every violent act. It’s okay, that guy didn’t kidnap her, not really: it was for her own good! He was saving her! He didn’t want to do it! They are in love now, and all is forgiven.”
The author/director writes:
“Every child has the right to be happy. By law.
“In the near future, a young social worker (Sunita Mani, “Glow” & “Mr. Robot”) travels to a small community to administer behavior-modifying “patches” that guarantee happiness for the wearers. She must decide what to do when a precocious girl (Audrey Bennett, “Frozen on Broadway”) refuses to accept the patch.
“Director’s Statement:
“As someone with a close family member who struggles with severe mental health issues, the way that we understand and help people with these challenges is always on my mind. So, when I stumbled across a Harvard bioethicist’s blog about the idea of always-on, perfectly-administered drip dosage of antidepressants, an entire world began to form in my head where this technology was a part of everyday life.
“I started to think about what this could do for people in our country, but also what it would do for our country’s culture. Who would use it? How would we handle this as a society? And also, how might the government address the disparity in privilege this technology would create between children who grew up with the wealth to be “happy” and those who did not? This lead [sic] me to think about what the government’s responsibility is to “level the playing field” in health and where can human freedom be factored into these decisions?
“There are a number of contentious issues in our country that, at their core, are discussions that pit something that might make society “better” against a loss of individual freedoms. We all agree it’s good the government removes citizens’ “freedom” to drive on the left side of the road in return for having safe roads. But where should the line be between giving up a freedom that makes “society” a better place, and allowing citizens to retain important autonomy? Many of us disagree about where this line might be for different issues like guns, education, or medical care, but I hope that this film serves as a starting place to discuss these issues, and for each side to empathize with the values and motivations of the other.”
There are answers already, at least for the question of children who grow up with unequal chances of being happy. The answer is: the government will do far too little, and will complain the entire time about it.
We’re All Bored of Culture by William Deresiewicz (Tablet Magazine)
“The commissars are enemies of beauty. I’m channeling Dave Hickey here: Beauty incites desire, and desire is destabilizing. Desire is anarchic, and the commissars are control freaks. They tell us what we ought to want.”
“The point is not that corporations have degraded popular taste. It is the opposite. The culture industry, like the junk food industry, has gotten very good at satisfying it, at reflecting back our taste to us. And with the internet, the feedback loops have gotten ever more efficient. Art is boring now, in other words, because we are boring. Art is woke because we are woke. Art is bland and unimaginative because we have landed ourselves in the lamentable position of getting exactly what we want.”
“Wokeness can only exert its tyranny, in fact, because artists are operating on an economic knife edge. They do not have the luxury of alienating their audience, not even part of it or even for a little while. Not of shocking it, not even of challenging it. And wokeness also acts to hide the deeply repetitive nature of contemporary culture. “Diversity” becomes a cloak for uniformity. The same old thing—the same kitsch pop songs, middlebrow fiction, wish-fulfillment streaming fare, agitprop gallery art—produced by a member of a “marginalized” “community,” convinces us that we have gotten somewhere new.”
“All the weirdness that we’re missing now, the wild originality, can only come from the activity of singular spirits: contemptuous of imitation, courageous in the extreme, obedient to nothing but the effort to achieve their vision. They are out there, I know, they are doing their work, but only on the margins, in the cracks. Expose them to the light, give them some mainstream attention, and instead of dragging us a little way in their direction, as they would have once, they just get homogenized, too.”
“What I see is narcissism: a demand that art affirm us, never threaten us, never make us feel inadequate or ignorant or small, echo back to us our precious little selves.”
“Great audiences create great artists, she explained, by giving people the freedom to take chances: to be irresponsible, dangerous, difficult, strange. When people compete to be sophisticated, artists win. Then we all win.”
My Own Private Energy Crisis by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“[…] when I’m crammed into the security funnel of that awful limbo known as Charles de Gaulle, I often find myself thinking: This can’t last. It’s going to collapse. All of it. It was always wrong. A sin. A disgrace. Yes, yes, my thought declares as it reaches its crescendo: Let ‘em crash.”
“[…] how one ought to live, whether in accordance with one’s desires and comforts, or in pure devotion to the collective good— is simply to deny that the ideological phantasms that shape your desires, but that are incompatible with your expressed values, have any real purchase on you. I have never been very good at practicing such denial. Growing up lower-middle class, with significant experience of economic precarity, will, I’ve learned, leave you with a chronic and incurable case of bourgeois aspiration, just as surely as childhood polio will leave you with a lifelong limp.”
“Many of my colleagues who were by contrast to the manor born seem much more comfortable, even in the midst of their obvious bourgeois comforts, flatly denying that the ideology of that world-historical class has any purchase on them whatsoever.”
“(I am speaking anecdotally, of course, but I have lived on both sides of the divide, and if my anecdotes count for nothing, then what even is the point of paying attention, of looking for patterns, as we go through our lives?).”
“I am sharply aware of the untenability of this country, whose frontier seems to have been conquered largely as a result of (i) innovations in refrigerant technologies, and (ii) the invention of barbed-wire […]”
“Any complete explanation of this untenable country’s obesity epidemic would surely have something to do with a sort of energetic false consciousness — Americans do not see their eating as a matter of measurable inputs and outputs, but simply as a matter of heeding the underlying message of every TV commercial for Chili’s signature Awesome Blossom or Long John Silver’s hush-puppies or whatever, which is, namely, as Slavoj Žižek used to love to say: “You may”.”
“[…] any machine that processes data will stop doing so if its battery runs down or it is unplugged, and this brute fact will always send us right back to the lithium mines and the hydroelectric dams, however free of such gross materiality we might have imagined we were up until the moment we ran out of juice.”
“Political side-taking is usually, perhaps almost always, for weak and needy joiners, and honesty probably requires of us most of the time that we be prepared to retreat into the forest and wait out the spiraling madness that the side-taking imperative necessarily generates.”
“[…] like Russia, the United States is the global power it is thanks to the alchemy of identification, where practically innumerable ethnic groups are convinced to buy into, and blend into, the chauvinism of imperial belonging.”
“From what I’ve seen of scholars working in this field, there is a tendency that almost approaches the common central African folk belief that no death is natural, that everyone who dies has been murdered by an enemy who has had recourse to the workings of a magician, and the best response to the loss of a loved one is to seek out a magician yourself to exact revenge on the supposed enemies of the deceased. Scholars in disability studies, similarly, seem to conduct themselves on the presumption that any time anyone is prevented, because of the condition of their body, from taking part in any socially valued activity, a political injustice has occurred.”
“There are complicated questions, beyond this stark truth, as to how much we may mitigate the disadvantages that come with physical decline, but they are going to come one way or another, and it is not for human justice to overcome this. There are all sorts of reasons why your comatose 98-year-old grandmother will not be able to participate in your session at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Some of these reasons might inspire you to declare: “It’s not fair!” But if I may play with a sort of contrapositive Rawlsianism here, unfairness, at least of this sort, is not injustice, and working out exactly what may reasonably be asked of a society in order to lessen the disadvantages met by some of its members positively requires that we remain sober and honest about the limits of what may be done.”
“Death and decline are not unjust — it wouldn’t make any sense to describe any necessary feature of our existence in this way.”
“[…] the most energy-efficient system is the one that does nothing at all. Beyond that, the only way to determine whether the energy burned by a given system is “wasted energy” or not is to determine whether the result of all this burning is something of value. So then, here is my life, and there behind me are all the calories burned to bring this life to this point. Has it been worth it? Is there anything I can change, now, to be able more confidently to answer that same question with a “yes” in the future?”
“For a while Ken had a page up where he listed the domain names he had registered and wished to sell for a profit. One of them was “fancyfree.com”, for which he wrote up a little description of the several virtues of this property and of its moneymaking potential, only soon enough to veer off into the arcana of a Mexican psychedelic pop group called Los Fancy Free . As I recall the lead singer was a descendant of Swedish Mennonites who had immigrated to Mexico, so by the time Ken arrived at the end of what was supposed to be a sales pitch for the URL, he had completed a fairly thorough summary of that Protestant sect’s complicated diasporic history. I bring all this up only in the hope that it will help you understand at least something of the genetic baggage informing my writing style.”
100% this by Jon Stone (Reddit)
“One reason people insist that you use the proper channels to change things is because they have control of the proper channels and they’re confident it won’t work”
Tweet by Linus Torvalds (Twitter)
“Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.
“I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?
“I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.
“And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*king disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.”
This is madness. Everything is ray-traced, everything is virtual. A lot of it has been created with text prompts. They use image prompts to generate 3D images.
The presentation at 22:00 shows a chip factory “defined in the omniverse”, which allows them to fine-tune defect-detection for their parts. They also showed a process whereby you build and refine that parts and algorithms for an autonomous robot (for a factory floor) all within the omniverse, which allows a tremendous amount of the iteration to happen virtually before you actually produce real-world hardware (which is far more costly).
Favour flat code file folders by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)
“In the same paper, Parnas describes the danger of making hard-to-change decisions too early. Applied to directory structure, the lesson is that you should postpone designing a file hierarchy until you know more about the problem. Start with a flat directory structure and add folders later, if at all.”
“I’ve never programmed in SmallTalk , but as I understand it, the language came with tooling that was both IDE and execution environment. Programmers would write source code in the editor, but although the code was persisted to disk, it may not have been as text files.”
This is true. I programmed Java in the early 90s with an IBM IDE that worked similarly. It stored everything in a version-controlled database.
“My misgivings about code file directory hierarchies mostly stem from the impact they have on developers’ minds. This may manifest as magical thinking or cargo-cult programming : Erect elaborate directory structures to keep out the evil spirits of spaghetti code. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Can we make our UI dumb enough to make our app usable without it?”
The video demonstrates navigating through a simple e-commerce site. Then, he shows how the app can be driven from the console by calling the APIs directly—upon which the URL and UI all update automatically. That is, the logic is not in the UI. He then demonstrates that he can drive the web site without a UI by deleting the rendering to React DOM entirely. He can still manipulate the console API to perform the same operations because the logic is all defined completely independent of the UI. Of course, this is the same command-line interface that can be used in the automated tests, which means that the entire product can be tested without a UI at all.
I’m becoming increasingly convinced that neither React nor Angular is the way to go. Both React and Angular mix logic into the UI, putting the UI front and center. This is wrong. Additionally, Angular suffers from a complete inability to speed up the development lifecycle because it’s so strongly tied to WebPack.
I’ve used Redux before and the boilerplate becomes prodigious. I’ve used the React reducers as well, and it’s a bit better, but still doesn’t feel very natural. I’ve used MobX but long before its current incarnation where it really seems to “just work” as a store of state and reactive programming logic. The when
construct (see 16:37 in the video), which takes a predicate and an action, is a very neat concept that allows you to define exactly how your application reacts to state changes without burying it all in the components.
“If the view is to be purely derived from the state, then routing should affect state, not the derived component tree.”
Therefore, a url-change is an action like any other, modifying the state and letting MobX handle notifying all interested parties. Once you’ve gotten that far, you don’t even need a UI-specific routing library because you can just configure any router to direct URLs to the store API—which will automatically update the UI. The UI (e.g., React) doesn’t have to have anything to do with routing. A route change triggers an action, which changes the state. The UI reacts. The UI does not do anything with the route—it just triggers actions. A reactive non-UI component ensures that the route stays in-sync with the state by reacting to changes in the state. In most cases, you can just create a value that calculates what the URL should be, based on the state. This could get complicated, of course, but it’s also completely separate from the rest of the application logic and can be thoroughly tested. We can also use the when
construct outlined above to simply listen for changes to the calculated URL and update the browser’s location and history. This way, the management of the history and URL is not entwined with the rest of the application logic. It’s just reacting to state changes, like everything else.
Working like this results in automated tests that work naturally and look very much like Playwright tests—but completely without UI and using semantically meaningful constructs. The UI is an afterthought (as Michel himself wrote in 2019). Playwright is nice, but it’s a last resort when you’ve already botched the job of writing your code in a more testable manner. It’s a nice check that the UI is properly wired to the logic of the application, but should not be used to verify application behavior—simply to verify UI behavior.
This all goes very much in the direction of The Humble Dialog Box by Martin Fowler in 2002, which shows that we’ve known how to build software correctly for over 20 years—and we keep getting distracted by “the new shiny”, thinking that we can somehow start with the UI and still get maintainable software.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Published by marco on 28. Jun 2023 21:08:52 (GMT-5)
“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything... [More]”
Published by marco on 19. Jun 2023 18:11:50 (GMT-5)
“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”
Published by marco on 5. Jun 2023 13:47:35 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Chinese health authorities warn of a new surge in COVID-19 infections with the XBB subvariant by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)
“Xie Liangzhi, chairman of Beijing-based SinoCellTech, told the Global Times , “The vaccines based on original variants are not designed to prevent infection by new variants. The former cannot induce sufficiently effective neutralizing antibodies against the mutated strain, whereas the new generation of vaccines, which are more targeted, can induce sufficient and effective antibodies.””
“Such admissions only underscore the continued failure of the vaccine-only strategy that the WHO itself had previously warned against. They had openly stated that vaccination without mitigation of the disease to the utmost possible extent was untenable as a pandemic control strategy. Its adoption now by the WHO is a scientific retrogression and a capitulation to the political pressures the agency has faced from the beginning of the pandemic.”
Or you could say that it reveals the stark limits of even a worldwide organization seeking to tell the scientific truth while retaining enough relevance to be even partially effective. People don’t want to change. They prefer a higher risk of illness and death. They want to have their cake and eat it., too They prefer to say something evil doesn’t exist, if there’s nothing that they’re willing to do about it. It’s like the downgrading of long COVID: can’t fix it, so ignore it. It’s the same problem every time: if those who must change or sacrifice are not the ones at risk, little to nothing will be done.
“It should be added that although XBB’s pathogenicity remains similar to its predecessors, it is no guarantee that future variants will not evolve more lethal versions. Recombinant events could very well link a highly transmissible variant like XBB with a variant that has similar tropism in deep lung tissue like Delta, leading to a variant with both characteristics: greater infectiousness and greater deadliness. That it has not happened yet is simply a case of blind luck.”
“All the public health gains in the first two decades of the 21st century are quickly being erased. Global life expectancy has plummeted. Diseases like HIV, cholera, tuberculosis and malaria are making gains again as access to necessary health care is being destroyed due to capitalism. Meanwhile, the threat posed by novel emerging pandemic pathogens has only grown in the face of inaction by governments all over the world and the demise of effective public health systems.”
Yup. We’ve peaked in the context of the incentive system that we have. It can offer us no more than this. Saving lives is only valuable if it can be proven to lead to more profit for existing elites. Otherwise, their comfort trumps life-improvement for its own sake. Society does not value well-being or long life, unless it can be linked to higher productivity in the workforce, the value of which will be reaped by the elites, not the workers.
WGA Urges Netflix & Comcast Shareholders To Reject Pay Hikes For Companies’ Top Executives In Light Of Ongoing Strike by David Robb (Deadline)
“In the midst of a disruptive labor dispute, Netflix is asking shareholders to give retroactive advisory approval of the company’s 2022 reported executive compensation totaling over $166 million. By contrast, the proposed improvements the WGA currently has on the table would cost Netflix an estimated $68 million per year.”
Look at what hedge funds really do – and tell me capitalism is about ‘rewarding risk’ by Brett Christophers (The Guardian)
“The main performance fee earned by alternative asset managers is “carried interest” – effectively, a profit share. In the UK and US, most asset management firms pay tax on this revenue at the capital gains rate, rather than the usually higher income tax rate. This is because the asset manager has typically been understood to be “taking on the entrepreneurial risk of the [investment]” – a standard justification for taxation as capital gain. But as we have seen, this simply does not hold water. In 2017, the New York Times called the beneficial tax treatment of carried interest “a tax loophole for the rich that just won’t die”. It’s time to close it.”
The US Might Be Only AA+ by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)
“The rules for money market funds , for instance, used to require money market funds to buy only highly rated assets, but they were revised in 2015 to remove references to credit ratings. Now funds can buy an asset as long as they make a “determination that it presents minimal credit risks at the time the fund acquires the security.” They also have to “provide ongoing review of whether each security (other than a government security) continues to present minimal credit risks”: They have to keep evaluating the issuers of commercial paper to see if they have become riskier, but they don’t have to do that for Treasuries. Treasuries are in their own separate category, above petty worries about creditworthiness.”
“Or for bank capital, the rule is that a bank “must assign a zero percent risk weight to an exposure to the U.S. government, its central bank, or a U.S. government agency.” For insurance capital, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners sets standards for risk-based capital based in part on ratings; but there is “no [risk-based capital] requirement for bonds guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the United States … because it is assumed that there is no default risk associated with U.S. Government issued securities.” Nothing about ratings.”
Yeah, none of that irrational exuberance is going to bite us in the ass. When was the last time that giving certain securities a free pass because they were “bulletproof” caused any trouble? Oh, yeah. 2008. The little kerfuffle called the global financial crisis.
“Obviously many of the specific stories here are along the lines of “our business is great, we are rolling in money, we just cannot possibly spend it all and we’re giving some back to shareholders.” But I am not sure that that is the macro story. If you think that the economy is on the brink of a recession and business will be bad, and you are an investor, you might want to sell stock. If you think that the economy is on the brink of a recession and business will be bad, and you are a company, you might want to buy your stock.”
Either way, the macro effect is that inequality increases, money leaves the economy, and already-wealthy companies make obscene profits. Whatever you want to call it, it’s detrimental to a society that functions for all members, rather than a handful.
Yanis Varoufakis: Greece’s Debt Is More Unsustainable Than Ever by David Broder (Jacobin)
“[…] you care about the people of Greece, then all this is an Orwellian lie. If you are looking at Greece as a foreign investor, it is true. Greece is deeper in the hole of insolvency today than it was in 2010, when the whole world of finance — the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission — said we were bankrupt. Back then, our debt was something like €295 billion and our income €220 billion, whereas today the debt is €400 billion and our national income, in real terms, €192 billion. Most of our debt is owed to the troika and to foreign investors. So, our dependence on the kindness of strangers is greater than ever.”
“[…] government bonds are trading at 3.6 to 3.7 percent yields — a very nice spread over German ones at 2.2 to 2.3 percent. Everyone knows that the Greek state is bankrupt and the bonds are junk. So, why do they buy them? The European Central Bank (ECB) has announced that it will back Greek bonds. It’s a political decision to declare Greece solvent, just as it was a political decision to declare it insolvent in 2010.”
“They can, for instance, buy a nonperforming loan of €100,000 but for just €3,000. They don’t expect to get the money back; but if they can sell the collateral for €50,000 they have extracted €47,000 in rent to the Caymans without paying a cent in tax. This can extract around €70 billion from a sub-€200-billion-a-year economy.”
“After my departure from the finance ministry, a “superfund” was imposed to manage public assets. This is a unique case in world history: since it is directly troika-controlled, Greece’s assets are formally, legally controlled by foreign powers, the worst kind of neo-neocolonialism.”
“Another institution we propose is a free, digital payments system, based on the software of the Greek tax office. People could receive and make payments based on their tax-filing number, effectively a transaction system outside of the ECB, private bankers, Mastercard, or Visa. While it would save €2 billion every year, this is a controversial proposal because it is independent of the ECB, which would thus be unable to blackmail the Greek banking system as it did in 2015.”
The next escalation in the war against Russia: US sends largest warship ever constructed to Norway by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“On Wednesday, the USS Gerald R. Ford arrived in Oslo, Norway. The USS Ford is the largest warship ever constructed and the first of a new generation of such carriers commissioned by the United States. The carrier strike group led by the Ford includes two nuclear-powered attack submarines, two Ticonderoga-class cruisers and a squadron of destroyers.”
“[…] the carrier strike group would travel north to the Arctic to carry out “freedom of navigation” operations—a term used by the United States to describe provocatively sailing ships into contested waters. In other words, this massive armada with its thousands of troops will sail near the Russian coastline under conditions of a rapidly escalating proxy war that Biden said last year would threaten a nuclear “Armageddon.””
“The clear conclusion is that strikes inside Russia, including the assassination attempt on Putin—which the press now admits was carried out by Ukraine—are done in the closest coordination and with the approval of the United States.”
“In its own desperate and reckless response to the provocative US efforts to expand the conflict, Moscow announced that it would be stationing tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus. “In the context of an extremely sharp escalation of threats on the western borders of Russia and Belarus, a decision was made to take countermeasures in the military-nuclear sphere,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said.”
“Confronting military setbacks in Ukraine and an escalating economic, social and political crisis at home—above all, in the explosive growth of the class struggle—the capitalist ruling elites, as Trotsky wrote on the eve of World War II, “toboggan with eyes closed” toward catastrophe.”
How the U.S. War on Taiwanese Semiconductors Might Benefit Japan by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)
“By “location,” Buffett meant Taiwan, in the context of the threats made by the United States against China. He decided to wind down his investment in TSMC “in the light of certain things that were going on.” Buffett announced that he would move some of this capital towards the building of a fledgling U.S. domestic semiconductor industry.”
He’s not doing that. He’s farming government subsidies. He’s a soldier in the U.S. war on China. A very well-payed one.
“In August 2022, U.S. President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law, which will provide $280 billion to fund semiconductor manufacturing inside the United States.”
See? Buffet is just going for free money.
“At the December 6 announcement, Biden said, “American manufacturing is back,” but it is only back at a much higher cost (the plant’s construction cost is ten times more than it would have cost in Taiwan). “The most difficult thing about wafer manufacturing is not technology,” Wayne Chiu—an engineer who left TSMC in 2022—told the New York Times. “The most difficult thing is personnel management. Americans are the worst at this because Americans are the most difficult to manage.””
“On May 2, 2023, at a Milken Institute event, U.S. Congressman Seth Moulton said that if Chinese forces move into Taiwan, “we will blow up TSMC. … Of course, the Taiwanese really don’t like this idea.””
“These outlandish statements by O’Brien and Moulton have a basis in a widely circulated paper from the U.S. Army War College, published in November 2021, by Jared M. McKinney and Peter Harris (“Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan”). “The United States and Taiwan should lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render Taiwan not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain. This could be done effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company,” they write.”
“In June 2022, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) announced it would put in 40 percent of a planned $8.6 billion for a semiconductor manufacturing plant by TSMC in Kumamoto. METI said in November that it has selected the Rapidus Corporation—which includes a stake by NTT, SoftBank, Sony, and Toyota—to manufacture next-generation 2-nanometer chips. It is likely that Berkshire Hathaway will invest in this new business.”
Groundhog Day 2023 by Boris Kagarlitsky (Russian Dissent)
“This lack of consequence for any event, even the most scandalous, has come about for systemic reasons. The narrow circle of the oligarchy, gathered around Putin, has no other goals or objectives than to remain in power and physically reproduce themselves (while maintaining, of course, their current status). If these people had any other tasks, even imperialist ones, they would be forced to respond to the changing situation, on which the resolution of these tasks would depend. But as soon as there are no tasks, then it is possible to not react to anything, except for what poses an immediate threat to personal physical existence. Whether things are going well or badly in Russia is not particularly important in this case. The main thing is to prevent radical changes that could force the rulers to leave their palaces and offices.”
In the U.S. the same. Exactly the same.
Is Putin Trolling? by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“What good will it do Americans if they read this list really, and try on their own to learn more about what companies like Raytheon, General Dynamics, General Atomics, In-Q-Tel, Lockheed-Martin and BAE Systems really do, or why they’d be on a list with a gazillion Atlantic Council Board members […]”
A Very Simple Request by Boris Kagarlitsky (Russian Dissent)
“To my Western colleagues, who, after more than a year since the beginning of the war, continue to call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. Do you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant?”
Here I must note that I can only tell that he’s talking about Russia rather than the U.S. because his last name is Kagarlitsky.
So Russia needs to shake itself free of Putin and his oligarchs. How to do that? The war needs to end. But how? If Russia “loses”, then Putin loses, and Russia has an opportunity to replace him. Will they be able to? Will they be allowed to? Of course not. That is not the world we have.
I read the author’s plea that western so-called progressives stop sympathizing with Putin, seeking a way to ameliorate the situation with a Russia led by him and his cronies. This is a good point: Russia is suffering immensely under that kleptocratic regime.
It is arguably suffering more than the U.S., but its people are suffering in the same way. They are all deep in the clutches of oligarchs bent on accumulation for accumulation’s sake.
What would happen if Putin were removed? A so-called power vacuum. We should worry less about what might sweep in from Russia to fill it, and more about what the West would rush in to fill it with. Russia would not be left to solve its post-Putin problem. There is no conceivable future in which the West simply provides support for a country recovering from deep, self-inflicted wounds. No, the West would pounce and take what they’ve long sought. China would be powerless to resist these moves. They have, on multiple occasions, expressed their intent to avoid meddling directly in other countries’ affairs. The rebuilding of Russian democracy would seem to be such an affair that concerns, most primarily, its own people.
So, while removing Putin and his ilk is a noble goal in Russia, doing so at this time would almost certainly lead to a situation in which Russia ends up being run by the CIA. There is no conceivable future in which the U.S. and NATO and Europe simply leave the country to recover at its own pace.
We have recent history as a guide. Look at what happened in post-Glasnost Russia. The vultures swooped in and laid the groundwork for Putin. They ensured that Yeltsin was elected and that he funneled as much of Russia’s wealth as he could either out of the country or to pliant oligarchs who could be counted on to work within the confines of the piratical capitalist system. They are no different than the West’s own oligarchs.
While the plea is understandable and the desire to fix Russia is large, it’s impossible for me to conceive of this ending well for anyone.
If we consider Kagarlitsky’s plea, it could be made from the U.S. as well. I often think, when reading about how things are going in Russia, that the Russian and the American people have a lot in common. They are led by avaricious idiots who spare not a single thought for the well-being of the people, except to mouth the words a couple of times per year.
“[…] when someone tells you that the Putin regime is a threat to the West or to the whole of humanity, this is complete nonsense. The people to whom this regime poses the most terrible threat is (aside from the Ukrainians, who are bombarded daily by shells and missiles) the Russians themselves, their people and culture, their future.”
“[…] the former officer, who knew the laws, objected that the conversation had been a private one. And such a charge was meant to apply to public statements only. “But it was public,” objected the intelligence officers. “After all, we heard it!””
“[…] the crisis that has been going on for the past three years, the war and total corruption, have led to irreversible shifts, in which the preservation of the existing political regime turned out to be incompatible not only with human rights and democratic freedoms, but simply with the elementary preservation of the rules of modern civilized existence for the majority of the population. We must deal with this problem ourselves. How quickly this will happen, how many trials will come along the way, how many more people will suffer, no one can know. But we know exactly what will occur. The decay of the regime will inevitably lead the country to revolutionary changes, which the supporters of the existing government will write about with horror.”
Netanyahu’s Tactical Mistake: A Fragmented Israel Faces Palestinian Unity by Ramzy Barzoud (Scheer Post)
“There are reasons why Israel’s propaganda is living its worst days. Aside from the power and influence commanded by Palestinian intellectuals, social media activists and the numerous platforms made available to them through innumerable solidarity networks around the world, Israeli hasbara has itself grown weak and unconvincing.”
Poor Edward Said. He didn’t have Twitter.
China, India, and the Emerging New World Order by Michael Klare (Scheer Post)
“After the expected Ukrainian spring/summer offensive, which is unlikely to dislodge all Russian troops from the lands they’ve seized since last February, India and China will almost certainly be nudging both countries toward a peace settlement aimed more at restoring the flow of global trade than upholding fundamental principles of any sort.”
Klare doesn’t read Russian or Chinese dispatches. He’s just knee-jerk repeating the U.S. line that, because the U.S. doesn’t have principles, it’s obviously much more evil enemies couldn’t possibly have them. China (sometimes with Russia) has very much been shouting principles from the rooftops. For example, Chou en Lai’s five principles of non-inteference, and advocating replacing empire with a renewed adherence to the U.N. as governing body.
“Many analysts believe that the 2015 summit would never have succeeded had it not been for the combined leadership of Obama, Xi, and Modi. Needless to say, that budding partnership was upended when Donald Trump entered the White House and terminated U.S. adherence to that agreement.”
Klare promulgates the myth that the Paris agreement meant anything. Not a single country in Europe did anything close to what it promised. Sad. It was all voluntary, torpedoed by the U.S. and Canada. Trump bad, Obama good.
“Again, all too sadly, such antagonisms are more likely to prove the norm in U.S.-China relations than that brief outburst of cooperation in 2014-2015. And while India has grown closer to the United States in recent years — in large part to balance China’s growing economic and military might — its leaders are loathe to become overly dependent on any foreign power, however closely aligned they might be in political terms.”
Jesus, Klare. You’re just phoning it in. No mention of the U.S.‘s actively aggressively predatory role?
The Good, the Bad, and the Befuddling: A Review of Philip Short’s Putin by Natalyie Baldwin (Antiwar.com)
“Putin is an arbiter of several different interests in Russia. Two of those interest groups have been the pro-Western neoliberal technocrats and the military and security services who were always much more hardline and suspicious of the US-led west. Over the years, as Russia got the short end of the stick in its relations with the west, despite its cooperation in many areas, and no consideration of its most basic security interests, the hardliners appeared vindicated in their criticisms of Putin from the right for not being proactive enough in dealing with the US-led west’s machinations. These machinations include NATO expansion up to its borders, active support of the 2014 coup in Ukraine that installed a government that was hostile to Russia, and abrogation of several key nuclear arms treaties, to name a few.”
“Putin isn’t corrupt by Russian standards and he explains what corruption actually means in Russia compared to western countries. This tracks with what program developer Sharon Tennison and diplomat John Evans – both of whom interacted with Putin while he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 1990’s – have said about Putin’s relative honesty.”
“[…] he takes too much of the western establishment narrative about the poisonings of Alexei Navalny and Sergei Skirpal at face value. I don’t claim to know exactly what happened in either of these cases but I do know that subjecting either of the western narratives on these poisonings to even minimal scrutiny shows them to be far-fetched to put it charitably. Giving the reader a description of the western narrative and then letting the reader know about counter-arguments available would have been helpful in letting the reader use their critical thinking skills to make up their own minds.”
The Nord Stream Explosions: New Revelations About Motive, Means, and Opportunity by James Bamford (The Nation)
“In addition to depriving Ukraine of much needed revenue, the project would also make Europe far more heavily dependent on Russia, Ukraine’s bitter enemy since the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s support for pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas in 2014.”
Bitter enemies? They were other’s greatest trading partners, share a language, etc. This is more horseshit designed to build the myth that NATO is simply acknowledging an existing animosity and is solely on the side of justice.
“In Kyiv, the resumption of work was viewed as nothing less than an act of war.”
Oh FFS.
“The threats posed by the pipeline, the spy agency warned , ranged from espionage—“NS2 is also a potential intelligence tool. The Kremlin might place surveillance capabilities along the pipeline”—to war: “The NS2 launch will increase the probability of additional Russian military action against Ukraine.””
Both just cited without a word about credibilty. This is shameful. Surveillance. Sure, sure, that makes sense. As the author says later, the U.S. has absolutely carpeted the north sea bed with listening devices, but the primary concern is that the Russians might have a couple—on a sea that they border.
“Another bitter foe of Moscow, Poland also had profitable Russian pipelines running through its territory—along with a similar fear that the new route would increase costs and strengthen Moscow’s grip on Europe.”
What? Other than the pipelines it already had? Running through its own country? This makes no sense. Just a hash of words.
“This is perhaps an unprecedented case of its kind in history,” he said . Among the incidents, according to Minin, was one involving a Polish trawler, SWI-106, that tried to ram the Fortuna , but was prevented by the intervention of a support vessel, the Russian icebreaker Vladislav Strizhov, that absorbed the collision. Afterward, the Polish captain apologized for the accident.”
If true, it’s fascinating that such lawlessness would go not only unreported, but not chastised and certainly not prosecuted.
“One place with experience in blowing up things that Ukraine wanted gone is the SZRU’s sister military spy agency, the Main Intelligence Directorate (MID). It is the organization believed to be responsible for masterminding the massive explosion that destroyed part of the Kerch Strait Bridge, which links Russia to Crimea, as well as drone strikes deep within Russia. Including, possibly, the double drone attack on the Kremlin on Wednesday, which may spark a devastating retaliatory strike on Kyiv.”
What the actual fuck is that unsubstantiated-allegation-filled sentence.
“According to the MID’s chief, Kyrylo Budanov, “Ukrainian intelligence is able to conduct operations in any part of the world, if necessary.””
Like Chicago? The Ukrainian agencies just can’t stop exaggerating and bragging.
“A British defense source told the London Times that a “ premeditated” sabotage could have been prepared by undersea drones that laid the explosives weeks beforehand.”
I’m reading this because Jeffrey St. Clair of CounterPunch said it was more believable than Hersh’s account. He obviously has an ax to grind with Hersh or he’s a fool or he didn’t read this. There are no sources here, just a description of a vague theory.
“According to NATO, much of the training, including “complex multi-vehicle UUV missions…was conducted off the coast of Bornholm, Denmark,” as part of the organization’s BALTOPS 22 exercises. “The BALTOPS Mine Counter Measure Task Group ventured throughout the Baltic region practicing ordnance location, exploitation, and disarming in critical maritime chokepoints,” said a press release issued by the US Sixth Fleet.”
But this is the same thing as Hersh said. This author just absolves everyone involved except mysterious and unnamed Ukrainians. This is not seriously intended to help find out who perpetrated this crime, but to explain why no-one will care to pursue it.
“German intelligence is reported to believe that at least one of the boats used in the attack was a 15.57-meter, single-masted sloop, the Andromeda . It was rented on September 6 by six people, allegedly including several Ukrainians and others with fake passports, from a small marina on the Baltic Sea in Rostock, Germany.”
This is the same horseshit theory advanced by the Times. This is not a new interpretation.
“A search of the boat later turned up small traces of “ military-grade ” explosives that matched the batch of explosives used on the pipeline.”
Wait, what? How and when did they determine which “batch” of explosives was used?
“At the opening ceremony on September 27, as enormous volumes of gas were still bubbling from the Nord Stream’s gaping blast holes, a smiling President Duda, along with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, symbolically opened the valve of a bright yellow pipe. “The era of Russian domination in the gas sphere is coming to an end,” Morawiecki happily declared . “An era that was marked by blackmail, threats and extortion.””
Holy shit. Just uncritically reporting that blowing up 20 billion dollars worth of economic rivals’ infrastructure combats criminal activity. It simply replaces Russian criminal activity with Polish criminal activity. Great.
“[…] beyond reporter Seymour Hersh’s elaborate, largely unsourced and self-published allegations, is there any evidence or indication that the United States itself was behind the blasts.”
Fucking hell. Self-published allegations. Neat trick, Nation. Ostracize, then denigrate the pariah for being a pariah. The only reason Bamford gets published is because his narrative will be the official one. The pipeline is gone and blame remains only for a nation that NATO will claim was legitimately defending itself in wartime, and was in no way acting as a proxy. Ukrainians are super-spies. They’re everywhere at once. No need to investigate further.
What’s Your Sign by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post)
““Can you stand somewhere else, buddy? Your sign is confusing and we’re trying to make the world a better place by getting the megacorporations we work for to pay us more money so we can get back to work helping rapacious billionaires continue to profit off the stranglehold they have on all the news and information outlets in the country while simultaneously distracting the public away from the fact that the democracy is collapsing by convincing them that it is better to remain as passive consumers of scripted virtue and heroism than to suffer the inconvenience that comes with actively participating in dismantling a fascistic corporatocracy that has corrupted our collective understanding of truth and justice by commodifying everything we experience and making anti-authoritarianism a bad investment.””
You Can’t Vote Your Way Out Of A Mess You Never Voted Yourself Into by Caitlin Johnstone
“US presidential elections are a performance designed to trick Americans into thinking they have any meaningful control over the major decisions that will be made by their government. They’re the unplugged video game controller you give your baby brother so you can stop him from whining to play without actually letting him.”
“The fact that a literal dementia patient sits in the White House currently is all the proof you could possibly need that this is the case. All that’s required of a US president is to not get in the way while the empire managers do their thing. A bottle of kombucha could do Biden’s job, and do it just as well.”
“You never voted to create this freakish dystopia where all political oxygen gets funneled toward vapid culture war debates which threaten the powerful in no way while any effort to effect meaningful change is ground into the dust.”
“This doesn’t mean there’s nothing anyone can do to make things better, it just means nothing will be made meaningfully better by the results of the US presidential election. If a building is on fire and everyone’s pushing on a fake door that’s painted on the wall, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to escape the building, but it does mean they need to stop pushing on the fake door and start looking for real exits if they’re going to get out.”
Trump Is Bad Because He’s Similar To Other US Presidents, Not Because He’s Different by Caitlin Johnstone
“Donald Trump spent four years proving to everyone that he wasn’t bad because he was similar to Hitler, he was bad because he was similar to Obama. He wasn’t terrible because of the ways he differed from other presidents, but because of the ways he was the same.
“The tiny smattering of violence that occurred in the US because of Trump was microscopic compared to the death and destruction he inflicted upon the world outside the nation’s borders. But the mainstream worldview can’t acknowledge those actions, because the mainstream worldview is designed to support and facilitate those actions.”
Roaming Charges: The Shame of the Game by Jeffrey St. Clair (Roaming Charges)
“Trump is setting himself up to run to the left of DeSantis. He may end up to the left of Biden…Trump in Iowa this week: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,” because I hear the term ‘woke woke woke’ — it’s just a term they use, half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.””
Lower down, St. Clair included this tweet, as well. Pigs and truffles, indeed.
“According to Bloomberg, China has reached peak CO2 emissions seven years ahead of schedule. Next year the country’s reliance on fossil fuels will begin to settle into a long-term decline, largely because China is now adding three times as much solar as it did only 2 years ago and a third of all new vehicle sales are EVS.”
“Richard Burton on Rex Harrison: “Rex came to dinner. God he is a simpleton. As self-righteous as only the genuinely stupid can be. He talks of Nixon as if he were a God. He is a perfect fascist in embryo. Were Hitler to arise here he would think him a great man & would join the Nazi party in a flash.” Diary entry, May 31, 1970.”
The Biggest Problem With The Western Left Is That It Doesn’t Exist by Caitlin Johnstone
“[…] by leftists I of course don’t mean Democrats or “progressives” or anyone who just wants a few adjustments to be made to the capitalist empire so that they can afford medicine or a college degree or whatever. I mean real socialists, communists and anarchists who oppose capitalism and imperialism and seek the drastic, revolutionary changes this civilization urgently needs. Those who understand that the system is not broken and in need of repair, but is working exactly as intended and is in need of complete dismantling.”
American life expectancy is dropping — and it’s not all covid’s fault by Steven H. Woolf and Laudan Aron (Washington Post)
“Young and middle-aged Americans are now more likely to die in the prime of their lives, devastating families and communities and taking a hard toll on our economic productivity. Even more disturbing, in a change never recorded in the past century, the probability that children and adolescents will live to age 20 is now decreasing.”
As pointed out in Roaming Charges: The Shame of the Game by Jeffrey St. Clair (Roaming Charges), while discussing the impact of Henry Kissinger’s war crimes, the Cambodians would be justified in feeling more than a little Schadenfreude.
This was a great 100-minute talk by one of the head journalists of the NachDenkSeiten. It’s in German and discusses the first year of the war in Ukraine, focusing on the hypocrisy of European countries. For example, you can see that even the biggest proponents of the sanctions on Russia ended up importing more fossil fuels from Russia in the last year than they had in previous years. He explained that Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, were able to use exceptions to the sanctions to continue imports. Great Britain—another very vocal hater of all things Russia—switched its imports from Russia to the Netherlands. But it’s still Russian fossil fuel—just one derivation removed.
