Links and Notes for September 22nd, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

Economy & Finance

Why Taxation Is Not Theft by Thomas Wells in June 2022 (3 Quarks Daily)

“[…] taxation is a device for solving collective action problems and thus allowing us (by coercing us) to meet our moral obligations to ourselves and each other – including our obligations to respect each others’ property rights. One can’t coherently be in favour of enforcing property rights, e.g. by having a police force and judges to catch and punish thieves, without also being in favour of a sustainable system for funding that enforcement.”

“[…] if I own a piece of land do I also own the part of the river that runs through it? Do I also own (some of) the fish in it? Do I also own the copper underneath it? If I mine the copper and kill the fish, do I owe people downstream compensation for killing ‘their’ fish? If I rent the land to someone else and they invest in agricultural improvements, who should get what share of the increased yield? If I go bankrupt who should decide which creditors get what share of my land and other assets? And so on.”

“[…] suppose it is generally agreed that all children should have access to a good quality education regardless of their parents’ ability to pay, or suppose it is generally agreed that a new waste water treatment plant is needed. The practical problem is that however good an idea it may be from the perspective of the whole society to build these public/club goods, from the perspective of individual members of that society it is an even better idea to avoid paying your share of its costs.”

“The main technology we have developed for this is government, including the power of taxation to compel people to make the required contributions (and hence achieve outcome 2). This is a power of coercion but it is not theft, since it consists in forcing people to live up to the implications of their moral obligations to other people. If you accept the goal, then by implication you already accept the means required to achieve it.”

“[…] anyone who really believes in private property that no one may take from you without your consent must also believe that the government can take property from people without their consent, at the very least for the project of institutionalising property rights. Far from being in conflict with each other, taxation turns out to be a practical requirement for the existence of property rights.”

Amazon to hire 250,000 new US workers, increase average starting pay to $20.50 by Alex Findijs (WSWS)

“Amazon’s incredibly high turnover rate of 150 percent per year, driven by infamous working conditions where workers are pushed to the point of exhaustion by electronic monitoring, has produced a situation where many new hires do not stay longer than 90 days and the company struggles to retain workers every year.”

“A report by Engadget in 2022 found that high turnover rates were costing Amazon $8 billion a year. By investing a few billion in raising starting pay, Amazon hopes to increase retention and cut down on the cost that poor employee retention has on its profit margin, which was still a considerable $33.36 billion in 2021.”

“[…] turnover among UPS part-timers is extremely high, with only a small minority lasting five years or more at the company. They have very little opportunity to move up to full-time jobs, with many waiting years or even decades before a position opens up. The new contract pledges UPS to “create” a pathetic 7,500 new full-time jobs over five years.”

“In other words, the supposedly “historic” pay increases in the UPS contract in reality only keep pace with market forces, which are driving up labor costs for many low-wage employers across the country. In fact, the contract helps to limit UPS’ exposure to the tightening labor market by freezing the starting rate at $21 per hour for four years, finally increasing to $23 per hour in the last year of the contract.”

Public Policy & Politics

The dismantling of democracy in India will affect the whole world by Arundhati Roy (Scroll.in)

“But now the time for warning is over. We are in a different phase of history. As a writer, I can only hope that my writing will bear witness to this very dark chapter that is unfolding in my country’s life. And hopefully, the work of others like myself lives on, it will be known that not all of us agreed with what was happening.”

“At the time, much of India, including corporate India recoiled in horror at the open slaughter and mass rape of Muslims that was staged on the streets of Gujarat’s towns and villages by vigilante Hindu mobs seeking “revenge”. Gautam Adani stood by Modi. With a small group of Gujarati industrialists he set up a new platform of businessmen. They denounced Modi’s critics and supported him as he launched a new political career as “Hindu Hriday Samrat”, the Emperor of Hindu Hearts. So was born what is known as the Gujarat Model of “development”: violent Hindu nationalism underwritten by serious corporate money.”

“In the nine years of Modi’s tenure, Adani became the world’s richest man. His wealth grew from $8 billion to $137 billion. In 2022 alone, he made $72 billion, which is more than the combined earnings of the world’s next nine billionaires put together. The Adani Group now controls a dozen shipping ports that account for the movement of 30% of India’s freight, seven airports that handle 23% of India’s airline passengers, and warehouses that collectively hold 30% of India’s grain. It owns and operates power plants that are the biggest generators of the country’s private electricity.”

“Just as Adani stood by Modi in his time of need, the Modi government has stood by Adani and has refused to answer a single question raised by members of the opposition in Parliament, going so far as to expunge their speeches from the parliament record.”

“Seventy three per cent of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1%, while 670 million Indians who comprise the poorest half of the population saw only a 1% increase in their wealth. While India is recognised as an economic power with a huge market, most of its population lives in crushing poverty.”

“In July Modi travelled to the US on a State visit and to France as the Chief Guest on Bastille Day. Can you even begin to believe that? Macron and Biden fawned over him in the most embarrassing manner, knowing full well that this would be spun into pure campaign gold for the 2024 general elections in which Modi will stand for a third term. There is nothing they would not have known about the man they are embracing.”

They know. They don’t care, at best. They are all criminals. The world governments are a network of criminal enterprises, not unlike organized crime families.

“India now ranks at 161 out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index, that many of the best Indian journalists have been hounded out of the mainstream media and that journalists could soon be subjected to a censorial regulatory regime in which a government-appointed body will have the power to decide whether media reports and commentary about the government are fake or misleading. And the new IT law that is designed to shut down dissent on social media.”

“They would have known about how the Delhi police forced grievously injured young Muslim men who were lying on the street to sing the Indian National Anthem while they prodded and kicked them. One of them died subsequently.”

“[…] under Modi’s watch, the state of Manipur in the India’s North East has descended into a barbaric civil war. A form of ethnic cleansing has taken place.”

“[…] the world’s powers choose to give Modi all the oxygen he needs to destroy the social fabric and burn India down. To me, this is a form of racism. They claim to be democrats, but they are racists. They don’t believe their professed “values” should apply to non-white countries. It’s an old story of course.”

“[…] if they imagine that the dismantling of democracy in India is not going to affect the whole world, they must indeed be delusional.”

“In Manipur where a civil war rages, the police, which is entirely partisan, handed two women over to a mob to be paraded naked through a village and then gang-raped. One of them watched her young brother being murdered before her eyes. Women who belong to the same community as the rapists have stood by the rapists and have even incited their men to rape.”

“I have just watched a chilling little video filmed in a classroom of a small school. The teacher makes a Muslim child stand by her desk and asks the rest of the students, Hindu boys, to come up one by one and slap him. She admonishes those who haven’t hit him hard enough.”

“What’s happening in India is not that loose variety of internet fascism. It’s the real thing. We have become Nazis. Not just our leaders, not just our TV channels and newspapers, but vast sections of our population too. Large numbers among the Indian Hindu population who live in the US and Europe and South Africa support the fascists politically as well as materially. For the sake of our souls, and for those of our children and our children’s children, we must stand up.”

“There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honourable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors that I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less ‘successful’ in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled. The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead.”

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.””

The Question about Biden by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“I take pleasure, not at all perverse, in watching Joesph R. Biden, Jr. and those around him panic as the bill comes due for all those years of conniving with Ukrainian crooks and as the unforgivable folly of the war he started is now everywhere understood, even among those who continue in public to pretend otherwise. It is not yet possible to discern just how our burbling president will go down, but go down he will. Of this we can now be certain. The time of comeuppance is near.”

“Fresh from a ruling that the Biden regime unlawfully coerced social media platforms to censor content, it now intends to lean on mainstream media to provide purposely unbalanced coverage of the impeachment inquiry in defense of the president.”

“[…] those defending Biden won’t win this way, either, in my estimation. Once again, mainstream Democrats and mainstream media manifest their fatal flaw: They are forever overestimating the stupidity of Americans — with the exception, of course, of liberals who think what they are told to think and see events as they are told to see them.”

In fairness, so do most Republicans. People cite FOX News all the time, without even barely noticing that they’re doing so.

“At this point the Biden regime’s charge into the war against Russia starts to look as reckless as the Light Brigade’s in Crimea all those years ago. This war is unwinnable, as Scott Ritter and various other military commentators have asserted. Realizing this, too many people are no longer on for the do-or-die bit and have begun to reason why.”

That is a deep, deep cut. Referencing Tennyson’s poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade: “Their’s not to reason why, Their’s not to make reply, Their’s but to do and die”.

“The Ukrainian president, clearly in desperation, suggested that Ukrainian refugees in Europe, who number in the millions, might resort to violence if the West withdrew its military support from the Kiev regime. As Glenn Greenwald put it in one of his System Update segments, the shockingly crude Zelensky may as well have said, “Give me your money or I will shoot you.””

“The follow-on question is very simple and very large. Does Zelensky have enough on Biden to get whatever he wants — the HIMARS rocket systems, the howitzers, the tanks and APCs, the F–16s, the scores of billions of dollars, much of which Biden’s people know full well is black-marketed or embezzled? It is time to ask this question, immense in its implications as it is.”

