Links and Notes for March 21st, 2025

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

The Zionists Within by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“This past week he had Marco Rubio, who comes over more as a schoolboy than a secretary of state, offering Moscow a ceasefire deal with the Kiev regime as if — one either laughs or does the other thing — the U.S. is the honest broker rather than the principal belligerent in the proxy war former President Joe Biden recklessly provoked.

“It is the same wherever one looks — north to Canada, south to Mexico, across the Atlantic to Europe, across the Pacific to China. Altering the direction of policy is one thing, very often what is warranted; creating crises is another, and usually the mark of diplomatic incompetence.”

“Israel has resumed blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza, this time water as well as food, tents and other essentials to survival. I read over the weekend that Israel is now preventing record numbers of doctors and aid workers from entering the Strip.”

“How did a former I.D.F. officer on the intelligence side find her way to directing Columbia’s equivalent of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard? O.K., Israeli spookery to the Israeli Mission to the U.N. is a plausible progression. But how did Yarhi–Milo get from there to Columbia’s S.I.P.A.? What could have been the journey?”

We absolutely can’t imagine this happening with anyone from any other country, can we? But here we have a former soldier in a foreign army just riding high atop a program intended to churn out the next generation of the deep state.

It’s the same thing as that Congressman from Florida who showed up to work in his IDF uniform. It was considered gauche to even notice that anything might be wrong with that.

“You get the drift here, I trust. By all available evidence, and with my bullshit detectors just back from the shop, this is a too-cute cover story apparently intended to gloss the appointment of a Zionist plant atop a major institution at a major American university.”

“Trump will now serve to demonstrate the extent to which the countless appendages of the Zionist cause demand America sacrifice itself — its institutions, its laws, its very intelligence — to protect the barbarities of “the Jewish state” from criticism.”

Professor at Center of Columbia University Deportation Scandal is Former Israeli Spy by Alan Macleod (MintPressNews)

“Mahmoud Khalil was among the leaders of the movement. The Syrian-born Palestinian refugee was willing to speak calmly and cogently to the press about the protest’s goals. A permanent resident of the United States, he was abducted by ICE on Saturday.”

““ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a radical foreign pro-Hamas student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come,” President Trump stated.”

Trump is and has always been a liar. Where’s Biden? Obama? Has Bernie condemned this?

Trump is not and has never unique, though. He’s just unwilling to be mealy-mouthed about it. He just comes right out and says the bad thing rather than singing a lullaby that lets people pretend that the bad thing isn’t happening.

“[…] he had been moved halfway across the country to a center in Jena, Louisiana. Journalist Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider explained that ICE often goes “immigration ‘judge shopping’ by putting detainees in detention centers under jurisdictions of courts that very rarely decide in favor of migrants.””

How is that legal? He’s still innocent.

“In January, the school announced that Jacob Lew would join the faculty. Lew had just left his job as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel under the Biden administration, a role in which he facilitated American complicity in genocide, supplying Israel with weapons and providing it with diplomatic support for its efforts.”

The Ceasefire That Never Was by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“For the past few days, Israeli drones have been dropping new flyers over the cities of Gaza featuring Netanyahu and Trump, warning of the “disappearance” of Gaza’s people at the hands of the Israeli Army:”

“To the people of Gaza, after what happened and the end of the temporary ceasefire and before we start Trump’s compulsory plan, which we will proceed with whether you like it or not, this is the last call for anyone who may share information with us in return for financial support…

“Reconsider this. The world map will not change if Gaza’s people disappear. No one will notice you. No one will ask about you.

“Neither America nor Europe cares about Gaza. Even the Arab states. They are our allies. They provide us with money, oil, and arms. They only send you shrouds. The game will end soon.”

“Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz: “What was not achieved in 17 months will not be achieved in another 17. What was not achieved with the use of the most barbaric force in Israel’s history will not be achieved with even more barbaric force.””

“Sky TV’s Middle East Correspondent Alistair Bunkall: “Israel has also prevented the entry of humanitarian aid for weeks. No food, no water, no fuel, no medicine is allowed. That and heavy air strikes has pushed hospitals to breaking point, hospitals that were already largely destroyed.”

“Australian medic Muhammad Mustafa describing the aftermath of Israel’s attacks at Baptist Hospital in Gaza City:”

“It was just mostly women and children burned head to toe, limbs missing, heads missing…We’ve run out of ketamine, propofol — all painkillers. We can’t sedate, can’t give analgesia. We intubate, and people wake up choking — no sedation. Seven girls are getting their legs amputated without anesthesia. The bombing hasn’t stopped since 1:30 a.m., with screams echoing everywhere and the smell of burnt flesh still filling the air.”

“The Turkish foreign ministry denounced the demolition: “We condemn the destruction of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital by Israel. The deliberate targeting of a hospital providing healthcare services to civilians in Gaza is part of Israel’s policy to render Gaza unlivable and force the Palestinian people into displacement. We urge the international community to take firm and effective steps against Israel’s unlawful attacks and systematic state terrorism.””

What else are you going to say, I guess? But the tone is more of fighting a parking ticket than of another country deliberately running a genocide. These are your allies, Turkey. You have no control over them, but you could abandon them, if only on principle.

“Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat:”

“Beit Lahia is being completely destroyed. Massacres have been ongoing since dawn yesterday. The occupation army is raining down fire on civilian homes, targeting residential neighborhoods and lands with heavy artillery shelling. Survivors are fleeing without a destination, and the number of displaced people is increasing by the minute. Beit Lahia is no longer a city; the smell of blood and dismembered bodies fills the air, and everything there is reduced to death.”

“As the tanks rolled into Gaza once more, Israel’s Defense Minister Katz announced that he had ordered the annexation of even more Palestinian land:”

“I instructed the IDF to seize additional territories in Gaza. The more Hamas refuses to release the hostages, the more territory will be annexed to Israel.”

This is the reality on the ground. All sides agree that this is the reality. All sides agree on the goal. Extinction.

There’s your anti-war president. He’s just like Obama—talking a peace game, talking about reducing nuclear weapons, but then starting more wars and ramping everything up, all while calling the only country to be waging war for a humanitarian principle—the Houthis are fighting only until Gaza gets humanitarian aid again—barbarians. And so it goes.

Why does Trump capitalize words like a German? It’s weird…

“In late February, the Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney was kidnapped by ICE after she tried to renew her work visa at the US/Mexico border. She was cuffed, thrown into a van, held prisoner for 12 days, denied access to a lawyer, made to sleep on concrete floors and given a forced pregnancy test before being sent back to Canada with no explanation from DHS officials for the brutality of her treatment.”

No. The savagery and cruelty is applauded from on high, but it is enacted from below. It is a cruel and savage society that delights in this. Many, many people had to have been involved in her 12 days of illegal detention. None of the people cared to release her. No-one lifted a finger. They’re paid to look the other way, or to participate, or they do it for fun.

“On March 5, Ranjani Srinivasan was told by email that her student visa had been revoked after she attended a couple of protests and liked some social media posts in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Ranjani, a 37-year-old architect from India who was on the verge of completing her doctoral program in urban planning at Columbia, withdrew from school and fled to Canada after ICE knocked on her dorm door and accused her of advocating “violence and terrorism.” In an interview with Boston radio station WBUR, Ranjani said:”

“I’m not a terrorist sympathizer. I’m not pro-Hamas. And I think it’s really dangerous to label any free speech that somebody disagrees with, or any sort of peaceful objection to global issues, as terrorism. I think it just creates a climate of fear where people are scared to share their opinions. There’s a feeling that your visa could be revoked for even the simplest political speech, and the whole point of an American university is to have debate and nuance about ideas to contest them freely. I think there’s a general fear of doing that now.”

Her statement is too long. It make me want to retort “no shit!” I know it happened to her and she has the right to express herself the way she wants but the language is far, far too conciliatory. It’s as if someone punched you right in the face and you only replied that “some people need to learn to keep their hands to themselves.” Unless you follow it up by kicking their asses to hell and back, … you sound like a milquetoast.

There is no need to lend any credence to any of the behavior. It is illegal, or it should be. No-one should put up with a society that behaves this way. “climate of fear”? ICE is invading campuses now? And no-one stops them? There are a lot of layers of people looking the other way while the U.S. Stasi has its way. They are establishing facts on the ground. This is the Israelization of the U.S.

“On March 7, Fabian Schmidt was detained by immigration officers at Logan Airport in Boston on his way back from Luxembourg. Schmidt holds a green card and has lived and worked in the US since moving to the States with his mother in 2007. He became a permanent resident in 2008 and has worked in the US as an electrical engineer ever since. As ICE officers interrogated him and demanded he surrender his green card, his partner, a cardiologist and US citizen, waited for him for four hours at the airport. During his detention, Schmidt was stripped naked, placed in a cold shower, and deprived of food, water, and medication. He collapsed before being hospitalized at Mass General. After his release from the hospital, Schmidt was taken to an ICE facility in Burlington, Mass., and then transferred to an ICE jail in Rhode Island. Schmidt’s green card had recently been renewed and there were no pending legal cases against him. He wasn’t served with a warrant at the time of his arrest and wasn’t permitted to contact his family for three days. Schmidt has an 8-year-old daughter who is a US citizen.”

