Links and Notes for July 12th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Programming
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

Open letter to the President of Switzerland, Ms Viola Amherd by Alfred de Zayas (CounterPunch)

“As a former senior official of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Secretary of the Human Rights Committee and Head of the Petitions Division, and as a former independent expert of the Human Rights Council on the international order, I am astonished by the slippery slope that Switzerland has chosen in “cuddling up” with NATO. This is nothing less than an ethical and legal aberration. Dear President Viola Amherd, please do your utmost to defend Swiss neutrality and to reestablish Swiss authority and credibility as a peace mediator.”

‘My Life’s Work Melting Before My Eyes’ by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“It is difficult to imagine a U.S. and Russian diplomat walking and talking today when, as Professor Sergey Markedonev, a fellow participant at the Vienna round table pointed out, official U.S. policy precludes even shaking hands with Russian diplomats.”

“To cross that bridge the U.S. government needs a signal from the American people that such behavior is not acceptable. We need a modern-day version of the June 1982 Central Park million-person rally in support of nuclear disarmament and arms control and against nuclear war.”

Iran’s run-off presidential election won by “reformer” advocating rapprochement with US imperialism as it sets Mideast ablaze by Keith Jones (WSWS)

“Pezeshkian provided no explanation as to how the nuclear accord could be revived and the punishing economic sanctions removed. Rather he relied on support from sections of the bourgeoisie and upper middle class who believe that Iran’s wholesale surrender to the imperialist powers will result in their personal enrichment, and who fear deep-rooted popular anger over social inequality, an inflation-driven collapse in living standards, and the regime’s violent suppression of anti-government protests in 2018, 2019 and 2022.”

“Under Khamenei, the Islamic Republic has sought to strike a bargain with the imperialist powers that recognizes the Iranian bourgeoisie’s claim to regional-power status through its combination of Shia populist appeals to the region’s “dispossessed”—including posturing as the foremost defender of the Palestinian people—military pressure, and repeated failed attempts at rapprochement. These include the overtures Tehran made to the Clinton administration under President Rafsanjani, the secret “grand bargain” offered George W. Bush as the Iranian regime connived in the 2003 US war on Iraq and the 2015 nuclear accord.”

“In the election debates, Pezeshkian claimed that the only way to address Iran’s economic crisis is to secure massive investment from the western imperialist powers. He called for friendly relations with all countries, except Israel, while avoiding any discussion as to why the US and its European allies are threatening Iran and waging economic war on it.”

We Need a New Political Vocabulary by Michael Hudson (CounterPunch)

“Political differences between Europe’s centrist parties are marginal, all supporting neoliberal cutbacks in social spending in favor of rearmament, fiscal stringency and the deindustrialization that support of U.S.-NATO policy entails. The word “centrist” means not advocating any change in the economy’s neoliberalism. Hyphenated-centrist parties are committed to maintaining the pro-U.S. post-2022 status quo.”

“Voters in France, Germany and Italy are turning away from this blind alley. Every incumbent centrist party has recently lost – and their defeated leaders all had similar pro-U.S. neoliberal policies. As Steve Keen describes the centrist political game: “The Party in power runs Neoliberal policies; it loses the next election to rivals who, when they get in power, also run neoliberal policies. They then lose, and the cycle repeats.” European elections, like this November’s one in the United States, are largely a protest vote – with voters having nowhere else to go except to vote for the populist nationalist parties promising to smash this status quo. This is continental Europe’s counterpart to Britain’s Brexit vote.”

“The AfD in Germany, Marine le Pen’s National Rally in France and Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy are depicted as smashing and breaking the economy – by being nationalist instead of conforming to the NATO/EU Commission, and specifically by opposing the war in Ukraine and European isolation from Russia. That stance is why voters are supporting them. We are seeing a popular rejection of the status quo. The centrist parties call all nationalist opposition neo-fascist, just as in England the media describe both the Tories and Labour as centrists but Nigel Farage as a far right populist.”

“What may have seemed to Western Europeans a peaceful and even prosperous international order in the 1950s under U.S. leadership has turned into an increasingly self-promoting American order that is impoverishing Europe. Donald Trump has announced that he will support a protectionist tariff policy not only against Russia and China, but also against Europe. He has promised that he will withdraw funding for NATO, and oblige European members to bear the full costs of restoring their depleted supply of armaments, mainly by buying U.S. arms, even though these have turned out not to work very well in Ukraine.”

We’ll see what he actually does. Trump says a lot of things.

“This global fracturing of America’s unipolar world order is enabling the anti-euro parties to present themselves not as radical extremists but as seeking to restore Europe’s lost prosperity and diplomatic self-reliance – in a right-wing anti-immigrant way, to be sure. That has become the only alternative to the pro-U.S. parties, now that there is no more real left.”

War and Famine by Andrea Mazzarino (CounterPunch)

“Armed conflict disrupts food supplies as warring factions divert resources to arms production and their militaries while destroying the kinds of infrastructure that enable societies to feed themselves. Governments, too, sometimes use starvation as a weapon of war.”