This Spanish city has been restricting cars for 24 years. Here’s what we can learn from it by David Zipper (Fast Company)

“Mayor Fernandez Lores was unmoved. “It’s not my duty as mayor to make sure you have a parking spot,” he said at a 2020 conference. “For me, it’s the same as if you bought a cow, or a refrigerator, and then asked me where you’re going to put them.””

“In Barcelona and Berlin, newly elected city leaders have rolled back the lower speed limits and car-free streets introduced by predecessors. A few weeks ago, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his opposition to London’s low-traffic neighborhoods, declaring “I am on motorists’ side.” But the longevity of Fernandez Lores’ tenure as mayor of Pontevedra—24 years and counting—shows that voters can reward leaders who free their city from an automotive stranglehold. Fernandez Lores told me that he is now the longest-serving large-city mayor in all of Spain.”

“That may be Pontevedra’s greatest lesson of all: Once residents experience life in a car-free city, most of them seem to like it. A lot.”

Adam Curtis Talks to Jacobin About Russia, Oligarchs, and the Fall of the USSR by Taylor C. Noakes (Jacobin)

“As one Russian journalist said to me, London now does feel a bit like Moscow in 1988. My primary goal was to tell the story, but I also wanted to convey that disenchantment with democracy can have its roots in corruption. And there’s quite a lot of corruption in Britain, Canada, and the United States, especially since 2008. I still don’t think we got our heads around what quantitative easing was about, which essentially entailed a massive wealth transfer to a tiny elite, creating what is now known as the “asset class.””

“I think we may look back at the last ten to twelve years and say that the rise of the “asset class” was as powerfully significant as the rise of the oligarchs in Russia from about 1992 onward. They’re not the same, it’s not the same kind of society or the same kind of corruption, but it is the same extraordinary transfer of power and wealth to a tiny elite. I don’t think we’ve got our heads around that yet.”

He’s right. It’s not the same. It’s worse. There’s more to steal. I don’t think we can wrap our heads around how much they’re stealing, every day. We don’t know what billions even are. We think shoplifting by poor people is a capital offense, but they shrug their shoulders at wage theft, which is 1000 times worse.

“[…] the person in charge of creating that democracy overnight, a man by the name of Yegor Gaidar, came out of the technocratic establishment under the Soviet plan. I think he was trying to bring democracy to Russia in a “rational” way, and it was completely mad. He thought that if you got the right things in the right place it would work just like a machine. But as I’ve shown, it was ruthlessly exploited by the oligarchs for their own advantage, and it led to a total and utter, cataclysmic, disaster.”

Exploited? Encouraged, then exploited? With corruption and a complete lack of scruples, you never know. I don’t really buy most these “good intentions, but bad outcomes” stories. There’s almost always at least a kernel—if not much more—of personal interest that leads to the outcome. At best, the person has utterly convinced themselves that a decision made in a way that is personally lucrative is also fortuitously the moral thing to do.

“It is extraordinary that politicians seem unable to stop the corruption — we all know it’s happening and they know that we know it’s happening. And they know that we know that they don’t know what to do about it. It’s absurd.”

I don’t think its extraordinary. I think it’s absolutely ordinary. It’s not true that corruption exists despite the politicians. It exists because of them. Politicians are in on it. They don’t stop it because don’t or can’t make them stop. I think it’s extraordinary that someone who’s made as many documentaries as Adam Curtis can still describe the world through a lens of “how can we stop these poor politicians from being corrupted despite their best intentions?”

“We all know it’s happening. We know the politicians don’t know what to do about it, but none of us have any idea of what an alternative solution would be.”

Dude, your prime minister is Rishi Sunak and you’re mystified about why he’s not part of the solution? He’s the main problem, a massive force of corruption and greed. We know the solution. It’s just not really possible to implement because the biggest part of the problem—capitalism and our fetishization of wealth and power, regardless of how it was acquired—will actively prevent us from replacing it.

“[…] somehow it became a way of avoiding having to face the fact that none of us, whether it’s Donald Trump or nice liberals, have any idea of how to create an alternative, fair, and just society that would work. We have a lot of dreams, but we know we don’t know what to do. And we know that those in power don’t know what to do.”

No. Wrong. Those in power are not interested in fixing anything because they are doing just swimmingly. There’s nothing to fix, in their eyes. How can you be so dense? There are people who know what to do, but, as I noted above, the system we have will actively resist being eliminated. Arundhati Roy knows what we need to do. It’s Utopic and perhaps Quixotic, but it’s a plan.

“While outside the theater they [the politicians] were locked in too, money and assets were moved in vast quantities into the hands of a tiny elite, and they did nothing to stop it.”

They ARE the elites. They are deeply corrupted.

“Everyone performs. The politicians perform as politicians, but they’re shit and everyone knows they’re not going to do anything. Some of us perform as indignant, outraged liberals, but we know in our heart of hearts that it’s not going to have any effect. The Right does its pantomime culture war thing, but it’s all just performance inside the theater. What we seem to lack is the ability to leave the theater and understand what’s going on outside its walls.”

This seems to be his thesis statement. I think he’s trying to excuse himself for not trying harder to fix it. I don’t think the problem is that we don’t know what to do to make things better for more people and to stop building systems that enrich only a tiny elite. I think I know what we could do better. I don’t know how to put it in motion or to get people on board because they seem to fragment as soon as they think that they might be part of that tiny elite. The problem is that people don’t really have scruples. They just don’t want to be on the bottom. I know what we should do, but I don’t know how to get us to do it.

Hell, I don’t think we can ever get people to stop pushing buttons in trains or elevators that are clearly already lit up and engaged. I don’t take elevators very often at all, but I can imagine that people push those lit-up buttons for all they’re worth—just to make it go faster. That’s what people do in trains to get the doors to open—push buttons that clearly indicate that the doors are going to open as soon as possible anyway. Click, click, click, click.

These are the same people we have to convince not to want things that would be taken away from other people. If they think they can be part of the elite pirate group, then they’ll absolutely do that. If they think that they’re not in the elites, then they’ll be against them—until they think they’re either in the elites or they could be. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist. The greatest trick the elites ever pulled was convincing their slaves that they, too, are in the elite already.

Wärmepumpedesaster mit Ansage by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Für die deutschen Wärmepumpenhersteller ist dieses Abwarten jedoch fatal. Ihre Geräte sind nämlich meist teurer als die der ostasiatischen Konkurrenz. Die kann von Skaleneffekten profitieren, die sich vor allem aus der technischen Nähe von Wärmepumpen und Klimaanlagen ergibt – bei denen sind die Hersteller aus Südkorea und Japan Weltmarktführer und chinesische Hersteller steigern Jahr für Jahr ihre Marktanteile.”

“[…] so wird sich der Sanitärbetrieb vor Ort weigern, ein preiswertes chinesisches Produkt einzubauen, für das seine Monteure nicht geschult sind und für das er im Fall eines Defekts weder über Expertise noch über eine zuverlässige Ersatzteillogistik verfügt.”

“Die Einzigen, die diesen Vorschlag vehement ablehnen würden, sind die Profiteure des jetzigen Systems – die Energiekonzerne, die Energiehändler und der Bundesfinanzminister, der sich mit den Steuern und Abgaben zurzeit sprichwörtlich dumm und dämlich verdient.”

“Die Grünen verfolgen die Ideologie, nicht über niedrige, sondern über hohe Preise das Verhalten zu steuern. Nicht Belohnung für erwünschtes, sondern Bestrafung für unerwünschtes Verhalten ist hier die Devise. Für die FDP wiederum ist der – bei näherer Betrachtung alles andere als – freie Markt eine heilige Kuh. Die Bepreisung eines kompletten Energieträgers von den Marktmechanismen zu entkoppeln, wäre für sie ein Sakrileg.”

Psychosis and its Consequences by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Poverty levels, including child poverty, are rising swiftly, as is credit-card debt. Inflation, although down from its peak, has chewed up what wage gains working class Americans have achieved since Biden came to office, and the official inflation rate is a chisel in any case, as it does not include energy and food costs. The administration is doing absolutely nothing as private equity firms buy houses—neighborhoods, indeed—at a rate that is destroying communities and provoking a housing crisis that starts to look like the early 1930s.”

Is Patrick Lawrence just failing to be as optimistic about the data as Dean Baker? Who’s right here?

“Kamala Harris is a liberal deplorable too far. Threaten Americans with a Harris presidency and Republicans could run Donald Trump’s masseuse and win. Democrats simply cannot be this far out of touch with reality. But I had better be careful: I could be wrong and they are.”

“I do not see how the Democrats can win unless Biden steps aside and takes Harris with him, and this seems a political impossibility. Ready or not, here’s my take: Democratic denialism is well on the way to making Trump the strongest candidate in the field. But then we have to wonder how far the liberal authoritarians will go to prevent any such outcome. My guess is a very long way.”

Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan Nightmare by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias.”

“Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel — the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing.”

“History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.”

“Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S.”

“GDP per capita declined by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while it could have increased by 68 percent if the economy had followed its pre-conflict trend,” the report says. “This suggests that Libya’s income per capita could have been 118 percent higher without the conflict.”

