Links and Notes for November 29th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun
• Video Games

Public Policy & Politics

The United States Raises a Middle Finger to the International Criminal Court by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“If the US throws the ICC warrants to the winds, then it has told the world with finality that it does not believe in the rules, or that the rules are only made to discipline others and not itself. It is remarkable to see the list of international treaties that the United States either never signed or never ratified. A few examples are sufficient to make the case about its disregard for a genuine rules-based international order:”

“It is because the US unilaterally left the ABM Treaty and the INF Treaty that the conflict over Ukraine has become so inflamed. Russia had made it clear on several occasions that the absence of any arms control regime regarding mid-range nuclear missiles would pose a threat to its major cities, were its neighbours to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).”

“Biden allowed Ukraine to use intermediate-range missiles to strike Russian territory, which drew a powerful response from Russia against Ukraine. If Russia had decided to fire one of those missiles at a US base in Germany in retaliation, for instance, we might already be in midst of a nuclear winter. The US disregard for the arms control regime is only part of its absolute disregard for any international law, sealed in place by its raised middle finger to the ICC.”

The ICC Warrants and the World They Announce by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

Citing Yair Lapid:

“Israel is defending itself against terrorist organizations that attacked, murdered and raped our citizens. These arrest warrants are a reward for terrorism.”

Israel thinks that it’s Superman, knocking down buildings to get the bad guy. They think they’re Tony Stark in civil war. “You want an omelette; you’re gonna have to break some eggs.” Of course, the eggs that get broken always seem to come from the same, poor carton, and, invariably, the person claiming our unavoidable and collective resignation for breaking eggs, is never, ever, ever in danger of having any of their metaphorical eggs broken in any way. Usually, they benefit enormously from the policy or policies that so negatively affects the unfortunate and benighted collateral damage.

“It turns out Bibi Netanyahu, I’ll be damned, craves acceptance. He wants to be seen as good and innocent and unjustly framed, awaiting redemption, like Dreyfus. He wants others to buy into his heroism.”

Yes. He really thinks he’s Tony Stark. In his own personal story, he’s the hero, just like the rest of us. He’s just much more wrong than most of us.

The Pacifica Radio/UC Berkeley Social Activism Recording Project: Riverside Speech Transcript by Martin Luther King in 1967 (Library Guides)

“[…] you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that [sic] are not poor.”

“I speak not now of the soldiers of each side, not of the military government of Saigon, but simply of the people who have been under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their broken cries.”

“Do you realize that the Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation. And incidentally, this was before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. And this is a little-known fact, and these people declared themselves independent in 1945. They quoted our Declaration of Independence in their document of freedom, and yet our government refused to recognize them. President Truman said they were not ready for independence.”

“And who are we supporting in Vietnam today? It’s a man by the name of general Ky [Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky] who fought with the French against his own people, and who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life is Hitler. This is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our government and the press generally won’t tell us these things, but God told me to tell you this morning. The truth must be told.”

“[…] we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support and all the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform.”

“They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps, where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women, and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the towns and see thousands of thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.”

Israel is not even close to unique in its treatment of Palestinians. This description of Vietnam from almost 60 years ago could very well have been made of Gaza today—or at any time in the last 30 or 40 years (at least).

“I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.”

“This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.”

I think he’s being too generous. The people of whom he speaks were and still are defending their piles. They are the enemy. Malcolm X was much more clear-eyed and right than MLK.

“[…] communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated.”

MLK thinks that communism is a form of punishment?

I recently saw someone quote Donald Trump as having said about Elizabeth Warren, “I have more Indian blood than her…and I have none.” That is a devastating and hilarious takedown, given her claim to be Cherokee with 1/1024 claimed lineage. I figured it was apocryphal but it’s not: Trump Mocks Elizabeth Warren: ‘I Have More Indian Blood Than Her and I Have None’ by Shane Croucher (Newsweek) I only wish he weren’t such a malevolent asshole because his comic instincts are just what the world needs to cut through the bullshit. Too bad he creates so much of his own.

If Lebanon, Why Not Gaza? by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Before the most recent influx of half a million people from Lebanon, more than 70 percent of Syrians – around 16.7 million – were already in need of humanitarian assistance. The impact on food security is particularly alarming, with nearly 13 million people already facing acute food insecurity in Syria – the fifth highest total globally – while the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has been forced to reduce its assistance by 80 percent in the past two years due to funding cuts. In northwest Syria, for instance, some 1.4 million internally displaced persons, mostly women and children, require urgent assistance. Approximately 730,000 of these individuals are still living in tents.”

The misery is unimaginable.

“The Lebanese National News agency reported that Israel had violated the terms of the ceasefire at least 25 times since the truce was signed on Tuesday.”

Unsurprising, except perhaps in how quickly they’ve violated it. It’s almost like the Israeli government thinks it’s OK to just lie to any other government because they’re all just lesser, non-chosen people.

I spoke to a friend and work colleague in Israel on Thursday and he started the call with uncharacteristic jubilation that a ceasefire had been called. How are you? I’m great! There’s a ceasefire! We then expressed our shared doubt that it would hold but neither of thought it would be violated immediately like this.

“Smotrich on Lebanon after the ceasefire: “Every house destroyed in South Lebanon will be defined as military infrastructure, and therefore, it will be forbidden to rebuild it.””

So arrogant and so cruel.

“Heavy rains this week flooded the tent camps of Palestinian refugees across Gaza, from Mawasi in the South to Deir al-Balah in the north. The floods damaged 10,000 tents, representing 81% of the tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in 543 tent encampments across the south and center of the Gaza Strip. Near the Al Qarara seaport in Khan Younis, more than 600 tents were reported to have been flooded by high tides. It’s estimated that Gaza may need as many as 250,000 new tents for displaced Palestinians to survive the winter months.”

“[…] between 10 and 31 October, the Nutrition Cluster has observed a significant increase in the admission of children suffering from Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) with nutritional edema, where patients show swelling caused by fluid retention in the tissues, which is an indicator of lack of protein in diets.”

Ukraine vs. Russia: Nuclear War, Frozen Conflict, or Peace? Debate w/ Simon Shuster by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

This interview was quite good for showing what “manufactured consent” looks like in person. Simon Shuster is an affable, seemingly reasonable person who represents exactly what the U.S. empire wants him to represent. When Aaron pushes back, though, he concedes that Aaron is right but then doubles down on his opinion anyway but always expressed in a seemingly friendly manner.

Like, if you listen to what he’s saying, where he admits that Ukraine did want to outlaw Russian as an official language but that no-one really noticed, or that banning supposedly Russian-influenced media in Ukraine was unconstitutional, but that didn’t affect Ukraine’s dedication to democracy and freedom.

He’s a con man who doesn’t even know he’s a con man.

It’s like someone who’s taking money out of your wallet, while agreeing with you that crime is bad and that stealing is wrong.

Aaron shows a tremendous amount of patience and really does an excellent interview, despite Shuster repeatedly accusing him of believing what are solely Russian talking points. Anything that doesn’t agree with Shuster’s (and the U.S. empire’s) narrative is de-facto Russian propaganda.

As Shuster reminded Aaron multiple times: he was there, in Ukraine and discussed everything in multiple conversations with Zelensky, and it’s all detailed in his book (which I wonder if he’s just assuming that Aaron hadn’t read it, as with pretty much all mainstream interviewers).

Shuster can say things that amount to: Zelensky is an upstanding fighter for freedom and democracy who has, unfortunately and against the exhortations of his advisors, shut down free speech and most media in his country as he veers toward a full year past his elected term with no elections in sight. He’ll admit to all of this but is so accustomed to people listening to his tone and not his words that he feels he can get away with it.

It reminds me of when Ted Danson was reading the gory details of a boxing match from the pages of Sports Illustrated to put a baby to sleep in Three Men and a Baby (IMDb):

“It doesn’t matter what I read, it’s the tone you use. She doesn’t understand the words anyway […]”

To Shuster’s credit: when Aaron says something that is partially drawn from Shuster’s book and partially drawn from Shuster’s own sources that is diametrically opposed to what he himself is saying, he says, “that’s a fair point.” Soon after, though, he will state his previous conclusion as if he’d proved something. In fact, he’d simply agreed with the information countervailing his argument then reiterated his opposite conclusion, but in a tone of voice that implies agreement. The words disagree but the tone agrees.

