Links and Notes for November 4th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

COVID-19

US health officials are declaring the 2022-2023 flu season an epidemic by Patrick Martin (WSWS)

“There have also been 732 deaths thus far, with two pediatric deaths attributed to influenza. This was the ballpark figure for total mortality sustained during the 2020-2021 flu season, when mitigation measures were in place to check the spread of COVID, leading to the near elimination of the flu. With the end of all pandemic mitigation and social distancing, the flu has returned with a proverbial vengeance.”

Economy & Finance

Neoliberals Oppose Market Intervention — Unless the Market Is Screwing US Corporations by Majeed Malhas (Jacobin)

“the Biden administration is reportedly considering pushing for a bill called No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels (NOPEC). The bill would change antitrust laws to revoke the sovereign immunity protecting OPEC+ members, allowing the Justice Department to sue nations that restrain trade in oil, natural gas, or any petroleum product.”

I kind of expect this from OPEC because being a cartel is their raison d’être—it’s right in their name. But the for the use to make this move is a clear sign that they’ve all but given up on pretending that they’re all about free markets. They never have been, but they’ve always at least bothered to apply a fig leaf to their otherwise brazen, anti-competitive moves. This move is not only breathtakingly self-serving, hypocritical, and hugely ironic, but also wildly childish. I mean, who chose that name?

“This is the logic of the neoliberal economic system that the United States, alongside the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has architected and globalized since the 1980s. To be clear, the OPEC+ nations, especially Saudi Arabia and Russia, are not just innocent market actors; they do have political motivations. But the United States has always been able to hide behind that screen of economic objectivity, even as its maneuvers were clearly a bid to maintain its foreign policy interests — so it’s striking to see the US change its tune when other nations do the same.”

“The Biden administration’s selective outrage at a “dissident” foreign monopoly in OPEC+ but timid accommodation of domestic ones operating under the same economic logic shows the disingenuousness of the US federal government’s commitment to the free market.”

FTX on brink of collapse after Binance abandons rescue by Joshua Oliver, Richard Waters, Ortenca Aliaj, James Fontanella-Khan, William Langley, And Chan Ho-Him, Ft (Ars Technica)

“The abrupt change in fortune for FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda Research marks a spectacular fall for Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old trader and entrepreneur who is one of the industry’s most prominent figures. Bankman-Fried was one of the world’s richest people just months ago, but large swaths of his $24 billion fortune will evaporate if FTX and Alameda Research go bust.”

What a nonsensical paragraph. It’s an interesting philosophical conundrum: If it could fall apart so quickly, then did it ever really exist?

I have seen nothing but reverential treatment of Bankman-Fried, as if everyone has to cover their egos for ever having thought he was the real deal. FTX’s rival Binance, after 48 hours of due diligence, gave up examining FTX’s records and called off their potential buyout because there was way too much shady shit and way too little there there. Also,

“The US Securities and Exchange Commission has expanded an investigation into FTX, which includes examining the platform’s cryptocurrency lending products and the management of customer funds, according to a person familiar with the matter.”

This one might hit crypto in general pretty hard again (harder than it already has, as Bitcoin and Ethereum already slid 20% over the last couple of days).

““Given the size and interlinkages of both FTX and Alameda Research with other entities of the crypto ecosystem… it looks likely that a new cascade of margin calls, deleveraging and crypto company [and] platform failures is starting similar to what we saw last May [and] June following the collapse of Terra,” JPMorgan analysts wrote.”

Public Policy & Politics

Percent of registered voters who say the U.S. is heading in the right direction

So it’s gone back up, but man you have to pay attention to the actual numbers. Only 24% support the direction the U.S. is taking. That’s absurdly low. An utterly unrepresentative democracy.

The Politicians Who Destroyed Our Democracy Want Us to Vote for Them to Save It by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“The bipartisan project of dismantling our democracy, which took place over the last few decades on behalf of corporations and the rich, has left only the outward shell of democracy. The courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and the media, including public broadcasting, are captive to corporate power. There is no institution left that can be considered authentically democratic. The corporate coup d’état is over. They won. We lost.”

“The wreckage of this neoliberal project is appalling: endless and futile wars to enrich a military-industrial-complex that bleeds the U.S. Treasury of half of all discretionary spending; deindustrialization that has turned U.S. cities into decayed ruins; the slashing and privatization of social programs, including education, utility services and health care […]”

“The Democratic Party and Joe Biden are not the lesser evil, but rather, as Glen Ford pointed out, “the more effective evil.””