“The misery and carnage, which rippled out from a dismembered Libya, was unleashed in the name of democratization, nation-building, promoting the rule of law and human rights. The pretext for the assault was that Gaddafi was about to launch a military operation to massacre civilians in Benghazi where rebellious forces had seized power. It had as much substance as the charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, another example of utopian social engineering that left over a million Iraqi dead and millions more driven from their homes.”

“Gaddafi — who I interviewed for two hours in April 1995 near the gutted remains of his home that was bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986 — and Hussein were targeted not because of what they did to their own people, although both could be brutal. They were targeted because their nations had large oil reserves and were independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.”

“The American experiment, built on slavery, began with a genocidal campaign against Native Americans that was exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. The narratives we tell ourselves about World War II, largely to justify our right to intervene around the globe, are a lie. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the German army long before we landed at Normandy. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The war in the South Pacific, where one of my uncles fought, was bestial, characterized by rabid racism, mutilation, torture and the routine execution of prisoners. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were egregious war crimes. The U.S. routinely destroys democracies that nationalize U.S. and European corporations as in Chile, Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with repressive military regimes. Washington supported the genocides in Guatemala and East Timor. It embraces the crime of preemptive war. There is little in our history to justify the claim of unique American virtues.”

“The creed of humanitarian intervention is selective. Compassion is extended to “ worthy ” victims while “unworthy” victims are ignored. Military intervention is good for Iraqis, Afghans or Libyans, but not for Palestinians or Yemenis. Human rights are supposedly sacrosanct when discussing Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, but irrelevant in our offshore penal colonies, the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza or our drone-infested war zones. The persecution of dissidents and journalists is a crime in China or Russia, but not when the targets are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.”

Bernie Sanders to UAW Rally: “We Refuse to Live in an Oligarchy” by Bernie Sanders (Jacobin)

“There is a reason why a recent Gallup poll had 75 percent of Americans supporting the UAW. They are sick and tired of an economy in which the rich get richer while working families struggle and the most desperate sleep out on the streets. What this struggle is about here in the Midwest is a demand that we finally have an economy that works for all of us, not just a few.”

“[…] despite a massive increase in worker productivity in the automobile industry and in every sector of our economy, despite the fact that CEOs now make four hundred times what their average worker makes, despite record-breaking corporate profits, despite corporate America spending hundreds of billions on dividends and stock paybacks, the average American worker today is worse off than he or she was fifty years ago.”

Is Bernie right? Or is Dean Baker? Their opinions seem to differ about how awesome the economy is going. Baker thinks that people are better off now, but I’m not sure if he means relative to the truly shitty times of the Great Recession—or that, relative to fifty years ago, Baker would also be forced to admit that workers have not at all benefitted from productivity gains. I think he would, quite easily. His story seems to be more that the economy isn’t doing worse than it was two years ago, and wants to emphasize that—so that people will vote for Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump. I think electoral politics drives people crazy.

“[…] you’ve got three people on top owning more wealth than the bottom half of American society.”

“I would like to say a word to the CEOs of General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis: understand the enormous financial sacrifices your workers have made over the years. It is time for you to end your greed. It is time for you to treat your employees with the respect and dignity they deserve. It is time to sit down and negotiate a fair contract.”

Make it voluntary and it won’t happen. These people don’t care about anyone but themselves. Given the choice between maximizing profit and taking care of as many people as possible, they will take the first choice every time.

“what the UAW is fighting for is not radical. In the first half of 2023, the Big Three automakers made $21 billion in profits, up 80 percent from the same time last year. In other words, they’re doing pretty good. Over the past decade, the Big Three made $250 billion in profits in North America alone. Last year, these companies spent $9 billion — not to improve the lives of their workers, but to pay for stock buybacks and dividends to make their wealthy stockholders even richer.”

“Brothers and sisters, enough is enough. Let us stand together to end corporate greed. Let us stand together to rebuild the disappearing middle class. Let us create an economy that works for all, not just the 1 percent. And let us all — every American in every state in this country — stand with the UAW.”

Othello and the War by Victor Grossman (ConterPunch)

“However, the offensive was successful. George H. W. Bush could announce: “For over 40 years, the United States led the West in the struggle against Communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values. … The Soviet Union itself is no more. This is a victory for democracy and freedom…””

What an incredible statement. Such hubris.

“[…] after politely thanking Mikhail Gorbachev “for his intellect, vision and courage” in helping to make this victory possible, US favor switched to the man who used tanks against the elected Duma so as to throw Gorbachov out and seize power. Bush made future principles clear: “We have been heartened and encouraged by President Yeltsin’s commitment to democratic values and free-market principles, and we look forward to working with him.””

Just noise. About as useful as any statement from an American elite politician.

“In March 2016 the expert Australian journalist John Pilger warned that nuclear warhead spending “rose higher under Obama than under any other American president… In the last 18 months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two, led by the USA, is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.”

“Putin is no angel, no hero, not an Othello. Nevertheless, I believe that [Putin] is primarily motivated by the wish to defend Russia against encirclement, suffocation followed by subservience or dismemberment – the fate of an insubordinate Yugoslavia not so long ago. Perhaps he keeps in mind the fates of men who defied Washington’s drive for world hegemony: the heart attack of Milošević in a prison cell, the death of Allende, the torture and dissolving in acid of Patrice Lumumba, the castration and public hanging of Afghanistan’s Najibullah, the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the murder and oceanic body disposal of Osama bin Laden, the sodomy killing of Muammar Gaddafi.”

Poverty Just Jumped. It Was No Accident. by Lakeisha McVey (CounterPunch)

“People can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get an education, and work multiple jobs. But in the face of rising prices, low wages, high rents, and a broken healthcare system, it’s often not enough. Without a safety net and a level playing field for families, financial security is often out of reach.”

“We Are Making History Today, Baby”: Scenes From the First Day of the UAW Strike by Keith Brower Brown, Luis Feliz Leon, Jane Slaughter (Jacobin)

““What really gets me is how the news talks like we get $60 or $70 an hour,” Forschim said on the line. “None of us make that! We get $32 an hour if we’re lucky. New temps get $16 an hour and no raises, no vacation, no sick days. It’s hard to live like that.””

“Millwright Dave Briseno is at the top of the pay scale, with a skilled job and twenty-four years in, but he still thinks pensions for the second-tier workers are a top issue. “A pension is a big deal,” Briseno said. “In the past, people came here for a career. The new guys don’t see it that way: ‘I can get a job at Walmart.’”

Tragic how browbeaten the younger generations are.

How Nancy Pelosi Used “Feminism” to Play the “Isolationist” Right by Nicky Reid in June 2022 (Exile in Happy Valley)

“You see, dearest motherfuckers, this is the problem I have with the Gloria Steinem School of Second Wave Feminism. The whole idea of success is predicated on women rising to the top of a tower of bones built by centuries of institutionalized heterosexist chauvinism. The result is women like Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Nancy Pelosi, who are supposed to inspire women like me by leading an empire just like the ass-grabbing barbarians they replaced or rather just joined on their mountaintop of fractured skulls and filthy money.”

“[…] the only thing the far-right hates more than mouthy women is the Chinese who they blame for everything from cattle mutilation to hemorrhoids.”

“Say what you will about that smug little trust-fund baby [Tucker Carlson], he’s a heinously xenophobic white nationalist pig fucker who treats terrified transgender children like bowling pins, but he’s also tragically the most consistently antiwar personality on cable news since MSNBC shit-canned Phil Donahue for politely opposing the Iraq War.”

“Just like Putin, Xi is a revanchist prick but he’s not wrong to consider his next-door neighbor a renegade province under these circumstances and he’s not paranoid to be pissed off at the US for running naval drills with nuclear death machines off China’s coastline in concert with this sketchy state that we promised to remain neutral on with the One China Policy.”

“Speaking as a proudly isolationist transfeminist, the only thing that offends me more than shallow bigots like Tucker Carlson are manipulative frauds like Nancy Pelosi, who gives human rights a bad name with her big macho ego. Put it back in your pants, chickenhawk.”

The British “Bubble of Unreality” by Patrick Lawrence in June 2022 (Scheer Post)

“A little at a time since she came into the public eye, Truss seems to me emblematic of the grave crisis of leadership in the Western post-democracies. Britain will be in very serious trouble if Truss wins the Tories’ vote on September 5. So will the rest of us, given she will represent a new low in our collective elevation of incompetence to high office.”

“I suppose I am circling the thought that the West is exhausted and the non–West is by comparison full of vigor. Perhaps Putin would agree with me: The emergence of the non–West as an energetic pole of power marks an inevitable turn of history’s wheel. The West’s decline does not. It is a choice a frivolous generation of leaders makes for us. And it is not going to end well without a profound change of consciousness […]”

Our Bad in Libya by Ted Rall

Ted Rall: 23-09-25

“October 20, 2011: President Obama ordered a predator drone strike in Libya. A missile hit a car carrying leader Muammar Gaddafi. Stunned and bleeding, he was captured and murdered by rebels by the side of the road.

“Libya collapsed into anarchy and civil conflict. ISIS and other armed terrorist jihadi groups partitioned the country. Law and order are no more. There are open-air slave markets. It is a failed state.

“In a failed state, there is no money to maintain infrastructure like the pair of 19705-era dams that collapsed after heavy rains, killing thousands of people in the northeastern city of Derna.

