Links and Notes for August 2nd, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.
[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.↩
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.↩
Table of Contents
Public Policy & Politics
”Well What SHOULD Israel Have Done After October 7?” by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)
“The correct question to ask is, what should the world do about Israel? What should the world do about this murderous entity which keeps trying to drag us all into a horrific new war with Iran and its allies?”
“And when you peel back the layers of this question you find that the question underneath it is, what should the world do about the US empire? What should the world do about this massive globe-spanning power structure which feeds into Israel’s abuses as a matter of policy to advance its own agendas of destabilization and division in a geostrategically crucial resource-rich region? What should the world do about the international power structure centralized around Washington which continuously terrorizes and abuses populations around the world with the goal of capturing them all under a single power umbrella?”
“So what we’re seeing in the middle east today is just the current symptom of a profoundly diseased world order whose sickness will eventually get us all killed. We’re going to have to find some way to stop these freaks. This is an existential issue for all of us. Gaza is just the most glaring example of an illness which affects the health and wellbeing of the entire world, and which cannot be allowed to continue untreated.”
Backing the Worst Aggressor by Caitlin Johnstone (Scheer Post)
“In reality, the U.S, isn’t vowing to defend the state of Israel, the U.S, is vowing to help Israel attack other countries. If you’re pledging unconditional support to an extremely belligerent aggressor while it commits the most demented acts of aggression imaginable, all you’re doing is condoning those acts of aggression and making sure it will suffer no consequences when it conducts more of them.
“A kevlar vest stops being a tool of defense when you wear one to prevent yourself from being stopped by police while conducting a mass shooting.”
Kamala Harris picks right-wing governor as Democratic running mate by Patrick Martin (WSWS)
“the DSA is nothing but a faction of the Democratic Party, the “left wing” of imperialism and genocide. The Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, is unalterably committed to upholding the worldwide interests of American imperialism, which includes the use of Israel as its attack-dog in the Middle East.
“But through such desperate pretenses, the DSA hopes to block working people and young people horrified by the genocide in Gaza from breaking with the Democratic Party and taking up a real fight against imperialist war and ethnic slaughter.
“Far from representing any restriction on Israeli genocide in Gaza, the selection of Walz puts a second ferocious defender of Zionism on the Democratic presidential ticket. While in Congress, Walz served on the House Armed Services Committee, where he was privy to US war plans from 2007 through 2018, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. He routinely voted to approve the massive US military subsidies to Israel, and visited Israel as part of a congressional delegation which met with Netanyahu.”
US Troops Get Hurt In The Middle East Because Of The Assholes Who Put Them There by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“Western officials like Antony Blinken and David Lammy have been urgently going on about the need for “de-escalation” in the middle east. You’ll never see western officials as opposed to escalation as they are when Israel has committed an insanely escalatory act of war against Iran but Iran has not yet retaliated. They’re fine to let Israel rampage completely unchecked, but as soon as it crosses the red line of someone strong enough to exact a heavy price, they’re all about “de-escalation”.”
“If Kamala Harris live-streamed herself torturing a puppy to death she’d lose the support of everyone, but openly backing the torture and murder of an entire enclave full of Palestinians is being overlooked by self-declared progressives as a forgivable little foible.
“Near as I can tell, the actual position of US progressives is as follows:”
- When Benjamin Netanyahu does a genocide, it’s genocide.
- If Trump were to continue the genocide, it would be genocide.
- When Democrats do a genocide, it’s good people making hard choices within the framework of the political realities of our time.
Cori Bush Loses Reelection Bid to Democrat Backed by $8.5 Million From AIPAC by Jake Johnson (Scheer Post)
“Rep. Cori Bush lost her reelection bid in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District on Tuesday to a Democratic primary candidate backed by a massive influx of spending from AIPAC, which targeted the progressive incumbent over her early calls for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.”
Just to be clear: both parties in the U.S. are just absolutely fine with foreign interference in U.S. elections, as long as it’s the right country buying influence. If it’s Israel, they are doing the Lord’s work. If there is even a suggestion of Russian paying a single ruble to influence U.S. politics, we literally start a war with them.
