Links and Notes for June 17th, 2022

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

Economy & Finance

Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism by Lex Fridman (YouTube)

At 1:19:00, there’s a brilliant bit about democracy.

At 1:26:00, the system selects for evil.

At 1:29:50, it contradicts human nature.

At 1:37:30, how the capitalist benefits from people blaming the government for everything.

At 1:40:20,

“The greatest practitioners of central planning are the corporations”

At 1:59:30, Lex asks whether there’s something about communism that leads to someone like Stalin in power. It’s a perfectly valid question, but it’s utterly fascinating that it would never occur to him to ask the same thing about the dominant system where he lives (America). Is there something about capitalism that leads to a wildly unequal distribution of societal wealth? Does capitalism always lead to empire? To conquest? To militarism? It sure looks like it.

At 02:24:20,

“They’re feisty personally, but not ideologically.”

Fresh Hell by Jason Arias (The Baffler)

“[…] the Burger King in the Las Vegas airport, operated by the catering company HMSHost, a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinational conglomerate Autogrill. ”

This is fascinating. HMSHost is Host Marriot Services, which Autogrill purchased as a wholly-owned subsidiary in 1999. On that page, it notes that HMSHost owns not only Burger King, but also Pizza Hut, and Starbucks Coffee. Autogrill (Wikipedia), on the other hand, “is controlled with a 50.1% stake by the Edizione Holding investment vehicle of the Benetton family (Wikipedia).” That company is owned by just a handful of people from the original family that founded Benetton in the 60s. Mind-boggling.

Public Policy & Politics

The UK’s Decision to Extradite Assange Shows Why The US/UK’s Freedom Lectures Are a Farce by Glenn Greenwald (Scheer Post)

“Free speech and press freedoms do not exist in reality in the U.S. or the UK. They are merely rhetorical instruments to propagandize their domestic population and justify and ennoble the various wars and other forms of subversion they constantly wage in other countries in the name of upholding values they themselves do not support.”

“The historical ignorance captured in the actions of Finland and Sweden was astounding regarding the role played by NATO in triggering the very conflict political leaders cited as the reason to seek the protection of alliance membership. It was as if a family whose house had been set afire sought shelter in the home of the arsonist in order to shield itself from the services of the fire department.”

Turkey Rains on NATO’s Parade by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“Instead, the NATO secretary general will preside over an organization at war with itself, unsure of its future and unable to provide a cohesive answer to the problems with Russia which originated from the very policies of expansion Stoltenberg was trying to continue through the now abortive membership applications of Finland and Sweden.”

Biden’s Summit of No-Shows by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“To describe this tilt as leftward is to miss the larger point. As López Obrador makes clear every chance he gets, it is also an assertion of sovereignty and postcolonial pride. Nobody is judging anyone else’s political stripe.”

Except the U.S. The U.S. judges everyone.

“The region wants economic policies that serve its populations and to rid itself of the corrupt leaders los norteamericanos have long favored. It is also more conscious of its shared identity and increasingly intolerant of the long record of U.S. interventions, coups, occupations, electoral interference, and the rest of the entries in Washington’s blotted copy book.”

“Latin American leaders, including rightists such as Bolsonaro, are emphatically not on for Cold War II. They’re rejecting the Biden administration’s framing of our moment as a war between democrats and authoritarians. Most immediately, they stand with the global majority in refusing to side with the U.S. and NATO in the proxy war against Russia they provoked via the filthily corrupt regime in Ukraine.”

“Nobody wants American missiles pointed at China on their soil, not even the Japanese. Even the South Koreans insist as a matter of longstanding policy, that U.S.-deployed weapons are not welcome if they are used in Washington’s campaign against the mainland.”

“Are Biden’s people kidding? This is what they have to say in reply to China’s extensive aid and development assistance throughout the Pacific, through which it is doing perfectly awful things such as building schools, hospitals, roads and bridges in the region’s underdeveloped nations.”