“Our bad.”

DEF CON 31 − An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification by Cory Doctorow (YouTube)

“Governments should require that every tech company that sells them a product or a service has to promise not to interfere with interoperability. That’s just prudent administration. The Lincoln administration only bought rifles from companies that agreed on standard tooling. I mean, of course they did! ‘War’s canceled, boys! The bullet factory shut down this week.‘ Right? That was been the bedrock of good public procurement for centuries. We just forgot it. Every digital system procured by every level of government should come with a binding covenant not to impede interoperability—from the cars in your government motor pool to the Google Classrooms in our public schools to the iPhones in our public agencies. Now, those companies—they’re gonna squawk, but nobody forces a tech giant to sell to the American government. If you’re too emotionally fragile to see to the American public on fair terms, then go find another line of work more suited to your delicate sensibilities. Your shareholder’s priorities are your problem, public agencies are charged with the people’s business.”

He ends by citing the old Irish joke, “if you’re trying to get there, I wouldn’t start from here,” to illustrate the morass that we’re in. He’s saying that if we wanted to have a world that worked like the example he gave above—where our democratically elected governments do other than the bidding of their corporate masters—then we “should have started 40 years ago”.

Still, as Doctorow says, “the second-best time to start is now.”

This brilliant illustration shows how much public space we’ve surrendered to cars (Vox)

Karl Jilg: City without streets

Roaming Charges: Our Man in Jersey by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Jonathan Lancaster was only 38 years old when he died four years ago in an isolation cell at Alger Correctional Facility in Michigan. During his time in solitary confinement, Lancaster lost more than 50 pounds in 15 days and became so dehydrated he couldn’t speak. He was kept in restraints and his body was found lying in his urine and feces. Two wardens and four prison nurses were charged with involuntary manslaughter in Lancaster’s death. This week a Michigan judge let them walk, saying that while the prison officials were negligent none of their actions (or lack thereof) directly led to Lancaster’s death, who, the judge noted, was “doomed to die from dehydration.””

Like, he was doomed to die of dehydration even without their treatment? Justice, as she is lived in America.

“The DEA is celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the War on Drugs. And what a smashing success it has been!”

“US drug overdose death rate, 1973: 3.0 per 100,000
US drug overdose death rate, 2021: 32.4 per 100,000”

“Median Net Worth of Average American Family”

When you get too excited about citing statistics and forget that words have meaning.

“A ground-breaking new study by Princeton scholars Ann Case and Angus Deaton found that life expectancy for the college-educated in 2021 was eight-and-a-half years longer than for the two-thirds of American adults without a bachelor’s degree, more than triple the 1992 gap of about two-and-a-half years.”

This is my experience anecdotally as well. And those who live less long also have much lower quality of life in their later years because of health problems engendered by working more physically demanding jobs.

“In the early 1990s, only 11% of homeless adults in the US were aged 50 and older. By 2003, this percentage had swelled to 37%. Now, the over-50 demographic represents more than half of the homeless single adults in the U.S. Baby boomers (those aged 57 to 75) are now among the most likely to end up living on the streets.”

So, the homeless are in the same age cohort as the FOX News viewers who hate them the most.

“The volume of ice lost from glaciers in the Swiss Alps during the summers of 2022 and 2023 is roughly the same as that lost between 1960 and 1990.”

JESUS CHRIST.

Number of animals slaughtered for meat (Our World in Data) every day…

Cows: 900,000
Goats: 1.4 million
Sheep: 1.7 million
Pigs: 3.8 million
Ducks: 11.8 million
Chickens: 202 million
Fish: Hundreds of millions

JESUS CHRIST.

“America’s newest “high speed” train, the Brightline between Miami and Orlando, travels at a top speed of 120 mph, slightly slower than the 130mph (210km/h) operating speed of the earliest series of Japanese bullet trains that went into service 59 years ago.”

EXCEPTIONAL. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

“Stephen Strother’s review of Oppenheimer in the Spectre Journal focuses on the fascist nature of super-heroes:”

“We are now fifteen years into the superhero movie’s dominion over U.S. film production, discourse, and consumption. Since the release of Iron Man in 2008, our major film productions have been almost exclusively devoted to stories of heroic individuals using superpowers to defeat grand cosmic threats. It’s no surprise that the essentially fascist notion of a superhero—an individual of unique power acting to quell threats to the collective population is too weak and ignorant to defeat on its own, and exempt from all laws and norms in that pursuit by virtue of their unique power—has so taken root in the United States. After all, our atomized culture of individual striving, fearful and violent, produces a society of anxious worshippers of unchecked power, a people who do not look to one another to solve problems or make a society, but to the hoped-for benevolence of a few extraordinarily powerful individuals. It is a world primed for Great Men to save it, and U.S. entertainment conglomerates have been happy to provide us with endless fantasies of Great Men (and the very occasional Great Woman).”

This explains the worship of billionaires.

NATO Keeps Saying Things NATO Doesn’t Let You Say by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“In his opening remarks to the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs on September 7, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made the stunning admission that Russian President Vladimir Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine, not entirely unprovoked, but – as Putin has always said – to push an encroaching NATO out of Ukraine.

“Stoltenberg said that in 2021, prior to the war, Putin “sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.” Stoltenberg then went on, “He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. . .. We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” The Secretary General of NATO then closed his remarks with the conclusion that “when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.””

It’s nice to see the evil Stoltenberg so gleeful about how he’d hoodwinked Putin that he doesn’t quite realize that he’s contradicting the prevailing narrative. Or he absolutely realizes it, and doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to care because NATO will get as much support as it wants no matter what he admits to having done. Over 1.5 years into the war, there is no longer any way to stop it from continuing as long as NATO wants. They no longer need the moral high ground because it’s been made abundantly clear that they get to occupy it no matter what they do.

“On August 15, Stian Jenssen, the chief of staff for Jens Stoltenberg, surprisingly said, “I think that a solution could be for Ukraine to give up territory, and get NATO membership in return.””

People Are Dying For Inches In Ukraine, The “World’s Largest Arms Fair” by Caitlin Johnstone (SubStack)

“The reason the map of gains and losses is so heartbreaking is because so much has been given up for so very, very little. At least tens of thousands have died in this war with hundreds of thousands wounded, all for those teeny, tiny little blips on the map. Ukraine is now freckled with more landmines than anywhere else on earth, which experts say will take decades to clear. This giant deathtrap is exacerbated by the cluster munitions that are covering the land with greater and greater frequency, which will go on to detonate and kill civilians (mostly children) for years to come. The mines and artillery fire on the frontline of this war are reportedly creating tens of thousands of amputees, numbers comparable to what was seen in World War I.”

“And now we see western officials and media outlets telling us all to prepare for this war to drag on for years, potentially into the 2030s. This nonsensical violence, which even the head of NATO now admits could have been avoided by simply ceasing to amass a western military threat on Russia’s doorstep, is scheduled to drag on as long as possible for no grander reason than the advancement of US strategic interests.”

“The fact that weapons systems are being tested on human bodies to the immense benefit of war profiteers over a completely avoidable and deliberately provoked war is one of the most depraved things you can possibly imagine, and is a clear sign that we are living in a profoundly sick society.”

Modern Empire Apologia Is Mostly Just Westerners Arguing With Reality by Caitlin Johnstone (SubStack)

“[…] the US-centralized empire is confronting nations which have policies and positions in place regarding their immediate surroundings which run much deeper and go much further back than vapid liberal idealism. Russia was invaded through Ukraine by both Napoleon and Hitler. Taiwan was used by the Japanese as an unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to continuously attack the Chinese mainland during World War Two. You can disagree with the deep-rooted security concerns of these nations if you want, but what you can’t do is simply hand-wave them away just because they don’t fit in with the made-up rules the west likes to pretend it plays by.”

Journalism & Media

Forget Bellingcat. Meet a Real “Open Source” Watchdog by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“One of my major interests has become how the two narratives of counter-disinformation and counter-human trafficking are used as the primary public justifications for the social media surveillance, cellphone location-tracking, facial recognition, and modernized human intelligence industries which cropped up during the Global War on Terror and then amplified as the U.S. shifted into “Great Power” competition with China.”

“[…] there isn’t enough appreciation for what can be gleaned from carefully analyzing what governments and companies already make public. This was essentially the thesis of legendary outsider investigative journalist I.F. Stone.”

Noam Chomsky also has always said that about the U.S. Most of what it does it published unashamedly, out in the open.

Fake News von Tagesschau und Baerbock? – „Russischer Terrorangriff“ auf Marktplatz von Kostjantyniwka war laut New York Times wohl ukrainische Rakete by Florian Warweg (NachDenkSeiten)

“Es stellt sich vor dem Hintergrund dieser Recherche die Frage, wieso ausgerechnet deutsche Journalisten und Spitzen-Politiker diese Tendenz haben, in der Situation einer kriegerischen Auseinandersetzung zwischen Ukraine und Russland, in der man keiner Seite, weder der angreifenden noch der verteidigenden, vertrauen kann, so extrem einseitig und unhinterfragt Informationen einer Kriegspartei wiederzugeben. Informationen wohlgemerkt, die man zu diesem Zeitpunkt unter keinen Umständen verifizieren konnte.”

