<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#sports">Sports</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/07/gop-democrats-fight-political-pugilism/" source="Jacobin" author="David Sirota">To Fight or Not to Fight</a> <bq>Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower lifespans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything — life in America just kept getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible.</bq> <bq>How did the two political parties flip their Zeitgeists? <b>How did conservatism realign to become the revolution while liberals transformed hope and change into more of the same?</b></bq> They all want the same thing: get the gravy train going for themselves. And keep it going. The rest of us can blow. <bq>if you aren’t yet lobotomized by TikTok or cable TV news and you live here in the real economy of crushing costs, red tape, and that pervasive feeling that you’re one medical diagnosis or arbitrary firing away from destitution, then <b>you can at least understand why a thinking person might be able to see some of their own rage in the GOP’s demagogues.</b></bq> <bq>Time and again, they’ve made clear their foremost objective is being seen as pragmatic and polite, as competent managers of societal decline — <b>regardless of what principles are being sacrificed in the transaction.</b></bq> This is far too generous. They are venal and self-serving. Just like the Republicans. <bq>Obama all but admitted his primary goal was good decorum and conflict aversion. He wrote that prosecuting bank executives in the wake of the financial crisis “would have required a violence to the social order, a wrenching of political and economic norms, that almost certainly would have made things worse.” <b>That social order soon after rewarded him with a palatial Chicago library and a Martha’s Vineyard mansion to shelter within amid Democrats’ historic loss of power</b> and Trump’s subsequent rampage.</bq> <bq>More recently, while the White House staff was focused on covering up the president’s cognitive decline, a few feisty appointees at a handful of alphabet agencies have <b>waged an increasingly successful guerrilla war against monopolies, predatory lenders, and crypto scammers. But those battles are rarely a central part of the Democratic story.</b> The party’s media machine is almost exclusively focused on agitprop about “saving democracy,” protecting “the soul of America,” and other paeans that are torn from Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing scripts and that <b>mean nothing to voters who are one family emergency away from bankruptcy.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/we-have-never-been-democrats" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">We Have Never Been Democrats</a> <bq>Yet at any time —at any time— the Kyffhäuser effect could throw this great process into chaos, as <b>some ancient stalactite-encrusted potentate emerges from the bowels of the earth, shakes off the dust of ages, and, full breath now regained, exhales the sulfurous fumes of his former refuge, lays waste to these poll-mongers and soundbite-traders, and restores the greatness of his realm.</b></bq> <bq>All monarchs are, in a sense, the reincarnations of their predecessors, and all the more when they adopt the name —one might do better to call it the name-soul—, of someone who came before them, altering it only with the addition of a higher ordinal number. In this light, anyone who can convince others that he is Dmitri II really will appear to share in the essence of Dmitri I. So <b>Marina very well could have seen this man, understood that he had none of the same scars as the earlier Dmitri, a different smell, a different distribution of hair, a different species of psychotic power-hungry stare, and nonetheless could have thought to herself: “Yes, here he is again. This is my man."</b></bq> <bq><b>It’s a peculiar and aberrant idea, really, one that only catches on with John Locke, that the continuity of personhood requires continuity of consciousness.</b> The idea never seems to have crossed Marina Mniszech’s mind, when she welcomed back her husband, nor the mind of anyone who ever transferred a loved one into a tüktüïe .</bq> <bq>[...] somehow, after just a day and a half, the “Kamala for President” posters have already been printed and distributed, and all it took for her nomination to become a fait accompli was a thumbs-up from a few of the party’s power-brokers, and also, crucially, a rechanneling her way of massive amounts of oligarchic donors’ money. Everyone on MSNBC is ecstatic that there is now a presidential candidate who brings “joy” and “love” to politics. <b>They are using the language of “heir apparent” and of “succession”, insouciantly forgetting, at least for today, that that’s not quite how it works.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>we were modern as long as we could plausibly maintain</b>, as I did for the first portion of my life, <b>a sincere belief in the great discontinuity between our rational and improved form of life and that of the greater part of humanity from its earliest origins.</b> The idea of democracy was a mighty powerful force in helping that belief to survive as long as it did.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/netanyahus-inferno-malekafzali" source="The Baffler" author="Séamus Malekafzali">Netanyahu’s Inferno</a> <bq>The issue of the displaced Israelis has become a significant thorn in the side of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said that he is working to make sure they will be able to return to their normal lives by September 1, when the new school year will start. But when Netanyahu was heard asking then-war cabinet minister Benny Gantz back in May if it mattered if that date was pushed back, <b>displaced families and their supporters erupted in anger, with local officials demanding immediate and decisive military action to push Hezbollah back from the border—even if that required the “total annihilation” of the land up until the Litani River, eighteen miles deep into Lebanese territory.</b> Still, Netanyahu has dithered on launching a full-on assault.</bq> He doesn't need to assault anyone. The attacks stop as soon as he stops curb-stomping Gaza. <bq><b>As it contemplates full-out war with Lebanon, Israel is once again relying on its attenuated version of reality, intentionally rejecting the existing material conditions in front of them and then responding in bewilderment when reality does not bend accordingly.</b> Decades of impunity have led to the creation of a ruling class in Jerusalem that believes that it can always be 1967, when Israel triumphed over its enemies in one fell swoop, as long as the guarantee of awesome American military support never wavers. <b>Those within Israel who argue that the country could be facing an enemy it cannot defeat are sidelined.