Links and Notes for September 8th, 2023

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

The deepening COVID pandemic further exposes the reckless self-delusions of the Biden administration (WSWS)

“[…] despite the ongoing pandemic that continues to deepen, corporate America is ordering millions of workers back into the offices while hundreds of millions more have been at their workstations from the beginning of the pandemic. A significant majority, regardless of their symptoms, trudge to work despite their illness knowing their livelihood depends on their paycheck. One can surmise that sick leave as a policy has come to an end for all workers and this has essentially received Biden’s unstated endorsement.”

Economy & Finance

Should People be Happy About the Biden Economy? by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“Here also there were conservative members acting as a brake on virtually everything Biden put on the table. And, he lost even this slim majority in the 2022 election, although an additional Senate seat gave him a small amount of extra wiggle room.”

This is all true, but it suggests that Joe Biden is not conservative. There is nothing in the shape of the policies that he’s enacted that belies his prior fifty years in office. He’s proud of his police-state record. He’s a corporate whore, a grifter, and a malicious asshole. Always has been. Why do so many people suggest the opposite? Baker here seems to be pushing the line of thinking that just because the Republicans are batshit, the Democrats must be some sort of safe harbor to which sane people can flee.[3]

This is absolutely how they get you. They are absolutely just as disinterested in the fates of anyone making less than $400K per year as the Republicans, but they are just willing to lie about it more. Watching what their hands do, not what their mouths say.

“The unemployment rate, which stood at 6.3 percent when Biden took office, had fallen to 3.9 percent by the end of 2021, and has not gone over 4.0 percent since. This is the longest period where the unemployment rate has been below 4.0 percent in more than half a century.”

It’s so frustrating to have to constantly think that no-one seems to care what kind of jobs these are or how utterly gamed the statistics are. Dean Baker himself writes article after article about how there are six figures providing every month—and how everyone cites the absolutely most optimistic one available. And then he turns around and cites those same statistics as if there were nothing wrong with them, as if they are prime evidence of a booming economy for all.

“As a result of the ARP, the United States is the only major economy that is largely back to its pre-pandemic growth path. The U.S. also now has the lowest inflation rate of any of the G-7 economies.”

Congratulations, the U.S. excels the most at blowing smoke up its own ass. The rise benefits the rich the most. Really interesting to hear Baker paraphrasing Reagan’s “rising tide lifts all boats”, trickle-down bullshit.

“In spite of the inflation of 2021 and 2022, real wages for the average worker are higher than they were before the pandemic. And, there have been larger gains for those at the bottom, reversing roughly a quarter of the rise in wage inequality we saw over the last four decades.”

So, better than it was but still terrible? When do you celebrate? It will be reversed at a whim. There is no trust that it won’t be. Much of what he’s discussing has already expired.

“Tens of millions of people are now working from home, either entirely or partially, saving themselves hundreds of hours a year in commuting time, and thousands of dollars on work-related expenses. These savings in time and money do not show up in our data on real wages.”

True, but those people are also only twenty percent of the workforce (obviously the most important part of the workforce, ammirite?). Good for them, but I don’t see how the other eighty percent should celebrate gains that they have no way of enjoying. All the while, bringing their newly home-officed lords and master takeout and amazon orders. It’s a glorious class system made immanent, so what’s the problem, right, Dean?

“These are all extraordinarily positive developments for large segments of the population. There is no period since the late 1990s that could even come close to the progress made in the first two and a half years of the Biden administration.”

I’m afraid I really have a hard time believing this statement, even from Dean Baker. Is this happening despite the Democrats? How long-term viable are these gains? Are they equitable? Why would they be? Did something change in the power balance or basic morality of the U.S. political landscape that I missed? Is Biden such an incredible force that he singlehandedly dragged the U.S. upstream? Is that the argument?

“But on the whole, it is pretty hard not to see the overall picture as being overwhelmingly positive, especially considering that Biden had to deal with the disruptions created by multiple waves of Covid, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

Are you fucking kidding me? Baker is often absolutely blind politically, but this is a bit much, even for him. Is he aiming for a job at the New York Times? Does he need a gig on CNN? Is he just jumping on the “lesser evil” bandwagon 15 months early? Like, if Trump is super-bad, then Biden must be super-good? I don’t even know how to process this. He’s portraying poor Biden as having had to deal with a war when, in fact, he could have easily prevented it by not provoking it in the first place? Smoke the NYT’s ganja little more, Dean.

