Links and Notes for January 20th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

COVID-19

COVID claimed more Australian lives in first three weeks of 2023 than all of 2020 by Oscar Grenfell (WSWS)

“In the first three weeks of the new year Australia has recorded 1,059 official COVID deaths, with weekly tallies of 271, 408 and 380. Under conditions where any attempt to monitor transmission has been dismantled, and a myriad of barriers have been placed in the way of people seeking a test, the grim fatality figures are a more accurate indicator of the state of the pandemic than the official infection statistics.

“The 1,059 deaths in some 21 days are substantially greater than the 909 fatalities reported in the entirety of 2020, the first year of the pandemic. In the whole of 2021, there were 1,330 COVID deaths.”

Economy & Finance

China’s growth rate falls as population declines by Nick Beams (WSWS)

““Some people say that China is pursuing a planned economy, but this is fundamentally impossible: Chinese people will not walk this path,” he said.”

Every country has a planned economy. It’s more a question of who are you planning it for?

“As the Chinese government tries to navigate the present, increasingly complex international economic environment, there are also long-term factors at work. These militate against any return to the high growth levels of the past, which have played a central role in the maintenance of global expansion over the past three decades.”

Good. Fuck growth.

“The period of high Chinese growth—sometimes reaching levels approaching 10 percent per annum—was based on the continued inflow of workers from the countryside into the cities. The regime itself recognised more than a decade ago this policy could not continue and has sought to increasingly base Chinese growth on the development of more advanced technologies to increase productivity.

“However, this strategy has now hit a major obstacle in the form of the US drive to cripple Chinese technological advance with a series of widening restrictions, because it fears China’s advance will further undermine its own global economic position.”

“[…] claiming it is possible to provide a prosperous future by integrating the country into the framework of world capitalism under the fraudulent banner of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

“This perspective has increasingly run up against “capitalism with imperialistic characteristics” in the form of the US drive to reduce China to a semi-colonial status, if necessary through war.”

“Zero-COVID in China ultimately collapsed because it was a national policy trying to deal with a global problem. The perspective of a national economic rise of China is equally constrained by global forces.”

Hintergrund: Denkfehler „Dollarhegemonie“ by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Viel wichtiger wäre es, in diesem Kontext endlich die Dominanz der USA bei den Finanzstrukturen zur Sprache zu bringen. Denn dass die US-Behörden de facto andere Staaten vom Welthandel abschneiden können, da sie über das SWIFT-System in Belgien und Clearing-Plattformen in New York gehen, ist an sich schon bemerkenswert und kritikwürdig – und dabei spielt es dann auch keine Rolle, ob diese Staaten nun ihre Rechnungen in Dollar, Euro, Rubel oder in sambischen Kwachas bezahlen.”

In 16 Years, the Fed Has Approved 4,506 Bank Mergers and Denied One by Pam and Russ Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“At the end of 1999, the year that President Bill Clinton’s Wall Street-friendly administration repealed the 66-year old Glass-Steagall Act – ushering in an era where Wall Street’s trading casinos could buy federally-insured banks – the number of federally-insured banks and savings institutions has collapsed from a total of 10,220 to 4,746 as of September 30, 2022 according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. That’s a startling decline of 54 percent in banking competition.”

“According to the September 30, 2022 report from the Federal Reserve, just four banks own $9.1 trillion in assets, or 39 percent of the total $23.6 trillion in assets owned by all 4,746 federally-insured banks and savings associations in the country.”

How the Fed Redistributed Wealth and Encouraged Reckless Corporate Behavior by Brian Doherty (Reason)

“The Fed’s allegedly crisis-ameliorating methods were complex, but the essential animating idea was simple: Create more money. From 2008 to 2011, the central bank conjured up as much new money as had entered the U.S. economy in the previous century, a 96,000 percent increase. The Fed’s “balance sheet”—a measure of the financial instruments it owns, which it buys from a select group of Wall Street institutions, thereby expanding the money supply—grew by $1.35 trillion over just a few months in 2008, more than doubling the cash value of its assets. From 2007 to 2017, the Fed nearly quintupled its balance sheet.”