</b></bq> <bq>Day and night, on Israeli television when they are given the chance, or else on social media, <b>government ministers, members of the ruling party and the larger governing coalition, as well as prominent media personalities, call explicitly for mass devastation, for Beirut to be made into another Gaza.</b></bq> <bq>The outcome appears inevitable. There is no prominent voice in either Israeli or U.S. military leadership, executive branch, or mass media that is not aware of the eventuality: a war against an enemy that has been preparing for this fight for its entire existence. <b>Israeli electric company CEO Shaul Goldstein has warned that “it will not be possible to live in Israel” after seventy-two hours without power and that Hezbollah has the ability to “cripple” the nation’s entire power grid.</b></bq> <bq>There may be some sort of miracle ahead, where somebody, somewhere comes to their senses, but if there is one thing that the past nine months of unspeakable horror have shown the world, it’s that the Western order is willing to destroy itself rather than give in, to admit it has done unspeakable wrong, to imagine that a different world might be possible. It must be its own author and finisher.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://madeinchinajournal.com/2024/07/23/on-the-unbalanced-coverage-of-the-xuebing-case/" source="Made in China Journal" author="Kexin Zhao">On the Unbalanced Coverage of the XueBing Case</a> <bq><b>This imbalance and skewed focus are both disheartening and deeply troubling, as they not only oversimplify or disregard the contributions of Chinese activists, but also highlight a lack of reflection in current discourse on the hierarchies embedded within social resistance.</b> A similar situation can be observed in Hong Kong’s ‘47-person case’, in which the public discussions focused mainly on a few well-known activists involved in overtly political issues and neglected the others.</bq> <bq>To ignore Wang’s pivotal role not only disregards the foundational efforts of less-visible activists, but also exposes a bias rooted in misogynistic and patriarchal norms; care work in activism is often socially gendered and undervalued. <b>It is important to clarify that this does not mean that care work in activism is done only by women. Rather, it reveals the irony of coverage that highlights movements like #MeToo, while inadvertently replicating the very norms they seek to challenge.</b></bq> <bq>We call on the media to reflect on its educational role and adopt a more balanced and nuanced approach to documenting such cases, as these reports can serve as an important reference for future social resistance. <b>Providing balanced and nuanced attention to activists and social struggles, regardless of their visibility or profile, is the first step towards building a more inclusive and progressive social movement for change in China.</b></bq> This isn't going to happen with profit-driven media. The incentives are diametrically opposed. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/today-in-every-accusation-is-a-confession" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Today In 'Every Accusation Is A Confession'</a> <bq>[...] <b>the US is disputing the election results in Venezuela again because they didn’t get the result they want</b>, with more sanctions and other interventionism likely on the way for the empire-targeted nation. <b>It’s so wild how every few years the US just casually tries to install a coup regime in the oil-rich nation of Venezuela and the western political-media class treats this as perfectly normal.</b> And then they’ll have the gall to shriek about “election interference” if some Russians make some Facebook memes about a presidential race or whatever. Really says a lot about how evil, entitled, supremacist and stupid western civilization is.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/30/venezuelan-opposition-cries-fraud-people-reelect-president-maduro/" author="Roger Harris" source="CounterPunch">Venezuelan Opposition Cries Fraud; People Reelect President Maduro</a> <bq>[...] <b>every one of these contests employed the same electoral system of multiple public audits, transparent counting, and an electronic vote backed with paper ballots.</b> The system is incontrovertibly fraud-proof. Former US President Jimmy Carter, whose electoral monitoring organization had observed over ninety elections – including Venezuela’s – had declared the South American country’s system the best in the world. Beyond the accusations, <b>concrete proof of fraud had not been forthcoming in the past even though the data were publicly available.</b> I was one of 910 internationals representing over one hundred countries who had been invited to Venezuela to accompany this election. Yesterday, I visited polling stations in the state of Miranda. I observed long but orderly lines of people going to the polls. At each one of the individual mesas (rooms at a polling station), representatives of political parties sat to monitor the process. I spoke to representatives of Maduro’s Socialist Party (PSUV) as well as other parties. <b>All expressed confidence in the fraud-proof nature of their electoral system. In fact, they are very proud of their system regardless of political affiliation.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/30/ejfc-j30.html" author="Andrea Lobo" source="WSWS">Maduro declared winner of presidential vote, as Washington escalates drive for regime change in Venezuela</a> <bq>After Chavez’s death from cancer in 2013, the World Socialist Web Site pointed to the fact that his government’s diversion of part of Venezuela’s oil bonanza into social programs and partial nationalizations did not “represent a path to socialism” and “made no serious encroachment on profit interests.” Instead, Chavez squandered most of the oil boom paying foreign creditors, increasing profits for transnationals and cultivating a faction in the ruling class and military leadership, called the boliburguesia, that grew rich from corruption and government contracts. <b>Even though the GDP multiplied 4.5 times in the decade before his death, no major industrial or agricultural development took place, preparing a major downturn once prices fell.