“[…] notably by modernizing the country’s power grid and setting up a system of charging stations for electric cars.”

What a fucking waste of money. Biden could have spent it on trains, but I suppose most American have given up on having anything other than a slightly less-polluting copy of the same terrible system that they already have. Biden is pouring money into this because all of his donors have ensured that he and his supporters will be handsomely rewarded for it. There is no change in the basic system.

But, apparently, the country’s infrastructure has been modernized. Funny, it didn’t feel like it, but maybe I was just hanging out in the poorer parts of the nation, where these amazing effects have failed to be felt—and where they will mostly likely never be felt because no one gives a shit about those places. They’ve got nothing to offer, so they get nothing from the Democrats. Hey, though, maybe Dean Baker knows better. New York City is flourishing, right?

“The second piece of legislation Biden got through Congress was the CHIPS Act , which appropriated $280 billion over the next five years (approximately 1.0 percent of the federal budget) for research and support for manufacturing of advanced semi-conductors in the United States.”

Yeah, good on Biden for subsidizing high-tech companies in the States. They had hardly and money or profits of their own to invest. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, it could turn out that TSMC isn’t going to build a packaging facility—and that the fab is behind schedule and can’t find the employees it needs.Money well spent, on the right people.

“It probably makes sense in any world to ensure that key components for the economy will be accessible in the event of a conflict with China, and given that Taiwan is our major supplier, this is a real concern.”

Again, the fact that it’s a real concern is because that conflict is being massively stoked and provoked by Biden, but go Biden, right Dean? How can this man be so politically tone-deaf? He’s lauding Biden for making a few hand-waving motions in the direction of fixing problems that he himself is causing—because his sponsors want more war and want to extend the American empire beyond its expiration date. Spending our money to solve a problem he’s causing. Bow before him in thanks.

“[…] positive story from an economic standpoint, although we should be asking more about ownership of this research than seems to be the case now.”

Nothing! The government funds everything! And owns nothing! It’s all in private hands. Stop being so naive. You know this, Dean. Do you need to believe that Biden is a good president and, thus, a viable candidate for a two-term president, so you just make shit up about how awesome he is? When you normally spend every article picking apart the massive giveaways? I can’t tell whether you got an LLM to write this article for you.

“we at last seem to be making good progress towards a green transition.”

No. We absolutely are not doing that. We are making good progress on spending other people’s money on our friends’ companies that are pretending to care about a green transition. But they don’t. No-one in that country gives a flying blue fuck about a green transition, not if it interferes in any way with easy ways of making money. The environment is nowhere on the list of priorities.

“We will be able to raise billions of dollars of tax revenue each year, just by monitoring what companies announce they are spending on buybacks. And, we don’t have to worry they will cheat. What will they do, lie to their shareholders?”

That seems spectacularly naive for companies that are international conglomerates. I can’t imagine they would have let it pass if they didn’t have a workaround. But, sure, let’s believe that the Biden administration—the Senator from ViSA, remember—has cracked the code and finally found a tax that will pass Wall Street and Congress and is super-easy to monitor and generate oodles of money. Pardon me for not believing it until I see it. We hear all the time about the U.S. turning a corner on some progressive measure until we realize that we’ve somehow been fooled again.

“[…] the corporate income tax, which currently averages around 13 percent of all profits,”

Does it really? That’s pitifully low but, at the same time, it also seems high, when the big guns are paying much, much less than that. Dean’s written about Walmart and Amazon—the nation’s two largest employers—paying essentially no taxes.

“With a growing body of evidence showing that a lack of competition has been important in raising profits at the expense of wages,”

Did we not already know this without collecting more evidence? Did we really need to use scientific experiments to learn that companies that claim that they couldn’t possibly pay higher salaries because they’re too busy paying billions in dividends and stock buybacks to all of their shareholders are bullshit?

“Biden’s appointees are committed to respecting workers’ rights to have a union, if they want one.”

It just isn’t allowed to help workers at the expense of employers. How do you ignore how the Biden administration crushed the railroad strike last year? The Biden administration does not give a shit about workers. Not. One. Bit. They care about ensuring profits for their crony international conglomerates, first and foremost. All you have to do is watch what happens when anyone threatens a strike: the Biden administration steps in to “help” by neutering all demands and using whatever legal means they can to force people to keep working without making any gains for themselves. Companies that shed billions in profits per year claim that they couldn’t possibly pay their employees cost-of-living increases—and the Biden administration nods enthusiastically and steps in to crack some skulls and bust some kneecaps until there’s a bloody signature on yet another capitulatory deal where the workers walk away with far too little and their management-heavy union and the company’s board of directors walk away grinning like Cheshire Cats.