Myth of The Iron Dome: The Costly Lie Behind Israel’s ‘Impenetrable’ Defense by Robert Inlakesh (Mint Press News)
“A significant downside, aside from malfunctions causing civilian casualties and infrastructure damage, is the cost of using the system. In 2012, the Iron Dome was upgraded to use smaller and more cost-effective missiles due to the high expenses associated with its operation. This has been a recurring issue, as the system combats rockets that only cost a few hundred dollars to produce, while the cost of a single Iron Dome missile is approximately $50,000.”
“While many air defense systems are oversold by the military-industrial complex and numerous nations publish unrealistic information about their effectiveness, the issue in Israel may run deeper. In such a small country, the Israeli public has been given systems like Iron Dome to believe in—a system that makes them feel safe and in which they can put their faith.
“During past conflicts with armed resistance in the Gaza Strip, the relative ineffectiveness of the munitions fired towards Israelis has supported the claim that the Iron Dome intercepts over 90% of incoming projectiles. However, as the Israeli military now confronts more sophisticated weapons from groups like Hezbollah, the famed air defense system appears to be taking a blow to its credibility.”
Kamala Harris is a Huge Draw at Massive Philadelphia Rally by Dave Lindorff (CounterPunch)
“It’s still a little soon to be able to say that, but if Harris and Walz elicit similar of responses as they set out to hit all the competitive states in the country (as their first outing in Dearborn, Michigan suggests they are doing), it might start happening. Right now polling still shows considerable residual support for Trump, though Harris keeps flipping his narrow leads in one swing state after another to her advantage, and is now leading narrowly in some national polls. In the 90 days remaining in this election season, if this keeps up and a Harris movement develops, it could end up become a landslide, giving Democrats control of both houses of Congress.”
Is this what counts for serious analysis? Two months ago, the polls were showing that Biden should drop Kamala from the ticket and now the entire country loves her? Shouldn’t the analysis focus instead on the power of the propaganda system to change people’s opinions to whatever the powers-that-be want those opinions to be? Or even analyzing whether the polls have anything to do with reality? In an environment where such a tremendous amount of fake information exists, how can any serious analyst take it all at face value? I continue to be frustrated by these people’s utter inability to see that everyone is blowing smoke up their ass, and not just “the other side.” I suppose you could say that they’re being hopeful, but I just can’t take them seriously.
“That would be a far better environment for political activists on the left over the next four years than the one we were looking at under a second Trump administration, during which he is talking about using the military to shut down anti-war or anti-police protests, and deporting millions of immigrants (always a way of silencing that important cohort of the US population, as was done during the 1920s).”
This is just the same tired argument that Trump would be worse than anything else anyone could possibly imagine. And they just leave it at that, all without analyzing how the current administration has taken tremendous liberties with a lot of freedoms. These people seem largely unconcerned that the southern border is in much worse ethical shape than it was even under Trump, with increases in militarization and much harsher amnesty policies, that homeless people somehow have lost the right to even exist, and that women’s rights have been drastically curtailed. And yet, these people blithely continue to believe that this will all be reversed when an even-less-competent politician takes the helm. It’s almost too stupid to believe.
“The job for us on the left should be to help this Harris/Walz campaign phenomenon develop while focusing our efforts on making sure as many as possible newly elected members of congress and down-ballot races are left-leaning. Harris and Walz will handle the abortion rights issue and Social Security and Medicare protection but we need to keep the public’s eyes on the War on Gaza, the incredibly dangerous war in Ukraine, climate change, the obscene wealth gap, and the corrupted reality of our modern government system.
“They won’t do that. Their job is to protect the US capitalist system and to support US empire with a massive military.”
This is what counts to political analysis: just accept that we have no choice but to accept empire and war in order to stop Trump. Just accept that we’ve pissed away another four years not building an alternative party that doesn’t have empire and Wall Street as its #1 priority. Four more years of pretending that the Democrats provide any sort of meaningful alternative to the Republicans just because, when women’s rights are severely curtailed, they pretend to be upset about it rather than celebrating it. That may be enough of a difference for some, but all I see is that the policy is the same, but the marketing is different. The two parties manufacture the same policies, but different kinds of consent.