</b></bq> <hr> OK, let's just judge the candidates on their merits. If we don't, then we'll have to settle for the opinion of the democrat-dominated Internet, which seems to be that we should be kicking ourselves for having made Harris place a distant fourth in her own state's primary, and therefore missed the opportunity of electing a once-in-a-lifetime intellect and policy tour-de-force to be our president in 2020. We should apparently not make the same stupid mistake in 2024. Let's pretend, just for a moment, that it doesn't matter whether Kamala is black and female. What has she done? I don't know. I know she was a zealous prosecutor of the drug war in California. She was campaigning, then she became in charge of border policy, during which it's apparent that she wasn't especially compassionate or effective in her policy. She was either completely ineffective or she was integral in the harshest border policy the U.S. has ever enacted. What else do I know about her? I've seen her talk a few times. I don't agree with most of what she says. I find it to be superficial, light on information, and stitched together with officially accepted lies and half-truths. She does not have the soul of a philosopher or thinker for any sort. The exact same goes for Donald Trump. I don't know much about their policy plans, but I'm quite certain which policies will continue unabated. Under Harris, I imagine that the careening tilt toward WWIII in the Caucasus will continue unabated. With Trump, I'm not so sure. It might, but it also might be prosecuted so unenthusiastically that some daylight will appear for a ceasefire. In Israel, I expect both will be terrible. It's unclear whether Harris's call for a ceasefire has not changed from Biden's call for one. Netanyahu pulled on Harris's leash---we'll see what happens. Trump would encourage it all to continue. The war with Iran will proceed apace. What about the rest of Asia? Harris is unlikely to deviate from rush to war in the Pacific; neither is Trump. What about abortion? It's unclear what Trump actually thinks about policy because he's also tacking in heavy winds and significantly changing his positions from day to day. Looking at her track record, there is absolutely no reason to believe that Harris will be the politician to navigate the stormy waters of federal abortion policy in the U.S. and end up hacking its Gordian knot for good. I honestly doubt she'll even try, although she'll tell people she will before the election. In the cast of both candidates, there is less reason than there ever was before to believe anything about the policies that they claim to want to fight for. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/bad-on-foreign-policy-but-good-on" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">"Bad On Foreign Policy But Good On Domestic Policy" Is Just American Supremacist Psychopathy</a> <bq><b>Splitting up “foreign policy” and “domestic policy” on questions of right and wrong only makes sense if you believe harming foreigners is more morally acceptable than harming Americans.</b> “Kamala is bad on foreign policy but good on domestic policy” just means “American lives are innately superior.” It can only feel true from the inside of an American supremacist worldview. Murder and abuse is wrong regardless of where in the world it happens to occur. <b>The fact that it isn’t happening to you or anyone you know personally doesn’t make it more ethical, it just makes it more tolerable for you if you’re the sort of person who only cares about yourself and your loved ones.</b></bq> <bq>If you are an American and you care about other people, then <b>“foreign policy” should carry the lion’s share of the moral weight for you, because that’s where the US government actions of most consequence for human beings will take place.</b></bq> <bq>Saying a US politician is “bad on foreign policy but good on domestic policy” is like saying <b>“Sure my husband spends his weekends murdering hitchhikers, but he’s a good provider and he knows how to fix a flat tire.”</b> You’re talking about genocide, nuclear brinkmanship, mass military slaughter and deliberate mass starvation, and <b>you’re placing these things on the same moral level as a candidate’s position on student loan debt.</b></bq> <bq>[...] let me preempt any objections that the two major presidential candidates are always murderous warmongers by saying, I know. Believe me, I know. <b>You can use that fact to argue that because they’re both corrupt genocide monsters you may as well support the genocide monster who might make things a tiny bit less hard for some people in one small part of the world</b>, or you can actually look at what I’m pointing at here and really ingest the horror of the situation the powerful have created for you and your compatriots. <b>The fact that you’re only allowed to vote for corrupt genocide monsters should shake you to your core</b>, and that’s what should be the main focus of everyone’s political attention. <b>It’s only because Americans are the most propagandized people on earth that this isn’t happening.</b></bq> <bq>I’m not telling anyone how to vote or not vote. I could not care less. <b>Your votes make no difference</b> as far as I’m concerned. Vote or don’t vote in whatever way seems best to you, and then turn your attention to the real problem that’s staring you in the face right now: <b>the fact that you live under a tyrannical empire which is fueled by human blood, and which is completely unaccountable to the will of the public.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/29/tvcr-j29.html" author="Barış Demir" source="WSWS">Erdogan threatens Turkish military intervention against Israel</a> <bq>In his statement on Netanyahu’s visit to Washington on Saturday, Erdoğan targeted both the US and Israel, saying: “The other day, we all watched those disgraceful scenes in the US House of Representatives. Frankly speaking, we were ashamed of what we have seen there in the name of humanity... <b>Rolling out the red carpet for someone like Netanyahu, going even further and applauding his lies until their palms swell, is a major abdication of reason for America.”</b></bq> <bq>Although Erdoğan has cut trade with Israel and toughened his rhetoric in the face of a backlash, <b>US-NATO bases in Turkey continue to support Israel. Moreover, Turkey continues to intercede for Azerbaijan’s critical oil shipments to Israel.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/28/john-kiriakou-the-south-korean-spy-affair/" author="John Kiriakou" source="Scheer Post">The South Korean ‘Spy’ Affair</a> <bq>Sue Mi Terry, a former Korea analyst for the C.I.A., a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Koreas, and a former national security council director for Korean Affairs, <b>was most certainly not charged with spying for South Korea.  She was not guilty, or even accused, of “sloppy spycraft.  And she was not charged with being a secret agent.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>none of this is illegal, other than the act of not filling out the form.</b>  And notice two other things:  Terry was never accused of espionage.  She was never accused of providing classified or “national defense” information to the South Koreans.  And she wasn’t charged with income tax evasion, indicating that the transfer of $37,000 to her think tank was done in the open and that she paid taxes on it.  <b>To call her a spy for the South Koreans is not only factually wrong, it’s defamatory.