“[…] when we have clear evidence of the much greater efficiency of this sort of tax, we will be able to move quickly down that road. The Republicans, and many Democrats, will do everything they can to prevent corporations from paying more tax, but when we have them defending pure waste, we are fighting them on favorable turf.”

Again, so unbelievably naive. People don’t want companies to pay taxes enough that they’ll elect people to enforce it. The opposite happens. He’s arguing that we have “favorable turf” because … why? Because the Democrats and Republicans are afraid of looking like corporate stooges? When has that every stopped them? There are no alternatives. It doesn’t matter who gets elected—companies don’t pay even close to enough taxes. Occasionally, someone will pass something that makes it look a bit better, to keep the savages at bay. But then a giant thing like the Trump (or the Clinton, or the Bush, or the Obama) tax cut eats up all of the gained ground anyway.

Baker’s argument amounts to celebrating a field goal by the losing team when the score was already 721 – 0. What the hell are we celebrating? Are we turning this thing around? Give me a break.

“I would say the same about Biden, but he is doing it in a context where he enjoys a far more tentative majority than Roosevelt faced. And, he clearly is not the same sort of charismatic figure as Roosevelt. But all in all, he is doing a damn good job.”

Biden: better than Roosevelt. Hard to accept, Dean. Roosevelt apparently had it easy compared to poor Biden. Jesus. That country really has lost the ability to wish for anything but a slightly less bloody beating. Honestly, just bend over and grab your ankles—and be effusively thankful when you get a drop of vaseline.

Public Policy & Politics

For Slovakia’s Left, Welfare Spending and Nationalism Make an Awkward Match by Jakub Bokes (Jacobin)

“Smer fulfilled its manifesto promise to reform the labor code, reinstating some of the labor protections abolished by Dzurinda’s government. During this time, Smer also tried, unsuccessfully, to regulate retail food prices, an unprecedented move in the post-communist period, and banned private health insurers from paying out dividends to shareholders.”

“With an outright parliamentary majority, Smer raised the minimum wage, reintroduced a progressive income tax, and introduced free train transport for students and pensioners, among other measures.”

“Fico has recently described the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war between the United States and Russia, calling on NATO and the EU to immediately de-escalate and push for peace negotiations. Ukraine, he said, should receive security guarantees from both Russia and NATO and become a buffer zone between East and West.”

“Smer’s electoral base is different from that of its sister parties in Europe. Instead of trying to mobilize the support of young voters disillusioned with neoliberalism and sympathetic to left-wing ideas, Smer’s base is composed mainly of pensioners and low-income workers in the country’s poorer regions.”

The Passion of Imran Khan and the Price of Aggressive Neutrality by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Not only had he refused to get involved in the NATO-Putin proxy war over Ukraine, but he had also strengthened ties with his neighbors in China and refused to offer the US military access to Pakistani bases as they fled their twenty-year clusterfuck with his other neighbors in Afghanistan. This is why America has slashed its military aid to Pakistan by hundreds of millions of dollars since Khan took power, sending a clear message to the Pakistani Military elites that America does not tolerate friends who refuse to share our enemies without reservation.”

“Dicks like Imran Khan and Sukarno don’t deserve such loyalty and their willingness to sell it out has been well recorded. But this is bigger than the egos of powerful mavericks or even the empires that they chafe. This is about poor people who are sick and fucking tired of being caught between the rich and their stupid fucking wars. Why should Pakistan get involved in the Donbass any more than Ukraine should get involved in Kashmir?”

Our Collective Trauma is the Road to Tyranny by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“The core traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt — are celebrated. The virtues of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice, are belittled, neglected and crushed. The professions that sustain community, such as teaching, manual labor, the arts, journalism and nursing, are underpaid and overworked. The professions that exploit, such as those in high finance, Big Pharma, Big Oil and information technology, are lavished with prestige, money and power.”

“It makes us confuse our desires, often artificially implanted by the consumer society, with our needs.”

“We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.””

““We are not content with negative obedience, not even with the most abject submission,” George Orwell wrote of the ruling “Inner Party” in his novel “1984.” “When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.””