“But he has the Europeans on his side. It is a mystery to many, but they have lined up via NATO in the proxy war against Russia and gone full-tilt with a sanctions regime that will hurt them more than the Russians. We will see how this goes as the war grinds on, inflation breaks records and furnaces go cold. Households in England are already burning wood.”

“He has divided the world between the small minority of the human community known as the West and the global majority. My words for this are regression and failure. The first is to be regretted, always. But failure in the case of American foreign policy is almost always to be applauded. This is necessary if the empire is to be brought to an end. I say this not because I dislike my country, though I am not much for nationalism, patriotism and all that. I say it because I refuse to let go of the great potential America has to do better.”

“The rest of the world will be better off when American primacy passes into history. So will Americans. The Spaniards, let us not forget, were better off once we relieved them of their empire during and in the aftermath of the Spanish–American war. Let events relieve us of ours.”

The New Democratic Party’s Joel Harden Is Fighting for a World Beyond Capitalism by Joel Harden (Jacobin)

“There are several appalling features of capitalism. One of the worst, for me, is that housing has become a speculative investment and not a human right. There are twenty-two thousand vacant units of housing in Ottawa right now. That is just galling in a context where hundreds of people are sleeping rough — even in winter — in tents, parking garages, forests. That is an indictment of our current setup — it shows how broken our society has become because profit matters more than human need.”

“I very much want to see a world beyond capitalism — beyond the greed, the incessant, disgusting waste of resources, the dehumanization of people, and the destruction of the planet. I know we can do better.”

Society of Spectacle by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“The result is, and was meant to be, politics as reality television, a media diversion that will change nothing in the dismal American landscape. What should have been a serious bipartisan inquiry into an array of constitutional violations by the Trump administration has been turned into a prime-time campaign commercial for a Democratic Party running on fumes. The epistemology of television is complete.”

This is the thesis of Amusing Ourselves to Death.

“There was no acknowledgement by committee members that the “will of the people” has been subverted by the three branches of government to serve the dictates of the billionaire class. No one brought up the armies of lobbyists who are daily permitted to storm the Capitol to fund the legalized bribery of our elections and write the pro-corporate legislation that it passes.”

“The wider the gap becomes between the ideal and the real, the more the proto fascists, who look set to take back the Congress in the fall, will be empowered. If the rational, factual world does not work, why not try one of the many conspiracy theories? If this is what democracy means, why support democracy?”

“In 1924, the government of Weimar Germany decided to get rid of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis, by trying Hitler for high treason in the People’s Court. Hitler was clearly guilty. He had tried to overthrow the elected government in the botched 1923 “Beer Hall Putsch,” which, like the January 6 riot, was as much farce as insurrection. It was an open and shut case. The trial, however, backfired, turning Hitler into a national martyr and boosting the political fortunes of the Nazis. The reason should have been apparent. Germany, convulsed by widespread unemployment, food riots, street violence and hyperinflation, was a mess. The ruling elites, like our own, had no credibility. The appeal to the rule of law and democratic values was a joke.”

“Congress is a cesspool. Corrupt politicians whore for the rich and get rich in return. This reality, which the hearings ignore, is apparent to most of the nation, which is why the hearings will not bolster the flagging fortunes of the ruling political class, desperate to prevent displacement.”

“A new game is taking its place, one where narcissistic buffoons, who stoke the fires of hate and only know how to destroy, entertain us to death.”

And there it is: the nigh-explicit reference to Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Joe Biden’s Revealing Embrace of Saudi Despots by Glenn Greenwald (Scheer Post)

“So devoted was Obama to the U.S.’s long-standing partnership with Riyadh that, in 2015, he deeply offended India — the world’s largest democracy — by abruptly cutting short his visit to that country in order to fly to Saudi Arabia, along with leaders of both U.S. political parties, to pay homage to Saudi King Salman upon his death. Adding insult to injury, Obama, as The Guardian put it, boarded his plane to Riyadh “just hours after lecturing India on religious tolerance and women’s rights.””

“The centerpiece of U.S. policy in the Middle East for decades has been to prop up Saudi despots with weapons and diplomatic protection in exchange for the Saudis serving U.S. interests with their oil supply and ensuring the use of the American dollar as the reserve currency on the oil market.”

