Links and Notes for May 27th, 2022

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Programming

COVID-19

Shanghai emerges out of lockdown after beating back Omicron by Benajmin Mateus (WSWS)

“If the counterfactual outcome were posed, a recent peer-reviewed study from Shanghai’s Fudan University, published in the journal Nature Medicine, found that if China abandoned its Zero-COVID policy, Omicron would lead to 112 million symptomatic cases within six months, 5.1 million hospital admissions, and 1.6 million deaths.

“Besides the complete overwhelming of their health systems, such an approach would have dire long-term consequences that include subjugating millions more to Long COVID and the possible emergence of new virulent strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

“The financial press has not even discussed the question of the impact on the global economy if China abandoned Zero-COVID. The current attempts to blame China for the world’s economic downturn are purely political. If the virus were allowed to spread without any public health measures to stem the tide of infections, the results would be catastrophic both to the population and to the world’s economy.”

I wonder to what degree this disparity in handling pandemics will contribute to China’s advantage in the medium-term future, as the western world is forced to deal with the long-COVID debt that it accrued with its short-sightedness.

Economy & Finance

The SEC Goes After Greenwashing by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“ESG is a diffuse set of strategies: Any ESG fund will have to make trade-offs between, you know, E and S, or whatever; it will have to decide whether to buy shares in an electric car company that exploits workers or an oil company with a really diverse board of directors. If you disagree with a fund’s trade-offs, or its ranking system, you can always say “this isn’t real ESG, this is greenwashing.” To some extent ESG means “buy companies that you think are making the world better,” and if different people have different conceptions of what makes the world better then they will disagree about what ESG demands.”

Public Policy & Politics

The Rise of NATO in Africa by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“In 2001, NATO conducted an “out of area” military operation in Afghanistan, which lasted 20 years, and in 2011, NATO—at the urging of France—bombed Libya and overthrew its government. NATO military operations in Afghanistan and Libya were the prelude to discussions of a “Global NATO,” a project to use the NATO military alliance beyond its own charter obligations from the South China Sea to the Caribbean Sea.”

“The ignominy of Western—and NATO’s—follies, including arms deals with Morocco to deliver Western Sahara to the kingdom and diplomatic backing for Israel as it continues its apartheid treatment of Palestinians, bring into sharp contrast Western outrage at the events taking place in Ukraine.”

As Russia war rages on, US secretary of state declares China the “most serious long-term challenge” by Andre Damon (WSWS)

““Even as President Putin’s war continues, we will remain focused on the most serious long-term challenge to the international order—and that’s posed by the People’s Republic of China,” Blinken said. He continued, “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” “We will defend our interests against any threat,” Blinken said.”

The empire has spoken. Of course, what Blinken means is that China wants to reshape the international order from the singleminded stranglehold that the U.S. has on it.

“Blinken’s statement constitutes yet another embrace of the central foreign policy aim of the Trump administration: preparations for conflict with China. Notably, Blinken invoked the racist conspiracy theory developed by the Trump administration, that COVID-19 was a man-made virus, condemning China’s alleged efforts to block an “independent inquiry into COVID’s origin.””

“The unstated premise of Blinken’s remarks was the so-called “Wolfowitz doctrine,” the policy conception, first expressed in the 1992 US defense planning guidance, which pledged, “to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests, and also thereby to strengthen the barriers against the reemergence of a global threat to the interests of the U.S. and our allies.””

“The Washington Post, for its part, is demanding further escalation, condemning all of those seeking a peaceful settlement of the conflict. The Post approvingly quotes Boris Bondarev, a former Russian official now campaigning for an escalation of the US war, who declares, “You just can’t make peace now… If you do, it will be seen as a Russian victory… Only a total and clear defeat that is obvious to everyone will teach them.””

“These comments make clear that the United States is absolutely hostile to any peaceful settlement of the war. The aims of the conflict are to retake the Donbas and Crimea—Russia views the latter as its own territory.”

The Hollow Ideology of Putinism by Aleksandr Rybin (Russian Dissent)

“The Russian President and his loyal officials are happy with the amenities provided by the regime – official fiefdoms, the spoils of corruption and parasitism. They have no ambitions to create a magnificent edifice on a truly historic and public scale. Their special operation is of no historical significance.”

“Now the Kremlin and its propagandists are left to drape their special operation in giant pseudo-Soviet fabric, for they are at their wits’ end with what they have begun – from the very beginning the operation has developed in accordance with its own logic, fully contrary to the expectations and commands of its organizers.”

