Links and Notes for October 6th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Economy & Finance

Team Billionaire is Winning by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“And, for two of our super-billionaires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, we have Section 230 protection. This means that their Internet platforms are not subject to the same rules on defamation as print and broadcast outlets. Yeah, this is just the market, telling us to give special privileges to online platforms.”

This is disingenuous. These platforms may disseminate information, but are structured completely differently than print. There are billions of authors, as well as the real risk of censorship. We should probably make a distinction between web sites and large corporate portals, but the moderation burden is much higher in either case.

You can try to outlaw people contributing to common portals entirely,—and enforcing “moderation”, i.e., making companies legally liable for what is deemed to be illegal content will inevitably end up there. There will always be something that gets taken too seriously, as we’ve seen millions of times in the existing social networks.

Baker derives no value from these forums, so he almost certainly doesn’t care if they disappear of become so neutered that they might as well not exist. The world no longer has a sense of humor because there is a huge incentive to be performatively offended.

This is typical of the people pushing for increased moderation, legislation, and regulation. I agree that you shouldn’t be able to make money off of it, but I also agree that you shouldn’t get to moderate away everything that offends anyone. I think especially that they will start by moderating away people calling other people “dirty jews” and posting swastikas into their comments, and they will end always end up by moderating away anything that they deem threatens the company, its profits, or the ruling class to which it belongs and that allows it to prosper.

The problem, as usual, is that a lot of people want to reach as large an audience as possible—because they’re narcissists—but they want to continue to communicate as if they’re just talking to their intimate friends. Hell, that “dirty jews” and swastika person might just be making a terrible joke that would be funny to their little in-group, in the context of other things going on. Without context, no-one can tell that it’s just a harmless idiot, learning how to behave themselves properly. With moderation and completely open channels, everyone has to already know how to behave from the get-go. Pushing the boundaries cannot be tolerated because speech is deemed too dangerous to abide.

“The government’s contract with Moderna to develop a Covid vaccine is the poster child in this category. It was very important for the United States, and the world, to develop Covid vaccines as quickly as possible. But, in the case of Moderna, we paid it over $900 million to develop and test a vaccine, and then gave it control over it. The result was that the stock price of Moderna increased by tens of billions and we created at least five Moderna billionaires by the summer of 2021. If we just celebrate the industrial policy – paying for the development of a vaccine – and don’t pay attention to how the rules are structured, then we get Moderna billionaires. And, if we do the same with our industrial policy for electric cars, wind and solar energy, and semiconductors, then we will end up with many more billionaires.”

There is no way this isn’t going to happen. We can only hope we get something good out of it, but the incentives mean that that will be of secondary concern.

“[…] it really is self-defeating and unnecessary to argue that we want the government to override the market. The issue is not whether the government will override the market, the issue is how the government will structure the market.”

“The right wants to structure the market so all the money goes to its billionaire backers. Progressives want to structure the market so that the benefits of growth are broadly shared.”

What the heck are you on about? Can you please stop making it look like there are two silos, with one of them sane? They’re all insane. Most people that identify as progressives want to structure the market so that it continues to benefit select groups, but just different ones. They generally want to sort out those groups by identity, completely ignorant of class.

Public Policy & Politics

Does Florida’s Transgender Bathroom Law Violate Free Speech? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“The contention that the Florida law would “force TGNCI people to adopt the state’s view of sex and gender” is a curious one, given that the opposite would force others to adopt the TGNCI’s view of sex and gender. Either way, a view is being “forced” on someone, the two differences being that one is a majority view and the norm, while the other seeks to impose a new and novel minority view on the majority.

“But are they not entitled to communicate their view that the definition of men and women is wrong, or at least inadequate, and should be changed? Are they not entitled to communicate by expressive conduct “that society can understand” that they do not fall within the historic and, in their view, wrongful paradigm that anatomy at birth defines their gender?”