„In ihren Schritten lag etwas Leichtes“ – schwülstige Baerbock-Propaganda vom RND-Chef by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Kernthese von Kochs als Kommentar getarnter Liebeserklärung an Baerbock ist es, dass es Wladimir Putins – so Koch wörtlich – „größter Irrtum“ überhaupt war, die dynamische Ex-Trampolinspringerin mit dem federnden Schritt zu unterschätzen.”

“Glaubt man den jüngsten Umfragen, sind gerade einmal 19 Prozent der Deutschen mit der Arbeit der Bundesregierung „zufrieden“ – „sehr zufrieden“ sind übrigens exakt null Prozent; offenbar durfte Matthias Koch bei der Umfrage nicht mitmachen. Rund 60 Prozent der Befragten sind zudem mit der Arbeit von Annalena Baerbock unzufrieden und das muss man als Außenminister erst mal schaffen, galt dieses Amt doch bis dato immer als Popularitätsgarant.”

Render a web page − CSS Podcast Tips by Chrome for Developers (YouTube)

I am not happy about the trend of these short, highly animated videos. There’s a heavily mascaraed Una peering up into a camera while a permanent subtitle runs below her face, with a bouncing highlight showing up which word to read—just like on fucking Sesame Street. What has this world come to? Is this who we are now? Are web developers so semi- or barely literate that they need to consume their tutorials in 1-minute morsels, accompanied by reading helpers for small children? Jesus wept.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Center for Democracy and Journalism: Racialist politics in the service of US imperialism by Dominic Gustavo (WSWS)

“Of the five news articles posted from the student newspaper on the website, two link to stories discussing the center’s opening. A third publicizes that the center has been gifted yet another multi-million dollar corporate foundation grant, this from the the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The article says the foundation will provide “general, unrestricted funding” for journalism focused on “racial health disparities.” It outlines, in vague terms, work that will take place in the future.

“The center counts two subscribers to its YouTube channel, which has managed to upload a single video five months ago. This is a two-minute long clip of Obama endorsing the center. The video has 79 views as of this writing.

“The World Socialist Web Site reached out to the center for clarification, asking how many journalism courses were being taught and how many students were part of these courses. No response has yet been received.”

“Given the Center for Democracy and Journalism’s limited output, it is fair to ask of Hannah-Jones’ credentials to head up a heavily endowed university studies program. She had managed to write a mere 23 articles over her seven years working at the New York Times before the major corporate foundations granted her the Howard sinecure—and after she had threatened to sue the University of North Carolina for not speeding her through to tenured professor status at another endowed professorship that had been promised her.”

Science & Nature

Who Lusts for Certainty Lusts for Lies by D.R.H. (Etymology Online)

“The text of Etymonline is built entirely from print sources, and is done entirely by human beings. Ngrams are not. They are unreliable, a sloppy product of an ignorant technology, one made to sell and distract, one never taught the difference between “influence” and “inform.”

“Why are they on the site at all? Because now, online, pictures win and words lose. The war is over; they won. Just remember: Ngrams are unreliable.”

From a comment on the article,

Bjorn Lomborg: How Our Climate Fixation Hurts the World’s Poor by Nick Gillespie (Reason)

“[…] develop pragmatic, relatively low-cost solutions to issues such as tuberculosis, malaria, lack of education, and access to food.”

“He argues that for about $35 billion a year—a little more than half of what the U.S. spends annually on humanitarian aid—these policies could save 4.2 million lives and generate an extra $1.1 trillion in value every year.”

I haven’t watched or listened to this, but let’s assume that the guy has his heart is in the right place. I wouldn’t characterize the problem as an obsession with climate. What we have is an obsession with pretending to care about the climate while still focusing laser-like on maintaining at least parity, if not an upward trend, on quality of life for the people that matter—namely, the elite (top 10% say) in OECD nations.

Art & Literature

J. G. Ballard’s Brilliant, Not “Good” Writing by Tom McCarthy (The Paris Review)

“Not only are his rhythmic cycles, in which phrases and images return in orders and arrangements that mutate and reconfigure themselves as though following some algorithm that remains beyond our grasp, at once incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very model and essence of poetry; but, mirroring the way that information, advertising, propaganda, public (and private) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, constitute a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary genre.”

As with Gaddis.

The Seat of the Soul by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“Within six months, a much more alarming figure was confirmed, first by the CDC, and in quick succession by the WHO: exactly 100% of patients who had recently received an abdominal ultrasound were found to be carrying an “onion” (in those early days it still had no official name). A comprehensive study of research cadavers kept in medical schools, moreover, yielded up an equally alarming result: precisely 0% of people who died prior to September, 2023, were found to be in possession of this new organ. Is that what it was? An organ ? Some experts argued that it was rather an accretion, like a sort of soft pearl in the body, caused by some new environmental irritant. Others, somewhat further out on the margins, argued it was a parasite, a bioweapon, the fetal stage of a gestating alien hatchling. The truth is no one had any idea what it was, or how it got there.”

The Night the Cops Tried to Break Thelonious Monk by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“As a composer Powell was nearly as inventive as Monk. In songs like “Dance of the Infidels,” “Tempus Fugit”, “Oblivion” and “Hallucinations,” Powell seemed to be developing a new vocabulary for music. Literary critic Harold Bloom cited Powell’s “Un Poco Loco” as one of the greatest works of twentieth century American art. He made the piano sing.”

“Powell spent the next five years in Paris, playing small clubs, working off-and-on with Dexter Gordon, panhandling for bottles of cheap wine. He played mainly standards, because he found it hard to learn new material. Even then, he often cut his sets short. Sometimes he would stop in the middle of a song, stare blankly at the keyboard, then erupt in an inchoate rage. Powell, now stricken with TB, returned to New York in 1964 for an engagement at Birdland, but he just didn’t have the goods anymore. He seemed to get lost in his own songs. The run was cut short. In the next four years he only performed twice in public, and both gigs were disasters. And then Powell was living on the streets, coughing up blood from the TB and a bad liver. He died on July 1, 1966 of malnutrition. To put it another way, Bud Powell, the man Bill Evans called the most talented jazz musician of his time, starved to death on the streets of Manhattan. He was only 41.”

“Monk took long walks in the night after Nellie came home, composing new songs in his head, re-structuring old standards into startling new forms, listening to the jazz and blues pouring out of the Harlem clubs. Sometimes he would go over to Brooklyn and play in black-owned bars, places that openly defied the New York Liquor Authority’s ban on cardless musicians,”

“Critics largely remained confounded by Monk’s style. He wasn’t as flashy or fast as Art Tatum and he wasn’t as transcendent as Powell, the great virtuoso. Monk’s idiom was for crooked passages and tricky time signatures, punctuated by strange silences and negative spaces, as if he had stripped the songs down to only essential elements. Essential for Monk, that is.”

How Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus Broke the Hollywood Blacklists by Taylor Dorrell (Jacobin)

“May 1, 1946 was an unparalleled May Day for the Left in America. Recently discharged veterans joined with teachers, writers, artists, lawyers, and other workers to march triumphantly through Manhattan. “The number of paraders, as we counted them, was over 150,000, and when they packed Union Square, cheering left-wing and Communist leaders and speakers,” the Communist writer Howard Fast wrote in his memoir, Being Red, “one would have said that the future of the left in America was extremely bright and of course they would have been wrong.” By May Day of 1948, the same Communists who were celebrated only two years earlier became the targets of violent reactionary crowds chanting “Kill a commie for Christ!” Fast was leading the Communist Party’s “culture block” made up of thousands of academics, artists, and writers who quickly found themselves in a street fight with anti-communist students from a nearby parochial school.”

“Among them was the group’s highest-paid screenwriter and also the committee’s most unfriendly witness: Dalton Trumbo. “[Y]our job,” Trumbo told chief investigator Robert E. Stripling after he instructed Trumbo to answer “Yes” or “No,” “is to ask questions and mine is to answer them. . . . I shall answer in my own words. Very many questions can be answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ only by a moron or a slave.””

“After serving their time, John Wexley, Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner, Ian Hunter, Dalton Trumbo, and many other blacklistees lived in exile in Mexico City, seeking work and refuge from the persistent harassment of the FBI. One day, the Canadian-born blacklisted screenwriter Hugo Butler dragged Dalton and Cleo Trumbo out to watch some bullfighting. One bullfight ended in an indulto , or pardoning of the bull, which is given after the crowd waves handkerchiefs in support of a bull’s showcase of bravery. The event inspired Trumbo’s film, The Brave One (1956), a drama following a boy and his bull. The film went on to win an Oscar under Trumbo’s pseudonym, Robert Rich. It was the first fracture in the wall that was the blacklists.”

“Audiences flocked to see a movie whose title screen displayed the names of two convicted Communist subversives, Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo.”

“The story of Spartacus is also the story of the story of Spartacus. Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo were two of the thousands of Communists in the United States who struggled to survive through the Red Scare. It was a time when, as Trumbo put it, “devils persuad[ed] us that freedom is best defended by surrendering it altogether.””

And here we are again, sick with the same disease.