On the Perspectives of the Left by Roman Kunitsyn (Russian Dissent)

“It turns out that sanctions, by ruining the middle and petty bourgeoisie of the megacities, “wash away” the supporters of Western-type democracy, the supporters of the speedy cessation of hostilities, and only strengthen the regime. As a result of the sanctions, anti-Western, ultra-nationalist, militaristic, far-right sentiment in Russia will only strengthen. It would seem that the prospects for a “left turn” are not very inspiring…”

“Ordinary Russian people love the ideal of equality, so much so that they are ready to sacrifice even freedom for it. After all, under the rule of an autocratic tyrant, all are equal, and even though ordinary people could experience moral satisfaction seeing princes and boyars tremble before the tsar, how a peasant trembles before a tyrant landowner.”

“People, of course, rejoice not in the destruction and death from rockets and bombs, but in the fact that − as it seems to them! – the hated bourgeois oligarchs who pilfered public property in the era of privatization are finally somehow punished, and the arrogant West, which was so proud of the victory over the USSR in the Cold War, has finally received at least some rebuff.”

“It must also be said that, in fact, this applies not only to the Russian “deep people.” We see how ordinary French people from depressed small towns, where the positions of communists and socialists once were strong, vote for Marine Le Pen, how in the USA the inhabitants of the “rust belt,” contemptuously referred to as the middle class “white trash” and “rednecks” give back votes to Donald Trump, how in the hinterlands of Germany, which were once part of the German Democratic Republic, the far-right “Alternative für Deutschland” is winning.”

“As the economic crisis forces the authorities to reveal their true neoliberal face more and more, it will be discovered that they did not mean to expel all oligarchs, but only to satisfy the appetites of “their” oligarchs.”

“[…] the left parties are losing voters, the left ideas are ceasing to be the ideology of the masses and are turning into mental chewing gum for the post-Marxist snobs’ “salons.””

“And in the West, as in Russia, these new “Black Hundreds” are supported by people from the “deep people.” Those who eke out a miserable existence on welfare because the factories they worked in have stopped. Those who live in towns where life was once teeming back in the 70s, but since the halt of production, they have turned into slums. These new poor are despised by the wealthy in the big cities.”

“The ultra-rightists finally understand that the need for equality and justice has built to an explosive charge in the “new poor,” and they exploit it for their own purposes…”

Twenty-Two House Republicans Demand Accountability on Biden’s $40B War Spending by Glenn Greenwald (Scheer Post)

“All Senate Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), voted in favor, seemingly in direct contradiction to Sanders’ February 8 op-ed in The Guardian warning of the severe dangers of bipartisan escalation of the war. Efforts by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to delay passage of the bill so that some safeguards and accountability measures could be included regarding where the money was going and for what purposes it would be used were met with scorn, particularly from Paul’s fellow Kentucky GOP Senator, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who condemned Paul as an “isolationist.””

“[…] the relentlessly war-supporting CNN last month acknowledged that “the US has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry it has sent across the border into Ukraine.” Biden officials admitted the “risk that some of the shipments may ultimately end up in unexpected places.” About the heavy weaponry the Biden White House had originally said it wouldn’t send, only to change its mind, a senior official briefing reporters said: “I couldn’t tell you where they are in Ukraine and whether the Ukrainians are using them at this point.””

““The American people did not elect us to pour their hard-earned money into a conflict halfway around the world with little ability to track the end use of weapons or their effectiveness,” they argued.”

““the speed with which it moved through Congress, where the leaders of both parties raised few questions about how much money was being spent or what it would be used for, was striking, given the gridlock that has prevented domestic initiatives large and small from winning approval in recent years.””

“Speaking at the annual World Economic Forum on Monday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) explicitly rejected the desirability of a diplomatic solution, saying the only acceptable outcome is full military victory over Russia by Ukraine and the U.S.”

The Ukraine War’s Collateral Damage: Planet Earth by Michael Klare (Scheer Post)

“Thanks to Russia’s invasion and the harsh reaction it’s provoked in Washington and other Western capitals, “great-power competition” (as the Pentagon calls it) has overtaken all other considerations. Not only has diplomatic engagement between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing essentially ground to a halt, making international cooperation on climate change (or any other global concern) nearly impossible, but an all-too-militarized competition has been launched that’s unlikely to abate for years to come.”