At about 54:00, he answers Katie’s question about a possible nuclear war by saying that, again, he has relatives in Russia and that he has access to Russian media[3] and that the “flippant way” that they discuss nuclear war is “maddening”. Agreed. Wholeheartedly. Has he watched the U.S. media and the U.S. administration talk about nuclear war? What does he think of that? How much worse could it be?

“Schuster: I agree with the consensus view that Russia needs to lose this war and be defeated in Ukraine, in order for it not to continue with its broader ideolological program of defeating the west, defeating NATO.”

Sure, Ok. That’s why your book is on the NYT best-seller list, dude. Noam Chomsky had your number a long time ago: If you didn’t believe what you believe, then you wouldn’t be in the position that you are. It’s a self-regulating system.

He goes on to accuse Russia of waging a “civilizational war” (instead of the other way around) and that it is the West that is “trying to stop that” (again, instead of the other way around). He concludes with a smile, saying that this is the “consensus view”, knowing that the people he’s talking to know that already and are not accepting it but also knowing that he couldn’t possibly be expected to doubt the consensus view, else he wouldn’t be who he is.

“Katie: So you’re saying—and this is not a rhetorical question—that some kind of nuclear war is preferable to letting Russia win, for the sake of democracy?”

Shuster doesn’t disagree.

Tellingly, Shuster says that Zelensky told him, “Russia’s already hitting us with everything have; if they hit us with a nuke, then we’ll keep fighting.” This is so wildly out of touch with reality. Shuster can acknowledge that Russia is winning but then believes Zelensky when he says he’ll keep fighting no matter what. Ukraine is already having trouble fighting as it is.

The only thing that can happen now is that more people die but there will be no change to the result, unless NATO steps in with its own troops and directly attacks Russia. The only reason it doesn’t do that is because of the nuclear threat. Why doesn’t Shuster discuss that, if the goal is so important, why doesn’t NATO directly fight for Ukraine? If he believes that it’s a civilizational war, then he should be all-in.

Of course, he knows—and simultaneously cannot acknowledge—that this would start an all-out European war. He knows that Russia isn’t interested in the goals he ascribes to it—European dominance and empire—because otherwise he would advocate fighting even harder against them. But, at the same time, he cannot say that we should just reconcile with Russia and stop the bloodshed because he knows that the real goal for which he’s a cheerleader is to bleed Russia and weaken it. That is the goal that he is advocating for without directly advocating it. The propaganda about Russia wanting to wage a civilizational war is just that: propaganda intended to garner support.

It’s fascinating to watch him say things like,

“We’re not choosing between peace and nuclear-use; we’re choosing between ways to contain a very aggressive authoritarian regime that has set out to basically humble and destroy the West.”

…without at-all understanding how that could very much and much more believably be the Russian viewpoint, by replacing the final words “the West” with “Russia”. There would be no war without NATO pushing toward Russia. Russia hadn’t moved an inch westward for about 80 years.

Shuster has so much faith in the “brains up in the state department and the Pentagon” that they are working in everyone’s best interests. It’s almost like he thinks they’re competent, amazing as that seems. He is a lackey for empire but an extremely affable one, so he’s all the more dangerous.

“If you allow Russia to swallow up Ukraine and get its way in Ukraine to neuter it militarily and so on, it won’t satisfy the appetites of the beast that Putin has unleashed with Russian militarism and expansionism.”

Breathtaking.

They Lied About Gaza, And They’re Lying About Syria by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Immense amounts of propaganda and information ops have gone into framing the violence we’ve been seeing in Syria since 2011 as a completely organic rebellion against a tyrannical dictator who just wants to murder civilians because he is evil. But if you bring the same sincere curiosity and rigorous investigation to this issue that you brought to the plight of the Palestinians, you will discover the same kinds of lies and distortions which you’ve seen the western political/media class promote about Gaza being spun about Syria as well — frequently by the same people.”

This statement about Syria dovetails nicely with the discussion above, where the exact same statement could be made about Russia instead of Syria. Neither Russia nor Syria is ruled by a generous and democratic government. But that doesn’t mean conversely that either of those governments is intent on murder and wanton destruction.

“This is how unpacking the lies of the empire tends to unfold for folks. Your eyes flicker open because of some really obvious plot hole in the official narrative like Vietnam, the Iraq invasion, or Gaza, and then once you’ve seen through those lies you start getting curious about how else you’ve been deceived. You start pulling on other threads and learning more and more, and then after a while you start seeing the big picture about the US-centralized empire inflicting horrific abuses upon humanity all around the world with the goal of dominating the planet.”

That is honestly how it happens. Once you start applying intellectual rigor to what you read in the news, the official narrative falls apart every single time. At best, there are half-truths about the situation but the espoused goals are always lies. If you back that horse, you are backing someone else’s interests, not your own.

Again, contra Shuster above,

“Boris Johnson told The Telegraph in a recent interview that the west is “waging a proxy war” in Ukraine, which, while obviously true, was once considered by the western political-media class to be a very taboo thing to say.

““We’re waging a proxy war, but we’re not giving our proxies the ability to do the job,” Johnson said. “For years now, we’ve been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs and it has been cruel.”

“For years it was considered Kremlin propaganda to call the war in Ukraine a western proxy war against Russia. Now the line is “Well this is obviously a proxy war so we need to give our proxies more weapons, duh!””

This is the real test of whether your thinking is right: are you able to seamlessly believe that it was Russian propaganda when you were saying it was but that it is now obviously not? That’s the true test of an imperial stooge.

The Real Villains by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“I’ve seen a lot of posts online highlighting the fact that the murder victim in this case was himself a murderer, and a much more prolific one than any serial killer or mass shooter who’s ever lived. The only difference was that his style of murder was protected by the law.

“This really nails home the point that the legal system is not intended to protect ordinary citizens from the worst people in our society, it’s there to protect the very worst in our society from ordinary citizens. You can see this just by watching the frenetic police manhunt that’s underway for Brian Thompson’s killer while Thompson himself was walking around a free man, and an obscenely wealthy one at that, despite his having made his wealth via profits reaped from corporate policies designed to deprive sick and injured people of healthcare as frequently as possible.”

“They lobby governments for more wars and militarism around the world because they manufacture weapons of war. They lobby governments to shrink environmental regulations because they maximize their corporate profits by pillaging the earth and externalizing the costs of industry onto the biosphere we all depend on. They lobby governments for fewer worker protections because worker protections eat into profits. They lobby governments for exploitative trade agreements because globalization gives them a steady supply of cheap wage slaves with fewer workers’ rights. They lobby governments to privatize services and resources so that they can turn things people are already getting into coercive mechanisms of private profit extraction.”

“Our laws and police forces exist first and foremost to protect these abusive systems. They’re not there to protect us, they’re there to protect our abusers. They’re there to make sure what happened to Brian Thompson happens as rarely as possible, and that people like him are able to abuse people like you and me with total impunity.”

NGL The best take on Brian Thompson came in the form of a reaction to a different bit of health-care news, that Anthem will not be pursuing a plan to limit “wasteful” use of anesthesia by making patients pay for time spent under that the insurance company considers to be “excessive”.

Why? Did something happen? 🫣 🥴

The U.S. just collectively does not care that this guy is dead. It’s a sad state of affairs.

Still, am I supposed to care more about the murder of a completely unknown individual just because you told me about them? I don’t think anyone should be murdered. But I also don’t spend a lot of time thinking about murder victims who are not already people I cared about. I don’t care more because I know the person’s name now. Maybe if that person was useful to society, then I might agree that it was a shame for a bit longer than I would if it were just some random person. If it’s a billionaire asshole? No chance.

Remy: Pardon My Son by Reason TV (YouTube)

Joe Biden has always been an asshole and a liar. Now he’s pardoned his son, which is par for the course. “President Biden did something sleazy and corrupt and lied about it.” is not news. Move on.

Also, he isn’t going to pardon anyone else. He’s on track to pardon fewer people than any other U.S. president. He’s an asshole, pure and simple. Just a terrible, terrible person that makes you think Donald Trump is the nice one. It’s fucking incredible.

Journalism & Media

This Dystopia Depends On Hiding Inconvenient Truths by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“We walk around in this perverse dystopia and laugh and joke and act like everything is fine, but everything is not fine. People are suffering and dying at an unimaginable scale because of the systems which allow us to live this way, and if it weren’t for the deceitful way this is always being hidden out of sight and out of mind, we would see this first hand right in front of us. And we would be forced to own it.

“Western civilization is like a castle on a mountain, and the mountain is made out of human corpses and weeping mothers and starving children, and everyone in the castle pretends that the mountain is not there. It forms the very foundation of everything our society is, but we try not to think about it too hard. It’s not just the propagandists who lie to us. We also lie to ourselves.”