Now that the Democrats have hit on the seemingly unassailably sure-fire tactic of pretending that Satan himself would take over if they are not allowed to remain in power, they don’t feel like they have to say or promise anything else. And every one of their acolytes believe and regurgitate this as received gospel without thinking about the damage that they cause to any real political possibilities. They prefer to make themselves feel good thinking that they’re fighting “real evil” than to actually push their chosen party for real promises and real change. Perhaps they’re right! Perhaps there is nothing to be extracted from either of these parties without violent revolution. In that case, though, you don’t need to capitulate so completely and shamefully.
“That’s why we also need to begin now, or at least when the election is over, working to build a mass worker-based socialist third party. We can’t just keep doing what the left always does, voting for lesser evil or for small protest parties or independent candidates that vanish from consciousness after the election season.”
Of course we need to begin now. But we needed to begin “now” 30 years ago too. And 20 years ago. And 10 years ago. But people like this never, ever do. They always vote for the lesser evil and then plan to get something done when the pressure’s off and the powers-that-be have gotten absolutely everything they’ve ever wanted from us.
US Policy: Let Israel Escalate Against Iran, Then Tell Iran Not To Escalate Back by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)
“Israel’s powerful western backers are happy to let it run rampant throughout the region without making any meaningful warnings against its criminal actions or imposing any consequences on it whatsoever. But as soon as it becomes clear that Israel has crossed a red line and is about to get hit, these western empire managers turn into a bunch of hippies who just want peace and love.
“When Iran does whatever it’s about to do, we may be certain that the western empire and its propagandists in the mass media are going to frame it as an unprovoked and outrageous act of aggression and start babbling about “defending” Israel against its “attackers”. Imperial history always begins right after Israel’s aggressions, and starts the clock as the retaliations for them emerge.”
Every American President Should Be Prosecuted by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)
“Kamala Harris has already met with the mandarins of Zion in private to promise them a steady diet of munitions regardless of her proclamations for a mythical ceasefire and JD Vance has made it obnoxiously clear that his isolationist posturing makes glaring exceptions for certain lobbies.
“Even among the growing handful of Americans who seem to be aware of such bipartisan ghoulishness, there remains a degree of willful historical ignorance. It wasn’t always this way; they’ll tell you before engaging in some masturbatory act of hagiography, shining the phallic pillars on the temple of “the good old days” of American greatness. But it has always been like this and the buck passing needs to stop or the slaughter never will. Every single American president has been a war criminal, and every single American president should be tried and held accountable for these atrocities.”
That Never Happened by Ted Rall
“Kamala lost big in 2020. Voters hated her personality. Her staffers all quit. She was a mean-girl prosecutor who jailed innocent people of color.”
“In their relief and excitement about getting rid of Joe Biden as their nominee, Democrats are forgetting all about Kamala Harris’ demonstrated weaknesses as a candidate in the most recent election cycle.”
She finished a distant fourth in her own home state’s primary and soon dropped out of the race. Given a choice, people hated her. Now, they’re over the moon because they’ve been ordered to be. Now, they care even less about what Israel is doing in Gaza, the West Bank,, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
Don’t Get Obama-ed Again by Ted Rall
“Just as Harris is attempting to do now, Obama ran as a rock star, long on charisma and short on specifics. Progressives and other leftists who gave him their votes quickly learned that being young, Black and cool enough to enjoy weed is no guarantee that a candidate will govern any better or differently than a boring old white guy. As president, Obama did exactly what a Republican would have done. He refused to codify Roe v. Wade (he called abortion rights “not the highest legislative priority”), granted full immunity to Guantánamo torturers, sent tens of thousands of more troops to the losing wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, used assassination drones 10 times more than Bush and supported the military coup against the democratically-elected, left-leaning president of Honduras.
“Obama’s decision to bail out Wall Street but not Main Street after the 2008-09 subprime mortgage crisis prompted pissed-off progressives to form the Occupy Wall Street movement in late 2011. True to right-wing form, Obama had his Homeland Security department partner with Wall Street banks, real estate companies, local police and the FBI to ruthlessly crush hundreds of Occupy encampments in violent coordinated raids.”