“As President Biden declared in Poland on March 26th: “We [have] emerged anew in the great battle for freedom, a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” This will not be a short-term struggle, he assured his NATO allies. “We must commit now to be in this fight for the long haul. We must remain unified today and tomorrow and the day after and for the years and decades to come.””

Fuck your so-called rules-based order, you fucking bully. It’s autocracy vs. autocracy. It’s An empire quashing a rival. Nothing more. I despair at how many people buy this bullshit.

“[…] Biden, Putin, Xi, and high-ranking officials everywhere would undoubtedly insist that addressing climate change remains an important concern. But let’s face it, their number-one priority is now to mobilize their societies for a long-term struggle against their geopolitical rivals.”

“A discussion of Army planning puts it this way, for example: “The Army’s Modernization Strategy enables American land power dominance to meet the demands of great power competition and great power conflict, as demonstrated by evolving threats in the Indo-Pacific and European theaters.””

None of which is relevant for American security. The U.S. Army is protecting its empire, not securing its own defense. Don’t believe the bullshit.

“Sadly, however, it’s no longer conceivable that China, Russia, the U.S., and the countries of the European Union (EU) will be able to work in any faintly harmonious fashion toward that goal. Russia has already demonstrated its disinclination to talk with the West on such vital matters by sabotaging negotiations aimed at restoring the nuclear agreement with Iran. Given increasingly hostile relations between Beijing and Washington, don’t count on those two countries, the world’s leading emitters of carbon, to cooperate on anything significant either.”

I wonder what he means by this. The U.S. is—and largely has been—completely uninterested in good-faith negotiation with Iran. That was going nowhere because this State Department only accepts total capitulation and subservience. The negotiations were never between two nations. They were predicated on a pack of lies about Iran’s nuclear capabilities and ambitions. They’d been broken off again and again. The U.S. had escalated its demands again and again. If the U.S. weren’t so powerful, Iran would have told it to fuck off long ago. But, alas, no-one can realistically do that.

“Astonishingly, in 2020 that country supplied approximately 43% percent of the EU’s natural gas imports, 29% percent of its oil, and 54% of its coal. Now, thanks to the Russian invasion, the EU is seeking to reduce those percentages to zero. “We must become independent from Russian oil, coal, and gas,” declared Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU’s executive arm. “We simply cannot rely on a supplier who explicitly threatens us.””

Ushi is a fucking reckless criminal who will be the death of us all. And she doesn’t care. Thank goodness for the temperance of women in charge.

“Thanks to a March 25th agreement between the EU and the United States, for example, this country will be supplying 50 billion cubic meters of LNG to Europe annually by 2030 (about double the amount shipped in 2020). To do so, 10 or more new LNG export facilities will have to be constructed in the U.S. and a similar number of import terminals in Europe. Such projects will cumulatively cost hundreds of billions of dollars, while ensuring that natural gas continues to play a prominent role in European energy consumption (and U.S. energy extraction), potentially for decades to come.”

They. Don’t. Care.

They. Never. Have.

They care only about themselves.

“This means, of course, that those of us who still view global warming as the crucial priority face the most difficult of challenges. Yes, we can continue our protests and lobbying in support of vigorous climate-change action, knowing that our efforts will fall on remarkably deaf ears in Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and major European capitals or we can begin to contest the very idea that great-power competition itself should be accorded such a priority on a planet in such mortal danger.”

No Way Out but War by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old.”

“The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.”

“The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry. Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts.”

“These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality. No longer able to salvage their own society and economy, they seek to destroy those of their global competitors, especially Russia and China.”

“But fewer and fewer nations, even among European allies, are willing to be dominated by the United States. Washington’s veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its economic decline, with China’s manufacturing 70 percent higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible.”

I don’t know about Europe, Chris. Europe seems to be eminently comfortable nearly completely up America’s ass.

“A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class, and military families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service.”

“The political class is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses to accept the emergence of a multi-polar world and the palpable decline of American power. It speaks in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it has the right to impose its will as the leader of the “free world.””

“On February 19, 1998, on NBC’s “Today Show”, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version of this doctrine of unipolarity. “If we have to use force it is because we are Americans; we are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.””

Breathtaking. When the Chinese say something like this, it’s justly derided as claptrap. When the U.S. says it, the courtiers nod sagely.