She’s basically talking about Omelas (Wikipedia).

Ukrainians And Americans Are Done With This War, But It Keeps Escalating Anyway by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“The Biden administration is now pushing Ukraine to lower its minimum draft age from 25 to 18 in order to provide more cannon fodder for the war against Russia.

“Polls say that both Ukrainians and Americans want this US proxy war to end, but instead of ending it Washington is pressuring Kyiv to throw teenagers into the threshing machine of an unwinnable conflict.”

“Don’t side with the powerful. Don’t side with Israel against the Palestinians. Don’t side with the US empire against any nation it targets. Don’t side with cops against their victims. Don’t side with billionaires and politicians against the people. Don’t side with the powerful.”

“Leftist indie media figures tend to drift to the right, either by shilling for liberal establishment politics or by promoting the faux populism of the Trump faction. This happens because when your business model is largely driven by clicks and views, you have an incentive to go where the mainstream numbers are. They don’t start off thinking “I can’t wait to sell out and covertly promote the interests of the power structures I claim to oppose,” they just see their virality go up when they talk one way compared to another and start putting out the kind of content that generates more.

“Independent media does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in an information environment that’s saturated in empire propaganda which is designed to herd the public into two power-serving mainstream political factions. By changing their output to align with the mainstream liberal faction or the mainstream right wing faction, indie media creators are effectively surfing on the tide of these propaganda streams to carry them into fame and fortune.

“This effect is further exacerbated by the fact that people tend to become more right wing the wealthier and more well-connected they become. The idea of fighting a class war against the ruling class is suddenly a lot less appealing when you’re a millionaire with a lot of rich celebrity friends and high-level political connections, so you’ll naturally find yourself pushing vapid culture war bullshit instead and restricting your criticisms of status quo politics to a much smaller zone. This happens to align perfectly with what the empire propagandists are doing, so you’ll still get plenty of clicks and views.”

A Rogue Reporter vs. The American Empire (w/ Matt Kennard) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

This is fantastic. He just kept on going at top speed, as if expected to be cut off at any second and he was trying to get out as much information as possible. Brilliant.

Labor

”Working People Can’t Afford To Buy Senators”: A Sit-Down With Dan Osborn by Ka (Jessica) Burbank (Drop Site News)

“To give a different outlook that is so sorely needed in our government at all levels of government. For example, in the state legislature here, $12,000 is the annual salary for a state senator in Nebraska. I don’t know how you can, you can’t live off that.

“So you either have to be retired, personally wealthy, or have a spouse that can take care of things. Or have a business, be a successful business person. So, those are the only people that we’re tending to get. That’s a problem. Again, our state legislature doesn’t represent the full array of the people in the state.

“So, it’s the same on the federal level. So, hopefully this is something that we’ll be able to minimize that.”

Economy & Finance

Quantity to Quality by Yanis Varoufakis (Z Network)

“Now, we have capital goods that were not created in order to produce, but in order to manipulate behaviour. This occurs through a dialectical process in which Big Tech incites billions of people to perform unpaid labour, often without their even knowing it, to replenish its cloud capital’s stock. That is an essentially different type of social relation.”

“Another factor was the 2008 financial crisis. To deal with its fallout, capitalist states printed $35 trillion between 2009 and 2023, giving rise to a dynamic of monetary expansion in which central banks, rather than the private sector, became a driving force. States also imposed universal austerity across the West, which depressed not only consumption but also productive investment. Investors responded by buying up real estate assets and pouring money into Big Tech. So, naturally, the latter became the only sector that was able to turn that torrent of central-bank cash into capital goods.”

“Remember that cybernetics were developed in the Soviet Union. They used the term ‘algorithm’ to refer to a cybernetic mechanism that would replace markets with a different method of matching needs with means. If Gosplan had had the technological sophistication of, say, the Amazon algorithm, then the USSR may well have been a long-term success story. Today, though, algorithms are not used for planning on behalf of society at large; they are used to maximize the cloud rents of their owners.”

“If a textile industrialist wanted a steam engine, he would have to go to James Watt and ask for one, and Watt would have to pay the workers who produced it a sufficient amount to provide their labour. With a company like Meta, much of its capital stock is being produced not by its employees but by its users in society at large – by unpaid people who, like modern-day ‘cloud serfs’, come into contact with its algorithms and work for free to imbue them with a greater capacity to attract other cloud serfs.”

“Marx recognized that rent-seeking can drive development, but he also agreed with Ricardo that if as a proportion of total income it surpasses a certain threshold, then it becomes a drag on capitalist growth. Today, cloud rents are so exorbitant that they are clearly having this effect.”

“[…] if you took listed companies thriving on cloud rent out of the the stock market, its values would collapse. At a more microeconomic level, consider that Amazon appropriates up to 40% of the price of a product sold on its platform. That leaves next to no surplus for the seller to reinvest. And when you have so much rent being siphoned out of the economy, out of the circular flow of income, then the capitalist sector is starved and increasingly subordinate to the cloud rent sector.”

“I strongly believe that in Western countries we underestimate the role of the state, and in China we overestimate it. My recent trip to China opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of the bold thinking about projecting Chinese values and influence comes from the private sector, whereas the state itself is far more hesitant. (The private sector is also where you find most Marxists, though there aren’t that many of them.) In the United States, meanwhile, people like Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel are totally intertwined with the state: the Pentagon, the pharmaceutical industrial complex.”

“I think the idea that the state has been separate from the market in the West, and that maybe now it’s time for it to play more of a role, is itself a libertarian fiction. It’s always been impossible to disentangle them. And if you look closely at the forms of convergence between the two in both the East and the West, you tend to see a remarkable degree of similarity.”

’No Family More Evil’ Fights On by Matt Bivens, M.D. (The 100 Days)

“Immediately after, the Sacklers started withdrawing 70 percent (!) of Purdue’s revenues for themselves. This went on for years — long before lawsuits started costing perhaps 3.5 percent of revenues and supposedly drowned the business.”

“Billions of dollars made selling opioids were whisked abroad. The U.S. Justice Department characterizes these massive withdrawals as “the fraudulent transfer of assets from Purdue.” The U.S. Supreme Court describes it thus: “Fearful that the litigation would eventually impact them directly, the Sacklers initiated a ‘milking program,’ withdrawing from Purdue approximately $11 billion — roughly 75% of the firm’s total assets — over the next decade. Those withdrawals left Purdue in a significantly weakened financial state.” Once Purdue had been gutted, the Sacklers declared it bankrupt. Creditors, attorneys general from California to Massachusetts, and families of opioid victims were all furious.”

“But the Sacklers have great lawyers. They sat down with their enemies and offered a trade: the family would pump a few billion dollars back into Purdue’s depleted carcass, to pay off some bills and claims. In return, the Sacklers would keep vast sums of money, and would also be granted personal immunity to all kinds of complaints, current or future, related to the opioid business. Once the bankruptcy courts approved this deal, even people not involved in the bankruptcy process would be forever forbidden to sue the Sacklers.”

““The Sacklers have not filed for bankruptcy, nor have they placed virtually all their assets on the table for distribution to creditors. Yet, they seek an order discharging a broad sweep of present and future claims against them, including ones for fraud and willful injury,” complained the Court. “In all of these ways, the Sacklers seek to pay less than the [bankrupcy] code ordinarily requires and receive more than it normally permits.””

Can businesses flourish in a world with a cap on personal wealth? by Ingrid Robeyns (Crooked Timber)

“Think, for example of the $46 billion compensation package Elon Musk received for serving as Tesla’s CEO.”

Well, he hasn’t received it yet. It’s still being fought out in court. Since it’s a stock package, its value now exceeds $100B.

“Can business owners remain owners of their business under limitarianism? And can their businesses thrive? This is an important question. Because even if there are strong moral arguments for limitarianism, they are not worth much if limitarianism destroys the economy.”

I don’t agree. We don’t want to make people suffer. If we have to destroy the current economy and replace it with something better, then so be it. Otherwise, your argument boils down to “let’s not outlaw murder because it’s lucrative. The economy, not morality, is what’s important here.”

“Everyone is dependent on a ‘lottery’ in which some are born with more talents and find themselves in a more privileged position, while others are less fortunate. This means that the rewards people gain from their talents are largely the result of factors other than their own efforts. And for this reason, we cannot say that these successes are morally deserved.”