</b> </bq> <bq>[...] the federal sentencing guidelines for violating FARA call for a jail sentence of zero-to-six months and/or a small fine.  <b>Why, then, was Maria Butina, a Russian grad student at American University, held in solitary confinement at the Washington, D.C., jail for 18 months for violating FARA?</b>  Coming at the height of the Russiagate mania in 2018 it was clearly political. </bq> <bq>[...] <b>why does the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, not have to register</b> when it is clearly, obviously, promoting Israeli interests?</bq> <bq>[...] the media have to get their act together and <b>learn the difference between a spy, an “agent,” and a person who is either too lazy or lacking in knowledge to fill out a form.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/02/flhd-a02.html" author="Andrea Lobo, Bill Van Auken" source="WSWS">Who is the US to preach “democracy” to Venezuela?</a> <bq>A revealing editorial published by the Washington Post in the immediate aftermath of the election concluded, “The United States and other democracies have invested heavily in a peaceful democratic transition for Venezuela. In that sense, this election is being stolen from them, too.” In other words, <b>all of the money poured by the CIA and USAID into fostering a right-wing opposition and fomenting violence and regime-change must yield the desired results.</b> <b>On Wednesday, finger-wagging National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby followed up, declaring: “Our patience, and that of the international community, is running out</b>, running out. I’m waiting for the Venezuelan electoral [authority] to come clean and release the full detailed data on this election.” <b>What gives the US government the right to dictate the conduct of Venezuela’s elections?</b> Dominated by two parties bought and paid for by a ruling oligarchy of billionaires, it systematically suppresses democratic rights in preparation for wars opposed by most of the population.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/02/venezuela-an-attempted-coup-by-any-other-name/" author="Maria Paez Victor" source="CounterPunch">Venezuela: An Attempted Coup By Any Other Name</a> <bq>Nicolás Maduro was re-elected with 51.2% of votes (5,150,092 votes), and the far-right candidate Edmundo González lost with 44.2% of votes (4,445,978 votes). The other 8 opposition leaders received 4.6% of the total votes cast. <b>This is the statistically irreversible results given out by the constitutional Electoral Authority (CNE) on election day, 28 July 2024, having examined and audited 80% of the votes. These results were audited 16 times.</b></bq> <bq>We are in the presence of <b>an attempt of the international fascist far right and the CIA to overthrow the government of Venezuela with a massive disinformation and denigration campaign</b> to justify illegal sanctions and foreign intervention in the country. The checkered past and crimes of Machado, poster girl of the far right, is never mentioned, <b>her involvement in coups, her promotion of street violence in the past, her asking the USA for sanctions and military invasion against Venezuela, and right now, her collaboration with criminal gangs and narco-paramilitary groups are never mentioned.</b> Her puppet, Edmundo González, was involved in the logistics and financing of the death squads in El Salvador’s civil war. Their hands are tainted with blood.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/promoting-peace-and-stability-in" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Promoting Peace And Stability In The Middle East By Unconditionally Backing Its Worst Aggressor</a> <bq>Washington’s position is made even more absurd after all the hysterical shrieking and garment-rending from the Washington establishment following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. <b>Israel murdered the leader of the Hamas political bureau, not a military commander, and he was the primary negotiator in the mediated ceasefire talks with Israel. This was a political assassination just like a successful attempt on Trump’s life would have been, but probably a lot more consequential.</b> And yet the only response from Washington has been to announce that it will help Israel continue its incendiary brinkmanship throughout the middle east.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/31/patrick-lawrence-the-murder-of-ismail-haniyeh/" author="Patrick Lawrence" source="Scheer Post">The Murder of Ismail Haniyeh</a> <bq>On Wednesday Mehdi Hasan, the journalist and co-founder of the media company Zeteo, put out an excellent history of Israel’s practice of murdering senior Hamas negotiators just as they were advancing toward one or another peace agreement in one or another circumstance. “Israel Has a History of Killing Hamas Leaders Who Are Trying to Secure Ceasefires” is a sobering read. <b>The only available conclusion is that the Israelis have never been serious about anything other than the extermination of the people with whom they pretend to negotiate.</b></bq> <bq><b>Terrorist Israel is absolutely unserious about peace or a negotiated settlement of any kind with the Palestinian people regardless of who they, the Palestinians, choose to represent them.</b> It is time for the international community to stop pretending otherwise—especially, but not only, by insisting that a two-state solution remains a real-world prospect. </bq> <bq>Finally and more broadly, it is time to recognize that <b>Israel is incapable of serious statecraft because it has no interest in it</b> and does not enjoy, in consequence, healthy, balanced diplomatic relations with other members of the community of nations. If this reality is not at this point self-evident, it will prove in time irrefutable.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/trump-sheepdogs-both-the-right-and" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Trump Sheepdogs Both The Right And The Left Into Supporting Status Quo Politics</a> <bq>If not for Trump, the US political spectrum would be drifting further and further to the left instead of to the right as the possibility of a better future begins to ignite the imaginations of Americans nationwide. Instead <b>you’ve got a depressingly impotent faction of progressive Democrats who’ll occasionally stick their head above the parapet to say something innocuous like “tax the rich” before ducking back down to unequivocally endorse whichever murderous empire goon has been elevated to the top of their party that election cycle</b>, because the only thing that matters right now is stopping Trump.</bq> <bq>Because of Trump you’ve got right wingers who would otherwise be putting their energy into libertarian factions instead throwing their support into the Republican Party, and you’ve got progressives who would otherwise be pushing toward socialism and communism instead throwing their support into the Democratic Party. <b>All it took was one rich manipulator with some experience in the theatrics of pro wrestling and reality TV.