“That is what made the hysterical reaction to Trump’s reaffirmation of that relationship so nonsensical and deliberately deceitful. Trump was not wildly deviating from U.S. policy by embracing Saudi tyrants but simply continuing long-standing U.S. policy of embracing all sorts of savage despots all over the world whenever doing so advanced U.S. interests.”

“[…] this has been the core propagandistic framework employed by the DC ruling class since Trump was inaugurated. They routinely depicted him as an unprecedentedly monstrous figure who has vandalized American values in ways that would have been unthinkable for prior American presidents when, in fact, he was doing nothing more than affirming decades-old policy, albeit with greater candor, without the obfuscating mask used by American presidents to deceive the public about how Washington functions.”

“While the bipartisan political and media class has spent decades insisting, and still insists, that the core foreign policy goal of the U.S. is to defend freedom and democracy and fight tyranny around the world, the indisputable reality is the exact opposite: propping up the world’s most brutal dictators who serve U.S. interests has been a staple of U.S. foreign policy since at least the end of World War II.”

“[…] the real goal of U.S. foreign policy is to generate benefits for the U.S. (or, more accurately, ruling American elites), not to crusade for democracy and human rights.”

“Thus, it was not Trump’s embrace of long-standing U.S. partnerships with Saudi and Egyptian despots that represented a radical departure from the American tradition. The radical departure was Biden’s pledge during the 2020 presidential campaign to turn the Saudis into “pariahs” and to isolate them as punishment for their atrocities. But few people in Washington were alarmed by Biden’s campaign vow because nobody believed that Joe Biden — with his very long history of supporting the world’s worst despots — ever intended to follow through on his cynical campaign pledge.”

“The rationale offered by The New York Times for Biden’s planned trip was virtually identical to the arguments Trump used in 2018: “the visit represents the triumph of realpolitik over moral outrage, according to foreign policy experts.””

“If Western leaders had simply acknowledged from the start the obvious truth about their role — that they regard Russia as a geopolitical adversary and seek to exploit the war in Ukraine to weaken or even break that country — at least an honest debate would have been possible. Instead, they and their corporate media allies did what they always do whenever a new war is newly marketed: they draped it in fabricated moral fairy tales about freedom-fighting and opposition to tyranny.”

“Good American patriots view the military-industrial complex as just a chronic lottery winner: they just keep hitting the jackpots purely through immense strokes of luck.”

“Somehow, without the U.S. press batting an eye, Joe Biden can deliver a speech righteously touting his commitment to protect democracy in Ukraine and stop Russian autocracy, and then board a plane the very next minute to go visit Mohammed bin Salman and General Sisi, heralding them as vital American partners, and announce new aid military and intelligence packages to each.”

“When it comes to the uniquely gullible and herd-like U.S. and British press corps and their unyielding faith in the noble motives of U.S. war planners, all of those dynamics are likely at play.”

“What possible cogent moral argument holds that it is permissible to maintain relations with the Saudis and Egyptians due to geo-strategic benefits around oil and international competition but not countries in the U.S.’s own hemisphere such as Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua?”

The argument where “those who kowtow to our demands are good” fits the data and is cogent but not moral.

“About a month before the Ukraine invasion, The New York Times was running pieces about how there might be civil war in the United States. People were giving serious thought to this question — editorials and op-eds were being written about the demise of democracy in the U.S. Then the war in Ukraine erupts and suddenly Joe Biden is the leader of the free world.”

“A Catastrophic Loss of Faith in America”​ | An Interview with Pankaj Mishra by Rebecca Panovka & Kiara Barrow (The Drift)

“We forget that it’s the United States, not China, with a global network of military bases; it’s the United States that’s policing large parts of the world where China is a major economic player. Though China is still very much on the defensive, it is constantly described as a threat by the U.S. military and intellectual establishment.”

“The Russians were indeed helping a lot of people, including the black majority in South Africa fighting against the apartheid regime, which was being armed by the so-called free world at the time. The Russians helped India liberate Bangladesh in 1971 from the genocidal Pakistani regime supported by Nixon and Kissinger.”