“The decisions of politicians like Biden have a staggering human cost, not only for the poor, workers and the shrinking middle class but for millions of people in the Middle East, millions of families ripped apart by mass incarceration, millions more forced into bankruptcy by our mercenary for-profit medical system where corporations are legally permitted to hold sick children hostage while their frantic parents bankrupt themselves to save them, millions who became addicted to opioids and hundreds of thousands who died from them, millions denied welfare assistance, and all of us barreling toward extinction because of a refusal to curb the greed and destructive power of the fossil fuel industry, which has raked in $2.8 billion a day in profit over the last 50 years.”

Citing critic Irving Howe, writing of the Snopes Trilogy, by William Faulkner,

““Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.””

“This puts liberals in a terrible bind. They have every right to fear the far right. All the dark scenarios are correct. But by backing Biden and the ruling corporate party, they ensure their political irrelevance.”

“After the Iraq war went sour, I, as someone who publicly opposed the invasion and had been the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, was often asked what we should do now. I answered that Iraq could no longer be put back together. It was broken. We broke it. Those who ask if we should support the Democrats as a tactic to halt our descent into tyranny are in a similar dilemma. My answer is no different. We should have walked out on the Democratic Party while we still had a chance.”

The Democrats’ Assault on Diplomacy by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“As soon as Biden won the November 2020 election and named the aforementioned to senior national security posts, all the talk of diplomacy went the way of “Build Back Better,” a higher minimum wage, no first use of nuclear weapons, and all the other promises Biden made and broke as quickly as you can say “No more support for the Yemen war.””

““The Squad,” whatever its members’ youthful altruism, is a pack of nebbishes in a heated competition with President Biden to see who can break more promises. Utterly useless.”

“In the years before he died in 2020, Steve Cohen, the noted Russianist, used to say there was only one political party in America, the War Party. What I took then to be a clever figure of speech is now the grimmest of realities.”

“When the Democratic Party fingered Russia after Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing mail was leaked in 2016, it was soon evident that in the small cause of Clinton’s political reputation the Democratic elite was perfectly willing to set loose a wave of paranoiac Russophobia with vast geopolitical consequences. There is a straight line between that episode and the “diplomacy never” line now prevalent in Washington. The state of hysteria that grips the policy cliques on all things to do with Russia is in large measure Hillary Clinton’s legacy.”

I have been banging this drum for years, arguing that our frivolous and self-serving kowtowing to Russophobia would be used as a weapon, to make everything worse. This has, unfortunately, come to fruition. Anyone who has been paying attention over the last two or three decades might be disappointed, but should not be surprised by the turn that world affairs have taken. This was utterly predictable. There are many examples on this blog over the years, but perhaps the piece Russophobia: the Lunatics are at the Helm from March of 2014 (shortly after the putsch in Ukraine) is the best example.

“Republicans are who they are and make few bones about it; Clinton and her liberal insincerities were scoring off the legitimate aspirations of ordinary Americans to sell them a late-imperial foreign policy diametrically opposed to their interests.”

“It has been evident for some time that America’s political process is indifferent to the wishes of those who continue to participate in it. Now it is also evident the ruling elites have rendered themselves immune to the power of language, and they are immune to the power of language because they are immune to rational thought. We must ask: Does anything we say matter to those who exercise power most directly?”

“[…] those who hold to the imperative of reason and rational discourse must keep on saying and saying and saying, a little like Medieval monks scribbling manuscripts to preserve civilization from the barbarity all around them.”

First Strike: The US and the World’s Most Dangerous Nuclear Policy by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“The updated Nuclear Posture Review makes it clear that it is the US that has the most dangerous nuclear policy in the world. China has recommitted to its no first strike policy. India has always had a no first strike policy. Russia does not. But it confines its nuclear employment policy to defending only Russian territory. Only the US reserves the right to a first strike policy and the right to extend its nuclear umbrella beyond its territory to the territory of its allies and partners.”