As in the case above, no-one should be treated like this even if there were pending legal cases against them. A pending legal has has not yet been decided. Innocent until proven guilty. My God, even if they had already been found guilty, you’re not allowed to torture people. For FUCK’S sake. Have we really allowed the needle to be moved so far that we don’t even realize what they’re doing, not really? They are not allowed to torture anyone. Period. So you don’t have to apologize in advance for not having made it clear to them that you don’t support Hamas or whatever bullshit. It is not germane. Focus.

This is America, as Childish Gambino said. Looks like white Luxembourgers are now getting treated like blacks and latinos have been treated for decades. Maybe now someone will care? You know, now that ICE is attacking real people?

“On March 9, a French space researcher was subjected to a “random” search upon arrival in the US. His phone and computer were confiscated and searched. The DHS agents found a series of text messages describing Trump’s treatment of scientists, which they used to accuse him of harboring a “hatred of toward Trump that could be described as terrorism.” He was held in custody overnight and deported back to Europe the next day. Agence France Press later reported that DHS had accused him of “hateful and conspiratorial messages” and had referred him to the FBI.”

Shouldn’t have let them into your phone. Also, I’m surprised those troglodytes could find someone who knows how to read French.

They’re not even pretending to get warrants anymore. The fourth amendment hasn’t existed since Bush II.

“The US Justice Department is looking at whether student protests at Columbia University over the genocide in Gaza violated “federal terrorism laws,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said this week. The Trump DoJ previously said the investigation is also looking into civil rights violations, stemming from the administration’s expanded definition of antisemitism to include criticism of Israel. Meanwhile, conservative activists are pushing the Trump administration to strip the citizenship and deport any pro-Palestinian Americans who received their citizenship within the last 10 years.”

Whoa. Interesting idea. I wonder if the time has finally come for me to come under the wheels of the U.S. with my radical web site.

“Let’s give the last word to Dr. Ezzadin:”

“The bakeries are closing. The last fires are dying in their ovens, and the smell of bread—warm, thick, human—has begun to vanish from the streets. Hunger is taking its place, creeping in like a sickness, curling its fingers around the ribs of children and old men alike. The bakers had held out as long as they could, stretching flour into dust and water into something less than soup. But no more. There is no more.

“For two weeks, no fuel, no flour. The last bags dwindled, then disappeared. This morning, two bakeries in the entire north still tried to fight back against the void, but they might as well have been spitting into the wind. A million people stand outside them, pressing against each other, pressing against the walls, pressing against death itself.

“And people are dying. Not from bombs today, but from the weight of each other, from the slow crush of human bodies desperate for a loaf of bread. The weak suffocate under the strong. They do not fall in battle, do not fight for honor or glory. They simply collapse under the weight of hunger, and no one even notices until their bodies stiffen and the line inches forward over them.

“And soon—soon it will get worse. Soon the crowd will break. There will be teeth in flesh, hands clawing at faces, bones cracking over crumbs. Hunger does not make men noble. It does not make them poets or prophets. It strips them, layer by layer, until all that is left is the beast inside, snarling for food, for life.

“And the world watches. The world stands at a distance, its belly full, its eyes half-closed in disinterest. It sees, and it permits. It allows the experiment to continue, watching with detached curiosity—how long can they go before they eat each other?

“Look at them. Look at their faces. Look at the hunger in their eyes, the way it hollows them, turns them into something not quite human, not quite alive.

“The ovens are cold. The world is colder. And somewhere, someone is already sharpening a knife.”

The Last Chapter of the Genocide by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.

“That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.”

Macklemore Supports Mahmoud Khalil and Palestine at New York City Event for Khalil's Freedom by Macklemore / BreakThrough News (YouTube)

📝 This video was removed within days of having been posted. I’m glad I saw it. I imagine that the channel got a strike against it because YouTube probably threatened to kill the whole channel. Read the text that I managed to pull from the transcript below. Then ask yourself why these words are being hidden. Macklemore’s speech is gone from DuckDuckGo. It’s not in YouTube. Wild.

It’s back:

Macklemore Speaks Out in Support of Mahmoud Khalil and Calls for a Free Palestine by BreakThrough News (YouTube)

“My ability to meet people where they are at has declined. My judgment of those who look away, remain silent, or center their own fear, has only risen. As the months have gone on, I have wanted the world to wake up so desperately that a part of me has fallen asleep. And I keep coming back to the question: how do we get people to care?

“How do we get people to care?

“And it stumped me for the last 18 months and, in this last week, I’ve realized I’ve been asking the wrong question. The question isn’t how we get others to care; it’s how can we be of the utmost service to humanity.

“Because change occurs when we cultivate our own light, not dimming ours to match another’s shadow.

“Change doesn’t occur by calling each other out, but by calling each other in.

“Change isn’t achieved in righteousness. It isn’t found in resentment.

“Change doesn’t happen with shaming another.

“No one has a spiritual awakening from being yelled at.

“Hearing your own voice reverberate throughout the echo chamber of folks that already feel the same way that you do isn’t stopping Israel and the United States any faster.

“Change occurs in the spirit. You cannot transmit love if you don’t have it yourself. You can’t force empathy and compassion on another if you lose those gifts along the way. If I am righteous, with my heart closed, pointing the finger and yelling at people who feel differently than me, I am drinking the same poison I am protesting against.

“Does our own fear influence how we respond, or justify violence against the most vulnerable populations? How do we unsubscribe to past generations’ fences … walls … identities that perpetuate the disease—thinking ‘them versus us.’

“How do we mobilize?”

“We are literal guests on this Earth, a rock spinning in space. We are here to make it better for all not some, not just for ourselves or the people that look like us or speak the same language or believe in the same God, but for those that are suffering the most. The structures that enable us to emotionally distance ourselves from another’s fight to exist must be eradicated.”

“What comfort are we willing to give up for justice?

“What seat at the table are we willing to share for a more equitable and just society?

“What if we all operated from a place of collective liberation over self-preservation?

“What if we saw ourselves? What if we didn’t see them? What if we saw us?”

It’s an interesting plea. It starts from a moral standpoint and ends with an appeal to the ego, as it unfortunately must. The appeal to the ego comes because people simply have no empathy beyond a small circle. They are actively trained not to expand their circle of empathy. They are actively taught a history that elides the degree to which their comfort depends on the suffering of others.

Very few will ever walk away from Omelas.

“I want to live in a world where using our platforms to condemn ethnic cleansing isn’t a risk, it’s a given. I want to live in a world where advocating for the most marginalized isn’t rewarded, it is expected. I want my children to know that Palestinian liberation is their liberation.”

After 18 months of genocide, the YouTube transcript continues to insist on translating “Palestinian” as “pales inian”, despite Macklemore’s incredibly clear diction.

The political menu is getting stale. It's time for something different. by Zohran Mamdani for NYC (YouTube)

NYC is Suffering from Halalflation by Zohran Mamdani for NYC (YouTube)

Scott Ritter : Why Would US Fight in Yemen? by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

This video features a great tirade by Ritter about the inherent racism of U.S. foreign policy. He is increasingly disappointed with Trump’s “stupid” policies. Again, just pointing out that anyone who calls Ritter right-wing is an idiot who never watches or reads him—or only reads context-poor snippets and tweets.

Roaming Charges: Schlock and Chainsaw by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The Kremlin’s foreign policy advisor, Yuri Ushakov, on why Russia rejected Trump’s ceasefire deal that Ukraine had accepted: “It gives us nothing. It only gives the Ukrainians an opportunity to regroup, gain strength, and continue the same thing.””

I Envy The Palestinians by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“I am quite certain Israelis feel the same way when they look at Palestinians. Here they are with this ridiculously fake culture of AI and electronic dance music, speaking a strange new version of a dead language that Zionists reanimated a few generations ago so they could LARP as middle easterners and pretend the “Israel” of today has anything whatsoever in common with the historic Israel of Biblical times. And then they look over at the people who were living there before them with their deep roots and vibrant authenticity, and they feel envy. And their envy turns to spite. And their spite turns to hate. And their hate turns to genocide.”

Trump Supporters Can No Longer Say Trump Never Started A War by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Face it Trumpers: you’ve been had. You voted for a president who told you he was going to end the wars, and he started a new war and was backing an active genocide within a few weeks of taking office. You voted for a president who said he’d protect free speech, and he’s stomping out free speech throughout the United States to silence criticism of Israel. You voted for a president who said he’d put America first, and he’s putting Israel first.

“Mark Twain said “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled,” so maybe I am wasting my breath here. But you have been fooled, my red-hatted lovelies. You have been fooled very badly.

“If you can’t accept it just yet, don’t worry. He’ll show you more proof before long.”

Journalism & Media

Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks by Azra Raza (3 Quarks Daily)

This is what this article looks like. This is an article that the main editor of 3QuarksDaily felt a burning interest to share. Before him, though, Maureen Dowd of the vaunted gray lady, The New York Times, felt a burning desire to shared with the world just how hard it is to be George Clooney.

Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks

Mind-boggling. Did this article appear above or below the one about Palestinian children running into stray bullets and rockets? Or of Columbia University cooperating with the U.S. government persecuting its legal-resident students for being “antisemitic”? Or do we just not report on that stuff now? Or wait … do we report on it now, now that it’s Donald Trump doing it but not before, when Biden was doing it? It’s all so confusing. Let’s read instead about how George likes to smoke but shouldn’t.

Erasing History: How Fascism Works (w/ Jason Stanley) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

I waited long minutes to see if Stanley would discuss which current genocide is leading to the crackdown on universities, and realized that he was never going to. He incredibly adroitly avoided even discussing for a second WHY the universities have been cracking down on protest. The only mention of Palestine, Israel, or Zionism came from Chris, to which Stanley at least nodded relatively vigorously. He did not take the bait, though, instead keeping vague or instead taking a U.S.-domestic example of the “Michigan Management Act,” which to him I suppose has more salience to the discussion of modern colonialism than Palestine. I find myself utterly unsurprised that this interview focused laser-like on domestic policy.

He is also an American exceptionalist, unabashedly saying that the U.S.‘s education system is the best in the world—like goddamned hayseed—and even doubling down and saying that no-one can even name a university in France or anywhere else. “Maybe the Sorbonne” That’s a lesson in how to tell us how you really feel without telling us how you really feel. Even within the English-speaking world, Oxford and Cambridge come to mind. I’m sure China, the Arab world, Russia, Africa, etc. all have their own institutions of learning that they consider to be vastly superior to the elite indoctrination factories of the U.S. Factories like Stanley’s employer Yale.

One commentator said that this guy’s book was good, and in the same virtual breath, recommended Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. I feel Timothy Snyder is not even close to fighting in the same morally clear weight class as Chris Hedges. Snyder’s book “On Tyranny”, though quite short, felt long. It was very much about Trump but didn’t mention him by name, positing 20 “rules” about tyranny, many of which were obvious reformulations of each other, and almost all of which were so vague that they often felt more like horoscopes. I’m mystified how he’s so popular or how he’s even a professor. I haven’t read “Black Earth”, though. Perhaps that’s better. But I doubt it.

Stanley is also a professor at Yale. It seems that school is expert in hiring people who can very carefully discuss fascism, colonialism, and empire without ever discussing any of the parts that they consider to unsavory to mention. While some might chastise Hedges for not having pushed him on it, I think it was a good interview about what Stanley’s book likely contains, it stayed very much on a topic on which Chris has written, and it very much gave Stanley enough rope to hang himself by giving him ample opportunity to discuss the very obvious—and immoral—lacunae in what he’s willing to discuss. Instead, Stanley very often took his examples from Nazis and Hitler’s Mein Kampf—over 80 years ago—and didn’t mention anything about U.S. foreign policy.

Even when discussing how fascists want to control schools and education in order to indoctrinate a love of one’s own nation, to the exclusion of all others, he mentioned only the U.S. It’s possible that he’s unfamiliar with the extreme level of indoctrination in Israel but I’m not buying it. I just think that he has carved out an immoral exception for Israel. It is tantamount to refusing to discuss it. This is intellectually and morally bankrupt.

This entire interview became a fascinating study in psychology and self-brainwashing. He didn’t even seem to have to dance around the subject of Israel to avoid slipping up. He simply had trained himself not to see it as a glaring example of all of the evils he discussed—fascism, educational control and indoctrination, propaganda and hate against the “other”, erasing history, colonialism, and genocide. He cheerily discussed all of these topics—in early 2025—and didn’t mention Israel once.

His book is called “Erasing History” and he didn’t spend one minute talking about Israel’s incredible campaign of indoctrination that convinces otherwise perfectly nice people to be ravening monsters against specific groups of people, and to consider theft, rape, murder, and even genocide to be not only ok but morally necessary when directed at those people.

Even when Chris had to point out that Stalinists didn’t kill the entire family, whereas Nazis did (when Stanley was starting to rail against communism as if it were worse than Nazism, like a good little, well-indoctrinated U.S.-American), Stanley agreed that that was “genocide” because they’d “killed entire families”, but then blew right past it. “That’s a great point, Chris.” Chris’s impassivity here was impressive because we absolutely know what he was thinking.

Stanley is a scholar for the state. He talks about fascist indoctrination and seems to be utterly unaware that his Israel lacuna is also indoctrination. His contribution is more insidious, in that he pretends to be against fascism but he’s just really against fascism that isn’t Israeli fascism. Look, I may be wrong about this, and he may just be utterly ignorant of what Israel is doing and he might be shocked—simply shocked—to find out what’s been going on.

Even toward the end, they discuss how “these are smart guys”—Trump, Cruz, etc.—who’ve been educated in the highest institutions of the U.S. Still, nothing. He doesn’t see the irony. He won’t see the irony that he teaches at Yale and he’s indoctrinating his students to not see Israel as fascism, colonialism, or genocidal. He just doesn’t see it.

To be clear, Trump et. al. have the same lacuna about Israel as Stanley and Snyder, but they don’t purport to be against fascism—instead, they openly embrace it as the way things should be run.

Late in the discussion, Stanley says “the opinion page of the NYT says that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are run by communist agitators,” but that’s such a strawman! Of course the elite institutions in charge of indoctrinating the next custodians of empire, each with endowments in the dozens of billions of dollars aren’t communist. This guy’s not very intellectually interesting except as an example of how an indoctrination system can produce people that seem like they’re supportive but are actually counterproductive. The best statements came from Chris.

When Chris cites about corruption from Stanley’s book and Chris says that “that’s the Trump administration right there,” Stanley responds with “and Putin” because he is, in the end, a good little liberal lapdog who almost certainly still believes in most of Russiagate and the Steele Dossier. I mean, he’s not bad, you know?

He says things like “when they say they’re against corruption, they just mean that the wrong corrupt people are in charge.” and “this is why unions are so important.” Yes! That’s right! But I can’t help but think that this dude only pops back up after having slept for four years during the Biden administration—because obviously there was nothing fascist, anti-democratic, or actively suppressive of free expression going on then.

He’s a good potential ally but he needs a few more rounds of deprogramming because his blind spots will make him incapable of focusing on the methods with the most leverage. It’s inconvenient to rail against an erasure of history while clearly suffering from a self-imposed version of the same.

A commentator on the video writes,

“He wants to equate anything done against universities with antisemitism, I guess. And I find that absurd. Hedges gently suggested that universities are deeply conservative servants of American power systems, but Jason would rather pretend that only Orange Man Bad.

“I’m not too clear on the rant as a whole. When they started talking about projection, haha! Government criminality is suddenly perceptible now that Trump is in office, but not before?”

To which I answered,

My thoughts exactly. Stanley is fine. He’s a potential ally. He has an enormous Israel lacuna. He has but a pale shadow of the moral and historical clarity that Chris has.

Thoughts On The Trump Team’s Signal Chat About Bombing Yemen by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“The story goes that Trump’s national security advisor Mike Waltz accidentally included in the chat Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who then swiftly exited instead of staying and doing some actual journalism by observing what these warmongering swamp monsters were up to. Goldberg did this because he is not actually a journalist, he is one of the most virulent war propagandists working in US media today, having famously worked to manufacture consent for the invasion of Iraq by publishing false narratives linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. He is also a former IDF prison guard.”

“The empire invests extensively in narrative control, as do manipulative people in general. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of knowing a malignant narcissist or sociopath, you’ll know they tend to pour immense amounts of energy into manipulating the social narrative about themselves and the people in their circle. Manipulators understand the power of narrative control, while ordinary people do not.

“And that’s why the world looks the way it looks: powerful manipulators understand this dynamic, while the rest of humanity typically doesn’t. Normal people tend to assume they’re looking at a more or less accurate picture of what’s happening and how the world works from the information that’s laid out in front of them, not understanding that the information they consume is being constantly distorted, funneled and manipulated by the powerful to the benefit of our rulers.

“That’s how consent is manufactured. That’s how wars are justified. That’s how revolution is suppressed. That’s how the political status quo is maintained. That’s how the public is duped year after year into signing on to more of the same while being robbed, cheated, exploited, impoverished, censored, oppressed, brainwashed, and driven to environmental disaster.

“The real currency of our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even war machinery. The real currency of our world is narrative and the ability to control it. We will keep being manipulated into disaster and dystopia until enough of us wake up to this reality.”

Economy & Finance

The goal of western private enterprise is to reap without sowing.

Ride or Die, Cowboy by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“I saw not an inkling of real violence at the rodeo—not a single fistfight. Everyone seemed very polite. But I could never get out of my mind the inherent possibility of ass kicking that comes with immersion in a world of cowboys. Guys who work on ranches for a living tend to be husky and strong in a way that exceeds people who live in cities and go to gyms, so I could not imagine winning the imaginary fights, either, which set me further on edge.”

C’mon fuckwit. Stop pretending like you risked your life among the cannibals. Who are you writing this for? Did you not reread this and notice how condescending toward your fellow workers it sounds? Or are you angling for a gig at a bigger magazine or newspaper with this writing style?

“I do know that—considering the cost of horses and cattle and big trucks and farm equipment—the idea that farmers are living a more humble lifestyle than their city counterparts is bullshit.”