“Nazi Germany’s nearly three-year siege of the city of Leningrad, which stands out for the estimated 630,000 people the Germans killed slowly and intentionally thanks to starvation and related causes. Those few Russians I know who survived that war as young children still live with psychological trauma, stunted growth, and gastrointestinal problems. Their struggles, even in old age, are a constant reminder to me of war’s ripple effects over time. Some 20-25 million people died from starvation in World War II, including many millions in Asia. In fact, some scholars believe that hunger was the primary cause of death in that war.”

“in war zones themselves, among civilians, the long-term effects of armed conflict play out on the bodies of those with the least say over whether or not we go to war to begin with, its indirect costs including the possibility of long-term starvation (now increasingly rampant in Gaza).”

“America’s longest war in Afghanistan deepened that country’s poverty, decimating what existed of its agriculture and food distribution systems, while displacing millions. And the effects continue: 92% of Afghans are still food insecure and nearly 3 in 10 Afghan children will face acute malnutrition this year.”

“[…] an estimated at least two out of every 10,000 people there are now dying daily from starvation, with the very young, very old, and those living with disabilities the worst affected. Gazans are trying to create flour from foraged animal feed, scouring ruins for edible plants, and drinking tepid, often polluted water, to tragic effect, including the rapid spread of disease. Tales of infants and young children dying because they can’t get enough to eat and distraught parents robbed of their dignity because they can do nothing for their kids (or themselves) are too numerous and ghastly to detail here. But just for a moment imagine that all of this was happening to your loved ones.”

“A growing number of Gazans, living in conditions where their most basic nutritional needs can’t be met, are approaching permanent stunting or death. The rapid pace of Gaza’s descent into famine is remarkable among conflicts. According to UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Food Program, the decline in the nutritional status of Gazans during the first three months of the war alone was unprecedented. Eight months into the Israeli assault on that 25-mile-long strip of land, a major crossing for aid delivery has again been closed, thanks to the most recent offensive in Rafah and a half-million Gazans face “catastrophic levels of hunger.” Thought of another way, the fourth horseman has arrived.”

“Seen in this light, the overwhelming focus of young Americans on the Gaza war and their lack of enthusiasm for preserving democracy, as they consider voting for third-party candidates (or not voting at all) and so handing Donald Trump the presidency, becomes more understandable to me. What good is a democracy if it hemorrhages resources into constant foreign wars? Certainly, the current administration has yet to introduce a viable alternative to our endless engagement in foreign conflicts or meaningfully mitigate the inflation of basic necessities, among them food and housing”

This is such a conflicted statement. Anyone who doesn’t vote for Biden hates democracy. How can you take this person seriously? That’s what she wrote that it’s “more understandable” to her that “young Americans” have a “lack of enthusiasm for preserving democracy.” That’s the interpretation you’re going with, based on the shitshow that’s going on over there? That anyone who can’t vote blue-no-matter-who is against democracy? Get the fuck out of here with your bullshit. You’ve got TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).

“Concerns about foreign wars can’t be solved by staying home on November 5th or voting for a third-party candidate or Donald Trump. The 2024 election is about preserving our very ability to protest America’s wars (or those this country is backing abroad), as opposed to creating a potential Trumpian forever hell here at home.”

It absolutely is not about that at all. The 2024 election is about nothing at all. Nothing will change, regardless of who is elected. The empire will roll on, unperturbed. Trump is not even close to competent or focused enough to fuck things up worse than the Democrats have—and people like this author continue to vote blue to prevent a loss of democracy. Morons. Vote blue no matter who, even though they keep us in this mess. No. Burn it down. These people are all the same. They have no perspective. They long ago picked a Trump presidency as the worst thing that could possibly happen and then never, ever, ever checked where the administration they do support has taken them. This is how Trump was elected last time; this is how he will be elected again. Unless they manage to shoot him, in which case I’m sure we’ll see at least one article from each of these blue-no-matter-who people lamenting the tragedy with giant crocodile tears.

Better than Sex? by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“We online writers, when it comes down to it, are none of us so unlike those Macedonian teenagers who, circa 2015, had just started up their low-traffic porn sites only to discover soon enough that the real money was in pumping out propaganda for the Trump campaign.”

Always nice to see someone like Justin keeping all of these “Macedonian teenagers got Trump elected” myths alive over so many years. Don’t ever change, Justin.

“The Democrats failed to do that, and have become only more jarringly the party of oligarchs and of coastal “symbolic elites”, such as, notably, my peers in universities and the publishing industry, who have only a fraction of the real elites’ wealth, but do whatever they can over the course of their anxious lives to maneuver as close to that wealth as they can get.”

“Too bad, then, that the current populist movement has squandered the spirit of absurdist countercultural exuberance on the adulation of a man whose understanding of the world will never extend beyond the street-knowledge accumulated in the louche demimonde of 1980s Manhattan real-estate.”

“The American electoral system is so compromised by wealth inequality, by gerontocratic clinging, by blatantly oligarchic campaign-finance operations, and by the rigid and unacceptable bipartisan stranglehold upon it, that any solemn airs one puts on in approaching the ballot-box by now seem to me as misplaced and comical as the moral self-satisfaction one might not long ago have seen on display from someone who has just paid membership dues to NPR. It is an empty gesture held over from the civic religion of a more hopeful time.”

Welcome to the club, Justin. There’s plenty of room.