An Evening with Slavoj Žižek: Why Do We Enjoy Feeling Ashamed? (YouTube)

I continue to be shocked at how terrible Žižek’s take on the Russian attack on Ukraine is. This video is very long and he spends most of the time fighting foolish strongmen, mostly people he calls his “friends”, who all seem to have the absolute worst reasons possible for not supporting Ukraine wholeheartedly. I heard absolutely nothing about any of the reasons anyone that I read has given for wanting to bring an end to this war. Žižek seems to think that being contrarian means somehow making it look like people who want to end the war are the truly violent people and those who sell weapons are not. This is ridiculous on its face—and even upon reflection. Perhaps he thinks that the unending war in Ukraine or the total annihilation of Russia is a necessary evil, which we have to endure in to have even more peace? Is this Žižek’s Christopher Hitchens moment? Perhaps we finally found the bugbear—Russia—that turns Žižek’s brain off. He spends a considerable amount of time somehow equating Russia’s attitude toward LGBT as being worth any other sacrifice. He’s in fantastic company in the U.S. (that’s sarcasm)—I just wonder if he’s aware of what he seems to be saying.

Or maybe he just got sick of being called a Putinist all the time and this is just a long troll. Jesus, he does a good job, though. Check out 1:00:00, where he sounds like he’s presenting to a Women’s Studies class. In the second half, starting at 1:05:00, he posits that Russia’s purported position of siding with the third world can be nothing but Russian propaganda, that too many countries believe without question. What I find missing is that Žižek fails to compare this at all with the fact that so many other countries do exactly the same thing with American propaganda. The more interesting analysis would be to see the whole conflict as a battle between high-level powers for allies, each deploying propaganda measures to win friends. More interesting would be to think about what we would do if not only the revolution were to come from the “wrong type of people” (as with Jan. 6th in the U.S.) but also countries would learn to fake being helpful and democratic so well that you could no longer tell the difference—like the androids in Blade Runner. What if China or Russia were to learn how to fake being nice so well that they were actually beneficial? What if the U.S. did?

At least Žižek understands Russian and claims to listen to a lot of Russian media. So, he’s bathing in the awfulness of that media. It’s like listening only to FOX News, I imagine. Now he says that Russia’s media must be taken at face value and that “words matter”. I suppose they do, but we also have to consider who’s saying them and why they’re saying them. Like, the Democrats say they are anti-racist, but all of their policies are implicitly racist—so do words matter there? They say one thing and do another. Do those words matter? Or do words only matter if you say you’ll do something bad? Does it matter if you actually follow through or have the capability of following through on it?

I wonder what happened to Žižek (as I’ve done before from one or two of his recent articles). It’s not that the fact that I disagree with him, but I’m saddened to see that the slyness and playfulness is gone from his argumentation—and he loses not a word on who his bedfellows have become in taking such a strong stand against (only) Russia.

At least he doesn’t waste any time rehashing the history of NATO’s encroachment. That is important for determining how to avoid this situation again (perhaps here Žižek would disagree, saying that pure evil like Putin cannot be avoided or appeased—to which I would shake my head and wonder if he literally doesn’t see that the same argument applies to NATO and the U.S), but is not important for getting fewer people killed and suffering and wasting power and time with a war. Perhaps the history will be important to a rapprochement, but it’s not necessarily important.

What shocks me is really Žižek’s seeming lack of nuance and seeming complete disregard for lacking nuance. He describes the situation as extremely black-and-white, as if arming Ukraine is unequivocally the only possible moral solution—and then brooks no disagreement. I cannot distinguish his position from that of any other moron who thinks we should just push on through and win the war and destroy Putin, as if that were a remote possibility. He batted the nuclear fear aside—just like anyone else on MSNBC—but didn’t address the possibility that the war could go on for another decade. He seems to think it will be over quickly. Either that, or he’s completely faking his empathy for Ukrainians. What if it’s not over quickly? What if it happens exactly as all of the far more qualified forecasters are predicting? I can’t tell the difference between Žižek and Biden on this.

If he thinks that we just have to push through in Ukraine in order to rid the world of the awful Russian empire, what does he see coming after that? A solidification of the beneficence of American empire? Wouldn’t it be just as easy to use the same logic to consider the Russians having invaded to be the monkey wrench in the works that we need to begin to topple NATO and the American empire? Wouldn’t that be a thought worth entertaining? Or is he really so in the tank for NATO and convinced that there is a definite good guy/definite bad guy here that he can leave his usual ambivalence by the wayside_ Or does Žižek really think that his hoped-for socialist flowers will bloom in the garden of American empire?