We have forgotten nearly everything about this time. We are not one whit better. Utter societal and moral stasis, philosophical retardation, ethical atrophy. We are steering hard for a second Red Scare, but this one will be quieter and more effective. People will just disappear from the conversation, their volume turned down. It is much easier to create Emmanuel Goldsteins (Wikipedia) these days.

Coming Attraction by Fritz Leiber (Project Gutenberg)

“Before it occurred to me that I would be going out again, I automatically tore a tab from the film strip under my shirt. I developed it just to be sure. It showed that the total radiation I’d taken that day was still within the safety limit. I’m not phobic about it, as so many people are these days, but there’s no point in taking chances.”

A True Movie Star: On the Career of Channing Tatum by Matt Zoller Seitz in June 2022 (Roger Ebert.com)

“No matter who he’s playing, or what scene the character is entangled in, Tatum always defaults to seeming like he’s not in on the joke—or barely aware of it and not letting on because he fears he might not understand it, which is just as funny as being oblivious. One can imagine him reading this piece and then forgetting all about it on purpose, because self-consciousness is the last thing an actor, dancer, comedian, drama star, or action hero needs.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Interview with Siri Hustvedt by Noga Arikha in June 2022 (The White Review)

“The shifters, I and you, are difficult to master, and children often reverse them. After all, why is a person ‘I’ one moment and ‘you’ the next?”

Here Are My Actual Dumb Opinions by Freddie deBoer in June 2022 (SubStack)

“I believe that achieving a just society cannot happen within a framework of capitalism, which inherently and necessarily increases inequality over time and which depends on exploitation for its basic functions. I believe in the peaceful and democratic replacement of capitalism with some kind of a socialist system. The exact dimensions of that system remain unclear, but they will surely involve removing basic human needs like food, shelter, clothing, medicine, education, and health care from market mechanisms; collectivizing ownership of the productive apparatus of society so that it may be used for the good of all, free from the profit motive; dramatically reducing the amount of inequality in material goods between different people and different groups; the gradual reduction (and perhaps eventual elimination) of what we conventionally consider the state, and bringing an end to the kind of permanent bureaucratic class which is inherently counter-revolutionary; an eventual end to our current rigid concept of paid labor, with guarantees that all people enjoy a certain standard of living so that they may engage in productive work that is not necessarily remunerative in the capitalist sense, thanks to an ever-growing technological abundance; and adopting a truly egalitarian, democratic system that protects the right to unpopular opinions, defends those who disagree with the ruling sentiment of the time, enshrines the will of the majority into tangible public action, and remains responsive to changing public sentiment.”

“I am a civil libertarian, in a way that was once perfectly common on the left. I believe that the purpose of human society is to reduce suffering, promote well-being, and engender freedom. Far from a bourgeois or capitalist concern, the pursuit of personal freedom is as Marx argued a natural and beneficial endeavor that reflects straightforward human desires to live without coercion. We should therefore maximize personal freedom to the degree to which it is possible to do so without hurting our ability to provide for the material need and comfort of all people.”

Is AI Going to RUIN Writing For Good? (w/ Corey Robin) by Bad Faith (YouTube)

This was an uneven, but overall quite interesting discussion about pedagogy, the importance of writing, and LLMs. The LLM part ended up being quite small because you really have to consider to what degree is most writing trash already. Why write? Why do people write? Why do people communicate? Is writing better than video? What happens if you can’t read or write? What does a world in which you navigate exclusively by video and audio look like? Is it dumber? Is it capable of elucidating nuance and questioning power to the same degree that writing has classically done for us?

On that topic,

Family Tree Wisdom by Jim Nielsen

“[…] if you climb a rope every day, you’ll never not be able to do it.”

“I’m not young enough to know everything.”

“What you’re saying might be true, but I don’t believe a word of it.”

Is Ibram X Kendi's 'Anti-Racism' a SCAM? (w/ Norm Finkelstein) by Bad Faith (YouTube)

At 00:02:00,

“Norm: If you go back as far as I do, the fact of the matter is, that what they teach now in college is what used to be taught in high school. […] There are many students who enter college who’ve never read a book. I mean that literally. I teach in those schools. I don’t fault them. I ask, ‘what did you do in English class?’ They say, ‘the teacher read us books.’ You can laugh, but that is literally the case. You will have many first-year college students who never wrote a paper. They don’t know what it means to write a paper.”

At 00:03:30, after having very eloquently and long-windedly come to a recognition that she should definitely stop fighting on the Internet with people arguing not only in bad faith (no pun intended), but also from an intellectually diminished standpoint, she says,

“Briahna: I have limited emotional energy left to not just call people stupid to their face. I feel like I’ve been spending the last five or six years of my life going out of my way—in part, because of who I am—to decline from saying ‘you are a fucking moron.’ … like 30 times a day.

“Norm: Briahna, I think ‘fucking moron’ is a perfect segue to the topic today, Ibram X. Kendi. [both laughing uproariously]”

At 44:30, a snippet with Cornel West includes,

“No, I am not first and foremost an anti-racist. I am first and foremost a lover of my mama—and it leads to anti-racist practice. That’s the second step. I love, whatever, I love the Asians, I love the Jewish folks, I’m gonna be against any kind of mistreatment of them. So, anti-racism is part of a larger, humanistic project that’s predicated on an affirmation of the humanity of people. Because if you’re anti-racist, you’re really nothing but a parasite on the host. You’re still looking at yourself through the lens of the racist—and you’re just “anti” them. And, one of the distinctive features of the racist gays is that they’ve lost contact with the humanity of the people they’re objectifying. They’ve lost contact with the humanity of the people they’re putting down. Why would you also want to do that? You don’t begin with them [racists]. You begin with the humanity of the people that you’re talking about.”

This is a brilliant mind. Future president of the United States, people. This is man who has assimilated a tremendous amount of knowledge and human experience and distilled it into something new, something that cannot be so easily swayed by superficially convincing argument. We need experts like this who can not only contribute new thought, but can also help us eliminate unproductive thoughts that we’ve beaten back before, but keep cropping back up because they appeal to the inexpert.

In the comments to this video, it was interesting to see that other people noticed that they were often talking past one another. One person said that it was HER podcast and that she’d been the “epitome of patience.” I responded,

“Really? That just goes to show how subjective conversations like this are. My impression was that he had to reformulate his points several times simply because she wasn’t understanding what he, for m, at least, quite obviously meant to convey in his first formulation. I think it’s useful to take the time to play through this because she’s probably not the only one who didn’t get his point the first time. As to it being HER podcast … this is basically an interview show and I’m watching because it says “Norm Finkelstein” not because it says Briahna. She’s fine, but she often has the less flexible mind of the two participants in her interviews. That’s an admirable place to be, though, considering the general quality of her guests (e.g., I recently watched a good interview with Corey Robin where she played the “do we really need to know how to write?” side of the debate).”

At 58:45,

“Norm: You must be able to distinguish between what you called a moment ago, a concept and a brand.

“Briahna: That’s fine. If it’s just a brand, we can cut this off short. Even if it’s just a branding exercise, he succeeded in that. That’s all I need to attribute to him. I honestly … we don’t need to be on this for another ten minutes, Norm. But, that’s my point. He did a successful branding exercise. Why’s that so hard to just acknowledge and move past?

“Norm: OK. There’s a simple answer to that. It’s called—and maybe this is going to sound very prissy and old-fashioned—it’s called respect for knowledge. It’s one thing to coin a brand. It’s quite another if you respect a field of intellectual inquiry and you respect the vast labors that were invested in creating that field of inquiry. To then call a brand a “concept”, to heap awards, tens of millions of dollars, a center for anti-racism, on somebody who just created a brand or a word. It’s so disrespectful of that struggle, the hard, honest labor, effectively beginning with W.E.B. Dubois.”

Here, we get her impatience with what is actually the core argument, the more interesting argument about someone like Ibram X. Kendi —namely, why did he become so famous? What damage did that do? I can’t tell if she’s wicked smart and pretending to be a dumb foil, but I suppose it doesn’t matter because, at any rate, she teed up a good question for Norm to answer. I don’t know if she listened to the answer, though.

Her contention is “none” because she doesn’t seem to be intelligent enough to acknowledge that pushing his kind of ideas to the forefront necessarily takes time away from other, more useful, ideas. Or she doesn’t care, because all ideas are equally bullshit—and all “brands” are bullshit.

It’s interesting that she continues to value her own opinions about Kendi over Norm’s, even after it’s become blindingly obvious that he’s actually read Kendi’s books and work—and that she has not. She’s just followed tweet-storms about him.

In case you think I’m being unfair, after his statement, she continued to berate him that “obviously, there’s an appeal to Kendi’s ideas”, which, while true, is irrelevant in a debate between two people who purport to not be representing the opinions of “fucking morons” (as she noted at the top of the podcast). What is the point of acknowledging that an idea is appealing to the easily lulled? Everything is appealing to them. You don’t have to worry about what morons think, because they don’t think, by definition.

The point is that Kendi’s work has been used as a cultural weapon that works against what might be a cohort that would agitate against the political elite. That relatively well-educated cohort is going to spend time thinking, even if only because they think they should be doing that because it increases their cachet in society.