“Noam Chomsky took some heat for pointing out, correctly, that Trump is the “one statesman” who has laid out a “sensible” proposition to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution included “facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe…in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation.””

Trump is wildly inconsistent, but he has consistently wanted to get rid of NATO.

“Trump is too unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the economic war against Venezuela and reinstituted crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which the Obama administration had ended. He increased the military budget. He apparently flirted with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” But he acknowledges a distaste for imperial mismanagement that resonates with the public, one that has every right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us into one war after another. Trump lies like he breathes. But so do they.”

“[…] the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.””

It has a kernel of truth and it resonates deeply.

“The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.”

America’s Role in the Syrian Civil War by Raghav Kaushik (CounterPunch)

“There has been some controversy over Noam Chomsky’s views on Syria. Since Chomsky has not had much to say about Syria, the controversy is befuddling. It appears to be based on quoting bits and pieces of interviews out of context, rather than an examination of his core arguments. As such, this interview is an attempt to capture Chomsky’s core views of American involvement in the Syrian civil war.”

Quoting Chomsky out of context is a big favorite of the liberal quasi-left. The quasi-right doesn’t quote him at all.

“A few notes about this interview. First, all serious commentators agree that the vast majority of the crimes in the civil war were committed by the Assad regime and its backers, principally Russia and Iran. This interview does not dwell on the above point.”

Um, ok? The interviewer has gone to a lot of effort to preface Chomskys remarks. Is he trying to keep me from reading further?

After reading further, this guy’s questions are as long as Chomskys answers. He’s looking to imbue his own views with Chomskys imprimatur. This is a pretty carefully structured and kind-of underhanded interview. You get page-long questions and then Chomsky’s comment that the argument is “interesting” or that he doesn’t disagree, but only because he’s completely unqualified to opine. That is unlikely to be the impression left in less-careful readers.

“As far as I recall, I once responded to the claim that the Russian-Iranian intervention was illegal by pointing out that it is not. That sentence is my total emphasis on the legality of what they did. The rest is bitter condemnation of their primary role in the horrendous atrocities. In response to tantrums about this correct statement, I have occasionally reiterated it.”

Christ what a poor guy Chomsky is to have to put up with this kind of fatuous reasoning. Something can be horrible and perfectly legal. Many things are. The laser-like focus on the crimes of official enemies while one’s own is a highly irritating and sanctimonious hypocrisy.

Cop Cars and Cash Machines by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“This is the nature of all forfeiture settlements when the “thing” seized isn’t fungible. If you want your seized car back, the offer will be to pay the government money for its return. Extortion? Of course. They kidnapped your car and demand money or you’ll never see your car again alive. Or you can go through the legal process, which will take years while your car languishes in a pound providing shelter for raccoons and junkyard dogs. Want to guess what condition your car will be in when you finally get it back? Want to guess what its value to you will be when it’s finally returned? Want to guess how you will get around during the years you don’t have a car? If you don’t want to guess, fork up the loot or you lose.”

“But the real difference here isn’t much of a difference at all. They’ve just stripped away the facade that forfeiture isn’t a money maker, and hence a money substitute for taxes for municipalities to use like an ATM. Sure, there are worse scenarios, such as when forfeitures inure directly to the benefit of the police departments, whether be using the cars seized or the proceeds going to the police retirement fund, albeit as a substitute for municipal contributions.”

Journalism & Media

Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now? by Matt Taibbi (Scheer Post)

“[…] the Clinton campaign created and fueled a successful, years-long campaign of official harassment and media fraud. They innovated an extraordinary trick, using government connections and press to generate real criminal and counterintelligence investigations of political enemies, mostly all based on what we now know to be self-generated nonsense.”

“The world has mostly moved on, since Russiagate was thirty or forty “current things” ago, but the public prosecution of the collusion theory was a daily preoccupation of national media for years. A substantial portion of the population believed the accusations, and expected the story would end with Donald Trump in jail or at least indicted, scrolling for a thousand straight days in desperate expectation of the promised justice.”

“We now know the initial public accusations that Trump “colluded” came more or less entirely from the Clinton campaign, based on information that was not just unreliable but fraudulent.”

“[…] disinformation is a real danger in the Internet age. The most dangerous variety, however, isn’t from random users in porn-like chats, but the kind exposed by the Clinton campaign. There’s just no defense against privately-generated fake news stories, commissioned by prominent politicians who in turn hand them to the corporate press, which then runs them with off-the-record nudges of encouragement from agencies like the FBI.”