While Canadians Struggle, the Liberal Government Is Focusing on Messaging by David Moscrop (Jacobin)

“Canada’s housing crisis is off the charts, and half the country lives paycheck to paycheck. In a classic show of disconnect, some Trudeau Liberals think the party’s greatest problem is that people don’t understand how fabulous a job they’re actually doing.”

This sounds exactly like the complaint that Dean Baker was making about Biden and the Democrats: that people aren’t appreciative enough of how awesome they’ve made the economy. Baker isn’t ordinarily the kind of guy to be completely blind to the way the economy seems to be working awesomely for at most 20% of the population—but also mostly NYT readers and their friends.

Destroy Democracy To Save It by Ted Rall

Ted Rall 9-18-23

Or We Could Campaign by Ted Rall

Ted Rall 9-20-23

Colorado Lawsuit’s Strategy for Keeping Trump Off Ballot Is Starting to Spread by Marjorie Cohn (Scheer Post)

This gleeful horseshit where people are delighted that they’ve found some old clause of some document seems to kind of maybe apply to Donald Trump if you take all of the allegations at face value—while reveling in the fact that the article you’ve found applies without a conviction, so you don’t have to bother with the pesky interference of a justice system—has got to stop. They don’t realize that their fervor in preventing what they deem to be the greatest threat to democracy ends up making them do things or support things or say things that make them actually a much-greater one. Your job is to stop Donald Trump from being elected by finding an alternative that people find more appealing, not by shoving a turd sandwich in their mouths and ordering them to chew. What the fuck, people? You’re perfectly happy doing something so anti-democratic in order to get your way and claim that you’re “protecting democracy”. Shut up and sit down while the adults are talking.

Donald Trump Should be on the Ballot and Should Lose by Steven Calabresi (Reason)

“[…] the University of Pennsylvania Law Review law review article by William Baude and Michael Paulsen, The Sweep and Force of Section Three, which argues that former President Trump is disqualified from running again for President.  A draft law review article taking issue with Baude and Paulsen, co-written by Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tilman, entitled Sweeping and Forcing the President into Section 3: A Response to William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen makes a good case that what happened on January 6, 2021 was not an “insurrection” and that the Baude/Paulsen reading of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is wrong.  I think Josh Blackman and Seth Tillman are more likely right than not. At a minimum, this is a very muddled area of constitutional law, and it would set a bad precedent for American politics to not list a former president’s name on election ballots given the confused state of the law surrounding Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Donald Trump’s Politics of the Berserk by Damon Linker (Persuasion)

“[…] short of a medical event that requires him to bow out of the race, the twice-impeached, serially indicted former president Donald Trump, who has led the field by a wide margin for over a year and is currently ahead by 43 points, is going to win the Republican presidential nomination by a mile.”

Journalism & Media

Bad Faith and Blank Checks by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Self-deception of the kind I describe is one of two forces sustaining the malpractice of journalism on the newsroom floor. It would be difficult to overstate its power. Breathe fetid air long enough and you have no notion of a spring breeze. I have never met a journalist in the condition of bad faith capable of recognizing what he has done to himself in the course of his professional life — his alienation, the artifice of which he and his work are made. Self-illusioning is a totality in the consciousness.”

“The Brass Check is a condemnation of the power of capital to corrupt the press and Sinclair judged it to corrupt absolutely. “Not hyperbolically and contemptuously, but literally and with scientific precision,” he wrote contemptuously, “we define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.””

“There is vastly more at stake in the misconduct of American journalists today than there was in Sinclair’s time. America has since made itself a global power. It is all the more remarkable to ponder the extent to which the information war that weighs decisively on so many momentous global events is sustained by editors and correspondents whose primary concerns are their everyday material desires — houses, cars, evenings out, holidays.”

“Robert Parry, a refugee from the mainstream when he founded Consortium News in 1995, put this point as well as anyone ever has when, 20 years later, he accepted the Neiman Foundation’s I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence . “To me the core responsibility of a journalist is to have an open mind toward information, to have no agenda, to have no preferred outcome,” he said on that occasion. He then added the summation I quoted earlier: “In other words, I don’t care what the truth is. I just care what the truth is.””

“We can no longer read The New York Times , and by extension the rest of the corporate press, to learn of events, to know what happened. We read the Times to know what we are supposed to think happened. Then we go in search of accurate accounts of what happened. Do not take this as an indulgence of cynical wit. The observation arises out of numerous cases wherein this unfortunate reality has proven so.”