“A McKinsey Global Institute analysis concluded that Fed policy “created a subsidy for corporate borrowers worth about $310 billion between 2007 and 2012 alone,” Leonard notes, while in the same period “households that tried to save money were penalized about $360 billion through lost earnings on interest rates” and “pension funds and insurance funds lost about $270 billion.””

Public Policy & Politics

The FBI and Personal Liberty by Andrew Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“Those of us who monitor the government’s destruction of personal liberties have been warning for a generation that government spying is rampant in the U.S., and the feds regularly engage in it as part of law enforcement’s well-known antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. Last week, the FBI admitted as much.”

“How can Congress, which is itself a creature of the Constitution, change standards established by the Constitution? Answer: It cannot legally or constitutionally do so. But it did so nevertheless.”

That’s not necessarily true, though, is it? Congress absolutely can, but with a constitutional amendment. Congress would pass those. Don’t overdo it, Napolitano.

“Fast forward to the weeks after 9/11 when, with no serious debate, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. In addition to permitting one federal agent to authorize another to search private records – contrary to the Fourth Amendment – it also removed the wall between law enforcement and spying.”

“Last week, the FBI admitted that it intentionally uses the CIA and the NSA to spy on Americans about whom the FBI is interested, but as to whom it has neither probable cause of crime nor even articulable suspicion of criminal behavior.”

“The NSA is required to go to the FISA Court when it wants to spy. We know that this, too, is a charade, as the NSA regularly captures every keystroke triggered on every mobile device and desktop computer in the US, 24/7, without warrants.”

War in Ukraine: When International Laws Collide by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“On the question of NATO expansion, the US cites the principle of the free and sovereign right of states to choose their own security alignments. At the same time, Russia cites the principle of the indivisibility of security: the assurance that the security of one state should not be bought at the expense of the security of another. Both principles are enshrined in international law and in international agreements. Both are legitimate, but the two are contradictory. Hence the conflict.”

“Russia holds that peace can be attained by a balance of powers in which the interests of all nations are respected. A hegemon cannot ensure its security while ignoring the security interests of another country. The US holds that the spread of a system of trade and democracy, with the US as the hegemon, will create a common sphere where peace can be preserved. The US argument implies that that spread cannot be a threat to other states.”

“In a December 30, 2021 essay, Russian ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov wrote that “Military exploration of Ukraine by NATO member states is an existential threat for Russia. . . . The principle of equal and indivisible security must be restored. This means that no single state has the right to strengthen its security at the expense of others.””

“On September 27, referendums on joining Russia in the Donbas republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts were completed. Citing the UN Charter’s principle of the territorial integrity of existing states, the US rejected the referendums; citing the UN Charter’s principle of people’s right of self-determination, Russia recognized them.”

What about Palestine? The Kurds? Will Russia recognize them as well? Or is this is a one-shot thing involving the people within what they consider to be their sphere of influence?

“Falk told me that “the practice of states and the UN is inconsistent, being driven more by power and geopolitical priorities than law, morality, and the UN.””

“Lavrov again argued that the principle of territorial integrity needs to be consistent with, and balanced by, the principle of self-determination. He argued that the 1970 UN Declaration “seals the duty of states to respect the territorial integrity of states” on the condition that they are “conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples… and thus possessed of a government representing the whole people belonging to the territory.””

Mass protests against Israel’s far-right government: A harbinger of revolutionary struggle by Chris Marsden (WSWS)

“The new government is dragging Israel into the blackest forms of political reaction, including war against the Palestinians. It does so under conditions where Israel is a social and political powder keg and the entire Middle East has been destabilised by the deepening global economic crisis, the pandemic and US-led plans to widen the war against Russia in Ukraine into open hostilities against Russia’s regional ally, Iran, with Israel as its chief attack dog.”