I’m honestly surprised he chose to alienate them as nouveau-riche poseurs rather than to note that they were almost certainly up to their eyeballs in debt.

Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face by Drew Devault

“Two years ago, we threatened to blacklist the Go module mirror because for some reason the Go team thinks that running terabytes of git clones all day, every day for every Go project on git.sr.ht is cheaper than maintaining any state or using webhooks or coordinating the work between instances or even just designing a module system that doesn’t require Google to DoS git forges whose entire annual budgets are considerably smaller than a single Google engineer’s salary.

“Now it’s LLMs. If you think these crawlers respect robots.txt then you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned, including expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in every repo, and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic.”

“Whether it’s cryptocurrency scammers mining with FOSS compute resources or Google engineers too lazy to design their software properly or Silicon Valley ripping off all the data they can get their hands on at everyone else’s expense… I am sick and tired of having all of these costs externalized directly into my fucking face. Do something productive for society or get the hell away from my servers. Put all of those billions and billions of dollars towards the common good before sysadmins collectively start a revolution to do it for you.”

Subsidized Europe Cries in Despair by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Europe hasn’t figured out yet that balanced budgets and spending caps are a cool perk you can access easily when a) you’re not paying for your own defense, and b) your military institutions aren’t so powerful they can openly defy those laws. Having taken a step in our direction, they’ll have a similar $40 trillion monkey on their backs soon enough. At the moment they’re still at the tadpole stage of learning they can order more charge cards.”

“Raised to think Europeans were our gentler, more civilized partners, they now look like shameless freeloaders who let their bills for daycare and paid vacations be subsidized by middle-American taxpayers, descendants of those poor Okies and hayseeds who died in piles to save Europe from itself generations ago. Kids of my generation were fed a succession of movies from Red Dawn to Russia House to Rocky IV to make sure we stayed focused on the Soviet enemy, but I’m beginning to think the higher purpose of NATO was to keep Europeans from killing one another, a condition they apparently had to be bribed to accept.”

That is an incorrect interpretation that fails to impart agency to the U.S. for pushing NATO so hard in the first place. Europe has no choice but to trail along in the U.S.‘s wake. Even now, when it thinks it’s breaking away from the States, it’s still only sailing in the propaganda waters of Russiagate, which mean that they can’t imagine a world with the U.S. They’re still buying the story that, when the Empire finally pulls back, if only for a little bit, they have to fill some sort of a vacuum. Europe could stay the same as it is now if it were just to stop fooling itself into thinking that it has to fight Russia. In this way, the U.S. still has Europe very much in its grip—it’s just that Europe is staying there for free now.

The Angst of the Well-Endowed by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“[…] as of June 2024, JHU’s endowment comprised more than 4,700 funds, each supporting specific purposes, schools, or faculty — totaling roughly $13.5 billion.” This was a 23% jump over the previous year, a roughly $2.5 billion increase. Speaking of “our bond,” JHU has three corporate bond funds worth $1.37 billion.

“Columbia is in even better shape, holding a $14.8 billion endowment as of last June. But that’s not all. As student loan activist, presidential candidate and beloved subscriber Alan Collinge points out, the school is also sitting atop $3.7 billion in undesignated cash reserves, above its endowment.

“[…] No one ever mentions that Columbia itself could probably fund treatment for those children, diabetics, and dementia patients without taking the unthinkable step of touching its endowment. They’re choosing not to, just as much as Musk is. No matter what you feel about the cuts, watching a cash machine like Columbia plead poverty is obscene.”

“His site, StudentLoanJustice.org, became what he called a “complaint box for the industry,” focusing among other things on the scammish financial setup of higher education. “The colleges are more awash in cash today than at any point in U.S. history, even adjusting for inflation,” he says. “But here we have them just falling over themselves trying to pretend they’re poor.””

If a business can avoid paying for something, then it will. There is no such thing as principles at this level.

“They live off giant subsidies in the form of limitless federal lending, which allows them to raise prices endlessly and spend endlessly on administrative bloat, rarely passing savings to students while always fattening endowments. Administrators are such relentless grifters that they build ludicrous climbing walls, zip-lines, and water slides at monstrous expense before considering lowering costs. Even mediocre schools now feature more contracting waste than the average Forward Operating Base, with terraced wet-decks and mansion dormitories appearing as giant middle fingers to the taxpayer: GENEROUSLY FUNDED BY YOUR GINORMOUS FEDERAL LOANS.”

“Between the Davos-style architecture projects and annual gloating headlines about the endowment gains schools like JHU and Harvard tend to with the care of British gardeners, any complaints from universities about the loss of even large amounts of federal dollars is hard to take. It’s easy to feel sorry for affected workers and researchers, but these are ultra-wealthy institutions who despite being run by (in many cases) utter morons have been gifted a profitability model more riskless than too-big-to-fail banking or NFL ownership. It’s almost impossible for Ivy League schools to lose money, which makes one wonder about professors who say they’re being “picked apart and destroyed” because their school is losing $400 million of taxpayer funds while sitting on $20 billion in assets (or in the case of Harvard, losing $686 million when it’s sitting on a $53 billion). Do they know what that sounds like?”

“Schools have instead become public-private hodge-podges existing in what Austin Powers would call a “consequence-free environment,” responsive neither to the market (which would demand superior teaching or affordability) nor voter preference (same). They compete on status, handing out degrees in self-obsession and intersectional horseshit that are useful for upper-class networking and not much else. Like military contractors their one important customer is the state […]”

Roaming Charges: Schlock and Chainsaw by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Financial journalist Michael Lewis (The Big Short) talking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on his new book, Who Is Government?:”

“When people throw around insults at federal bureaucrats, they’re really revealing they don’t know what goes on in federal government. It’s a mind-bendingly complicated place that does lots of different things, some of which they do very well and some less well. When you go in, you realize how hard fraud would be to perpetrate. Waste is different. Waste is more complicated. There are all sorts of inefficiencies that aren’t really the fault of the workers, that’s more the fault of the structure of the system. But you can’t take a federal worker to work and buy them a turkey sandwich. They just won’t take the money. They are watched every which way and they are conditioned to be very careful about what they do financially. If you said Mike, I’d like you to write a story about fraud; I’d much rather look for it in a private company…I worked on Wall Street. A million things happen every day in a Wall Street firm that if it happened in the civil service, it would be a scandal.”

Goodbye, LINKE! by Yanis Varoufakis (ZNetwork)

“The German parliament amended the constitutional debt brake so as to enable unlimited military spending, irrespectively of how deeply into the red it will push the federal government’s budget. Meanwhile, none of that fiscal generosity is to be extended to investment in hospitals, education, firefighters, kindergartens, pensions, green technologies etc. In brief, when it comes to funding life, austerity remains part of Germany’s constitutional order. Only investments in death have been released from austerity’s constitutional clutches.

“The underlying reason for introducing this stunning change to Germany’s constitution is simple: German automakers are now too uncompetitive. They can’t profitably sell their cars to civilians in Germany or abroad. So, they demand that the German state buys tanks that Rheinmetall will be making on Volkswagen’s disused production lines. To get the state to pay for this, the constitutional brake of government deficits had to be bypassed. ”

“Nothing obliterates the ethical standing of a political party of the left more efficiently than a leadership overly keen to be ‘accepted’ by a radicalised centre constantly moving towards the xenophobic, warmongering ultra-right. It was terrible enough that the leaders of Die Linke felt the need to turn a blind eye to Israel’ genocidal apartheid project. Now, this week, they have taken the next step to political oblivion: they have used their votes in the Bundesrat to ensconce, for the first time since 1945, military Keynesianism in the German constitution.”

Roaming Charges: The Goldberg Variations by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Something is egregiously wrong with this economic system…The average WSJ bonus ($244,700) is now four times the annual salary of US workers.

“The global population of people worth at least $100 million has breached the 100,000 mark for the first time, according to CNBC. The number of Gen Z households receiving unemployment benefits rose by nearly a third in the past year, more than any generation. But most members of Gen Z don’t have even a month of savings…

“Making 14-year-olds work the midnight shift at the slaughterhouse because you rounded up all of the noncitizens who were willing to do these shitty jobs for low pay and sent them to dungeons in El Salvador…Dystopian novels can’t keep up with our dystopian political economy.”

“Most Americans never travel abroad (only 3.5% [the linked article is from 2012, but it’s probably not budged a whole lot], according to one analysis), which is why they have no idea that universal health care, public transport, pedestrian-friendly urban centers and French food and wines are actually good things. Many don’t leave their own states. Some never venture out of their own Zip Codes. To each their own. But tourism to the US is a $155 billion a year industry, which Trump is rapidly killing off. “Even before the most recent spate of detentions, forecast visits to the country this year had been revised downward from a projected 5% rise to a 9% decrease by Tourism Economics.””

Science & Nature

‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture by Joseph Howlett (Quanta Magazine)

“Even the Kakeya set that overlaps the most has to take up some space, Fefferman found. That minimum volume depends on how thick the tubes are. Mathematicians quantify the relationship between the tubes’ thickness and the volume of the set using a number called the Minkowski dimension. The smaller the Minkowski dimension, the more you can reduce the set’s volume by thinning the tubes slightly.”