This is fine, but society also wants to encourage those who are useful. While we can’t say that the successes are morally deserved, success is still a form of reward that encourages behavior that benefits society. It’s not the only form of reward but we need to be aware that it is currently the primary form of reward. Other rewards are recognition, appreciation, and so on. Billionaires will tell you they are useful, of course. They are wrong. They are a drag on society and the economy.

“One option would be that, as soon as the 10 million threshold is surpassed, the tax authorities would tax the founder in kind. The profit shares would be transferred to a collective fund, i.e. a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Out of this fund, dividends could be paid to all citizens, as the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation does, which holds the shares of its major oil operating company. In this way, the above-limits wealth would directly benefit all citizens.”

“Foundation-owned companies are a well-known phenomenon in Denmark , and, to a lesser extent, Germany. Large foundation-owned enterprises in Denmark are stock-listed (such as Carlsberg or NovoNordisk) but a majority of control rights lie with the foundation. A founder would lose direct control over the company, but their vision for the company could remain the leading principle – the ‘purpose’ – anchored in the charter of the foundation, protected by the foundation board’s control.”

“Instead of selling their company to the highest bidder, they can also convert it into a steward-owned one, or set up an ESOP. In light of the large number of retiring entrepreneurs in the years to come, we would move closer to the realisation of limitarianism by a generation of successful entrepreneurs who leave a more-than-decent inheritance to their own children but repurpose their excess wealth to society.”

Halt‘ du sie dumm, ich halt‘ sie arm by Lutz Hausstein (NachDenkSeiten)

“Mit seiner aktuellen Forderung folgt Linnemann also nur alten Klischees und es ist nur der erneute Aufguss eines schon lange kalten Kaffees. Denn seit Jahrzehnten wird Arbeitslosigkeit als individuelles Versagen und individuell fehlende Leistungsbereitschaft interpretiert anstatt als Ergebnis eines den Unternehmensinteressen unterworfenen, auf Effizienz, Personalabbau und letztendlich Profitmaximierung getrimmten Arbeitsmarktes.”

“Es sind vielmehr die Unternehmen, die kaum Bereitschaft an der Arbeitsaufnahme von Arbeitslosen zeigen, da diese generell mit dem Stigma der Nicht-Leistungsfähigen sowie Nicht-Leistungswilligen gebrandmarkt sind. Es gibt nicht wenige Unternehmen, die Arbeitslose als Bewerber von Vornherein aussortieren, ohne überhaupt weitere persönliche Daten in Augenschein zu nehmen. Unter denjenigen Firmen, die sich trotz des Stigmas weitergehende Informationen der Bewerber anschauen und dabei auf ein gehobenes Alter – das häufig schon jenseits der 40 beginnt – stoßen, sinkt die Bereitschaft, diese in einem Bewerbungsgespräch kennenzulernen, noch weiter. Und sie erreicht de facto null, wenn es sich um Bewerber handelt, die schon seit mehreren Jahren ohne feste Arbeit sind. Niemand – Ausnahmen bestätigen die Regel – stellt einen Bewerber ein, der schon seit fünf, zehn oder fünfzehn Jahren arbeitslos ist. Dabei könnten diese Menschen, nach einer vernünftigen, in früheren Zeiten völlig üblichen Einarbeitung durch das Unternehmen und entsprechend ihrer persönlichen Qualifikation, auch einen wertvollen Beitrag für die Firma leisten. Die Vorbehalte der Unternehmen sind jedoch häufig so groß, dass dies überhaupt erst gar nicht als Möglichkeit in Betracht gezogen wird. Und Politiker wie Medien schüren diese Ressentiments dauerhaft und sich gegenseitig verstärkend. Stets wurden und werden die Arbeitslosen in die alleinige Verantwortung genommen, eine Verantwortung der Unternehmen kommt dabei nie vor.”

“Es ist schon unter normalen Umständen völlig realitätsfremd, eine bundesweite Pauschale für Wohnkosten ansetzen zu wollen. Die Mietpreise sind deutschlandweit derart verschieden, dass für die Miete einer 60-qm-Wohnung in der Provinz nicht einmal ein 20-qm-Einzelzimmer in einer Studenten-WG einer deutschen Millionenmetropole angemietet werden kann.”

“[…] läutet der CDU-Vorsitzende Friedrich Merz die nächste Runde in diesem unwürdigen Kampagnen-Theater ein. Der Kanzlerkandidat der Union sprang seinem Generalsekretär Linnemann beiseite, indem er einen Zehn- Milliarden-Euro-Betrag an Einsparungen, sprich Kürzungen, durch eine „Abschaffung des Bürgergeldes in seiner jetzigen“ Form forderte. Dieser Betrag würde dann einer anderen Verwendung zur Verfügung stehen, so beispielsweise für weitere Waffenlieferungen an die Ukraine, für die Abschaffung des Solidaritätszuschlags für Spitzenverdiener im Wert von 12 Milliarden Euro oder für die Anhebung des Spitzensteuer-Grenzwertes auf dann 80.000 Euro jährlich, ab dem dieser dann erst greifen soll.”

“Die nun im vorstehenden Artikel angeführten Protagonisten, seien es nun Politiker oder Medienschaffende, können zweifelsfrei als „rechts“ kategorisiert werden. Mit ihren Kampagnen gegen die ärmsten Mitglieder unserer Gesellschaft, die entweder unterkomplex sind oder – häufiger noch – auf falschen Behauptungen basieren, verneinen sie implizit die Gleichwertigkeit aller Menschen. Grundlegende Rechte, die sie anderen gesellschaftlichen Gruppen niemals absprechen würden, werden den Betroffenen verweigert. Genau das ist jedoch ein wesentliches Merkmal dessen, was als rechts zu bezeichnen ist.”

G20 Knocks Out G7 Agendas by Pepe Escobar (Scheer Post)

“Beijing’s prime role as an engine and cooperation propeller across Asia–Pacific also applies to most of the G20 members. China is the largest trading partner of the 13 APEC economies, and is responsible for 64.2 percent of Asia-Pacific’s economic growth. This prime role extrapolates to China’s BRICS colleagues among the G20, as well as brand-new BRICS partner-nations such as Indonesia and Turkiye. Compare that with the G7/NATOstan contingent of the G20, starting with the United States, whose main global offerings range from Forever Wars and color revolutions to weaponizing of news and culture, trade wars, a tsunami of sanctions, and confiscation/theft of assets.”

“As for Beijing, after 7 years of combined Trump-Biden trade and tech war, the Chinese economy continues to grow by 5.2 percent a year. Exports now account for only 16 percent of China’s GDP, so the economic powerhouse is far less vulnerable to foreign trade machinations. And the US share of that 16 percent is now only 15 percent; that is, trade with the US represents only 2.4 percent of Chinese GDP.”

No Flat Taxes. More Progressive Taxes! by Ted Rall

“The miserable economy of the first century and a half of American history was punctuated by bank failures, stock market crashes, widespread unemployment and depressions so severe that money stopped circulating at times and people had to make do with barter. Between the Panic of 1819, the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1873 (which led to the Long Depression) and the Depression of 1882-1885, Americans were either losing everything or accumulating wealth that was about to be lost. We were a sh—hole country.”

The only real solution (Reddit)

Become the exploiter

““If you don’t like being exploited (employee, tenant), then become the exploiter (boss/ owner, landlord)” is the capitalist mindset that has been drilled into all of us since we were kids.

“The real solution is to end exploitation (capitalism) altogether.”

As Good As It Gets? by Joel Suarez (n + 1)

“In the months before Trump’s victory, not just elected Democrats but countless wonks and columnists were celebrating the Biden Administration’s macroeconomic successes: sustained low unemployment, strong GDP growth, falling inflation, and rising wages. This is the stuff of economists’ dreams—and as close to fulfilling labor’s long-held hope of full employment as the country has come in nearly half a century. Under contemporary US capitalism, this is about as good as it gets.”

It’s just typically shitty project-management: you hit all of your OKRs but most of your customers are miserable and your product still sucks, just not in a way that you’re measuring. Congratulations, you’ve earned your bonus.

“He insisted that there were no intentional delays; Israel would be armed, as it wished; St. Charles would have jobs, as it should; Palestinians would die, as they seemingly must. This encounter prompts a question: how could the economy be “near perfect” if US military largesse was the only thing saving an entire congressional district from immiseration?”