The second question was very good:

“You said ‘words are not just words. They should always be taken seriously, especially in Putin’s case’ and he has brought up mutually assured destruction on many occasions now. How is it, in your mind, considered moral, to advocate for a confrontational stance against Russia when the possible consequences are so high i.e. mutually assured destruction.”

Žižek was absolutely swimming in a way that I’ve rarely seen him do. He was at a loss for words and his analysis was not good. He fell back to straw-manning people who knee-jerk disses on everything NATO does but not automatically what Russia does. Hey Žižek: there is no need to keep hammering on the crimes of a criminal who admits to being a criminal. It’s the one who commits crimes who claims holiness that we should keep an eye on.

Instead of answering the guys question, Žižek returned to answering questions his left-liberal friends asked instead. He went on to harangue Yanis Varoufakis for celebrating the blow to American imperialism that was the retreat from Afghanistan. Of course, the people of Afghanistan will not be better off under the Taliban (maybe). Of course, you shouldn’t celebrate necessarily, but it was a good thing. Žižek thinks Russia would not have stopped at Ukraine, so he’s totally in the tank for the theory that Putin’s goal is to take all of Russia. The guy from the audience was great, asked just the right questions. I wonder whether Žižek isn’t just getting old? Or he had COVID? He seemed very muddled. Žižek kept repeating the well-worn propaganda elements (e.g. Putin’s saying that he wants to bring back the Soviet Union, which he never said, at least not if you include his full quote). He kept fighting his leftist friends who think that “they are on the side of good if they oppose NATO”. It’s not about being good or bad, you old fool. It’s about trying to figure out which causes should you support in order to put an end to this, to increase stability, to get us focused again on the real problems. Nobody serious is saying that one side is all good or all bad. There is no point discussing those viewpoints. The idea is how to realistically stop this and prevent it from getting worse and maybe how to avoid it happening in the future (which involves paying attention to the actual history).

He did not answer the question. He did not justify how his simplistic “words are not just words” applies in one case and not the other.

We want a solution. Constantly saying Russia is bad is useless. Could we have prevented it? Do we care? Girlfriend scratched up the car. Why? It’s she really just crazy? Or did we drive her crazy? Is sure too sensitive? Does it matter? Will our car keep getting scratched by girlfriends if we don’t change? Are we sure enough that we’re not there the asshole that we’ll keep getting our car scratched rather than change our behavior? Or do we just beat the shoot out of her before and or afterwards to make sure it never happens again? Well that really work? Do we still have the moral high ground? Do we care?

Democracy, Good And Hard by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“There was no winning the midterms for most of us, a reality that many realized but few admitted. If the predicted red wave happened, it might have been understood as a repudiation of the culture war progressives were desperately seeking to ram down people’s throats. Then again, it meant that morons and dangerous nutjobs would hold office, which wasn’t a good thing. […]

“Either party could have owned this country with candidates of moderate intelligence, a modicum of integrity and a rejection of their tribes extreme fringes. Neither party could pull it off. The best we can hope for is another two years of congressional paralysis so that Biden doesn’t squander a few more trillion and make plural pronouns the law of the land by Executive Order.

“No lesson will be learned. No one will be saved. And the prospect of the next election, a presidential election, with no candidate as yet that a nation will want to vote for, looms large. The Dems sought to make this election existential for democracy, and the Reps did their best to help the Dems make the case, but what kind of democracy do we have when election after election, our votes are cast against the candidate we find most despicable rather than for a candidate we want in office?”

A Good Week for Liberty by Eric Schliesser (Crooked Timber)

“It’s probably not an entire coincidence that the Russians plan to withdraw from Kherson after realizing that the mid-term Trumpist wave petered out. ”

Just go ahead and complete the lobotomization if I ever express any sentiment this insipid in an article with that pretentious a title.

Haiti Is in Big Trouble. Are We Going to Help? by Ted Rall

Ted Rall 11.11.2022

Please, U.S., help everyone. You’re so rich. (At least, for now.) Maybe send diplomatic help and food instead of soldiers and weapons. But we know you don’t do anything unless you see a personal

Journalism & Media

Disinformation, Absolutely by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“The idea that someone needs to be in charge of deciding what’s true and false on behalf of the rank-and-file citizenry is becoming more and more widely accepted, and it’s plainly irrational. In practice it’s nothing other than a call to propagandize the public more aggressively. You might agree with their propaganda. The propagandists might believe they are being totally impartial and objective. But as long as they have any oligarchic or state backing, directly or indirectly, they are necessarily administering propaganda on behalf of the powerful.”