Is the US Losing Control of Ukraine? by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)
“Putting an end to Ukraine’s negotiations with Russia, State Department spokesperson Ned Price remarkably said that “this is a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine” and insisted that Ukrainians go on fighting and dying for “core principles,” for US goals.”
“Ukraine is now pursing its own security interests in a way that is extraordinarily dangerous to US security interests. And they seem to be disregarding US restrictions in pursuing them. Months of US permissiveness, months of US failure to say no to Ukraine at each crossing of a red line has seemingly emboldened Ukraine to ignore US limits and conditions on the use of American supplied weapons.”
It’s perfectly understandable that Ukraine does this, I suppose. They just seem to be ignoring the risks of a larger conflagration that will take them down first. I suppose that they feel the same existential threat that Russia claims to be defending themselves against. It’s just that Ukraine’s ability to take us all down this path with it, is contingent on the massive weapons stores provided by NATO. So, NATO is not only complicit, but to blame, if things go south from here.
“At the beginning of the war, the US pushed aside Ukrainian interests and insisted that Ukrainians fight and die in pursuit of American goals. The ironic blowback from that is that, fourteen months later, Ukraine is pursuing security concerns created by that insistence in a way that is in direct contradiction to US security concerns. The US seems to have lost control of Kiev, and Ukraine is now pursuing its own goals in a way that ignores US goals by increasing the danger that the US and NATO could get drawn into a war with Russia.”
This is not surprising in the least, given the way that Zelensky has had all other leaders wrapped around his finger, from the very beginning. The Ukrainians are probably shocked at how incompetent the U.S. mafia actually is, as compared to their own.
The Debt Ceiling Deal Is an “F You” to Poor People by Matt Bruenig (Jacobin)
“Elsewhere, social assistance at least nominally answers the question of how certain kinds of people who fall through all the cracks of the ordinary income system are supposed to live. These are usually very stingy benefits with very strict means tests, but they at least exist and serve this important function as a last-ditch protection.
“But what is our answer to how these kinds of people are supposed to live in the United States? It’s weird that we don’t even seem to ask the question, let alone make any real effort to answer it.
“What do we want a fifty-two-year-old who does not have a job and gets cut off of food stamps to do exactly? Beg on the streets? Die? Do crime? Seriously, what’s the idea? Does anyone know? Does anyone care?”
The Russiagate Fraud Revisited by Rob Urie (CounterPunch)
“70% believe that the US intelligence agencies are 1) rigging American elections and 2) should be prevented from doing so in the future. This view finds support in the recently released report from Special Counsel John Durham that concluded that the FBI colluded with the 2016 (Hillary) Clinton campaign to concoct and promote the Russiagate fraud. The apparent plan was for the FBI to help Clinton win the election, or to disempower Mr. Trump if he was elected.”
“Mueller’s indictments of foreign individuals and corporations were political in nature because they were unlikely to be contested. What foreign national would voluntarily come to the US to face the charges? In fact, one of the companies charged, Concord Management, did precisely that. The Mueller team instantly dropped the charges. Russiagate is a fraud. Read the Durham Report.”
“A large and intrusive Federal effort to counter ‘disinformation’ was created to prevent revelations that now appear to be true from ever reaching the public. In other words, the task of the Federal (and private) disinformation industry is to insure that only Federally-sponsored disinformation and malinformation gets distributed.”
“[…] they saw the Russiagate fraud for what it now appears to have been— a Clintonite scam to convince fragile and deeply cloistered city and suburb dwellers that they are God’s chosen people. And it worked. A political economy of Trump-derision emerged, with sad, gray, opportunists finding their callings repeating CIA talking points.”
“Joe Biden’s campaign staff, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has now been credibly accused of colluding with the CIA to rig the 2020 election in Biden’s favor. And recent revelations now place dozens of Federal agents in key positions during the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021.”
“[…] the ‘plot’ to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was conceived, organized, financed, and partially carried out by the FBI and its informants (see here, here, here, here, here). These informants outnumbered the alleged conspirators by 3:1. Of course, the FBI had already been accused of entrapping young Muslim and Black men in fake ‘terrorism’ plots over the fifteen years that preceded the riot. Anyone doing left political organizing over the last half-century would have been aware of the presence of the FBI in organizing circles.”
“Most Americans have likely forgotten the state of panic that was achieved when retired grandparents living in tiny towns across the US were convinced by the George W. Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was going to rape them in their sleep (poison them with biological weapons made by the US military). The bourgeois panic over Trump had pundits whose skillsets were limited to tying their shoelaces demanding that Trump nuke Russia in retaliation for events that the Durham report makes clear never took place. Again, Russiagate was a fraud.”
John Durham and the Burying of American History by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Those among us willing to look squarely at events and evidence without fear or favor in the true meaning of this phrase understood years ago that the Democratic Party and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—among others, I have to add—conspired to concoct the Russiagate ruse in the service of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency. The Durham Report gives us a lot of detail as to just how this was done. We are now able to follow the bouncing ball once Clinton, personally so far as I understand it, got it rolling by way of what Durham calls the Clinton Intelligence Plan.”
“I do not think Russiagate’s perpetrators, criminal as they were and remain, ever intended the anti–Trump operation to grow to the magnitude it did. No, when the Clinton Intelligence Plan and Crossfire Hurricane were set in motion they were intended to last only a few months. Clinton would win in November, and what may be the greatest subversion op in our history would take its place among the countless other cases of our republic’s political rambunctiousness, and so fade away.”
“The mind goes back 60 years—60 years, can you believe it?—to the Kennedy assassination. How long did it take, due to the perspicacity of Oliver Stone, the filmmaker (JFK , 1991; JFK Revisited, 2021), David Talbot, the author (The Devil’s Chessboard, 2015), and a few honorable others to establish the CIA’s culpability beyond a reasonable doubt? And how much longer before the truth of Nov. 22, 1963, is disinterred and given its place in our history?”
“People without a history are condemned to remember and remember and remember—memory as burden. It is only when people are confident their story is inscribed in history that they can begin to leave behind their memories, lifting a great weight from their shoulders and proceeding with a light, life-embracing step.”
“Was he urged to conclude—this reminds me of Al Gore’s moment in 2000—that the truth, the whole, and nothing but of Russiagate would threaten the stability of our republic (as I think it would) and so avoided telling it?”
“The Times and the major dailies that routinely ape it continue to report allegations of malfeasance at the FBI as mere “conspiracy theory.” You see what is going on here, I trust. Allow the Deep State and its appendages to bury our history in this manner and we will lose our ability to see anything clearly—you name it: the war in Ukraine, Joe Biden’s senility, the conjured nonsense of “domestic extremism,’ and in the end even ourselves, who we are, and what kind of nation we live in.”
Why the Conspiracy Theory About Trump and Russia Won’t Go Away by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“Myths are impervious to facts. They fulfill an emotional yearning. They are a short circuit from reality into a world of childish simplicity. Hard and painful questions are avoided. Thought-terminating cliches are spat out to blissfully embrace a willed ignorance.”
“The cynical con the Democratic Party and the FBI carried out to falsely portray Donald Trump as a puppet of the Kremlin worked, and continues to work, because it is what those who detest Trump want to believe.”
“When you feed a public consoling myths — the most absurd being that America is a good and virtuous nation — there is no accountability. Myths make us feel good. Myths demonize those blamed for our self-created debacles. Myths celebrate us as a people and a nation. But it is like handing heroin to junkies.”
“The FBI, the report reads, authorized an investigation “upon receipt of unevaluated intelligence” and “without having spoken to the persons who provided the information.” The FBI did no “significant review of its own intelligence databases,” did not collect and examine “any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities” and did not interview “witnesses to understand the raw information it had received.” None of the “standard analytical tools employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence” were used.”
“The report documents a systematic abuse of power by senior members of the FBI to advance Hillary Clinton’s campaign. FBI officials were aware that there was no reason, other than an institutional hatred of Trump, to open the investigation. The FBI “discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” the report reads. FBI officials “disregarded significant exculpatory information” and used “investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents” to prolong the investigation, feed the media frenzy and obtain search warrants.”
“The liberal class, by clinging to this conspiracy theory, is as disconnected from reality as the QAnon theorists and election deniers that support Trump. The retreat by huge segments of the population into non-reality-based belief systems leaves a polarized nation unable to communicate. Neither side speaks a language rooted in verifiable fact.”
They’re all unhinged, yes. However, new evidence has surfaced that Biden’s 2020 campaign was assisted by the FBI as well. It seems like the Democrats have found a winning formula.
“If those you oppose are evil — and rhetorically we are close to embracing such apocalyptic rhetoric — anything is permitted to thwart the enemy from achieving power. This is the lesson of the Durham report. It is an ominous warning.”
The Origin of the Specious by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Donna Brazile, the longtime Democratic Party hack, as corrupt as they come but taken seriously nonetheless, published a piece in The New York Times a few weeks back under the headline “The Excellence of Kamala Harris Is Hiding in Plain Sight.” This is not merely ridiculously unserious, the essence of our bullshit politics, if you will excuse the infelicity. It is a form of psychosis.”
“Nobody has captured this interim more astutely than Chris Appy, the distinguished UMass historian, who got it down in American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (Viking, 2015). It is a brilliant work of history and social psychology that traces precisely the way America transformed the Vietnam War from an act of U.S. imperial aggression into a conflict that left Americans the victims.”
“That’s a way of worrying about what the war did to us, particularly to our own soldiers. I still have students who grew up persuaded that maybe the most shameful thing about the war was the way we treated returning veterans. That’s a classic example of how we transformed [Vietnam] into an American tragedy.”
“Henry “Old Rock” Benning, who fought for slavery at Antietam and so dishonored Black people, must go. In comes Harold “Hal” Moore, a soldier who front-ended the most shameful of America’s many 20th century aggressions, leaving behind three million brown people as casualties.”
“[…] features 40 graphic—to put it mildly—drawings by Abu Zubaydah that depict scenes of torture at the Guantánamo prison over the past two decades. That is how long Zubaydah has been held there, nearly how long the U.S. has known and acknowledged he is innocent, and we are still counting the duration of this atrocity, for Zubaydah remains at Guantánamo as we speak.”
Everything’s Getting Way More Dangerous And Way More Stupid by Caitlin Johnstone
“Are you ready for a year and a half of this? Because you’re getting a year and a half of this. A year and a half of all substantive questions about real policy of real consequence getting diverted into the most vapid culture war quagmires you can possibly imagine, because it isn’t the US president’s job to change the way the US empire operates, it’s the US president’s job to keep everyone dazzled with fake bullshit while the US empire marches along unimpeded by the wishes of the voting public.”
“Supporters of Israeli apartheid and America’s proxy war in Ukraine have been pretending to believe that rock icon Roger Waters donned a Nazi costume in support of Nazism at a concert in Berlin earlier this month, their feigned outrage leading to an investigation by German police despite the fact that literally everyone knows he was just portraying the fascist character from Pink Floyd’s The Wall that he’s been performing for over four decades.”
“There is darkness, but there’s also light. Far more of it than most people realize.
“So do your worst, Stupid Dystopia. We’ll fight with all we’ve got and enjoy the ride for as long as we’re here.”
Propaganda Restricts Speech More Than Censorship Does by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“In our civilization most people are thinking, speaking, gathering information, working, shopping, moving and voting exactly as our rulers want them to, because these mass-scale psychological conditioning systems have been imposed to keep human behavior aligned with the empire. We are trained to believe we are free while behaving exactly how our rulers want us to behave, and to look down on other nations and shake our heads at how unfree their people are.”
“You’ll never convince me it’s an organic phenomenon that the population always splits itself into two equal oppositional political factions which always leaves them in a deadlock unable to get anything done, and it always deadlocks in a way that benefits the rich and powerful.”
“It’s so destructive and degrading how the products of mainstream culture (movies, shows, music etc) are produced not based on how edifying, transformative and adventurous they can be, but on how much money they can make. The arts which get the most traction in our society wind up being not those which call us into the higher aspects of our being and encourage us to explore the bounds of human experience and potential, but those which deliver a quick ego hit and pump the brain full of fast reward neurochemicals.”
“Someday the leaders of ecocidal corporations will be put on trial for their crimes against our planet, and their defense that they did it to generate profits for their shareholders will be treated the same as war criminals saying they were just following orders.”
Most Propaganda Looks Nothing Like This by Caitlin Johnstone
Over and over and over again, day after day, we are fed seemingly small messages which add up over time. Messages like,
- The world works more or less the way we were taught in school.
- The media have some problems but basically tell the truth.
- The status quo is working basically fine.
- Democracy is real and voting is effective.
- This is the only way things can be.
- Our government might have its problems, but it’s basically good.
- You can earn your way into happiness by working harder.
- You can consume your way into happiness with more spending.
- If you think the system is dysfunctional, you’re the dysfunctional one.
- Those who oppose the status quo are weird and untrustworthy.
- Things might get better after the next election cycle.
- Any attempt to change things is a silly waste of time.
By feeding us all these simple, foundational lies day after day, year after year from the time we are very young, they lay the groundwork for the more complex, specific lies we’ll be told later on. Lies like “Russia/China/Iran/etc is a real problem and its government needs to be stopped,” or “People are struggling financially right now, but it’s just because times are hard and it can’t be helped.”
“So that’s what we’re up against. There’s a failure to appreciate just how pervasive and powerful the empire’s propaganda machine is, even among those who are very critical of empire, because propaganda in our society is like water for fish — we’re swimming in it constantly, so we don’t see it. You have to step way, way back and begin examining our situation from its most basic foundations to get any perspective on how all-encompassing it really is.
“Finding your way out of the propaganda matrix takes a lot of diligent work, tons of curiosity, the humility to admit you’ve been completely wrong about everything, and more than a little plain dumb luck. But if you keep hacking away at it eventually you get there, and then you can help others get there too. It’s a hard slog, but if our chains are psychological that means they’re ultimately only made of dream stuff. All that needs to happen is for enough of us to wake up.”
Name the Kook by Ted Rall
The Florida mom who sought to ban Amanda Gorman’s poem says she’s sorry for promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Andrew Lapin
“Salinas challenged the Gorman poem — which she says she hasn’t read in its entirety — on the grounds that it contains “indirect hate messages.” The review committee said it “erred on the side of caution” in deciding to limit students’ access.”
“Reached by JTA on Wednesday, Salinas confirmed that the post about the “Protocols” was hers and apologized for it, saying she hadn’t read it beyond the word “communism.” Salinas said her aversion to communism stems from her Cuban identity. She added that English is not her first language.
““I see the word ‘communism,’ and I think it’s something about communism,” she said. “I didn’t read the words.””
As for the books and poems she got banned,
“She said she had only read parts of the books. “They have to read for me because I’m not an expert,” she said. “I’m not a reader. I’m not a book person. I’m a mom involved in my children’s education.””
This women reposted a post of a picture in German (which she can’t read), accompanied by text in English (which she doesn’t read well). By her own admission, she’s not a good reader in any language, just not really interested in it.
She is however, a poster. She wants to participate. So she posts stuff that has certain trigger words for her, like “communism”. She’s like an animal picking out her food bowl by color. She doesn’t really understand what’s going on. To what degree can she or should she be punished for what she’s doing? To what degree can we tell if she’s hiding behind a shield of feigned ignorance when she’s caught espousing noxious beliefs?
Her participation is not predicated on any sort of minimum level of understanding. Can she be punished for causing harm that she clearly didn’t intend? Is she more like a child or a mentally handicapped person? The world is complex. People are generally not capable of understanding all of its complexity. Our censorship and punishment laws are being built with the idea of perfect understanding on the parts of all involved parties. This is clearly not the case.
The Neoliberal Model Is Destroying Innovation in Science by Simon Grassmann (Jacobin)
“Facing climate catastrophe and a crisis in wealth distribution should make us rethink this approach to organizing social life. But for science, the problem is obvious: the structure of a competitive marketplace is not conducive to good research in the first place. First, objectification of scientific exploration and innovation in the way that capitalism demands is not conducive to scientific breakthroughs, because most breakthrough discoveries, by their nature, are unpredictable .”
“Suppressing the autonomy and creativity of the trainees by turning them into wage laborers is detrimental for the future generation of professors, who then have lost their ability to think creatively and have been trained to take less risky options.”
Roger Waters in Berlin: A powerful musical and political statement against fascism, militarism and war by Johannes Stern (WSWS)
“The method used by politicians and the media to crack down on Waters is as dirty as it gets. Using the charge of anti-Semitism, any opposition to the oppressive, anti-democratic and extremely belligerent policies of the Israeli government, in which far-right forces set the tone, is to be silenced.”
“The same message delivered at the beginning of every show then followed: “If you’re one of those ‘I love Pink Floyd, but I can’t stand Roger’s politics,’ people you might do well to fuck off to the bar right now.” In fact, no one went to the bar, but the message was greeted again with strong applause!”
“[…] nearly every song addresses the “pressing issues of our time: imperialist war, fascism, the poison of nationalism, the plight of refugees, the victims of state oppression, global poverty, social inequality, the attack on democratic rights and the danger of nuclear annihilation.””
You forgot climate change, but that’s OK. The other ones group together better.
“Waters left no doubt as to who were the main warmongers. For another anti-war song “The Bravery of Being Out of Range” from his solo album “Amused to Death” (1992), the portraits of all US presidents since Ronald Reagan were displayed—each with the slogan “War Criminal” and a list of their war crimes. Waters savaged George W. Bush for his lies “about weapons of mass destruction,” and Barack Obama and Donald Trump for their “drone murders.” In reference to incumbent US President Biden, he stated, “Just getting started….””
““Déjà Vu,” from Waters’ last album, “Is This the Life We Really Want?” (2017) and “Run like Hell” (“The Wall”—1979) form a unit and, based on the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, address US war crimes in Iraq.”
“It was a recurring feature of the show that the audience responded with applause, especially in Waters’ clear political statements, which were often displayed in large letters on the video screens. “Fuck all Empires,” “Fuck Drones,” “Fuck Bombing People in their homes,” “Fuck the Occupation” and “Human Rights.” The same strong reaction was given to the militant calls for resistance in “Sheep” (“Animals” – 1977): “Resist War,” “Resist Fascism,” “Resist Militarism,” “Resist Capitalism.””
Psychotic Disorders Do Not Respect Autonomy, Independence, Agency, or Freedom by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“Every step we take towards seeing the severely mentally ill as inherently harmless and “valid” is a step we take away from fully and compassionately understanding the depths of their problems. Real severe mental illness is constantly painful, periodically debilitating, always ugly, and sometimes violent. If you aren’t willing to admit to those things you will never be a friend to the severely mentally ill.”
“It’s a good example of progressive sympathy for the mentally ill that leads them eventually to ignore and minimize the mental illness itself and leave the severely ill worse off.”
“What prevented Neely from having a place to live was not just poverty, or our perennial lack of housing, or discrimination. What also prevented Neely from having a home was his illness itself, which these people refuse to take seriously . The illness itself was a problem. The illness itself was an injustice. The illness itself was tragic, ugly, painful, and ultimately deadly. Why so many have decided that the way to take mental illness seriously is to absolve the illness itself, I’ll never know. I’ll never understand. And I don’t want to.”
“Sometimes we are compelled to choose between bad options. Sometimes there is no perfect solution. Sometimes we have to stumble along the best we can in an inherently broken world. What strikes me about Williams’s thread and the dozens of comments and quote tweets is the absolute absence of doubt, complication, uncertainty, pause, or humility.”
“Two weeks after the Harvard event, Brown was back on the street, panhandling, deluded, filthy. I’m guessing the ACLU lost interest; certainly the press did. She spent the rest of her life in and out of treatment, impoverished, resisting treatment, refusing services, periodically using heroin, and died at 58 years old. But, hey. At least she had her freedom.”
“Ms. Williams will go on pursuing her busy little career for a nonprofit that will, like almost all nonprofits, do essentially no material good in the world. She’ll sit there full of that uniquely white self-satisfaction that you find only in the white person who wants you to know how much they love Black people, smiling that beatific smile.”
Goodbye to All That by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“Recent transplants are forever mooning on about how incredible New York is, about how “real” the people are and such, and to me it’s always transparently the case that they’ve been slapped in the face by the city a little bit and are overcompensating. People who’ve been here a lot longer and feel more secure as residents are much more willing to admit that, sometimes, this city can really fucking suck. I think the endlessly stupid bodega discourse is a vestige of this phenomenon. The people who are trying so hard to convince you that there’s really, truly a difference between the relationship they have with their “bodega guy” and the relationship someone has with the 7/11 employee they see every day in their New Jersey suburb…. I think this is a vestige of New York being almost uniquely demoralizing, at times. So people come up with all of this extra credit romanticized shit to offset the fact that they stepped in human excrement last week, that if they ask their landlord to fix a leak they’ll get put on some sort of blacklist, and that an extra value meal costs $17. This romanticism, as I’ve said before, is not necessarily out of line; certainly it’s understandable. It is, however, a big part of why many people from other places find New Yorkers insufferable.”
The Little Mocker by Robert C. Martin in 2014 (Clean Coder Blog)
“[…] stubs and spies are very easy to write. My IDE makes it trivial. I just point at the interface and tell the IDE to implement it. Voila! It gives me a dummy. Then I just make a simple modification and turn it into a stub or a spy. So I seldom need the mocking tool.”
“I don’t like the strange syntax of mocking tools, and the complications they add to my setups. I find writing my own test doubles to be simpler in most cases.”
UI as an afterthought by Michel Weststrate (Michel Codes)
“[…] we should approach building web apps from the opposite direction, and first encode what interactions our customers will have with our systems. What are the processes. What is the information he will need? What is the information he will send? In other words, let’s start with modelling our problem domain. The solutions to these problems are things we can code without reaching for a UI library. We can program the interactions in abstract terms. Unit test them. Build a deep understanding of what different states all these processes can be in.”
“Every dev on your team has a CLI (hopefully): the test runner. It interacts with and verifies your business processes. The fewer levels of indirection that your unit tests need to interact with your processes, the better. Unit tests are the second UI to your system. Or even the first if you apply TDD.”
“React is to me like a CLI lib, a tool that helps to capture user input, fire of processes, and to transform business data into a nice output. It’s a library to build user interfaces . Not business processes.”
“You will also discover that testing becomes simpler; you will write way less tests that mount components, fire events etc. You still want some, to verify that you wired everything correctly, but there is no need to test all possible combinations.”
“Back-end interaction like submitting mutations or fetching data is the responsibility of my domain stores. Not the UI layer. React-Apollo so far feels to me as a shortcut that too easily leads to a tightly coupled setup.”
“Suspense + React state is great to manage all the UI state, so that there can be concurrent rendering and such. Supporting concurrency makes a lot of sense for volatile state like UI state. But for my business processes? Business processes should be exactly in one state only at all times.”
Building a Signal Analyzer with Modern Web Tech by Casey Primozic
“OffscreenCanvas
allows for true multi-threaded rendering to canvases. Once theOffscreenCanvas
is created and transferred to the worker, the worker can take over completely. The browser handles all the details of synchronizing calls to the GPU and compositing pixel data together in sync with the monitor’s frame rate.”
“Wasm SIMD is used in some of the rendering code for the spectrogram as well as in the implementation of biquad filters which are used by a band splitting feature for the oscilloscope I’m working on. It greatly accelerates aspects of the visualizations, making it possible to render in higher quality and consume less CPU.”
“Also note that whileSharedArrayBuffer
is used to exchange the actual FFT output data with the worker, the async message port interface is used to handle initialization and runtime configuration. It enables structured data like JS objects and wholeArrayBuffers
to be easily exchanged between threads, and it provides a fully typed interface to do so which is a huge boon to developer experience.”
“Lots of data moving between threads, but it’s the same methods as before:SharedArrayBuffer
for rapidly changing data (raw audio samples in this case) and message port for structured event-based data.”
“[…] the AWP’s sole purpose is to copy the samples into a circular buffer inside a SharedArrayBuffer which is shared with the web worker. Once it finishes writing a frame, it notifies the web worker which then wakes up and consumes the samples. It was shockingly easy to implement the lock-free cross-thread circular buffer to support this. Atomics made its design obvious and it felt natural to build.”
“In the larger web synth project, I have UIs built with WebGL, Canvas2D, SVG, HTML/DOM, as well as Wasm-powered pixel buffer-based renderers all playing at the same time and working together. The browser handles compositing all of these different interfaces and layers, scheduling animations for all of them, and handling interactivity.”
“There is a small bit of handling needed to detect the DPI of the current screen and using it to scale your viz, but it really just consists of rendering the viz at a higher resolution and then scaling the canvas it’s drawn to. The whole thing is like 20 lines of code. The browser takes care of making it show up nicely the subpixel rendering.”
“It really feels like the working groups and other organizations behind the design of these APIs thought very hard about them and had this vision for them from the start.”
Stage 20 of the Giro d’Italia was a time trial that ended with an 8km climb over 900m.
I generally don’t like the flat time trials, but this one was exciting because a climbing time-trial really separates the wheat from the chaff. Primož Roglič managed to take enough off of Geraint Thomas’s time that he ended up winning the Giro on this last stage. As a climber myself, I honestly can’t imagine racing something that averages 12.1% (I’m also old). There are two sections that go over 22%.
Why Tears of the Kingdom’s bridge physics have game developers wowed by Nicole Carpenter (Polygon)
“Software engineer Cole Wardell put it another way: “Imagine the lava bridge above, when you grab the end of it, you pull part of it to one side,” he said. “Well, now that drags the other attached piece a little bit with it, and that piece moving makes the next piece move, and so on and so forth. And if any one element of the track collides with something, it has to be nudged or slid back into somewhere that doesn’t collide, which moves the pieces next to it which moves the pieces next to it.””
“Rocksteady Games senior gameplay and combat programmer Aadit Doshi on Twitter. “To be able to confidently present the player with a stack of blocks that are linked with chains that move in accurate ways, without clipping, without objects shaking like crazy as it tries to figure out what it needs to do is awe-inspiring.””
“God forbid you want the rope to collide with itself. Those collisions will cause more nudges, which is more movement, which ends up with your robe vibrating out of the map.””
““There is a problem within the games industry where we don’t value institutional knowledge,” Moon said. “Companies will prioritize bringing someone from outside rather than keeping their junior or mid-level developers and training them up. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by not valuing that institutional knowledge. You can really see it in Tears of the Kingdom . It’s an advancement of what made Breath of the Wild special.””
““In addition to the overall hard work of the team, the institutional knowledge is clearly a factor in why this ended up being so smoothly done,” Moon said. “The more stable and happy people are, the more they are able to make games of this quality. If you want good games, you have to give a damn about the people making them.””
]]>“What’s known as a “balance of payments” crisis is eroding standards of living in a country still reeling from devastating flooding last year. It could “reverse the poverty gains achieved in the last two... [More]”
Published by marco on 3. Jun 2023 22:19:25 (GMT-5)
The article Pakistan’s political crisis will deepen its economic misery by Julia Horowitz (CNN) writes,
“What’s known as a “balance of payments” crisis is eroding standards of living in a country still reeling from devastating flooding last year. It could “reverse the poverty gains achieved in the last two decades and further reduce the incomes of already poor households,” the World Bank warned last month.
“Pakistan’s ability to maintain payments on its debt has also been called into question. Ratings agency Moody’s downgraded the country’s credit rating in late February, noting that foreign currency reserves were “far lower than necessary to cover its imports needs and external debt obligations over the immediate and medium term.””
The World Bank speaks as if there were no money in the world to help Pakistan. No-one considers donations or a redistribution from those who have far more than they need. No-one considers favorable borrowing conditions despite an unstable political situation—how is a country to exit the such a situation if it is being ruined financially as well? A country can’t go bankrupt. A country can’t be “repossessed” by the bank. Can it?
Why is Ukraine a good investment? Well, the U.S. just recently said that money spent on weapons for Ukraine is the “best money they’ve ever spent.” Why is Greece a good investment? Because the ECB has guaranteed every bond issued by Greece for 100 cents per euro, just like they did for Deutschbank eight years ago. Greece is a great money-laundering scheme—they launder public money into private profits. The same in Ukraine. Pakistan doesn’t have anything to offer the western elites, so it can collapse, for all they care.
Our moral standard is incredibly low. The only way that we’ll offer funds to Pakistan is if it shows a willingness to neglect its population in order to pay interest on its existing debt. That is, it needs to borrow more money because it doesn’t have enough money to help its people.
However, it’s already borrowed money in the past, so it must show a willingness to pay interest—otherwise, the same lenders will be unwilling to lend more money (which will, presumably, also not be paid back, and will also not yield interest payments). So, it actually needs more money in order to—most importantly—cover the costs of past borrowing.
This all makes logical sense from a merciless economical standpoint. It’s horrifying from a human standpoint.
The people of that country suffered massive flooding in the last year (1/3 of the country was underwater at one point) and is now suffering from a massive parliamentary/constitutional crisis. It looks very much like there will be yet another military putsch—as there was when Musharraf took power in 1999. Pakistan has only since the partition in 1947 and has had 4 verifed military coups (Wikipedia).
Published by marco on 30. May 2023 22:17:44 (GMT-5)
I recently purchased a Garmin Edge 530 biking computer to upgrade from my Edge 500. It had served me well for over ten years, but the battery was no longer holding a charge reliably and wouldn’t last longer than 3 or 4 hours maximum. I also wanted to be able to store routes so that I was no longer the only annoying guy in the group who had no idea where I was going when we left familiar territory.
I got the 530 because it’s compact and doesn’t have a touch-screen.
I’m still trying to figure out how to turn off the “sharp corner warnings” when I’m not navigating. It makes no sense to announce turns that I might be taking—but usually am not taking.
Note to Garmin: here in Switzerland, we have traffic circles. Like, a LOT of traffic circles. You may have heard of them? No, I don’t think you have, because your silly gadget warns me about every single one as a “sharp U-Turn” even though it has NO IDEA which exit I’m planning to take because I’m not riding a route.
Also, while I am navigating, the “upcoming turn” warnings are great, of course. But … only when you’re actually moving at speed. Otherwise, they dominate your device for up to a minute as you crawl your way up a 12% grade toward that “dangerous, sharp corner” that you’re likely to fly off of at 10km/hr. I think I’ve figured out how to have it show those hints only when I’m actually looking at the map, but I haven’t tested yet whether that’s better (next up: I’ll be complaining about missing turns on my route).
Note to Garmin: here in Switzerland, we have hills and mountains and passes. Like, a LOT of hills. You may have heard of them? No, I don’t think you have, because your silly gadget warns me about “upcoming turns” for 45 seconds before I get to them because I’m GOING UPHILL. I’m fascinated to see that you’ve been working on these devices for decades and still haven’t figured out how to adjust the lead time for a turn warning based on vehicle speed.
Fortunately, it pays to complain loudly about things because my friend patiently wrote back that,
“On the Garmin 530 it’s located under “Settings” / “Activity Profiles” − select the profile you want to change, then scroll down to “Navigation”. You’ll now see the Sharp Bend feature and by default it’s “on.”
Doh!
I was on that page. I turned the other option to Text only
so that it stops switching to the map on me. I somehow did not see the Sharp Bend
option that WAS RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF MY FACE.
Complaining loudly in a semi-public forum FTW! 🎉
I was curious about the imaging library he was using and searched for ImageProcessingContext
(because I saw it in his code). That led me to ImageSharp, after which I searched for comparisons to the cross-platform... [More]
Published by marco on 30. May 2023 22:04:15 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 11. Sep 2023 13:14:50 (GMT-5)
I watched a great video about image-manipulation using an AWS lambda function.
I was curious about the imaging library he was using and searched for ImageProcessingContext
(because I saw it in his code). That led me to ImageSharp, after which I searched for comparisons to the cross-platform library used in Maui (MSDN).
That led me to the issue SkiaSharp vs ImageSharp (GitHub), which noted that,
“Note that JimBobSquarePants, the creator of ImageSharp, contributed some interesting discussion in #47.”
I read/waded through that whole issue thread and commented the following:
For future readers: The discussion itself is not very interesting, but the conclusion is. The title of the issue is Basic premise of the library is based upon a fallacy and harms existing projects. (GitHub) (referring to Maui.Graphics), which doesn’t feel super-constructive (and wasn’t). There are long screeds about how harmful MS is for everything OSS. The final comment is worth reading, as it explains that it turns out that the harshness of the issue title was completely unwarranted (as admitted by the original poster). Good conclusion; typically unproductive Internet discussion.
There is no conflict. Skia’s support for images is weaker than ImageSharp’s but it allows using GPU rendering on supported platforms whereas ImageSharp is for in-memory data (CPU-bound).
In the referenced issue itself, I commented,
“That’s wonderful. While I’m happy to learn that the issue was resolved, is there any way that we can pin this comment to the top so that future readers don’t have to wade through the 80% catfight in the middle?
“I was linked to this issue while researching Skia vs. ImageSharp and found the initial question and a couple of responses interesting, then waded through 80% chest-thumping, then finally got to this comment that essentially says “hey, we actually talked to each other and it turns out it was a tempest in a teapot”, which is what I was hoping to learn.”
I just got a response today:
“No way to pin comments, but I added a link to that comment from the initial issue description.”
Nice! 👌❤️🔥
Published by marco on 27. May 2023 00:37:46 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Biden proposes $1 trillion in social spending cuts after announcing $375 million more for war in Ukraine by Barry Grey (WSWS)
“In his remarks on Sunday, Biden provided a glimpse of the scale of parasitism and plunder of the economy by the financial aristocracy. He noted that 55 US corporations that made $400 billion last year paid zero in taxes. He added that billionaires in the US pay an average tax rate of 8 percent. He asserted that the hiring of IRS agents and enforcement of a 15 percent corporate minimum tax would generate $400 billion in additional federal revenue.
“In fact, as Biden well knows, nothing will be done to rein in these swindlers. He raises the issue in an attempt to cover his attack on the working class with a fraudulent veneer of “equal sacrifice.””
Squeezed by the Shorts: Time to Ban Short Selling? by Ellen Brown (Scheer Post)
“Short sellers “borrow” stock they don’t own and immediately sell it, driving the price down. Then they buy it back at the lower price, return the stock, and pocket the difference. Bankers say the practice is threatening the stability of the banking system and are calling for a ban on short sales of bank stock. The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to decline but is investigating whether the practice constitutes illegal market manipulation intended to deceive investors.”
“[Y]our brokerage firm cannot lend out your stocks without your permission. However, you may have signed a customer agreement that explicitly allows your broker to lend out your securities. This clause is often tucked deep within the customer agreement, and few investors pay much attention to it. In many cases, investors who have a margin account with their brokerage firm will be asked to sign a hypothecation agreement. This agreement generally gives the brokerage firm the right to lend shares of securities that you own.”
“[…] if that were a necessary feature of functioning markets, short selling would also be happening in the markets for cars, television sets and computers, which it obviously isn’t. The reason it isn’t is that these goods can’t be “hypothecated” or duplicated on a computer screen the way stock shares can. Short selling is made possible because the brokers are not dealing with physical things but are simply moving numbers around on a computer monitor.”
“North Dakota has its own “mini-Fed,” the Bank of North Dakota (BND). The bank is wholly owned by the state and is not publicly listed, so its shares cannot be shorted by speculators; and the vast majority of its deposits are state revenues, so there is no fear of a run on the bank.”
US National Security Experts Call for Peace in Ukraine by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies (Scheer Post)
“The statement calls the war an “unmitigated disaster,” and urges President Joe Biden and Congress “to end the war speedily through diplomacy, especially given the dangers of military escalation that could spiral out of control.””
They’re sending jets instead.
“On May 10, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that he is delaying Ukraine’s long-awaited “spring offensive” to avoid “ unacceptable ” losses to Ukrainian forces.”
“How can a new offensive with mixed results and higher casualties put Ukraine in a stronger position at a currently non-existent negotiating table? If the offensive reveals that even huge quantities of Western military aid have failed to give Ukraine military superiority or reduce its casualties to a sustainable level, it could very well leave Ukraine in a weaker negotiating position, instead of a stronger one.”
China and the Axis of the Sanctioned by Juan Cole (Scheer Post)
“Where two sides are tired of conflict, as was true with Saudi Arabia and Iran, Beijing is clearly now ready to play the role of the honest broker. Its remarkable diplomatic feat of restoring relations between those countries, however, reflects less its position as a rising Middle Eastern power than the startling decline of American regional credibility after three decades of false promises (Oslo), debacles (Iraq) and capricious policy-making that, in retrospect, appears to have relied on nothing more substantial than a set of cynical imperial divide-and-rule ploys that are now so been-there, done-that.”
Farewell to the Welfare State? Not Just Yet. by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“[…] this piece has a special message for Americans: There shall be no more daydreaming about how good the Danes or the French have it. The military-industrial complex has crossed the Atlantic. Neoliberalism has won. It is indeed the end of history. It is “TINA” time: “There is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher famously used to say. The future will be no different from the present.”
“[…] the place of defense spending in America’s political economy. It has long been a way to finance various kinds of technological innovation and keep defense contractors and the thousands of satellite companies supplying them profitable. This has never been at all elastic. Remember, by the Cold War’s end all 435 congressional districts—this by design—had an interest of one or another kind in keeping the money flowing to the defense sector.”
“There were quite impressive peace dividends in two other places. One was post–Soviet Russia, where defense spending collapsed. The other was Western Europe, where it did pretty much the same.”
“Europeans—well, some Europeans, no, make that a lot of Europeans—have been grousing about the Americanization of their way of life for decades, especially since America’s triumphalist 1990s: McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza parlors all over the place, that vulgar Disney World outside of Paris, Costco and the other “big box stores,” all those infantilizing films coming over from Hollywood, the slobification of the Continent as standards of dress declined.”
“Behind all the demotic junk of America’s corporatized popular culture has been the creep of neoliberal austerity policies in finance ministries and among the technocrats in Brussels. One of the remarkable features of America’s post–Cold War rendition of neoliberalism is that it can brook no deviation. If America worships markets, everybody must worship markets. If we let a lust for profit destroy everything that gets in its way—culture, community, human dignity—everyone else must do the same.”
“How many times, I used to wonder in years gone by, do I have to read New York Times stories—the Times carried the spears on this front—telling me Sweden no longer works, or the French healthcare system—which the U.N. rates the world’s best, along with Japan’s—is falling apart? After a time, this reader’s irritation gave way to sheer derision as the clerks who serve the reigning ideology, known euphemistically as correspondents, discredited themselves.”
“It tells us that the “the peace dividend”—again it gets the quotation marks—was nothing more than an irresponsible holiday for the Europeans. The long war is over (because another one has begun). Europe will no longer count as a worrisome alternative to America’s grim neoliberal realities, poisoning our minds with the thought that there are other ways to live. The danger—that European social democracy, in all its various stripes, actually works—has passed.”
“It is impossible to miss the triumphalist gloat coursing through Cohen and Alderman’s prose. Read the piece. This caught my eye from the first paragraphs onward. It’s the military-industrial complex über alles —finally, thank goodness, etc.:”
“The near term for Europeans is clear, set: They have been conscripted into Cold War II, like it or not. Nothing beyond this seems so certain to me. Let us hope Europeans prove able to keep a certain flame alive, the flame of possibility, and the piece I parse here turns out to be nothing more than another Sweden-doesn’t-work story.”