“For those focused on short-term macroeconomic indicators like growth and unemployment, that immiseration has been hard to see—and voters’ cries of misery beggared belief. How could so many people be drowning when GDP growth was so robust and unemployment so low? The Apollo report was clear-eyed. The post-pandemic recovery was “a story of two cohorts.” One group owes money and has been crushed by high interest rates; the other owns assets and has never been better off financially. For the latter, inflation was a nuisance at worst; it was hard to believe anything was fundamentally wrong. But as the Financial Times noted on the eve of the election, “the bottom 40 per cent by income now account for 20 per cent of all spending while the richest 20 per cent account for 40 per cent”—“the widest gap on record.” Elite consumption is so lopsided that it appears to be driving much of the economy, while the rest barely hang on.”

“The much-touted wage gains received by the bottom decile of earners appear to be only the bare minimum needed, as the cost of rent and food exploded, by more than 17 percent and 19 percent respectively from 2020 to 2023. Furthermore, even as hourly wages rose from 2021 into 2024, average weekly working hours declined. In a sense, workers are being paid more but taking home less: comparing between 2017–19 and 2021–24, Ferguson and Storm found average real weekly earnings fell across all wage classes, with disproportionate declines in the median, the third quartile, and the ninth decile of earners. These, of course, are the very income bands in which Trump made inroads in 2024.”

“The despair of lower- and middle-income voters was seen as a political problem rather than an empirical reality, an irrational and irritating sideshow to an otherwise “near perfect” economy.”

“One notable exception to this trend, however, is Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and leftist Jewish woman who won over a deeply Catholic, oil-producing, and still profoundly patriarchal country hit by an even worse bout of inflation than the US.”

We’re all going to die (Reddit)

Will the depleted soil care if you throw a bunch of dollars at it?

““collapse isn’t coming because we’re all getting richer.” Great. Will the depleted soil care if you throw a bunch of dollars at it? can you fill the Caspian Sea with euros?”

The Hidden Costs of Capping Credit Card Interest Rates by Jared Dillian (Reason)

“In September this year, during a campaign rally in New York, Donald Trump proposed capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent. Others from Josh Hawley to Bernie Sanders have also taken up the cause.

“Lost in these proposals are millions of Americans who may lose their credit card overnight—not because they mismanaged their finances, but because a new policy made it unprofitable for lenders to offer credit. Many borrowers, even those with good credit scores, could see their accounts terminated under an interest rate cap, leaving them scrambling for alternatives in a society that often requires a credit card to function.”

This is how most Reason authors think about everything. Instead of thinking that maybe we shouldn’t make it a requirement that people borrow money from private companies in order to survive in society—inconceivable—they cannot think of any other incentive than the profit motive. Since libertarians have to eliminate the government everywhere, they find themselves beholden to private corporations. It’s so sad to see them chasing around like rats in an ideological maze, largely of their own making.

You think I’m exaggerating? Then try Union Workers Are Fighting To Keep U.S. Ports More Dangerous and Less Efficient by John Stossel (Reason). I’m not even going to bother reading that one because John Stossel is a special kind of moron. I’ve given him enough chances. Reading him makes you dumber. I steer clear.

Roaming Charges: Delay and Deny by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“A new study by economist Jessica Min argues that non-college US employment has declined by over 1,000,000 positions since 2000 because average employer healthcare premiums have doubled, making middle-income workers not worth hiring.”

“According to the Huffington Post, Harris campaign aides said internal polling never showed her ahead of Trump. Then maybe they should have diverted a couple hundred million into trying to win the House.”

Unsurprising. They would think nothing of trying to bluff their way in. Why wouldn’t they believe it? The “official” polls were looking better; go with those.

“Swipe fees for credit cards are the third largest expense behind rent and payroll for small businesses in the US. There’s no real justification for them. The fees constitute a 4% tax assessed by Visa on every non-cash consumer transaction.”

“Presidents have been committing crimes for 248 years with de facto immunity. None asked for it because they were never indicted for war crimes, surveilling US citizens without warrants, corruption, torture, and lying the country into war. The court made explicit what had been implied.

“Even the “best” presidents did unspeakable things: Lincoln oversaw the largest mass execution in US history and FDR locked up 10s of thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent for no reason other than their race. Were there any other even remotely good ones? JQ Adams, maybe.”

“The presidential pardon is a good thing. It should deployed much more generously.”

And honestly Hunter Biden shouldn’t have been first in line—and certainly should not have gotten the sweeping, pardon that he did.

“The economy already seems to be grinding to a halt. Current job openings by industry compared to a year ago:

“Construction down 40%
Transport/warehouse down 44%
Federal gov’t down 42%
Manufacturing down 20%
Healthcare down 20%”

And yet the stock market and Bitcoin soar to unprecedented heights! Of course, the devaluing of the U.S. dollar does help, in the sense that “number goes up” is greatly aided by “dollar-value goes down”.

“A federal government taking decisive action to raise the minimum wage not only can be done, it’s being done by a more progressive, humane and enlightened society than our own: namely, Claudia Scheinbaum’s Mexico, which just boosted it by 12 percent.”

“Nina Turner: “The issue with Walmart isn’t DEI; it’s the fact that in nine states alone, Walmart had 14,500 employees on SNAP and 10,350 on Medicaid. Instead of attacking corporations for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, people should call out the low wages.””

Science & Nature

Record-breaking diamond storage can save data for millions of years by Jeremy Hsu (New Scientist)

““Once the internal data storage structures are stabilised using our technology, diamond can achieve extraordinary longevity – data retention for millions of years at room temperature – without requiring any maintenance,” says Ya Wang at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei.”

“This storage method isn’t yet commercially viable because it requires expensive lasers and high-speed fluorescence imaging cameras, along with other devices, says Wang. But he and his colleagues expect that their diamond-based system could eventually be miniaturised to fit within a space the size of a microwave oven.”

Art & Literature

Borges on the Couch by David Foster Wallace (NY Times)

“The idea is that we can’t correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation. That this is simply assumed as an axiom by many biographers is one problem; another is that the approach works a lot better on some writers than on others. It works well on Kafka – Borges’s only modern equal as an allegorist, with whom he’s often compared – because Kafka’s fictions are expressionist, projective, and personal; they make artistic sense only as manifestations of Kafka’s psyche. But Borges’s stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments+; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness – “to be incorporated,” as Borges puts it, “like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.””

“It is not merely that Williamson reads every last thing in Borges’s oeuvre as a correlative of the author’s emotional state. It is that he tends to reduce all of Borges’s psychic conflicts and personal problems to the pursuit of women.”

“The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty – a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.”

“And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots’ centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroës.”

“Because Peronism still had great popularity with Argentina’s working poor, the exiled dictator retained enormous political power, and would have won any democratic national election held in the 1950's. This placed believers in liberal democracy (such as J. L. Borges) in the same sort of bind that the United States faced in South Vietnam a few years later – how do you promote democracy when you know that a majority of people will, if given the chance, vote for an end to democratic voting? In essence, Borges decided that the Argentine masses had been so hoodwinked by Perón and his wife that a return to democracy was possible only after the nation had been cleansed of Peronism.”

Well, that is unfortunate. It is the same conclusion to which a lot of people who think that they are smarter than everyone else come.

Bangers and Mash by Justin Smith-Ruiu / Hélène Le Goff (Hinternet)

“I’ve always sort of felt that a writer, among other things, is someone who simply internalizes the duty of capitalization and other things like that, so that we spontaneously do it everywhere, not just on Substack but even in the most telegraphic of our text messages, whether we’ve got an editor breathing down our neck telling us we must do it or not.”

Damocles by Jim Culleny (3 Quarks Daily)

I saw a cormorant, wings spread
drying herself in the wind after lunch
oblivious to the dilemma of our recklessness
but snared nevertheless in its reach

but time itself is oblivious

ENDON 'YOUR GHOST IS DEAD' (OFFICIAL VIDEO) by Daymare recordings (YouTube)

I honestly don’t know what to make of this. It’s utterly fascinating how focused and dedicated they are to what they’re doing. There is method to the ostensible madness. The video is wild. The music is definitely metal.

The band is, to absolutely no-one’s surprise, Japanese. I just thought that the lyrics were incomprehensible English but it turns out that they’re incomprehensible Japanese. You know how I can tell? Search for the lyrics and you won’t find any hits—because lyrics web sites can’t handle Kanji.

You start off with a “WTF am I watching?” feeling and then start to feel the musicality and power of it. I start to imagine hiking uphill faster to it.

This is the future of music: making things that only humans could convincingly make—even if you have to go all weird.