Bush is Biden is Bush by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Propaganda demands Bush take a dive now. Not only did his recent honesty malfunction complicate messaging about the unique iniquity of Russian aggression, he’s a living reminder of the uncomfortable truth that he and Joe Biden have essentially merged to become the same president. Biden is just a less likable, more deranged version of Dubya, a political potted plant behind which authoritarians rule by witch hunt and moral mania, with Joe floating on a somehow even fatter cloud of media protection than Bush enjoyed after 9/11.”

“The one conspicuous stylistic difference is that this time, the loose-tongued, mentally absent executive signing off on sweeping secret surveillance programs gets a near-total pass from the press. The big difference between Bushisms and Bidenisms is the former were often endearing or unintentionally funny, while Biden is mostly just horrifying. His brain is like a cereal bowl in which the bits floating in milk occasionally touch and produce furious or incoherent exclamations: “immune to prostitute,” “I love those barrettes in her hair map,” “I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man,” “Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people,” and so on.”

Science & Nature

Practical Power Beaming gets real by Paul Jaffe (IEEE Spectrum)

“Guglielmo Marconi, who was Tesla’s contemporary, figured out how to use “Hertzian waves,” or electromagnetic waves, as we call them today, to send signals over long distances. And that advance brought with it the possibility of using the same kind of waves to carry energy from one place to another. This is, after all, how all the energy stored in wood, coal, oil, and natural gas originally got here: It was transmitted 150 million kilometers through space as electromagnetic waves—sunlight—most of it millions of years ago.”

“Wires also challenge electric utilities: These companies must take pains to boost the voltage they apply to their transmission cables to very high values to avoid dissipating most of the power along the way. And when it comes to powering public transportation, including electric trains and trams, wires need to be used in tandem with rolling or sliding contacts, which are troublesome to maintain, can spark, and in some settings will generate problematic contaminants.”

“For systems that use microwaves and millimeter waves, the transmitters typically employ solid-state electronic amplifiers and phased-array, parabolic, or metamaterial antennas. The receiver for microwaves or millimeter waves uses an array of elements called rectennas. This word, a portmanteau of rectifier and antenna, reflects how each element converts the electromagnetic waves into direct-current electricity.”

Art & Literature

Perhaps the Barriers to Entry for Creative Work Have Become Too Low by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)

“But there’s another dimension of this that I’ve thought about for awhile now: I fear that because it’s so easy to make something, now, people feel no pressure to make anything particularly ambitious. I worry that, now that the urge to create can be scratched by making a half-assed video in 10 minutes or by playing video games on Twitch for a couple hours, there’s no particular reason for people to dream bigger and invest more time, energy, and emotion into their work.”

“I think there’s potentially a broader element to the dynamic I’m describing here − the internet’s structures create incentives for us all to try and be mildly popular with a large group of people, to gently amuse a bunch of strangers who will never really care about us, and that’s contrary to my basic definition of human flourishing. But setting that aside, I really worry that we’re being deprived of a new generation of artists by the easier and less ambitious substitute of making TikToks, telling jokes on Twitter, photographing your lunch for Instagram, and making ponderous and unconvincing video essays for YouTube.”

Philosophy & Sociology

In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

“Many autistic people live great lives, enjoy the beneficial parts of their condition, and find it annoying or oppressive when psychiatrists keep trying to medicate them. Many other autistic people can’t live outside of institutions and constantly try to chew off their own body parts. A reasonable conclusion might be “the first group seem mild and should be left alone, the second group seem severe and probably need intensive treatment”, but it’s surprisingly hard to convince people of this.

“Calling some cases “mild” sounds trivializing. Calling other cases “severe” sounds stigmatizing. Whatever your criteria for a mild case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria, but says the condition ruined their life and you are dismissing their pain. Whatever your criteria for a severe case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria but is thriving and living their best life and accuses you of wanting to imprison them in a hospital 24-7.”

“People need personal mythologies. “I am a guy who works a McJob and is bad at it, and that is all I am” isn’t going to cut it psychologically. “I am a guy who works a McJob by day, but my hallucinations give me a higher level of insight into the problems of the world than all these people who are superficially more successful than I am” is just healthier, as long as it doesn’t get taken to a grandiose extreme.”