“Fortunately, Wang and Zahl didn’t have to start from zero. Tom Wolff proved in 1995 that no three-dimensional Kakeya set has a Hausdorff or Minkowski dimension below 2.5. But they needed a way to prove that a dimension between 2.5 and, say, 2.500001, was also impossible. Then they could repeat that argument to get a bound of 2.500002, and so on. Each time, they would essentially be showing that no Kakeya sets exist within that tiny increment.”

““It’s like perfecting a perpetual-motion machine. It’s magical,” Tao said. “They’re getting more at the output than the input.” Their machine took them all the way to a Minkowski (and Hausdorff) dimension of three, proving the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture.”

“The conjecture’s resolution is a seismic shift for the field of harmonic analysis, which studies the details of the Fourier transform.”

“Wang recently co-authored a separate paper reducing the next conjecture in the tower to a stronger version of the Kakeya conjecture, a step toward bridging the two levels.”

“The four-dimensional Kakeya conjecture remains open, with a tower of four-dimensional conjectures above it as well. New difficulties will arise, Guth said, but he thinks that the jump from two dimensions to three was the hardest, and that Wang and Zahl’s proof can likely be adapted to that tower, and beyond.”

Medicine & Disease

Roaming Charges: Schlock and Chainsaw by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“In 2024, at least 48,000 Americans died of COVID. By contrast, this year’s flu season, one of the worst in decades, has killed 22,000 Americans.”

“Sophie Cousins writing in the LRB on TB: ‘Tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease, killing more than a million people a year and infecting many millions more, even though treatment in the form of antibiotics has existed for seventy years. TB predominantly affects the poor in the Global South. As Paul Farmer wrote in Infections and Inequalities (1999), “the ‘forgotten plague’ was forgotten in large part because it ceased to bother the wealthy.”’”

The New York Times Remains Utterly Dedicated to Telling Only One Story About Mental Illness by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“Jordan Neely was emaciated, drug-addicted, hallucinating, and suffering from all manner of infections and illnesses when he was choked to death on a subway car floor, a fate which could have been prevented had New York City had the moral integrity to lock the door to his ward. Medication could have saved Neely’s life, as it could save many people’s lives. But then, we’re too busy waxing poetic over Laura Delano’s healthy skin and tasteful fashion sense to think about the sad poor brown story of sad poor brown Jordan Neely, and anyway people like Neely don’t subscribe to the New York Times. That’s a core issue here, that in their effort to flatter the biases of their affluent urbanite liberal subscriber base, the Times exclusively fixates on patients who are utterly, comically unrepresentative of those with serious mental illness.”

“In the now-infamous NYT magazine piece I linked above, the value of psychiatric medicine is debated purely through the lens of a tiny number of incredibly privileged schizophrenic outliers who, like, live in Sedona and believe in the power of crystals and manage their illnesses from their tasteful adobe homes.”

“Isn’t that extraordinary? That this one couple, pushing a contentious agenda about an immensely controversial subject and making a lot of money doing so, have received universally sympathetic attention in three of the most elite publications in the industry?”

“For what purpose? For whose benefit? Why on earth would this one wealthy Great Gatsby-ass American aristocracy white couple and their revenue-generating anti-psychiatry boondoggle receive such an immense volume of fawning praise in our biggest publications, with none of them seeing fit to spell out what exactly is the actual pragmatic reason why they’re the ones getting it?”

“[…] the paper can’t stop publishing this sort of thing in general because it so perfectly flatters the biases of tony Brooklyn Heights creative-class millionaires who wax poetic about urban diversity before sending their kids to Miss Porter’s. If you’re the kind of cosseted wealthy coastal meritocrat who has utterly pruned your daily existence of exposure to the homeless and the criminal, then of course Laura Delano makes sense to you as some sort of avatar about what mental illness really is. And the alternative − going into the streets and into the subways and into the institutions and into the halfway houses and finding the grubby, sad reality of actual psychiatric crisis, the ruined lives and the broken people, the violence, the drug use, the unsanitary conditions, the total lack of basic human flourishing − is unpleasant for reporters to perform and unpalatable for audiences to read. So why bother?”

New York Times resurrects debunked Wuhan Lab Lie by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Tufekci’s audacity to dismiss all objective scientific evidence and belittle the efforts of dedicated scientists who have continued their work despite intense global scrutiny is both conceited and mean-spirited. Her assertion that China and Chinese scientists are leading the world toward another research-related pandemic is mere fearmongering that appeals to the lowest sentiments. Her entire argument is irrational and unhinged, aligning closely with the broader social crisis that has enveloped bourgeois society.”

“Science is being undermined and replaced by anti-science; public health is being dismantled and replaced with anti-public health. The entire culture of science and the history that has promoted longevity and well-being is under threat.”

Art, Literature, & Cinema

Lessons From Singapore: English-Speaking Polyglots by Eric Feigenbaum (3 Quarks Daily)

“In 1965, Singapore’s Founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew corrected an Australian news reporter:

““I am not in fact Chinese. I am Malaysian. I am by race Chinese. I am no more Chinese than you are an Englishman.” He refined the example on other occasions, eventually saying he was “no more Chinese than President Kennedy was an Irishman”.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

The Lost Art of Research as Leisure by Mariam Mahmoud (Kasurian)

“Carl Sagan, after taking his TV audience on a journey through the cosmos, found himself alone in a library, circling back to Galileo. With the Cavatina — one of two Beethoven songs floating in space on the Voyager II’s Golden Record — playing, Sagan marvelled at the existence of books. “Writing,” he says, “is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.” “A book,” he concludes, “is proof that humans are capable of working magic.””

“[…] reading and writing assemble and shape culture. And without culture, there is no civilisation.”

“In a letter to Jorge Luis Borges ten years after his death, Sontag apologised to her old friend: “I’m sorry to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species.” By books, she means not the book itself, but “the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects.” Soon, “we will call up on ‘bookscreens’ any ‘text’ on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, ‘interact’ with it.” Sontag’s conclusion threads White and Woolf’s fears of decades past, “when books become ‘texts’ that we ‘interact’ with…the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality.” It will mean, she declares, not only the death of the book, but “nothing less than the death of inwardness.””

“[…] none of these writers, nor Harold Bloom in How to Read and Why , nor Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in How to Read a Book , nor Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, predicted the future that arrived: an uncanny valley, neither in “orality” nor “literacy” — surrounded by more books, more words, more reading and writing than perhaps at any time in history, yet lacking a coherent culture.”

“Woolf, White and Sontag foresaw the corrosive, savage effect of the “audio-visual” on the human brain and soul. They did not worry about the disappearance of books, but about the cultural collapse that would occur when reading shifts from an immersive, contemplative act to something passive, fragmented and superficial. The death of reading was not a loss of books, but a loss of culture.”

“We are a culture in crisis. We lack, as Byung-Chul Han articulates in The Disappearance of Rituals, the structures and forms that make meaning possible, leading to cultural fragmentation. The result is a sense of civilisational ADHD. A generational restlessness, inattentiveness, and excessive movement in no direction, with insight elusive and ephemeral.”

“The leisure that forms the basis of culture is a directed and intentional curiosity — it is the practice of formulating questions and seeking answers with a disposition towards wonder, not rigid certainty. Where free time is not used for research — for developing questions, and investigating the answers with an explorer’s spirit — cultural coherence crumbles. For Pieper, without leisure as letters, or “research as leisure,” there is no pattern from which higher civilisation is found.”

“Having the library of Alexandria in our pockets has dulled, rather than heightened, our senses. Despite unprecedented access to information, there is a sluggish incuriosity, a giving of the self to the algorithm that feeds us information, rather than allows us to search for it.”

Unfortunately, this seems to be the case for a lot of people. I really feel I’ve avoided this, to a large degree. I’m spending my last few minutes before bed listening to an almost three-hour-long video about the philosophy and incidence of conspiracism vs. conspiracy theories vs. reality or documented history, all while I’m putting together these notes right here, which document my thoughts about all of the essays that I’ve read in the past week.

One Day, I Briefly Understood by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“[…] anyway that was lovely old hippie weed, giggle weed, pleasant afternoon high weed, not the brain-obliterating mental cyanide that the profit motive has foisted on us today.”

“[…] suddenly I had a purely cognitive feeling that I’d never experienced before: I grokked it. I experienced understanding that penetrated deeply enough that the line between what I knew and what I was had started to dissolve. I perceived the same basic idea but on a level that revealed the deepest truth of it.”

I remember this happening a few times while studying math in my room during sophomore year in college.

“You could be forgiven for thinking that this was some sort of mystical experience, but in fact it was the opposite of mystical, thoroughly pragmatic, explainable, unsentimental. Experiencing it was life-altering but the experience itself was fundamentally mundane. Thinking of nothing else, unaware of time or my body, I rolled the understanding around in my mind, both the thought itself and the feeling of thinking it, and then after maybe an hour or so, it was gone.”