“International peace and security are really the only thing that matters to me. I don’t live in the United States. My voting district is “the rest of the world”, and I am, along with my fellow expatriates, in the unusual position of being permitted, by circumstance of birth, to vote in the US elections while the great majority of the others in my abstract “district” cannot. So as far as I’m concerned, all you “territorial Americans” can work out all the domestic stuff on your own. It’s not really my business anymore.”

“The state took away almost everything my father had, simply because he got sick. Russia doesn’t do that to its citizens; China doesn’t do that to its citizens; and the US is certainly not going to do that to me, because I’m not going to be there to let them.”

“During his first presidency President Trump frequently shot off his mouth in reckless ways that could have caused real trouble. But the fact remains that the actual amount of violent conflict instigated or abetted under Trump was by any reasonable estimate significantly lower than what we have seen in the years since.”

“All we have to go on is what has already happened, and when we do this we see that the world is by many measures a much less secure place than it was when Biden came into office. And we see, also, a period of relative calm on the international scene in the four years prior to his election. I would of course prefer international solidarity to nationalist isolationism. But if our choice is between the latter of these and the preservation of American global hegemony at any cost, well then, as far as I’m concerned, from my perch here in Europe, American isolationism no longer looks quite so bad.”

“Curiously, it often seems not so much as if the Democrats are the hawkish party and the Republicans the doves, as that the Democrats are hawks in Europe and doves in Asia, while with the Republicans it’s the reverse.”

Pardon? Democrats are doves in Asia? What are you smoking, Justin?

“I grow more convinced every day that whoever is in office, of whatever political orientation, is in any case only going to be overseeing one and the same vast historical transformation, whose short- and long-term outcomes are going to be substantially the same no matter who is in power.”

True, but our timeline does not arc toward justice.

“But let’s start with the Pax Americana, and with the role of “soft power” in maintaining its legitimacy for much of the Cold War era. I don’t think Americans quite realize just how little the rest of the world is thinking about them these days. At least not the way they used to. It often seems as if American soft power in the world has entirely vanished, and only the hard power, the constant threat of American force, remains.”

On manga as a cultural touchstone entirely divorced from U.S. soft power:

“This was a volley of characters and stories that paid no deference to Mickey Mouse or to the Brothers Grimm. It came from a world where the representation of gender, of sexuality, of courage, of what is to count as success, were all so extremely different from the prevailing global cultural narratives of the 20th century as to make someone who had been raised up in these feel as if he were traveling in time, witnessing an Ancient Greek phallic procession, or a story told by a West African griot. It was human, definitely, but differently human, and the young people were eating it up indiscriminately.”

“It’s the initial phase of what I expect is going to be a large-scale shift from a world of chum to a world of slop , from a world in which machines are deployed so that some human beings may exploit and extract wealth from other human beings, to a world in which machines begin to do their thing independently of what might suit any human being’s desires or interests, well thought-out or no, morally salutary or no. It is already slop, and not chum, that is shaping the cerebral cortices of infants plopped down in front of screens to watch hours-long loops of “Johnny Johnny Yes Papa” or of the adventures of Monkey Bon Bon , as their parents meanwhile sit nearby in front of their screens trying to figure out how to update their passwords in order to pay their taxes or make their medical appointments.”

“There is no telling yet what sort of things these young victims of our most recent data revolution are going to value as adults, but I am fairly confident in saying that the civic duties, such as we understand them, of a free citizen of a multi-party democracy will not make the cut.”

“It is probably better for the world to force recognition of just how extreme these transformations are, by refusing even to pretend that any octogenarian political animal shaped in the 20th century, such as Trump and Biden both were, neither giving any real indication of any interest in adapting to or even acknowledging our new reality, should have any kind of role in stewarding us into a future fit for human beings.”

“Political candidates are idiots. It’s a requirement for the job. It is vulgar and undignified to invest even the smallest shred of your affective life into these people. They will continue to come and go. It is definitely inappropriate to allow politics to serve, as it does today for so many, as a totalizing world-view that might be expected, notwithstanding its necessarily immanentist frame, to speak to our deepest longings.”

The Old Evil by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

This is a fantastic essay. It evokes the same images you’ll find in the graphic novels Palestine by Joe Sacco, from 1993–1995.

“RAMALLAH, Occupied Palestine: It comes back in a rush, the stench of raw sewage, the groan of the diesel, sloth-like Israeli armored personnel carriers, the vans filled with broods of children, driven by chalky faced colonists, certainly not from here, probably from Brooklyn or somewhere in Russia or maybe Britain. Little has changed. The checkpoints with their blue and white Israeli flags dot the roads and intersections. The red-tiled roofs of the colonist settlements — illegal under international law — dominate hillsides above Palestinian villages and towns. They have grown in number and expanded in size. But they remain protected by blast barriers, concertina wire and watchtowers surrounded by the obscenity of lawns and gardens. The colonists have access to bountiful sources of water in this arid landscape that the Palestinians are denied.”

“The wall lacerates the landscape. It twists and turns like some huge, fossilized antediluvian snake severing Palestinians from their families, slicing Palestinian villages in half, cutting communities off from their orchards, olive trees and fields, dipping and rising out of wadis, trapping Palestinians in the Jewish state’s updated version of a Bantustan.”