“Given the extent publishing platforms such as Facebook and Twitter now collaborate directly with DHS and other federal agencies, as Fang and Klipperstein detail it, we can no longer entertain any claims that there is no official censorship in America. What these two writers reveal is illegal, a clear breach of the First Amendment.”

The Cold Civil War by Anna Ochknia (Russian Dissent)

“My God! These are normal people! Not just ineffectual types, they have proven themselves in troubles and trials. What happened to their minds, their souls? What happened to all of us, to Russia?”

I ask myself the same thing about my fellow citizens in both the U.S. and Switzerland. No-one is paying attention because they mostly have the luxury of not being made to pay attention by their circumstances.

““I hate your beliefs, but I am ready to give my life for your right to express them” is the thought of Voltaire, one of those that form the core of my life principles. The trouble is that the question of the war in Ukraine for me is not a matter of belief, it is simply a matter of humanism. I cannot support inhuman convictions, but in the same way, for some, my convictions look like a betrayal of the Fatherland. We all just tolerate each other now. For now. For the time being.”

“I’m talking about those who sincerely believe that our country is in danger and threatened by “Ukrainian Nazis” in collusion with NATO and the insidious “collective West”.”

I believe that Russia’s place in the world is in danger. It’s control over its own resources and fate is in danger, yes. NATO seems to have decided—and expressed quite clearly—that the only tolerable outcome is for Russia to be under NATO’s yoke, as Germany and England are, occupied. This is the equilibrium toward which the powers-that-be—the empire—inexorably tends. There does not seem to be a stable alternative in which three—or more!—bodies could co-exist in a stable configuration.

“It cannot be denied that propaganda has done a good job of working on Russian society. But why did it work at all, and why did it work the way it did? Our propagandists do not have any special skills, and the authors of the famous “manuals” from the ideologues in the Presidential Administration are also mediocre thinkers. But it was their ignorance and intellectual poverty that helped them to hit the nerve, and stupid and greedy propagandists managed to awaken bright and pure feelings in their audience, rousing a disgusting obedience to war.”

It is very interesting how much of this article—written by a Russian journalist about Russia—applies just as well to the U.S., Germany, Great Britain, or Switzerland (these are the countries whose media I’m familiar enough with to be able to deem what the general attitude has been so far).

“Today, it is even more difficult for political convictions to be born: there is no habit of conscious resistance to the authorities, but there is a habit of eternal sabotage. And the spectre of “the fatherland is in danger” begins to interfere with sabotage. And irritation rises against those who wish for the defeat of their own country, which goes against all the rules and principles of a civilized mind.”

Oh, yes! There is very much that irritation! Although sometimes it very much feels that people are more irritated that they are being made to think, to re-open their history books, to study and consider and evaluate before they come to major moral conclusions about the present and the future—instead of just parroting the words of people whom they would never admit were they betters, necessarily, but whose ideas they’ve still adopted wholesale because it very much beats thinking for themselves, which is difficult and takes time and effort, all of which drastically cuts into the amount of time one has available after work for shopping, Instagram, and reality TV.

Art & Literature

Death of an Oracle by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“He knew that any concession to power — and he saw universities as bastions of corporate power — eroded your integrity. He was unyielding. He told me, but perhaps more importantly showed me, that I must also be unyielding. We would not, he assured me, be rewarded by the wider society for our obstinacy, nor would we often be understood, but we would be free. And there would be those, especially the marginalized and oppressed, who would see in our defiance an ally, and that, in the end, was all that truly mattered.”

A short history of language in Ukraine by Norman Davies (The Spectator)

“One can suggest with caution, therefore, that Flemish, Dutch and German are the Germanic counterparts of Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian in the Slavonic world.”

“[…] after the revolutions of 1917, the Bolsheviks would actively support the dissemination of all non-Russian languages.”

“Tsarist Russians were not uniquely wicked. In 19^th Century Europe a widespread, Darwinian belief was that powerful so-called ‘historical languages’ like English, French, or German (and indeed Russian) deserved to flourish while ‘unhistorical languages’ were unfit to survive. Leading British educators shamelessly embraced the assumed superiority of English and the accompanying demotion of Welsh, Irish or Scottish Gaelic.