“The argument that “TGNCI people cannot urinate—or exist—like other people” harkens back to equal protection, Of course they can urinate like other people, physiology being what it is, but the issue is where they are allowed to do so. As for the hyperbolic “exist,” this is the mantra of transgender rights, that any constraint on being allowed to do as they please without regard to its impact on anyone else erases their “existence.” Any accommodation or compromise, even though “other people” are subject to a multitude of rules and limitations on conduct with which they may disagree, find inconvenient or find offense, is unacceptable. Anything short of hegemony is, according to their battle cry, an effort to cease their existence.”

“But if taking matters a step further, to engage in the conduct they’re challenging, then no law would be constitutional as every challenge by physical conduct could be claimed communicative, thus obviating all limitations.”

“What about the person who wants to communicate that she believes a politician is bad, and does so by striking the politician. Does this conduct communicate his views? Arguably, it does. But it’s not the views that are prohibited. It’s the conduct. Much conduct has a communicative element, and yet it remains conduct and, as such, can be prohibited without regard to any ancillary free speech claims.”

Tampering with History by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“By the spring of 2015 Kiev was daily shelling civilian populations in the east, a campaign that would last eight years and claim roughly 14,000 lives. Moscow had by then decided to support Luhansk and Donetsk as autonomous republics, while co-sponsoring accords — the two Minsk Protocols — that would have held Ukraine together as a federated republic. These events marked out the battle lines with which we are now condemned to live. NATO approved of the merciless shelling of noncombatants to the extent it trained the Armed Forces of Ukraine to achieve maximum effect. The West never had any intention of backing the Minsk accords, which, in addition to saving Ukraine as a unified nation, would also have saved many thousands of lives.”

This is crucial, uncontroversial history—but no-one knows it. The war started in earnest in 2014. The economic war against Russia began even earlier. And then, in 2016, there was Russiagate, which had the twin purposes of attacking Trump and also of priming a population to believe that Russia is behind every evil in the world. You can see it in silly TV series, like The Morning Show, which, when attacked by a hacking outfit, showed that immediately “Russia” was on everyone’s lips, without question, evidence, or motive.

“For the record, Babyn Yar (also spelled Babi Yar), a section of Kiev, was the site of multiple Nazi massacres during World War II. Blinken’s reference is to the events of Sept. 29–30, 1941, when 34,000 people were massacred. In total, 100,000 to 150,000 Jews, Soviet POWs, Romani and others were killed there. While the Nazis attempted to cover up the Babyn Yar atrocities, the Soviets instantly publicized them when they liberated Kiev in 1943. After the war they tried those deemed responsible.”

Tony Blinken promulgates a completely different version, like a member in good standing of Infowars.

No ‘End of History’ in Ukraine by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

““Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal.” “A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one another’s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values.”

This is all just fine, sound reasoning, It’s just that the U.S., in its hubris, naturally assumed Fukuyama was talking about it when, in fact, the conclusion should be that, given Fukuyama’s premise, the U.S. could not possibly be considered a liberal democracy. It is, in fact and instead, an empire.

It’s like the nearly incessant babble about free markets: it’s correct, in principle, but inapplicable because we don’t have free markets.

“Karl Marx, who famously observed that, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.””

“Political scientists in the Fukuyama “end of history” school view this conflict as being derived by the resistance of the remnants of Soviet regional hegemony (i.e., modern-day Russia, led by its president, Vladimir Putin) over the inevitability of liberal democracy taking hold.”

I mean, it’s an adorable fairy tale for an empire to tell itself—or with which to convince its conquests to give up with less of a fight. These conquests know they’re in for a lot of pain if they don’t bend the knee. What better to convince them to do it sooner than a fairy tale that will actually come true for a handful of elite members of the conquered. Instead of fighting the empire, the target of conquest ends up fighting against itself over table scraps.

“To understand the roots of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, one needs to study German actions after the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the rise and fall of Symon Petliura and the Polish-Soviet War — all of which predated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the dissection of Galicia that took place in 1939 and 1945.”

“[…] upon its creation, the Western Ukrainian Republic found itself at war with a newly independent Poland and, following the merger between the Western Ukrainian Republic and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the war morphed into a general conflict between Poland and Ukraine. One of the major battlegrounds of this conflict was the western Galician territory of Volhynia. It was here that Ukrainian troops undertook the slaughter of thousands of Jews, for which Petliura has been blamed.”