“The Hearing Voices people pat themselves on the back because they have interesting hallucinations and are more creative than everyone else. Freddie pats himself on the back because he has an uncompromising commitment to taking his psychiatric problems seriously, warts and all, and not glossing over the negative aspects. I pat myself on the back because I’m balanced and reasonable and empathetic to both sides. It’s really hard not to do the special snowflake thing in some way or other. Prudence consists of doing it in ways that don’t step on other people’s toes, wildly contradict reality, or make society worse off.”

“A friend read an article once about someone who moved to China for several years to learn to cook rare varieties of tofu. She became insanely jealous; she doesn’t especially like China or tofu, but she felt that if she’d done something like that, she could bank enough quirkiness points that she’d never have to cultivate another hobby again.”

“We can admit that you don’t need a “personality” beyond being responsible and compassionate. That if you’re good at your job and support your friends, you don’t also need to move to China and study rare varieties of tofu.”

“My starting point for any discussion of this, which I feel like it’s really hard for a well-informed and well-intentioned person to disagree with, is that at least some large subset of transgender people aren’t consciously faking it. That is, they genuinely have the experience of feeling like they are the other gender, they’ll be absolutely utterly miserable if forced to live life as their birth gender, and telling them “no, just snap out of it” will not work, at all.”

“lots of people start dieting because they want to be a ballerina or something, but the extreme dieting seems to flip a switch, the switch turns it biological, and you can’t make anorexics go back to healthy eating just by convincing them not to want to be a ballerina anymore”

“Some peer mental health counselors are among the best and most compassionate people I know. This is difficult and low-paid work, performed by people who may be struggling themselves, and yet they do amazing jobs and probably save a lot of lives in situations I can barely imagine having to operate in. Other peer mental health counselors suck. The arrogance of a doctor who’s read a lot of textbooks and journal articles about a condition can’t hold a candle to the arrogance of a peer who has overcome the condition themselves and thinks that means they know the One True Standardized Way everyone has to do this.”

“[…] why did he need a cure in a week anyway? He said he was an inspirational speaker on the topic “How I Overcame My Anxiety”, and he had a speech scheduled next week, but was too anxious to work on it. I think about this person often.”

“This forms a difficult and ethically-questionable tradeoff − how do you balance the patient’s own comfort with the comfort of the people around him who don’t want him being disruptive? Part of the role of psychosocial support is to give the patient an environment where people are willing to tolerate the occasional weird or disruptive thing, so that the compromise point on this tradeoff is more compassionate to the patient’s needs.”

“I think there’s room for the Hearing Voices movement and things like it in the mental health tent − as long as they don’t try to kick other people out of the tent and say their way is the one-size-fits-all solution for everyone.”

Is Everything Political? by Justin E.H. Smith (The Hinternet)

“I really don’t think the America I take to be “real” — founded on genocide and slavery; sustained by greater brute force and glossier propaganda than anything the second-tier global powers have been able to conjure; belovèd by me like an imperfect parent, only because it’s the place that shaped me, but in fact not one iota better or worse than any other empire in human history — is what Dan Ball had in mind when he chose that name for his show.”

“I acknowledge I do not know how, practically, to bring it about, yet typically neither these questionnaires nor the broader discursive culture in which they circulate is interested in the distinction between the world we would ideally like to see and the changes we are demanding post haste.”

“[…] the numbers of lives lost are staggering, while everything possible has been done to ensure that no individual death be processed ritualistically at all, that death be euphemized beyond recognition so that it appears as mere procedure, that there be no thought of that archaic and unfashionable category of sacrifice, with the result that death, or certain kinds of death, are rationalized within a mass-scale, streamlined, and barely perceptible system that feels so contemporary, so built into the landscape of modernity, that we have trouble cognizing it in any other way than as morally neutral.”

“The first part of this presumption in turn compels those who accept it either to explain any lingering bad things in the modern world as the result of some current injustice enacted by a small minority of the powerful, or to rationalize those same things to a point where they can plausibly be seen as morally neutral.”

“I would sincerely like whichever political system brings about the greatest amount of thriving and self-fulfillment for all people, but I sincerely have trouble convincing myself that I am in a position to know what that would be. It would surely involve significant economic redistribution, as the greatest injustices in the contemporary world are directly rooted in wealth disparities.”

“[…] any viable political strategy will be one that reassures the wimps, and those who for whatever other reasons are just not characterologically disposed to a life of political engagement (those who “just want to go to Applebee’s”, as Jason Brennan nicely puts it) that they have a bright future under the new regime too.”