“A special animus, however, was reserved for forms of regional speech, which were closely related to dominant state languages, and which were viewed by the powers that be as needless, subversive irritants. In France, the Republic’s full weight was thrown against Occitan and Provençal in particular. In Spain, General Franco’s educators were pursuing their campaign to liquidate Catalan as late as 1975.”

Yaka Yaka by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“I suppose, when the time comes. I am certainly aware that the internet has a tendency to transform eulogy into tawdry scavenging, where the praise people offer up to the dead barely conceals their glee at having the opportunity to offer it […]”

“However little I’m able to get excited about Beyoncé’s music, it is really just wonderful that she is so earnestly committed to paying her respects to regional subgenres such as New Orleans bounce, and in that respect helping to return our deepest American musical culture to its roots in the sort of genius that flows directly from the body and circumvents useless propositional speech.”

“Just listen to the opening seconds of “Mean Woman Blues” from the 1964 recording of his concert at the Hamburg Star Club, with the incredible Nashville Teens (from Surrey, in reality) as his backing band. This was not a concert, as one raving critic noted, but a crime scene. It was a diabolical desecration of the same venue at which the Fab Four, the lovable Liverpudlian mop-tops (etc.), had only recently completed their first apprenticeship and moved on to global stardom. It was the very purest distillation of all the dark energy rock and roll had conjured into our world like another Bomb. Nothing else has ever come close, before or since — not Hendrix, not the Stooges, no one. It is not “proto-punk”, but the very Form of Punk, a transcendent rupture amidst all our small-minded measurements of before and after. And it all depended entirely on who Jerry Lee Lewis, “The Killer”, was as a human being.”

“Earlier, in 1835, the year the two were married, Poe published “Berenice”, a story that is at once the purest expression of his artistry as a writer of short fiction, and his most extreme and shocking contribution to the genre of Gothic horror. In it a man lives, shut in and isolated in a dark decaying mansion, with his beautiful first cousin. The two eventually marry, a decision he knows in his bones will damn them both, but that he makes anyway. Soon she begins wasting away from some unnamed disease, and of all her parts only her teeth remain as perfect and white as before. He becomes fixated on them, and —short story short— ends up prying them out one by one before burying her alive.”

“Lewis’s own defining moment is sometimes said to be his boogie rendition of “My God Is Real” at the Southwest Bible Institute of Waxahachie, Texas, which led to his immediate expulsion. This is the same gospel standard that Al Green would some years later turn into what sounds at least like a strangely sexy love song, full of sensuous yearning far more than the doxastic certitude implied by the song’s title.”

“So he’s problematic? Jerry Lee could have told you that himself. In fact he has been doing so, in his art, on stage, in the public eye, before the world, presumably before his God, for the past seventy years.”

“Bonne fête de la veille de la Toussaint[3], you ghouls. Don’t marry your cousins, watch out for the straight-razors and the fentanyl, and good lord mind your teeth.”

The Essential Philip K. Dick by Molly Young (NY Times)

“The best of his work is fueled by nuclear-strength imagination, grand metaphysical and theological explorations, and prescience in matters of technology, marketing, consumerism, media and ecological catastrophe. Dick picked up on sinister cultural undercurrents the way a cat senses a can of tuna being opened six rooms away.”

“Stanislaw Lem considered Dick’s ambiguity — when it was successful — to be a strategy for generating rapture. Insisting on precise conclusions from the author, Lem wrote, would be like demanding that Kafka produce an entomological justification in “The Metamorphosis” stating when and under what circumstances a guy might wake up as a bug.”

“If I could propose two essential qualities of Dick as a human, they would be cosmic bafflement and heroic hopefulness, both present in “Ubik.” This is a novel with a long half-life. You may not clock the full effects until you find yourself thinking about it six or 60 months later.”

“Any of the novels listed here can be mined for insights about how it feels to move through the world with an overdeveloped prefrontal cortex. The one that best replicates the feeling of lunacy is “Martian Time-Slip” (1964).”