“Conversely, the protests are a powerful refutation of the central tenet of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign, which treats all Israelis as if they share responsibility for the crimes of their government.

“The Zionist project of establishing a Jewish state through the violent dispossession of the Arab population has led inexorably to the creation of an apartheid-style regime built on mass repression.”

So confusing. Did the boycott work against South Africa? How does something like that differ from sanctions? They’re sanctions, right? Do you have to trim them so that luxuries are affected, but no staples?

The climate change protests at Lützerath and the reactionary face of Germany’s Greens by Peter Schwarz (WSWS)

“The transformation of the Greens into a war and law-and-order party that suppresses environmental protests in the interests of energy companies cannot be explained by commonplaces such as “power corrupts.” It raises fundamental questions of perspective and class orientation. It shows that the climate crisis—like all the major social problems of the 21st century—can only be solved by a socialist transformation of society.”

“the new head of state of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, took up this slogan. He declared the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle obsolete, dismissed “capitalism” and “imperialism” as propaganda terms, hived off state property to private individuals and threw himself at the imperialist powers in the name of solving “questions of humanity.”

“But class struggle and imperialism did not disappear. They returned with a vengeance. The major Western powers, led by the US, lost all restraints and waged wars over oil, markets and power, destroying entire societies in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere.”

“The Greens’ war fever now borders on madness. They are ready to conduct the war against Russia to the last Ukrainian soldier. Today they send tanks, tomorrow the German army. The heirs of the 1968 protest movement, which rebelled against old Nazis at the universities, in the judiciary, administration and business, march today in the footsteps of Hitler against Moscow.”

Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic by Billy Perrigo (Time Magazine)

“[…] the working conditions of data labelers reveal a darker part of that picture: that for all its glamor, AI often relies on hidden human labor in the Global South that can often be damaging and exploitative. These invisible workers remain on the margins even as their work contributes to billion-dollar industries.”

“The contracts stated that OpenAI would pay an hourly rate of $12.50 to Sama for the work, which was between six and nine times the amount Sama employees on the project were taking home per hour. Agents, the most junior data labelers who made up the majority of the three teams, were paid a basic salary of 21,000 Kenyan shillings ($170) per month, according to three Sama employees.”

“But the need for humans to label data for AI systems remains, at least for now. “They’re impressive, but ChatGPT and other generative models are not magic – they rely on massive supply chains of human labor and scraped data, much of which is unattributed and used without consent,” Andrew Strait, an AI ethicist, recently wrote on Twitter. “These are serious, foundational problems that I do not see OpenAI addressing.””

The Border is a Ponzi Scheme by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“[…] these people aren’t rushing the ramparts of the world’s biggest police state because they’re just jonesing for our superior brand name of freedom. They are fleeing for their fucking lives from the flaming shitholes that our superior brand name of freedom has reduced their homelands into after we failed to outsource it by the barrel of an M-60. The top four nationalities currently seeking refuge at the southern border are Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians. The first three in that bunch were actually doing relatively fine by post-colonial standards until we chained their countries up in strangling economic sanctions and kicked them into the bottomless well of human misery that tends to come with that sort of economic terrorism and Haiti has been fucked over so many times by Uncle Sam that we all lost count about a century ago. These people are refugees of American violence flocking to the land where all their wealth is being hoarded by a bunch of lazy fucking gringos with sharing issues.”

Is America Ready for a Multipolar World? by Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (YouTube)

It’s a very interesting discussion of about 110 total minutes over two panels (with a 10-minute break in between). The answer is “no.”

Lee Camp & Jingjing Li: You're Being Lied To About China by Behind the Headlines (YouTube)

At 23:35, Fred M’membe of Ghana’s socialist party says,

“China has never sponsored a coup in any African country. Can the western countries say the same? Who is our enemy? Who is our friend? Who is the imperial power over us? Is it China? The answer is a categorical no.