Just like now, though, no-one with any influence asked the right questions, no-one held his feet to the fire, none of those so-called “progressives and other leftists” bothered to find out whether they were giving their vote away to someone who was just lying them in order to get the vote. They care more about feeling good about how they vote than they care about their actual politics.
“We don’t know nearly enough about Harris’s stances on the issues. The little we have learned so far on matters like Gaza (she supports Israel), universal healthcare (she’s against it) and the long-frozen minimum wage (she doesn’t talk about it) doesn’t give much reason for optimism from a leftist point of view.
“It’s been more than two weeks since she became the Democratic standardbearer. Yet she still refuses to give any press conferences—something every candidate and every president ought to do daily, 365 days a year—or interviews with reporters. Like the senile Biden, every word she utters in public is read off a Teleprompter.
“If she won’t tell us what she thinks, and we don’t like what she says, she shouldn’t get our votes.”
That’s not how most people think politics works these days. They choose a team and start burning the cars of people with the wrong bumper sticker. Simple as that.
Environment & Climate Change
Circular battery self-sufficiency by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“The total quantity of minerals we need to extract to permanently satisfy the world’s energy storage needs is about 125m tons.
“This last point is the one that caught my eye. Extracting 125m tons of anything is a tall order, and depending on how it’s done, it could wreak a terrible toll on people and the places they live.
“But one question I learned to ask from Tim Harford and BBC More Or Less is “is that a big number?” 125m tons sure feels like a large number, but it is one seventeenth of the amount of fossil fuels we dig up every year just for road transport. In other words, we’re talking about spending the next thirty years carefully, sustainably, humanely extracting about 5.8% of the materials we currently pump and dig every year for our cars. Do that, and we satisfy our battery needs more-or-less forever.”
Technology
The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“Dragging things out in the hopes of running out the clock is a time-honored tradition in tech antitrust. IBM dragged out its antitrust appeals for 12 years, from 1970 to 1982 (they called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam”). This is an expensive gambit: IBM outspent the entire DOJ Antitrust Division for 12 consecutive years, hiring more lawyers to fight the DOJ than the DOJ employed to run all of its antitrust enforcement, nationwide. But it worked. IBM hung in there until Reagan got elected and ordered his AG to drop the case.
“This is the same trick Microsoft pulled in the nineties. The case went to trial in 1998, and Microsoft lost in 1999. They appealed, and dragged out the proceedings until GW Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and dropped the case in 2001.
“I am 100% certain that there are lawyers at Google thinking about this: “OK, say we put a few hundred million behind Trump-affiliated PACs, wait until he’s president, have a little meeting with Attorney General Andrew Tate, and convince him to drop the case. Worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, it’ll work for us. And it’ll be a bargain.””
“The judge repeats some of the most cherished and absurd canards of the marketing industry, like the idea that people actually like advertisements, provided that they’re relevant, so spying on people is actually doing them a favor by making it easier to target the right ads to them.
“First of all, this is just obvious self-serving rubbish that the advertising industry has been repeating since the days when it was waging a massive campaign against the TV remote on the grounds that people would “steal” TV by changing the channel when the ads came on. If “relevant” advertising was so great, then no one would reach for the remote – or better still, they’d change the channel when the show came back on, looking for more ads. People don’t like advertising. And they hate “relevant” advertising that targets their private behaviors and views. They find it creepy.
“Remember when Apple offered users a one-click opt-out from Facebook spying, the most sophisticated commercial surveillance system in human history, whose entire purpose was to deliver “relevant” advertising? More than 96% of Apple’s customers opted out of surveillance. Even the most Hayek-pilled economist has to admit that this is a a hell of a “revealed preference.” People don’t want “relevant” advertising. Period.”
“The problem with Google’s monopolization of the surveillance business model is that they’re spying on us. But for a certain kind of competition wonk, the problem is that Google is monopolizing the violation of our human rights, and we need to use competition law to “democratize” commercial surveillance.