“it’s not just the Russians who are going to suffer from the sanctions, but all the countries that are deeply connected to Russia, mostly through trade links. I mean, a country like Egypt imports an enormous amount of wheat from Russia. It was planning to buy some from India, one of the top wheat producers, but India has just banned wheat exports — many other food-producing countries are becoming obsessed with food security and worried about the major crisis ahead. And you’re going to see a really terrible situation where people are simply starving — they can’t get wheat, because of the blockade by Russia of Black Sea ports, and even if they can get it, they can’t pay for it in the way the Russians would want. So I think sanctions are an incredibly blunt and globally destabilizing weapon wielded by rich countries.”

“It’s strange to think that only a few months before the invasion of Ukraine, we saw those last images of people clinging desperately to the wings of airplanes as they were taking off from Kabul’s airport. But then we forget about Afghanistan. Months go by and we barely hear about Afghans being punished. As you know, Joe Biden froze the Afghanistan National Fund, and there’s been very little discussion about that. Tens of thousands of babies died in Afghanistan this year due to malnutrition.”

“[…] allowing Ukrainians victimized by the war to travel to different parts of Europe, putting them in the homes of families, temporarily making other arrangements for them. And yet, for many, many people outside Western Europe and the United States, it’s hard to see these acts of compassion without the tint of cynicism, because you know that other people are damaged by the wars that the United States engaged in, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but not offered even a fraction of this hospitality.”

“All the lessons of these catastrophic wars are being disregarded today, and the same warmongers boldly assume hawkish positions — people who supported the catastrophic invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, people still in positions of power and influence, completely unchallenged.”

“I disagree with the Modi government on everything, but I do agree with them when they say, why are you asking us to stop buying oil from Russia when all of Europe is still doing it every day. Every day, you’re giving hundreds of millions of dollars to Putin to pursue his war in Ukraine. And you want a relatively poor country to stop buying cheap oil?”

“[…] feel the prospects for left-wing politics today are brighter than at any other point in my lifetime. You have a generation today without illusions of national omnipotence, without illusions about the liberal international order and related fantasies. However strange it may seem, I’ve never been more hopeful than at this moment of total despair.”

Time for a Taxpayer Revolt Against Rich Corporate Welfarists by Ralph Nader (Scheer Post)

“You’ve been required to subsidize these companies for them to make a profit and you get nothing in return – silent partners pouring money indirectly into big-name corporations. They misleadingly call these subsidies “incentives,” but they are really coerced entitlements.”

“Hochul is just getting started in her enormous giveaways to the super-rich and greedy. She is the plutocrats’ Governor. Public Defenders are leaving their crucial positions in the state because they are paid so little they can’t meet their living expenses. Kathy Hochul has no interest in raising their salaries and securing their constitutional mission of justice for indigent defendants.”

Roaming Charges: A River Ran Through It by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“New York City is facing a lifeguard shortage at its public swimming pools, but Mayor Eric Adams has come out against a modest pay hike (starting salary: $16/hr, $1 above minimum wage), saying it wouldn’t help attract more lifeguards: “They do it because of the love of the swimming, they do it because of the love of protecting people.” Let’s see Adams apply this logic to the overtime pay of NYPD cops.”

“The annual Air Quality Life Index report finds that “particulate air pollution takes 2.2 years off global average life expectancy, or a combined 17 billion life-years, relative to a world that met the WHO guidelines….This impact on life expectancy is comparable to that of smoking, more than three times that of alcohol use and unsafe water, six times that of HIV/AIDS, and 89 times that of conflict and terrorism.””

“Over the last seven years, China has reduced air pollution by nearly as much as the US did in three decades. The amount of harmful particulate matter in the air in China fell 40% from 2013 to 2020. This may add about two years to average life expectancy in the country.”

Roaming Charges: the Anal Stage of Constitutional Analysis by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Brexit for thee, Ireland and the EU for us… In 2016, only 47 British MPs & Lords held an Irish passport – by 2021, that figure went up to 227 . As of this month, there are now 321 of them with an Irish passport.”