“[…]

“They think we can never have a relationship of equality with anybody else. And also there’s a racist attitude in this. Do they think we Africans are fools who everybody should dominate the way they dominated us for over 500, 600 years? The Chinese should only come to dominate us? They [the west] don’t see their domination of us as domination, as something wrong, but they see our association with the Chinese as domination, imperial domination. Let them remove this racist attitude, this racist arrogance. And they started to see us as human beings, deserving their respect, deserving their compassion. We have dignity. We have human dignity that deserves respect.”

Another statesman from Zambia asked, “Does the west think that we don’t know what imperialism feels like? That we don’t know when we’re being colonized? What do they take us for?”

Roaming Charges: The Ugliest Thing in America by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“We rarely consider the after-effects of prolonged war, the misery and death that continue to plague ravaged countries long after the cruise missiles have stopped shattering buildings. Let’s return to Iraq for a moment. In a much overlooked (if not ignored) study (‘Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009’) of 4,800 individuals in the heavily bombed city of Fallujah published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, medical investigators documented a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancers in kids under the age of 14. The survey also detected a 10-fold increase in female breast cancer and large increases in both lymphoma and brain tumors in adults. Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukemia. By comparison, survivors of the Hiroshima atomic blast experienced a 17-fold increase in leukemia.”

Journalism & Media

Traveling While White by Rafia Zakaria (The Baffler)

“France is also a busy place where white travel influencers on TikTok are concerned. The account “francesurvivalguide” is run by another white and blonde woman. Here again is a story of triumph with travel. “Francesurvivalguide” left her stateside life to be with her French boyfriend. She bought an old house in the countryside, which turned out to be a nightmare that ended with a breakup.”

AIs will be writing these soon, if they’re not already writing them. You can just generate these bullshit posts for nothing and glean and sell attention. They’re already mostly fake; just go whole-hog and make it totally fake, with generated graphics, people, text.

“Collectively this smattering of white women travel influencers present a problem. In pretending that jet travel, and lots of it, is ennobling they create a new genre of virtue signaling that is smugly uncritical of the injustices of who gets to travel and why.”

“The problem with what these women (and scores like them) are putting out is that it presents a warped version of the world and of the freedoms that it offers. The assumption is that tourist travel is a morally unproblematic form of exercising feminist freedoms rather than a racially limited commodity for the wealthiest with no real concern for our burning, flooding, and withering planet.”

“[…] spending weeks traveling while unemployed, and buying homes in the South of France are not acts of courage or bravery; they are the indulgent and privileged pastimes of the wealthy.”

Walking Back the Russian Troll Scare by Caitlin Johnstone (Scheer Post)

“The Pulitzers are mostly just a bunch of empire propagandists giving each other trophies for being good at empire propaganda.

“A journalist with real integrity would spurn the approval of the media class. It would nauseate and repel them, because it would mean you’ve been aligning yourself with the most powerful empire in history and the propaganda machine which greases its wheels.”

Human Resources by Anna Ochkina (Russian Dissent)

“It sneakily follows from this advertisement that small pensions are not the result of a failed social policy, but merely a trademark of Russia, a mark of which one can even be proud. True, this mark is only carried by some, the same ones who offer to send children to war in order to avoid poverty. That poverty is a creation of the Russian government, just as much as is the war that it has started and is losing. This massacre stubbornly continues, with the help of an army composed, by the logic of the video, of mostly desperate losers.”

“The country which, according to official propaganda, is waging an unequal battle with all the world’s evil for justice and the happiness of all peoples, seems to even boast of the poverty of its citizens. Moreover, the state is ready to use the hopelessness of that poverty as a valuable means of mobilizing for its “holy wars.” The poor, incidentally, are a renewable, almost inexhaustable resource thanks to our state’s unwillingness to fight poverty.”

“We have to admit that many people going to this war today have such motives. The motivation to help the family, to get out of financial difficulties, or to get rid of suffocating debts is much more common than the heroic desire to die for the Motherland.”