“[…] who could forget learning to draw a cube, fat elementary school pencil on thick elementary school paper? Not just the drawing of it but the understanding of its parts and how they work and why an inside corner has the same form as an outside corner, why projection and depression are simply points of view. Who could forget that?”

“I understand that reversing her spin is a reflex of the brain, not a choice of the mind, and in turn I must confront the possibility that my feeling that I had transcended understanding was itself merely a trick of neurology, a consequence of chemistry. But part of me insists that if only I could switch her back and forth, I would truly understand the way I once understood. When I try to make her switch, it always feels like I’m so close.”

Why is it always the already massively over-privileged who constantly seek to improve things in their own lives, who wonder why they don’t have the yacht with the helicopter landing pad? They should be happy with what they’ve got.

I heard Bill Burr start a rant on a Jimmy Fallon clip (YouTube) today with “Billionaires are not happy having a billion dollars.” I thought to myself: that really says it all, in a nutshell. And then I found my own text above, that I’d written earlier in the week. Sometimes things just line up.

I would like to push back firmly against the notion that ignorant and selfish wastefulness is in our nature. I think that our media environment and culture works very hard to train us to be short-sighted and selfish. We spend every waking moment in a warm bath of propaganda, whispering to us that everything is limitless for us, that if you can afford it, you can have it, that you shouldn’t worry about externalized costs (because there are none!), that you shouldn’t worry about exogenous effects (because anyone who suffers them wasn’t hustling hard enough, not like you!), that there is no heart of colonial darkness pumping lifeblood to the empire that keeps you safe and secure in its loving arms. Go back to sleep.

What is your story for how the utility of a tool relates to making the world a better place for more than just yourself? Do you have one? Or is your belief in the value of a tool like AI wholly related to the degree to which it improves your own personal position in society? Are you just hand-waving and claiming that all progress eventually lifts all boats, then never bothering to check whether that’s true because, well, your boat got lifted, and that’s all that really mattered anyway, ammirite?

This thought was inspired by the fact that the article Why even a “superhuman AI” won’t destroy humanity by Ashutosh Jogalekar (3 Quarks Daily) started off with “AGI is in the air”. Sure, it’s in the air for you. I feel like a lot of the AI hype is for people who don’t have any problems worse than “it’s annoying to have to right-click on something” or “writing emails is hard.” Sure, then AGI is “in the air”. You have a lot of leisure time, comfort, safety, and security from which to consider that burning question. If you’re in Gaza, then “rockets are in the air.” If you’re 90% of the rest of humanity, then “real shit needs to get done.”

If you’re cheerily pursuing your own ends, either completely ignoring your place and privilege in the grand scheme of things, then you’re no worse than most other people. Our societies train us not to ask questions, especially when things are going our way—or seem to be. Sticky questions of ethics and morals generally don’t come up. If you do consider ethics and morals and then come to the conclusion that your pioneering of these AI-based tools will eventually trickle down to help the 90% get their “real shit done,” then disabuse yourself of that notion. That’s not been the historical trend ever and there is no reason to believe that it will magically become that trend because of your wishful thinking.

I think that this thing that we’ve decided call AI—but which is perhaps more accurately described as IS (Intelligence Simulation)—is a force multiplier. This is not as positive a designation as many would think because negative force can also be multiplied.

The problem, as I see it, is that most people are intellectually incurious, whether by nature or by training or a combination of both matters not. That means that they are not equipped to notice when a technology is inadequate because literally anything seems adequate to them. These people didn’t notice how shitty software is or has become and they don’t notice how AIs don’t really do what it says on the tin.

Intellectually curious people are either able to leverage the technologies to satisfy themselves, or are running a scam whereby they will personally benefit from selling something that they know is basically fraud. As soon as you’re selling a technology that, when it works, takes the credit and, when it doesn’t, blames the user, is indistinguishable from a scam.

I wonder to what degree the popularity of AI is because people don’t understand anything so it’s easy for them to say that an AI can do it. And it’s easy to fool them into believing that’s possible. The initial wow effect plateaus quickly but sunken cost is a seductive bitch.

I am not resisting any brave new world that changes what I have learned to do. I don’t resist that the skills that I’ve gained and the things that I thought I did better and more usefully than others will be obsolete. I don’t care, as long as that which replaces it is better in some quantifiable way, and not just better at immiserating people and funneling money upward. I we don’t need to be engineers anymore, then I’m going to need to be convinced more. We can’t just let the dumbest of us with the most charisma round up what we have to “let’s just throw away everything else.” No. We are wasting time with this shit. We are not solving any of our pressing, existential-threat problems with this shit.

When LLMs first came on the scene, I thought one interesting conclusion was that we realized how basic much of what we wanted to write was, when it became possible for a pretty simple algorithm to replicate it. Now that it’s writing code, we’re constantly delighted by how “it just seems to know what I want!” and we’re not at all concerned that that means we’re basic people asking the machine to do basic things, of no real value because it’s so similar to so many things that came before it.

A friend had just returned from a long remote-work/vacation in the Sierra Nevadas. He’d really had his eyes opened—as planned—and was having a bit of a time adjusting back to the glories of modern New Jersey.

How are you adjusting? Are you torn between feeling less loss every day? At feeling less loss for the days when you were able to be in the mountains and nature every day? Because, well, you just always adjust back, don’t you?

So, it’s between the relief of knowing your brain will help you blunt that loss versus your active mind’s resistance to that acquiescence, because you know it was better in the mountains and you wonder whether you should succumb to the numbing of the pain because the pain of loss indicates a real thing, an improvement of quality of life that you should not forget and should instead strive to make more permanent?

I know the feeling, obviously. Perhaps the best we can do is succumb to a superficial numbing but to keep the fire lit.

Christ, that’s deep. That’s a zen koan, is what that is.

There’s a difference between learning from an experience and holding a grudge.

It’s perfectly legitimate to avoid toxicity but be keenly aware of whether you’re the one bringing it to the party.

The final speech in The Great Dictator includes the following passage,

“Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. ”

I think when we treat disrupt as something positive, we allow ourselves to be convinced that everything that came before is garbage, or at least inefficient. I think it allows the disruptors to fool us into believing that what we had was bad, when what we had might have been less efficient than hoped, it was a balance of technology and humanity that checked other effects, like funneling all profit and value upward to a few, greedy hands. That’s generally what’s being “disrupted”, the actual value no longer goes to the original stakeholders, but to a much smaller group of stakeholders. This is classic conservatism: think of Chesterton’s fence and then decide whether or how much disruption is really needed. It’s possible that, when you’ve examined the requirements for all stakeholders soberly, you’ll realize that the disruption is a scam meant to look like it continues to primarily benefit the existing stakeholders, but now prioritizes other, largely hidden ones (like shareholders).

Want to know just how big Texas is?

Even if this is fake, this is a great way of explaining how AI is not going to be a good thing. We were already dumb and, instead of making us smarter, each technological step makes most of us a bit dumber, while making some of us a bit smarter. AI promises to “accelerate” whatever is happening … so it will make us dumber faster. The handful of people who will be made smarter will be encouraged to start the next round of innovation that will continue the process.

CONSPIRACY by Contrapoints (YouTube)

At 20:00,

I’m absolutely down for a video that’s “[…] not about any particular conspiracy theory, but about conspiracism,” but I’m a bit leery about balance when not a single example given in the preceding ten minutes was of any pill-brained lunacy like most, if not all, of Russiagate (whose impact was and continues to be profound), just a giant glaring example that is never mentioned, even though it’s just as much a cult as QAnon was and has very arguably survived to this day, which QAnon hasn’t really (as you mentioned).

At 50:00,

Cites QAnon and deep-staters as the two examples. My hopes dwindle that anyone purportedly on the left will ever treat with the conspiracies believed by their own side. It does not lie in the nature of people to debunk the things that they themselves to continue to believe in. Why would you debunk facts? Far better, in fact, to debunk anyone who doesn’t believe in Russiagate as a conspiracy theorist! (Which she, in fairness, does not do.)

At 56:30, she says something about the invasion of Ukraine but luckily stops short of positing any subsequent conspiracy theories. Bullet dodged.

At 2:00:00, she covers George Carlin’s phrases being re-used by conspiracy theorist even though he was—as she points out—a rational leftist without really a trace of conspiracism to him.

At 2:19:00,

“Guys, I started out this video trying to be nice, but this post has spent the last of my patience.

“It’s just so stupid. How can you be this stupid?

“I’m not asking you to be an intellectual, I’m not asking you to write a thesis on fucking Wittgenstein. I’m asking you to be 10% smarter than the absolute dumbest. It is possible for a human to be.

“It boggles my mind how susceptible to propaganda you are.

“It’s not like someone tricked you by giving you a transcript without telling you who wrote it. They told you it was Hitler. And when you agreed with it anyway, did you question your own judgment? No. The first thought through that infinitesimally tiny brain of yours was that the mainstream media has lied to us about Hitler.

“There’s a reason they only let us see him speaking German. I honestly can’t believe it. I cannot believe how God-damn dumb you are.”

It’s funny and, obviously it’s the wrong conclusion, but an interesting topic would be that the populism holds allure because it talks about actual, real, and obvious problems. The solutions are dangerous and wrong. But that doesn’t mean that the problems that they purport to solve don’t exist.