“We turn a corner on a hillside. Cars and trucks are veering spasmodically to the right and left. Several in front of us are in reverse. Ahead is an Israeli checkpoint with thick boxy blocks of dun colored concrete. Soldiers are stopping vehicles and checking papers. Palestinians can wait hours to get past. They can be hauled from their vehicles and detained. Anything is possible at an Israeli checkpoint, often erected with no advance warning.”

“It was like this for Blacks in the segregated south and Indigenous Americans. It was like this for Algerians under the French. It was like this in India, Ireland and Kenya under the British. The death mask — too often of European extraction — of colonialism does not change. Nor does the God-like authority of colonists who look at the colonized as vermin, who take a perverse delight in their humiliation and suffering and who kill them with impunity.”

“The Palestinians want their land back. Then they will talk of peace. The Israelis want peace, but demand Palestinian land. And that, in three short sentences, is the intractable nature of this conflict.”

Roaming Charges: Politics on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“In 1988, Biden suffered two near-fatal brain aneurysms that he says “changed him into the man he wanted to be.” That “changed man” treated Anita Hill dismissively (1991), wrote the most racist and punitive crime law in US history (1994), wrote a counterterrorism bill that expanded the federal death penalty against people who hadn’t committed murder and became a model for the Patriot Act (1996), proposed cutting Social Security (1995), voted against gay marriage (1996), backed the gutting of welfare (1996), voted to repeal Glass-Steagel, setting the stage for the financial crisis (1999), voted for the Patriot Act (2001) and the Iraq War (2002/3), voted against bankruptcy protections for students (2005) and armed a genocide (202¾).”

Journalism & Media

Many Democrats Claim Push Against Biden is Racist by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

This is a great analysis of how there will no be a Democratic party after Trump wins the next election. They will self-immolate. They are already infighting so much about who their candidate will be—and they have such a paucity of actually plausible candidates to choose from. There are those who think that anyone who is against Biden is racist because Biden is the only one who can beat Trump, who would put all black people into concentration camps. Therefore, pushing against Biden is pushing for Trump and is racist. You see how easy that is?

There are others who say that, if Biden has to go, that Kamala Harris is the obvious next candidate and that it would be racist to even consider anyone else. She is the heir apparent, no matter how wildly unqualified and stupid she is. People want her to be in line for president because it’s her turn. She is black and she is female and she is next in line. See how easy that is?

None of this makes any sense and none of this is worth even discussing. These people are utterly incapable of communicating in anything other than quick takes. They are powerful and important to the discourse, more’s the pity. They have all obviously internalized the fact that it doesn’t matter who the president is, as long it’s not Donald Trump. That is their only concern. They are mind-numbingly stupid and they are in charge.

Democratic Oligarchs: Attempting to Override the Will of Their Party's Voters? by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

The Biden Administration Has Exposed The Brain Rot Of Western Liberals by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“There is a kind of poetical beauty in the fact that the so-called “moderates” of western liberalism are cheerleading for the re-election of a half-dead dementia patient while his administration facilitates an active genocide in Gaza, perpetuates a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine, prepares for war with Lebanon, and militarizes with increasing aggression against Russia and China, all while killing the earth’s ecosystem and contributing to the poverty, sickness and oppression of the American people at home.”

“This is the political ideology that Biden has aligned with throughout the entirety of his far-too-long career, from when he was just a baby swamp monster elected to the Senate at the age of 30 all the way until now as he watches all the cognitive flotsam and jetsam of his decades of Beltway soul-selling blur together like oil paints on the palette of his ruined cerebral matter.”

The Corporate News Media at Work by Jonathan Cook (Scheer Post)

This is a very good analysis of reporting on Russia (bad guy) vs. Israel (good guy). It comes to the following obvious conclusion.

“The truth is the BBC, The Guardian and the rest are nothing more than conduits of state-corporate propaganda, masquerading as news outlets.

“Until we grasp that, they will continue grooming us.”

Art & Literature

Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky by Antoine Volodine (The Baffler)

“I cannot tell you anything about this, you will have to go on waiting another one thousand and nine hundred years, give or take a few. Farther on, a stone will stand like a vain, superfluous sign, a squared off block before and after its assassination, a testament to the persistence, otherwise and elsewhere, of a collective history, a collective hurt, a black waste populated with animals and humans, and you’ll want to communicate with this ostentatiously scarred stone, you’ll imagine the possibility of a dialogue, but nothing of the sort will happen. So you’ll remain bent over the wee hours, the place of the day, the twilight, you’ll restart your ruminations for an answer regarding yourself, once again you’ll revive the sterile silence, exhaustion on the edge of knowledge, the slowness of disaggregation, once again you’ll hope to learn the reason for being of the present, and, as if you were already poised before the truth, without love you will wish for the end of things, with love you will wish for the beginning of memory: the beginning of pain.”

“Your thoughts, in any case, will be too muddled to express in sentences. They’ll drift in spirals above the muds and waters that hide access to great depths. At one moment, everything will tilt, and you will crumple, dead-winged, at the foot of the tombs others will have abandoned before leaving. Behind the tombs, the sky will be infinite, as always. Behind the tombs, the sky is painfully infinite, and then, then there is nothing.”

““Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky” is from Nos animaux préférés, published Éditions du Seuil (Paris), 2006.”

