Links and Notes for February 23rd, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Climate Change
• Medicine & Disease
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• Programming

Public Policy & Politics

Spin Cycle by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post)

Scheer Post − Mr. Fish − Spin-Cycle

“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.”

Journalism & Media

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.”

Labor

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.””

Economy & Finance

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.

Science & Nature

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.”

Climate Change

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.”

Medicine & Disease

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.”

Art & Literature

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.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

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.”

Technology

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.

Programming

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!”