I learned about Brandolini’s law (Wikipedia),

“[…] also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states:”

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

“The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized.”

This is the reason AI is so dangerous: it’s a productivity and efficiency sink, unless you’re very careful.

Technology & Engineering

MASTERING R&D COMPETITIVENESS IN 2030+ by Lea Thomas Smith, Denis Trost, Moritz Krogmann, Janina Pohl, Felix Prem (3dSE Management Consultants)

The executive summary screams at you to PANIC because YOU ARE MISSING OUT.

No. FOMO is be resisted and coolly evaluated. You only need to “rethink radically” if you’re doing something wrong. Just because you’re moving, doesn’t mean you’re improving.

The most important thing is to know where you are relative to where you want to be. “focusing specifically on high-impact projects” is kind of a no-brainer. Who “vaguely works on low-impact projects”? With statements like that, you have to be careful not to equate “high-impact” with “only focus on the short-term”.

“Manage your resources in a very efficient manner” is classic “easier said than done” and also incredibly obvious advice.

OMG we should be totally not wasting time! Who knew?!?

Thanks for your deep and wise insight, 3dSE!

The hard part is in determining what “wasting time” means.

The statement “speed beats perfection” is quite dangerous, especially when completely unqualified or framed. This is equating “disruption” with “good”. Remember Chesterton’s Fence. Always.

What does speed even mean? I think a much better way of formulating the advice would be to,

Evaluate whether perfecting a “good” product is higher priority than making a different, but just as good product in a different field or for a different purpose. Moving from one milestone to another shouldn’t be considered a foregone conclusion. You have to reevaluate the whole plan to see where resources are best invested. Don’t be fooled by sunken cost, but also be willing to see that you’ve built something useful that is worth improving.

Once you have this mindset, you will automatically design useful milestones that are “basecamps” on the way to a “peak”. You may never get to the peak, but you can train your people to enjoy the journey. Wait, why is that important? Because your want to keep people inspired and engaged with work that has many potential outcomes. We want to harness the power of perfectionism for good. Perfectionists are great! They’re only a problem when you can’t change what they think “perfect” is, … and it’s not what you want it to be.

When a paper like this writes, “companies that fail to drastically shorten…”, then this is consulting speak for “hire us or you’ll be driven out of business by a competitor that did hire us.”

Take a deep breath and think about what a reasonable time-to-market is and whether it can be shortened. This document assumes that companies have the feeling that they’re leaving efficiency and, therefore, profits, on the table. Therefore, when you read it, you’re meant to feel like you’re inadequate.

Instead, think of it as a checklist of practices that you should consider: Are you already doing them? Are you doing them enough? Did you used to need to do them more than you do now? Could you tone it down now?

The document is written as a marketing document for consulting services. It will not admit that the reader might not need 3dSE’s advice. That would be beside—or against—the point.

Just imagine that you’d already read this document and had followed its advice. On a second reading, you’ll still feel like a failure because it doesn’t discuss when you’re good enough. Remember what the point of this document is: to sell 3dSE’s services. And remember what you’re trying to get out of it: benefitting from the sage advice of business-consulting experts who’ve published a free document online to entice you into finding out more. If you treat it as a checklist and determine that your company is already in a position to evaluate its position on the efficiency and effectiveness spectrum, then the document on its own is quite useful.

Just on a side note, what kind of maniac makes a document like this landscape mode? For God’s sake, there are reams of research that should 70-80 characters is the optimal reading width and this bloody document is twice that. Throw me a bone, man.

“fast, autonomous decision-making”: Hmmmm. This is so much easier said than done. You don’t want to be a control freak, but man there’s a lot of wiggle room here. Autonomous decision-making might also just be startup-like, pivoting, diva-driven “planning”.

This document is, so far, kind of an empty buzzword-salad.

Any use of AI-based tools necessitates a change in mindset, a change in attitude toward testing. Because these tools are capable of producing so much information, we must engender a mindset where people are constantly thinking: is this what I wanted? Is it good enough? How do I know? Which test do I use to verify the output? Am I eyeballing it? If I don’t have a test or I have a weak one, can I justify that? What if I’m wrong? What’s the risk?

We need to increase frustration with inefficiency, engender an affinity for efficiency. Always be annoyed by your process and tools when they “fail” you, instead of just accepting it. People need to change their mindset to be active participants in the configuration of tooling and process. This is not just advice for developers! Everyone should learn to think this way.

A good front-office example that is very salient to working in Switzerland (or any multi-lingual context) is: is the spelling and grammar-checking in your most commonly used tools configured to support your in all languages? Even when you switch languages line-by-line? Did you know that this is already possible? That you should, in face, demand that this works, as an absolute minimum?

“Electronics & high-tech devices: Stricter ethical and legal requirements and the pressure to leverage AI technologies, pose challenges in maintaining compliance while integrating new technologies in products or processes.”

I’m honestly not sure how “entrepreneurial culture” is going to address this type of problem. It seems more like it might exacerbate it.

“Ensuring cybersecurity has become a critical challenge as machinery becomes more connected.”

Well, yes.

LLMs & AI

slop capitalism and dead internet theory by Adam Aleksic (Etymology Nerd)

“As meme researcher Aidan Walker points out in his outline of slop capitalism, a main goal is to “crowd out actual human voices on platforms.” Every real creator replaced by an AI creator represents a reduction in how much money the platforms have to give back through influencer rewards programs.

“We already know that Spotify has been stuffing its playlists with AI-generated music to avoid paying streaming revenue to artists, and that Google’s “AI Overview” feature is designed to replace actual content providers with summaries that can then incorporate advertisements. The same thing is now happening with entertainment content on social media: human influencers are losing market share to artificial ones.”

“[…] the industry already considers “content” as the end goal of social media, rather than the messages or ideas held inside the content. To them, it would be better if there weren’t even a message in the first place: they just want to produce more of more, so that users become passive consumers, entertained through a “culture industry” of constant online spectacle.”

“[…] platforms are leveraging generative AI to replace actual discourse with a simulacrum of discourse. This pseudo-discourse will never have any intellectual substance; rather, it will simply fill up space on your feed, extracting value from your attention.”

A Bear Case: My Predictions Regarding AI Progress by Thane Ruthenis (Less Wrong)

“But the models feel increasingly smarter!”:”

• It seems to me that “vibe checks” for how smart a model feels are easily gameable by making it have a better personality.
• My guess is that it’s most of the reason Sonnet 3.5.1 was so beloved. Its personality was made much more appealing, compared to e. g. OpenAI’s corporate drones.
• The recent upgrade to GPT-4o seems to confirm this. They seem to have merely given it a better personality, and people were reporting that it “feels much smarter”.
• Deep Research was this for me, at first. Some of its summaries were just pleasant to read, they felt so information-dense and intelligent! Not like typical AI slop at all! But then it turned out most of it was just AI slop underneath anyway, and now my slop-recognition function has adjusted and the effect is gone.

“Eisegesis is “the process of interpreting text in such a way as to introduce one’s own presuppositions, agendas or biases”. LLMs feel very smart when you do the work of making them sound smart on your own end: when the interpretation of their output has a free parameter which you can mentally set to some value which makes it sensible/useful to you.

“This includes e. g. philosophical babbling or brainstorming. You do the work of picking good interpretations/directions to explore, you impute the coherent personality to the LLM. And you inject very few bits of steering by doing so, but those bits are load-bearing. If left to their own devices, LLMs won’t pick those obviously correct ideas any more often than chance.”

“They just have bigger sets of templates now, which lets them fool people for longer and makes them useful for marginally more tasks. But the scaling on that seems pretty bad, and this certainly won’t suffice for autonomously crossing the astronomical inferential distances required to usher in the Singularity.”

“I dare not make the prediction that the LLM bubble will burst in 2025, or 2026, or in any given year in the near future. The AGI labs have a lot of money nowadays, they’re managed by smart people, they have some real products, they’re willing to produce propaganda, and they’re buying their own propaganda (therefore it will appear authentic). They can keep the hype up for a very long time, if they want.”

“There will be news of various important-looking breakthroughs and advancements, at a glance looking very solid even to us/experts. Digging deeper, or waiting until the practical consequences of these breakthroughs materialize, will reveal that they’re 80% hot air/hype-generation.”

“[…] some people desperately, desperately want LLMs to be a bigger deal than what they are.

“They are not evaluating the empirical evidence in front of their eyes with proper precision.[6] Instead, they’re vibing, and spending 24/7 inventing contrived ways to fool themselves and/or others.

“They often succeed. They will continue doing this for a long time to come.”

“LLMs are masters at creating the vibe of being generally intelligent. Tons of people are cooperating, playing this vibe up, making tons of subtly-yet-crucially flawed demonstrations. Trying to see through this immense storm of bullshit very much feels like “fighting a rearguard retreat against the evidence”.

“Indeed, even now, having written all of this, I have nagging doubts that this might be what I’m actually doing here. I will probably keep having those doubts until this whole thing ends, one way or another. It’s not pleasant.”