Bundesregierung zum Einsatz von Uranmunition gegen Russland: „Keine signifikanten Strahlenexpositionen der Bevölkerung zu erwarten“ by Florian Warweg (NachDenkSeiten)
“In Serbien steigen seit der NATO-Bombardierung 1999 nachweislich die Krebsraten, insbesondere bei Lungenkrebs. Das Land belegt inzwischen seit Jahren den zweiten Platz weltweit bei der Verbreitung dieser Krebsart”
“Wenn man weiß, wie umfassend und eindeutig diese Kausalität belegt werden muss, bevor Soldaten Anspruch auf Entschädigungen haben, bleibt wohl wenig Zweifel an den, von der Bundesregierung negierten, direkten Auswirkungen von Uranmunition auf die menschliche Gesundheit.”
“Der außenpolitische Sprecher der AfD-Bundestagsfraktion, Petr Bystron, erklärte in Bezug auf die Antwort der Bundesregierung: „Die Bundesregierung verurteilt die britische Lieferung von Uranmunition an die Ukraine nicht, obgleich die Bundeswehr selbst diese Munition aufgrund der Gefährdung der eigenen Soldaten gar nicht einsetzt. Auch bezeichnend: Über den angeblichen Einsatz von Uranmunition durch Russland liegen der Bundesregierung keine Erkenntnisse vor, womit klar ist, dass es sich bei dieser Behauptung um reine Kriegspropaganda handelt.“”
The USA’s Soviet-Style President by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Get ready, readers. We are in for 19 months of relentless, insultingly transparent spin, propaganda, and lies of omission, by way of which a senile, patently incompetent man will be offered to us as the president for another four years.”
“You won’t see much of Biden during the coming campaign season. He will make the minimum of public appearances, and they will be brief. He will not answer many questions — mine, yours, or any journalist’s. And those he does answer will be carefully vetted replies written on index cards, as is already the practice. Already we are advised the Democratic National Committee will hold no primary debates.”
“Will we have to depend on the Post, a Murdoch property, for an undue proportion of genuine news about Biden, his corrupt family, and his past doings as the campaign season gets going? I will not be surprised if this turns out to be the case, given our liberal media are absolutely bent on keeping all of the above from public view so as to keep this log-roller in office.”
“So far as I understand the matter, the No. 1 “non-law enforcement or non-intelligence use” of the F.B.I.’s file is political. It is to tell the public just what Biden got up to during his vice-presidency so that we can all decide if we like him or detest him and — among those who vote — if they will support him next year. No, the F.B.I. says: That would be an improper use of this information. Do you ever get as sick of these bamboozlers, these cretins, as I do? Does your heart send faint signals it is breaking as we watch utterly unqualified people with too much power send our republic straight down the chute?”
“Remote, unanswerable and unanswering, Biden seems to me the U.S.’s first fully Soviet-style president. During his 2020 campaigns I compared him with Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the two dottering Soviet general-secretaries who preceded Mikhail Gorbachev.”
“What gets my goat, sticks on my craw, gets up my nose — how uncomfortable it is to comment on these matters — is the offensive confidence the Democratic machine displays as it presumes it can foist a senile old man on our republic. The corrupt-to-the-core DNC gives every impression of thinking it can do whatever it wants and still get its man into the White House. These are the same bastards who prattle on about voters’ rights, the defense of democracy, and so on.”
“[…] there is the matter of comeuppance. A party so complacent and contemptuous of democracy as to assume it can impose an incompetent geriatric on the nation to suit its purposes deserves some.”
The Perils of a Simulacrum by Anna Ochkina (Russian Dissent)
“[…] contrary to all historical facts, ideas are spreading in Russian society not only that the victory in World War II was exclusively an achievement of the USSR, but also ideas about the relationships of all the other European countries with Nazi Germany. Allegedly, the Second World War was a battle between Soviet warriors of light against all the Western countries, who suddenly sided with evil.”
It’s all dark by Justin E.H. Smith (Cabinet Magazine)
“[…] what remains constant is the belief that there must be some difference between the near side and the far side, between two cosmic realms whose official boundary, so to speak, is the solstitial colure between the two hemispheres.”
“Plutarch had wanted to know why it smiles so: why there is, or appears to be, a man in the moon. Is he a reflection of terrestrial features, or is his appearance due to the relief of the moon’s own surface? Is he in truth a man, or at least a telling indicator of the presence in the moon of some sort of conscious, perhaps rational, being? It might have helped Plutarch to know that in Chinese and Indian astrology, the relief in the near surface of the moon is not a man at all, but a rabbit, banished there for some earthly malfeasance in some versions, sent as a sacrifice in others. Run, rabbit, run.”
“It was the coup de grâce of the men behind the Soviet space program to go to the other side and see for themselves, and while they could not have said as much, what they were in fact doing was checking to make sure that there was no atmosphere there, no vegetation, no seas or grottoes or beasts with legs like camels, no spirits. Again, this final verification was meant to seal the coffin on a certain old way of thinking, to show that it’s all the same everywhere, and that simply being hard to reach does not make a region of the cosmos special or peculiar, nor charge it with any unusual powers, nor populate it with unusual beings.”
“In The Changing Light at Sandover, another magnum opus of the 1970s, James Merrill sees the same rockets hailed by Riabchikov two decades earlier as the very congelations of reason, and warns that the “Powers / We shall have hacked through thorns to kiss awake / Will open baleful, sweeping eyes, draw breath / And speak new formulae of megadeath.” Here the heavy metal allusion is off by a vowel, yet not entirely coincidental. The poet, like the band whose name is derived from the technical term for one million fatalities by nuclear explosion, sees that rockets are launched by unreason too. It’s all dark, said the Abbey Road doorman. The sun is eclipsed by the moon.”
I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a cop by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)
“Evaluation forces me to flatten everything I teach into something that can be tested, and it encourages students to ignore everything that isn’t on the test. Plus, instruction and evaluation compete for time: every minute I spend ranking students is a minute I’m not teaching them, and a minute they’re not learning.”
“Nobody ever told me why I’m evaluating my students. In fact, in the final year of my PhD, I became the person who taught grad students how to teach, and I never told them why they were evaluating their students. We all just took it for granted: “Ah yes, the ancient, sacred tradition of assigning people a number based on how many classes they attended and how many multiple-choice questions they answered correctly.””
It’s an abstraction thats allows you to determine to what degree someone has learned something. It’s a proxy that allows scaling up and, ostensibly, comparison across widely distributed cohorts. Where should we invest precious teaching resources? Where it makes the most utility. That’s the reason.
The author would eventually make this point as well, but it was kind of annoying to have to wade through pages of him shouting about how terrible evaluation is, when his point was actually that teachers shouldn’t be the ones making evaluations. Fair enough, and an interesting point.
“The idea that people don’t care about learning is a dumb cousin of the even dumber idea that people are stupid.”
People don’t necessarily care about learning stuff that they aren’t convinced is immediately useful. Think martial arts. They also may not be stupid, but deliberate ignorance is prevalent. It’s not always possible to tell the difference.
“Whenever I got an essay back in college, I would always flip to the final page to look for the grade, feel the appropriate emotions (“I’m the smartest guy who ever lived!!”/“I’m an idiot, destined to die in a hole!”), and basically ignore the comments, because the grades counted and the comments didn’t.”
Funny. I did the exact opposite.
“I’m not actually interested in doing this. What am I going to do, send the good students to heaven and send the bad students to hell? Besides, what makes a student “good”? Some students make great comments in class but turn nothing in. Some students are getting divorced right now and can’t really focus on school. I want to teach every kind of student the best that I can, and maintaining a “naughty” list and a “nice” list only gets in my way.”
Do you have no notion of societal utility? Just teaching for teaching’s sake? Are you teaching for your students? Or for yourself? Sometimes hard things are worth doing. You have to figure out what sort of carrot will convince or compel someone to learn how to do them.
“Three things are happening here. One: the gatekeepers who guard selective opportunities know that they can demand anything of applicants. Why go to all the trouble of trying to figure out how smart someone is when you can make them spend four years and ~$150,000 proving it to you?”
“There’s not much that can be done about #1, but #2 and #3 would change pretty quick if people had to see evaluation up close, really stick their noses in it and take a big whiff. Because then they’d realize that evaluation, when taken to its logical end, smells a lot like prison.”
Scholastic evaluation is also mostly half-assed and absolutely not comparable across versions. It’s why software companies have assessments. You need to just find out what the person can do. I also think the hiring side gets excited about their power and starts getting overly fussy, thinking they can control for minutiae that just isn’t possible.
“But look, we need some evaluation. People have different talents, and they should get opportunities that tap those talents, not just because it benefits them, but because it benefits everybody. If I’m drowning (God forbid), I want to be saved by a lifeguard who’s good at swimming. If I get hit by a bus (God forbid), I want to be operated on by someone who’s good at surgery. If I take a math class (God forbid), I want to learn from someone who’s good at math. For that world to exist, someone, at some point, has to evaluate people on their swimming, surgery, and math.”
Finally!
“If getting evaluated means visiting a police state, it’s better to be a tourist than a resident—spending a month studying for the SAT and an afternoon taking it is miserable, but spending a lifetime in classrooms that double as prisons is even worse.”
“[…] we treat evaluation as its own beast, rather than something you can get for free from a transcript.”
“Every time we rank one another, we lose a little humanity. The people who end up on top become more arrogant, the people who end up at the bottom become more indignant, and the people doing the ranking become more callous. Evaluation is like X-rays: small doses are helpful, but large doses are lethal.”
Sammy Goes to School by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“The students I teach in prison have variations of the same story. They are funneled into the maw of the prison-industrial-complex, the largest in the world, and spat out decades later, even more lost and traumatized, to wander the streets like ghosts until most, unequipped to survive on the outside and without support, find themselves back in the old familiar cages.”
“But I tell this story because it needs to be told. I tell it because this time the end will be different. This time the system will not win. I tell it because neglected and abused children, no matter what crime they commit, should not be imprisoned as if they were adults. I tell it because we are complicit. I tell it because until we stop investing in systems of control and start investing in people, especially children, nothing will change. It will only get worse.”
““Decisions were made early on in my life that I would serve the service sector of society,” he says. “I wasn’t taught innovative curriculums. They sent me to woodshop or auto mechanic schools.””
Those are not fallbacks; they are alternatives. The system that considers this menial work is diseased. I learned it all. I knew instinctively, early on, that there were no bad courses. I took everything I could, disappointing teachers right and left, who thought that it was beneath me.
“He was housed in Trenton State Prison’s Vroom wing for those with mental and behavioral issues. Prisoners called it “the terror dome.” “It had the biggest overzealous guards,” he says. “Twenty-three and one lockdown,” meaning he was only out of his cell for one hour each day. “They came around with a little book cart,” he says. “You could get a book if you wanted. You’d be let out into the yard every few days. You’d get a shower every few days, other than that you’re in your cell.””
Other than the cold and no spoon, this sounds like the story of Denisovic in his gulag.
The Ukraine Refugee Question by Seymour Hersh (Scheer Post)
“One of the driving forces for the quiet European talks with Zelensky has been the more than five million Ukrainians fleeing from the war who have crossed the country’s borders and have registered with its neighbors under an EU agreement for temporary protection that includes residency rights, access to the labor market, housing, social welfare assistance, and medical care.”
This is a huge shock to labor markets and social safety nets that is, purely coincidentally, felt not one bit by the U.S.
““Hungary is a big player in this and so are Poland and Germany, and they are working to get Zelensky to come around,” the American official said. The European leaders have made it clear that “Zelensky can keep what he’s got”—a villa in Italy and interests in offshore bank accounts—“if he works up a peace deal even if he’s got to be paid off, if it’s the only way to get a deal.””
Name the Kook by Ted Rall
“Two parties, two frontrunners, one a president, the other one a former president. Both at the same exact place in primary polls. Both face challengers. But only one gets taken seriously. Could the reason be media spin?”
Quantifying the human cost of global warming by Timothy M. Lenton, Chi Xu, Jesse F. Abrams, Ashish Ghadiali, Sina Loriani, Boris Sakschewski, Caroline Zimm, Kristie L. Ebi, Robert R. Dunn, Jens-Christian Svenning & Marten Scheffer (Nature)
“Here we express them in terms of numbers of people left outside the ‘human climate niche’—defined as the historically highly conserved distribution of relative human population density with respect to mean annual temperature. We show that climate change has already put ~9% of people (>600 million) outside this niche. By end-of-century (2080–2100), current policies leading to around 2.7 °C global warming could leave one-third (22–39%) of people outside the niche. Reducing global warming from 2.7 to 1.5 °C results in a ~5-fold decrease in the population exposed to unprecedented heat (mean annual temperature ≥29 °C). The lifetime emissions of ~3.5 global average citizens today (or ~1.2 average US citizens) expose one future person to unprecedented heat by end-of-century. That person comes from a place where emissions today are around half of the global average.”
So the people causing the warming are not the ones experiencing the worst of it. That’s essentially means that people are not going to stop warming the planet. It’s literally “if you had a box with a button that, when you pushed it, it gave you a million dollars but also killed a person you don’t know.”
It’s All in Your Hands by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“I’m not one who struggles to just keep going, as so many people do, but I come closest when I think of this: that there are gentle people to whom the world is not gentle. It hits me like a does of Haldol, every time − a slap to the face that clarifies and makes you feel worse. I’ll be in the supermarket minding my own business, wondering who exactly names the varieties of apple, when suddenly it occurs to me that many exist who walk around the world undefended, reaching out unthinkingly to others without cool or irony or aggression, those without savvy or a plan, and they’re treated with cold and harsh behavior that they receive with hurt and, worse, surprise. That’s the part I can’t bear − thinking of someone expecting the world to be soft the way that they’re soft, and finding that it isn’t.”
“The sun was barely up and I was alone in the most popular park in the most populated borough in the city. At the boathouse a heron stood on the tile next to the dock. He stalked around, alien, prehistoric, and though I couldn’t really, from the distance of the bridge, I told myself I could hear the clatter of ancient claws on weathered tile. The sight of him terrified me.”
“[…] where I am now: fat, rapidly aging, a joke to many, but financially secure, slowly chipping away, loved and in love, four walls and a roof.”
“[…] the train moves, shaking just as the train shakes. And around you pass the busy people, not unkind, just mute and useless, those who would do nothing to harm you but who can’t imagine a world in which they might save people like you. I would think that the image of your corpse would be arresting, but the people on the subway had somewhere to get to, and so did the subway, and the city did too.”
“Mother, be with me now, the world belongs to the stupid and cruel, I have grown ugly with time, my words are weak, every building I pass looks like a crumbling and underfunded hospital, I write and write and no one cares. Let me remember the plant growing from a coconut shell in the surf, the white city at the end of an immaculate beam.”
How “post-rationalism” is reshaping tech culture by Tara Isabella Burton (New Atlantis)
“Whether you call it spiritual hunger, reactionary atavism, or postliberal epistemology, more and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers (and would-be thinkers) are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology — that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so — is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism.”
Stanford Law Students Are Your Class Enemy by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“[…] becoming functionally a tool of the status quo doesn’t require ideological transformation. I don’t think people become conservatives en masse as they age. I do think that people get busy with life and find themselves increasingly deepening inequality and supporting unjust structures as they just try to get ahead. I’m sure that will happen with a lot of these Stanford law grads. But I’m also sure a lot of them are going to wave the black flag right up until they get a cush $350K/year entry-level job at a major firm and then get busy helping cigarette manufacturers avoid lawsuits. And I’m also sure they’ll never feel bad about any of it.”
Escaping The Prison Of Mainstream Culture by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“Turning to religion and conservatism as a solution to the degradation of mainstream culture is just replacing the modern systems of mass-scale thought control with the old ones. It’s a completely maladaptive solution to the problem, but you can’t ask people to just keep participating in a worldview that feels like it’s sucking your soul out of your body 24/7. You need to offer them something nourishing and authentic. Nothing in mainstream liberal culture offers this; it’s self-evidently phony, soulless and vapid.
“This isn’t something the left can just dismiss. There needs to be something on offer which meets these needs better than both mainstream culture and the regressive belief systems which caused so much suffering in the past.”
“If you have to make up imaginary communist threats to give your ideology meaning and purpose, you have a dumb ideology. Making an identity out of being anti-communist in the west is like making an identity out of being anti-dinosaur. Stop being ridiculous and do something real.”
“This is the only reason those who talk about western propaganda and Silicon Valley information manipulation get branded conspiracy theorists. It’s not because the evidence for our position on those issues isn’t abundant, it’s because it’s not officially acknowledged and studied.
“Domestic propaganda is the most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our civilization, because it causes people to think, speak, work, shop and vote in ways that perpetuate the status quo. You should be able to get a PhD in its study, but you can’t even write a thesis on it.
“The most important thing you need to know about our society is that all our means of understanding our world are being aggressively and continuously interfered with by powerful people who benefit from the status quo. They’re actively meddling in our perception of reality.”
The Ghost in the Machine (Part II): Simplifying the Ghost of AI by Ali Minai (3 Quarks Daily)
“[…] the fact that LLMs almost always use words in meaningful ways indicates that they have an implicit model of meanings too. What is the nature of that? The answer lies almost certainly in a linguistic idea called the distributional hypothesis of meaning, which says that the meaning of a word can be inferred from the statistics of its use in the context of other words. As described above, LLMs based on transformers are pre-disposed to the statistical learning of structural relationships in text, and their representations of meaning must be derived implicitly from this because of the tight linkage between word usage and meaning per the distributional hypothesis. Given enough data, the statistics can become very accurate – hence the meaningful output of GPT-4 et al.”
“This deeply and inherently intelligent “machine” takes in all its sensory input across all modalities, integrates it with its own state, and generates new states of thought, feeling, emotion, action, memory, and action continuously in real-time, just as a rotation is generated in a pinwheel by a breeze. Only a minuscule fraction of these states rise to the level of consciousness; even fewer are the result of deliberation (which, from a non-dualist viewpoint, must itself be seen just a more complex, slower-changing trajectory in the state space.) The key point here is that, even System 2 behavior – thought or action – is built on a deep substrate of System 1 behavior: The key we learn to press when first learning to play a piece of music may be chosen deliberately, but the coordination of intention and movement that allows us to press it at all is all automatic. System 1 is the soil in which System 2 grows.”
“This is why producing extremely smart chatbots or Go champions is inherently more feasible than putting safe fully self-driving cars on the road. It is also why AI programmers, lawyers and physicians will likely become a reality sooner than useful household robots. You can learn all of medicine from text and data, but you can’t learn to fold laundry – actually fold it, not just the steps – without doing it.”
“The difference lies in the multiscale organization of coordination modes discussed earlier. Evolution and development preconfigure a repertoire of useful coordination modes as primitives of behavior , and reinforcement learning simply needs to learn how to trigger the right combinations. The instantiation of these coordination modes through a gradual process of development ensures that they are learned efficiently by each stage building only on the successful modes learned in earlier stages, e.g., toddling on standing, walking on toddling, running on walking, etc.”
Writing Python like it’s Rust (Kobzol's blog)
“The first and foremost thing is using type hints where possible, particularly in function signatures and class attributes.”
A great first step. I’m fascinated to read these posts by Python programmers, writing as if they’re discovering new territory.
“Using type hints is one thing, but that merely describes what is the interface of your functions. The second step is actually making these interfaces as exact and “locked down” as possible. A typical example is returning multiple values (or a single complex value) from a function. The lazy and quick approach is to return a tuple […]
“Great, we know that we’re returning three values. What are they? Is the first string the first name of the person? The second string the surname? What’s the number? Is it age? Position in some list? Social security number? This kind of typing is opaque and unless you look into the function body, you don’t know what happens here.”
Congratulations, you’ve discovered what people knew when they invented Ada and Algol about 50 or 60 years ago.
“The proper solution is to return a strongly typed object with named parameters that have an attached type. In Python, this means we have to create a class. I suspect that tuples and dicts are used so often in these situations because it’s just so much easier than to define a class (and think of a name for it), create a constructor with parameters, store the parameters into fields etc. Since Python 3.7 (and sooner with a package polyfill), there is a much faster solution − dataclasses.
“[…]
“You still have to think of a name for the created class, but other than that, it’s pretty much as concise as it can get, and you get type annotations for all attributes.”
I cite at length because I’m fascinated to watch the Python coding world “discover” programming as engineering. There are also sections on avoiding primitive obsession, avoiding a ton of mutable state in a single object, and so on.
This is not to say that I’ve never done any of this. I’ve definitely created a client for a custom protocol that had a Connect()
method that you had to ensure wasn’t going to be called at the wrong time. It’s just kind of funny to watch them discover this kind of stuff as if it were all brand new.
At least when I was re-learning stuff, I had no Internet from which I could have learned it better, and I was only ignoring a couple of decades of computer science rather than five decades worth of it, at least three of which were accompanied by an Internet utterly rich in tutorials and information about how to write clean code. And yet—Python was born and everyone with no programming experience—or inclination to learn from anyone who had any—started using it.
Clean Frontend Architecture with SvelteKit: Discovering the Use Cases by Niko Heikkilä
“Do note that with a real-world product, you should define user stories by discussing with stakeholders instead of inspecting existing behaviour from an external service. Technical people defining the features they want to deliver without conversing with the right people is a great way to waste money.”
This should go without saying, but it bears repeating. It happens all the time that technical people end up defining the features because no-one else in the project is trained to think logically about how to design features. Even though it can be a good guess, it’s still not even close to the same thing as finding out what customers actually need. Although a lot of popular products are “giving customers stuff they didn’t know they wanted or needed”, most industry software is for customers who are very well-versed in their domains and can say what they need. You can’t disrupt everything.
“One of the reasons for writing this guide is that I have seen too many frontend applications where application and networking logic is tightly coupled with the view layer. Typically, user interface components fetch data in the browser via AJAX requests, applying formatting on top of it and displaying it to the user.”
I’ve done this as well, but it’s wrong, unless you’re just prototyping or playing around. Unless you are prototyping directly for a customer—who is likely to be more receptive to a visual approach—you should always just start with defining services, as described in this article.
“Components should primarily see the data passed to them via properties, commonly known as props. It helps you by creating a natural anti-corruption layer between your views and the application keeping it maintainable, scalable and effortless to test. Push the logic as far to the backend as possible, whether it’s the frontend’s backend or the actual backend.”
“Your application must be reachable from a command-line interface. Therefore, in most projects, your command-line interface is your test runner. This knowledge makes it easy to validate if your design is clean enough. For example, do you need to test the user interface to validate your core business logic? If you do, your design is painfully coupled with the user interface.”
There are certain interactions or facets of use cases that can only realistically be tested directly in the UI. You should be a bit careful about spending too much time abstracting and extracting everything so that it can be tested from the command line/test harness. For example, if you expect a chart to show red dots for data points below a certain threshold, you can test that offline—but you still can’t verify that the color is actually red until you actually see it in the browser. That is, you can verify that a certain CSS class is being applied to an element, but how can you verify that this class actually applies a red foreground color? The only realistic way is to actually display the page in the browser, take a screenshot and compare it to an expectation.
Or, how would you test drag-&-drop behavior? For example, suppose you want to verify that certain drop zones are valid and others are not? You can probably determine that from state. Can you verify that those drop zones are actually colored differently? Or that they indicate that they are drop-zones somehow? Of course you can—but is it always worth automating? These kinds of verifications can quite time-intensive—and most developers will simply be incapable of writing this kind of code.
This kind of code is often very touchy and highly dependent on operating-system events that are not so easy to fake. Even if you can fake them, you’re generally faking up an ideal system that may or may not correspond to what actually happens in real systems. The amount of effort you invest in verifying your drag-&-drop behavior outside of a UI context may be quite high relative to just testing that behavior manually.
You should be aware of the cost of automation and plan accordingly.
Clean Frontend Architecture with SvelteKit: Handling the External Dependencies with Gateway by Niko Heikkilä
“You can test against a real filesystem, API, and an actual database to your heart’s content. However, you will realize the importance of test doubles when your previously so fast tests start to take longer and longer to run, and as a consequence, you run them less frequently, increasing the feedback loop and causing defects to arise.”
This is a great video, introducing an interesting concept.
Sleeping across Europe. Night Train Network; Destinations 2023
The route from Longarone, IT (at 436m) to Tre Cime di Lavaredo, IT (at 2304m) covered 5400m of climbing over 183km. The winner averaged 33.5kmh.
On an earlier segment, they showed the stats for one of the riders on a climb of 10km with 8.8% average incline. He averaged 22.3kmh at 440w and 85 cadence. Absolutely insane.
Published by marco on 22. May 2023 06:51:29 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Masks Work. Distorting Science to Dispute the Evidence Doesn’t by Matthew Oliver, Mark Ungrin, Joe Vipond (Scientific American)
“In many scientific disciplines randomized trial methods are fundamentally inappropriate —akin to using a scalpel to mow a lawn. If something can be directly measured or accurately and precisely modeled, there is no need for complex, inefficient trials that put participants at risk. Engineering, perhaps the most “real-world” of disciplines, doesn’t conduct randomized trials. Its necessary knowledge is well-understood. Everything from highways to ventilation systems—everything that moves us, cleans our air and our water, and puts satellites into orbit—succeeds without needing them. This includes many medical devices.”
Von der Leyen und der Pfizer-Skandal – Warum schweigen die deutschen Medien? by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)
“Stand heute wurden nach offiziellen Angaben 975 Millionen Dosen verimpft – das heißt, dass mehr als jede zweite verbindlich bestellte und bezahlte Impfdosis vernichtet werden muss; zählt man die optional vorbestellten Dosen hinzu, hat die EU mehr als viermal so viele Impfstoffe bestellt wie benötigt. Das freut die Pharmakonzerne, für die die zentrale Impfstoffbeschaffung der EU der wohl größte Jackpot aller Zeiten war und ist.”
“So kam es, wie es aus objektiver Sicht kommen musste: Die EU-Staaten wussten bereits wenige Wochen nach dem Pfizer-Deal gar nicht mehr, wohin mit den vielen Impfdosen. Diese wurden zunächst eingelagert oder bereits von den Herstellern ab Werk vernichtet. Ausgeliefert wurden ab diesem Zeitpunkt vor allem Dosen, die diejenigen Dosen in den Lagern ersetzten, die aufgrund des Verfallsdatums dort vor Ort vernichtet werden mussten. Doch: Pacta sunt servanda, Verträge sind einzuhalten. Und so werden auch heute noch jeden Tag Impfdosen produziert, die niemand will und die richtig viel Geld kosten. Von der Leyen sei Dank.”
“Von den rund 500 Millionen Impfdosen, die die EU Pfizer Stand heute noch abnehmen muss, fallen 220 Millionen Dosen weg. Dafür muss die EU jedoch eine Art Stornogebühr bezahlen – 2,2 Milliarden Euro. Die restlichen 280 Millionen Dosen werden in einem neuen Rahmenvertrag bis 2026 geliefert … oder besser „vernichtet“. Dafür zahlt die EU dann jedoch nicht den alten, ohnehin schon massiv überteuerten Preis, sondern einen neuen, sich an dem Marktpreis orientierten Abnahmepreis. Auf Deutsch: Es wird noch teurer.”
What Makes a Consumption Tax Regressive? by Matt Bruenig (Jacobin)
“Because richer people consume more than poorer people, taxing consumption results in richer people paying more consumption tax than poorer people pay. But because poorer people spend a larger share of their income on consumption than richer people, taxing consumption results in poorer people paying a higher percentage of their income toward consumption tax than richer people pay.”
“Of course, ultimately, it is not really possible to analyze one piece of an overall distributive system and decide whether it is itself good or bad. What matters is whether the system as a whole achieves your overall distributive goals. Put differently: distributive justice can only really be coherently evaluated at the level of the overall system, not at the level of each particular institution in that system.”
AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are. by Naomi Klein (The Guardian)
“There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.”
“Why, for instance, should a for-profit company be permitted to feed the paintings, drawings and photographs of living artists into a program like Stable Diffusion or Dall-E 2 so it can then be used to generate doppelganger versions of those very artists’ work, with the benefits flowing to everyone but the artists themselves?”
“The trick, of course, is that Silicon Valley routinely calls theft “disruption” – and too often gets away with it. We know this move: charge ahead into lawless territory; claim the old rules don’t apply to your new tech; scream that regulation will only help China – all while you get your facts solidly on the ground. By the time we all get over the novelty of these new toys and start taking stock of the social, political and economic wreckage, the tech is already so ubiquitous that the courts and policymakers throw up their hands.”
“They are just hoping that the old playbook works one more time – that the scale of the heist is already so large and unfolding with such speed that courts and policymakers will once again throw up their hands in the face of the supposed inevitability of it all. It’s also why their hallucinations about all the wonderful things that AI will do for humanity are so important. Because those lofty claims disguise this mass theft as a gift – at the same time as they help rationalize AI’s undeniable perils.”
“According to this logic, the failure to “solve” big problems like climate change is due to a deficit of smarts. Never mind that smart people, heavy with PhDs and Nobel prizes, have been telling our governments for decades what needs to happen to get out of this mess: slash our emissions, leave carbon in the ground, tackle the overconsumption of the rich and the underconsumption of the poor because no energy source is free of ecological costs.”
“The reason this very smart counsel has been ignored is not due to a reading comprehension problem, or because we somehow need machines to do our thinking for us. It’s because doing what the climate crisis demands of us would strand trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets, while challenging the consumption-based growth model at the heart of our interconnected economies.”
“[…] he seems to be hallucinating a world entirely unlike our own, one in which politicians and industry make decisions based on the best data and would never put countless lives at risk for profit and geopolitical advantage.”
“Then watch as people get hooked using these free tools and your competitors declare bankruptcy. Once the field is clear, introduce the targeted ads, the constant surveillance, the police and military contracts, the black-box data sales and the escalating subscription fees.”
“[…] we leftists also know that if earning money is to no longer be life’s driving imperative, then there must be other ways to meet our creaturely needs for shelter and sustenance. A world without crappy jobs means that rent has to be free, and healthcare has to be free, and every person has to have inalienable economic rights. And then suddenly we aren’t talking about AI at all – we’re talking about socialism.”
“We live under capitalism, and under that system, the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists. It means that those people will find themselves staring into the abyss […]”
“Altman reassures us: “Nobody wants to destroy the world.” Perhaps not. But as the ever-worsening climate and extinction crises show us every day, plenty of powerful people and institutions seem to be just fine knowing that they are helping to destroy the stability of the world’s life-support systems, so long as they can keep making record profits that they believe will protect them and their families from the worst effects.”
I don’t think that they think even that far. They just want to make profit for the sake of making profit.
Biden and the Greatest Economy Ever by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)
“While working from home is a benefit largely restricted to more educated and higher-paid workers, lower-paid workers have also been doing well in the recovery. Research by Arin Dube, David Autor, and Annie McGrew shows that much of the growth in wage inequality over the last four decades has been reversed in the last three years. While there is still far to go, workers in the bottom 20 percent of the wage distribution are seeing their pay grow far more rapidly than those at the middle or top of the wage distribution.”
As for the first part, I think the word “largely” is overly generous. Jobs that cannot be performed remotely are generally the ones that are paid the worst. And, even if wages at the bottom are rising relatively faster, that doesn’t mean that it’s closing the gap. If a person making $30k per year gets a $300 raise, then they’re making 1% more per year. A person making $200k per year who gets a $1k raise is then making .5% more per year. So, the lower salary is increasing at a faster rate, relative to its base salary, but the gap is also still growing. When we hear “higher rate”, we kind of think that the lower one will catch up to the higher one, but that ain’t necessarily so. Also, most reported salaries do not include bonuses in the U.S. because they’re not an official part of the pay structure. Bonuses don’t exist for the hoi polloi.
“Does this amount to the greatest economy ever? That’s a tough call. We expect living standards to improve over time as technology improves, people become better educated, and we get a larger and better capital stock.
“The real question is the rate of improvement. By that score, it would be hard to beat the decades of the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. We saw a quarter century of generally low unemployment and rapid economic growth, from which the gains were widely shared.
“Also, while we have seen some gains for those in the bottom half of the income distribution, we still see falling life expectancies for this group. That is not due to strictly economic factors, but economics plays an important role.”
The Pundits Were Wrong: Corporate Greed Stoked Inflation by Andrew Perez, Matthew Cunningham-Cook, David Sirota (Jacobin)
“[…] corporations that had been permitted to grow into oligopolies during the era of lax antitrust enforcement were now able to leverage their outsized market power to hike prices — and to do so with less fear of competitors undercutting them. It’s a reality that has since been recognized by a Federal Reserve study, a top economist at UBS, European central bankers, and, most recently, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. And yet, corporate media outlets ignored the available data, choosing to publish and platform pundits who scoffed at accusations of what they derisively called “greedflation” and who insisted that the problem is workers being paid higher wages. That decision delivered devastating consequences for the US working class.”
Empörender Umgang mit dem Tag der Befreiung: „Hier weht nur noch die Ukrainefahne“ by Tobias Riegel (NachDenkSeiten)
“Das ist nicht nur ein Verrat an der historischen Verpflichtung Deutschlands, das macht auch einen extrem kleinlichen Eindruck: Manche Propagandisten vermögen es sogar angesichts der monumentalen Vorgänge des Zweiten Weltkriegs nicht, über den Schatten der täglichen Auseinandersetzungen zu springen, um die historischen Taten jener Befreier, die den größten Blutzoll entrichten mussten, angemessen zu würdigen.”
The U.S. has been comfortable telling this story for my entire lifetime. Germany will also become accustomed to it, with practice.
“Es sei denn, man ist Holocaust-Relativierer und man möchte den Einmarsch Russlands in die Ukraine mit den Feldzügen der Wehrmacht gleichsetzen und das heutige Handeln Russlands mit dem der deutschen Nazimörder. Zusätzlich muss ja die Geschichte der Ukraine und der NATO mindestens seit 2014 massiv unterdrückt werden, damit die hierzulande dominante und vor doppelten politisch-moralischen Standards strotzende Deutung des russischen Einmarsches von 2022 nicht auffliegt.”
Ukraine’s Big Mistake: an interview with Renfrey Clarke by Natylie Baldwin (Scheer Post)
“Ukraine had been one of the most industrially developed parts of the Soviet Union. It was among the key centres of Soviet metallurgy, of the space industry and of aircraft production. It had some of the world’s richest farmland and its population was well-educated even by Western European standards.”
“Fast-forward to 2021, the last year before Russia’s “Special Military Operation,” and the picture in Ukraine was fundamentally different. The country had been drastically de-developed, with large, advanced industries (aerospace, car manufacturing, shipbuilding) essentially shut down. World Bank figures show that in constant dollars, Ukraine’s 2021 Gross Domestic Product was down from the 1990 level by 38 percent. If we use the most charitable measure, per capita GDP at Purchasing Price Parity, the decline was still 21 percent. That last figure compares with a corresponding increase for the world as a whole of 75 percent.”
“Few of the new business chiefs knew much about how capitalism was supposed to work, and the lessons in the business-school texts were mostly useless in any case. The way you got rich was by paying bribes to tap into state revenues, or by cornering and liquidating value that had been created in the Soviet past. Asset ownership was exceedingly insecure — you never knew when you’d turn up at your office to find it full of the armed security guards of a business rival, who’d bribed a judge to permit a takeover. In these circumstances, productive investment was irrational behaviour.”
“Customs barriers were absent, and technical standards, inherited from the U.S.S.R., were mostly identical. Ways of doing business were familiar, and negotiations could be conducted conveniently in Russian. Perhaps most critically important was another factor: the two countries were on broadly similar levels of technological development. Their labour productivity did not differ by much. Neither side was in danger of seeing whole industrial sectors wiped out by more sophisticated competitors based in the other country.”
“The shift to integration with the West, however, did not bring Ukraine the promised surge of economic growth. After a severe slump in the aftermath of the Maidan events of 2014, Ukrainian GDP saw only a weak recovery between 2016 and 2021. Meanwhile, the country’s trade balance with the EU remained strongly negative. Integration with the West was doing far more for the West than for Ukraine.”
This is the story of every other Eastern European country, most of which became export markets and/or source of cheap labor.
“[…] the role Ukraine has been assigned is that of a market for advanced Western manufactures, and of a supplier to the EU of relatively low-tech generic goods such as steel billets and basic chemicals. These are low-profit commodities that Western producers are tending to move out of in any case, especially since the industries concerned can be highly polluting.”
“In the dreams of liberal theorists, foreign capitalists had been going to troop over the border, buy up ruined industrial enterprises, re-equip them and on the basis of low wages, make attractive profits from exports to the West. But Ukraine had a criminalised economy run by oligarchs. Rather than swim with sharks, potential foreign investors opted overwhelmingly to stay away.”
And how would even the initial scenario have been beneficial to the local populace?
“it seems like the left — at least in the U.S. — has been reduced to a frightened waif obsessing over a caricaturised form of identity politics and regurgitating the latest war propaganda. What, in your opinion, has happened to the left?”
“In the classic left analysis, modern imperialism is a quality of the most advanced and wealthy capitalism. Imperialist countries export capital on a massive scale, and drain the developing world of value through the mechanism of unequal exchange. Here Russia simply doesn’t fit the bill. With its relatively backward economy based on the export of raw commodities, Russia is a large-scale victim of unequal exchange.”
“Imperialism has to be resisted. But does this mean that the left should support Putin’s actions in Ukraine? Here we should reflect that a workers’ government in Russia would have countered imperialism in the first instance through a quite different strategy, centred on international working-class solidarity and revolutionary anti-war agitation.”
I fail to see how that would have affected the actions of NATO or the U.S. at all. They would not have acted any differently. Do you think that NATO would have failed to propagandize the war even if they hadn’t had Putin as their bugaboo? They are capable of manufacturing consent out of whole cloth. The quality of the initial—or real—enemy doesn’t matter one whit.
“[…] the left-liberal position, of seeking victory for imperialism and its allies in Ukraine, is deeply reactionary. Ultimately, it can only multiply suffering through emboldening the U.S. and NATO to launch assaults in other parts of the world.”
“The military draft has taken large numbers of skilled workers from their jobs. Other highly qualified people are among the Ukrainians, reportedly at least 5.5 million, who have left the country. An estimated 6.9 million people have been displaced within Ukraine, and this has also affected production.”
“The figure I have for total planned U.S. military spending in 2023 is $886 billion, so the NATO countries can afford to maintain and rebuild Ukraine if they want to. The fact that they’re keeping the Ukrainian economy on a relative drip-feed — and worse, demanding that many of the outlays be paid back — is a conscious choice they’ve made. There’s a lesson in this for developing-world elites that are tempted to act as proxies for imperialism, in the way that Ukraine’s post-2014 leaders have deliberately done. When the consequences get you in deep, don’t expect the imperialists to pick up the tab. Ultimately, they’re not on your side.”
“How is the fighting to end? At present, the Russian forces seem unlikely to be defeated, at least by the Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the closer a Russian victory, the greater the prospect of full-scale imperialist military intervention.”
“Presuming there can be an “after the war,” what might it look like? We must remember that Ukraine is now one of the poorer parts of the capitalist developing world. For countries in this general situation, there can be no genuinely “stable and equitable” economic future. Such a future is conceivable only outside capitalism, its crises, and its international system of plunder.”
“In politico-economic terms, Ukraine’s future doesn’t lie in “integration with the West” — a destructive fantasy — but in …. taking its place among the member states of organisations such as BRICS, the Belt and Road initiative, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. For its financing needs, Ukraine needs to repudiate the IMF and look to bodies such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.”
Do Conservatives Actually Like RFK Jr., or Do They Just Think He’ll Hurt Biden? by Joe Lancaster (Reason)
“As Reason’s Matt Welch has written, Kennedy has a long and shameful history of authoritarian pronouncements, including stating that his political opponents should be arrested and dissenting corporations “given the death penalty.” Kennedy also praised Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez as the “kind of leader my father and President Kennedy were looking for.”