Their thoughts have to be channeled and focused so that they don’t think the wrong ones. Instead of thinking about how everything is a problem of class, and that there is a class war being waged by elites, those elites promote brands like Kendi to intellectually cow people into thinking that everything is about race.

Even if we were to magically solve some problems of race in the U.S., the underlying class war would still be raging, with wealth and power would still flowing upward. That is the point that even Norm Finkelstein was not making very well.

The corporate and elite appropriation of something like Kendi’s anti-racism—or BLM and rainbow flags before it—is a bellwether. It is the way that the elites prevent dangerous ideas from coming to the forefront. It is deliberate. It is unsurprising that it’s a scam. It also happens to hurt a lot of people whose careers are ruined by accusations of anti-racism—conveniently enough, many people who would otherwise be promoting dangerous thought, like class being the root of the problem rather than race. In this, the elites wield Kendi as a weapon to cow their opponents, or, if they refuse to be cowed, to eliminate them entirely from public discourse.

Briahna eventually expresses her point better (covering a few of the points that I make above), but it takes her a long time get there—and she does so in an incredibly exasperated voice that indicates that she thought she’d already expressed these ideas in her muddled half-sentences before. But, maybe I just understand Norm in shorthand better than Briahna. I felt a few times like she was forced into making a more lengthy characterization of her argument that ended up being much more articulate, nuanced, and useful than her initially terse and oversimplified formulation, then tacked onto the end that that was the same thing as she’d said in the first place, which was patently untrue. I wonder if it’s just her avoiding ever having been wrong, which doesn’t really matter, but tends to get in the way.

I think that they both blur the distinction between racism and discrimination. Everyone discriminates. Not everyone is a racist. Do you think fat people are kind of gross? What about ugly people? People with bad teeth? Terrible hair? Bad fashion sense? Too many tattoos? Dumb people? Which distinctions are you allowed to draw?

If you discriminate against someone because they’re dumb, is that wrong? If you don’t let them operate a steam-shovel because they’re black, you’re a racist. If you don’t let them do it because they’ve never done it before, is that wrong, too? Aren’t you limiting their range of experience based on distinctions you’ve made based on them lacking characteristics that they lack through no fault of their own? It’s not their fault that they were never given an opportunity to learn how to operate a steam shovel because of a racist world, so you not letting them do it now just promulgates that racism. That way lies madness.

It’s why Archer’s plea “I wanna fly the plane!” is so funny.

What if you had a news anchor who could only speak Spanish, but wanted to work on an English-language broadcast? Is it discriminatory not to hire them because of that? What if they’re latino? Is it fair to claim that they weren’t hired because they’re latino when they’re obviously woefully unqualified?

Not only that, but, as Norm points out at 01:19:15,

“It had never occurred to me before that, when they say black IQ scores are lower than white IQ scores—who’s defining who’s black? […] my point is, that these are very complicated concepts and, for me, I recoil, […] at attaching the label “concept” to something which is just a brand like Adidas. I can’t accept that, not because I’m some important scholar, but because I respect the intellectual labor of those who wrestled with these concepts and produced serious scholarship.”

As noted above, it’s also just a waste of time and energy, deliberately aimed at frivolous topics that don’t endanger elites.

The scholarship is deep and stretches back many decades, if not a century, and has included the thoughts of many intellectuals who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. The shortcuts that we make—”black” or “white”—is actually a spectrum. One that used to include “quadroon” and “octaroon”, which seems like utter madness today. The only way out of this morass is to just stop considering race a distinction at all.

It’s similar to the abortion debate. It’s very easy to be lulled into thinking that you’re either “for” or “against” abortion—or, more precisely, “a woman’s right to choose”. But, when you are forced to think about the mechanics of it, which kinds of abortions do you support? State-ordained ones? After 10 weeks? After 20 weeks? 30? What if the child is viable? Unviable? The mother’s life is endangered?

The problem really is that there are some debates in which everyone feels qualified to take part, but for which we are woefully unequipped. People burbling along at a superficial level feel slighted when others who’ve already plumbed the depth dismiss their arguments. On the other hand, it’s also not so hard for those who’ve been involved in a subject for a long time to have overcomplicated it, often beyond recognition, and, sometimes, because that’s become personally lucrative. Still, the danger that dilettantes drive policy is real.

At 01:26:00, Norm says,

“That woke culture is completely, totally bankrupt. That’s the problem. It’s not only bankrupt, but it does huge damage. I went out […] every day for those George Floyd demonstrations. For six weeks, I went out every day. And then, when I saw what it turned into? $90M for BLM? And it all just disappeared? Wild horses couldn’t get me to come out for another demonstration. And I’m pretty committed. Wild horses. And now, the money’s going to dry up for African American Study Centers because they’re gonna say, ‘you know those people. Lurking behind every black person is an Al Sharpton.’ That’s exactly right. That’s what everyone’s gonna think. And now, you’re gonna say, ‘that’s because they were racist to begin with,‘ and I’ll grant that. But guess what? Why help it out? Why facilitate it. No integrity whatsoever. You have this charlatan and hustler. […] doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.”

“This culture is not just bankrupt. It’s retrograde. It does real damage. […Ibram X. Kendi] is an exemplar of the damage. Reduced the field to idiotic brands. Discredited the giving of money and donations and nurturing of the field.”

Briahna wraps up by defending that it wasn’t the left that built Kendi, but that’s just defending yourself. There is a large machine that calls itself left that built him. Kendi’s just a scam artist. But what’s the point of bringing in the “no true Scotsman” argument? She distinguishes between leftists and liberals, but very few people see the distinction. She defends the left by saying that they were more involved in the UAW strike rather than caring about wokeness and Kendi. But, Norm says that this is evasion—because Kendi is everywhere, and his ideas fill the bookstores that influence a lot more minds than the left could ever dream of doing. You don’t have to pay attention to every little stupid thing, but you should be more aware of how well the rest of the populace is being distracted by things that aren’t your agenda. It speaks to the emptiness of the left’s political ability in the States that it thinks it can ignore such large changes in intellectual movements.

I like that Norm managed to provoke her into blowing up at the end of her own podcast, complaining that she “doesn’t understand why everyone wants to talk to her about Marianne Williamson”—as a podcast host. She seems to get mad a lot (and I’ve observed this in other shows) when people try to change the topic from what she’d like to talk about. Luckily—or unfortunately—she has excellent guests who are often quite interesting.

A comment on the video summarizes it well,

“Very disappointing behaviour from Briahana at the end. Norman was trying to explain, politely, how dangerous and empty it can be to elevate certain people with no substance, no track record, only with nice slogans/brands. Briahana dismisses Ibram X but fails to see the potential same issue with Marianne W. who apparently she admires.”

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who thinks that Norm towers over Briahna intellectually and that, despite her best efforts, seems to rub her the wrong way. A perfectly reasonable response from her would have been that she’s voting for Marianne as a spite vote, even though she knows it doesn’t matter. Instead, she doubled down, imbuing her choice with more support for the candidate’s policies than she seems to actually have.

The forbidden topics by Drew DeVault

“Critics of radical free speech, victims of hate speech, and marginalized people of all kinds began to appear in hacker communities. The things they had to say were not comfortable.

“The free speech absolutists among the old guard, faced with this discomfort, developed a tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them. They were not the target of the hate, so it did not make them personally uncomfortable, and defending it would maintain the pretense of defending free speech, of stalwartly holding the line on a treasured part of their personal hacker ethic.”

I don’t think that’s it at all, but the author seems to have a completely different axe to grind. He complains that his post was quickly moderated off of the front of Hacker News, but the post is overly long and pretty much doesn’t belong on Hacker News. I guess you could just let it get ignored out of existence, but it was banned. Sure, fine, maybe there’s a problem. Or maybe the author has made enough of a pain-in-the-ass of himself that he just gets a priori banned now.

There is a difference between defending free speech and defending a person’s right to say what they want, no matter the context. If you’re going to Thanksgiving dinner at you’re aunt’s house, then I’m not going to stand there and defend your right to say “cunt” throughout the meal, discomfiting everyone else and ruining the evening (or, most likely, afternoon). You’re allowed to say the word, but not everywhere you like. You can even say it at Thanksgiving, but expect to be thrown out of the house if you persist.

It’s just like I can write the word “cunt” on my own personal blog and very rightly claim that anyone who doesn’t like it, doesn’t have to come here and read my blog.

Chris Hedges and Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Full Version (YouTube)

This is several-part, and overall three-hour, interview with Sheldon Wolin, a man who lived through most of the 20th century as an academic in the United States. The interview takes place about one year before he died, at 93. He is incredibly articulate and fluent, and capable of remembering seemingly everything he’d experienced, as well as expressing it wonderfully.

He lived through the Great Depression, World War II (he fought in the Pacific Theater), the McCarthy Era (HUAC), the upheaval of the 60s, the fight against apartheid in the 70s. It all helped him build his theory of inverted totalitarianism, his description of the core tenet of the American Empire. There is much here that I already knew, but it was expressed wonderfully by Wolin, as well as interlocutor, the always-excellent Chris Hedges.