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/democrats-think-their-candidate-is" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">Democrats Think Their Candidate is Running for President of Online, Again</a> <bq>New York has been particularly uninspiring in this regard, producing a lot of takes predicated on the idea that the median undecided swing state voter is, well, a New York magazine subscriber. Here Jason P. Frank says that the key to victory for Harris is mobilizing “stans.” Jason, <b>what Kamala Harris needs is white independents without college degrees in swing states.</b> Are a lot of those in very-online fan armies? I have my doubts. In fact I suspect most of the people Harris needs the most don’t know what the fuck a stan is and don’t spend any time in the spaces where stans congregate! Here Angelina Chapin credulously covers <b>a pro-Harris Zoom call for white women, which I’m sure is a great way to reach women married to laid-off-ironworkers-turned-Uber-Eats-drivers in the Rust Belt.</b></bq> <bq>These strategic mistakes were not the reason that Hillary lost, but they played directly into her biggest weakness, which was how <b>her underlying unpopularity fit squarely into the perception that Democrats came from a different strata of life than swing voters. You can’t fix that by disappearing further up the ass of popular culture.</b> (If you’re over the age of 25 and you catch yourself earnestly discussing whether something is “brat,” please find Jesus. Or heroin. Or Dianetics. Whatever it takes to change your life.)</bq> <bq>When Donald Trump incoherently rants about Hannibal Lecter, that’s a vulnerability; when Kamala Harris once again mumbles about “being unburdened by what has been,” somehow, that’s an opportunity. Because of memes, or something. <b>Memes that the voters Democrats need won’t ever see because they don’t have bullshit email jobs where they can watch Instagram reels for six and a half hours a day.</b></bq> <bq>Votes within a given state are fungible, so of course Black votes were important, but it’s just not true that they were determinative. And… why would we need to pretend that they were? Is that some sort of laurel we need to hand Black people? I find it all so bizarre, just more of <b>this senseless liberal habit of acting like hype men for the concept of Black people, as if that's what fighting racism entails.</b></bq> <bq>Democrats need to perform well with all kinds of voters to win, certainly including a kind of voter they have struggled to attract in recent election cycles. “Black voters are the key for the Democratic party” is just one of those things that patronizing white liberals say in lieu of securing actual progress for Black people. It’s obviously untrue. <b>Stop mistaking the responsibility Democrats have to Black citizens for the electoral impact of Black voters. They’re not the same.</b></bq> <bq>[...] none of that will have the slightest impact on an election that will be decided by voter perceptions of inflation, Harris’s ability to effectively campaign on abortion, and the whims of a bunch of politically-incoherent retirees in Tucson and the Phoenix suburbs. But <b>Hess is not writing a piece about winning an election; she’s writing a piece about winning the game of social positioning among online-poisoned educated Millennials, which is the only game many people in the media seem willing to play - the game of trying to impress each other.</b> That is not of interest to me.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2024/07/26/karens-for-kamala-inside-the-white-women-zoom-call-for-harris/" author="Elizabeth Nolan Brown" source="Reason">'Karens for Kamala?' Inside the White Women Zoom Call for Harris</a> <bq>"I am here tonight, embracing myself in your incredible, profound white women midst, because we've got a fucking job to do, y'all," said Britton, who has starred in shows like Nashville, American Horror Story, and The White Lotus. She went on to suggest that because Vice President Kamala Harris is a woman, she will "listen. And lead with empathy, integrity, and the power of the truth." <b>When President Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic Party's 2024 presidential nominee and endorsed Harris to take his place, "the world blew up. Did you feel it?" asked Britton. "It was seismic. Cosmic, even. And since then—have you seen it? Have you seen Kamala glisten in the brilliance and shine of her true power and leadership? And what does that feel like? Feels like self-love."</b> <b>"Women, when we are capable of opening up to our own voices and gifts, can access a love of self that is reflective…and can shine outward to unknown depths,"</b> Britton continued. "Which brings me back to us. Beautiful, beautiful white women. Here we are gathered together."</bq> The world blew up. Seismic. Cosmic. This is nuts. This sounds like a cult. it's a 100% echo chamber built by people who don't understand that politics is about convincing people who don't already believe everything that you do. Well, that is if you believe in a democracy. People are f$&king sheep. I hate everyone. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <img src="{att_link}_get_your_credit_card_napkin_on_united.jpg" href="{att_link}_get_your_credit_card_napkin_on_united.jpg" align="none" caption="'Get your credit card!' napkin on United" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/26/taanstafl/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Fintech bullies stole your kid’s lunch money</a> <bq>The report samples 16.7m K-12 students in 25k schools. It finds that schools are racing to go cashless, with 87% contracting with payment processors to handle cafeteria transactions. Three processors dominate the sector: Myschoolbucks, Schoolcafé, and Linq Connect. These aren't credit card processors (most students don't have credit cards). Instead, <b>they let kids set up an account, like a prison commissary account, that their families load up with cash. And, as with prison commissary accounts, every time a loved one adds cash to the account, the processor takes a giant whack out of them with junk fees</b>. If you're the parent of a kid who is eligible for a reduced-price lunch (that is, if you are poor), then <b>about 60% of the money you put into your kid's account is gobbled up by these payment processors in service charges.</b></bq> <bq><b>If your kid doesn't qualify for the lunch subsidy, you're only paying about 8% in service charges</b> (which is still triple the rate charged by credit card companies for payment processing).</bq> <bq>The payment processors charge a flat fee for every top-up, and poor families can't afford to minimize these fees by making a single payment at the start of the year or semester. Instead, <b>they pay small sums every payday, meaning they pay the fee twice per month (or even more frequently.