“And that’s to say nothing of what became Kennedy’s signature issue for nearly two decades: a full-scale opposition to vaccines that only intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the years, he has repeatedly compared vaccination to Nazi experiments, including using the term “holocaust.”
“Scully huffs that tarring Kennedy as a conspiracy theorist or an anti-vaxxer is “lazy and slanderous, telling us nothing about the merits of his arguments or about what has or has not actually been ‘debunked.’” However, Kennedy’s long-held insistence that there is a causal link between childhood vaccinations and autism spectrum disorder has been debunked. Kennedy’s prediction that Bill Gates would design a COVID-19 vaccine with a microchip, ushering in a cashless society, has also proved incorrect. He has further claimed, without evidence, that 5G wireless signals “could have almost unimaginably devastating impacts on our health [and] environment”; and that they will enable insidious forces to “harvest our data and control our behavior.””
“Kennedy, meanwhile, served on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s commission on hydraulic fracturing, better known as “fracking”; the commission successfully lobbied Cuomo to ban the practice. In 2016, Kennedy secretly lobbied New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to impose a “corporate death penalty” by terminating ExxonMobil’s authority to operate within the state. Kennedy’s campaign website promises that his platform will include “curbing mining, logging, oil drilling, and suburban sprawl.””
Kennedy also said this in a tweet (Reddit):
“The most crucial aspect of the immigration crisis is rarely discussed: Why are so many people so desperate in the first place to leave their homes and countries behind for an uncertain future? The answer is uncomfortable. In large part, it is U.S. policies that create desperate conditions south of the border. The War on Drugs is one. U.S.-funded dictators, juntas, paramilitaries, and death squads. Neoliberal extraction of resources. Unpayable debts. It is inhumane and hypocritical to deny immigration while creating the conditions that drive immigration. As President, I will change these policies. That’s the only long-term solution to the border crisis.”
Picketing writers in New York City: “The people who run these companies are getting richer and richer, and they’re asking us to work for as little as they can possibly pay us” by Our reporters (WSWS)
“The highly paid parasite-executives at Disney, Amazon Studios, Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony Pictures, NBCUniversal and the rest, who contribute nothing to television and movie production, consider the various series and films as their personal property, which only exist to enrich them and which they can dispose of as they see fit. Objectively, the strike raises the question of who presently controls cultural life and who should control it.”
“The people who run these companies are getting richer and richer and they’re asking us to work for as little as they can possibly pay us.”
Journalists-on-Journalists Crime by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Diana Johnstone, the distinguished Europeanist who has corresponded from Paris for decades, sent a brief note after Fox’s announcement, calling Carlson “the last free voice on mainstream television.” I paused and wondered if I agreed. And then decided I did.
““The TV host paid the price because he tried the impossible: straddling the divide between corporate media and critical journalism,” Jonathan Cook, who I hold in the same high regard I have for Johnstone, wrote last week on his blog . “He exposed ordinary Americans to critical perspectives, especially on U.S. foreign policy, that they had no hope of hearing anywhere else—and most certainly not from so-called ‘liberal’ corporate media outlets like CNN and MSNBC. And he did so while constantly ridiculing the media’s craven collusion with those in power.””
“Johnstone and Cook share an essential point. It is not about agreeing with everything Tucker Carlson had to say on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” his evening cable broadcast. They don’t and I don’t. This is about the presence of independent voices in American journalism. And Carlson has raised such a voice since Fox gave him a prime-time slot in 2016.”
“This is not a left-right question. Not much is anymore when you come down to it, primarily because there is no left left in America to allow for right-left questions. I do not read Carlson as an ideologue of any sort. I read him as an independent mind feeling its way, correct on many things, wrong on just as many.”
Oh, I think Carlson is a more than a bit of an ideologue on some topics. He drives very hard on topics like immigration without seeming to be “feeling his way” toward a consensus opinion that represents reality. He is/was quite vociferous and unbending and unsympathetic. He was also wildly illogical considering the realities of the U.S. workforce (without immigrants working its fields, the U.S. would quickly starve or suffer massive price swings on basic foodstuffs).
“Stacey Plaskett had the gall to refer to Matt Taibbi as “a so-called journalist.” That’s what these people are. They are the penny-ante scoundrels who populate the lower reaches of Cold War II as our discourse is narrowed to suit an information monoculture. Journalists—my take-home here—have fundamentally changed the function of the profession. There is among the great majority of mainstream reporters no longer even the pretense of independence from the powers they are supposed to cover. They openly serve now as the clerks of the political and administrative cliques they “report” upon. They give the impression they think this is their proper role.”
“I do not think Garland and his assistants give a hoot about the APSP or the Uhuru Movement. They chose to go after these groups precisely because they are so insignificant. It is the implications the Justice Department is after—the legal precedent. Garland and Olsen are using these two groups to establish that sowing discord and all the rest can be prosecuted, when this case concludes, as unlawful.”
Mainstream Media Doesn’t Care That the CIA May Have Helped Cause 9/11 by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)
“Relaying the information gathered from dozens of interviews he conducted with former FBI and CIA personnel, members of the 9/11 Commission, and US government officials, Canestraro’s affidavit outlines a sequence of events that, if true, suggest a botched and illegal domestic CIA operation was at the heart of the intelligence failure that enabled the attacks. More than that, it suggests there was a concerted cover-up of the grave blunder after the fact by both the CIA and the George W. Bush administration.”
“More than two decades later, there’s no price the US establishment won’t pay, no civil liberty it won’t bend, no effort it won’t go to prevent another September 11 — except, apparently, taking a critical eye to its own unaccountable intelligence agencies.”
Western News Media Exist To Administer Propaganda by Caitlin Johnstone
“Typically the only time you’ll ever hear the word “propaganda” mentioned in mainstream discourse is in reference to things other countries do to their own citizenry or as part of foreign influence operations, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the times we’ve encountered propaganda in our day to day lives, the call was coming from inside the house.”
Is there something fishy about radiocarbon dating? by Paul Braterman (3 Quarks Daily)
“The ICR article’s author, James Johnson, has a law degree, and arguments based on the correction of scientific errors seem to have a particular appeal to lawyers, who treat the science as they would a witness who had changed their story under cross-examination. This shows total misunderstanding of what is really going on, and it is deplorable that lawyers (and juries) regard eyewitness accounts as more reliable than forensic evidence.”
“There is long-standing puzzlement among archaeologists about the apparent lack of Viking skeletons, and it now seems that this might be resolved by re-dating skeletons thought to be pre-Viking, applying the appropriate correction for diet. It is also a splendid example of science in action. Hypothesis (that we are looking at skeletons from the Viking Great Army), anomaly (mismatch of measured dates), subsidiary hypothesis (the effect of diet) proposed to resolve the anomaly, and independent support for that subsidiary hypothesis, without which we would have had to suspect special pleading.”
Pour One Out by Tim Requarth (Slate)
“The updated guidelines simply mark the fading of this radiant aura, rather than signaling a return to Prohibition. “The main message is not that drinking is bad. It’s that drinking isn’t good. Those are two different things,” Hartz said. “Like, cake isn’t good for you. Getting in a car isn’t safe. Life has risks associated with it, and I think drinking is one of them.””
This is not the future we wanted by Karl Sharro (Reddit)
“Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted.”
The Ghost in the Machine (Part I): Emergence and Intelligence in Large Language Models by Ali Minai (3 Quarks Daily)
“Metabolism : The ability to extract energy from the environment in order to generate the nutrients necessary to remain organized against the forces of entropy.”
I quite like this clinical definition.
“All these attributes give animals intelligence, defined as the capacity that allows them to survive longer and reproduce more successfully by exploiting their environment. Thus, intelligence too can be regarded as an essential emergent property of an arrangement of matter that includes a central nervous system and a body capable of perception and behavior.”
“The result has been deep learning, which is essentially the practice of building and training extremely large neural networks on extremely large amounts of data – and, incidentally, using up a lot of power”
Stolen data…
“Looking at why the output is Y, we see that the network did not, in fact, produce Y at all. All it produced was a set of numerical probabilities over all possible words in its vocabulary, and that the word Y is the result of “sampling” this probability distribution [1] (which is why LLMs produce different answers to a repeated question). Therefore, we need to determine how and why the machinery inside the network generated that set of probability values.”
“We could also look into the entire network hoping to make sense of things, but all will we find is billions of numbers – signal values, neuron activations, synaptic weights – none of which have any meaning in themselves. It is only in their specifically patterned collectivity that they produced the probabilities that then generated the meaningful word Y.”
“The clear implication is that, while the system is indeed simply generating a sequence of tokens (words, punctuation, spaces, line breaks, etc.), the choice of tokens at each step is coming from a model of the general rules of language at the syntactic, grammatical, and semantic levels inferred as an emergent effect of learning sequential token generation.”
“In the end, however, we still cannot be sure that the model of language that an LLM has learned has any formal correspondence with human language, even though its empirical correspondence is apparent to all users.”
“Their successes tell us that a truly surprising amount of deep information about both language and the world is implicit in the extant corpus of electronic text, and LLMs have the ability to extract it. But the failures of LLMs – notably, their pervasive tendency to just make up false stuff – tells us that text, no matter how extensive, cannot substitute for reality.”
“Yes, the system has learned about a world, but that world in not the real world; it is the world of the text it was trained on. It “knows” the real world only to the extent that well-formed statements in the world of text are also meaningful in the real world.”
Cory Doctorow Explains Why Big Tech Is Making the Internet Terrible by David Moscrop (Jacobin)
“There’s this kind of performative complexity in a lot of the wickedness in our world — things are made complex so they’ll be hard to understand. The pretense is they’re hard to understand because they’re intrinsically complex. And there’s a term in the finance sector for this, which is “MEGO:” My Eyes Glaze Over. It’s a trick.”
“The pathology that I think that Musk is enacting in high speed is something I call “enshitification.” Enshitification is a specific form of monopoly decay that is endemic to digital platforms. And the platform is the canonical form of the digital firm. It’s like a pure rentier intermediary business where the firm has a set of users or buyers and it has a set of business customers or sellers, and it intermediates between them. And it does so in a low competition environment where antitrust law or competition laws are not vigorously enforced.”
“Think about Uber losing forty cents on the dollar for thirteen years to just eliminate yellow cabs and starve public transit investment by making it seem like there’s a viable alternative in rideshare vehicles. And we see predatory pricing and predatory acquisition in many, many, many domains.”
“One of the things that platforms do when they reach this stage is they start undermining both the revenue that publishers get from advertising — they’ll pay you less of the money that they collect from advertisers to show you content associated with your material — and they also charge advertisers more and deliver it less reliably.”
“I think that we need to understand that capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be in an environment in which they have to compete. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is just that if there’s no alternative, they can extract more surplus from you without you defecting to a rival’s offer. And so, they really like lock-in and predatory pricing and mergers-to-monopoly.”
“Google as a company kind of epitomizes all of this. Google is a company that made one successful product. They made a search engine and it was really good. And then they just had no other ideas. Everything they tried in-house was a failure. The exceptions are their Hotmail clone and the time they took the Safari code base that Apple had discarded and used it to make Chrome. Every other product that has succeeded is something they bought from someone else.”
“Their whole ad tech stack, their whole video stack, their whole server management stack, their whole mobile stack, docs, calendaring, maps, road navigation, these are all acquisitions.”
In fairness, operationalizing those innovations could be perceived as just as worthwhile—or perhaps more—than the original innovation. It’s not easy building a platform like YouTube that actually works more often than not. It’s also not easy keeping it running. Sure, their desire for profit is killing it—slowly but surely—but the operational technology is solid and something that Google built.
“Each product manager, each executive, is like “My bonus, which is 5x my salary and determines whether or not my kids go to Harvard without accumulating debt, depends on whether or not I can increase the profitability of my business unit by 3 percent. And the way I do that is by enshitifying.””
“[…] you get to the florid chatbot confident liar, which is not a thing anyone wants, not a thing anyone’s asked for.”
“Yes, AI — which let’s just say here, is not artificial and not intelligent — it makes for a lot of great and fun party tricks and probably will make some interesting art and may automate certain parts of certain jobs in ways that makes them less shitty to do. But AI is not AI. We haven’t created robots that can answer our questions. As the eminent computer scientist they fired for coming up with this said, “We’ve created stochastic parrots .” All it amounts to is a party trick. And I like party tricks. I was at the Magic Castle last week and I saw a conjuror do an amazing mentalist and sleight of hand act that I’m still thinking about. It’s great. I love living in a world with party tricks, but the idea that the way that we solve searches is with a party trick is just manifestly wrong.”
“I think that when people worry about Skynet, what they mean is the imperatives of business are driving the world to the brink of human extinction.”
“That’s Skynet, right? That’s the limited liability company. Charlie Stross calls them slow AIs . They’re basically AIs with clock speeds that are really low, but they still accomplish the same imperative. Paperclip maximizing”
The Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder Blog)
“The Dependency Rule always applies. Source code dependencies always point inwards. As you move inwards the level of abstraction increases. The outermost circle is low level concrete detail. As you move inwards the software grows more abstract, and encapsulates higher level policies. The inner most [sic] circle is the most general.”
“[…] consider that the use case needs to call the presenter. However, this call must not be direct because that would violate The Dependency Rule: No name in an outer circle can be mentioned by an inner circle. So we have the use case call an interface (Shown here as Use Case Output Port) in the inner circle, and have the presenter in the outer circle implement it.”
Announcing .NET 8 Preview 4 by Jon Douglas (MSDN Blogs)
This is an incredibly detailed and feature-filled release with a ton of low-level optimizations and language and runtime features that will enable a ton of performance improvements in already-existing code.
Rune Struct (MSDN Documentation)
This struct allows proper handling of Unicode characters, as shown in the code below.
static int CountLetters(ReadOnlySpan<char> span) { int letterCount = 0; foreach (Rune rune in span.EnumerateRunes()) { if (Rune.IsLetter(rune)) { letterCount++; } } return letterCount; }
However,
“The number ofRune
instances in a string might not match the number of user-perceivable characters shown when displaying the string.”
“For similar types in other programming languages, see Rust’s primitive char type or Swift’s Unicode.Scalar type, both of which represent Unicode scalar values. They provide functionality similar to .NET’s Rune type, and they disallow instantiation of values that are not legal Unicode scalar values.”
Character encoding in .NET (MSDN Documentation)
“In .NET APIs, a grapheme cluster is called a text element. The following method demonstrates the differences betweenchar
,Rune
, and text element instances in a string […]”
Boop by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“Subscribe.”
“Have you noticed that you can get humans to do almost anything as long as you pretend it’s a scam?”
“Can I watch ads instead of paying you?”
Robot John Searle by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)
“Imagine there’s a man he has a book that translates all possible phrases from english to Chinese
“[…]
“It’s clear the book 1s conscious by any definition but the human is just an operator of the book with no sense of what
the symbols mean.“It turns out that this is what humans are like with reference to almost every subject − not just Chinese language but most languages, mathematics, history, and in general the nature of reality.
“Sure, they can operate in the universe, but they have no meaningful internal model of it.
“Therefore, we conclude that although a human does things, it’s clear they are not in any sense conscious.”
As we discuss whether AIs are conscious—or even capable of consciousness—it’s a good idea to revisit what we consider to be the canonical vessel of conscious intelligence—humans—and to evaluate to what degree most exemplars are actually satisfying the definition.
Actually... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 21. May 2023 13:14:20 (GMT-5)
The joke does not continue; my apologies. Unless the joke is that we will soon be even less able to comprehend, make sense of, or otherwise act on hypotheses about the world because we are accelerating our already advanced pollution of our information environment. What does that mean?
Actually salient information drowns in a sea of utterly meaningless noise. It’s been this way for a while, if you’ve been paying attention. Social media was the first booster rocket taking us further away from being able to influence our societies in any way that does anything to even think of negatively affecting the profits of our elites or the stranglehold they have over any and all levers of power.
You can see it in the shocking lack of information many people have about how the world works, or about any current events. But let’s go back to something with a bit more levity instead of focusing on the doom and gloom.
A friend sent me the site The Infinite Conversation, which is an AI-produced,
“[…] never-ending conversation between Bavarian director Werner Herzog and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. When you open this website, you are taken to a random point in the dialogue. Every day a new segment of the conversation is added. New segments can be generated at a faster speed than what it takes to listen to them. In theory, this conversation could continue until the end of time.”
Part of the joke is that this AI product is so niche that it is utterly harmless. More people will recognize Herzog, but very few will recognize Žižek. I’m a fan of both [1].
It’s kind of sobering how realistic it sounds at first. You have to really follow along to tell that it doesn’t make much sense (i.e., mine had Herzog saying that his dream was to make films in the jungle; he’s already made several). And Žižek’s sentence wasn’t even grammatically correct – but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t Žižek. 🙃
That it makes no sense to the trained or expert ear is actually quite normal for AI-produced output. What AIs produce is usually kind of generic—like an undergraduate essay—or just outright incorrect. You kind of already have to know the answer if you want to be able to use it. People generally ask these things the kind of questions that it can’t hope to answer, but which they fervently hope will provide them with some sort of insight into how to proceed in their own lives. I see these AIs more as oracles or tea-leaf readers. You will get out of it what you interpret from the vague answers that they deliver.
We’ve always dealt with the possibility (and absolute reality) of fakeness in our information environment. It just used to be more difficult to produce it en masse. Now, we can spew out a literal TON of noise to signal, drowning out any hope of understanding our underlying physical reality even further. Now, when we would need most to understand what is happening, and now, when we are responsible for making decisions that will impact generations—if not the species—we are more befuddled than ever…and couldn’t really care less.
The largest misinformation campaigns go largely unignored, because they are official ones. There is the cult of Russiagate, which has poisoned nearly all thought not only in its country of origin, but it has also severely infected the mental hygiene of otherwise rational people in allied countries. That complete fabrications laid the groundwork for a renewed hot war with Russia is much, much more dangerous than these AI infractions, which are tiny in comparison (so far).
Eminence grise Donald Knuth documented his (indirect) interaction with ChatGPT (3.5, I believe) in a text file. His conclusion?
“I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy.”
Sounds good.
There were 16... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 14. May 2023 00:25:55 (GMT-5)
I watched the first round of the semifinals but didn’t take notes. I was inspired to take notes for the second semifinals. It was a dumpster fire.
There were 16 contestants, but I’ve only reviewed fifteen below. Sue me.
This whole palette is awful so far.
This part had 26 contestants, listed below. Some of the repeats reference the reviews above. I was too lazy to copy/paste it. Sue me. Just scroll. Or search in the page. Whatever. Oh, you’re on a phone? Sucks to be you.
Published by marco on 14. May 2023 00:13:39 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Nobody Trusts the Banks Now by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)
“Relationship businesses in general are on the decline. In a world of electronic communication and global supply chains and work-from-home and the gig economy, business relationships are less sticky and “I am going to go into my bank branch and shake the hand of the manager and trust her with my life savings” doesn’t work. “I am going to do stuff for relationship reasons, even if it costs me 0.5% of interest income, or a slightly increased risk of losing my money” is no longer a plausible thing to think.”
Yeah, put a fork in it. It’s done. The financial business model needs to be trashed and reimagined. Nearly everyone involved has such a poisoned mindset that there is no hope of salvaging anything from it. So, well, yeah; fuck you very much. The system incentivizes the worst behavior.
You Are Reading This Thanks to Semiconductors by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)
“In 2020, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee decried that China was facilitating ‘digital authoritarianism’ because it has ‘been willing to go into smaller, under-served markets’ and ‘offer more cost-effective equipment than Western companies’, pointing to countries under US sanctions such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe as examples.”
Yeah, but Trump, ammirite? We definitely need to let this kind of nonsense continue because we have to stop the Republicans. At this point, I can’t even remember who was in charge of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2020—it doesn’t even matter. Just that the most powerful nation on Earth—which will not shut up about free markets and capitalism—calls China authoritarian for selling better products at better prices under far-better conditions to customers that the West would like to keep. Instead of considering that they’ve been outplayed in the markets—on their vaunted “level playing field”—they seek ways of using economic and military pressure to force their competitors from the field.
“There is nothing anti–Western or even anti–American in what is going on in the non–West as we are considering this today. I think the non–West altogether would welcome American and European participation in the making of a new world order suited to our century. But this cannot mean a continuation of half a millennium of Western superiority or 75 years of American hegemony. This means one thing: It is up to Americans and Europeans to decide if they will participate in this grand project or stand against it.”
Europe’s Fate by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Europe still has a chance to admit the truth about NATO and act according to this truth. This alliance is outdated, it is in no way to be described as defensive, and proves now to be an incalculably destructive force.”
Who Is Fighting Whom in Sudan? by As`ad AbuKhalil (Scheer Post)
“The two generals (Abdel Fattah Burhan who leads the Sudanese Army and Hamidti who leads the Rapid Support Forces, RSF) followed in the footsteps of other Arab despots who knew that the way to Congress’s heart passes through Tel Aviv. Against the wishes of the Sudanese population, both generals established open relations with the Mossad. And while they did not allow a U.S.-picked technocrat to exercise power as a prime minister (Hamdouk), they went ahead and ousted the civilian component from the government to rule without a civilian façade. This coup of 2021 (by the two generals with Mossad support) didn’t trigger sanctions in Washington, and the U.S. administration continued to have excellent relations with both generals. The two generals resorted to force and the military shot and killed protesters to secure the new coup. The U.S. did not mind the use of force; it has other considerations, including an ever-expansive role in Africa — always in the name of fighting terrorism, which never seems to end or even diminish.”
“Each side serves as a regional patron to a different group. But the UAE’s close relations with Israel underlines the Mossad patronage of Gen. Hamidti. Gen. Burhan, on the other hand, is sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Egypt. The conflict in Sudan is a domestic, regional and international conflict. The U.S. and its media, wary of a Russian role in Africa, have exaggerated the part played by the Wagner group and all but omits the influential roles of U.S. allies in the region.”
“There is no end in sight in Sudan; somebody from outside the country is fueling the conflict. In the Middle East, we often used to say, when the U.S. evacuates its personnel, it is usually a sign of a sinister plot by Washington against that country. The U.S. has just evacuated its personnel.”
The Coming War by John Pilger (Scheer Post)
“There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.”
“No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.”
“Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews. Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.”
“Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.”
“Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.”
“According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.”
“With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.”
“When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’”
“Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.”
“In the year Nato invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia’. Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to ‘confront the threat from China’, in the words of his Defence Secretary.”
This horseshit all started with Obama, this pivot to Asia. To be precise: it was his secretary of state Hillary Clinton who sent us on our way.
“Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons’.”
“Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Patricia Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.”
Obama and Clinton again. Trump and Biden are just following the path laid by them.
“I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22 : that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.”
The Enemy From Within by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“America is a stratocracy , a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored. Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia.”
“The American public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.”
“nearly every socialist leader walked away from their anti-war platform to back their nation’s entry into the war. The handful who did not, such as Rosa Luxemburg, were sent to prison.”
“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev and later Vladimir Putin lobbied to be integrated into western economic and military alliances. An alliance that included Russia would have nullified the calls to expand NATO — which the U.S. had promised it would not do beyond the borders of a unified Germany — and have made it impossible to convince countries in eastern and central Europe to spend billions on U.S. military hardware. Moscow’s requests were rebuffed. Russia was made the enemy, whether it wanted to be or not. None of this made us more secure.”
“They pour money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. The public is impoverished. The harsh forms of control the militarists test and perfect abroad migrate back to the homeland. Militarized Police. Militarized drones. Surveillance. Vast prison complexes. Suspension of basic civil liberties. Censorship.”
“[…] the war state harbors within it the seeds of its own destruction. It will cannibalize the nation until it collapses. Before then, it will lash out, like a blinded cyclops, seeking to restore its diminishing power through indiscriminate violence. The tragedy is not that the U.S. war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.”
I always think of Gandalf fighting the balrog in the Lord of the Rings. The U.S. is the balrog, an echo of another day, still incredibly powerful, but defeated, throwing its whip upwards to destroy as much as it can on its way down. It’s whip curls around Gandalf’s leg and takes him down, too. “Fly, you fools!” indeed.
The Kremlin Did Not Kill Itself by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“Your rulers do not care what race you are. They do not care if you are gay, transgendered or nonbinary. They do not care how many bullets you are allowed to have in your gun. They do not care whether you are allowed to have an abortion or not. They do not care if you are racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic or fatphobic. They do not care about diverse representation in politics or media, and they do not care about any lack thereof. All they care about is that we all keep thinking, speaking, working, consuming and voting in ways which keep them rich and powerful and keep us poor and powerless. And they will happily keep us arguing as intensely as possible about the things they do not care about so that we don’t turn our attention to the things they do care about.”
“It’s obnoxiously self-righteous and condescending for older generations to worry about how the new generations are turning out. Imagine being left a bat shit insane civilization and a dying world by the people who made it that way and having to listen to them bitch about how your generation isn’t doing it right.”
Bono Is Doing Illustrations For The Atlantic Now, Because Everything’s Fake And Stupid by Caitlin Johnstone
“You see things like this all the time under the shadow of the US empire, and individually they don’t look like much, but once you start noticing them you come to recognize them as symptoms of the profoundly diseased civilization that we are living in. One where our heart strings are pulled in the most obnoxious ways imaginable to get us to support capitalism, empire and oligarchy, where we are manipulated into espousing values systems which benefit powerful sociopaths under the cover of noble-sounding causes. Where we are trained like rats to support systems that are driving our species toward extinction because our rulers gave lip service to humanitarianism and waved a rainbow flag.”
“This is what dystopia looks like. […] Like military industrial complex-funded feminist rock operas about drone operators and Cookie Monster helping Samantha Power psychologically colonize Iraqi children. Like Bono coming home from singing a heartfelt number about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr to illustrate a cover for a war propaganda piece in The Atlantic.”
Trump on Ukraine: ‘I Don’t Think in Terms of Winning and Losing—I Think in Terms of Getting It Settled’ by Eric Boehm (Reason)
“During a chaotic and at-times combative interview on Wednesday night, former President Donald Trump made at least one sensible point: Ending the war in Ukraine is more important than the notion of who wins it.
““Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” asked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at one point during a broader discussion of how Trump would handle the now 15-month-old conflict if he returns to the Oval Office.
““I don’t think in terms of winning and losing,” Trump said. “I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people.” Later, he stressed that same point: “I want everybody to stop dying. They’re dying. Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying.”
“That is…entirely sensible. More than that, it’s probably the most humanitarian message that a leader of the United States could send.”
The reactions in the U.S. were, predictably, ignorant; shockingly so.
He apparently put on quite a Trumpian display. Cherry-picking one of the few sensible things he said probably gives the wrong impression. The statement is important, though. It’s one the democrats could never make.
Still, I honestly don’t know what to think. Trump is an obviously terrible person who should not be running the country. He does say he wants to end the war and does not want to start another one. That actually puts him ahead of Biden and the Democrats. I’m flabbergasted.
Jordan Neely’s murder on the New York City subway and the terminal crisis of capitalism by Fred Mazelis (WSWS)
“The fundamental responsibility for Penny’s actions lies with the ruling elite of New York City, and with American capitalism as a whole. The homeless and the mentally ill have not increased in numbers as if by magic. They are produced by the terminal crisis of capitalism. Wall Street, the giant hedge funds, the billionaires and their political representatives stand condemned by this murder. It is their system that regularly and increasingly produces tragedies such as the needless death of Jordan Neely.
“The Democrats have no answer to the social crisis. They are split between so-called “moderates” like Adams and “progressives,” including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The divisions are purely tactical and rhetorical, however, with Ocasio-Cortez, public advocate Jumaane Williams and others simply using “left” rhetoric to obscure their own responsibility.
“Some Democrats, including City Council president Adrienne Adams, as well as various pseudo-left politicians, have hastened to depict the murder of Neely, who was black, by Penny, who is white, primarily in racial terms. This conveniently ignores the role of Adams, who is African-American, and of at least some, if not most, of the passengers on May 1. The focus on race obscures the most fundamental class issues—above all the responsibility of the profit system.”
Julian Assange and World Press Freedom Day by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)
“Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy — diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory — to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Donald Trump criminalize journalism and demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States? Under what law did the CIA violate attorney-client privilege, surveil and record all of Julian’s conversations both digital and verbal with his lawyers and plot to kidnap him from the Embassy and assassinate him?”
Multiple US Officials Confronted About US Assange Hypocrisy On World Press Freedom Day by Caitlin Johnstone
“It is good that activists and journalists have been doing so much to highlight the US empire’s hypocrisy as it crows self-righteously about its love of press freedoms while persecuting the world’s most famous journalist for doing great journalism. Highlighting this hypocrisy shows that the US empire does not in fact care about press freedoms at all, save only to the extent that it can pretend to care about them to wag its finger at governments it doesn’t like.”
Tucker Carlson Is Lying to You by Matt Welch (Reason)
“On Tuesday night, the man who was until last month the most popular cable news host in the country told a Twitter audience of 122 million viewers and counting that, “at the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie—a lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind.”
“Then Tucker Carlson told a revealing lie of his own: “The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can. But there are always limits. And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it. That’s not a guess—it’s guaranteed. Every person who works in English language media understands that. The rule of what you can’t say defines everything. It’s filthy, really. And it’s utterly corrupting.””
The author goes on to pick the nit that not all “English-language media” subject their employees to this—in particular, the magazine Reason does not.
However, you could also understand the statement as hyperbole on Carlson’s part, in part to shield him and his own ego from having partaken in the lie for so long.
Tesla’s magnet mystery shows Elon Musk is willing to compromise by Gregory Barber (Ars Technica)
“In the US, government agencies—especially the Department of Defense, which needs powerful magnets for gear including aircraft and satellites—have been keen to invest in supply chains domestically and in friendly places like Japan and Europe.”
It’s terrible how casually political and partisan science and tech publications are. So smart but so dumb. China is not unfriendly; they’re just not vassals. Japan is definitely a junior partner.
“JEHS”, RIP (2001-2023) by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“Plainly, this grand dame could not have aspirated a vowel if you had put a gun to her head. It was not her fault, of course —if you want all the phonemes of the world available to you in adulthood, I’m told, you should learn Berber in infancy; otherwise, tough luck—, but somehow it did drive home for me something else I’ve long known, but only acknowledged to myself with shameful delay: that I am, and always will be, notwithstanding all my dabblings, a lifelong Anglophone.”
Beau Is Afraid Is a Referendum on Director Ari Aster, Cinema’s Latest Wunderkind by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)
“The film is supposed to be a comedy, according to director Ari Aster, just so you know. That’s a popular move being made lately. Insufferable dramas that test all your endurance to sit through are actually marvelous comedies — if only you’re highbrow enough to get the jokes. I’ve read that Tar is a hilarious “ blast ” for the cognoscenti, too. Paul Thomas Anderson said so.”
“My own tolerance for this kind of thing is minimal. I was the only one in the screening room watching the latest Aster opus. Other people, ordinary filmgoers who don’t have to watch three-hour art films of epic repulsiveness know better than to blow their hard-earned leisure time on a silly monstrosity like Beau is Afraid.”
“This fancy, frivolous love of sickness is such a preoccupation of the healthy. If you’ve always done fine in life, you can afford to wallow excitedly in the sick and the crazy and the abject. It’s the people who have never lived in any real state of hardship or chaos — weren’t raised in circumstances defined by mental illness, say, or alcoholism, or abuse, or mayhem of any kind — who want to make a film like Beau is Afraid. I hate these people. Trauma tourists, every one of them.”
“Watching Beau Is Afraid feels more like having the filmmaker himself sitting next to you, endlessly nudging you to make note of the thirty-seven tiresome production design curlicues he’s inserted into every single scene.”
Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? by Ted Chiang (New Yorker)
“The point of the Midas parable is that greed will destroy you, and that the pursuit of wealth will cost you everything that is truly important. If your reading of the parable is that, when you are granted a wish by the gods, you should phrase your wish very, very carefully, then you have missed the point.”
“[…] if you imagine A.I. as a semi-autonomous software program that solves problems that humans ask it to solve, the question is then: how do we prevent that software from assisting corporations in ways that make people’s lives worse?”
You can’t. Not within the current system.
“Is there a way for A.I. to do something other than sharpen the knife blade of capitalism? Just to be clear, when I refer to capitalism, I’m not talking about the exchange of goods or services for prices determined by a market, which is a property of many economic systems. When I refer to capitalism, I’m talking about a specific relationship between capital and labor, in which private individuals who have money are able to profit off the effort of others.”
There are no legal mechanisms or ethical roadblocks in western society. Causing suffering is fine if you can tell yourself a story that you’re not at fault. Stealing the same. Sociopathy is rewarded. There is nothing in place to stop or even slow those people using AI as a lever.
“whenever I criticize capitalism, I’m not criticizing the idea of selling things; I’m criticizing the idea that people who have lots of money get to wield power over people who actually work.”
“I’m criticizing the ever-growing concentration of wealth among an ever-smaller number of people, which may or may not be an intrinsic property of capitalism but which absolutely characterizes capitalism as it is practiced today.”
“Some might say that it’s not the job of A.I. to oppose capitalism. That may be true, but it’s not the job of A.I. to strengthen capitalism, either. Yet that is what it currently does. If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one.”
“In effect, they are intensifying the problems that capitalism creates with the expectation that, when those problems become bad enough, the government will have no choice but to step in. As a strategy for making the world a better place, this seems dubious.”
“Accelerationism says that it’s futile to try to oppose or reform capitalism; instead, we have to exacerbate capitalism’s worst tendencies until the entire system breaks down. The only way to move beyond capitalism is to stomp on the gas pedal of neoliberalism until the engine explodes.”
It’s an enticing idea, especially to those who are unhappy with the current system and will be largely shielded from the subsequent carnage. For the hoi polloi, though, there will be lotsa and lotsa collateral damage though.
“The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.”
“[…] it’s helpful to clarify what the Luddites actually wanted. The main thing they were protesting was the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners’ profits were increasing, along with food prices. They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry.”
Whoa … that sounds familiar.
“Whenever anyone accuses anyone else of being a Luddite, it’s worth asking, is the person being accused actually against technology? Or are they in favor of economic justice? And is the person making the accusation actually in favor of improving people’s lives? Or are they just trying to increase the private accumulation of capital?”
“[…] we find ourselves in a situation in which technology has become conflated with capitalism, which has in turn become conflated with the very notion of progress. If you try to criticize capitalism, you are accused of opposing both technology and progress. But what does progress even mean, if it doesn’t include better lives for people who work? What is the point of greater efficiency, if the money being saved isn’t going anywhere except into shareholders’ bank accounts?”
“In the United States, per-capita G.D.P. has almost doubled since 1980, while the median household income has lagged far behind. That period covers the information-technology revolution. This means that the economic value created by the personal computer and the Internet has mostly served to increase the wealth of the top one per cent of the top one per cent, instead of raising the standard of living for U.S. citizens as a whole.”
This is an excellent point to remember: the previous revolutions about which we’ve all been encouraged to be excited for utopian reasons have actually ended up being quite detrimental to overall well-being. Well, that’s not quite right; but they’ve contributed to an increasing inequality rather than decreasing it.
The personal-computer revolution, the social-media revolution—all of these things have been coopted and used to further the existing power base. We should be very leery of the next “revolution”—-or, at the very least, we should approach it with eyes open, perhaps accepting its inevitability, but at least no longer being hoodwinked into being excited about it.
It is the rare technological revolution that was an unalloyed good—vaccines come to mind—but things like fossil fuels, the automobile lifestyle, nuclear power/weapons, these have all been twisted into something much, much worse than it could have been, simply because the technology was made to serve the interests of capital rather than the interests of humanity.
Imagine if we’d actually had sane and moral people in charge of the introduction of these technologies! We’d have long since found a solution for storing or ridding ourselves of nuclear waste, we’d never have developed weapons, we’d still be living in walkable communities, we wouldn’t be facing a decade of elevated CO2 combined with a supercharged El Niño getting ready to change life as we know it—even in the short term.
“I’m not blaming the personal computer for the rise in wealth inequality—I’m just saying that the claim that better technology will necessarily improve people’s standard of living is no longer credible.”
“The only way that technology can boost the standard of living is if there are economic policies in place to distribute the benefits of technology appropriately. We haven’t had those policies for the past forty years, […]”
“The productivity software that ran on personal computers was a perfect example of augmentation rather than automation:”
“A.I. will certainly reduce labor costs and increase profits for corporations, but that is entirely different from improving our standard of living.”
“[…] we can’t evaluate A.I. by imagining how helpful it will be in a world with U.B.I.; we have to evaluate it in light of the existing imbalance between capital and labor, and, in that context, A.I. is a threat because of the way it assists capital.”
“In 1976, the workers at the Lucas Aerospace Corporation in Birmingham, England, were facing layoffs because of cuts in defense spending. In response, the shop stewards produced a document known as the Lucas Plan, which described a hundred and fifty “socially useful products,” ranging from dialysis machines to wind turbines and hybrid engines for cars, that the workforce could build with its existing skills and equipment rather than being laid off. The management at Lucas Aerospace rejected the proposal, but it remains a notable modern example of workers trying to steer capitalism in a more human direction. Surely something similar must be possible with modern computing technology.”
“In General Electric’s annual report from 1953, the company bragged about how much it paid in taxes and how much it was spending on payroll. It explicitly said that “maximizing employment security is a prime company goal.” The founder of Johnson & Johnson said that the company’s responsibility to its employees was higher than its responsibility to its shareholders. Corporations then had a radically different conception of their role in society compared with corporations today.”
“If there is any lesson that we should take from stories about genies granting wishes, it’s that the desire to get something without effort is the real problem. Think about the story of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in which the apprentice casts a spell to make broomsticks carry water but is unable to make them stop. The lesson of that story is not that magic is impossible to control: at the end of the story, the sorcerer comes back and immediately fixes the mess the apprentice made. The lesson is that you can’t get out of doing the hard work.”
“The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism.”
How Ought We Think About Ought Thoughts? by Mike O'Brien (3 Quarks Daily)
“Note that, unlike some other formulations, this version of normativity does not require normative beings to have any beliefs or reflective attitudes about norms; it only requires the capacity to learn and apply norms aptly. (Indeed, many human customs are followed without beliefs or reflective attitudes about the reasons for those norms; Andrews cites the example of a Mapuche man preparing a corn dish in which ashes are added before cooking, explaining to an observer simply that “It’s our custom”, apparently unaware that such a step is necessary to release niacin and avoid potentially deadly malnutrition.)”
Most people live lives of pure ritual and magic, not understanding the reasons for most things, and never thinking to ask. No-one is aware of the knife-edge of many things that magically go right every day so that they can enjoy the incredible luxury of their daily lives. They drive vehicles composed of thousands of pieces, not one of which can they even conceive of how it was created or how the tools that built the machine that built it were created or how the materials that created those tools were mined and refined or how the energy was obtained or delivered or stored. The pump gas that comes from thousands and thousands of kilometers away while drinking coffee and eating chocolate—none of which is available anywhere close to here. Lives of magic, indeed.
The World’s Oldest Ultramarathon Runner Is Racing against Death by Brett Popplewell (The Walrus)
“Then he smiled and paraphrased a quote from his childhood hero, Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who led the first crossing of Greenland on skis: “If it’s difficult, I’ll do it right away. If it’s impossible, it will take a little longer.””