“It is later revealed that “Horselover Fat” is an alias for Philip Dick; apparently “Philip” means “horse lover” in Greek and “fat” a (loose) translation of the German word “Dick.” The novel is autobiography gone mad, with a version of Dick narrating an alternative version of Dick.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Scheer Intelligence: Is Elon Musk the Best or the Worst for Twitter? by Robert Scheer (KCRW)

This interview with Corynne McSherry, the EFF’s Legal Director Corynne McSherry. It seemed like a good idea at first, but she wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped. Although she was clear and correct in saying that sites need moderation, she never gave me the indication that she thought that there was a difference between moderation and censorship. As a staunch and stalwart American Democrat, she is, of course, happy to make an exception for Donald Trump, saying “I don’t lose any sleep over a former president of America not being able to have a Twitter account.”, justifying it by saying that “he has many other channels of expression”, so censoring him is OK. I find this lack of rigor pretty disappointing. The legal director of the EFF is not a free-speech absolutist. She thinks some censorship is OK, as long as she gets to decide who’s censored? Or a democratic majority? What?!?

Donald Trump should be able to tweet. People should be able to block him. People should be able to see him. The site doesn’t have to promote his tweets. There is no implication in the right to free speech that you’re owed a megaphone on every platform. There is a difference between moderation and censorship that they utterly failed to discuss. Any site with content will have to moderate content, if for no other reason than to combat bots and spam and unwanted advertising. If your site’s purpose is to host anything other than that almost-certainly unwanted content, then you’re going to have to moderate in some way. I have a nearly unknown site and I’ve had to moderate when the spambots showed up. I had no qualms that I was engaging in censorship as I was deleting ads for “cialis” and “hot teens”. I have also received the rare comments from the rare visitors who stumble on my site who vehemently disagreed with whatever premise I’d posited in the article on which they were commenting. I left those. Why not? They added to the discussion, if not for me, then perhaps for future readers. Some were utterly hare-brained, of course, but the way to combat those is to provide a response, I suppose, if you’re into that.

Anyway, don’t bother listening to this episode of an otherwise excellent podcast.

Technology

How’s Twitter doing over there?

Chiquita fake accounts

Great work today, guys!

Some of these parody accounts are quite funny. How hard is it to just pay attention to the @-part of the title?

Programming

The Perfect Commit by Simon Willison

“I’m not a huge advocate of test-first development, where tests are written before the code itself. What I care about is tests-included development, where the final commit bundles the tests and the implementation together.”

“Sometimes I’ll even open an issue seconds before writing the commit message, just to give myself something I can link to from the commit itself!”

“Most of my issue threads are me talking to myself—sometimes with dozens of issue comments, all written by me.”

I consider it be more that I’m currently talking to myself, but I’m always talking to either a future version of myself or any team member or person who stumbles across the content and would benefit from the context. I need to know what I’ve already tried in order to avoid repeating useless solutions. I need to know when I made contact with other people, in case the task drags on over time, in which case I’ll need to stop the task and do something else for a while. Other developers will want to know enough detail to be able to determine whether what they’re looking at is a solution applicable to their problem.

“After I’ve closed my issues I like to add one last comment that links to the updated documentation and ideally a live demo of the new feature.”

It is very important to distill the “solution” to the task, especially if you’ve been very voluble in your analysis and comments. The “solution” section should be a succinct summary of how the expectations or acceptance criteria were achieved.

“My commit messages grew a lot shorter when I started bundling the updated documentation in the commit—since often much of the material I’d previously included in the commit message was now in that documentation instead.”

“The biggest benefit of lengthy commit messages is that they are guaranteed to survive for as long as the repository itself. If you’re going to use issue threads in the way I describe here it is critical that you consider their long term archival value.”

That is true, but you have to consider efficiency. Team members and others are far more likely to be searching work items and documentation than they are to search commit messages. We have to be careful to not sacrifice usability for some artificial requirement of repository completeness.

“One of the reasons I like GitHub Issues is that it includes a comprehensive API, which can be used to extract all of that data. I use my github-to-sqlite tool to maintain an ongoing archive of my issues and issue comments as a SQLite database file.”

“Bug fix that doesn’t deserve documentation? Still bundle the implementation and the test plus a link to an issue, but no need to update the docs—especially if they already describe the expected bug-free behaviour.”

“If I’m writing more exploratory or experimental code it often doesn’t make sense to work in this strict way. For those instances I’ll usually work in a branch, where I can [use] “WIP” commit messages and failing tests with abandon. I’ll then squash-merge them into a single perfect commit (sometimes via a self-closed GitHub pull request) to keep my main branch as tidy as possible.”