</b></bq> <bq><b>The CFPB can – and will – do something to protect America's poorest parents from having $100m of their kids' lunch money stolen by three giant fintech companies. But whether they'll continue to do so under a Kamala Harris administration is an open question.</b> While Harris has repeatedly talked up the ways that Biden's CFPB, the DOJ Antitrust Division, and FTC have gone after corporate abuses, <b>some of her largest donors are demanding that her administration fire the heads of these agencies and crush their agenda.</b></bq> <bq>The Democrats need to be more than The Party of Not Trump. To succeed – as a party and as a force for a future for Americans – <b>they have to be the party that defends us – workers, parents, kids and retirees alike – from corporate predation.</b></bq> That's not who they are. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/29/why-do-people-lie-to-cnn-pollsters-about-their-financial-situation/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Why Do People Lie to CNN Pollsters About Their Financial Situation?</a> <bq>If the 69 percent of the people in the CNN poll who report cutting back are accurately describing their behavior, then <b>the other 31 percent must be spending like crazy.</b></bq> Baker writes this like it's completely out of the question. He accuses people of lying. Fewer people are definitely taking more of the services: that's an utterly expected effect of rising inequality combined with a willingness to spend what feels like "extra" money on the part of those who are getting more than their fair share. This is why everything everywhere is booked out---all tourist areas are packed to the gills. Things must be going great! Well, that, or 30% of the people are doing just fine while everyone else realizes that no part of the world is built for them anymore. Wanna go to Greece? Thought maybe you could afford to? You've been priced out. It costs 3x as much as it did 10 years ago, even if you're willing to put up with a much worse experience because there are so many goddamned people are the ones most willing to play within the reserve-everything-in-advance and pay-to-play system get to have everything. The quality of a lot of experiences has changed significantly. There is no room for spontaneity or for fortuitously getting to be alone or having some elbow room somewhere. <bq><b>CNN also reports that 41 percent of respondents say they have cut back their driving. By contrast, the Commerce Department data show that gas consumption is up by 1.8 percent from before the pandemic</b>, although it is down 0.5 percent from last year. Before making too much of that year-over-year drop off consider that there were 1.1 million electric vehicles sold last year, 2.0 million hybrids, and 0.2 plugin hybrids.</bq> Isn't it also possible that the gas-consumption per ICE vehicle continues to increase? The numbers reported have been shown several times to be very optimistic, even idealistic. I just rented a car in the States and the fuel-efficiency numbers---if you can even call them that---are horrifying. And that was for compact and economy cars. Trucks, SUVs---those are the large part of the fleet and the large part of the replacement fleet. Why should be surprised that they might be using more fuel per vehicle-mile? What Baker doesn't seem to think to question is whether these numbers he's citing have anything to do with reality. Why would they? Nothing else really does. The overarching goal of numbers is to inspire consumption and short-term profit. There is a greater fealty to that than to reporting any sort of situation accurately. Everything is political these days. Even given that politics or preferences or methodology haven't skewed the numbers, they might still be wrong because people are just f@&king incompetent and their software sucks and most people aren't even remotely qualified for the jobs that they have. Even if they are, they will be betrayed by software glitches---were the numbers gathered in Excel?---or further damaged by terrible processes promulgated by several layers of self-serving management. I'm on a flight right now that changed its gate within minutes of having printed it on a boarding pass, that announced that it was an hour late, then retracted that announcement ten minutes later. It managed to print my partner and I our boarding passes for seats that it had also already allocated to other people. We had hard copies; they had it on their phones. When I checked with the flight attendant, neither my partner nor I appeared in their app. When they checked with the desk, though, we were there, and we were assigned the seats that we had on our boarding passes. This is the system we're looking at. I'm not so sure that we should ascribe so much confidence to any data we have. We have long since lost the ability to deal with the complexity of the world in anything approaching a serious manner. 99% of people are cosplaying their jobs. It's a giant LARP where everyone pretends that no-one else is LARPing so that they themselves don't get called out. <bq>[...] <b>wage increases at the bottom end of the wage distribution have far outpaced inflation</b>, so this is not consistent with low-income workers feeling especially stressed right now.</bq> Dean continues to bang this drum because he fervently believes that conservative media is gaslighting people into thinking that their lives are not going great under Biden. Dean has to convince people otherwise, otherwise they might elect Trump for completely nonexistent reasons, which would be a shame because the Biden administration has been so irrevocably stellar for everyone, across the board. I continue to be skeptical about national averages like this. It makes it too easy to dismiss people's complaints when they come from sometimes-large pockets of the nation where wages haven't increased---or outpaced inflation. On top of that, Dean usually includes the caveat that this doesn't include rent, which is a dumb thing to say because that's where a large part of most people's money goes. Who cares if your wages might have outrun the CPI by 0.05% when your rent went up by 10%? So, you've got $12 extra per month but your rent went up by $150? Breaking it down to actual numbers---and looking at local situations---matters, because otherwise your stress can be easily derided as greed. A greed that is, by the way, also engendered 24/7 by everyone all the time everywhere. <bq>To be clear, we know that tens of millions of people are struggling to make ends meet and that many are falling short, going hungry and/or losing housing. But <b>this was the story before the pandemic also, when most people were positive about the economy.