“Nor did we need to await the era of Twitter to learn this lesson. Decades-old obfuscatory terms like “pro-life” and “pro-choice” are a vivid reminder that we did not need the internet to arrive at inane culture-war deadlocks; we were already there when the primary technology for sharing what passed as opinions was the bumper-sticker.”

“Whenever I see such auto-epithets, I think: Who cares who you think you are? You’re a nobody is who you are, to all but your parents and children and a few real friends if you’re lucky, and if you want to be something more than that to people who don’t know you yet, you’re going to have to articulate at least one coherent thought of your own, rather than simply getting on board with a key-word or two that the algorithm has delivered up to you. And even if you have come up with your views on your own, there’s simply something gauche in supposing that they are the appropriate material for an opening gambit with new acquaintances.”

“What starts as cringe becomes retro soon enough, and whatever is retro has value as documentation of a lost world. I realize this compels me to recognize that someday Marvel superhero movies will have value, just like, say, Ohio Express’s bubble-gum hit, “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy (I’ve Got Love in My Tummy)” (1968) does now. This pains me, but I grant it.”

“[…] as I argue in The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, that “reality” itself is now a satellite of social media. That is, whether you are speaking in a classroom or a courthouse, or whether you are writing a Tweet, the range of things you are able to say is increasingly being shaped by the algorithmic forces that have been honed within the attention-extractive and engagement-maximizing economy of Twitter, Facebook, &c. In this respect, whether you are “on social media” or not, you are on social media. The world is on social media.”

“Engagement with the arts is largely limited to questions of representation and rectitudinous messaging, questions that indeed have their natural home in politics, while political engagement, for its part, comes to look increasingly like the sort of boosterism that has its natural home in the fan-bases of popular entertainments.”

“[…] hope to see this change in the coming years, and when it does change I expect that it will be harder to mistake those of us who refuse to join fandoms of any sort for “conservatives”. There is a stratum of the human that is deeper than politics, and it is the calling of aesthetic education to help others to access it.”

“What I hate about Auto-Tune is that it is the musical equivalent of Marvel Comics movies: it is the sound of giving up on the art-form.”

Programming

The Surprising Truth About Pixels and Accessibility by Josh Comeau

“When picking between pixels and rems, here’s the question you should be asking yourself:”

“Should this value scale up as the user increases their browser’s default font size?”

“This question is the root of the mental model I use. If the value should increase with the default font size, I use rem. Otherwise, I use px.”

“We’re so used to thinking of media queries in terms of mobile/tablet/desktop, but I think it’s more helpful to think in terms of available space.

“A mobile user has less available space than a desktop user, and so we design layouts that are optimized for that amount of space. Similarly, when someone cranks up their default font size, they reduce the amount of available space, and so they should probably receive the same optimizations.”

“In general, we need to be really careful when setting fixed widths and heights.

“In the example above, setting width: 15rem will, in many cases, break mobile layouts, since it may produce a value too large for its container when the user cranks up their default font size!

“We can often mitigate this by clamping it to a maximum of 100%.

“Similarly, when it comes to heights, we often want to use min-height instead of height. This allows the container to grow as tall as it needs, in order to contain its children. This becomes important when a user scales up their font size, since the text will wind up wrapping onto more lines.”

Structuring, designing and publishing your API documentation (GOV.UK)

“The Technical Documentation Template allows you to publish documentation with a GOV.UK theme. It uses a static site generator called Middleman. The content can be written in HTML or Markdown and is stored as code, which allows it to be kept in version control systems such as Git. This industry approach in treating documentation as code is often referred to as ‘docs-as-code’”

“You should regularly test active API documentation, especially if you introduce any changes that affect how a user would consume the documentation or use your API. For example, you can ask them to complete common scenarios with your API and see if the instructions you have provided in the documentation help them to complete a task. By observing your users following your documented instructions, you can see whether your documentation is incomplete, unclear, or helping users effectively.”

Simple Software Things that are Actually Very Complicated by Ashley

“Apparently there’s a Canvas formatted text spec proposal which looks like it would also let us use the browser layout engine for wrapped text in a canvas − which would be great if all browsers supported it, and none have shipped it yet.”

“[…] it’s easy to look at mature, comprehensive pieces of software engineering and think it’s simple. That is because it is the pinnacle of success in software engineering to do a great deal of complicated work, and have it work so smoothly that people think it’s simple.”