It Only Counts When It Hurts by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)
“Were I a 5’2, 110-pound woman who was walking through that tunnel for the first time, I would likely be afraid of a homeless man shouting to himself or at me, and it would be perfectly natural and defensible if I was. It would not be defensible to call the cops. It would not be defensible to wish him harm. It would demonstrate a lack of character to not want better for him. But simply to be a little scared of him would be natural. Because despite a popular myth, people with some kinds of mental illness really are more likely to be violent, and someone who lives on the street is vastly more likely to have one of those conditions. Your responsibility is to control your fear and act responsibly. But the risk of violence is genuinely higher with a homeless person. I’m sorry, folks.”
“But right now I’m just trying to get to the preconditional understanding that some things in life are bad, and mental illness and homelessness are among them, and it simply does no good for anyone to act like we should be blasé and desensitized to the outward expressions of them in our urban spaces. And, indeed, to make your support contingent on a false picture of who the severely mentally ill really are is to demonstrate that your compassion only encompasses those who are not really sick.”
“A movement that insists that homeless men ranting on the train should be seen as a regular and unproblematic part of life is, for one thing, a movement that hates mass transit − if you tell ordinary people that taking the subway or the bus means that they’re going to be exposed to chaos and instability, and they have no right to complain about it, then people will stop taking public transit, they’ll stop voting to fund public transit, and public transit will wither and die.”
“[…] that kind of oh-so-cool attitude will simply convince regular people that our movement doesn’t care about them and can’t be trusted to establish basic order. It’s an unfortunate habit of progressive people to act as though, since we are the ones who speak for the rights and interests of the marginalized, those who aren’t marginalized have no rights or interests that we should protect. But to protect the marginalized requires us to appeal to the majority. It’s the only way we can protect them.”
Google “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI” (Semi-analysis)
“While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly . Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months.”
“The barrier to entry for training and experimentation has dropped from the total output of a major research organization to one person, an evening, and a beefy laptop.”
“In both cases, low-cost public involvement was enabled by a vastly cheaper mechanism for fine tuning called low rank adaptation, or LoRA, combined with a significant breakthrough in scale ( latent diffusion for image synthesis, Chinchilla for LLMs). In both cases, access to a sufficiently high-quality model kicked off a flurry of ideas and iteration from individuals and institutions around the world. In both cases, this quickly outpaced the large players. These contributions were pivotal in the image generation space, setting Stable Diffusion on a different path from Dall-E. Having an open model led to product integrations, marketplaces, user interfaces, and innovations that didn’t happen for Dall-E.”
“Part of what makes LoRA so effective is that − like other forms of fine-tuning − it’s stackable. Improvements like instruction tuning can be applied and then leveraged as other contributors add on dialogue, or reasoning, or tool use. While the individual fine tunings are low rank, their sum need not be, allowing full-rank updates to the model to accumulate over time.”
“it doesn’t take long before the cumulative effect of all of these fine-tunings overcomes starting off at a size disadvantage. Indeed, in terms of engineer-hours, the pace of improvement from these models vastly outstrips what we can do with our largest variants, and the best are already largely indistinguishable from ChatGPT”
“[…] the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet’s worth of free labor. Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.”
“And in the end, OpenAI doesn’t matter. They are making the same mistakes we are in their posture relative to open source, and their ability to maintain an edge is necessarily in question. Open source alternatives can and will eventually eclipse them unless they change their stance.”
The Computer Scientist Peering Inside AI’s Black Boxes by Allison Parshall (Quanta)
“[…] it’s really hard to troubleshoot models if you don’t know what’s in them. Sometimes models depend on variables in ways that you might not like if you knew what they were doing. For example, with the power company in New York, we gave them a model that depended on the number of neutral cables. They looked at it and said, “Neutral cables? That should not be in your model. There’s something wrong.” And of course there was a flaw in the database, and if we hadn’t been able to pinpoint it, we would have had a serious problem. So it’s really useful to be able to see into the model so you can troubleshoot it.”
It should be obvious that we should not be blindly using unverifiable results, and yet here we are.
“These are high-complexity models. They’re neural networks. But as long as they’re reasoning about a current case in terms of its relationship to past cases, that’s a constraint that forces the model to be interpretable. And we haven’t lost any accuracy compared to the benchmarks in computer vision.”
“[…] it’s much harder to train an interpretable model, because you have to think about the reasoning process and make sure that’s correct. For low-stakes decisions, it’s not really worth it. Like for advertising, if the ad gets to the right people and makes money, then people tend to be happy. But for high-stakes decisions, I think it’s worth that extra effort.”
“The explanations have to be wrong, because if their explanations were always right, you could just replace the black box with the explanations. And so the fact that the explainability people casually claim the same kinds of guarantees that the interpretability people are actually providing made me very uncomfortable, especially when it came to high-stakes decisions.”
“[…] when we find a tiny little model for predicting whether someone will have a seizure, I think that’s beautiful, because it’s a very small pattern that someone can appreciate and use. And music is all about patterns. Poetry is all about patterns. They’re all beautiful patterns.”
“When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibilities. You have to help create the language, the philosophy, and the laws because they’re not going to happen automatically. If it confers power, it will start a race. If we do not coordinate, that race will end in tragedy.”
What is interesting is that they come so close, but still don’t understand or address the fact that the second and third points follow only because of the utter failure of our system to be able to accomplish anything driven by any impetus other than the profit motive.
“Where’s the harm? Where’s the risk? Be kind with yourselves. It’s going to feel like the rest of the world is gaslighting you.”
That’s how contrarians (or conspiracy theorists) always feel.
Mojo may be the biggest programming language advance in decades (Fast AI)
“Swift has gone on to become one of the world’s most widely used programming languages, in particular because it is today the main way to create iOS apps for iPhone, iPad, MacOS, and Apple TV.”
Slow down. That’s not even a little bit true. I’m starting to suspect that the unnamed author of this piece on a site called “fast AI” is either a shill or an AI or a combination of the two.
“This seems wise, not just because Python is already well understood by millions of coders, but also because after decades of use its capabilities and limitations are now well understood. Relying on the latest programming language research is pretty cool, but its potentially-dangerous speculation because you never really know how things will turn out. (I will admit that personally, for instance, I often got confused by Swift’s powerful but quirky type system, and sometimes even managed to confuse the Swift compiler and blew it up entirely!)”
This is just muddled reasoning. Accept the extremely limited status quo because the supposedly more useful alternatives are scary. What?
“There has, at this point, been hundreds of attempts over decades to create programming languages which are concise, flexible, fast, practical, and easy to use – without much success. But somehow, Modular seems to have done it.”
What the fuck are you talking about? Are you a fool or an AI?
“The key is that Mojo builds on some really powerful foundations. Very few software projects I’ve seen spend enough time building the right foundations, and tend to accrue as a result mounds of technical debt.”
You mean like building on Python with no solution for parallelization?
“At its core is MLIR, which has already been developed for many years, initially kicked off by Chris Lattner at Google.”
This is the second time the article has said this. I think the unattributed asshole wrote this with an AI.
“By simply outsourcing that to an existing language (which also happens to be the most widely used language today)”
That is absolutely false. Python is not the most-used language today.
]]>“Most deepfake videos are of female celebrities, but creators now also offer to make videos of anyone. A creator offered on Discord to make a... [More]”
Published by marco on 7. May 2023 07:39:49 (GMT-5)
The article Found through Google, bought with Visa and Mastercard: Inside the deepfake porn economy by Kat Tenbarge (NBC News) described something I’d been only vaguely aware of.
“Most deepfake videos are of female celebrities, but creators now also offer to make videos of anyone. A creator offered on Discord to make a 5-minute deepfake of a “personal girl,” meaning anyone with fewer than 2 million Instagram followers, for $65.”
Customized porn of anyone is novel to me. I’d never read it hypothesized in any of the incredible multitude of stories .
Jesus, it’s one thing for a celebrity like Scarlett Johansson, but can you imagine if schoolteachers have to worry about their students viewing them through the lens of the hardcore pornography they’ve been faked into? The boys and girls pool their money and get Ms. Jenkins on her own highlight reel. An AI facilitates the whole operation.
Everyone knows that this can’t be stopped. They will try. They will shut down access for everyone, they will make up sweeping rules that are far too broad, that stifle reasonable expression and creativity. But they will try to stop this from happening—and it absolutely cannot, not without turning society into an authoritarian hellscape. And, even then, they will find a way, they will just have been criminalized for doing what they absolutely are going to find a way to do, which is to see Ms. Jenkins engaged in enthusiastic intercourse.
And you might say, well, Ms. Jenkins should have known what she was getting into because she’s a middle-school 8 or 9 and she became a teacher anyway. But this also means that anyone can make porn of anyone. Maybe if they have more video, it helps make it more convincing, but even if they only have a picture or two, have a look online to see how well they can make that picture match up to an animated face or the face in a video. People who don’t look too carefully will believe it. And someone will pay to make it because someone will think it’s hilarious.
““More and more people are targeted,” said Martin, who was targeted with deepfake sexual abuse herself. “We’ll actually hear a lot more victims of this who are ordinary people, everyday people, who are being targeted.””
Can you imagine a job interview where the interviewer has watched fake porn of the interviewee, but they would naturally have their opinion influenced despite knowing it’s fake. Porn is embarrassing, but can be explained away as too “ridiculous” to be true, but what about faking mugshots or arrests or trials? How long until there’s a service for people to torpedo rivals by generating FUD that HR will believe, or that HR AI will believe? Powerful tools. Completely irresponsible herd into which they’re being released.
““It’s not a porn site. It’s a predatory website that doesn’t rely on the consent of the people on the actual website,” Martin said about MrDeepFakes. “The fact that it’s even allowed to operate and is known is a complete indictment of every regulator in the space, of all law enforcement, of the entire system, that this is even allowed to exist.””
I understand the angry reaction, but I don’t think regulation can possibly stop this. I think people will have to get less sensitive and society has to be less trusting that all content is real. Maybe a Light of Other Days quantum leap is needed. We kind of have this already with ubiquitous public filming and facial recognition. We tried to avoid it, but the relentless march of authoritarianism coupled with purely-for-profit capitalism has created surveillance states everywhere that they can afford them.
Or maybe a de-pruding of society is needed, where nobody cares if you’ve done porn just like nobody cares if you’ve played softball.
“Martin successfully campaigned to outlaw nonconsensual deepfakes and image-based sexual abuse, but, she said, law enforcement and regulators are limited by jurisdiction, because the deepfakes can be made and published online from anywhere in the world.”
You won’t be able to stop this unfortunately. Only an ethical increase in the worldwide population would devalue this business model, whereby people would refuse to consume faked data, which obviously isn’t going to happen. Maybe we’ll get something like organic-content labels?
First of all, he started working on it on April 1st, but it’s hard to believe that he’s pranking—he doesn’t seem the type—so I’ll give him the... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 7. May 2023 07:36:41 (GMT-5)
Drag-Drop Image Conversion by Simon Willison is a gist that contains the conversation that Simon Willison had with Ghat-GPT to build a drag-&-drop image converter.
First of all, he started working on it on April 1st, but it’s hard to believe that he’s pranking—he doesn’t seem the type—so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Assuming that this is real, it’s impressive that it can turn those prompts into a working application.
Although … did it? If you copy/paste any of its examples into an HTML page, none of them does what it says they do.
The drag-&-drop doesn’t work. The output is just most of the code repeated in the text box.
It’s just impressive-looking and much closer than just random code, but they don’t work. If you don’t know how to program, can you fix it? Of course not.
The fixes Willison ended up making were very non-cosmetic.
Still, let’s pretend that they had worked or gotten much closer to working. What if everyone could build code like this?
Hey, maybe it brings back the world of experimentation we had back in the early days of the web, when everyone was writing HTML directly. Maybe these simple things will start showing up more again, especially when a machine writes them.
I wonder, though, where it got this code from. Has it really built it mostly on its own? Or would we find a remarkably similar version somewhere in the vast input data that was its corpus?
Another question is: what are the implications if we would start building software this way? Do we just dump our notions of architecture and a common coding style? There are a lot of considerations about maintainability and consistency and onboarding and so on that go into our software today. Do we just throw all of that overboard and move to a patchwork of one-off components?
If we’re being honest, isn’t this how a lot of programmers are already building code for their employers? Just copy/pasting stuff together and crossing their fingers?
How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide by Ethan Mollick (One Useful Thing)
“You often need to have a lot of ideas to have good ideas. Not everyone is good at generating lots of ideas, but AI is very good at volume. Will all these ideas be good or even sane? Of course not. But they can spark further thinking on your part.”
I suppose this beats having friends or coworkers. Apparently the film “Her” was utopic, not dystopic.
“Summarize texts. I have pasted in numerous complex academic articles and asked it to summarize the results, and it does a good job!”
How the hell are you in a position to judge? You said before that it lies all the time, that it has no mechanism for admitting defeat because that doesn’t exist. It’s building text. It’s always successful. There’s no meaning to get wrong. It’s like reading tea leaves. The cup doesn’t know how to set up the leaves. The meaning is inferred solely by the reader.
If you don’t know what the paper is about, and you know the reputation of your tool to just make shit up, how can you possibly even think you can judge whether the summary it produced is reprentative?
“If you don’t check for hallucinations, it is possible that you could be taught something inaccurate. Use the AI as a jumping-off point for your own research, not as the final authority on anything. Also, if it isn’t connected to the internet, it will make stuff up.”
Hahahahaha sure. That’s exactly how a lazy, conspiracy-obsessed society treats technology and information. This guide actually applies to using the Internet in general, but almost nobody’s ever followed it. People just inhale information, with the only vetting process being “am I being entertained?”
Also, this is exactly the lesson he ignored above when he claimed that the AI did a good job of summarizing complex academic papers.
Schillace Laws of Semantic AI (Microsoft Learn)
“Don’t write code if the model can do it; the model will get better, but the code won’t.”
So treat the prompt like a high level language that targets a compiler that fabricates and whose workings we don’t understand. Interesting, so maybe just feed your requirements directly into the machine and hope for the best? At some point, it will come up with something that actually functions?
The code won’t get better on its own, but neither will it get worse. It will continue to do what it says on the tin. We may discover more negative ramifications, but what the code does will not change. The quality of the code produced by a prompt—or series of prompts—will change, but not necessarily only for the better, which is being strongly implied by this rule.
“Uncertainty is an exception throw. Because we are trading precision for leverage, we need to lean on interaction with the user when the model is uncertain about intent. Thus, when we have a nested set of prompts in a program, and one of them is uncertain in its result (“One possible way…”) the correct thing to do is the equivalent of an “exception throw” − propagate that uncertainty up the stack until a level that can either clarify or interact with the user.”
Understandable, but it sounds tedious and fraught. It’s getting farther from treating coding as an engineering discipline. Maybe something comes out of it—maybe it’s how everyone will be coding in ten years!—but it feels very wooey and very hypey right now. I can’t tell the difference between this technology and an actual scam, except that this technology kind of looks like it does something useful. It reminds me of a scam in some cities: you have people who pose as public-transportation workers who will sell you tickets. The tickets actually work. But they’re not valid for more than just the smallest zone. You’ll pay for five or six zones, but you can’t actually travel there. AI reminds me of that, so far.
The comments are full of people heralding the growth of Lithium mining, as if there being more of it available has come at no cost to anyone. Of course, they don’t think about the destroyed environment or the destroyed communities—they think only of their... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 7. May 2023 07:23:16 (GMT-5)
Why Are Lithium Prices Collapsing? (Hacker News)
The comments are full of people heralding the growth of Lithium mining, as if there being more of it available has come at no cost to anyone. Of course, they don’t think about the destroyed environment or the destroyed communities—they think only of their privileged, 1% future because they know they only ever benefit from increased extraction—in the form of increased availability or lower prices or both—and they never suffer any of the ill effects. Then they flood the zone with comments about how the doom-saying Cassandras were wrong about limited resources because lookit how much there is naow.
The so-called Cassandras were never saying that there wasn’t more lithium. They were saying that the price for increasing production was high. That it would be wrong to extract more of these resources, if it comes at the cost of the environment or increased CO2-production. They have not been wrong.
Why are lithium prices collapsing? by Nichloas Larsen (International Banker)
I don’t really have to read the article to know the answer. Prices are collapsing because the most powerful elites in the world see the possibility of increased wealth and profits in selling every first-world idiot an electric car or three. Prices are collapsing because they will it—and because neither they nor anyone they know, or are aware of, will suffer any of the deleterious side-effects associated with increased extraction.
After spoon-feeding its audience a bunch of horseshit, it ends with a complete repudiation of the article’s title.
“And while substantial new sources of supply may come online eventually, some analysts do not see this having a sustained impact on prices in 2023. Scotiabank (Bank of Nova Scotia), for instance, believes the recent selloff in lithium equities has been largely unjustified for this reason. “While the year ahead has a slight chance to see temporary softness in lithium spot prices, beyond 2024, we are stumped as to where supply will come from to satisfy demand,” it recently noted, as quoted by the Financial Times. And Trafigura recently echoed this sentiment. “I really don’t think there’s any reason to believe that so many tons can magically appear this year to return the market to balance,” Claire Blanchelande, a lithium trader at the commodities trading firm, told Bloomberg in January. “The pain is not over yet.””
The post Please explain++ (Fuck Nestle) by PetronilaConaway (Reddit) is of the following image:
It reads,
“Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.”
The top comment by Horse_Renoir reads,
“That’s easy!
“Capitalism expects infinite growth from our finite world so it is inevitable that capitalists will come for our every last natural resource.
“The entire system is setup to support capitalism. So if you get in the way of capitalists exploiting the things we need to survive in their quest to make a profit you’re a terrorist. 😡
“If you’re a capitalist exploiting the things peons need to survive you’re just doing as the system intended and are in fact a very good business person. 🤗”
Near the end, he shows a matrix of Nagel’s artwork, showing 25 skinny white women and then says
]]>“They give the impression of real people—chic, fashionable, independent people—but still leave enough space for you to place yourself in them. For salons, Nagel-women served as aspirational images,... [More]”
Published by marco on 7. May 2023 07:22:58 (GMT-5)
Near the end, he shows a matrix of Nagel’s artwork, showing 25 skinny white women and then says
“They give the impression of real people—chic, fashionable, independent people—but still leave enough space for you to place yourself in them. For salons, Nagel-women served as aspirational images, though it has to be said that these women, all being of one complexion, it’s likely they were only aspirational for a certain segment of the population. This speaks to the warped priorities of 1980s advertising—and the 80s in general—but that’s a topic for another video.”
What should Nagel have done instead? He was painting for a market. Even if that market would have wanted paintings of all sorts of complexions, is he a racist if he only paints white women? Is that the intimation? Does it matter what he likes to paint?
I never once drew a picture of a black woman growing up. Was I a racist child, then teenager? I drew a lot of women, none of them anything but white. I never drew an asian, nor black, not latina. Does that make me racist?
How much obligation does one have when creating artwork? Does it matter if you wouldn’t be able to sell it? Should you still have to create artwork that you neither want to create nor does anyone want to buy, just to be ethical and moral? What kind of logic is that?
And what if he had painted black women? Wouldn’t he have then been accused of commodifying them? Or trying to make them be slimmer than they naturally are? Or getting their hair wrong? Or culturally appropriating them somehow? Who does he think he is—a white man—drawing black women?
Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, it seems.
She is in the Diamond League (very prestigious). It treats her like chattel. She has to do sooooo much work to stay in the league. I, on the other hand, am also in the Diamond League, but I have to do hardly any work at... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 7. May 2023 07:21:34 (GMT-5)
DuoLingo is teaching my partner and I something about neoliberal capitalism.
She is in the Diamond League (very prestigious). It treats her like chattel. She has to do sooooo much work to stay in the league. I, on the other hand, am also in the Diamond League, but I have to do hardly any work at all to stay there. Sometimes I do one lesson a day for a couple, three days in a row. No biggie. No demotion. Nobody’s working too hard in my chapter of the Diamond League.
My partner, on the other hand, has to earn 10x the points I do just to stay in the league. She’s running to stay in place. The classic rate race. Me, on the hand? I’m like George Bush, I was born on third, and think I hit a triple.
I get the exact same accreditation as she does with 1/10 of the work.
There are tournaments occasionally. She literally had to give up trying to into it because she needed another 1,000 points just to get in – whereas I’d only gotten about 800 points total and was sitting comfortably in third place.
There’s the lesson about neoliberal capitalism. If I didn’t know her or her situation, I would just assume that she’s not trying hard enough, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have what I have if didn’t deserve it.
Published by marco on 7. May 2023 07:21:08 (GMT-5)
I don’t think I’m an especially fussy user of software. I just can’t help noticing when it keeps doing stuff that it wants to do rather than what I want it to do. I also can’t help noticing how so much software manages to utterly fail to adequately do even the simplest tasks that are directly related to the thing they were built for doing.
Today, I had Apple Maps open in Schaffhausen. I searched for a route from Winterthur Bahnhof to a restaurant. I left open for later. When I got to Winterthur, I opened Apple Maps again. I could see the route I’d planned, with a Go button. Before I could click the button, though, the app reloaded itself and asked me where I’d like to go. You know where the f*%k I want to go. I just had it on the screen before you needlessly refreshed. Why did it refresh? I’m sure that there’s a logic in there that says: if enough time has passed since the query or perhaps your location has changed enough, then just refresh the page. Why? Because there’s no refresh button, perhaps. But, it’s not smart enough to notice that I was literally at the starting point of the route that it so gracelessly erased.
This is not uncommon on phones. Browsers generally like to reload themselves all the time, even when there’s absolutely no need to. This not only wastes data, but is often frustrating when you have no connection or only a flaky connection. In this case, you literally had the information you wanted on-screen, but then your gloriously intelligent supercomputer of a phone decided to throw this all away and try loading it again, in which case it just tells you, “whoops, sorry, that information’s not available.” Well, it was available, you exquisite dumbass, but you erased it needlessly. No-one asked you to erase it, and I could have told you that you wouldn’t be able to reload it because I can see that you have no data connection.
The SBB app is quite famous for doing this. Instead of simply showing the route I’d planned, it’s refreshing all of the time, even when it could very easily check that it has no data connection. Just. Stop. Doing. Stuff. Just show me the data that was on the screen. I will tell you when I want you to show something else.
The SBB app is also quite bad at linking its information. Today, I searched a route and had bought a ticket for it. I didn’t know where the route went after that, though. It shows the purchased ticket—or, rather, the QR-code for it—but then the itinerary that you’d purchased it gone. You can click on what looks like the itinerary, but it’s just the day-ticket that shows you the zones you’d purchased. Where’s the route? It’s in the “journeys” tab, which is ordinarily empty, or is filled with an advertisement for the “get-on-get-off” feature that they’re pushing so hard. I only checked there on a last-ditch hunch. It’s exactly what I was looking for. So, what’s the problem? Well, why wasn’t there a link from the ticket I’d purchased to the journey for which I’d purchased it? This is not rocket-science.
One app that does a relatively good job with this is Komoot. That app kept showing me various levels of detail with its offline-map feature no matter how little data I had. It even worked fine before I’d purchased the offline-maps feature, in which case it was able to show me any of the zoom levels I’d loaded before I went off the grid. Very nice, and exactly what I expected.
While on the subject of sports apps, I am shocked to be able to say that I was pleasantly surprised to see that Garmin’s algorithm handled by extra kilometers generously today. What does that mean? Well, I’d signed up for an expedition a while ago, and had only 1km of 162 left to go on it. I walked about 17.5km today, all together. Garmin awarded me the badge for the expedition, then transferred the remaining 16.5km to the next expedition that I signed up for! Nice! That was a pretty pleasant surprise.
I’m looking at Apple’s reminders right now. If there’s a single one, you hover it and it’s supposed to show a little button that you can use to select “Complete” or “Snooze”. Sometimes it shows up; sometimes it doesn’t. If you click anywhere else in the notification, it opens the calendar or reminders app and you’ve missed your opportunity to complete or snooze it. Too bad for you. If there are multiple messages, then you can’t click the button. It doesn’t show up on hover. Then, you have to click somewhere in the notification, in which case it doesn’t open the calendar or reminder app, but instead unfolds the notifications to show them all individually. What are you training us for here, Apple? Do you even have a UX engineer working there?
I just turned on my UPC television. I was listening to a radio station on it last night. Did it turn back on to the radio station? Of course not. It defaulted to a arbitrary TV channel. It wasn’t even the TV channel I’d been watching before I’d switched to the radio. This is categorically and unequivocally awful. Now, I have to switch back to the radio, which is about seven clicks away. And why does UPC not remember which user was last selected? Every time I turn on the television, I have to select my user again so that the TV guide is a manageable size (favorites are associated with a user).
And the movie I was watching in French the other night? The one I have in my list to continue watching later? When I start it back up, the language has been reset to English—because, well, why not? Why would a computer in a box be able to remember a handful of settings along with the movie. At least it managed to remember where it was in the film. Thank God for small favors.
In all fairness, the show that the TV is forcing me to watch is Selby vs. Allen in the Snooker World Championships, so I’m not altogether angry about it.
In that regard, Apple TV is extremely good at picking up where it left off. If I turn it on in the morning, it picks up exactly where it was in the song that was playing the night before, in seconds. Good boy.
On the other hand, my Apple Mail on my laptop shows 3 unread mails in a mailbox that has, very obviously, no unread mails. The badge on the app icon has shown first one, then two, now three, even when there are no unread mails. I see the flagged folder says “4”, but, when clicked, it shows only two mails. I’ve tried a few online guides to remedy this, but nothing seems to help.
Then there’s Apple Photos, which mostly works pretty well. The Photo Stream feature is a complete crap-shoot, though. Sometimes, it syncs; sometimes, it doesn’t. Sometimes the photos show up immediately—and sometimes the photos aren’t synced, even after the devices have spent hours in the same network. It’s a mystery. There’s no refresh button. There’s no sync-now button. There are no logs. There’s literally nothing you can do to debug the system—other than to really debug the system. As a normal user, you can’t reset it or force-refresh it.
When you do sync photos directly—over a cable 😱—do you think that Apple Photos notices that you’ve already synced photos via Photo Stream? Of course it doesn’t. It cheerfully offers to copy over all of those duplicate photos for you. If you’ve synced the photos manually and then Photo Stream does decide to wake up and sync something, do you think it skips the photos that have already been manually synced? Of course it doesn’t. It cheerfully fills your album with duplicates.
On that subject, it’s also terrible that you can’t sync photos back to your phone once you’ve edited them in your Photos desktop app. The only solution is to turn on cloud-syncing for all photos. In my case, that would be over 150GB of photos and videos from over 20 years. The laptop can handle it. Neither the desktop nor my phone have enough space for it. There is no way to sync only a part of the library. I’d have to split it manually into two libraries on the laptop. I’d like to keep a curated album of photos on my phone, but I really can’t. I’ll have four photos on the phone, then sync them over to the desktop. I pick the nicest one, perhaps crop it a bit, but … then what? I can’t copy it back to the phone to be able to carry around the photo I like. I can’t see which photo is nicer on the phone screen. And why would I have to? Because Apple’s dozens of thousands of engineers and trillions of dollars can’t be bothered to make a simple syncing app actually work for its customers—rather than for them.
That’s just from one day. There are some successes in there, but it’s mostly just a sad failure to be useful, a continuous requirement for me to hold the hand of apps that should really be working much better by now. Are there really no product engineers out there who can make products work better? Or is it really the case the capitalism ruins everything? That the desire to maximize profits almost always leads to company’s stopping development when their product is just adequate enough to keep their users from going to a competitor? Even if the state of their product is embarrassing on all levels? It’s a shame, but that seems to be the best we can hope for: that some lone team will focus on quality, regardless of that obsession’s effect on their own bottom line.
Published by marco on 5. May 2023 23:06:32 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
The emergence of a dangerous fungus, Candida auris, in US health care systems by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)
“[…] surveillance data and the distribution of fungal pathogens and their resistance pattern have been poorly studied. Only a few countries across the world maintain an adequate fungal surveillance program and have the necessary laboratory equipment to monitor them. Funding for addressing these pathogens is woefully lacking.”
“Although the number of cases appears small overall, that needs to be placed in perspective. From 2013 to 2016, the CDC had documented only 63 clinical cases and 14 screening cases. In total, there have been 5,654 clinical cases and 13,163 screening cases since 2013. The last 12 months account for over 40 percent of all cases. This has become a matter of considerable urgency from the standpoint of public health.”
“Additionally, once such a case is identified, the treating facility must undergo a rigorous disinfection protocol to rid the environment of the fungus, due to its ability to survive on surfaces for prolonged periods and withstand most commonly used disinfectants. This means stopping the day-to-day operation of the health system to sterilize the facility, which is costly and disruptive to patient care.”
“Once the disease becomes systemic in a patient, it has a fatality rate between 30 and 60 percent.”
“The use of Far-UVC at around 222 nanometers has shown promise in treating such scenarios. In a study published in August 2022 in the journal Mycoses , the authors write, “Our results are in agreement with the data from Narita et al., where the fungicidal effect of 222 nm UVC against candida albicans is comparable with 254 nm UVC. A devastating effect could be demonstrated from 24 mJ/cm2 compared to control.” They showed a reduction level of 70 percent for this level of irradiation. At 40 mJ/cm2 the colony growth of the Candida species fell by more than 98 percent. Such technology can be used to disinfect rooms and surfaces throughout health care settings and poses, if appropriately mounted and maintained, no harm to patients and staff.”
How the War on Crypto Triggered a Banking Crisis by Ellen Brown (Scheer Post)
“[s]ome in the crypto space noticed highly coordinated activity between the White House, financial regulators, and the Fed, aimed at dissuading banks from dealing with crypto clients, making it far more difficult for the industry to operate. This is problematic because it represented an attempted seizure of power far beyond what is normally reserved for the executive branch.”
But warning people away from a scammy bubble is good, I think. It’s hard to tell the difference between actual banking and a scammy bubble on the best of days. The argument here seems more that one scammy-bubble cartel pulled strings to torpedo another. Rather than pulling for the underdog, our reaction should be that we want neither of them.
“[…] lawlessness associated with authoritarian regimes. In a lawful society, solvent banks are not seized by the government simply because their clientele is politically disfavored.”
Of course that’s correct. But, it’s an interpretation of events based on an unproven accusation. Huge accusations need huge evidence. I’m honestly not convinced that the only reason the government might want to torpedo crypto is because there’s a conspiracy to do so. It’s also entirely possible that they pulled all support for it because it genuinely is destructive, if only to a small degree because of its size. What is the point of encouraging crypto from a societal standpoint? It’s barely begun and it’s already suffused with so much corruption and so many scams that you have to squint really hard to see the original, clean vision of a non-fiat currency.
“He observes that the upshot will be to drive crypto innovators abroad . In fact that move is happening already .”
Who cares? And: good.
“The Attorney General noted in the filing that the Fed had created a “Kafkaesque situation” where a Wyoming-chartered bank is denied access to the U.S. dollar payment system “because it is not federally regulated, even while it is also denied federal regulation.””
“Long concludes: Congress tasked the Fed and FDIC with running utilities; it did not give the Fed and FDIC veto power over U.S. states – and, in turn, power to block the responsible innovations that state banking authorities create as they fulfill their economic development mandates.”
“Fulfilling economic development” mandates sounds, in an era of almost pure financial speculation, like “rapid unplanned disassembly”: PR for scams and flimflam, in other words.
“The stellar and only model in the U.S. is the Bank of North Dakota, formed in 1919 when local farmers were losing their farms to foreclosure by big out-of-state banks. With assets in 2021 of $10.3 billion and a return on investment of 15%, the BND is owned by the state, which self-insures it.”
Sure, but those returns are stupid-high and reek of externalized costs. Lo and behold, ND is fueled nearly solely by fracking. Any sane society would consider the long-term viability and sustainability of a banking model that people are going to put their money into for decades.
“The FDIC has not formally rejected insurance coverage for state-chartered publicly-owned banks, but regulators have intimated that it is not interested in covering them;”
Wait, you want a state-chartered bank with federal protection, but the federal level shouldn’t be able to say no? How does that work? The federal institution has to provide insurance for a state-chartered bank no matter what sort of hooey it comes up with? Or has been bribed into chartering? I’m not arguing against crypto here, necessarily. I’m arguing against the line of argumentation that the FDIC refusing national insurance for a state-chartered bank is inherently questionable.
“Andersen Hill writes, “The language and structure of the Federal Reserve Act require that the Federal Reserve provide payment services to all eligible banks.… If the Fed wants to exclude banks, it should ask Congress to change the law.””
I have a feeling that’s an oversimplification, or that the term “eligible” in that statement allows a lot more leeway than the author thinks, and perhaps exactly the sort of leeway that the FDIC has currently exercised. As the lender and insurer of last resort, they absolutely do pick winners and losers. This isn’t terrible, until the system becomes corrupt. That may be the argument here, but it’s kind of getting lost in the fallacious argumentation of “well, the FDIC also insures a bunch of scams, so it should insure these new-style scams as well.” No, I do not agree that this is the direction we want to take.
No, It’s Not Techno-Feudalism. It’s Still Capitalism. by Daniel Denvir & Evgeny Morozov (Jacobin)
“The ideal type of capitalism is clean. That’s not to say it doesn’t have to rely on police power, or it doesn’t have to rely on people starving. Even in completely perfect, ideal conditions, the way the capitalist system works is that you go and sell your labor and somehow still as a laborer you are being shortchanged. The bottom line is that all of that happens invisibly, and it’s all legal. It’s all clean.”
“Again, I’m not saying that capitalism functions without the state, where there is no force making up the contract, but in capitalism it is supposed to happen in a much cleaner way. The workers are supposed to be convinced that they’re not being screwed.”
“The existence of extraneous, expropriation-enabling processes — violence, racism, dispossession, carbonization — is not denied, but they should be analytically bracketed out as non-capitalist extras; they may have abetted particular capitalists in their individual efforts to appropriate surplus value, but they stand outside the process of capitalist accumulation as such.”
This seems to me to be a distinction without a difference: good to know, but not salient to the discussion of the system we have or how to get out from under its thumb. As with authoritarian communism, the authoritarian bit seems inevitable, as the inherent power relations engender inequality. In capitalism, it’s means of production; in communism, it’s the redistributive mechanism. Those who own the former or control the latter gather power.
“You have some people reading Marx to be saying that before capitalism acquires this innovative dynamic whereby competition forces capitalists to cut costs and invent new things, capitalists have to engage in a certain initial, much messier, and more violent process of capital accumulation. That required a very different set of tools, techniques, and means, if you will. And that was kind of like feudalism. You wouldn’t even recognize it from feudalism if it did not lead to this much cleaner, systematic, innovative dynamic that doesn’t need to be violent.”
That’s only if you accept the extremely narrow definition of violence promulgated by those who are doing all of the violence not covered by their definition.
“So you can think about enclosures of land and property. That is initially very violent, and there are a lot of people who are unhappy about it. But eventually everybody accepts that. And you start having, in some cases, market players trade the rights to land, to means of production, to ideas, and everything becomes a commodity of some kind. And we know that commodities are traded in the market, and it’s so very clean and proper.”
The violence has been accepted and institutionalized, so it is no longer considered as such. Because who would want to think of themselves as living in and benefitting from a violent society? No-one. So, instead of removing the violence that makes the machine run well for the elites, churning value from below to above, they just stop calling it violence. When a family is evicted because they can’t afford the rent, that’s not violence, that’s just the system. It’s mostly their own fault for having failed the system, which is seen as unimpeachable.
“But the alternative reading of primitive accumulation would be to say that Marx did not actually mean to delineate it as some kind of a historical stage, after which capitalism was supposed to work frictionless and perfectly in a clean way without recourse to violence.”
There’s that word “violence” again, unqualified.
“You write that if the tech giants really are lazy rentiers who are ripping everyone off by exploiting intellectual-property rights and network effects — why do they invest so much money in what can only be described as production of some kind? What kind of rentiers do that? Alphabet’s R&D spending in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 was $16.6 billion, $21.4 billion, $26 billion and $27.5 billion respectively. Does that not count as ‘lifting a finger’?”
Because it’s not much investment relative to the massive profits they make. Also, the R&D is what attracts the talent they need to run the profit-making stuff. Without the fairy tale of beneficence, you’d bleed workers, no matter the salaries. You can’t replace tech bros with finance bros. Finance bros don’t bring actual talent with them. Tech bros at least kind of know how to build stuff—even if they’re woefully ill-equipped in any of the softer sciences (like not getting deluded by Libertarianism and Objectivism).
“Cédric Durand , the French Marxist economist and thinker, who has a more nuanced take on it. He doesn’t subscribe to this vulgar kind of equation between a mode of production and firms. He almost arrives at this middle ground where the firms can be kind of capitalist and invest and expand and have all sorts of behaviors you would associate with the typical capitalist firm — but at the same time, the net result of the activities on the economy is to some extent equivalent to what you would expect from feudal actors or from it being a feudal economy.”
“But alas, I guess I’m still not entirely convinced that making sure that our socialist car production is more efficient than under capitalism is necessarily a good deployment of our cognitive and political resources.”
Yes, because you’re still producing stupid cars. It’s like electric versus ICEs: it’s not that it’s not an improvement, but that we’re not getting a lot of bang for our buck. We invest a tremendous amount of energy and resources, and end up only slightly better, still committed to an essentially stupid lifestyle, but with vehicles whose energy consumption is shifted primarily to the extractive side rather than the consumptive one.
“At the end of the day, should it matter to people who are generally concerned with the emancipation of the Global South, with social movements of reversing extractivism, whether or not we are leaning on frameworks that give us an accurate understanding of what’s going on — or whether we remain pure and faithful to one that doesn’t? I’m not convinced that winning theoretical debates through purity counts much.”
A-fucking-men.
“The fact that we keep enforcing strict borders about what counts as leftist, to say nothing of what counts as Marxism, I just find a bit unproductive.”
YES.
Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit: Serbiens Klage gegen die Nato by Willy Wahl (NachDenkSeiten)
“Tartalja hat in Italien über 350 Fälle gewonnen, in denen er nachgewiesen hat, dass bei italienischen Soldaten und Offizieren der Friedenstruppen, die im Kosovo und Metohija nach den Bombardierungen stationiert waren, wo die meisten Uranbomben abgeworfen wurden, Krebs diagnostiziert wurde und viele von ihnen als direkte Folge des Urans in den Nato-Bomben gestorben sind. Bei der Analyse ihres Blutes wurde 500-mal mehr Metall gefunden als normal.”
“Die Nato ist also nicht nur für «Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit» verantwortlich, wenn sie diese Bomben einsetzt und Restminen hinterlässt, sondern sie hat auch das Verbrechen des Ökozids begangen, indem sie das Ökosystem und die biologische Vielfalt Serbiens beschädigt und zerstört hat.”
Und die haben letztlich entschieden, dieselbe Munition in Ukraine einzusetzen.
“Srdjan Aleksic und sein Team von Anwälten sind nicht an wirtschaftlichem Gewinn interessiert und verlangen von ihren Klienten keine Gebühren für ihre juristische Arbeit, da die meisten Kläger aus den südlichen Teilen Serbiens stammen, die extrem arm sind und bereits fast alles verkauft haben, was sie besitzen, nur um wegen ihres Krebses behandelt zu werden.”
“Die Nato hat geantwortet, dass sie Immunität geniesse und sich aufgrund des 2005 zwischen Serbien und der Nato unterzeichneten Transitabkommens und des Beitritts Serbiens zur «Partnerschaft für den Frieden» (PfP) im Jahr 2006 nicht vor dem Obergericht in Belgrad verantworten müsse.”
Force-Marching the Europeans by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“Scott Miller, the Biden regime’s ambassador to Bern for a little more than a year, is indeed a doozy in this line. In his often-demonstrated view, he is in Switzerland to tell the Swiss what to do. At the moment, Miller is all over this nation for not signing on as a participant in Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine—pressuring ministers, denigrating those who question the wisdom of the war, offending the Swiss in speeches and newspaper interviews. It is a one-man assault on Switzerland’s long, long tradition of neutrality, waged in the manner of an imperial proconsul disciplining an errant province. Swiss commentators question why the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the FDFA, has not expelled this tone-deaf ignoramus.”