A conversation I had with a co-worker:

Me: Nope. Even the apostrophe will eventually be wiped out. Think about how haphazardly English approaches whether something is written with a space (fist bump), a hyphen (anarcho-capitalist) or … just all smooshed together (beanbag).

I’m not a prescriptivist, but I’m not a descriptivist either. I’m somewhere in-between, examining each change to determine whether it improves concision and clarity. If it doesn’t, I lament why we let the least linguistically adept make the decisions about we wield language.

Co-worker: This is an interesting point. On first pull, I find it a little elitist. What decides who is linguistically adept? Restricting language changes to those who are learned in the language precludes interesting innovation. English dialects like AAVE do push the language and offer new language features, but it hasnt [sic] been until rather recently that it has been recognized as a real and respectible [sic] dialect.

Me: The linguistically adept are capable of expressing themselves without having to constantly reformulate “what they meant” by the initial, incomprehensible thing that they said. They don’t wear out the phrase “you get what I meant.” If AAVE doesn’t put the burden on the listener, then I don’t have anything against it.

Like when people started using “lead” for both the present and past tense. That’s a step backward. It puts more burden on the reader. For me, it’s all about putting the burden on the writer or speaker and freeing up the reader or listener to ingest what was meant without constantly triangulating between possible interpretations until a word or phrase two sentences later finally collapses the wave-form and makes that which was said a minute before comprehensible.

OTOH, I don’t think we need to focus too much on whether we write “backwards” or “backward”. Either is fine. No-one’s confused. I’m honestly not even sure which is primarily British and which American.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Wir sind die Guten! Darum schlagen wir Euch den Schädel ein! by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Schaut man sich die Atlanten und Geschichtsbücher an, erkennt man schnell, dass die liberale Demokratie ein westliches Konzept ist. Fragt man beispielsweise einen Araber oder einen Chinesen, so werden sie die Aussage, nach der die liberale Demokratie die beste aller denkbaren Staatsformen ist, mit Inbrunst bestreiten; so wie ihre Ahnen bestritten hätten, dass das Christentum die beste aller denkbaren Religionen ist. Und wer sich heute die nackten sozioökonomischen Zahlen anschaut, wird ja auch nicht unbedingt Belege für die Überlegenheit liberaler Demokratien finden – im Gegenteil. Natürlich, wir sehen uns als „die Guten“. Aber auch die Russen, die Chinesen, die Araber oder die Inder sehen sich selbstverständlich nicht als „die Bösen“, sondern auch als „die Guten“ und sind ebenfalls davon überzeugt, dass ihr System für ihr Land das Beste ist.”

“Paradoxerweise wird die Toleranz auch von den Wertekriegern unserer Zeit gerne ins Feld geführt – jedoch nur im Sinne einer Toleranz gegenüber den eigenen Werten; man fordert Toleranz ein, ist jedoch selbst zutiefst intolerant, wenn es um andere Länder, um andere Wertekanons geht.”

“Und da haben wir ihn, den modernen Wertekrieger. Er sieht sich selbst als den Guten und ist von der Mission getrieben, seine Werte zur Not mit Gewalt denen nahezubringen, die sie nicht teilen. Und da unterscheidet sich ein moderner Grünen-Politiker nur unwesentlich von einem Bischof zu Zeiten der Kreuzzüge. Der eine predigt die Überlegenheit der eigenen Werte vom Talkshowsessel bei Markus Lanz, der andere predigte sie von der Kanzel.”

Securitising History: Reimagining and Reshaping the ‘Imagined Community’ in China’s New Era by Juan Qian (Made in China Journal)

“The political narrative on Tibet exemplified this approach: by emphasising the immense suffering and enslavement of Tibetan peasants in the past, the Party justified its rule in Tibet by asserting that it had liberated Tibetans from feudal oppression and granted them the rights of free and equal PRC citizens under socialism (for a dissertation focusing on the PRC’s ethnic narrative about Tibet, see Coleman 1998).”

“Accusing the preceding regimes of being ‘Han chauvinists’ (Mao 1953), the Mao-era Party leadership did not force ethnic minorities to assimilate culturally, but primarily demanded their political conformity with the CCP’s socialist agenda and ideological campaigns (Weiner 2023). In other words, the Party sought to use a shared communist vision and political objectives as the unifying force to bind Han and non-Han peoples into one polity, thereby justifying its rule over non-Han borderlands (Csete 2001).”

“[…] the ethnic policy of Xi’s administration revolves around an assertive agenda to ‘strengthen the consciousness of the Chinese national community’ (Klimeš 2018). The authorities now view overt ethnic or religious expression as a challenge to national unity and non-Han citizens are demanded to acquire a Chinese cultural identity in their hearts and minds. Metaphorically, while the PRC’s longstanding ethnic policy was ‘anyone who is not against me is with me’, the new era policy is ‘anyone who is not with me is against me’.”

They are not alone in struggling with the question of integration.

“From this analysis, it is possible to understand why the Chinese authorities and official historians take such a combative posture in controlling the interpretation of Qing history. The Qing Dynasty’s legacy plays a pivotal role in legitimising China’s territorial claims and national identity, particularly over its vast non-Han ethnic frontier. An orthodox, Sinocentric view of Qing history is crucial for national security—it allows Beijing to reinforce its narrative of historical continuity and unity, maintain internal cohesion, and counter challenges to China’s territorial claims.”