US-China tensions flare over Taiwan Strait by Peter Symonds (WSWS)

“The US and international media seized on the operation as further evidence of China’s aggressive intentions toward Taiwan. In fact, Beijing is responding to ongoing US provocations, both diplomatic and military, over Taiwan. The extensive Taiwanese ADIZ, which covers parts of mainland China, has no standing in international law and no Chinese aircraft flew into Taiwanese airspace.”

“The US assertion of its “right” to sail through and fly over the Taiwan Strait is shot through with hypocrisy and contradictions. According to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a country has exclusive rights within its territorial waters—12 nautical miles from its coastline—and more limited rights within its 200-nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

“The Taiwan Strait is about 70 nautical miles at its narrowest point and 220 nautical miles at its widest. Moreover, if one accepts that Taiwan is part of China, as the US nominally still does under the One China policy, then the entirety of the strait falls under Chinese jurisdiction of one form or another. What can or cannot be done within an EEZ is in dispute between China and the US and its allies. Washington’s attempt to claim the higher ground based on “international law” is particularly two-faced given that it is one of the few countries not to ratify UNCLOS.”

“Quite apart from the finer points of UNCLOS, the US is claiming the “right” to fly warplanes and sail its warships close to strategic military bases on the Chinese mainland and thousands of kilometres from the nearest American territory. At the same time, it denounces China for conducting similar operations in what the US insists are international waters and international airspace.”

“US imperialism, however, is determined to prevent China’s economic rise from threatening its global hegemony and Taiwan is vital to those plans. It is not only strategically located in the so-called first island chain, running from Japan through to the Philippines, that Pentagon strategists see as essential to blockading China. It is also home to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company that produces over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced computing chips, essential to both the US military and industry.”

Journalism & Media

I should be able to mute America by Patrick Marlborough (Gawker)

“The martyrdom of fungbunger has made it crystal clear in my mind: we need a way to mute America. Why? Because America has no chill. America is exhausting. America is incapable of letting something be simply funny instead of a dread portent of their apocalyptic present. America is ruining the internet.”

“America insists that you bear witness to it tripping on its dick and slamming its face into an uncountable row of scalding hot pies. You do more than bear witness, because American Twitter has the same kind of magnetic pull as a garbage disposal unit. A sick part of you wants to shove your hand in. You want to let the blades cut into your knuckles, if just to see if you can slow them down a little.”

“The greatest trick America’s ever pulled on the subjects of its various vassal states is making us feel like a participant in its grand experiment.”

“This is why funbunger’s thread was as cathartic as it was inspiring. There he was, pushing back against the American sensibilities that crawl their way into every last crevice of the internet, despite the platform, the users, and the algorithms insistence that he bend to them. A dial-up Breaker Morant staring down the barrel of a perma-ban and barking: oi you dog cunts, shut your Seppo gobs!”

Philosophy & Sociology

20 Years Later, The Wire Is Still a Cutting Critique of American Capitalism by Helena Sheehan & Sheamus Sweeney (Jacobin)

“The Wire broke more decisively as it explored the social crisis resulting from a world in which many people will not succeed or necessarily even survive, whether they are smart or honest or hardworking; indeed even conceding that they might even be doomed because they are.”

“For David Simon, “[c]apitalism is the ultimate god in The Wire. Capitalism is Zeus.” The worldview underlying ancient Greek tragedy is one in which individuals do not control the world. They are at the mercy of forces beyond their control. The Wire is a drama of fated protagonists, a rigged game, where there is no happy-ever-after ending.”

“In building a whole world, The Wire rivals the breadth of vision of the nineteenth-century realist masterworks. It too anchors its sympathies in a class doomed to extinction, living in Simon’s shadows of the “brown fields and rotting piers and rusting factories,” “dead-ended at some strip mall cash register,” or “shrugged aside by the vagaries of unrestrained capitalism.””

“We see characters and events against the backdrop of the city from its grandest views: from executive offices or luxury condos overlooking the harbor. And we also see the windowless basement offices where police monitor wiretaps and the grim abandoned houses where addicts inject heroin.”