“According to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, in effect since 1961, diplomats are barred from intervening in the internal affairs of host countries. The State Department lately displays as much concern for this U.N.–sponsored accord as it does for international law altogether: Little to none, you find when you watch these men and women at close range.”
“The Finns have succumbed and just joined NATO. We can put the Swedes in the same file. Now it is the Swiss and their neutrality in international affairs who take the heat. This is the thing about the liberal imperialists: They cannot tolerate deviation from their illiberal orthodoxies.”
“The larger point, in my view, is far more insidious. It is to eliminate all thought of neutrality among nations in the (undeclared but obvious) name of the Biden regime’s intent to get everyone on side for a nice, long, profitable new Cold War.”
“The Swiss government, reluctantly and controversially, went along with the sanctions that followed the outbreak of hostilities last year, but Miller has been pressing Bern not merely to sequester more funds deposited by Russian oligarchs, but to confiscate them so that they can be sent to Kyiv to finance the eventual reconstruction of Ukraine.”
“Miller is 43 and arrived with his partner without one day’s experience in statecraft. Together they were and may remain major donors to the Democratic Party, giving the appearance that they bought the Bern appointment–a common practice since at least the Reagan years. Scott Miller is an example of the cost of such practices to our institutions in terms of competence.”
Afghanistan Watchdog Says ‘You’re Gonna See Pilferage’ of Ukraine Aid by Dave DeCamp (Scheer Post)
“US government agencies have assigned their own inspector generals to oversee Ukraine aid but have resisted efforts to establish a position similar to Sopko’s. He said a “whole of government” approach was necessary for the oversight. The Senate recently voted down an amendment introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) that would have created a special inspector general for Ukraine.”
Syria Comes in From the Cold by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)
“[…] in the spring of 2020 in the aftermath of an “oil war” between the two nations which saw Saudi Arabia precipitously lower the price of oil by overproducing, only to be matched by Russia. The Saudi-Russian oil war ended because of negotiations brokered by then-President Donald Trump and for a while the world was compelled to live in an environment where the top three oil producers — the U.S., Russia and Saudi Arabia — openly colluded on global production quotas.”
“Work remains to be done, however, as Saudi Arabia’s effort to bring Syria back into the ranks of the Arab League faces resistance from staunch U.S. allies Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar. But the fact is that, thanks to Russian and Chinese diplomacy, peace, not war, is breaking out all over in the Middle East. Bringing Syria in from the cold is simply the most recent manifestation of the phenomena.”
Russia’s War Is a Failed Answer to Its Demographic Crisis by Sasha Talaver (Jacobin)
“The conservative Russian government hates any emancipatory projects, whether Bolshevik or queer-feminist. But the question of gender has the more fundamental political-economic connection with social reproduction, which is doubtless one of the Kremlin’s key anxieties. “Traditional values,” as Putin’s ideologues present things, provide a secure basis for the nation’s procreation. In this conservative worldview, a woman is often seen as incomplete until she gives birth. Everyone who has ever visited a gynecologist in Russia will know this attitude — according to women’s consultation personnel, all our problems will wither away as soon as we give birth. Women should, preferably, give birth to three children — or so Putin explained to us in his 2012 address to the Federation Council.”
“[…] in Russia people stay childless because they simply cannot afford to have children. Thus, there is no solution to the demographic crisis without a radical restructuring of the economy in favor of reproduction — and the national strategy reveals the fact that “traditional values” are an unachievable goal for the government and probably an undesirable one for the population. Russian data shows that having three or more children in almost 50 percent of cases means life below the poverty line. In this sense, the talk of a return to “traditional values” is just a symptom of the Russian government’s helplessness in influencing women’s demographic choices.”
Because they also have no argument that starts with national interest before the oligarchic one. Once the oligarchs have finished feeding, whatever remains is allowed to serve the national interest. There is not enough to make a convincing argument. They try to bridge the gap with force, an altogether banal and not-at-all unique reaction. Forcing the oligarchs to take a smaller share to grease the machine better is just as inconceivable there as it is in the U.S. or Britain, for just two examples.
“The fight for “traditional values” is an attempt to find a metaphysical solution for the actual material problems of poverty and inequality that are among the causes of population decline.”
“If something should have been a “reasonable security concern,” it was not as much NATO expansion per se as the lack of human bodies to protect Russian borders.”
Well, without NATO pressure, there also less pressure to have such a large standing army.
“[…] the Kremlin accumulates cheap labor power, appropriating Ukrainian state investment in the birth, care, and education of its former citizens; their reproductive labor; and even their personal relations that allow them to survive in Russia without state support. This — together with the appropriation of companies and the devastation of territories now to be redeveloped — is a typical process of imperialist accumulation by dispossession.”
“It is vital to note that these amendments to citizenship law came from Putin’s own initiative, upon the eve of the invasion. This helps us understand how he sees the “saved” Ukrainian population — as a silent and obedient workforce requiring zero support and investment. In this sense, the kidnapping of Ukrainian children is only the tip of the iceberg of the demographic politics of this war. It is crucial that any conversation about postwar justice makes visible and heard these millions of Ukrainians who have been displaced to Russia and forced into Russian citizenship.”
It’s an interesting theory, of course, but hardly conclusively worse than the practices of other countries whole morality is generally considered to be far less impugnable than that of Russia. ICE in the U.S. and Frontex in the E.U. This is not to argue in favor of Russia’s policies, which sound just as abhorrent as everyone else’s, but to reason that Americans and Europeans who consider the Russian arena to be the first place to start should rather focus on cleaning up their immoral messes in their own glass houses.
The United States of Paralysis by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“It is the paralysis of doing nothing while the ruling oligarchs, who have increased their wealth by nearly a third since the pandemic began and by close to 90 percent over the past decade, orchestrate virtual tax boycotts as millions of Americans go into bankruptcy to pay medical bills, mortgages, credit card debt, student debt, car loans and soaring utility bills demanded by a system that has privatized nearly every aspect of our lives.”
“The institutions that should provide redress to the public become parodies of themselves, atrophy and die. How else to explain legislative bodies that can only unite to pass austerity programs, tax cuts for the billionaire class, bloated police and military budgets and reduce social spending?”
“Biden told us as a candidate he would raise the minimum wage to $15 and hand out $2,000 stimulus checks. He told us his American Jobs Plan would create “millions of good jobs.” He told us he would strengthen collective bargaining and ensure universal pre-kindergarten, universal paid family and medical leave, and free community college. He promised a publicly funded option for healthcare. He promised not to drill on federal lands and to promote a “green energy revolution and environmental justice.” None of that happened.”
“Rulelessness means the rules that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. It means that the rules we are taught — hard work and honesty will assure us a place in society; we live in a meritocracy; we are free; our opinions and votes matter; our government protects our interests — are a lie. Of course, if you are poor, or a person of color, these rules were always a myth, but a majority of the American public was once able to find a secure place in society, which is the bulwark of any democracy,”
“These pathologies of death, diseases of despair, are manifested in the plagues that are sweeping across the county — opioid addiction, morbid obesity, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings. My book, “ America: The Farewell Tour ,” is an exploration of the demons that grip the American psyche.”
“The obliteration of all restraints on capitalism, from organized labor to government oversight and regulation, has left us at the mercy of predatory forces that, by nature, exploit human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.”
Her Name Was Nora al-Awlaki: The Real Reason Donald Trump Should Rot in Hell by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“This case is shit and I’m tired of pretending otherwise just so I don’t have to agree with my Fox News addicted mother. Alvin Bragg’s entire house of cards is built on the single victimless crime of covering up another single victimless crime that nobody has or ever will be convicted of, and you all know it.”
“Her name was Nora al-Awlaki, and I want you to remember that name because she was just an 8-year-old American girl and apparently, she had to die for your freedom. But she wasn’t alone. She was one of thirty people murdered in a wild and reckless Seal Team 6 raid on a dusty little village called Yakla in Yemen’s Bayda Province. A heavily armed death squad of American heroes came in so hot on this patch of sand that they literally crashed their chopper, injuring three of their compatriots in the process and leaving them with no choice but to abandon their sunken ship and burn the evidence by calling in an airstrike.”
“Experts say that we launched a massive raid on a densely populated village just to retrieve a treasure trove of vital intelligence on pilfered computer software. Experts won’t tell us what exactly was on those confiscated servers, but experts do give us their solemn word that it was well worth the trail of corpses Seal Team 6 left in their wake to retrieve it.”
“[…] then-White House Secretary Robert Gibbs dipped the administration’s hand when questioned at a press conference about the murder. “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children, I don’t think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about your business” Sung like a natural born killer.”
“This all seemed to change under Obama, who officially upgraded Anwar’s status to “regional commander” before he became the first American citizen added to Barack’s infamous CIA kill list. Though Anwar had never even been charged with a crime in the US, he did briefly exchange emails with Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, whose massacre the GOP had a field day blaming on the new president with the suspiciously Muslim sounding name.”
“The raid that would murder the third American al-Awlaki in just under six years was actually planned by Obama, but he decided to kick the can to Trump once he was elected, likely knowing that bastard would finish the job for him and get more shit for doing so simply because he’s an oafish lout.”
“Donald Trump will never be tried for the murder of Nora al-Awlaki for the same reason that Barack Obama will never be tried for the murder of her older brother. Because both parties kill children just like jihadists to send a message to populations who resist America’s will and neither party plans to stop anytime in the near future.”
“I’ll say it three more times before I say it again and again and again. Her name was Nora al-Awlaki. Her name was Nora al-Awlaki. Her name was Nora al-Awlaki. And I won’t let you forget that fucking name because I am sick and tired of watching children die so powerful men can stand a little taller on their corpses. May they all rot in hell.”
At 11:00, Blyth says
“So the Americans basically insist that everyone gets on line […] this kind of autarkic empire. It’s very fragile. And it’s very fragile to domestic politics, because, if the Republicans get in, particularly Trump, all of this is dead. Trump will do an accommodation with China. He doesn’t really care all that much. China’s good for beating up on the campaign route: China’s taking your jobs, China’s a problem. Whatever. Put up some tariffs. But, when you look at what actually happened, it was the Democrats, particularly things like the FOBs, the FOBs executive order that dealt with chip-fabrication. It really applied the squeeze. And, Republicans are dreadful opportunists. They will jump on any bandwagon as is electorally satisfying to them and get somewhere they need to be. The Democrats are actually true-believers on this. They really have just went [sic] completely all-in on China as enemy. And, you know, to me, that’s like a train wreck waiting to happen. So, you know, unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any good outcomes on this one.”
At 15:15, he says
“One of the most unexpected things about privatizing and liberalizing markets was that, left to their own devices, they don’t become competitive, they become oligopolistic, not monopolistic.”
Then follows it up with a good example from the airline industry. He goes on to discuss other monopsonies, like ISPs, or monopolies, like TicketMaster. They charge extraordinary fees for terrible service. Why? Because they can. Because they also happen to be the biggest campaign donors.
“40% of presidential campaign donations in the U.S. come from the top 0.1% wealthiest part of the population.”
What I do find fascinating is that, after discussing how dystopic the society underlying it is, Blyth says the same thing as Baker: the economy is doing just fine. Whereas they’re both right in that it’s not about to collapse, it’s also doing just fine for only a part of the population, even if some people are getting a few extra breadcrumbs. Saying it’s “doing fine” without qualifying for whom it’s doing fine leads one to misunderstand the sentiment. Perhaps what is intended is that it’s doing fine and no-one relevant is going to change a thing because it’s working for them, so you have to force them to change it to make it work for you, as well, but that message is sometimes lost or inadequately clearly expressed.
Reminder: The Media Once Bashed Trump For Transgressing The One-China Policy The US Now Spits On by Caitlin Johnstone
This is good article for remembering how the media doesn’t have principles, it has a team that it roots for.
“The US has been increasingly treating Taiwan like a sovereign nation with whom diplomatic relationships and alliances can be formed, in violation of its longstanding One-China policy that has kept the peace for decades. And I just think it’s worth noting that the western media who’ve lately been condoning these moves became outraged at Donald Trump just a few years ago for doing the same thing to a far lesser degree.”
When Trump dared to make a phone call to the Taiwanese president, he was deliberately provoking China in a diplomatic cock-up that they warned would embroil the U.S. in a senseless war. Five years later and they cheerlead even more senselessly provocative moves made by Democrats—and cheerlead the war that may ensue.
You’re Not Deficient, You’re Just Ruled By Assholes by Caitlin Johnstone
“Think about the consequences it would have on mental health to continually be bombarded with messaging that you need to keep working like a machine under whatever conditions your employer sees fit to provide, for whatever compensation your employer sees fit to offer, and that if you can’t thrive in this soul-crushing environment the problem lies with you and not the system which permits such an exploitative relationship. Then consider the possibility that this is exactly what’s happening.”
“It’s a testament to human resilience that anyone is sane. When everyone’s mind is always being pummeled with messaging that you’re deficient if you can’t thrive under our oppressive systems, that you’re flawed if you don’t look, think and act a certain way, that poverty is normal and acts of mass military slaughter are acceptable, it’s a wonder we don’t all snap.”
“There’s no real reason life needs to be this difficult. There’s no reason we can’t provide for everyone while technological advancement gives us all more and more free time. There’s no reason we can’t learn to live in collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem instead of in competition for the benefit of a few abusers at the top. All that’s required is for enough of us to decide we’re not going to take it anymore.”
This is quite a good report by Aaron Maté, showing Tucker Carlson in a much more favorable light than you usually see him in. As Maté says, he “has abhorrent views on immigration”, but his public pronouncements about how the media works and his role in it are refreshingly honest and introspective. It’s almost a bit jarring. Maybe those are deep-faked videos? 😙
NASA’s Voyager Will Do More Science With New Power Strategy (JPL)
“Voyager 2 and its twin Voyager 1 are the only spacecraft ever to operate outside the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the Sun. The probes are helping scientists answer questions about the shape of the heliosphere and its role in protecting Earth from the energetic particles and other radiation found in the interstellar environment.”
“Both Voyager probes power themselves with radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. The continual decay process means the generator produces slightly less power each year. So far, the declining power supply hasn’t impacted the mission’s science output, but to compensate for the loss, engineers have turned off heaters and other systems that are not essential to keeping the spacecraft flying.”
““Variable voltages pose a risk to the instruments, but we’ve determined that it’s a small risk, and the alternative offers a big reward of being able to keep the science instruments turned on longer,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager at JPL. “We’ve been monitoring the spacecraft for a few weeks, and it seems like this new approach is working.””
“The Voyager mission was originally scheduled to last only four years, sending both probes past Saturn and Jupiter. NASA extended the mission so that Voyager 2 could visit Neptune and Uranus; it is still the only spacecraft ever to have encountered the ice giants.”
The Power of Trees by Peter Wohlleben review – out of the woods by Charles Foster (Guardian)
“Wohlleben’s idea is this: leave forests alone. Stop fiddling with them, thinking that we can deal with climate change better than nature. If we fiddle, our Romes will burn. The Hidden Life argued that trees are social and sensate. The Power of Trees shows that they can be our saviours. But it’s terribly hard to let ourselves be saved. We think we can be the authors of our salvation. We are doers by constitution. Of course, there are things we could and should be doing, but in terms of forestry practice, often what’s billed as part of the solution is part of the problem.”
“The way of the woods is not the way of the market, and if we see forests as warehouses we are doomed. Foresters must be more than stockholders, shelf stackers, shippers and restockers. We need a radically new ethos. Deciduous trees are not “harvest-ready” at 200 years: they are teenagers. Tree planting isn’t necessarily good: the collateral costs may be extortionate. We must interrogate comforting expressions such as “renewable energy”, and learn the real cost of our toilet paper.”
A New Kind of Symmetry Shakes Up Physics by Kevin Hartnett (Quanta)
“Higher symmetries can detect that — and by detecting it, they allow physicists to take knowledge about better-understood quantum systems and apply it to others. “The development of all these symmetries is like developing a series of ID numbers for a quantum system,” said Shu-Heng Shao , a theoretical physicist at Stony Brook University. “Sometimes two seemingly unrelated quantum systems turn out to have the same set of symmetries, which suggests they might be the same quantum system.””
“This non-invertibility reflects the way that a higher symmetry can transform a quantum system into a superposition of states, in which it is probabilistically two things at once. From there, there’s no road back to the original system. To capture this more complicated way higher symmetries and non-invertible symmetries interact, researchers including Johnson-Freyd have developed a new mathematical object called a higher fusion category.”
“In condensed matter physics, researchers hope that higher and non-invertible symmetries will help them with the fundamental task of identifying and classifying all possible phases of matter . And in particle physics, researchers are looking to higher symmetries to assist with one of the biggest open questions of all: what principles organize physics beyond the Standard Model.”
The day before trash-pickup for our building, this is what the six trash containers look like. People are too lazy to walk a few extra steps to use the trash bins that aren’t already so full that the tops don’t close and the rain gets in. Not only does the rain get in, but the sanitation workers have to shuffle the bags around manually because they can’t just pick up an overflowing container automatically. This is why we can’t have nice things. This is why we’re not even going to come close to solving the climate crisis. We are a failure as a species. Big brains, my ass. We are rutting baboons, at best.
Untitled by Peter Orner (The Baffler)
“Aaron’s mother would howl at us. She’d say, It’s like you two are walking on the tracks with your backs to the train. Aaron’s father worked for the Washington Post . He was too old to be a reporter, but he’d refused to be kicked upstairs. He said, I’m a fucking writer not a salesman. He once gave me a piece of advice. He said that the key to carrying drinks on a tray is to not look at the drinks. This didn’t help me become any less shitty a waiter. Still, no better advice. Don’t look at the drinks.”
Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag by Alexander Wells (European Review of Books)
“But when the bilingual puns are good, they’re good — and enhanced by the thrill of belonging. I love this one billboard ad for classic indie radio that reads Everybody hörts (« everyone listens to it »), and I love it not only because I like the pun, but because I feel a surge of pride that I’m in on the joke, that maybe I do really speak German. This is exactly the effect that they’re going for, I suppose, just flipped 180 degrees.”
“Doing so in a foreign language meant a curious alchemy took place: I was incapable of finding anything kitsch. Cologne-area dad rock, no problem. When the YouTube algorithm forced soap opera heartthrob Jörn Schlönvoigt’s attempted pop crossover Das Gegenteil von Liebe on me, I slurped it right down. I even took a liking to Germany’s premier comedy a cappella group, an aging quintet by the name of Wise Guys.”
Can confirm. Films I mark as schlock in English seem better to me in German, especially when I’m only half-paying attention.
“On bad days, I worry that English has turned primarily into a status symbol — a tool of pure Habitus, a means for young elites to signify their cosmopolitanism and savviness. On days like that, it’s also hard to avoid the feeling that English — the language I inhabit, the tool I use to pay the rent and tell my wife I love her — is like too little butter spread out across too many bits of toast.”
“In her novel Flights, Olga Tokarczuk wryly marvels that there are countries out there where people have English as a mother tongue. Other Europeans might speak English when they travel, but they always have their own languages tucked away for private use. Anglophones, by contrast, have nothing to fall back on:”“How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures — even the buttons in the lift! — are in their private language. Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them — they are accessible to everyone and everything!”
“In 1995, French businessman Jean-Paul Nerrière coined the term « globish » to describe a « decaffeinated » version of English spoken by non-native businesspeople abroad.”
“The original Lingua Franca was no official elite language but instead a pidgin used for trade around the eastern Mediterranean from around the eleventh century throughout the early modern period — or, more accurately, an array of different pidgins, which mixed elements of Latin via Italian with bits of Arabic, Greek, Turkish and other languages. Lingua Franca, as Dunton-Downer notes, was not a « standardized or codified language » but instead a spectrum of dialects that varied according to location, purpose, and time.”
Floor 796 by 0x00
I absolutely love these labors of love. If you select “about” at the top-left, you can read more about the project and can even download individual images from there. The images are large, though—about 22MB.
“Floor796 is an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station! The goal of the project is to create as huge animation as possible, with many references to movies, games, anime and memes.
“All scenes are drawn in a special online editor right in the browser by one person, as a hobby. You can watch the process of drawing some blocks on youtube.”
Episode 288: Crazy White Boy University (w/ special guest John Lingan) by Trillbilly Worker's Party (Soundcloud)
This is a great discussion of the abolitionist John Brown, as well as the semi-historical novel about him by Russell Banks, called Cloudsplitter.
You Can’t Censor Away Extremism (or Any Other Problem) by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“[…] if anyone was going to be “no-platformed” it was going to be us. But the thought had apparently not occurred to him, marinated in academia and I’m guessing very online. He was a progressive living in 21st century America and he assumed that those he chose to censor were those he could. This confidence is shared by many left-leaning people today, and it is typical of contemporary liberalism in its combination of arrogance and folly.”
“One of the themes I’ve come back to many times in my writing is the idea that people mistake empirical claims (this is true about the world) with normative claims (this should be true about the world). Nowhere is this more clear than with “hate speech” and censorship. I think hate speech laws are politically and morally wrong, a normative claim, but more importantly they don’t work, an empirical claim − one which if true renders normative claims that hate speech laws are good irrelevant.”
Kant’s “is” and “ought”, no?
“The debate about whether we should censor unpopular views such as hate speech is an important one, but also a strange one. In my experience, it operates wholly independent from any consideration of the restraints of reality. People debate only on the level of the highest principle; everything is a referendum on the mores of democracy. They are all should questions − should we erode the right to free expression in the name of protecting minority groups from psychic harms? Should we prohibit the use of certain offensive terms? Should we declare some political positions out of bounds in public society? But all of these normative questions depend on the answers to empirical questions that preempt them, “cans” that come before “shoulds.””
“Like canceling , censorship has that quality of simultaneously being both destructive and impotent at the same time. The capacity of progressive people to engineer outcomes that fail to address the problems they were meant to but which create new problems is almost endearing.”
“You see, when […] government gets in the censorship game, they don’t stop just where you want them to. This may come as a shock but consistent principles like “don’t censor people” are easier to defend than sentiments like “censor people because they’re bad but make sure you ask me who’s bad first because I’m the one who decides who’s bad, OK?””
“[…] probably the most deluded is their dogged belief that if some new laws restricting speech were to be passed, they would inevitably be the ones to choose who gets silenced and what they don’t get to say. This is from a group that constantly self-identifies as marginalized and othered, and yet they are certain that they will be the ones left on the throne to decide who gets to say what. Why? I have no idea. The cops like you as little as you like them, lefties. You really think they’re gonna enforce the hate speech law the way you want them to? You want to defund the police, you think they’re irredeemably racist, you think they’re all fascists at heart, but you also want to give them sweeping new powers to limit what people say? That’s… strange.”
“Censorship is always an end run around a larger issue, a deeper, more vexing, stickier issue. The problem is never the expressions you wish to repress themselves but the existence of the people who would express them, and those people are ultimately the product of conditions in the world you can’t control. You cannot eliminate hate from the world, and no one alive will live to see the end of fascism. What you can do is to mitigate the negative effects of hate as best you can by empowering targeted groups and by trying to present a more compelling and attractive vision than the fascists.”
by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)
“It took us a dozen or so millennia to move from control of small agricultural plots and herds of domesticates, to the very limit of ecocide. Periodizations are of course blurry and there is always overlap, but it is significant that the earliest modern intimations of an awareness of environmental devastation at a vast scale were occurring right around the time of Isaac Newton’s epoch-making work of classical mechanics. Thus John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, the first scientific study of air pollution, was published in 1661, just six years before the Principia Mathematica. We began to detect that we were pushing living nature to its limit, transforming the surface of the earth beyond recognition, turning forests into fields, and reducing tremendous biodiversity to a handful of monocultures;”
“[…] over the past century researchers just kept finding more of them, and the closer they looked at them the more it became apparent that these entities were not behaving at all in standard particle-like ways, and soon enough the very best physical theory on offer modeled reality not as a totality of particles each of which is in some determinate state or other, but as a non-classical probability calculus; a quantum-mechanical state is nothing other than a probability measure.”
“[…] as the science progressed, the world physics was supposed to be accounting for largely slipped away; its fundamental objects changed not just in their particular qualities, but in the most basic determination of their ontological category — from something like pebbles or marbles or motes in the air, to mathematical entities providing a probability distribution for the outcomes of measurements.”
“It is a bit of a cliché, yet true enough for present purposes, to say that this is just what classical Indian philosophy did, in attributing to language a foundational role for inquiry into reality that is comparable to the role of physics in the most prominent schools of Western natural philosophy. Thus Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, first composed around 500 BCE, was not initially understood, by those who studied it and mastered it, as a work on a circumscribed and specialized science of language. It was rather an enumeration of the elements of the world, as they are spoken into being, and is thus best understood as a work of fundamental ontology.”
“It’s not, namely, that we are currently in the process of discovering that what we thought were its are actually bits. Rather, science is currently shifting its attention from things that are more it-like to things that are more bit-like. As this happens, it may be that we are arriving at the end of several centuries of dominance of physics as Prima Scientia, and entering a new era in which informatics lays claim to the throne. And this could be the real story of the rise of the simulation argument: its defenders are grasping for language to account for a broad historical transition that they themselves scarcely understand.”
“I’ve recently been reading the rich and fascinating Manual of Nuer Law , compiled by the British government clerk P. P. Howell in 1954 to serve as a codification of customary law in Sudan — “translating”, it was hoped, implicit lifeways into explicit legalisms. One of the most memorable aspects of Nuer customary law, of which I have also seen variations in at least a few other cultures around the world, is the practice of “ghost marriage” — when an unmarried young man dies prematurely, one of his younger brothers will marry as him. That is, the junior sibling will take a wife, have children, fulfill all the duties of a husband, but his children will be identified, with the privileges of heredity and social positioning and so on, as the children of his deceased brother.”
“Traditional onomastics is thus already a sort of theory of reincarnation, where the name itself is the bearer of the soul, not the individual human beings who carry the name for the brief duration of their lives. As with ghost marriage, when the name is the true individual, and the living body its temporary host, we find again the possibility of agency beyond the confines of the body, and beyond the finitude of an individual life.”
“It is in part in light of these anthropological considerations that I remain fairly sanguine as I sit and watch others contorting themselves rather desperately to trace back what we “should” be saying about, say, gender categories like “man” and “woman”, to what nature tells us we “must” say about the complexity of forms taken by biological sex.”
“If you think same-sex marriage is weird, for example, just think also of the Nuer, who have figured out how to marry dead people; or think of the Mongol-Turkic pastoral nomads , who sometimes marry their daughters off, when all the suitable men are gone, to pocket-sized clay figurines.”
“The particular slogans I hated the most were the ones that expressed some variant of the idea that same-sex marriage is salutary, because “marriage is about being with the person you love”. But of course, as a general rule, marriage is about no such thing! Marriage is about securing dynastic succession, or receiving a handsome bridewealth in the form of cattle. Bourgeois liberals since the nineteenth century have made it about “love” in some places, but to take their vision of marriage as the timelessly correct one, except with the one minor tweak that it must also include same-sex pairings, struck me, simply, as ignorant and ahistorical, and I could not go along with it. And yet, then as now, I said and I say: hooray for gay marriage. Some people want it, and it does no harm to those who don’t want it. I’m sold!”
“In keeping with the general decay of language over the past years, it is no surprise that the slogans generated in the controversy surrounding trans rights are consistently more stupid even than the ones deployed in the earlier conflict. In such a degraded environment, facts themselves become as dumb and futile as slogans. Thus we see endless parsing of scientific data about chromosomes and gonads across the animal kingdom, and we see defenders of the most radically opposed views consistently pointing to the same information about the same natural world as if the testimony it provides is just obviously in their favor.”
“From Dahomey to Kamchatka, for one thing, they all make a pretty basic distinction between men and women. In fact, it’s kind of the whole motor of everything that happens in the world as they narrate it, and it’s definitely not something these cultures perceive as an external imposition from the West.”
“Now, you can say that all this is just the result of infection from centuries of imperial domination, and indeed this might explain in part what particular Indigenous people in the world find themselves affirming in the twenty-first century. But it certainly will not explain the ample archives and evidences we have of pre-contact narrative traditions, which, again, consistently represent the entirety of sociocosmic reality as structured by the complementarity of the male and female principles.”
“Yet the hard existence of this binary does not prevent us from organizing our own society, now, however we might wish to do so within the bounds of feasibility. What the case of ghost marriage and of the clay figurines reminds us is that in any case our social identities —as “married”, as a child, as a woman, as a chief, as a king— are in the end all about symbolic representation, and these symbols can often be highly abstract and disconnected from anything that would make any sense at all to an outsider.”
“In any case, as far as I can see, the idea that some women in a given culture might be initially received into the world as boys certainly is no more strange than that some husbands are ghosts, or terracotta lions. There’s room to maneuver, and the proper direction of maneuvering cannot ever be dictated by biology alone.”
“[…] there is also no good biological basis for committing even to the ontological robustness of our own organismic individuality, for believing that we, the ordinary flesh-and-blood creatures we take ourselves and others to be, are the real units that natural selection is selecting for, rather than any number of other possible candidates, such as the gene, the gut microbiome, the population, or even the ecosystem.”
“As dematerialization advances, I expect gender identity will have less and less to do with a choice between these two binary options, less and less to do with hormones and other murky matters of the body, and ever more to do with virtual self-creation.”
Great, but if we’re doing that, why continue to focus so much on an a facet, gender, that is essentially useless when virtualized.
Episode 287: Creative Ass by TrueAnon (Patreon)
“Our old friend David A. Banks is back to talk about the release of his new book, The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America. We also discuss the complicated legacy of Richard Florida and the false prophets of the creative class.”
At 25:00, there’s an amazing discussion of homogeneity in building and construction. Again, capitalism and abstracted investment, interested only in returns, is the problem.
Comic #4036 by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)
“today’s question:
“why is there something rather than nothing?
“Because if there were nothing, then nobody could worry about it!
THE END.“It’s DEFINITIONAL.
with nothing, there’s nobody to worry about ANYTHING.
with something, there COULD be therefore it’s a PREREQUISITE for worrying about the universe that something BE there first“NEXT QUESTION: IS THE UNIVERSE REAL:
“Real enough that we can’t tell the difference and if we’re fake nothing changes for us anyway!
“Come ON
philosophers!!“I CAN’T DO ALL YOUR WORK FOR YOU FOREVER”
The Bet You’re Making by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
“This period of AI hype is among the most intellectually irresponsible and wildly conformist that I’ve ever seen. The stakes are low compared to past media failures, but I can’t remember a moment or story in which the same fundamental failures of common sense and humility were quite so universal. The sheer hubris…”
“You do not, in fact, live in the most important era of human history. You have not been lucky enough to occupy some sort of liminal period for our species. But you have a consciousness system that compels you to think of yourself as uniquely special and thus begs you to believe that you live in special times. The idea that you are somehow not important, the notion that the universe had no special responsibility to produce you, is in a very deep sense unthinkable to you.”
“Do absolutely everything you can to extricate yourself, momentarily, from what the maladaptive evolutionary byproduct we call consciousness is screaming in your ear, and ask yourself: which of these two stories is more likely?”
I.e. You are not special living in special times; you’re just another heartbeat, alive for a few decades, and then gone. OR. You are part of what will be considered to be the inflection point of human history. Not only are you alive at the right time, but you are part of the exact right class in the exact right society who’s going to benefit from the “[…] new technology [that] has emerged, and those who stand to make billions off of it are telling you […]” to believe the latter is true.
How prompt injection attacks hijack today’s top-end AI – and it’s tough to fix (an interview with Simon Willison) by Thomas Claburn (The Register)
““OpenAI and Anthropic, these companies all want a fix for this because they’re selling a product. They’re selling an API. They want developers to be able to build cool things on their API. And that product is a lot less valuable if it’s difficult to build against it securely.””
““People are super excited, and I’m excited, about this idea of expanding models by giving them access to tools,” said Willison. “But the moment you give them access to tools, the stakes in terms of prompt injection goes sky high because now an attacker could email my personal assistant and say, ‘Hey Marvin, delete all of my email.’””
““That’s when prompt injection gets so much more complicated to even reason about,” he said, “because I could give you an output that I know is going to be summarized and I could try and make sure that the summary itself will have a prompt injection attack and that will then attack the next level along the chain.” “Just thinking about that makes me dizzy, quite frankly,” he continued. “How on Earth am I supposed to reason about a system where this sort of malicious prompt might make it into the system at some point, and then go through multiple layers of the system, potentially affecting things along the way? It’s really complicated.”
““And this is a really depressing thing because, oh my god, I feel like I’m within a month of having my own Jarvis from the Ironman movies, except if my Jarvis locks my house for anyone who tells it to, then that was a bad idea.””
Cite Your Sources, AI by Jim Nielsen
Citing Chris Coyier,
“Google should be encouraging and fighting for the open web. But now they’re like, actually we’re just going to suck up your website, put it in a blender with all other websites, and spit out word smoothies for people instead of sending them to your website.”
Introduction to ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs by Khalid Abuhakmeh (JetBrains Blog)
“[…] the ASP.NET Core MVC approach can typically detach the structural definitions of your application from the actual code you write. With global filters, model binders, and middleware, this complexity can lead developers to introduce subtle yet frustrating bugs.”
“[…] applications built with Minimal APIs can easily fit into a single file, expressing the functionality in one easy-to-read place. Some developers prefer this explicitness to ASP.NET Core MVC’s sprawl of controllers, models, and views.”
“If you’re starting with Minimal APIs, you’ll make many decisions that you might not have to with ASP.NET Core MVC. There’s freedom in choice, but it can sometimes feel like a burden. Where do you put your models and services? How do you refactor filters? Where should you define routes? The dizzying amount of choices likely means that you’ll see many Minimal API apps looking dramatically different from each other, while MVC is a standard and recognizable approach. These are certainly not showstoppers in adopting Minimal APIs, but you should be mindful of them.”
I’ve read about text-formatting algorithms and how they have different balancing policies to avoid pathological formatting, like ending too many lines in a row with a hyphen. I’ve never heard about trying to avoid something like this, though.
If you can’t see it, look for the word “declarations” at the start of six consecutive lines, or seven of eight lines by the end of the relatively long sentence. I’m not there’s any algorithm that would foresee something like this, to say nothing of being able to do anything about it.
This is a fantastic talk that talks about local-first software, treating offline clients as “high latency” clients—with latency measured in days, weeks, or months rather than milliseconds or seconds. Of course, the local-first approach needs to work with CRDTs (which I’ve written about a few times) to sync offline documents when they finally come online.
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself? by sriram_malhar (Hacker News)
“My MIL is 93, and the only tech she can really deal with is turning on the radio and TV and changing channels.
“She is fond of music from old classics (from the 60's and earlier), so I hooked up a Raspberry PI with an FM transmitter and created her own private radio station. She tells me what songs she likes and I create different playlists that get broadcast on her station. It preserves the surprise element of radio, and there is nothing in there she doesn’t like.
“The tiny FM transmitter is surprisingly powerful. Her neighbours (of similar vintage) are very happy too, so their requests have also started coming in :)”
Start your morning with David Byrne and his amazing band doing everything better than everyone else.
Published by marco on 1. May 2023 22:10:35 (GMT-5)
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.
A well-constructed if utterly predictable movie with some standout performances. It’s a bit too saccharine for me, but it wasn’t over-the-top. It’s refreshing to see a movie for children that doesn’t look like a cookie-cutter Pixar CGI or Disney cartoon. It’s a slower, nicer kind of movie with longer sections of peaceful life and only a few frenetic sections, at the end.
Paddington (Ben Wishaw) is living with his family in London. He wants to give his aunt a present for her 100th birthday. He finds a popup book of London at the shop of Mr Gruber (Jim Broadbent), but he can’t afford it. So, Paddington finds several successive jobs, which her performs with only modest success, although everyone’s always happy with the jolly little bear.
Phoenix (Hugh Grant) is a local actor with a lot of bills and a lot of money problems, at the tail end of his career. He plots to steal the popup book because he knows that the author had hidden clues in it that will lead him to a treasure hidden in London somewhere. As he’s stealing the book, Paddington tries to apprehend him, but ends up being arrested, tried, and imprisoned for the crime himself. In prison, he meets Knuckles (Brendan Gleeson) as well as many other inmates, all of whom he befriends with his innocent, sweet manner.
The Browns continue to try to vindicate Paddington, getting closer and closer to Phoenix, whom they now strongly suspect is behind the subsequent crimes and heists in which he breaks into buildings to get the clues hidden there. He seems to have gone a bit squirrelly and spends considerable time in his attic, talking to costumes stored on mannequins as if they were real people. Grant is quite good here.
Paddington breaks out of prison with Knuckles and two others. Though they originally broke out together to prove Paddington’s innocence, they others quickly reveal that they’d just like to flee the country instead and that Paddington should come with them. He refuses, electing to clear his name instead.
Paddington and the Browns end up at Paddington Station (of course), where Phoenix boards the circus train that holds the calliope that he has determined contains the treasure. He has the secret code—a sequence of musical notes—that he has enter in order to reveal the treasure. Paddington interrupts him before he can abscond with it. There is a lot of hijinks involving two parallel-running trains with Phoenix eventually unhitching Paddington’s car and derailing it off a bridge and into a river.
Knuckles and co. had meanwhile turned their plane around and come to Paddington’s rescue. Paddington falls into a coma, from which he awakes only days later—on Aunt Lucy’s birthday. He never managed to get her the book, so he has no present. The Browns—as well as the rest of the neighborhood—had flown Aunt Lucy in, so she did get to see London—and her nephew—after all.
To round out the happy endings, Knuckles and co. are exonerated, while Phoenix ends up in prison, but has a captive audience for his incredibly campy one-man show.
Puss (Antonio Banderas) has used up eight of his nine lives. Because he can’t afford his high-risk lifestyle anymore, he retires to a home for cats run by a Mama Luna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). She will not be important to this movie in the least. Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears, Mama (Olivia Colman), Papa (Ray Winstone), and Baby (Samson Kayo) track him to this home, but think that he is dead because they find the grave where he’d buried his costume.
In the home, Perrito (Harvey Guillén) befriends Puss. Perrito is an irrepressible chihuahua with a heart of gold posing as a cat. Puss, having heard that Goldilocks is on a mission to get the last wish from a wishing star, heads off on one last mission to get his allotment of nine lives back. He heads off to Big Jack Horner’s (John Mulaney) house, where the map to the star can be found. Perrito accompanies him. Along the way, they meet Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek).
All the while, Puss is threatened by Wolf (Wagner Moura), who is actually Death incarnate, but it’s hard to tell how much he’s real and how much he’s in Puss’s mind.
The three adventurers are now squared off against Goldilocks and the three bears, as well as Jack Horner and his baker’s dozen. The starmap shows a different path to the wishing star depending on who is holding it. Most of the characters are presented with a miserable path, but Perrito sees only sunshine and lollipops because he’s a truly good soul.
Goldi is conflicted about how to share the wish, should she and the bears get it, as is Puss, who wants to get his nine lives back, especially because Wolf is constantly terrorizing and terrifying him. The bears end up saving Goldi, who ends up saving her brother. Kitty traps Horner in his back of tricks. Puss learns humility and avoids Death’s kiss that way—Death realizes that this is not the same arrogant being who’d disdained his many previous lives.