This reminds me of having recently read that metal band Knocked Loose was on Jimmy Kimmel, completely unironically, doing their song without pulling any punches. The official video for the song they played is below.

Knocked Loose 'Suffocate' Ft. Poppy (Official Music Video) by Pure Noise Records (YouTube)

They have apparently been nominated for a Grammy.

After two songs back to back, I’m not 100% into the screaming but I like the vibe, I like the anger, I like the energy.

Sci-Fi Short Film 'Through Fire She Calls' by DUST / Jason Georgiades (YouTube)

A well-made sci-fi short film. Showing, not telling.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Gen Z Is Super Weird by Amber A’Lee Frost (Jacobin)

“The idea of American fascism runs counter to capitalism. Don’t get me wrong: as far as contemporary states go, we’re probably top dog when it comes to the enabling of fascism abroad, and as far as developed countries go, our neoliberal structure is uniquely and exceptionally cruel, oppressive, and exploitative toward Americans themselves. But, if you’ll forgive the pedantry, you’re not going to roll out fascism in good old USA anytime soon for the same reason you’re not going to roll out socialism: neither has the institutions or base to challenge capitalism.”

“Our “evil elite” is a different beast, and anyone trying to overthrow it has no means by which to do so. We have no militant labor power, and we have no storm troopers. Instead, we have the deep state and Amazon, and the Republican and Democratic “parties” — neither of which is an actual party with citizen members exercising any kind of democratic control.”

Talking Trump, RFK Jr., Epistemic Collapse, &c. by Justin Smith-Ruiu & Olivia Ward-Jackson (Hinternet)

I credit both participants but, if we’re honest, Justin talks about 95% of the time. It was quite an interesting discussion/talk, touching on several salient points. I’m still somewhat surprised to hear how empire-tinged some of the Justin’s information is, despite his conclusions being decidedly anti-empire. In particular, he completely mischaracterized Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney, which were a, for Trump. surprisingly very well-reasoned argument against war hawks, who talk a big game about sending other people to war.

Even taking the execrable liberal talking-points site In Context: What former President Donald Trump said about Liz Cheney facing a firing squad (Politifact)

“When asked about Liz Cheney campaigning for Harris, Trump said, “Well, I think it hurts Kamala a lot. Actually. Look, (Cheney is) a deranged person. The reason she doesn’t like me is that she wanted to stay in Iraq.”

“Trump covered many other topics, then said: “I don’t want to go to war. (Liz Cheney) wanted to go, she wanted to stay in Syria. I took (troops) out. She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them out. I mean, if were up to her, we’d, we’d be in 50 different countries. And you know, number one, it’s very dangerous. Number two, a lot of people get killed. And number three, I mean, it’s very, very expensive.”

“Later, Trump added “I don’t blame (Dick Cheney) for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She is a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.””

You will note that he doesn’t say anything about a firing squad. He doesn’t even imply it. When I first heard him say this in a video (from Glenn Greenwald, I believe), I didn’t even think of a firing squad. I just thought that he was talking about sending Liz Cheney into combat to see how she likes it. In fact, if you read not even very carefully, his hypothetical posits to “put her with a rifle”, which is an odd way of painting a scene with her facing a firing squad. These people make things up out of whole cloth. I’m ashamed for Justin that he chose to talk about his without even spending 45 seconds watching what Trump actually said. You don’t have to defend his right to want to send Liz Cheney before a firing squad because he never said anything like that. He actually said that we have to stop fighting wars and that the psychos promoting all of these wars should have some empathy for the soldiers they send to fight and die for their causes.

If you look at the quote, he cites three reasons: danger, loss of life, and waste of money. Since Justin didn’t actually watch the clip, he’s free to accuse Trump of focusing on the waste of money, even though that is absolutely not what he said. This is just a lazy promulgation of liberal talking points, even as he purports to be disputing them. He’s still bought some of the narrative, which is that Trump is only about the money. It’s possibly still true! But if you’re going to cite Trump, then you should at least say that he says it’s about the loss of life, but everything else he’s ever done seems to be about making money, etc. etc.

The analysis of Trump’s comments on Liz Cheney were, despite their ostensibly being against the liberal line that he wanted to put her in front of a firing squad, which he never said, still mischaracterizing what Trump actually said. If you actually listen to what he said (or read the transcript), then you’ll hear him taking a very anti-war stance and calling out Liz Cheney for being a stupid war-hawk, ready to send other people into combat all over the world.

He never says anything about a firing squad; in fact, his hypothetical gives her a rifle! He also lists the reasons for avoiding war: (1) “it’s very dangerous” (2) “a lot of people get kileld” and (3) “it’s very, very expensive.” You’ll note that, although Justin considered money to be Trump’s #1 reason for being opposed to war, it’s actually #3 when you listen to what he’s saying.

We don’t have to take Trump at his word but, if we are to cite him, we should at least do so accurately, then express our doubts about the veracity of his comments, rather than mixing the two and pretending that what we think he meant to say is what he actually said.

At 01:07:00, he says that,

“[…] and I haven’t been thinking about that [COVID] so much over the past, say, year. We are to some extent now facing the fallout of the chaos of that period, right? And the perception, right or wrong, that our important institutions’ claims to a monopoly on knowledge and to scientific authority were being called into doubt, right?

“Rightly or wrongly, but I think inevitably I have to concede to some extent, right? We were getting directives from one week to the next in some cases that just said A and not A about masks, about hand-washing and stuff. And that’s okay. I mean, sometimes authorities just don’t know, right?

“They do their best and there’s nothing blameworthy in that. But the combination of those vacillations with this strange new emerging discourse in the pandemic era that you must trust the science, smelled fishy to a lot of people. I think rightly so.

“Like, I’m supposed to trust the science no matter what, even when it says A and not A? How can I do that? How could I possibly do that? Wouldn’t it be better maybe to say trust the science with some reasonable degree of reserve or something like that?

“And the insistence became so dogmatic that I think it’s only natural that the populist movement at that time, I mean, the populist movement pre-exists COVID, but that at that time the populist movement started to kind of take up the baton of COVID skepticism, right?

“And this follows the same dynamics as so many other things in American culture and politics, but we would have done a lot better to tolerate and even encourage skepticism rather than pushing it out to the populist margins, because now … those are not the margins.

“Now we have a COVID skeptic who’s positioned to head up the Department of Health and Human Services. So there again, it’s massive, massive blowback from the kind of reduction of authority to a kind of caricature or a zombie version of itself to leave us because we’re in power and we told you so.

“A lot of people are saying, well, no, I won’t. I’ll just take power instead, right?
Yeah, and we spoke about sort of spirituality earlier. That almost felt like a sort of religious reverence for the science rather than sort of this is how you understand it and therefore… You have faith in it because you understand it.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, I teach history and philosophy of science. I think a lot about the epistemology of authority in this connection. And, you know, this is kind of my bailiwick long before and was long before the populist movement started gaining steam and I can affirm, as an expert, and you have to listen to me because i’m an expert. Science never won its authority by command. You know, by saying, believe us.

“And so it was just such a distortion of the actual role of the institution of science in society that it’s not surprising that many, many people smelled something fishy.”

The Century of the Self (Full Adam Curtis Documentary) by Adam Curtis / David Lessig (uploader) (YouTube)

An absolutely excellent 4-hour documentary about how the world we know took its shape. It

At 16:34,

“Man’s desires must overshadow his needs. Prior to that time, there was no American consumer. There was the American worker and there was the American owner, and they manufactured and they saved and they ate what they had to. When the people shopped, they shopped for what they needed. And, while the very rich may have bought things they didn’t need, most people did not. And Maiser envisioned a break with that, where you would have things that you didn’t actually need, but you wanted as opposed to needed. And the man who would be at the center of changing that mentality for the corporations was Edward Bernays.”

At 30:05,

“Mass democracy, at its heart, was the consuming self, which not only made the economy work, but was happy and docile, and so created a stable society.”

“Both Bernays’s and Lippmann’s concept of managing the masses takes the idea of democracy and it turns it into a palliative. It turns it into giving people some kind of feel-good medication that will respond to an immediate pain or an immediate yearning, but will not alter the objective circumstances one iota. I mean, democracy, really—the idea of democracy at its heart—was about changing the relations of power that had governed the world for so long. And Bernays’s concept of democracy was one of maintaining the relations of power, even if it meant that one needed to sort of stimulate the psychological life, the lives, of the public. And, in fact, in his mind, that was what was necessary. That, if you can keep stimulating the irrational self, then leadership can basically go on doing what it wants to do.”