Programming

Big Ball of Mud by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder on June 26, 1999

“A BIG BALL OF MUD is haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape and bailing wire, spaghetti code jungle. We’ve all seen them. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth, and repeated, expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where nearly all the important information becomes global or duplicated. The overall structure of the system may never have been well defined. If it was, it may have eroded beyond recognition. Programmers with a shred of architectural sensibility shun these quagmires. Only those who are unconcerned about architecture, and, perhaps, are comfortable with the inertia of the day-to-day chore of patching the holes in these failing dikes, are content to work on such systems.”

“Why is this architecture so popular? Is it as bad as it seems, or might it serve as a way-station on the road to more enduring, elegant artifacts? What forces drive good programmers to build ugly systems? Can we avoid this? Should we? How can we make such systems better?”

“[…] we seek not to cast blame upon those who must wallow in these mires. In part, our attitude is to “hate the sin, but love the sinner”. But, it goes beyond this. Not every backyard storage shack needs marble columns. There are significant forces that can conspire to compel architecture to take a back seat to functionality, particularly early in the evolution of a software artifact. Opportunities and insights that can allow for architectural progress often are present later rather than earlier in the lifecycle.”

“A certain amount of controlled chaos is natural during construction, and can be tolerated, as long as you clean up after yourself eventually. Even beyond this though, a complex system may be an accurate reflection of our immature understanding of a complex problem. The class of systems that we can build at all may be larger than the class of systems we can build elegantly, at least at first. A somewhat ramshackle rat’s nest might be a state-of-the-art architecture for a poorly understood domain. This should not be the end of the story, though. As we gain more experience in such domains, we should increasingly direct our energies to gleaning more enduring architectural abstractions from them.”

“There may not be enough time to consider the long-term architectural implications of one’s design and implementation decisions. Even when systems have been well designed, architectural concerns often must yield to more pragmatic ones as a deadline starts to loom.”

“One reason that software architectures are so often mediocre is that architecture frequently takes a back seat to more mundane concerns such as cost, time-to-market, and programmer skill. Architecture is often seen as a luxury or a frill, or the indulgent pursuit of lily-gilding compulsives who have no concern for the bottom line.”

“[…] the benefits of good architecture are realized later in the lifecycle, as frameworks mature, and reusable black-box components emerge […]”

“An investment in architecture usually does not pay off immediately. Indeed, if architectural concerns delay a product’s market entry for too long, then long-term concerns may be moot. Who benefits from an investment in architecture, and when is a return on this investment seen? Money spent on a quick-and-dirty project that allows an immediate entry into the market may be better spent than money spent on elaborate, speculative architectural fishing expedition. It’s hard to recover the value of your architectural assets if you’ve long since gone bankrupt.”

“If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.”

“Some programmers have a passion for finding good abstractions, while some are skilled at navigating the swamps of complex code left to them by others. Programmers differ tremendously in their degrees of experience with particular domains, and their capacities for adapting to new ones. Programmers differ in their language and tool preferences and experience as well.”

“Architecture is a hypothesis about the future that holds that subsequent change will be confined to that part of the design space encompassed by that architecture.”

“A problem we might have been told was definitely ruled out of consideration for all time may turn out to be dear to the heart of a new client we never thought we’d have.”

“The “right” thing to do might be to redesign the system. The more likely result is that the architecture of the system will be expediently perturbed to address the new requirements, with only passing regard for the effect of these radical changes on the structure of the system.”

“Alan Kay, during an invited talk at OOPSLA ‘86 observed that “good ideas don’t always scale.” That observation prompted Henry Lieberman to inquire “so what do we do, just scale the bad ones?””

“[…] as Brooks [Brooks 1995] has noted, because software is so flexible, it is often asked to bear the burden of architectural compromises late in the development cycle of hardware/software deliverables precisely because of its flexibility.”

“[…] often, the customer needs something working by tomorrow. Often, the people who control and manage the development process simply do not regard architecture as a pressing concern. If programmers know that workmanship is invisible, and managers don’t want to pay for it anyway, a vicious circle is born.”

“Ralph Johnson is fond of observing that is inevitable that “on average, average organizations will have average people”. One reason for the popularity and success of BIG BALL OF MUD approaches might be that this approach doesn’t require a hyperproductive virtuoso architect at every keyboard.”

“One thing that isn’t the answer is rigid, totalitarian, top-down design. Some analysts, designers, and architects have an exaggerated sense of their ability to get things right up-front, before moving into implementation.”

“Kent Beck has observed that the way to build software is to: Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast [Beck 1997]. “Make it work” means that we should focus on functionality up-front, and get something running. “Make it right” means that we should concern ourselves with how to structure the system only after we’ve figured out the pieces we need to solve the problem in the first place. “Make it fast” means that we should be concerned about optimizing performance only after we’ve learned how to solve the problem, and after we’ve discerned an architecture to elegantly encompass this functionality. Once all this has been done, one can consider how to make it cheap.”

“Skilled programmers may be able to create complexity more quickly than their peers, and more quickly than they can document and explain it. Like an army outrunning its logistics train, complexity increases until it reaches the point where such programmers can no longer reliably cope with it.”