“Many opposition telegram channels have begun to resent the narrowness of the lower classes, who will send children to war for a cheap car and sausages. Of course, a state that tries to cash in on the despair of its citizens, without hiding it, even boasting of its ingenuity, disgusts me more than oppositional thinkers who are indignant at a narrow-minded and selfish people. But after reading these lamentations, it still began to seem to me that the opposition, which despises its people for the coarseness of feelings caused by poverty, and the government, which seeks to cash in on the desperation of the poor, deserve each other.”

Art & Literature

Missed Calls by Rafia Zakaria (The Believer)

“Late at night, after everyone had gone to sleep, I would sneak into my father’s study, unplug the phone, unscrew the plastic plug, and fold in the wires so it would appear to be plugged in when it wasn’t. It was only then that I could go downstairs into the darkened formal sitting room and call him without worrying that my parents would awaken, pick up the extension, and overhear our conversation.”

Francine by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“In conversation he appeared quite taken with the the new theory that it is Gotland, and not the Holy Land nor any far-flung Ararat, that is as they say the vagina nationum, the matronly sheath from which all peoples primordially emerged, and shot from there as arrows throughout the globe.”

“I have found a single large wooden malle to contain the telltale items whose appurtenance to the philosopher call into question somewhat his favored depiction of himself as a proud and resolute novator, for whom there are no powers in this world of bodies other than those explicable by the mass, figure, and motion of dull corpuscles.”

“[…] of a viable homunculus, understood not simply as a counterfeit human being, but as a human being in the full and proper sense, except that it is generated by artifice rather than by nature.”

Philosophy & Sociology

What Lies Ahead? by Slavoj Žižek (Jacobin)

“[…] the future is causally produced by our acts in the past, while the way we act is determined by our anticipation of the future and our reaction to this anticipation. We should first perceive the catastrophe as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities (“If we were to do that and that, the catastrophe we are in now would not have occurred!”) on which we can act today.”

The philistine war on AI art by Justin E. H. Smith (UnHerd)

“Philistines go in for photorealist painting; they imagine it testifies to “progress” in representation since the time of the Dutch Masters, since its lines are sharper, its objects come across on the canvas as more like objects the way we find them in “the real world” (that is, the world mediated by the physics of light and by the physiology of vision, which ordinarily we scarcely understand, or even think about, instead taking the affordances of our sense of sight to be straightforward reports of external reality itself). But of course what photorealist paintings actually resemble are photographs, and in this respect to learn to paint the world photorealistically is to create machine-aided paintings, where the machine is, namely, the camera.”

“I am confident in predicting that we will have AI art. In this art there will be occasional flashes of genius, or something like it, against a general background of cultural overproduction of shit. This has also been the general balance throughout the history of photography, television, and cinema. The most significant change with the rise of AI comes with the human relinquishing of control over the pre-set parameters.”

“I’m not looking forward to any of this. I am going to stick with my vintage technologies, and my aesthetic orientation will remain forever backward-looking. But even less than the new era of AI art am I looking forward to the inevitable wave of renewed debate around the inane and empty question of whether this new variety of culture-embedded and technology-dependent activity ought to count as art. It’s like asking whether a hamburger can count as breakfast. There is no ontological rift between breakfast and lunch; breakfast is what we say it is, and if you feel like your 8am burger is not doing it for you, this tells you something only about your expectations, and not about the world.

“There is similarly no ontological divide separating artworks from “the commonplace”. Art tends to emerge at the sites of social value, of care. If we think AI art is a bad idea, then we might slow its ascendancy by grounding our care in other spheres of human life than those shaped by cutting-edge technologies. But this is almost certainly not going to happen.”

Remote Work Shifts Costs From Management Onto Employees by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)

“[…] democracy requires that we think of other people than ourselves, including and especially people who we would never consciously choose to spend time with. We need to understand ourselves in a context with strangers, as part of a polis. This is especially true for people with progressive political sympathies; to build support for social safety net programs, voters need to have a sense of the common humanity of people they don’t already know and care about. All of this also says depressing things about the average person’s feelings toward their fellow man. And I really don’t know how single people hook up or fall in love these days in anything like a traditional and organic way.”