At 01:25:00,

“They actually believed that this elite was necessary, because individual citizens were not capable, if left alone, of being Democratic citizens. The elite was necessary in order to create the conditions that would produce individuals capable of behaving as a good consumer, and also behaving as a democratic citizen. They didn’t see their activities as anti-democratic, as undermining the capacity of individual citizens for democracy, quite the opposite. They understood [themselves to be] creating the conditions for democracy’s survival and future.”

I don’t believe it. I believe that some of them believed it. But I also think that they enjoyed the wealth, power, prestige, privilege, omniscience, and omnipotence they felt they had gained. They sold the idea that they should be in charge in that way but I bet most of them couldn’t have cared one way or the other exactly which story was told, as long as it resulted in their own personal dominance and comfort.

Their arrogance was necessary in order to sell the idea that they knew better. Whenever you hear someone saying that people “made the wrong choices”, you’re hearing the voice of elitism creeping in and you should be extremely careful.

At 01:30:00, there is an absolutely excellent and absolutely devastating section on Bernarys’s efforts on behalf of United Fruit to topple Arbenz’s presidency in Guatemala in 1954. The inclusion of psycho-warfare would form the template for dozens of other coups and the anti-Communist century that followed—and continues.

Flatten 2 by Zach Weinersmith (SMBC)

SMBC: Flatten-2

“We convince them that they belong to a simplistic category no matter how arbitrary.

“Then, we can define the features of the category and watch as they reshape their own sense of self, simplifying and flattening their personalities, making our algorithms more effective.”

I think that the final line being “It me.” would have been better, but what do I know?

The Kind Of Ceasefire Where One Side Keeps Firing by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix)

“Antisemitism simply is not a significant threat in our society. It used to be, but it isn’t anymore, because our society has changed. There was a time fairly recently when I would’ve been discriminated against for being divorced from the father of my children. This never happens to me in our present day, because we no longer have the kind of puritanical society where that sort of discrimination occurs. Some fringe religious kooks on the internet might tell me divorce is a sin, but they have no institutional support and normal people think they’re ridiculous.

“In exactly the same way, the archaic superstitions and prejudices which drove the persecution of Jewish people in previous generations simply do not exist in the way they once did. What you see labeled as “antisemitism” today is 99 percent just people criticizing Israel or fighting back against the oppressive abuses of a genocidal apartheid state, with the remaining one percent being expressions of medieval prejudices against Jewish people from fringe assholes with no political power.”

Nihilist Penguin (Werner Herzog) (YouTube)

I record this here because I don’t want to forget it. it’s haunting.

“With five-thousand kilometers ahead of him, he’s heading for certain death. ”

Technology

How decentralized is Bluesky really? by Christine Lemmer-Webber, (Dusty Cloud)

“Part of the concern I have with Bluesky presently is thus that people are gaining the impression that it’s a decentralized system in ways that it is not. There are multiple ways this could end up being a problem for the decentralized world; one irritating way is that people might believe there’s an “easy decentralized way to do things” that Bluesky has discovered which isn’t actually that at all, and another is that Bluesky could collapse at some point and that people might walk away with the impression of “oh well, we tried decentralization and that didn’t work… remember Bluesky?””

“Bluesky and ATProto have no design for this at present, and most of the architectural assumptions assume public messages only. Now this could change of course, but everything within Bluesky’s current literature and architecture assume public-only content. In fact, even blocks are public information.”

“All direct messages, no matter what your Personal Data Store is, no matter what your relay is, go through Bluesky, the company.

“If you find this shocking, so did I, but then again, this information was publicly available even when direct messages were announced. Bluesky’s direct messages are also not end-to-end encrypted, and don’t use any particular kind of protocol which is amenable to decentralization or federation.”

“I strongly believe that the right answer is a Petname System, which allows for local human meaning to globally non-human-meaningful names. However, the discussion of why I believe that is the right approach and how to accomplish it is too large for this writeup; I will only say that Ink and Switch did a great petnames demo and (while not particularly polished) there are more ideas one can read about in a prototype Spritely put together. But admittedly, petname systems have not been widely deployed to this date, and so the UX challenges around them are not fully solved.”

Apple Contacts is loosely like this.

“Petname systems could address this issue, but integrating them at this point would be a major shift in how users perceive of the network, and it seems unlikely that downplaying the role of domains is something Bluesky as an organization will be motivated to do since selling domains is currently a Bluesky business strategy.”

“But perhaps that’s too ambitious to suggest taking on for either camp. And maybe it doesn’t matter insofar as the real lessons of Worse is Better is that both first mover advantage on a quicker and popular solution outpaces the ability to deliver a more correct and robust position, and entrenches the less ideal system. It can be really challenging for a system that is in place to change itself from its present position, which is a bit depressing.”

“I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.”

Taking the last two citations together and the statement is: Bluesky is neither decentralized nor is it federated, nor is it likely to become so. Instead, it is more likely to enshittify as it grows.

The Substack video player is very, very frustrating for pausing/tracking/transcribing. I like that authors can post on Substack instead of YouTube but I do miss the sane approach to tracking forward and back in a video. Or being able to bookmark a video for watching later. Substack’s video player interprets a click in the video not as pausing the video, but as expressing a desire to track back to the position in the progress bar corresponding to the x-position of your mouse within the video. What madness is this? Who does this?

LLMs & AI

On Good and Bad AI by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Eric Salzman was scolded by an AI for trying to co-write a satirical film trailer about ESG ratings, because that might involve spreading “misleading narratives.””

This inspired me to formulate the problem with having a handful of systems offering a tool that offers productivity increases but only with guardrails. Those who ask the tools to automatically write content that fits the prevailing narrative will not only have an easier time selling this type of content because of its ideology, they will also be able to do it in more volume and more efficiently than those who will have to write their screeds without the help of tools that will refuse to aid the revolution.

LLMs available only from a handful of trillionaire companies will further cement the stranglehold that capitalism already has on discourse and publishing reach.

Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why by Simon Willison

“It turns out many of those names are examples of individuals who have complained about being defamed by ChatGPT in the last. Brian Hood is the Australian mayor who was a victim of lurid ChatGPT hallucinations back in March 2023, and settled with OpenAI out of court.”

This is a very short article that makes no mention of how horrifying it is to depend on a tool that further restricts what we’re allowed to see. In increasing order of restrictiveness,

1. There is the entirety of human endeavor.
2. There is that which is documented. (some knowledge is oral.)
3. There is that which is digitized. (Some documents are only available offline.)
4. There is that which is reachable via Internet. (Some documents are private.)
5. There is that which is available to search engines. (Some documents are blocked by the owner.)
6. There is that which is returned by search engines. (Some documents are blocked by the search engine.)
7. There is that which is returned by LLMs. (Some documents are blocked by the LLM’s guardrails.)

AI is not Designed for You by No Boilerplate (YouTube)

“We’re bad at identifying confidence tricksters. […] from colonies on Mars to democratizing money it’s always easier to promise a bright future than build a better present. What I remind myself to do whenever I see these bizarre products that no one needs, is to pay less attention to what these companies say their tech will do in the future and far more to what they actually can do today.”

Programming

Storing times for human events by Simon Willison

“My strong recommendation here is that the most important thing to record is the original user’s intent. If they said the event is happening at 6pm, store that! Make sure that when they go to edit their event later they see the same editable time that they entered when the first created it.

“In addition to that, try to get the most accurate possible indication of the timezone in which that event is occurring.

“For most events I would argue that the best version of this is the exact location of the venue itself.

“User’s may find timezones confusing, but they hopefully understand the importance of helping their attendees know where exactly the event is taking place.”

“Now that we’ve precisely captured the user’s intent and the event location (and through it the exact timezone) we can denormalize: figure out the UTC time of that event and store that as well.

“This UTC version can be used for all sorts of purposes: sorting events by time, figuring out what’s happening now/next, displaying the event to other users with its time converted to their local timezone.

“But when the user goes to edit their event, we can show them exactly what they told us originally. When the user edits the location of their event we can maintain that original time, potentially confirming with the user if they want to modify that time based on the new location.

“And if some legislature somewhere on earth makes a surprising change to their DST rules, we can identify all of the events that are affected by that change and update that denormalized UTC time accordingly.”

SemVer Is Not About You by Alex Kladov (matklad)

“[…] projects follow the “deprecate than [sic] remove cycle”. I’ve learned this with the release of Ember 2.0. The big deal about Ember 2.0 is that the only thing that it did was the removal of deprecation warnings. Code that didn’t emit warnings on the latest Ember 1.x was compatible with 2.0.”