Why I don’t like AI art by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“[…] the entire communicative intent in a chatbot-generated letter is just those three bullets. Everything else is padding, and all it does is dilute the communicative intent of the work. No matter how grammatically correct or even stylistically interesting the AI generated sentences are, they have less communicative freight than the three original bullet points. After all, the AI doesn’t know anything about the grad student, so anything it adds to those three bullet points are, by definition, irrelevant to the question of whether they’re well suited for a postdoc.”

“Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work.”

no fucking way dude, this studio ghibli thing has gone way too far (Twitter)

So, people are generating all sorts of moments in history with ChatGPT in Studio Ghibli style.

9 11 in Studio Ghibli style

It’s pretty good, bro.

Be me.

Wanna try it.

So I went to Copilot and asked it to render the “Famous Challenger explosion in Studio Ghibli style.”

“Your request would contravene the designer guidelines.”

WTF. LET ME HAVE FUN.

So then I told it to make a picture of four frogs frolicking in a field of flowers by a pond. One frog is much bigger and wearing a waistcoat and a monocle. Studio Ghibli style.

IT WAS PRETTY GOOD.

I lost the page, so I don’t have it, but you can imagine it. It wasn’t Studio Ghibli, so I told it to make it more like that.

It was better but still not as good as the ones in the Twitter thread.

Then I told it to make the big frog hold a globe.

Bro’s holding a globe now. The whole picture changed, but the frog had a globe.

“Now make the big frog be trying to hide an erection.”

“Your request would contravene the designer guidelines.”

THIS TOOL IS THE DEATH OF ART.

The guardrails are very, very narrow.

At least, this is true, in my limited experience and especially if you’re logged in with a corporate account. I’ve used Copilot at work and it’s very limited. It won’t even suggest a “salacious” term. This time I used my teacher account (it was logged in and has Copilot). Also very limited.

Maybe if you pay ChatGPT $20, it’ll let you be a dirty, dirty boy. I dunno.

A friend suggested “Count Frog Hyper-Errection.”

😂 Sadly, this world is not for us.

He was more hopeful that the good times would come back.

I, too, am hopeful. We will keep the flame alive. It will gutter and spit in the howling roar of corporate inanity and slackjawed lumbering indifference, but we will keep that bloody flame alive.

Cue the rousing opening chords of the old Soviet national anthem…

“AGI” Is Impossible: Objections and Replies by Justin Smith-Ruiu (HInternet)

“I maintain that the reasons for the equivocation are irreducibly ideological — they are motivated by a concern to reduce the scope of what we think of human beings, qua human beings, as doing, so that the Malgache medicine-man gets left out of the fold, while the sad-sack at a desk passing his life filling Excel files and applying for corporate promotions and so on gets included within it. By switching the could out for a can, and by imagining under the can only the sort of things Western educated (post-)industrial information workers do, we are left, in the 21st century, with a grossly impoverished anthropological frame — one that indeed positions us perfectly for a machine takeover. If the only things we value about human beings are the things we are building our machines to do, then we are indeed fucked — and yet we’ve fucked ourselves not through technological innovation, but through overidentification with our technology.”

Programming

RavenDB 7.1: One IO Ring to rule them all by Oren Eini (Ayende)

“Those are kernel tasks, generated by the IO Ring at the kernel level directly. It turns out that internally, IO Ring may spawn worker threads to do the async work at the kernel level. When we had a separate IO Ring per file, each one of them had its own pool of threads to do the work.”

“The problem we had was that when we had a separate IO Ring per data file and put a lot of load on the system, we started seeing contention between the worker threads across all the files. Basically, each ring had its own separate pool, so there was a lot of work for each pool but no sharing.”

“The end result of all this behavior is that we have a completely new way to deal with background I/O operations (remember, journal writes are handled differently). We can control both the volume of load we put on the system by adjusting the size of the IO Ring as well as changing its priority. The fact that we have a single global IO Ring means that we can get much better usage out of the worker thread pool that IO Ring utilizes. We also give the OS a lot more opportunities to optimize RavenDB’s I/O.”

CSS Animation with offset-path by Chuan

Why should you only set the framework target and not the language version? What you’re trying to do is to enable a newer language feature, right? But those language features are only available as of a certain version of C#, many of which are bound to the framework target. It is possible to use certain newer language features even when you’re building against a framework version which shipped with an older language version. However, since your project must select a framework target no matter what. It is perhaps better to set the framework target to a newer one and to leave the language at the default value for that target.

Why? Because, right now, you’re trying to set a new minimum language version by setting a property value in the project. In the future, that same property, will be setting a possibly unwanted maximum language version.

Although it is technically true that you need to set the target framework to at least 5.0, you should be targeting the latest LTS, which is currently 8.0. You should receive a warning from the compiler but the advice should include that expansion. Copilot does not mention it.

They lied to you. Building software is really hard. by Andreas Møller (toddle)

“The true value of a software engineer is in our ability to analyze problems as well as design and implement creative solutions. To get good at these skills you need to understand not just the tools at your disposal but also the technologies you are building on top of. If you don’t understand how an application works then you have no chance of fixing its bugs and issues.

“With no-code tools you often reach a hard limit where the tool simply does not make sense to use anymore.”

Comptime Zig ORM by Alex Kladov (matklad)

“This curious pattern”

pub const ID = enum(u64) { _ };

“is a Zig idiom for creating a new type over an integer. ID is an enumeration, whose backing type is u64. This enumeration doesn’t have any explicitly named variants, but it is open (_) — any u64 numeric value is considered to be a member. This is exactly what we want for an id — it’s an opaque number with a unique type, whose “numberness” is not exposed (you can’t add two ids together). In the transfer struct, we refer to account id:”

debit_account: Account.ID

“Note that although Account.ID and Transfer.ID have exactly the same definition, they are distinct types. Let this sink in — Zig’s type system is nominal, but all types are anonymous!”

“It could have been cleaner to instead write:”

const Account = struct {
    id: ID = .unassigned,
    balance: u128,
    pub const ID = enum(u64) {
        unassigned = 0,
        _,
    };
};

“That is, to add an explicitly named variant for zero.”

“Values are going to be sorted by a particular field. For example, we sort transfers by their ids. So, when creating a “Table” of transfers, we’ll need to pass the type of key, the type of value, and functions for extracting and comparing keys:”

const TransfersTable = TableType(Transfer.ID, Transfer, struct {
    pub fn key_fn(value: Transfer) Transfer.ID {
        return value.id;
    }
    pub fn key_cmp(lhs: Transfer.ID, rhs: Transfer.ID) std.math.Order {
        return std.math.order(@intFromEnum(lhs), @intFromEnum(rhs));
    }
});

“Here’s the corresponding declaration:”

fn TableType(
    comptime KeyType: type,
    comptime ValueType: type,
    comptime Functions: type,
) type {
    const key_fn = Functions.key_fn;
    const key_cmp = Functions.key_cmp;
    return struct {
        …
    };
}

“This is a type constructor function, which takes a bunch of types as arguments and returns a new type. Such functions can only be called at compile time.”

Oh, interesting. This is generics in Zig.

Fun

Bill Burr Can't Help But Laugh When He Watches The News | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend by Team Coco (YouTube)

This is a fantastic 12-minute video. Bill Burr is on fire, as usual. He brings together a few stories I’ve heard before, but juxtaposes them to expose new meaning.

After he tells several stories in which he ended up laughing at stories in which others suffered, he says,

“I don’t even know what the fuckin’ news is. It’s like, here’s a bunch of shit you can’t fix, that happened, that was horrible.”

Bill’s point isn’t a new one but it’s an important one to remember: sometimes you’ve just to laugh at the dark humor of reality. Just say, ‘good one, God. You got me.’

You can’t cry all the time and those who pretend that they can are posing for an imaginary audience.

Commentator Bombadil-ez9ns writes,

“I love how good Bill is at saying the WORST THING EVER, then walking you through it so that you understand where he’s coming from, and part of you even agrees.”

That’s called “philosophy.”

Another eloquent summary is from TheOtherMrEd,

“The thing I love about Bill Burr when he goes on these rants is he says all the things we think or feel… but know we shouldn’t. He’s right. Sometimes the level of “tragedy” reaches a point where it becomes absurd. And laughing about things you can’t change is a healthy survival strategy. Processing everyone else’s tragedy as though it was your own leads to burnout and compassion fatigue.”

Even this, though, isn’t exactly why Bill Burr laughs at The Biggest Loser. He said it himself, “most of the world is starving”. That’s why. He’s laughing at the utter darkness of a country having come up with a hit series about people who have eaten so much that they can barely move, filming them crying about their inability to control themselves—which is real and which is devastisting but only to them—when the rest of the world has real problems. Even a lot of their fellow citizens have real problems that don’t involve having so much disposable incomes that you literally can’t stop yourself from eating Oreos. You laugh at the genius of a culture that airs this kind of stuff to distract everyone else from noticing that they are part of the oppression that causes starvation in the rest of the world, at a system that encourages—nay, enforces—people to focus solipsistically on their own problems, despite having relatively no problems compared to most. He laughs because he’s really woke, not posturing. He is awake to the structure of the system and he’s laughing at how it’s trying to manipulate him into going back to sleep.