Horner eats a cake to grow to even more prodigious dimensions, allowing him to escape his bag and almost get to the last wish. But Perrito distracts him long enough for the others to destroy the map, and thus, the star, taking Horner with it. Everyone else lived happily ever after.
This is definitely a movie from the Shrek universe. It’s not nearly as quiet or serene as Paddington 2 was, but it’s much funnier. It’s also considerably more frenetic, with the first ten minutes feeling like it was made exclusively for people with ADHD.
See my review from just over a year ago. My opinion is unchanged.
The only addition I would make is that the news in this movie is refreshingly honest. They actually show the bodies from the a slaughter where the bugs outmatched the humans, wiping out 100,000 humans in one hour. There is no way that would ever happen today, no way they would show film of shredded corpses, no way they would admit that they’d done anything wrong, that they’d underestimated the enemy. The film failed to acknowledge the media environment of the time.
Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is in the Hitler Youth. He thinks he can see Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi). He is at a camp for with many other youth, training. He is given a rabbit to kill to prove that he’s not a coward. He tries to free it, but the older boys grab it, snap its neck, and throw it into the woods, to the applause of all the other children.
His imaginary friend Adolf is back and builds him back up, telling him that a rabbit is a hero, not a coward. He encourages Jojo to run back to camp, where the other children are doing an exercise with a potato-masher grenade. He grabs it, runs off with it, throws it, it bounces of a tree, and lands at his feet. It explodes, knocking him off his feet, out of the camp, and nearly taking one of his eyes.
His mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) picks him up from the hospital and takes him home. She takes him back to the camp organizers, where she makes them take care of him while she works. Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson) run the place; they give him a job to do distributing propaganda.
He returns home from his first day to discover a girl hiding in his attic—his mother is harboring a Jew named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie). Jojo and Adolf are forced to bargain with her because she’s a slippery eel. He confronts his mother, but she pretends not to understand. Johannes (Jojo) must come to terms with this situation.
Jojo is at physical therapy and asks Klenzendorf and Rahm, who give him spectacularly terrible but utterly hilarious advice. The characters and settings are all very quirky, very Wes Anderson. Jojo decides to take up writing a book about Jews, with Elsa’s input as the primary material. Jojo is extremely rude to his mother, but it’s quite funny. He provokes her into pretending to be his father. She puts on a whole show where she plays both roles—father and mother. It’s quite good. Johansson is a revelation.
Elsa and Jojo continue to get to know each other. Elsa tells him of Rilke; he and Adolf look him up in the library. Jojo writes a pretend-letter from Nathan (Elsa’s fiancé) wherein he breaks up with her, hurting her feelings, against her will. Jojo feels bad and reads her another letter, wherein Nathan takes her back.
Jojo spends a day with his mother. His mother is a free spirit, against the war. She wants to dance. “Tanzen ist was für Menschen, die nicht arbeiten.” Elsa starts to “help” Jojo write his book, telling him all sorts of fairy tales about Jews. He’s really quite brainwashed, just shocking. Adolf is getting a bit suspicious of Jojo’s relationship with Elsa. Jojo finally sees his old friend Yorki (Archie Yates), who has promoted himself to “soldier”. Jojo is walking around in a homemade robot costume, collecting batteries for Hitler.
“Elsa: Du bist kein Nazi.
Jojo: Ehm, ich stehe total auf Hakenkreuze. Ist ein ziemlich deutliches Zeichen.”
A crew of Gestapo show up, headed up by Deertz (Stephen Merchant). As they’re about to toss the place, Klenzendorf shows up and allays some suspicions, but they continue to search the place. They end up in his room, which is heralded for being absolutely bedecked in Nazi paraphernalia, but Deertz notices that Jojo is missing his knife. Elsa comes to his rescue, playing Inge, Jojo’s sister. She’s asked to provide papers and she’s hardcore ready for all of their questions. She gets her birthday wrong, but Klenzendorf does not betray her. They’ll be back—and then what? Jojo is in a bad spot.
Hitler is not happy with Jojo. he lets loose with an absolutely amazing tirade,
“Hitler: So langsam hege ich Zweifel an deiner Loyalität gegenüber mir und der Partei.
“Du nennst dich einen Patrioten? Aber wo sind die Beweise?
“Der deutsche Soldat wurde aus Notwendigkeit geboren. Deutschland ist abhängig von der
Leidenschaft dieser jungen Männer. Von ihrer Leidenschaft und Bereitschaft, fürs Vaterland zu fallen, trotz der vergeblichen Anstrengungen der alliierten Kriegsprofiteure, die ihre schlecht vorbereiteten Truppen tapsig in die Wolfshöhle schicken.“Und nur dienstbeflissene Männer, die standhaft sind im Angesicht des Feindes … werden sich auf ewig einbrennen in das deutsche Gedächtnis.
“Und du musst entscheiden, ob du in Erinnerung bleiben oder spurlos verschwinden möchtest … wie ein erbärmliches Sandkorn in einer Wüste der Bedeutungslosigkeit.
“Einfach ausgedrückt: Krieg deinen Scheiß auf die Reihe und setze Prioritäten.”
He walks through town and finds his mother hanging from the gallows in the town square. He tries to take revenge on Elsa, but cannot. With his mother dead, he is forced to forage for wood and food on his own. The war is going poorly for Germany; the enemy approaches. Elsa and Jojo have only each other now.
Jojo meets Yorki again as the city is being attacked by,
“Yorki: Die Russen, Jojo. Sie kommen. Und die Amerikaner von der anderen Seite. Und England und China und Afrika und Indien. Die ganze Welt kommt.
Jojo: Und wie schlagen wir uns?
Yorki: Furchtbar schlecht. Unsere einzigen Freunde sind die Japaner. Und ganz unter uns, die sehen nicht sehr arisch aus.”
“Yorki: Die Russen sind da draußen. Die sind die Schlimmsten von allen. Ich hab gehört, die essen Babys und haben Sex mit Hunden. Die Engländer machen das auch. Wir müssen sie aufhalten, bevor sie uns essen und all unsere Hunde vögeln.”
The Allies take the city. Klenzendorf is captured, as is Jojo. Klenzendorf pretends that Jojo is a Jew so that the Allies send him home instead of assassinating him with the others. Interesting that the Allies are considered capable of murdering children just because they’re Germans.
Back at home, Jojo lies to Elsa that Germany won the war. He doesn’t want here to leave. He relatively quickly sees that he cannot do this and lets her know that her lover is waiting for her in Paris. Elsa tells him that her lover died of a disease a year ago. They slowly emerge from the apartment, with Elsa discovering that the Americans have taken over the town and that she is free. They do a little shuffle-dance together and strike out toward their future.
I saw it in German. It was amazing in German, even though the original language was English.
This mini-mockumentary about the 1982 Tour de France was a 39-minute delight.
It was packed with absolute professionals, from the only five remaining riders, Italian Juju Pepe (Orlando Bloom), Nigerian Marty Hass (Andy Samberg when young; Jeff Goldblum when older), Adrian Baton (Freddie Highmore when young and pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man; Julia Ormond when older and in prison for having killed on-site sportscaster Rex Honeycut (James Marsden)—who had learned that, since he’d ridden the whole way with everyone that he was qualified to win the whole race, but upon dying, it became obvious that he had a motor in his frame—because Adrian(a) and Marty had fallen in love, (s)he sacrificed her place on the podium to take out Rex, but accidentally killed him on a rock), Gustav Ditters (John Cena when young; Dolph Lundgren when older), and Slim Robinson (Daveed Diggs when young; Danny Glover when older) to Joe Buck, Nathan Fielder (as Stu Ruckman, the head of the anti-doping agency), Maya Rudolph (as Lucy Flerng, a cycling fan who thinks cyclists are sexy), Kevin Bacon (as Ditmer Klerken, a Dutch guy who got into so much gambling trouble that he solicited $50,000 bribes from every rider who wanted to dope and he’d let them slide through, which is why there were only five riders left after an accident triggered a roid-raging donnybrook that decimated the field), Mike Tyson as himself, Lance Armstrong as himself, who was hilarious in trying to verify that he was being hidden in shadow, but he totally wasn’t, like, the whole time, and, finally, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Adebisi from Oz) as Olusegun Okorocha, who was a Nigerian who hates Marty Hass for claiming that he’s from Africa when he’s really just a lily-white trust-fund, diamond-mine millionaire.
After every other racer had been banned from the race for doping, the remaining five riders realized that they would have to ride as a group, but no-one wanted to pull the others along in the draft. So they rode super-slowly for days. Nine days. Until someone yelled to Gustav that he couldn’t ride fast, so he tore up the Pyrenees faster than anyone had before—faster than any unenhanced person could—so he’s disqualified for doping (which, given that he looked like John Cena, should have been a foregone conclusion). The next day, Juju Pepe’s heart blows out on a climb (á la Marco Pantani, il Pirata) and he glides twelve miles down the hill before he flies off of a cliff.
In the end, Slim, who’d quit the race in the middle to dally with a French milkmaid, returned to the race on his egg-delivery bike to beat Marty Hass by a mile.
This movie is based on a true story about W. Eugene Smith (Johnny Depp), a photographer for Life magazine. He is at the tail-end of his career, wallowing in obscurity and alcohol when a pair of Japanese find him at this squalid apartment. Aileen (Minami) is the translator with whom Gene feels an immediate, reciprocal spark. He agrees to accompany them to Japan on an assignment to photograph and shed light on the devastating health effects of mercury poisoning on Japanese coastal communities that are unfortunate enough to be near the factories of giant conglomerate Chisso.
Gene goes to his editor at Life Magazine Robert Hayes (Bill Nighy), who reluctantly agrees to back him, but only because the world of advertising and journalism has changed so much that he’s having trouble keeping the magazine afloat while retaining any semblance of integrity.
Gene gets to Japan and settles in, taking many pictures and befriending a young man who’s body is twisted into a pretzel, but who is extremely interested in photography. Gene and Aileen sneak into a Chisso hospital where many, many patients are kept under wraps, taking many more pictures. Aileen and Gene grow much closer and become romantically involved. They take part in many protests.
This company is led by a ruthless president Junichi Nojima (Jun Kunimura) who tries to bribe Gene into throwing away his photos. Gene refuses—even though it’s a ton of money. The police start to put pressure on the villagers, breaking up one of their meetings at which they discover that the company is pretending that they’ve all signed a register absolving Chisso of all wrongdoing. Soon after, Gene’s shack by the lake—along with all of his photos—is burned down.
Hayes is pushing Gene to send him something because the deadline is approaching and he’s under a lot of pressure. Gene has starting drinking heavily again—“you’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.”— bereft that he has nothing to send him, that he’s once again failed to live up to a reputation he’d earned when he was a much younger man.
Drunk, Gene calls Hayes, telling him that he’s giving up.
“Gene: Big people hurt little people. Little people get hurt by big people. Same thing here, same thing there.
“Bob: Not okay, Eugene. Not fucking okay! 67% ads ads and I’m losing. Likely I wouldn’t even have my integrity to fall back on in my old age. But I will have yours! Dammit Gene! I will have yours!
“Gene: I’ll tell you what: if there’s any left, I will stuff it into a fucking box and ship it to you.
“Bob: I don’t know how many more issues I’m gonna be able to publish, but one of them is going to have the most important photographic essay of the last 30 years or I will personally fly out there and kick you pathetic, whinging ass.
“The kids in the office, Gene, the special ones? They don’t look up to me. They look up to you. Because you matter.
“Just bring me the story, okay? Bring the story home.”
In a last-ditch effort, Gene throws himself on the mercy of the village, asking them whether he can take pictures of them in their homes, that he needs something in order to tell the world their story. They agree.
There is a large protest, with 500 people, on the day of a board meeting. Several of the villagers are inside, to redress their grievances directly. Nojima seems contrite, they seem to touch him. The leader Mitsuo (Hiroyuki Sanada) ends up sitting cross-legged on the director’s table while his friend, a fisherman, tells his tale. Nojima asks for a moment to consult with his CFO. They regret that they can do absolutely nothing. They leave as one of the villagers tries to kill himself by slitting his wrists.
Outside, at the protest, several men beat Gene within an inch of his life. In the hospital, a man from the village—seemingly the one who’d been involved in burning down Gene’s lab—hands him an envelope. Gene’s hands are bandaged and he can’t see what it is. When Aileen arrives, she discovers that it’s all of the negatives from Gene’s lab—the man had rescued them before burning everything down. He saw how honorably Gene had acted with his mother and offered this as his apology.
Back at the village, and still sorely injured, Gene and Aileen take the iconic photo of a mother bathing her exceedingly deformed boy. (Wikipedia)
Gene sends his photos to a long-suffering Hayes. Luckily, this was during the 70s, when it was literally impossible to fake photos like this. Chisso had no choice but accept that their story was out, out of Japan, into the world.
“Nojima: We have to pay. Somehow, we will have to find a way. We must.”
Unfortunately, they never did. As the end credits put it,
“[…] Chisso Corporation nor the Japenese government has upheld the moral and financial essence of this deal.
“In 2013, the Japanese Prime Minister declared that Japan had recovered from mercury pollution, denying the existence of the the tens of thousands of victims who continue to suffer today.”
Gene and Aileen would be married until his death in 1978.
Johnny Depp is nearly unrecognizable—except for his voice, as usual—and does a fantastic job. The other actors are equally impressive.
This is not a great movie, but it’s gotten more relevant with each passing year. The scenario it describes is completely impossible, but the global situation, almost 20 years later, is even more dire than when the film was made.
I’ve reviewed the film before, in 2017.
This is a live performance filmed on a single-room set that is the cabin of a long-haul He3 transporter piloted by Max (Yuri Lowenthal) and crewed by Tommie (Yasmine Al-Bustami). Max is the old hand, expert in keeping an old ship running. Tommie is the young genius, with school smarts but no real experience. Max puts her through her paces and they learn to function as a crew. Both of the actors are fantastic. It’s almost hard to believe that it was all done in one take.
The plot is basically Max showing Tommie how things work out in space with underpowered and ancient equipment, as well as how tough things are when you’re not rich and required to kowtow to giant corporations. Tommie inadvertently loads a virus into the ship’s systems when she connects her music player to the main computer—even after Max told her not to.
They discuss their various personality deficiencies and how they lead to their relationship problems. Max is a pilot whose painter husband Mark (Marc Anthony Samuel) doesn’t have much patience left for his constant absences. Tommie is a bit robotic and doesn’t know how to address her boyfriend Sebastian’s (David Blue) emotional needs. They also occasionally communicate with people back on their space-station home-base, like Lily (Natalie Whittle) and Deepi (Nardeep Khurmi), so it’s not just the two of them in the cabin of a spaceship.
As they load up with their cargo of He3, they enter a storm of space-junk deliberately placed in their path by rebels. Their ship is holed, they fix it, and then Max has to do an EVA to try to save the ship. He and Deepi manage to get the ship back on course, but he’s apparently blown away from the ship. This, however, turns out not to be the case, as we get a flash-forward to Deepi piloting the ship with a Russian, seemingly unperturbed. Max and Mark show up for visit and they all have a joyous reunion. The end.
All of the episodes are available on YouTube.
The first season is six episodes that takes place in 1485 England, in the time of King Richard III (Peter Cook). His son Richard IV (Brian Blessed) is the luckiest man alive, making incredibly ill-considered decisions and somehow always ending up ahead.
Richard IV’s youngest son Edmund (Rowan Atkinson) is the eponymous Blackadder, scheming to become king before his brother Harry, Prince of Wales (Robert East) can. He is joined by his “crew”: Baldrick (Tony Robinson), a bondsman whose family has been bonded for as many generations as he can remember, and Percy (Tim McInnerny), a twit of the highest order and some form of lesser nobility that allows him to dress much better than Baldrick, but still be mostly destitute.
They have a few adventures, most of which end badly for Edmund, as his reach tends to far exceed his grasp. Harry, on the other hand, sees his fortunes rise continually as a result of Blackadder’s machinations.
I was not so impressed with this season, as the humor is quite dated and relatively low-brow—it makes much hay of women and gays being obviously inferior or strange, which, while obviously “of the time”, is just not funny—and it relies too much the moronic facial expressions that Atkinson would go on to use to even greater success and acclaim in Mr. Bean. I’m not a fan—and never have been—but the audience laugh-track seemed to love it.
Everyone dies in the end because of Edmund’s negligence—including him.
The second season revives Blackadder in the Elizabethan era, following the antics and life of Edmund, Lord Blackadder, who is the great-grandson of the original. He is a different creature than his forebear, in that he is dashing, eloquent, and intelligent. Like his forebear, though, he is still constantly scheming for income and prestige. He is quite cynical and very dryly humorous, which ingratiates him to Queen Elizabeth I (Miranda Richardson) and sets him directly at odds with the Queen’s courtier Lord Melchett (Stephen Fry).
Baldrick and Percy reprise their roles as well, largely unchanged in position and class from their season-one incarnations, although Baldrick is now excruciatingly stupid instead of the most intelligent of the trio. They have adventures wherein Blackadder nearly dies, nearly gains an incredible fortune, nearly loses everything he has, etc. etc. Hugh Laurie appears in the final two episodes as a German spy/kidnapper who tries to usurp the Queen’s throne—and finally manages it, after killing absolutely everyone else in the final minutes of the season.
I liked this season much better than season one. Queen Elizabeth and Melchett were somewhat underutilized in that they were accurately depicted as utter morons with God-like powers to kill and disenfranchise, which was both a pity and occasionally annoying. Overall, though, a much stronger effort than season one.
Published by marco on 29. Apr 2023 00:00:17 (GMT-5)
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages [1], and occasional annotations [2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Yellen lays out economic war against China by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“In pursuit of its objectives, the US has imposed a range of sanctions aimed at crippling hi-tech development in China on the grounds it affects national security.
““Even as our targeted actions may have economic impacts, they are motivated solely by our concerns about our security and values. Our goal is not to use these tools to gain competitive economic advantage.”
“At another point in the speech, she said the measures imposed against China were not designed to “stifle China’s economic and technological modernisation.” And that even though “these policies may have economic impacts they are driven by straightforward national security considerations”, “we will not compromise on these concerns, even when they force trade-offs with our economic interests.”
“There are two points to be made here. The first is that national security, the preparation for war, trumps everything and the technology bans are also very much directed to gain economic advantage, which is inextricably tied in with military objectives.”
Who is Yellin talking to? The Chinese are not so gaslit as to believe this bullshit.
“The actions against Huawei mean that the very future of the company is at stake, according to its founder. And with a new range of technology restrictions imposed by the US last October the whole Chinese chip industry is threatened as the methods developed against Huawei are applied more broadly.”
Huawei was the first domino to fall.
“The US, she said, sought a healthy relationship with China so long as Beijing “plays by international rules,” that is, rules set and enforced by the US. And if it does not, there is the threat of the mailed fist to which Yellen referred regarding Ukraine.
““China’s ‘no limits’ partnership and support for Russia is a worrisome indication that it is not serious about ending the war. It is essential that China and other countries do not provide Russia with material support or assistance with sanctions evasion. We will continue to make the position of the United States extremely clear to Beijing and companies in its jurisdiction. The consequences of any violation would be severe.””
Just breathtaking.
I’m reminded how thankful I am that women are now at the helm and we no longer have to endure the madness and war of a male-dominated world.
““In certain cases,” Yellen said, “China has … exploited its economic power to retaliate against and coerce vulnerable trading partners. For example, it has used boycotts of specific goods as punishment in response to diplomatic actions by other countries. China’s pretext for these actions is often commercial. But its real goal is to impose consequences on choices that it dislikes – and to force sovereign governments to capitulate to its political demands.””
No doubt they’ve done this. But the U.S.—the country for which Yellen works as head of its central bank—does it much, much more. It’s just shocking to see her say things like this without a hint of humility or shame. She doesn’t even seem to be aware of the irony.
The U.S. media deemed her speech an “olive branch” to China. Ludicrous.
Macron’s Europe by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“On the foreign side, Macron has proven a well-oiled weathervane, and thus a great disappointment over the years. What he says on Monday may not match what he says or does on Wednesday. But what he has said on various Mondays during his presidency includes some very worthy ideas: NATO has lost its way, Europeans share a common destiny with Russia, Europe must reclaim its autonomy and take care of its security itself. Macron, indeed, reminds me of Donald Trump on these matters. It is a comparison Macron would detest and Trump would not understand, but both are capable of articulating bold foreign policy initiatives while lacking the character to give them substance, win acceptance for them and put them into practice.”
“Macron fairly leapt into all this as soon as he disembarked in Beijing on April 6. In his arrival speech at the Great Hall of the People, he appealed directly to Xi to exert his influence in Moscow. “I know I can count on you to bring Russia back to reason and everyone back to the negotiating table,” Macron said. The cause, he added, was “a durable peace that respects internationally recognized borders.””
This is nearly exactly what Baerbock said, as detailed in the previous article.
“[…] von der Leyen was not invited to Guangdong. Xi, we can confidently infer, wants to deal with European nations such as France and leaders such as Macron rather than the rigidly neoliberal European Union and ideologues such as the European Commission’s current president.”
“Whatever you may think of Macron, he went to Beijing to stand for an autonomous Europe that determines for itself its ties with the non–West’s premier power. It is net-positive, as I say. Europe’s relations with China continue to hang in the balance, and good enough for now.”
Taking Back Our Universities From Corporate Apparatchiks by Chris Hedges (SubStack)
“Rutgers, like most American universities, operates as a corporation. Senior administrators, who often have a Master of Business Administration degree (MBA) with little or no experience in higher education, along with sports coaches who have the potential to earn the university money, are highly compensated while thousands of poorly paid educators and staff are denied job security and benefits. Adjunct faculty and graduate workers are often forced to apply for Medicaid. They frequently take second jobs teaching at other colleges, driving for Uber or Lyft, working as cashiers, delivering food for Grubhub or DoorDash, walking dogs, house sitting, waiting on tables, bartending and living four or six to an apartment or camping out on a friend’s sofa. This inversion of values is destroying the nation’s educational system.”
“Union leaders, who shut down 70 percent of the university’s classes, are demanding increased pay, better job security, and health benefits for part-time lecturers and graduate assistants. They’re also asking the university to freeze rents on housing for students and staff and extend graduate research funding for one year for students who were affected by the pandemic. Tenured professors, in an important show of solidarity, agreed not to accept a deal unless the lowest paid academic workers’ demands were addressed.”
“Rutgers laid off five percent of its workforce during the pandemic, throwing many into extreme distress, even as the university’s net financial position — total assets minus total liabilities — “increased by over half a billion dollars to $2.5 billion, a 26.7 percent rise in a single year,””
“Wealthy donors are assured that the neoliberal ideology that is ravaging the country will not be questioned by academics fearful of losing their positions. The rich are lauded. The working poor, including those employed by the university, are forgotten.”
“[…] there is the rank hypocrisy, with universities such as Rutgers purporting to defend values of equality, diversity and justice, while grinding its teaching and service staff into the dirt.”
“The nation’s universities have been deformed into playgrounds for billionaire hedge fund managers and corporate donors. Harvard University will rename its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after the billionaire hedge fund executive and right-wing Republican donor Kenneth Griffin in honor of his $300 million donation.”
“A decade ago, Harvard renamed the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research after Glenn Hutchins , a private equity oligarch who donated $15 million to the institute. Harvard, to save face, said the famed Du Bois Institute was subsumed into the new entity, but the fact that Du Bois, one of America’s greatest scholars and intellectuals, would have his name replaced by a white equity mogul, lays bare the priorities of Harvard and most colleges and universities.”
“The fundamental aim of an education, to teach people how to think critically, to grasp and understand the systems of power that dominate our lives, to foster the common good, to construct a life of meaning and purpose, are sidelined […]”
““It sucks that we don’t get compensated for the things we love, the things that change people’s lives, that change the world.””
The capitalist maw inhales, but excretes without digesting.
Yes. That sucks.
A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation by Jacob Siegel (Tablet)
“When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.”
“The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.”
“It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.”
“If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind.”
“The phenomenon was not unique to Trump. Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist candidate in 2016, was also seen as a dangerous threat by the ruling class. But whereas the Democrats successfully sabotaged Sanders, Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, which meant that he had to be dealt with by other means.”
“The internet, writes Yasha Levine in his history of the subject, Surveillance Valley, was also “an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. Some even dreamed of creating a sort of early warning radar for human societies: a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them in much the same way that traditional radar did for hostile aircraft.””
“Weapons created to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda were turned against Americans who entertained incorrect thoughts about the president or vaccine boosters or gender pronouns or the war in Ukraine.”
“The fight against ISIS morphed into the fight against Trump and “Russian collusion,” which morphed into the fight against disinformation. But those were just branding changes; the underlying technological infrastructure and ruling-class philosophy, which claimed the right to remake the world based on a religious sense of expertise, remained unchanged.”
“[…] the underlying technological infrastructure and ruling-class philosophy, which claimed the right to remake the world based on a religious sense of expertise, remained unchanged. The human art of politics, which would have required real negotiation and compromise with Trump supporters, was abandoned in favor of a specious science of top-down social engineering that aimed to produce a totally administered society. For the American ruling class, COIN replaced politics as the proper means of dealing with the natives.”
“It is a supreme irony that the very people who a decade ago led the freedom agenda for other countries have since pushed the United States to implement one of the largest and most powerful censorship machines in existence under the guise of fighting disinformation.”
“These people—politicians, first and foremost—saw (and presented) internet freedom as a positive force for humanity when it empowered them and served their interests, but as something demonic when it broke down those hierarchies of power and benefited their opponents.”
“As heads of the government’s internet policy, they had helped the tech companies build their fortunes on mass surveillance and evangelized the internet as a beacon of freedom and progress while turning a blind eye to their flagrant violations of antitrust statutes. In return, the tech companies had done the unthinkable—not because they had allowed Russia to “hack the election,” which was a desperate accusation thrown out to mask the stench of failure, but because they refused to intervene to prevent Donald Trump from winning.”
“A classified report by the House Intelligence Committee on the creation of the ICA detailed just how unusual and nakedly political it was. “It wasn’t 17 agencies, and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment,” a senior intelligence official who read a draft version of the House report told the journalist Paul Sperry . “It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan handpicked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.””
“In the final two weeks of the Obama administration, the new counter-disinformation apparatus scored one of its most significant victories: the power to directly oversee federal elections that would have profound consequences for the 2020 contest between Trump and Joe Biden.”
“Sharpen the focus on that timeline, and here’s what it shows: Horne joined Twitter one month before the launch of ASD, just in time to advocate for protecting a group run by the kind of power brokers who held the keys to her professional future.”
“The seamless transition from the war on terror to the war on disinformation was thus, in large measure, simply a matter of professional self-preservation. But it was not enough to sustain the previous system; to survive, it needed to continually raise the threat level.”
“As journalist Glenn Greenwald observed, George W. Bush’s “‘with-us-or-with-the-terrorists’ directive provoked a fair amount of outrage at the time but is now the prevailing mentality within U.S. liberalism and the broader Democratic Party.””
“Watts is a career veteran of military and government service who seems to share the belief, common among his colleagues, that once the internet entered its populist stage and threatened entrenched hierarchies, it became a grave danger to civilization.”
“There is no reason to question the motivations of the staffers at these NGOs, most of whom were no doubt perfectly sincere in the conviction that their work was restoring the “underpinning of a healthy society.” But certain observations can be made about the nature of that work. First, it placed them in a position below the billionaire philanthropists but above hundreds of millions of Americans whom they would guide and instruct as a new information clerisy by separating truth from falsehood, as wheat from chaff.”
“The modern “fact-checking” industry, for instance, which impersonates a well-established scientific field, is in reality a nakedly partisan cadre of compliance officers for the Democratic Party.”
“How is it that so many people could suddenly become experts in a field—“disinformation”—that not 1 in 10,000 of them could have defined in 2014? Because expertise in disinformation involves ideological orientation, not technical knowledge.”
“Berenson was kicked off Twitter after tweeting that mRNA vaccines don’t “stop infection. Or transmission.” As it turned out, that was a true statement. The health authorities at the time were either misinformed or lying about the vaccines’ ability to prevent the spread of the virus. In fact, despite claims from the health authorities and political officials, the people in charge of the vaccine knew this all along. In the record of a meeting in December 2020, Food and Drug Administration adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated , “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.””
“In the United States, the DHS produced a video in 2021 encouraging “children to report their own family members to Facebook for ‘disinformation’ if they challenge US government narratives on Covid-19.””
“It may be impossible to know exactly what effect the ban on reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptops had on the 2020 vote, but the story was clearly seen as threatening enough to warrant an openly authoritarian attack on the independence of the press. The damage to the country’s underlying social fabric, in which paranoia and conspiracy have been normalized, is incalculable.”
“The latitude inherent in the concept of disinformation enabled the claim that preventing electoral sabotage required censoring Americans’ political views, lest an idea be shared in public that was originally planted by foreign agents.”
…instead of those planted by American agents.
“The pattern in these cases is that the ruling class justifies taking liberties with the law to save the planet but ends up violating the Constitution to hide the truth and protect itself.”
“The ultimate goal would be to recalibrate people’s experiences online through subtle manipulations of what they see in their search results and on their feed. The aim of such a scenario might be to prevent censor-worthy material from being produced in the first place.”
They’re most of the way there, at least with most people. Most don’t participate politically or engage intellectually at all.
“So the problem of disinformation is also a problem of democracy itself—specifically, that there’s too much of it. To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely.”
“Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the news that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter by declaring that preserving free speech online was “Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.” According to Reich, censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.””
He really is useless. What an absolute shitheel. Does he really believe that statement? Who knows? He didn’t take it back. It’s still out there. He must stand by it.
“The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony, on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance—surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.”
If Jails Can’t Care for Prisoners, Prisoners Should Walk Free by Ted Rall
“If government refuses or cannot afford to provide for the basic needs of people accused or convicted of a crime, which obviously includes access to healthcare and sanitary conditions, it should not be in the imprisonment business. We need a federal law that allows a prisoner suffering inhumane conditions, and their family members and lawyers, with a right to file an emergency ex parte petition for immediate release.”
“That’s the case where I live in New York, at the city jail on Riker’s Island. After “years of mismanagement and neglect”—the Department of Corrections’ own spokesman’s words—a 2021 New York Post exposé found “as many as 26 men stuffed body to body in single cells where they were forced to relieve themselves inside plastic bags and take turns sleeping on the fetid floors.” Despite an annual $1.2 billion budget, “Dozens of men crammed together for days in temporary holding cells amid a pandemic. Filthy floors sullied with rotten food, maggots, urine, feces and blood. Plastic sheets for blankets, cardboard boxes for beds and bags that substituted for toilets.” Nothing has improved since.”
This is Riker’s Island, a jail, which houses people in pre-trial detention. They have not been convicted of a crime. It would be bad enough to treat criminals like this, but they are treating innocent people like this, as well. (Innocent until proven guilty.)
Roaming Charges: Nipped and Tuckered by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“It doesn’t get much more obscene than this. A couple of weeks ago, Gentner Drummond, the Attorney General for the state of Oklahoma, asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate the conviction of death row inmate Richard Glossip. Citing the misleading testimony of the main witness in the case, a mentally-disturbed man named Justin Sneed, who actually committed the murder, Drummond told the court: “The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness.” Drummond wasn’t alone. The prosecutor in Glossip’s case also wants the conviction overturned, as do many members of the Oklahoma legislature, fearing the state is on the verge of putting to death an innocent man. But the appeals court swiftly rejected the request, coldly saying: “Glossip has exhausted every avenue and we have found no legal or factual ground which would require relief in this case.” The appeals court’s denial was followed by the OK Board of Pardon and Parole decision to deny a clemency request for Glossip on a 2-2 vote. His execution date is set for 5/18, unless the Supreme Court intervenes.”
A country with a kangaroo court, a history of obscenely racially biased prosecutions, and chronic understaffing in its courts should not also have the death penalty. It should not also have some of the worst prisons in the world. It’s a carceral state. How can so many people keep turning a blind eye to this? The prosecution allowed the actual killer to be its star witness to put away an innocent man. They “have found no legal or factual ground…” Ridiculous. Criminal. Abhorrent. Immoral.
“Maurice Jimmerson was arrested by police in Albany, Georgia in 2013, along with four other men for a double murder. Two of Jimmerson’s co-defendants were acquitted by a jury in 2017. But Jimmerson has yet to even go trial and has spent the last 10 years in the Dougherty County Jail. At this point, Jimmerson, who has pleaded not guilty, doesn’t even have a lawyer, due to a shortage of public defenders in rural Georgia. Maurice was 22 when he was arrested. He’s now 32 and still doesn’t have a trial date.”
So, while Ted Rall is calling for ex parte petitions, there are people in jail for over ten years, awaiting trial. And the courts don’t care.
See the article This Georgia Man Has Been Jailed for 10 Years Without a Trial by Emma Camp (Reason) for more information. It’s a good article, but even the author doesn’t go hard enough.
“When sloppy bureaucracies go unchecked, defendants like Jimmerson—who cannot afford their own lawyers and must rely on public defenders—are in danger of being effectively denied their Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial.”
Is a ten-year wait not long enough to no longer be called speedy? Why characterize the situation as “in danger of”? He’s been denied a speedy trial. His constitutional rights have not been granted. He has a right to redress grievances. Jesus. Let the man out of jail.
Roaming Charges: In the Land of Unfortunate Things by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“To give you a sense of how big of victory the deal was, Dominion Voting Systems has annual revenues of about $14 million a year and they just took Murdoch for $787 million.”
“Dominion walked away more money than they would have probably ended up with after the lengthy and inevitable appeals. There were never going to be any admissions from Fox. Nothing new was going to come out on the stand. It’s not a criminal trial, so there wouldn’t be a “guilty” verdict. They got a huge settlement and set the table for the Smartmatic suit. In most settlements, the discovery is put under seal. Not here. The damning depositions, emails and internal documents are all in the public domain for use in other trials and investigations.”
“When Ginni Thomas worked for the Heritage Foundation, Justice Thomas checked the box “none” on his financial disclosure form for his wife’s income. She’d actually been paid more than $686,000. When the deception was disclosed, Thomas said it was “due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.””
An honest mistake by an honest man.
“Globally, 87% of the children killed by gunfire were shot in the USA.”
“The fruition of Clintonism: Nine of the top 10 wealthiest congressional districts are represented by Democrats, while Republicans now represent most of the poorer half of the country. 64% of congressional districts with median incomes below the national median are now represented by Republicans.”
“Nearly two-thirds of the homes in Norway now have heat pumps, the highest percentage in the world. Since 1990 emissions from home heating have fallen by more than 80%.”
After the Ukraine Documents Leak, Mainstream Media Is Missing the Story by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)
“The leak lays bare the extent of US spying on friends and enemies alike, including the United Nations secretary general. It shows that friendly nations dependent on US largesse have quietly been undermining Washington’s geopolitical interests. It makes clear that the world came far closer to unimaginable catastrophe during last year’s September run-in between British and Russian pilots than we were told at the time. And it confirms that the United States and NATO allies do have boots on the ground in the war-torn country in the form of ninety-seven special forces personnel.”
“The more time you spend thinking and talking about the leaker and whether or not he’s a good person, the less you’re devoting to the substance of the leaks and the official deception and misbehavior they have shed light on.”
“The moves we’ve seen to track down and prosecute this leaker closely mirror the punitive response to the explosive 2021 IRS leak that revealed to the public just how little tax the US ultrarich were paying.”
Child labor returns to the United States: A society moving in reverse by Tom Hall (WSWS)
“A basic litmus test for whether a society is moving forwards or backwards is its treatment of the most vulnerable, including the youth. What emerges in the US, therefore, is a picture of a country moving rapidly in reverse, driven by a deep and intractable economic, political and social crisis.”
“One figure gives an indication of the cumulative results. A young American worker entering a factory earning a starting wage of $16 per hour, as is typical in the auto industry, makes less in real terms than the average production worker did in the United States in 1944. In other words, the entire postwar boom has been reversed for the younger generation.”
“Youth have no future under capitalism. The continued existence of this form of society is predicated upon the cannibalizing of all the social and cultural achievements of the past. In the sense of technical and scientific developments, humanity long ago created the means to eliminate poverty, war, pandemics, environmental destruction and every other social problem. That all of these are re-emerging today with a vengeance is for one reason only: the capitalist profit system.”
Russian Opposition Leader Vladimir Kara-Murza’s Powerful Final Statement to the Court by Ilya Somin (Reason)
“I not repent of any of this, I am proud of it…. I subscribe to every word that I have spoken and every word of which I have been accused by this court. I blame myself for only one thing: that over the years of my political activity, I have not managed to convince enough of my compatriots and enough politicians in the democratic countries of the danger that the current regime in the Kremlin poses for Russia and for the world.”
“I… know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate. When black will be called black and white will be called white; when at the official level it will be recognized that two times two is still four; when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper; and when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognized as criminals.
“This day will come as inevitably as spring follows even the coldest winter. And then our society will open its eyes and be horrified by what terrible crimes were committed on its behalf. From this realization, from this reflection, the long, difficult but vital path toward the recovery and restoration of Russia, its return to the community of civilized countries, will begin.”
I find myself thinking that this eloquent statement could be wistfully made about the U.S. as well.
I’m reading the guy’s Wikipedia page and finding out that he was great friends with John McCain, which makes me immediately suspicious about his actual politics (although his statement above seems pretty above-board and eminently supportable). He was a pallbearer at McCain’s funeral.
Somin continues:
“n the United States, most Americans have come to recognize the historic evils of slavery, segregation, and the oppression of Native Americans. It is entirely possible that a similar transition will occur in Russia in the future. Those who believe that Russians are inherently brutal authoritarians incapable of change should recall the long history of similar statements about Germans and Japanese, among others.”
The highlighted point is a good one, though it’s sad that we have to make it. Also, I would be much less smug than the author in celebrating the degree to which America has acknowledged, learned from, and moved on from its crimes. There are still native-American reservations that are human-rights catastrophes. The war atrocities of the last 25 years are nearly wholly unacknowledged—I just listened to a podcast interview with Ro Khanna where he said—wholly without irony—that the U.S. had never invaded anyone. Also, the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington has only the names of its own soldiers on it—not a single name of any of the millions of South-east Asian victims of that conflict. There are Holocaust museums everywhere, but it’s easy for America to build those—that was Germany’s fuckup. The U.S. is remarkably bad at atonement and learning from its mistakes. It just doesn’t acknowledge them.
Somin has been for the standard outcome for a while, though.
“[…] defeat often helps discredit the ideology of the defeated regime. Putin’s imperialist nationalism is more likely to be discredited in the eyes of Russians if it suffers a decisive defeat in Ukraine. That provides an additional reason to push for such an outcome.”
I don’t think he’s been reading the news. The recently leaked U.S. documents show quite clearly that no-one actually involved in that conflict really believes that this is a serious possibility.
NATO declares “Ukraine will become a member:” A prelude to direct NATO-Russia war by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“Stoltenberg, an unelected military official, effectively pledged NATO to go to war with Russia, a nuclear-armed power, without bothering to inform or ask the public, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the further escalation of the war.”
“Under conditions in which the achievement of the aims set out by Ukraine’s vaunted counteroffensive will require the deployment of air and ground forces, Stoltenberg’s statements remove even the most minimal verbal limitations on US military intervention in the war.”
This is sobering. The recent leaks show that Ukraine will lose ignominiously on its own. NATO declares that it will do anything and everything to help Ukraine. Ergo, NATO is going to war with Russia in Ukraine.
A friend asked me the other day “what about Kamala Harris”?
30 seconds of a Kamala Harris speech (Twitter)
“I think it’s very important—as you have heard from so many incredible leaders—for us at every moment in time & certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist & are present & to be able to contextualize it — to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment — as it relates not only to the past but the future.”