Kind of like GTA.

“The Wire is “about untethered capitalism run amok, about how power and money actually route themselves in a postmodern American city, and ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer able to solve our problems or heal our wounds.” It is a show in which the excesses of capitalism are not reduced to the actions of a few proverbial bad apples.”

“When McNulty observes, “everything else in this country gets sold without people shooting each other behind it,” the irony is implicit. Within legitimate capitalism, the economic system’s violence remains largely hidden. Only in the primitive accumulation of the drug economy is violence visible.”

“Commodity value is consistently prioritized over use value. The public sector has become impoverished — to the point where it cannot meet basic needs — while money accumulates in other sectors, particularly in the drug trade, beyond any possible need or use.”

“When Roland Pryzbylewski is dismissed from the police force for accidentally shooting a black officer, he becomes a public school teacher. Sitting in a meeting to discuss how to “teach the test” for the forthcoming No Child Left Behind standardized tests, he experiences a flash of recognition. “Juking the stats,” he comments to a colleague, “you juke the stats and majors become colonels. I’ve been here before.””

“The concluding scenes, particularly the final montage, are marshaled to show that the police department, drug trade, school system, newspaper, and city hall all carry on in the same way. No matter what characters have risen or fallen or died, the cycle continues and the system survives.”

“Simon admitted at the time, however, that he was pessimistic about the possibility of political change as he found the political infrastructure bought, journalism eviscerated, the working class decimated, and the underclass narcotized.”

“Underlying The Wire’s story arc is the conviction that social exclusion and corruption do not exist in spite of the system but because of it. Its skepticism about reform comes from recognizing that substantive social change is not possible “within the current political structure.””

“Simon said he identified with the social existentialism of Camus: to commit to a just cause against overwhelming odds is absurd, but not to commit is equally absurd. Only one choice, however, offers the slightest chance for dignity.”

Technology

Why Not Wait On AI Risk? by Robin Hanson (Overcoming Bias)

“Our usual story is that such hurt is limited by competition. For example, each army is limited by all the other armies that might oppose it. And your employer and landlord are limited in exploiting you by your option to switch to other employers and landlords. So unless AI makes such competition much less effective at limiting harms, it is hard to see how AI makes role-mediated harms worse. Sure smart AIs might be smarter than humans, but they will have other smart AI competitors and humans will have AI advisors. Humans don’t seem much worse off recently as firms and governments who are far more intelligent than individual humans have taken over many roles.”

This argument is, basically, we’ve already capitulated to corporate overlords, who’ve coopted our institutions to such a degree that we have almost no control over the societies in which we live (unless we’re exceedingly wealthy and unscrupulous), so why not capitulate to the AIs, as well, who will most likely do the same thing? Perhaps there’s even hope that they’ll treat us better than the previous, corporate, incarnation? Maybe the AIs will help kill the corporations? Maybe we should ask Australia how that all worked out with their frogs and rabbits and such.

Programming

Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming (👠 Hirrolot's Blog)

“You see how our simple task of registering handlers has seamlessly transcended into wandering in rustc issues with the hope to somehow circumvent the language. Designing interfaces in Rust is like walking through a minefield: in order to succeed, you need to balance on your ideal interface and what features are available to you. Yes, I hear you. No, it is not like in all other languages. When you program in some stable production language (not Rust), you can typically foresee how your imaginary interface would fit with language semantics; but when you program in Rust, the process of designing APIs is affected by numerous arbitrary language limitations like those we have seen so far. You expect that borrow checker will validate your references and type system will help you to deal with program entities, but you end up throwing Box, Pin, and Arc here and there and fighting with type system inexpressiveness.”

Some thoughts on naming tests by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)

“I’m puzzled that people are so passionate about test names. I consider them the least important part of a test. A name isn’t irrelevant, but I find the test code more important. The code is an executable specification. It expresses the desired truth about a system. Test code is code that has the same lifetime as the production code. It pays to structure it as well as the production code. If a test is well-written, you should be able to understand it without reading its name.”