</b></bq> See? Dean is just saying that there are always going to be turtles at the bottom and he thinks it's unfair for them to complain about it when Biden is president when they didn't complain while Trump was president. He probably thinks that they're even being actively malicious when, on top of it all, they claim that <i>things were better under Trump.</i> Dean sees an utterly unearned electoral victory going to Trump with people doing themselves an economic disservice---and he's trying to save them from themselves. He would like them to, instead, hand Biden an utterly unearned and undeserved electoral victory. Either way is a shit sandwich for these people, so why can't they just play ball and stop voting for Trump, who annoys everyone on the two coasts? <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/07/economy-workers-media-voters-election/" author="The Center for Working-class Politics" source="Jacobin">The Economy Isn’t Actually Good for Workers Right Now</a> <bq>From a 30,000-foot perspective, Democrats appear to be on solid economic footing: strong employment numbers and job creation, recent increases in real wages, high consumption levels, and a strong GDP. Yet these measures actually do little to capture the reality of the US economy for many Americans, particularly those in the working class. Instead, <b>celebration of today’s economic conditions reveals more about the class biases of journalists and other experts than it does about the realities of the economic situation for ordinary workers.</b></bq> <bq>[...] average real wages have only outpaced consumer prices by 1% per year since 2021. That’s not nothing, but it’s not much either, especially since <b>growth in real wages over the past four years follows forty years of stagnation in workers’ purchasing power</b> — driven by, among other reasons, a sharp increase in benefit costs and the decline of labor unions.</bq> That's an excellent point. Many of the arguments that things are going great are contingent on people being immediately grateful that a huge gap is started to be filled. That gap opened into a chasm and it might be starting to close for some people, but even those people are still doing far worse than they should be. Being grateful for the improved economy isn't on their agenda. They're still struggling, but they're struggling less. They may even be more hopeful that they will be struggling even less in the next couple of years. But why would they be? What would have trained them to think that the current, admittedly minor, improvements will continue until there is some sort of parity, some sort of justice? They still see a world---a system---that is bent on pulling money away from them and putting it in the hands of others, what the system deems their betters. Why would they trust that this would continue? It never has. They don't trust the system. They know exactly that the system will go for their jugular the second they stop fighting. They have no security. That's the deficit. The surveys and all of the numbers are based on money, which the system has temporarily been able to turn into a better story for the worst-off. But people are psychologically insecure. They just don't really believe that any improvement will continue. And they have no reason to believe it. <bq>While median income growth was around 5% between January 2021 and March 2024, wage growth among the top 25% of income earners averaged over three times that value (16.5%), while <b>the bottom 25% of income earners experienced negative median income growth (an average of -0.7% between January 2021 and March 2024).</b> So it’s hardly surprising that <b>affluent cheerleaders of Bidenomics are feeling more bullish about the post-pandemic recovery than the rest of us: their own wages have far outpaced inflation</b>, while those of ordinary workers have at best stayed slightly ahead of the curve and at worst fallen further behind.</bq> <bq>The compound weight of decades of declining economic opportunity and the post-COVID inflation shock has generated pain among working-class Americans that’s not easy to shake. And while wage increases are met with cheers, <b>workers are well aware that they have earned those increases — indeed, if worker productivity is any measure, they deserve much greater increases.</b> They work hard, and <b>a raise does not feel like a handout from the Biden administration — nor should it. Yet that’s exactly how pundits seem to think workers should respond.</b></bq> <bq><b>Workers who have diligently saved and maintained steady employment through these tumultuous past few years find it much more than a minor inconvenience that suddenly a home in a desirable neighborhood is completely out of reach.</b> That feeling is not assuaged by graphs showing that their wages are actually better now than under President Donald Trump [...]</bq> <bq>[...] insisting that workers have never had it so good is not only a lie, it’s a recipe for electoral disaster.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Adirondacks/comments/1edvw1z/lake_jimmy_bridge_23_years_then_now/" author="" source="Reddit">Lake Jimmy bridge 23 years then & now</a> Someone asked: <iq>What is stopping the rebuilding of this bridge?</iq> If I had to guess, I'd say it's a deeply rooted and, at this point, nearly pathological, societal disinterest in investing in anything that doesn't generate direct, short-term profits. Even when the interest is there, there are no mechanisms for putting a lever to it. The best you could hope for is to get Mountain Dew to sponsor the bridge and probably start to charge for crossing it via an app that you have to download and set up an account for. It's not that there are no budgets at all, obviously, but that they usually end up being shockingly inadequate because of a pervasive fear of government waste that is laser-like focused on services that everyone can use (parks, healthcare) and completely myopic for large-figure items that don't (i.e., military, football stadia). That's why you'll hear people passionately argue that we couldn't possibly find, say, $50M for rebuilding trails in the Adirondacks, while, at the same time, the same government is raining down $50M of missiles on an unknown country for reasons that are unfathomable even to the people who pulled the target out of their asses two minutes before they pushed the red button. Or the same state government can chirpily fund a football stadium to the tune of billions, even though the team owner is a billionaire. That's the kind of welfare we can totally accept, somehow. It's why you'll hear people constantly complain about welfare cheats pulling down mad cash of a couple of hundred bucks per month (x x100k people, etc.), while completely ignoring corporate welfare that sucks 1000x as much for far less social benefit. <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/selfishness-and-therapy-culture" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">Selfishness & Therapy Culture</a> <bq>[...] <b>ideology refers to those beliefs you do not examine <i>because you do not see them as beliefs at all.