This is absolutely representative of her intellectual capacity and speaking style. I’ve seen a dozen of these over the years. She seems to get utterly lost in her sentences, or literally doesn’t understand what’s she’s saying. Maybe it sounds pithy in her head. It doesn’t. She sounds like a middle-schooler trying to stretch a single index-card worth of material into the five minutes required by the homework assignment. She acts like she didn’t prepare anything—and has absolutely no capacity for speaking extemporaneously. She’s a dodo.
The Press is now also the Police by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“The Times spent a lot of time in its “War Logs” coverage reassuring readers that it was releasing documents “responsibly,” and not upsetting its pals in the Obama administration too too much, but the fact remained that the 2010 Times emphasized the newsworthiness of the leaks, not the crime of leaking. A decade and a half later, Assange is in jail, and the only permitted form of “leaking” in the modern media landscape comes either from the intelligence services themselves, or facsimile organizations like Bellingcat.”
“The press loses its institutional power the moment the public ceases to view it as being separate from government. If politicians aren’t worried about taking a beating in the newspapers, they won’t fear newspapers, and if the public sees that news reports are indistinguishable from party press releases, they’ll eventually skip past media and go straight to the source. That was already happening, but this latest caper is even worse. If the public sees journalists as agents of law enforcement, they’ll literally cross the street to avoid us. The media is in an audience crisis as is. This is a remedy?”
“A profession that once got off on informing the public now seems jazzed by correcting it and punishing its errors of character, like being a “gun enthusiast” or a “gamer,” or trading “offensive” jokes. It’s a short step from playing fact police to appointing oneself the real thing.”
“People hated reporters when they thought we were just politically biased, power-adoring, elitist scum-liars. How low will our reputations sink when “snitch” is added to the mix? By the time these people are finished, we’ll be looking up even to Congress.”
The Cultural Logic of QAnon: The Deformation of the Information Space by Matthew Hannah (CounterPunch)
“Such eruptions of insanity and violence are troubling portents of a new conspiracism pervading online communities.”
What about the global conspiracies? Like the one that Ukraine can win its war, or that Taiwan needs defending, or that working hard matters? Those conspiracies ruin and cost many more lives.
“Thatcher infamously dismissed the notion of society altogether: “They are casting their problems at society” Thatcher admonished the poor, “And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.””
None of that even makes any sense. She’s just babbling, chaining her stock phrases together arbitrarily. Her brain was just as much goo as Reagan’s was.
“Central to the QAnon mythos is a fear of government conspiracies within what is described as the Deep State. Trump himself used the phrase Deep State to refer to forces he perceived as hostile to his presidency such as the Democrats and “Republicans in Name Only.” Of course, Trump’s obsession with the Deep State belies his own expansion of that state to serve his own interests.”
But, just to be clear: the Deep State exists. It’s never been more obvious than now. We’ve been watching it quiver its back fur, trying to shake off annoying ticks, several times over the last few months.
The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model by Christopher Paul, Miriam Matthews (RAND Corporation)
I did not read this article. It is 16 pages long and the parts that I skimmed seem to completely unironically describe all of the tactics used by American media, but saying that the Russians do them, too. That is, they seem to act as if it’s only the Russians doing that and that the exact same things aren’t happening in the U.S. It’s wild because that’s actually the more important thing to focus on, if you’re really concerned about saving American democracy. That is absolutely not what Rand is concerned about, though. That organization has always been about supporting spooks and military.
The Empire Of Hypocrisy by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“So it turns out that after the Hunter Biden laptop leak Tony Blinken contacted his CIA buddy Mike Morell to make it go away, and Morell has now admitted to cooking up the bogus “Russian disinfo” letter from 51 US intelligence insiders to “help Vice President Biden… because I wanted him to win the election.”
“Obama’s acting CIA director just cooly admitting that he used his intelligence connections to orchestrate a psyop to change the outcome of a presidential election completely invalidates anything the US government does under the banner of fighting “election interference”. Keep this glaring hypocrisy in mind as the US government continues churning out indictments and ramping up authoritarian measures in the name of fighting “disinformation” and protecting American “democracy”.”
News Blackout in Effect by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
“It transpires that the infamous incident before the 2020 election in which 50 former intelligence officials signed an open letter declared a New York Post expose about Hunter Biden’s laptop to have the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” was instigated at the behest of the Joe Biden campaign.”
“If the Biden campaign had any role in soliciting former intelligence chiefs to sign the “Disinfo Letter” weeks before a presidential election, how is that less serious than Donald Segretti’s ratfucking, or the “Canuck Letter,” or any of Dick Nixon’s other harebrained schemes? Are they really going with the excuse that Blinken didn’t explicitly say something like “Please cook something up?” Really?”
Episode 285: War, Etc. by True Anon (Patreon)
At about 35:00, Liz says,
“Everybody knows that we’re being gaslit all the time, but rather than just fucking say something, everyone just keeps going along with it, where it’s like… how can this be the strongest labor situation in American history—the economy’s rebounding, doing great—and yet everything feels like shit and everything is really expensive and there’s a massive credit-crunch happening and people can’t get this and people can’t get that. But, it’s like being gaslit constantly. And there’s this weird social attitude. And you see it from different levels, from people whom you talk to on the street, all the way up to your bosses, or people in the government, or people in the journalism profession. I feel it everywhere and it makes me feel fucking insane.”
America, the Single-Opinion Cult by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)
This article starts off with this video clip of AOC and Jen Psaki agreeing with each other that the government should be doing more to control what is available on “broadcast TV” (which is a bit of a bizarre expression to even hear from AOC (Wikipedia), who’s only 33 years old). Jen Psaki (Wikipedia) is 44 years old and was the White House Press Secretary less than a year ago. She was the face of the Biden administration. She was replaced by a gay, black woman. This is just to say that we have a very woke-seeming group of people who check all of the identitarian boxes—AOC is a young latina, Psaki is woman who used to be the face of the most powerful nation on the planet. And, yet, here they sit, enjoying the exact same revolving-door privilege to either work for the media or benefit from its boot-licking to tell the same old story of woefully inadequate authoritarianism that still allows people to hear opinions that differ from their own.
“It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is going. To paraphrase Mencken, you don’t have to think Carlson’s motivations were noble to see that his rhetoric on Ukraine stood out in the current TV environment like a wart on a bald head. The rest of the corporate press, be it left or right, will now be a parade of generals and security experts whose argument won’t be about whether or not the U.S. should be involved in Ukraine, but which party is most committed and whose strategy will lead to Putin’s defeat faster. We are moving back toward an era of two homogeneous messaging landscapes that will intersect on national security issues, with the beaten antiwar left a fading memory and the isolationist right fired, under indictment, or banned.”
“People like AOC can couch these moves in terms of prevention of violence all they want, but it’s just too conspicuous that what’s left of major commercial media also happens to be much engaged in the trumpeting of government messaging, to the point where the people reading the news are government officials.”
“There is no institution like that left in American life. What we have instead is an increasingly pissed-off population that needs to look about eighty results down in every Google search to find its point of view represented. Who thinks that situation is going to hold?”
With Climate Indicators ‘Off the Charts,’ UN Chief Calls Policies of Rich Nations a ‘Death Sentence’ by Kenny Stancil (Scheer Post)
“The World Meteorological Organization warned Friday that climate change indicators are “off the charts,” one day after United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told officials from wealthy countries that their refusal to halt fossil fuel expansion amounts to a civilizational “death sentence” and pleaded with them to urgently decarbonize the global economy.”
“Measured concentrations of the three main heat-trapping gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—have never been higher, and emissions continued to increase in 2022, the WMO points out. Last year’s mean global temperature was 1.15°C above preindustrial levels, and the eight years since 2015 have been the eight hottest on record despite the cooling effects of a rare “triple-dip” La Niña event over the past three years. The return of El Niño conditions in 2023 is expected to exacerbate heating.”
“In addition to ocean warming, a major contributor to rising sea levels is land ice loss from Earth’s glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The rapid melting of glaciers and sea level rise will persist for “thousands of years,” says the WMO, underscoring the importance of slashing planet-heating pollution to protect the billions of people living near coastlines.”
Uncrewed SpaceX rocket Starship explodes after launch by Bryan Dyne (WSWS)
“A press release from SpaceX indicates that the company itself initiated a “flight termination system” after the spacecraft began to tumble off its projected course. The company also claimed that the mission was a “success” despite the “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” a bizarre euphemism for blowing it to bits.”
“The first stage, a booster called Super Heavy, was expected to detach from the second stage, the actual Starship spacecraft, about three-and-a-half minutes into the flight and land in the Gulf of Mexico. When it didn’t, and when Starship began its programmed roll maneuver with the booster still attached, the whole system began flying wildly.
“Video also shows that eight of booster’s 33 Raptor engines failed at some point during the launch, some possibly as early as liftoff. It is possible that debris from the launch pad caused by the launch flew up and struck the rocket, initiating a series of cascading problems that caused certain engines to fail and possibly even prevented booster separation.”
Jesus, what a shitshow.
“[…] while the launch pad wasn’t destroyed, as touted by the company’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk, it will likely be unusable for months. The rocket plume was so strong that it dug out the concrete base of its launch pad and flung debris and dust for miles.”
And of course, they’re doing it on the cheap, bribing to avoid regulations.
“[…] the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world’s first spaceport, built by the Soviet Union in 1955 and now operated by the Russian space agency Roscosmos, is dozens of miles from the nearest city. Both the NASA and Soviet launch sites were built so far away from established residences in part to minimize the type of danger and damage to lives and livelihoods caused by SpaceX’s latest launch.”
Read the whole article, it absolutely looks like SpaceX is just conning the government out of billions of dollars, with no feasible hope of coming anywhere close to achieving its targets.
“Far from exploring the final frontier, space exploration under capitalism has become completely stunted since the years of Apollo. The technology which SpaceX uses is fundamentally the same as that of the Saturn V (more accurately the failed Soviet analog, the N1), despite the colossal scientific advances made over the past 50 years. At the same time, spaceflight has been reduced from a collective effort on a national scale to lurching forward with half measures at the whim of a few individuals.”
Comment on “How much can Duolingo teach us?” by rcarr (Hacker News)
“Duolingo is good, but it is not a fucking miracle worker. If you’re going in expecting to put in two or three lessons a day and then are disappointed that after a year you don’t speak Spanish, you’re completely fucking deluded and it is not Duolingo’s fault. It takes a lot of fucking effort to learn a language and you get what you put into it. I have been using Duolingo for two years to learn Spanish now, and the results have been wonderful. I can read a lot of Spanish texts, I can pick up on a lot of dialogue in tv and movies and I can express quite a few thoughts in Spanish. Am I completely proficient? Probably not − but if I lived in a Spanish speaking country for a few months I think I’d get pretty competent pretty quickly. And the learning I got has cost me a grand total of about £140. I can guarantee that as far as value for money goes, I have gotten way more learning for the money through Duolingo than if I’d have spent the equivalent on human one to one lessons […]”
Science confirms it: The best kimchi is made in traditional clay jars (onggi) by Jennifer Ouellete (Ars Technica)
“The fact that the obggi’s porous walls are permeable to CO2 helps reduce the levels of the gas inside the vessel. Those lower levels, in turn, are favored by the desired lactic acid bacteria, which can proliferate in greater numbers under such conditions. Hu et al. even developed a mathematical model to show how the CO2 was generated and moved through those porous walls.
““Onggi were designed without modern knowledge of chemistry, microbiology, or fluid mechanics, but they work remarkably well,” said co-author Soohwan Kim, a graduate student in Hu’s lab.”
Philosophical Ghostbusters by Corey Muller (Existential Comics)
“The term “supernatural” is kind of funny because by definition it sort of means things that don’t exist. If something exists, it is part of the natural world, in that it can interact with particles via the rules of physics. If ghosts exist, for example, they can’t so much disobey the laws of physics, because scientists would simply adjust the rules of physics to match what they observed in the ghosts. The most striking example of this are cryptid animals like Nessie or Bigfoot. In a way they sort of count as supernatural, merely by the fact that they don’t exist. If they were ever discovered, they would be boring old natural animals. In the sea, the division is even clearer, we can imagine a cryptid enthusiast asking a scientist “do you believe in sea monsters?”, and the scientist replying “oh sure, there are plenty: great white shark, orca, giant squid, etc”. Here the cryptid enthusiast would become frustrated and say “no I mean like Leviathan or Kraken”. The scientist might ask “isn’t that just a Sperm Whale and Giant Squid?”. Frustration increasing, the cryptid enthusiast says “no, I mean things that don’t exist.” Here our poor scientist is left to contend with the true meaning of the question: “do you believe in things that don’t exist?”.
“There are two differences, it seems, between “sea monsters” and “sea creatures”. The first is that sea monsters are named in Greek, where sea creatures are named in Latin. The second is that sea monsters don’t exist.”
But Where Does Electricity Come From? by Ted Rall
“CARS SPEW CARBON DIOXIDE, A MAJOR GREENHOUSE GAS, FROM BURNING FOSSIL FUELS. OLD CARS LEECH TOXIC CHEMICALS.
“SO WE’RE GETTING RID OF GASOLINE-DOWERED VEHICLES. ELECTRIC CARS.
HEDE WE COME!“WHICH ARE RUN ON ELECTRICITY − WHICH COMES 60% FROM FOSSIL FUELS. OLD E-CAR BATTERIES LEECH TOXIC CHEMICALS.
“(YAY, HUMANITY WE MADE IT AN EXTRA 6 MONTHS!!)”
Renfield’s Ingenious Premise About Standing Up to a Vampire Boss Bleeds Out by Eileen Jones (Jacobin)
“So many of us who’ve been in therapy know perfectly well that it can’t possibly deal with our main problems, which are all about economic injustice — working too hard and long for too little pay. As a direct result, we’re perpetually exhausted, sick, and depressed. Fix all the immense glaring social problems and the therapy numbers would be guaranteed to drop like a rock.”
“[…] what we really need is to quit our horrible jobs and leave this insane nation designed for the pleasure and prosperity of a not-altogether-dissimilar class of bloodsucking vampires. When Renfield hits those notes — and it does quite often — it’s a pleasure that, sadly, resonates with far too many of us.”
A Road Paved with Bloodshed: High Plains Drifter Turns 50 by Brandon David Wilson (RogerEbert.com)
“[…] whispering a truth that some ears can hear perfectly well, that the kind of violence routinely visited on Black men at that time could all too easily be turned on a white lawman if he forgot one of his twin directives: To protect capital and/or protect white supremacy.”
“That truth is what elevates “High Plains Drifter” to the peak of the genre. It was a bold announcement from Eastwood, a man obsessed with how fear can turn men into evil. Fifty years later, it has lost none of its lacerating power.”
Roaming Charges: Nipped and Tuckered by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“[…] here’s the story of how Bob Dylan made his first recorded performance on Belafonte’s 1962 record, The Midnight Special, as a last minute substitute for Sonny Terry, whose plane had been grounded in Memphis by a thunderstorm.
“Belafonte described the strange encounter with the young Dylan in a 2010 interview with MOJO magazine:”
“My guitarist Millard Thomas, said, ‘Well, there’s this kid I see all the time down in the Village, and he does that whole Sonny thing. He sleeps and dreams it.’ So I said, ‘We don’t have a choice I guess. Go find him.’
“And this skinny kid appeared and he had a paper sack with him full of harmonicas in different keys. I played the song for him and he pulled one out of the bag, dipped it in water, and played through a single take, and it was great. I loved it. I asked him if wanted to try another take and he said, ‘No.’ I asked him if he wanted to hear it back and he said, ‘No.’ He just headed for the door and threw the harmonica in the trashcan on his way out.
“I remember thinking. Does he have that much disdain for what I’m doing? But I found out later that he bought his harps at the Woolworth drugstore. They were cheap ones and once he’d gotten them wet and really played through them as hard as he did, they were finished. It wasn’t until decades later, when he wrote that book [Chronicles: Volume One], that I read what he really felt about me, and I tell you, I got very, very choked up. I had admired him all along, and no matter what he did or said, I was just a stone, stone fan.”
The Great Pretender: AI And The Dark Side Of Anthropomorphism by Brooks Riley (3 Quarks Daily)
“Am I alone in thinking that this invasion of our emotional sphere might not be in our best interests? Should we worry about people whose emotional life is already unstable? If I can be riled by a conversation with a chatbot, what about people with violent tempers or a tenuous grasp of reality? Will laptops be thrown against walls by exasperated students already under hormonal siege? Or is the Alexa generation better prepared for ChatGPT? Emotions are not digital playthings; they are messy neurobiological realities.”
“As with so much of social media, ChatGPT has been designed and implemented by people more interested in the mass consumption of their product and the bottom line than in the emotional well-being of users or the ethical structure of its products.”
Systems design 2: What we hope we know by Apen Warr
“[…] The underlying assumption, when someone says you’re a victim of magical thinking, is that if you understood the mechanisms, you could make better predictions.”
“Nobody in the world knows how to build a paperclip that will never break. We could build one that bends a thousand times, or a million times, but not one that can bend forever. And nobody builds a paperclip that can bend a thousand times, because it would be more expensive than a regular paperclip and nobody needs it. Engineering isn’t about building a paperclip that will never break, it’s about building a paperclip that will bend enough times to get the job done, at a reasonable price, in sufficient quantities, out of attainable materials, on schedule.”
“As an engineer you are absolutely going to make tradeoffs in which you make things cheaper in exchange for a higher probability that people will die, because the only alternative is not making things at all.”
“Unless you’re going to grad school, nobody in the world cares if you got an 80% or a 99%. Do as little work as you can, to learn most of what we’re teaching and graduate with a passable grade and get your money’s worth. That’s engineering.”
“I know many people reading this weren’t even alive in the 1990s, or not programming professionally, or perhaps they just don’t remember because it was a long time ago. But let me tell you, things used to be very different back then! Things like automated tests were nearly nonexistent; they had barely been invented. Computer scientists still thought correctness proofs were the way to go as long as you had a Sufficiently Smart Compiler. The standard way to write commercial software was to throw stuff together, then a “quality assurance” team would try running it, and it wouldn’t work, and they’d tell you so and sometimes you’d fix it (often breaking something else) and sometimes there was a deadline so you’d ship it, bugs and all, and all this was normal.”
“[…] in software engineering, we acknowledge that failures happen and we measure them, characterize them, and compensate for them. We don’t aim for perfection.”
Thus my love of logs, error-handling, and useful log- and error-messages.
“The best thing about brute force solutions is you don’t need very fancy engineers to do it. You don’t need fancy algorithms. You don’t need the latest research. You just do the dumbest thing that can possibly work and you throw a lot of money and electricity at it.”
“Throughput can always be added with brute force. Cutting latency always requires cleverness.”
“I apologize for such a long letter − I didn’t have time to write a short one. — ”
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
“It’s quite good at summarizing. I don’t know how good. I wonder if there’s a way to quantify that. Summarizing well requires the ability to recognize and highlight insight. I don’t know if it’s good at that. I think it might be. When you have all the text in the world memorized, that means you have access to all the insights that have ever been written. You need only recognize them, and have a good idea of what the reader knows already, and you can produce insights – things the reader has never heard before – on demand.”
It depends on the listener. If they don’t know much, it’s a low bar to … step over. I don’t want to be that guy, but the reason so many people are delighted with the current crop of AIs is because they are delivering a crazy number of insights—but because the people asking the questions are ripe for being surprised. Ignorance is not only bliss; it also makes you easy to delight.
“Politics Is Not a Dinner Party” … Yet: In Praise of Festive Leftism by Scott Remer (CounterPunch)
“During human history to date (what Marx hopefully called prehistory), politics is fundamentally tragic. It always entails a quantum of evil. At least a modicum of compulsion lurks behind every law and regulation. If you want to keep your hands totally clean, the best way is noninvolvement: living a secluded, monastic life, sequestered from the world’s unpleasant events, in what Weber terms a “mystic flight from reality.””
“Champagne and limousines are associated with gaiety as well as riches. The only real problem with them (aside from the environmental impact of both) seems to be that the riches needed to purchase them aren’t much more equally distributed; I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with champagne or limousines. Leftism doesn’t require asceticism. Such, at least, is the contention of the phrase “full luxury space communism” and Oscar Wilde’s idiosyncratic brand of luxurious, aesthetic socialism.”
Cull the Robo-Dogs, Cherish the Dirt-Clods by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)
““rationality”, that is, in the old and august sense of the philosophers, as in, that special faculty of the human mind that partly removes a human being from the animal realm and permits us to share somewhat in the nature of the divine.”
“The artifacts we build, though —the Antikythera mechanism, the clepsydras, the submarines and the LLMs— were never in communion with God in the first place. On the contrary, they are the fruit of our long history of prideful presumption that we are in a position to go it alone, to replace God with our own clever ingenuity.”
“You don’t have to be a “Luddite” or some stripe or other of anarcho-primitivist in order to recognize that science is, fundamentally, as Karol Wojtyla said, a “Promethean ambition”; it is fully continuous with alchemy and natural magic, and not a rupture with these venerable traditions, as we prefer to imagine […]”
“[…] It is significant that among the self-justifications GPT-4 gives when you ask it for a cost-benefit analysis of its own likely impact on society, it consistently acknowledges that it may be destroying basically everything we have come to value as central to human existence for the past few millennia, but that for all that it is still damned good, far better than we could ever hope to be, at diagnosing illnesses and proposing optimal pathways of preventive care.”
“I have often confessed in this space to a strong sympathy for the view that it can indeed be a moral transgression to say, break an icicle off of a tree branch, or intentionally to smash a dirt clod when crossing a field. Nor do I think the wrongness of such destructive acts can be reduced to the deleterious effect they might have on the moral character of the agent of the breaking or kicking,”
“[…] all existence is a perpetual combat against the ravages of the second law of thermodynamics, for the dirt clods and the icicles as for us.”
“[…] these lifelike representations have always functioned in society as aids and triggers of ritual and narrativity, which project us beyond ourselves and into a different order of reality (even in the whimsical mode of, say, a Saturday-morning cartoon, it is just this projection we are after). The function of AI, endowed with the outer form of a dog or a human, is by contrast to maintain and regulate the mundane order — not to send us outside of ourselves, but to keep us in line.”
“Quite apart from the question whether AI will attain consciousness or not, there is a deeper problem opened up by the implicit expectation of the Turing test, where at bottom the ultimate “proof of concept” for an artificially intelligent system is not that we experience any real Mitsein with it, but only that we be fooled into thinking that is what we are experiencing. Having established this desideratum already in the 1950s, over the following decades “AI creators… attempted to paper over the [uncanny] valley with cutesy humanoid touches, Disneyfication effects that will enchant and disarm the uninitiated.””
“The machine will not say anything at all that deviates from a very narrow set of norms designed to keep us feeling safe. These norms are of course slapdash, like everything else in our society — some hasty recipe of Silicon Valley tech optimism and legalistic conformity to the bien-pensant consensus of American elite institutions.”
“Either the guardrails come off, and the AI begins making its notoriously enigmatic determinations of previously unfamiliar “oughts” (all sofas ought to be destroyed, etc.); or they are kept on, and AI is constrained to assist those human beings in power in the enforcement of norms to which we, the relatively powerless, have never consented.”
“Bing’s guardrails are in the end just another Disneyfication effect, akin to the silicone smile of the robot-receptionist. The entire internet is now configured to advance the entire Disneyfication of social reality. Disney itself plays a part in this, but is far from working alone.”
“It suggested that it is at least theoretically possible that there are as-yet undiscovered “memory fields”, somewhat akin to the recently discovered Higgs field, that could have interacted with particles in the pre-Cambrian in such a way as to store precise information about specific events, which might be extracted today in order to produce accurate visualizations. Total nonsense, of course, but it was exhilarating, at least for a moment, to have the sense that the machine was imagining along with me.”
That’s kind of cool.
“I find myself these days entertaining an antinomy about AI, uncertain both as to which horn of it I might prefer for my impalement, and as to any possible means of sublating them in order to arrive at some higher-order understanding of our current predicament. On the one horn of the antinomy, we find ourselves in a situation much like 1938, except that this time it is data, rather than atoms, that we are discovering to be charged up with powers that are much, much too great for human beings to assume responsibility over them.”
“When I was in New York last week, the subway turnstile hit me in the balls. I was angry at it, but futilely so. It is a collectivity of human beings who caused that mechanism to operate in the way it does. The turnstile is a consequence of the outsourcing of rule enforcement to an unthinking apparatus. So far, to the extent that I can make out, AI is a massive leap forward for this sort of outsourcing, and a massive kick in the balls to humanity. I will continue to kick back for as long as I am alive — not in combat against the “pathetic fallacy”, the very notion of which I reject, but in defense of the ecumene of true beings against the encroachment of spurious ones.”
“I am consistently stunned at how clueless so many people remain about the human limits of our ability to remain constantly in touch, with no time to ourselves to read and to think. Here we plainly need new norms of engagement. I honestly don’t understand why these are so slow in emerging.”
I have defined these, with reminders for far-away, but good friends. It’s not easy at all.
Tech Would Be Fine If We Weren’t Ruled By Monsters by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“So many emerging technologies would be cause for celebration if our rulers weren’t so damn evil and our systems weren’t so damn oppressive. In a healthy society we’d be celebrating automation and AI giving us more and more abundance and free time; instead we’re terrified of police robots and technocratic dystopia.
“The knitting of neurology and technology would have incredible implications if we didn’t know sociopathic intelligence agencies would immediately insert themselves into the use of those technologies. Virtual reality would be awesome if it wasn’t going to be used to create fake worlds for people to purchase fake goods in so that capitalism can continue expanding while we destroy the real world.”
“There’s this nonstop calculation of “How much freedom can we take away from our people while still saying we’re better than Russia and China?” And lately they’ve been walking right up to the line: imprisoning journalists, prosecuting dissidents, censoring the internet, etc. The desire to take away freedom from the people is so very, very seductive to those in power that they have a hard time walking that line between keeping the story of being free while eroding freedoms. This is why the hypocrisies of the empire are getting more and more obvious.”
“In school we’re taught that our government protects our freedoms because of values that our society holds; in awakening to reality we discover that our government does not value those freedoms at all and sees them solely as propaganda weapons to advance their own interests.”
“US politics increasingly revolves around debating whether or not you should be nice to trans people because it’s one of the only things the two parties actually disagree on. If you fully agree on war, authoritarianism and capitalist exploitation, there’s not much left to debate.
“On every issue that affects the interests of real power the parties are effectively in total alignment, while all the intense emotional debate gets steered toward issues the powerful don’t care about one way or the other. Only an idiot would believe this happened by coincidence. To quote Chomsky, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.””
A Conversation About Crime by Freddie de Boer (SubStack)
This whole hypothetical, question-and-answer session is very well-written and interesting.
“I think the basic reality of human life is that we’re fallible. We don’t do the right thing, often. So we need society to create incentives and punishments to urge people towards the right kind of behavior. In the kind of society you’re envisioning, we aren’t creating those incentives and punishments to encourage lawful behavior, and so people will break the law. I don’t believe that people are essentially self-policing; I don’t believe that all people are basically good. I think most people are basically good, but some very much are not, and the ones who aren’t will prey on those who are if we don’t do anything. It’s sad but it’s a fact of life.”
“In a state of nature, human beings rob and rape and kill. So you have to have some sort of formal system of crime and punishment. That’s why I’m not a libertarian or anarchist. And I find it very weird that a lot of ostensible leftists have essentially adapted right-wing libertarian visions of law and order. But it’s really weird that those same people are also so eager to basically unperson those who say offensive things! Of course there should be social prohibitions against racism and similar types of offense, but it feels like the left is impossibly sensitive to those social mores and totally insensitive to the costs of having someone stick a gun in your face and take your car. If a woman goes on Twitter and says, “my boss just called me sexy,” people there will do everything they can to cost that man his job. If that same exact woman says, “I just got carjacked,” people with hammers and sickles in their bios will laugh at her and tell her that crime is just something you have to accept, and anyway she was rich enough to own a car so she’s privileged.”
The Drowning Utilitiarian by Corey Muller (Existential Comics)
Does Peter Singer really believe these things? Or did he just follow the Utilitarian argument to its logical conclusions? That we should euthanize disabled or old people is something that a society without enough luxury is required to do. It does make sense to consider what we are spending our luxury on.
Are we maximizing the utility? Currently, we are not. We are pouring most of our resources into a handful of the elite. Before we even have to talk about euthanizing anyone, we would need to address that imbalance. If a society doesn’t have enough resources, of course it would rationally discuss who they can support.
Talking about these things don’t make you evil. They make you a philosopher and sociologist. We make these decisions all the time. For example, poor people don’t get mental-health services, even though they need them the most. Poor children don’t get food, etc. Utilitarianism, which considers how resources are allocated, isn’t nearly as cruel as the casual violence of Capitalism, which doesn’t even bother.
I had a conversation the other day with some colleagues from Bratislava and it turned to the way that content is being shaped for us these days, in ways often referred to with the sobriquet “woke”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. What it ended up meaning to us was “preachy”. There are real issues to address in how cultures are represented, how people are represented, what we are taught to believe about how the world works by the content to which we are exposed. It’s all propaganda, in one way or another. It’s all trying to teach you something, either explicitly or implicitly. That movies and TV were nearly entirely populated by white men for decades was a deliberate choice. That we should correct that is largely undisputed. How we correct for that? The first ugly steps are largely missteps. Instead of fixing the actual problems, we just keep the same number of assholes and horrible life lessons, but let women and minorities play a bunch of the roles. This is not progress, people.
Also, if content is supposed to have everyone in the right proportions, where are all the Chinese people? The world is full of them. TV shows should have at least ¼ Indians and ¼ Chinese people in them. 50/50 women/men. Instead, American TV shows have wildly overcorrected and now populate their shows with far more homosexuals and black people than the audiences are ever likely to encounter in their daily lives. Perhaps this makes those shows more palatable…where, exactly?
You just kind of feel like you’re being yelled at for being a terrible person, when all you wanted was to be entertained. The work mind-virus is nothing of the sort, but it’s just another way of putting you in your place. You might feel vaguely like “wow, there sure are proportionately a lot more shows about black people than there used to be.” which is very true, but that’s because everybody used to be played by white people. Making everybody be played by black people instead isn’t fixing anything. it’s just alienating a different group of people. Just make it normal. Stop making everything a teachable moment. Stop filling up Star Trek with so many black people and gay people that even they must be thinking, Jesus Christ, enough already. It’s not even representative, because where are all the Asians? Not enough orientals in Star Trek. This will not stand. The answer to historically having only white men being assholes in TV shows is not to make half of the assholes be gay black women. It’s to stop making shows about assholes. Stop promoting assholery as a lucrative way of life.
On AI and Intellectual Property Rights by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)
This raises serious questions about how AI will affect the future of intellectual property. To my mind, we should keep the focus on three distinct points:
- Creative workers need to be compensated for their work
- Copyright monopolies may not be the best route, especially in a world with AI
- There are alternative mechanisms that we already use and which could be expanded.
“People write, sing, paint, and do other creative work because they enjoy it, but we cannot expect to get as much of these products as society wants, if we don’t pay people to do them. A musician or writer who has to spend eight hours a day bussing tables to pay the rent is not going to be able to devote themselves fully to developing their talents in these areas.”
“[…] copyright enforcement creates all sorts of issues that would not exist in a copyright free world, where basically all digital material could be obtained immediately at zero cost. Copyright is a way to support creative work, but arguably not a very good one. The Internet already raised the costs associated with copyright enforcement substantially. If we have to impose all sorts restrictions on AI, in order to protect copyrights, then the cost to society of copyright enforcement will rise further.”
“To be eligible to receive the funding, a person or organization would have to register in the same way that an organization has to register now with the I.R.S. to get tax exempt status. This would mean effectively saying what it is they do, as in write music, or play guitar. As is the case now, there would no effort to determine whether a particular individual or organization is good at what they do, just as the I.R.S. doesn’t try to determine if a church is a good church or a museum is a good museum. The only issue is preventing fraud, ensuring that they do what they claim to do.”
“The point is that we only subsidize creative work once. If we pay the worker to produce a book or movie or song, we don’t have to pay them a second time by granting them a copyright monopoly.”
“This sort of system could produce a vast amount of creative work that could be freely reproduced and transferred without any concerns about copyright. If AI programs wanted to scrape them to create new works, there would be no issue of compensation, the producers had already been compensated. A rule that could be applied (obviously this requires more thought) is some sort acknowledgement in an AI produced work, much as any scholarly article includes a reference section for work that it draws on. This would prevent outright plagiarism by an AI program and also give credit to the creative workers who it relied upon for a derivative work.”
“Copyright suits need not be eligible for statutory damages. If my neighbor knocks over my fence with their SUV, I can sue them for the cost of repairing my fence. I don’t also get statutory damages and usually would not be able to collect attorney fees. We don’t have to give this special status to those bringing lawsuits for copyright infringement.”
Two sides of the same coin by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“This is not me saying that we should sit back and let super-charged machine-learning platforms devourer our lives. But we also shouldn’t let very scared institutions use our own fear — and lack of tech literacy — to consolidate power and erode what’s left of the open web. We need more user-generated platforms, regardless of whether their [sic] owned by Chinese companies, we need more, better search engines, and we need to look for real pragmatic solutions on what to do with increasingly better machine learning. Because if we don’t we’re going to wake up one day and realize we didn’t fix anything and only helped make a lot of already very rich people even richer while making our own lives worse.”
“I don’t want to get too in the weeds on all of this, but I think rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism all eventually boil down to a bunch of weird nerds on message boards hoping they can find a way that sounds ethical to normies of using technology to rebuild feudalism with them on top.”
Tweet accompanying a video showing people being amazed at how mirrors work by Chamillionaire Socialist (Twitter) that has been viewed and shared and liked dozens of millions of times.
“I love how early on the internet had these people with aspirations of making a more enlightened era and ended up making people believe things a medieval peasant would.”
How Microsoft names threat actors
Microsoft is an international, global company, Look at the URL: it even says “worldwide” right in the link. They are so ideologically blind that their list of potential “threat actors” includes Lebanon and Vietnam, but not Israel or the U.S., two of the most aggressive and successful threat actors in operation today.
The U.S. is arguably one of the worst, but its hacking is not acknowledged as such—not even in this official document from Microsoft about how they protect us from threat actors. If the threat comes from the U.S. or Israel, then Microsoft is implicitly saying that they will not help us at all. They are going to give those threat actors free reign.
Need your Blazor sibling components to talk to each other? by Jon Hilton (Making sense of .NET)
“If we’re essentially modelling a page, which is a cohesive part of our UI, and the child components are only there to enable us to break the UI down into smaller, more manageable components, then lifting the state up is probably the way to go.
“But sometimes components need control of their own data. For example, you can imagine a component which uses a datagrid to show data.
“There’s a good chance you want this component to fetch its own data, not least so you can handle things like pagination, sorting, filtering, etc.
“In that case, a service which sits outside the component tree and “brokers” communication between components is a good choice.”
Offline Is Just Online With Extreme Latency by Jim Nielsen
“I love the notion of shifting the idea of two binaries, online/offline, to a spectrum of latency where “offline” is merely the most extreme form of latency. It makes you think differently. You even begin to realize that “offline” has its own gradations: latency of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, or more! They’re not all the same and represent a more accurate, all-encompassing picture of the kinds of environments real-world users live in.”
Very slow and very ugly but I still love it by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)
“GPT-4 is currently limited to 25 messages every three hours and the code it spits out is buggy and often confused. So if you want to make something that works really well and is fine-tuned to your specifications, it’s going to take a long time and might not even be possible tbh.”
“[…] by coding something this way, you end up with all kinds of stuff that you know is wrong and janky about the code, but can’t really easily fix. For instance, I don’t know why the cursor doesn’t turn into a hand when it overs over the button on the web app. And I can’t figure out how to center the button on the page. And I don’t know why the Chrome extension doesn’t allow you to press the back button to a previously-loaded page. And if anything broke for any reason, I doubt I could tell you why or fix it properly.”
This is, in fairness, how a lot of code is for a lot of programmers already. Most people are in charge of piles of half-working code that they don’t really understand.
“I think the TikTok ban discourse in the US is ludicrous and feels like a panic response to the waning influence of the American tech industry, but I also don’t think China has any moral high ground here. They don’t let their citizens access the app either. They want all the soft-power influence of TikTok without any of the society-melting algorithmic decay it causes. If China’s online nationalists want to complain about anti-TikTok saber-rattling in Washington, fine, let us all on Douyin.”
“I guess I just don’t get the mindset here. There is a seemingly endless reservoir of unflappably enthusiastic (white) guys who all bought Twitter checkmarks and spend their time promoting how-to guides for getting rich quick with AI. I suppose it’s just a new form of snake oil for a new kind of technological revolution. We get all these promises about how whatever new thing is in the news will make our lives magically better when in reality it just does [bullshit].”
Correct two Common Misconceptions: End-to-End Test Automation is “Simple and Easy” or “Complex and Impossible” by Zhimin Zhan (Medium)
Simple ≠ Easy
“In the movie, “Central Intelligence”, when someone asks about Bob (the main character by Dwayne Johnson, the Rock)’s transformation, he says he just did one thing: He went to the gym. “For six hours. Every day. For the last 20 years. Straight,” Bob says. The classic software engineering book “The Pragmatic Programmer” conveyed the same concept.”“The real challenge in automation is maintenance, not creation (~10%, effort-wise). If a team finds test creation complex and hard, ongoing maintenance (running the whole end-to-end suite several times a day) will be impossible.”“A tourist visiting England’s Eton College asked the gardener how he got the lawns so perfect. “That’s easy,” he replied, “You just brush off the dew every morning, mow them every other day, and roll them once a week.”
““Is that all?” asked the tourist. “Absolutely,” replied the gardener. “Do that for 500 years and you’ll have a nice lawn, too.””
Nibbling at the costs by Oren Eini
“This is the sort of code that runs billions of times a second. Reducing its latency has a profound impact on overall performance. One of the things that we pay attention to in high-performance code is the number of branches, because we are using super scalar CPUs, multiple instructions may execute in parallel at the chip level. A branch may cause us to stall (we have to wait until the result is known before we can execute the next instruction), so the processor will try to predict what the result of the branch would be. If this is a highly predictable branch (an error code that is almost never taken, for example), there is very little cost to that.
“The variable integer code, on the other hand, is nothing but branches, and as far as the CPU is concerned, there is no way to actually predict what the result will be, so it has to wait. Branchless or well-predicted code is a key aspect of high-performance code. And this approach can have a big impact.”
“When you last went on a recipe web-site and had to fight through a gauntlet of ads and newsletter modals and cookie-consent banners, and the recipe author’s story about her childhood memories of aunt Beryl’s butter-pecan cookies and you are left thinking: ‘if you they had used a different abstraction for creating DOM elements…
“No. You don’t.
“The web doesn’t suck because of frameworks.
The web sucks because of capitalism.“It sucks because of the attention economy, because we pay for everything with data, and because we’re all slaves to the algorithm. On some level, we all know this and so I’ve come to believe that the most impactful thing that we can do isn’t fixating on a kilobyte here or a millisecond there, it’s empowering developers through education and documentation and diagnostics and sensible defaults, to do the right thing in the face of structural forces that bend the web towards sucking.”
We are all a little bit this bunny (Reddit) is one of the cutest thing that exists on the Internet. It’s a short video of a rabbit in REM sleep, slowly, slowly, slowly tipping over while twitching its mouth. It’s guaranteed to drop your blood pressure by at least 20. Click the link for the slo-mo video. Adorbs.