This is a pretty good policy. It’s what I did for years with Quino.

Importing a frontend Javascript library without a build system by Julia Evans

“chart.js’s package.json also says “type”: “module”, which according to this documentation tells Node to treat files as ES modules by default. I think it doesn’t tell us specifically which files are ES modules and which ones aren’t but it does tell us that something in there is an ES module.”

This is good to know. It may simplify my current project in a class I’m teaching.

“Also someone pointed me to Simon Willison’s download-esm, which will download an ES module and rewrite the imports to point to the JS files directly so that you don’t need importmaps. I haven’t tried it yet but it seems like a great idea.”

“Is there a tool that automatically generates importmaps for an ES Module that I have set up locally? (apparently yes: jspm)”

What's New for ASP.NET Core & Blazor in .NET 9 by dotnet / Daniel Roth (YouTube)

This was pretty informative, overall. I wish he’d spent a bit more time on HybridCache, which seems like a big win.

Oh, hey, look at that:

Introducing HybridCache in ASP.NET Core by dotnet / Marc Gravell (YouTube)

The following video covers Redis, HybridCache, and stampede-protection as well.

Easily Improve Web Application Performance using .NET 9 Caching and Redis by dotnet / Catherine Wang & Matt Soucoup (YouTube)

Modern WinForms Development with .NET 9 by dotnet / Merrie McGaw & Klaus Loffelmann (YouTube)

This was quite an interesting video, in that it really drives home that WinForms is here to stay. The community pushed hard to make a lot of the code base expose and use nullability. Microsoft has also improved performance in System.Drawing and replaced all interop with code generated by CSWin32. There is also improved support on base UI objects for asynchronous calls like Form.ShowAsync and so on.

I like that his demo to show text in a color-mode-aware manner failed because he was creating the brush with the right color but he wasn’t assigning it anywhere. How do I know he wasn’t using it anywhere? Because Visual Studio had grayed out the instance variable to which he had initialized his brush. He’d assigned the brush but hadn’t actually assigned it to be used by any control. This is why you configure and then pay attention to the warnings and suggestions in your IDE, folks. It really does help you solve otherwise pretty hairy problems. In this case, I was able to diagnose his problem just from a brief flash of less than a second of him scrolling through his file.

It hurts me so much to watch people click toolbar buttons to comment/uncomment code. Seriously, you’re fired.

8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production by Dmitrii Kovanikov (chshersh)

“Haskell has waaaaaay more features than probably any other programming language (well, C++ can compete). This is both good and bad.

“It’s good because you have the tools to solve your problems in the best way.

“It’s bad because you have those tools. They’re distracting. Every time I need to solve a problem in Haskell, I’m immediately thinking about all the ways I can design the solution instead of, ahem, actually implementing this solution.

“I’m interested in building stuff, not sitting near my pond on a warm summer day, thinking if TypeFamilies + DataKinds would be better than GADTs for making illegal states unrepresentable.”

Advanced Pattern Matching in C# by dotnet / Oli Sturm (YouTube)

At about 8:30, he shows a nice usage of switch expressions with range expressions to make a recursive summing function.

static int Sum(Span<int> l) => l switch {
    [] => 0,
    [var x, .. var xs] => × + Sum(xs)
};

Nice!

There were a lot of interesting examples in this video. The final one for refactoring a red-black tree was really cool. It’s funny how bad these people are at demos, though. He showed up that he had 513 tests running and passing in 0.5s. Then he says that the passing tests is the only thing that’s important. Um, no, it’s also important that rebalancing is done in a reasonable amount of time, so we should also keep an eye on the time the tests take with any refactored implementation.

To demonstrate that the tests actually test the code he’s going to refactor, he wiped out the enter implementation and re-ran the tests. But they didn’t run because he was no longer returning a value from his method, so it didn’t even compile. He blew right by that and said “see, the tests don’t run.” Um, no, the program no longer compiles and you haven’t proven anything about the connection between the implementation you’re going to refactor and the tests.

All that aside, though, it’s quite an elegant solution that looks just like the original Haskell code. It’s not legible at a glance but is a very succinct representation that uses the standard style for these kinds of things.

Red-black tree in C#

Testing.Platform, the new way to run .NET tests by dotnet / Jakub Jares (YouTube)

The Testing.Platform is very nice. It promotes test suites to first-class citizens, built as executable files without an reflection-based assembly-scanning at runtime. Instead, the source generator scans and generates code for running the tests. It also supports a “watch” mode (called “hot reload”, of course), which lets you keep the tests running as a separate app. It’s much faster and more reliable, it’s AOT-friendly, etc. etc.

When it was initially introduced in January of 2024, the only drawback was that you could only use it with MSUnit. That’s changed! At 23:00, he shows how to enable and run NUnit-based and XUnit-based tests with Testing.Platform. I really, really like how MS-based projects like this embrace open standards and non-Microsoft standards: the testing platform is to replace VSTest, which only ran on Windows. Testing.Platform is platform-agnostic and testing-framework-agnostic, bringing its Reflection-free, AOT-capable, runtime-stable approach for everyone.

He demonstrates running a solution with NUnit, XUnit, and MSUnit tests running as a standalone, collectively with dotnet run, and in Visual Studio. Rider / VSTest writes “JetBrains Rider can run tests from any custom test framework that uses VSTest or Microsoft.Testing.Platform.” ReSharper / VSTest writes “ReSharper can run tests from any custom test framework that uses VSTest or Microsoft.Testing.Platform.”

Good news all around. This thing is ready to be used!

Datenmodellierung mit Summen und Produkten by Michael Sperber und Stefan Wehr (funktionale-programmierung.de)

Also available in English.

TIL that:

• Java has record types, pattern-matching, and even discriminated unions/sum types (already! Before C#!) It all appeared in the last couple of years. I hadn’t been paying too enough attention to poor Java. I wonder how many Java programmers are (A) aware that this exists and (B) able to work with a version that has it (a lot of enterprise Java tends to “pool” not only on LTS versions like 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, and adoption even of the newer LTSs tends to be quite slow).

  The syntax for declaring a sum type is barely recognizable as such in Java, especially when you’re accustomed to the elegance of the declaration in Haskell, but it’s possible. C# still doesn’t have them but there is a well-thought-out and lengthy proposal.

• Kotlin doesn’t have pattern-matching but its flow-based type-checker supports type-narrowing that gets you about the same behavior.

  when(this) {
    is Tablet ->
      "$morning-$midday-$evening"
    is Infusion ->
      speed.toString() + "ml/min for " + duration + "h"
  }

I was already aware that Swift, F#, Python, and Rust had pattern-matching and sum types. Typescript has them too, but as “undiscriminated” types.

“Das bekannte Open/Closed Prinzip besagt, dass Software zur Berücksichtigung neuer Anforderungen idealerweise nur erweitert und nicht modifiziert werden sollte. Code, der nach dem von uns als funktional bezeichneten Ansatz (oder mit dem Visitor-Pattern) geschrieben ist, ermöglicht Offenheit für neue Operationen, während der objektorientierte Ansatz Offenheit für neue Alternativen ermöglicht.”

Sports

Bulletproof ASP.NET Core APIs: The OWASP API Security Top Ten by dotnet / Christian Wenz (YouTube)

This is a very useful introduction to common security issues and how to address them. He talks about how to program by default so that the issues never come up.

At around 19:00, he even discusses how to build a threat model. He kind of backs into describing it by talking about the types of risks for which you might need processual mitigations. That is, the threat model talks about something like “the system allows a single user to book multiple seats for themselves on a plane” and then talks about (A) whether you even want to mitigate this and (B) which kinds of mitigations would work against it.

Fun

Anyone else passing this bottle around today? (Reddit)

The revolution will not spare you

1. grandma you’re looking lovely tonight
2. look you guys I just think is a universal right
3. cousin john you’re a fascist and the revolution will not spare you

anon pimps (Reddit)

I need some whores for my GI Joes

> be me
> 9yo
> shopping at Toys R Us
> pick out some Barbie dolls
> go to checkout
> clerk smiles and asks “oh, are you shopping for your sister or cousin?”
> “nope, for me”
> “aren’t those toys a little girly for you?”
> “I need some whores for my Gl Joes”

I’m not even going to take the edge off of this one. It’s a good joke because it’s an absolutely monstrous thing for a child to say. It’s monstrous for anyone to say. That is why it’s funny.