</i></b> Ideology isn’t a matter of ingesting arguments about better or worse, right and wrong, and evaluating them to determine your own beliefs. <b>Ideology is fundamentally the unexamined framework of the system through which you perform such an evaluation, the part you can’t and don’t see; it’s the assumptions that you cannot understand as assumptions.</b> And the ideology that Carons demonstrates here, the set of assumptions she can’t begin to examine critically because she does not notice them, says that the individual has no responsibility to anyone but themselves. There is no moral duty, there is only the immediate emotional needs of the individual, which eclipses all other concerns, which is sacrosanct.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/nevada-philosophy" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu" source="Hinternet">Nevada Philosophy</a> <bq>One thing my American upbringing did not give me the language to describe, or even the consciousness to perceive, but that now jumps out to me as salient and self-evident as wildfire smoke: the habitués of Circus Circus are decidedly at the lower end of our social and economic hierarchy. <b>These gamblers are not, I mean, wearing tuxedoes and evening gowns like in L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), but rather t-shirts celebrating the 2nd Amendment, the WWE, the Minions, and other bottom-end seepage from our junk culture.</b> The average BMI here is high indeed, nor is there any shame in resorting to a reduced-mobility cart. Some of the gamblers appear to have no mobility at all, and are happy to take advantage of the auto-play option on the slot machines. <b>They install themselves in front of the screen, and they watch, immobile, as the screen —displaying at intervals the outcomes of a process aleatoric and deterministic at once— subtracts funds from their credit cards.</b> The one-armed bandit now looks scarcely any different from an online scammer.</bq> <bq>You step away from Fox and MSNBC for just a moment, out here, and you cannot fail to understand that the great rift Maddow, Hannity, et al., are so intent on maintaining, if only for the sake of their own livelihood, is truly just the narcissism of minor differences. <b>The only real rift is the one defined by income inequality, between the rich and the poor, or, to cite John Steinbeck, between the small number of actual millionaires and the great number of Americans who imagine themselves “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.</b></bq> <h id="technology">Technology</h> <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/07/the-crowdstrike-outage-and-market-driven-brittleness.html" source="" author="Bruce Schneier">The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness</a> <bq><b>The cost of failure to a company like CrowdStrike is a fraction of the cost to the global economy.</b> And there will be a next CrowdStrike, and one after that. The market rewards short-term profit-maximizing systems, and doesn’t sufficiently penalize such companies for the impact their mistakes can have. (Stock prices depress only temporarily. Regulatory penalties are minor. Class-action lawsuits settle. Insurance blunts financial losses.) <b>It’s not even clear that the information technology industry could exist in its current form if it had to take into account all the risks such brittleness causes.</b></bq> <bq>Each contract has a cost. Performing the same function in-house also has a cost. When the costs of maintaining the contract are lower than the cost of doing the thing in-house, then it makes sense to outsource: to another firm down the street or, in an era of cheap communication and coordination, to another firm on the other side of the planet. <b>The problem is that both the financial and risk costs of outsourcing can be hidden—delayed in time and masked by complexity—and can lead to a false sense of security when companies are actually entangled by these invisible dependencies.</b></bq> <bq>The ability to outsource software services became easy a little over a decade ago, due to ubiquitous global network connectivity, cloud and software-as-a-service business models, and <b>an increase in industry- and government-led certifications and box-checking exercises.</b></bq> <bq>Last week’s update wouldn’t have been a major failure if CrowdStrike had rolled out this change incrementally: first 1 percent of their users, then 10 percent, then everyone. But that’s much more expensive, because it requires a commitment of engineer time for monitoring, debugging, and iterating. And can take months to do correctly for complex and mission-critical software. <b>An executive today will look at the market incentives and correctly conclude that it’s better for them to take the chance than to “waste” the time and money.</b></bq> They may also not have the skill, technical competence, or the organization for it. <bq>We can’t expect that a regulation that mandates a specific list of software crash tests would suffice. Again, <b>security and resilience are achieved through the process by which we fail and fix, not through any specific checklist. Regulation has to codify that process.</b></bq> <bq>Today’s internet systems are too complex to hope that if we are smart and build each piece correctly the sum total will work right. <b>We have to deliberately break things and keep breaking them. This repeated process of breaking and fixing will make these systems reliable.</b> And then a willingness to embrace inefficiencies will make these systems resilient. But the <b>economic incentives point companies in the other direction, to build their systems as brittle as they can possibly get away with.</b></bq> <h id="sports">Sports</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/olympics/comments/1eidsnq/the_judo_goat_does_it_again/" author="" source="Reddit">The Judo GOAT does it again</a> TIL about Frenchman <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_Riner">Teddy Riner</a>, who's the most successful judo competitor in the sport's history. He has medaled at every Olympics games since 2008. Since 2009, he's competed 213 times, winning 210 of them. He had a streak of 154 consecutive victories. He has now won the 100+ gold medal three times. He is the only athlete to win a gold medal at an Olympics for which he also lit the torch. His career arc reminds me a bit of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Karelin">Aleksandr Karelin</a>, of Russia. He is the most successful Greco-Roman wrestler. He won gold three times and silver once in his unlimited weight class. He was finally defeated by American Rulon Gardner, who was simply too big to lift into Karelin's "reverse body lift". He went undefeated for 13 years, when he lost in the final in his final Olympics and what would turn out to be his final international competition.