Technology

zells − Enabling Software Literacy by Zells (GitHub)

“In a world increasingly controlled by software, understanding how the systems that we interact with every day work, can eliminate a lot of frustration and superstition. Just as knowing why apples fall down and aeroplanes fly up, the citizens of the 21st century need to know that computers are not magical boxes but composed of dynamic models.”

The False Promise of ChatGPT by Noam Chomsky (New York Times)

“That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.”

“The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.”

“Here’s an example. Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation: “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking.”

“To be right, it must be possible to be wrong. Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism. Human-style thought is based on possible explanations and error correction, a process that gradually limits what possibilities can be rationally considered.”

“The theory that apples fall to earth because that is their natural place (Aristotle’s view) is possible, but it only invites further questions. (Why is earth their natural place?) The theory that apples fall to earth because mass bends space-time (Einstein’s view) is highly improbable, but it actually tells you why they fall. True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things.”

“ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.”

We can only laugh or cry at their popularity is an appropriate summation of many things that are happening today.

I only hope that this isn’t a trick being played on us, with an LLM posing as Noam Chomsky. I wouldn’t put it past the New York Times, at this point. At any rate, I find the text intriguing and well-written.

Programming

Eloquent: Improving Text Editing on Mobile by ACM SIGCHI on October 8, 2021 (YouTube)

The State of Async Rust: Runtimes by Matthias Endler & Simon Brüggen (Corrode)

“Async Rust might be more memory-efficient than threads, at the cost of complexity and worse ergonomics. As an example, if the function were async and you called it outside of a runtime, it would compile, but not run. Futures do nothing unless being polled. This is a common footgun for newcomers.”

“As an important caveat, threads are not available or feasible in all environments, such as embedded systems. My context for this article is primarily conventional server-side applications that run on top of platforms like Linux or Windows.

“I would like to add that threaded code in Rust undergoes the same stringent safety checks as the rest of your Rust code: It is protected from data races, null dereferences, and dangling references, ensuring a level of thread safety that prevents many common pitfalls found in concurrent programming, Since there is no garbage collector, there never will be any stop-the-world pause to reclaim memory. Traditional arguments against threads simply don’t apply to Rust — fearless concurrency is your friend!”

“Keep your domain logic synchronous and only use async for I/O and external services. Following these guidelines will make your code more composable and accessible. On top of that, the error messages of sync Rust are much easier to reason about than those of async Rust.”

This is good advice for any language.

“Inside Rust, there is a smaller, simpler language that is waiting to get out. It is this language that most Rust code should be written in.”

The convenience of .NET by Richard Lander (.NET Blog)

“We use convenient APIs in some places in .NET libraries, even though they are not the maximum speed. They makes the code small, simple and easy to understand and that can be more valuable than maximum speed.”

“That’s what one of our architects had to say about our approach to our codebase, even in a team dedicated to high performance. We like to write convenient code whenever we can. We’d rather focus our efforts on building more features and optimizing APIs that are likely to get called in a hot loop.

“The other side of the coin is that the more efficient the convenience APIs are, the more we’ll be able to use them without concern in our codebase. It makes the team as a whole more efficient. We try to make convenience APIs as efficient as possible within the confines of what the shape of the API allows.”

“Many of the IndexOf{Any} calls are actually on spans now, rather than direct calls to string.IndexOf{Any}. While the spans are frequently pointing into strings, these APIs often operate on slices (after calling string.AsSpan, internally).

“This family of APIs have been improved a lot, using multiple techniques to improve performance. For example, these APIs uses vector CPU instructions to search for search terms in a string. In .NET 8, support for AVX512 was added. That’s not yet relevant for most hardware, however it means that IndexOf will be ready for newer hardware when you’ve got it.”

“Out of the Software Crisis”: Gardening by Jim Nielsen

“Software is the insights of the development team made manifest.”

“[…] it’s precisely why churn is so costly to organizations. The insights a team of people has over time, and then responds to by evolving their software, is how a product grows and comes to fruition.

“Cut out the people who hold the insights and you tear out the roots of the software.

“Software is the lessons we learned along the way.

“Great software requires growing, a growing together of the team, their insights, and the technological possibilities of the time.”

Making Large Language Models work for you by Simon Willison

“LLMs have started to make me redefine what I consider to be expertise.

“I’ve been using Git for 15 years, but I couldn’t tell you what most of the options in Git do.

“I always felt like that meant I was just a Git user, but nowhere near being a Git expert.

“Now I use sophisticated Git options all the time, because ChatGPT knows them and I can prompt it to tell me what to do.

“Knowing every option of these tools off-by-heart isn’t expertise, that’s trivia—that helps you compete in a bar quiz.

“Expertise is understanding what they do, what they can do and what kind of questions you should ask to unlock those features.”

Well, welcome to the party. Expertise has always been exactly what you’ve described. It’s having an understanding of a subject—wisdom about it, if you like—born of extensive familiarity. But it’s never been about rote memorization of things. Sure, experts tend to have to look things up less, just because they’ve done something you’re asking about so many times before that they can’t help but remember how it’s done. My expertise in programming techniques, programming languages, and development environments leads me to expect more, to be able to conceive of a feature I’d like to have and to go looking for it. A lot of people can’t do that. So, they’re not experts.

The only that really is about deep familiarity and rote memorization is vocabulary, the toolbox from which you draw in order to express your thoughts. When I want to type a word like “morass” and can’t remember whether it has two r’s or two s’s—or both—and then use a real-time spellchecker to test which version is correct, only to realize that it doesn’t have an ‘e’ at the end, I’m still expressing my own thoughts, in words that I know.

When I use an LLM to generate entire swaths of text, I’m no longer expressing anything of myself. It’s not my thoughts. It’s words generated from a kernel that came from me. It’s leveraging, sure, but it’s a fundamentally different expression. It contributes much more text—which others have to wade through—from much less, not only effort, but much less thought. You’re essentially cheating people who you’ve tricked into reading what you’ve gotten the LLM to write for you.

So, yes, expertise ineluctably comprises at least one skill: an expert is someone who’s amassed a formidable arsenal of tools with which to express their thoughts. If you don’t have thoughts, you’re not an expert. If you rely on tools to express your thoughts for you, then you’re faking it. However, you might be able to eventually fake it well enough to provide value to society? I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

There are some tasks for which immediately available, immanent expertise is essential, where the ability to quickly correlate information from disparate sources is exactly what the interlocutor is looking for. There are others where a delay is OK. Say, you need to know how to light a campfire. It’s great if you have someone in the group who already knows how to do that, but, you can also just look it up and learn how to build a fire in five minutes. If you need to know the temperature, likewise.

Where immanent expertise is important is when you don’t have a data connection. If your keeping your expertise off-site, then you run the risk of being cut off from it.

A task for which immanent expertise is currently very advantageous, if not essential, is debating, participating in meetings, talking to other people. The thing that greases the wheels of civilization, in other words. Being able to properly express what you’re thinking in real-time is helpful. The current idea of offloading to a web search or LLM prompt incurs too much delay to be a viable replacement, or even an alternative.

Can you imagine it? Instead of learning a language, with vocabulary and practice in elocution, one party expresses a truncated set of half-baked bullet points that they balloon with an LLM into several paragraphs of text that they then send, unread, to their counterpart, who sends the text, unread, to their own LLM, which distills it back down to a few bullet points, which, one hopes, bear some semblance to the original ones, but it doesn’t really matter because both parties are, at this point, so under-equipped to be communicating in the first place that it’s a crap-shoot as to whether they can express or understand any concepts worth discussing.

All that said, and I honestly can’t see the advantage of having an LLM answer these questions rather than a search engine. I manage to quickly extract answers from DuckDuckGo every damned day without feeling like I’m restricted because I didn’t get to ask 12 questions to an LLM to refine the answer, or ask the search engine to answer as a goat in a tree. What absolute madness is this?

What’s mind-boggling is that this is a very smart guy who only hit upon the idea to use a tool to “remember” Git commands for him when he could do it with an LLM. He still uses Git from the command line, but he now pipes his questions through an LLM first—e.g., he asks it how to “undo last Git commit” and it tells him git reset HEAD-1 (which, honestly, seems kind of intuitive enough to remember)—and then executes it on the command line. And then he calls this “efficient”. I’m blown away that he’s never heard of a Git UI. I just type Ctrl + Shift + K from long years of muscle memory using SmartGit.

This is a question I have for anyone who asks me about how to leverage LLMs in programming: are you even using the other tools we already have available?

Fun

Gerhard Polt Oktoberfest ORIGINAL FULL Gerhard Polt Nobelpreisträger − Attacke auf Geistesmenschen in 1998 (YouTube)

Rated M by My_Memes_Will_Cure_U (Reddit)

Reeses Penis Butter Cups

“I started up Destiny 2 yesterday and burst into tears because I forgot I had set my Steam name to “reeses penis butter cups” but instead of censoring penis, it censored the “butt” in butter. This game is rated “M”.”

me_irl by kruminater (Reddit)

Bone Mech in Meat Armor

“You don’t have a skeleton inside of you. You’re a brain. You are inside of a skeleton. You’re piloting a bone mech that’s using meat armor.”

Video Games

Mortal Kombat 1 − Official Launch Trailer (YouTube)