“Such code can become a personal fiefdom, since the author care barely understand it anymore, and no one else can come close. Once simple repairs become all day affairs, as the code turns to mud. It becomes increasingly difficult for management to tell how long such repairs ought to take. Simple objectives turn into trench warfare. Everyone becomes resigned to a turgid pace. Some even come to prefer it, hiding in their cozy foxholes, and making their two line-per-day repairs.”

“Status in the programmer’s primate pecking order is often earned through ritual displays of cleverness, rather than through workman-like displays of simplicity and clarity. That which a culture glorifies will flourish.”

“BIG BALL OF MUD architectures often emerge from throw-away prototypes, or THROWAWAY CODE, because the prototype is kept, or the disposable code is never disposed of. (One might call these “ little balls of mud “.)”

“Since the time of Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius , [ Vitruvius 20 B.C. ] architects have focused on his trinity of desirables: Firmitas (strength), Utilitas (utility), and Venustas (beauty). A BIG BALL OF MUD usually represents a triumph of utility over aesthetics, because workmanship is sacrificed for functionality. Structure and durability can be sacrificed as well, because an incomprehensible program defies attempts at maintenance. The frenzied, feature-driven “bloatware” phenomenon seen in many large consumer software products can be seen as evidence of designers having allowed purely utilitarian concerns to dominate software design.”

“[…] sometime the anticipated contingencies never arise, and the designer and implementers wind up having wasted effort solving a problem that no one has ever actually had. Other times, not only is the anticipated problem never encountered, its solution introduces complexity in a part of the system that turns out to need to evolve in another direction. In such cases, speculative complexity can be an unnecessary obstacle to subsequent adaptation. It is ironic that the impulse towards elegance can be an unintended source of complexity and clutter instead.”

“The so-called maintenance phase is the part of the lifecycle in which the price of the fiction of master planning is really paid. It is maintenance programmers who are called upon to bear the burden of coping with the ever widening divergence between fixed designs and a continuously changing world.”

“Proponents of extreme programming portray it as placing minimal emphasis on planning and up-front design. They rely instead on feedback and continuous integration. We believe that a certain amount of up-front planning and design is not only important, but inevitable. No one really goes into any project blindly. The groundwork must be laid, the infrastructure must be decided upon, tools must be selected, and a general direction must be set. A focus on a shared architectural vision and strategy should be established early. Unbridled, change can undermine structure. Orderly change can enhance it. Change can engender malignant sprawl, or healthy, orderly growth.”

“Some years ago, Harlan Mills proposed that any software system should be grown by incremental development. That is, the system first be made to run, even though it does nothing useful except call the proper set of dummy subprograms. Then, bit by bit, it is fleshed out, with the subprograms in turn being developed into actions or calls to empty stubs in the level below.”

“The abstract classes and components that constitute an object-oriented framework change more slowly than the applications that are built from them. Indeed, their role is to distill what is common, and enduring, from among the applications that seeded the framework.”

“To begin to get a handle on spaghetti code, find those sections of it that seem less tightly coupled, and start to draw architectural boundaries there. Separate the global information into distinct data structures, and enforce communication between these enclaves using well-defined interfaces. Such steps can be the first ones on the road to re-establishing the system’s conceptual integrity, and discerning nascent architectural landmarks.”

“Periods of moderate disorder are a part of the ebb and flow of software evolution. As a master chef tolerates a messy kitchen, developers must not be afraid to get a little mud on their shoes as they explore new territory for the first time. Architectural insight is not the product of master plans, but of hard won experience.”

The Death of the Junior Developer by Steve Yegge (Sourcegraph)

“He said he’s more of a reviewer, or coach, or nanny, something like that. He makes ChatGPT do all the work and he just crafts prompts and reviews the output. That resonated with me, since I, too, have been replaced by a bubble-bath plant pod human who pretends to be a programmer, but is in fact outsourcing almost all of it. Naturally, when I say “make ChatGPT do all the work”, there is plenty of coding we still do by hand. What I mean is that chat-first is the default, and writing by hand (with completions, naturally!) is our fallback plan. My quantum friend and I are both finding much less need for that fallback recently.”

Other than Simon Willison, everyone’s so cagey and vague about what constitutes “writing” or “programming”. What kind of coding are you doing? What kind of problems are you solving? I haven’t been able to get these silly tools to solve any of my problems. What they can do is help me hit tab instead of Ctrl + V to insert = string.Empty; after a non-nullable property.

I’m more than ever convinced that most people get barely any benefit from the fallback. Either that or they’re still writing way too much boilerplate.

“Since then I’ve found several other super amazing colleagues who have also adopted this coding strategy to accelerate themselves. And frankly it has been a bit of a relief to hear confirmation coming from so many great people that chat-first programming is indeed a New Thing.”

Everybody’s doing it! Jump off that bridge. Also, Steve’s company coincidentally makes a coding chatbot.

“And truth be told, this wasn’t entirely inaccurate prior to mid-May. The models weren’t quite there yet.”

Sure. Even if you’ve already looked, and found the tools lacking—go look again! The AI company Steve works for thinks it’s worth it. Yegge ain’t what he used to be. Actually, he is.

“All AI coding assistants benefit from this upgrade, too. It has certainly been huge for our coding assistant Cody, which in my opinion has the best chat due to our automated context assembly engine, which saves you from having to explain your code base every time. Plus Cody Pro lets you use both GPT-4o and Claude (and others), so you can spot-check all your work with another LLM.”