“I think it would behoove remote workers, even enthusiastic remote workers, to think a little more critically about what they’re giving up, and what they’re now paying for themselves. If nothing else, you might want to try and negotiate to get some of your expenses paid.”

Remember Rich Uncle Pennybags by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)

“When you think politically, apply the inverse of Gandhi’s famous dictum: think of the most privileged person you have ever seen, and ask if your next act will be of any threat to him. I call this the Rich Uncle Pennybags test, after the guy from Monopoly. The question is, does your next proposed political action hurt Rich Uncle Pennybags? Does it threaten his station at all? Could it meaningfully reduce his advantage? I’m not saying everything that you do has to pass the test. I’m not saying that there aren’t meaningful, constructive types of political engagement that fail the test. But I am saying that a left-wing movement that devotes most of its time, effort, and attention to actions that fail the test risks no longer being a left-wing movement at all. I’m saying that a left wing that constantly fails the Rich Uncle Pennybags test is precisely the kind of left-wing movement that establishment power would prefer to face − a movement about symbolism over substance, about the individual rather than the masses, about elevating minorities in the ranks of a corrupt system rather than ending that corruption, about personal antipathy rather than structural reality.”

Technology

Why we all need subtitles now by Vox (YouTube)

This is a nearly 11-minute video that explains really well how terrible sound has gotten outside of theaters. Down-mixing changes the sound—Dolby Atmos has 128 channels—from the theater to Dolby 7.1, Dolby 5.1, Sstereo, or even mono.

Programming

Igalia: the Open Source Powerhouse You’ve Never Heard of by Mary Branscombe (The New Stack)

““We helped unblock container queries, which was the number one ask in CSS forever,” Kardell told us. “We unblocked has(), which is now in two browsers.” The has() selector had been in the CSS spec since the late 1990s and was also a top request from developers, but it was a complex proposal and so browser makers were concerned it would affect performance.”

“Maps, blob databases and Google Docs all use Canvas and the way Canvas blocked the main thread, so everything else in the browser was interrupted while you pan or zoom, might be bearable on a high-end device, but was a significant problem for performance on resource-constrained embedded devices. Fixing that improves the experience for everyone.”

““Why couldn’t a million developers democratically decide ‘this is worth a dollar’ and if you collected a million dollars in funding, then you could do a million dollars’ worth of work and that’s amazing.””

What the hell is Forth? (blog dot information dash superhighway dot net)

“But the inventor of Forth, Chuck Moore, literally said, in 1999: “I remain adamant that local variables are not only useless, they are harmful.” In the Forth philosophy, needing to use local variables is a sign that you have not simplified the problem enough; that you should restructure things so that the meaning is clear without them.”

“Forth syntax is, with a few exceptions, radically, stupefyingly simple: Everything that’s not whitespace is a word. Once the interpreter has found a word, it looks it up in the global dictionary, and if it has an entry, it executes it. If it doesn’t have an entry, the interpreter tries to parse it as a number; if that works, it pushes that number on the stack. If it’s not a number either, it prints out an error and pushes on.

“Oops, I meant to describe the syntax but instead I wrote down the entire interpreter semantics, because it fits in three sentences.”

“The compiler/interpreter itself is usually, in some way, written in Forth. It turns out that you can discard virtually every creature comfort of modern programming and still end up with a useful language that is extensible in whatever direction you choose to put effort into.

“Forth enters that rarefied pantheon of languages where the interpreter is, like, half a page of code, written in itself.”

“It is done this way because it turns out that if you add the ability to mark a word as “always interpret, even in compile mode”, you have added the ability to extend the compiler in arbitrary ways.”

“The lesson that implementing abstractions as directly as possible enables you to more easily change them is a useful one. And the experience of succeeding in building a programming environment from scratch on an underpowered computer in a couple of weeks is something I will bring with me to other stalled projects – you can sit down for a couple of hours, radically simplify, make progress, and learn.”