“This is deeply perverse, but it represents a central split in competition theory. Some trustbusters fetishize competition for its own sake, on the theory that it makes companies better and more efficient. But there are some things we don’t want companies to be better at, like violating our human rights. We want to ban human rights violations, not improve them.”
“I want to break – and break up – Google because I want to end its ability to bigfoot privacy law so that we can finally root out the cancer of commercial surveillance. I don’t want to make Google smaller so that other surveillance companies can get in on the game.”
LLMs & AI
Private equity rips off its investors, too by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)
“The pauperization of an entire class of creative workers is just a canned demo, a way to fool investors into thinking that there is a whole universe of similarly situated workers whose wages can be diverted to AI companies. This is the logic of small-time spammers, scaled up to the scale of the entire S&P 500. Smalltime spammers looked at AI and thought, “OK, I can generate as much botshit as I want on demand for free. Science fiction magazines pay $0.10/word. So if I generate a billion words, I’ll get $100 million.” But that’s not how any of that works: sf magazines don’t buy botshit, and even if they did, the entire market for short fiction adds up to what Sam Altman spends on a single designer t-shirt. The point of destroying these beloved, useful things isn’t to make a lot of money by taking their markets – it’s to convince dopey, panicked rich people to give you lots of money you can steal, because they think you can do this to every market and they don’t want to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime.”
“A public company has to open its books for the SEC, its investors, and the world. PE is private – and so are its finances. It is absolutely routine for PE bosses to put their spouses, kids, and pals on the payroll and hand them millions for doing little to nothing, all at the expense of their investors.”
“People who try to understand the PE business model often give up, because it seems to make no sense, leading many to assume that they’re too unsophisticated to grasp the complex financials here. For example, PE is absolutely dependent on massive loans as a way of looting its businesses, but it also often defaults on those loans. Why do banks and investors keep making huge loans to PE deadbeats? Because – like the PE fund investors – they are credulous dolts.
“The reason PE seems like a scam is that it is a scam. It is a fractal scam – every part of it is a scam. You might have heard about the “carried interest” tax loophole that allows PE bosses to avoid billions in taxes on the money they steal from their investors, creditors, workers and customers. Most people assume “carried interest” has something to do with “interest” on a loan. Nope: “carried interest” is a 16th century nautical tax rule designed for mercantalist sea-captains who had an “interest” in the cargo they “carried”.
“But rich people and other “sophisticated investors” (like pension fund investment managers) are no smarter than the rest of us. They are herd animals. When they see other rich people piling into some scheme or asset class, they rush to join them, which makes the asset price go up, which makes them think they’re smart (until the inevitable rug-pull).”
The argument is that you’re a fool if you don’t get in on the scam. I suppose if your only goal is to make money, regardless of how it’s made and to whose detriment, then you can try it. Most people don’t have any principles anyway. If you dress up a scam enough, they’ll buy right into it, with a clean conscience and perfectly able to sleep at night. They’ll even cheerily disparage the people whose lives their investments ruin as lazy for not becoming rich like them. This happens without a problem for nearly everyone. If there’s a scam, then you shouldn’t avoid it, they say. Instead, you should profit from it, then get out before it collapses, leaving other “suckers” holding the bag. This is the pinnacle of elite thinking these days. No-one is bothered in the slightest by it.
Sports
I’m in the U.S. this summer. The France 2024 Summer Olympics are playing. While NBC’s coverage is better than it used to be, with some streams seemingly nearly commercial-free, the jingoistic coverage is still incredibly grating. The empire is wholly unaware of what it must look like to the rest of the world when it wins a third of all of the medals and takes one high-profile medal after another.
And it’s never enough. If the U.S. loses a medal, they’re terrible sports about it, backhandedly suggesting that the actual winners were probably doping, all the while not acknowledging in any way how unbelievable some of their own wins are.
I heard on the radio that people were surprised to find out that athletes weren’t paid to be in the Olympics. Perhaps not directly, I suppose, but many of them benefit already during the Olympics from endorsement deals, participating in cloying and annoying commercials, mostly for financial products. Everyone else is making beaucoup bucks off of these athletes, which is just how the organizers like it.