There it is. The hook. An unabashed advertisement in the middle of his “article.”

“I wrote this post a week ago and have been thinking hard about whether I believe the premise, which is that within a few years, the norm for source code will be that it is written and modified by LLMs via prompting. For all practical purposes, all source code will be written this way, with exceptions becoming ever rarer. Not only do I believe it, I could even see it happening in 12-18 months at the current rate of LLM progress. I think the change will have a ton of fallout, only some of it foreseeable. And one casualty might well be junior devs, in the sense that they become less marketable and it could cause various kinds of crunches across the industry. We’ve already seen the big companies doing eng layoffs to make room for AI practitioners. Small companies may be faced with their own version of this decision: Why hire a junior developer to write mediocre code, when the LLM will do that for you ten times faster?”

Blinkered thinking. Silicon valley is not the world. Neither is the U.S.

“All I can tell you is this: Get there early. One time Googlers were complaining at TGIF that the parking garage was filling up by midmorning, and Larry Page jokingly suggested, “Maybe you should come earlier.” At that moment he reeked of billionaire. But if you really wanted to park in the garage, you took his advice.”

I fucking hate every last thing about this story. Jesus, do you even hear yourself, Yegge?

“It doesn’t matter what approach you take, as long as you start making heavy use of chat in programming. Because that, friendo, is how it works now. Like it or not. And you need to survive it. Good luck to you.”

Says the guy selling this solution. Christ, these people are completely indistinguishable from people selling timeshares and crypto.

My Glorious Ascension To Thought Leadership by Nikhil Suresh (Ludicity)

“[…] grifters have such a comprehensive stranglehold on the global corporate stage that the world is dying for someone to just say what we can all see. I can see the wishful thinking happening. It is very, very easy to transmute yourself into a thought leader. If I had lied and said my company did a hundred million dollars in revenue this year, journalists would have accepted it totally uncritically because they want it to be true.”

“[…] so, so tired of hearing clowns tell them that ChatGPT is going to replace their jobs. The very dweebs who gloat about LLMs revolutionizing society are the ones on the chopping block and they’re trying to scare other people. The first people to go will be Deloitte consultants because LLMs are very good at emitting bullshit — that’s not their only use case, but it’s obviously their main one.”

“[…] do you think plumbers are going out of work before people that make Gantt charts for a living? I am going to spend a year repeating this question to every dickhead that brings this up, preferably on stages in front of large audiences.”

I hope someone tells Nikhil about that South Park episode. He should know about it before he convinces himself that this is his own, unique idea.

Should interfaces be asynchronous? by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)

“Regardless of specific language constructs, there are, as far as I can tell, two kinds of interfaces: Interfaces that enable variability or extensibility in behaviour. Interfaces that mostly or exclusively exist to support automated testing. While there may be some overlap between these two kinds, in my experience, the intersection between the two tends to be surprisingly small. Interfaces tend to mostly belong to one of those two categories.”

“Should an API return a Task-based (asynchronous) value ‘just in case’? In general: No. You can’t predict all possible use cases, so don’t make an API more complicated than it has to be. If you need to implement an application-specific interface, use the Adapter design pattern.”

“A possible exception to this rule is if the entire API (the concrete implementation and the interface) only exists to support a specific application. If the interface and its concrete implementation are both part of the Application Model, you may as well skip the Adapter step and consider the concrete implementation as its own Adapter.”

'Mind The Gap' by Ryan Florence at Big Sky Dev Con 2024 by Montana Programmers (YouTube)

These people are so broken that they don’t have any idea how unrelatable it is to talk about how your Instagram-hot wife is a perfectionist and can’t accept any concessions to her vision and spent $250K remodeling three rooms in your house. He says that you need to think about tradeoffs. That’s why he doesn’t have a “lambo”. Even the poster for the video reminds us of this. He thinks maybe they could have done it for $50K instead. You know, like 1/3 more than the median salary for an American, just spent on some pieces of wood for your bedroom wall. He thinks that would have been reasonable compared to 5x that much (which was 8x as much as the median salary). A bit later, he casually mentions that $250K was as much as his second house cost—and I have to believe that he’s collecting houses.

Video Games

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 − Gameplay Overview Trailer by Focus Entertainment (YouTube)

“How you vanquish your enemies is entirely up to you.”

Well, no. I’m pretty sure that diplomacy and negotiations are off the menu.

This game looks incredible. The rendering is so lush and liquid. There are so many things moving on-screen at once. The hordes of enemies remind me a bit of Serious Sam. It looks fun. But it’s also the same game as ever. Wade through enemies, kill them all, kill the boss, go back to a central mission point, get a new mission, continue. They excitedly tell you that you can be a sniper or a close-quarters fighter. Wow. Grappling hook? Check. Sniper rifle? Check. Nothing beyond Quake 3 here. 6v6 online death-match play? Check.

The characters yell “For the emperor!” It’s literally promoting empire. The slogan of the game is “Eternal war demands eternal discipline.” You have to “prove your valor on the battlefield.” It’s pretty heavy-handed. There’s nothing roguish about this game. They yell “For the emperor!” one more time, give some release details, then wrap it up in the final second with “your craft is death.”