“[…] there is simply no ground to expect mainstream media to reclaim the independence they long ago surrendered to the national security state — not under present circumstances. I detect only faint signs of debate among these media on this question, the most decisive they face, for they refuse, as they did during and after the Cold War, to recognize the errors, the dysfunction.”

“Every journalist now practicing faces a choice none was ever trained to confront. “If journalism is anything,” John Pilger said in a television appearance as I wrote this chapter, “you are an agent of people, not power.””

How the Media Turns Migrants Into Monsters by Lara-Nour Walton (Scheer Post)

“today it is virtually impossible for Americans to accept migrants as human when the news persistently degrades, brutalizes, and distorts their image. But not to accept them as such is to deny them their “human reality,” their “human weight and complexity.” It’s not a fictional caravan of monstrous migrants we should beware of; it’s the monster-makers in U.S. media.”

Art & Literature

Lunar Caustic by Justin Smith-Ruiu & Nicéphore Niépce (Hinternet)

“The nearby mountain known as Cerro Rico was to become, by the end of that century, the source of well over half of the global silver trade, which profoundly transformed the modern world economy. With the constant traffic of galleons between Acapulco and Manila, soon enough over thirty percent of Potosí’s silver was to end up in the reserves of the Yuan Dynasty in China, a mass-scale interhemispheric transfer of wealth whose consequences are still being felt today.”

I can’t tell if this is true, but it’s very interesting if it is. It seems like it might be, according to the article on Potosí (Wikipedia).

I’d never heard of Bashkortostan (Wikipedia), but it was mentioned. Again, I thought it might be made up, but it’s apparently,

“[…] a republic of Russia located between the Volga and the Ural Mountains in Eastern Europe. It covers 143,600 square kilometres (55,400 square miles) and has a population of 4 million. It is the seventh-most populous federal subject in Russia and the most populous republic.[13] Its capital and largest city is Ufa.”

Piracy and Morality by robot_cook (Reddit)

This is an interesting take: when capitalism keeps stealing access to culture from the poor, the only moral thing to do is to steal it back.

Philosophy & Sociology

Identity politics is a game the left can’t win by Fredrik deBoer (Boston Globe)

“Though the United States is the most economically powerful country on earth, public polling reveals a country full of people who feel economically insecure, who can’t cover the cost of minor emergencies, who think the economy and the country are headed in the wrong direction. Even when majorities respond to such polls positively, the existence of large minorities who are underpaid, unsatisfied, or afraid can be used to stoke the basic human desire for fairness.”

And yet, this same author has a more recent post talking about much better everything is now than before because of the easy, cheap access to stuff like… *checks notes*… flying to Tokyo or having a Korean place near you in the burbs. People can literally not keep their thoughts straight. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Technology

Connected cars are a “privacy nightmare,” Mozilla Foundation says by Jonathan M. Gitlin (Ars Technica)

“Eighty-four percent of the brands they analyzed said they can share your data, and 76 percent said they can sell it. And more than half say they’ll share data with the government and law enforcement by request.”

“Our main concern is that we can’t tell whether any of the cars encrypt all of the personal information that sits on the car.”

“[…] there’s virtually no choice out there—I’m not sure of a single new car on sale in 2023 in the US that doesn’t contain an embedded modem, and such equipment is now mandated by law in the European Union for emergency services.”

HeyGen translation test by Jon Finger (YouTube)

I’m better at German and it was “tadellos”. The French sounded very accurate to me as well. The flow was good in both languages.

Programming

Horizontal and vertical complexity by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse)

“Wrapping up code this way reduces horizontal complexity in that it makes the top level program shorter and quicker. But it increases vertical complexity because there are now more layers of function calling, more layers of interface to understand, and more hidden magic behavior. When something breaks, your worries aren’t limited to understanding what is wrong with your code. You also have to wonder about what the library call is doing.”

“There is always a tradeoff. Leaky abstractions can increase the vertical complexity by more than they decrease the horizontal complexity. Better-designed abstractions can achieve real wins.

“It’s a hard, hard problem. That’s why they pay us the big bucks.”

“[…] adding code and interfaces and libraries to software has an obvious benefit: look how much smaller the top-level code has become! But the cost, that the software is 0.0002% more complex, is harder to see. So you keep moving in the same direction, constantly improving the software architecture, until one day you wake up and realize that it is unmaintainable. You are baffled. What could have gone wrong?

“Kent Beck says, “design isn’t free”.”