“The alliance between Poland and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, concluded in April 1919, led to a Polish offensive against the Soviet Union which ended with the capture of Kiev by Polish troops in May 1919. A Soviet counterattack in June took the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw, only to be thrown back in August by Polish forces, which began to advance eastward until the Soviets sued for peace, in October 1920. While various efforts to end the Polish-Soviet conflict had been brokered on the basis of a delineation of territory known as the Curzon Line, named after the British Lord who first proposed it back in 1919, the final demarcation of the border was negotiated via the Treaty of Riga, signed in March 1921, which formally ended the Polish-Soviet war.”

“Bandera rose to lead the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1930’s, eventually allying himself with Nazi Germany following the 1939 partitioning of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, which ran roughly along the Curzon Line demarcation. Bandera was the driving force behind Ukrainian nationalist forces operating alongside the German occupying forces after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. These forces participated in the massacre of Jews in Lvov and Kiev (Babyn Yar) and the slaughter of Poles in Volhynia in 1943-44.”

“That same year, the newly created C.I.A. took over management of the Gehlen organization. From 1945 until 1954, the Gehlen organization, at the behest of U.S. and British intelligence, worked with Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) to direct the efforts of the Banderist fighters who remained on Soviet territory. They fought in a conflict that claimed the lives tens of thousands of Soviet Red Army and security personnel, along with hundreds of thousands of OUN and Ukrainian civilians. The C.I.A. continued to fund the OUN in diaspora up until 1990.”

Depleted Ukrainium by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“[…] we find once again that the U.S. is a victim of its old, Manichean habit of dividing the whole of humanity into good guys and bad guys. The headline on CNN’s report on the elections reads, “Pro–Russian politician wins Slovakia’s parliamentary election.” The New York Times head is, “Unease in the West as Slovakia Appears Set to Join the Putin Sympathizers.””

“The insidious thing here, and let us be ever vigilant on this point, is that these media are inserting into our brains the thought that any deviation from the Russophobic orthodoxy amounts to support for the Kremlin’s demonized occupant.”

“Across the pond there are signs of impatience as roughly eight million Ukrainian refugees settle in Europe, displaying little interest—and who can blame them?—in going home when the war is over. War or no, solidarity or no, the Poles have blocked imports of cheap Ukrainian wheat. There are signs of buyer’s remorse among the Finns a matter of months after their impulsive decision to join NATO. And now the Slovakians and their new leader’s alarming display of political and intellectual independence.”

“The Ukrainians’ long-touted counteroffensive, a major prop in the campaign to maintain public support for the war, is touted no more. It is well on the way to taking its place next to the 2007 “surge” in Iraq. Remember that? Of course you don’t. And you won’t remember the counteroffensive any more distinctly in, I would say, a year’s time.”

“If the majority of Americans has already had enough of this conflict as they drive to work along potholed roads and across crumbling bridges, Ukraine will be a much harder sell once the Biden regime can no longer pretend the rest of the West is with us. At that point—best outcome here—Americans may realize once again that the street is a very fine place to conduct politics.”

“As it emerges that Washington and Kiev are the only powers committed to prolonging hostilities, it will also become evident that neither has a choice under its current leadership. Volodymyr Zelensky cannot at this point enter seriously into peace talks: He has sacrificed too many Ukrainian lives. Joe Biden, apparently skilled at grifting, seems a dumbhead when it comes to thinking things through tactically or strategically. He has staked far too much on Ukraine and is now stuck—in an election year no less—with his whatever-it-takes, as-long-as-it-takes grandstanding.”

And Trump is able to capitalize on his “I was always against it,”—no matter how untrue or inapplicable—as it crumbles under Biden.

“American officials said they are convinced that Mr. Putin intends to try to end U.S. and European support for Ukraine by using his spy agencies to push propaganda supporting pro-Russian political parties and by stoking conspiracy theories with new technologies.”

NYT gonna ride that Russiagate hobby-horse until it breaks.

‘Horrific Step Backwards’: Biden Admin Waives Protections to Speed Border Wall Construction by Julia Conley (Scheer Post)

“The 26 laws —which include the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act—are being set aside “to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border in Starr County, Texas,” the Federal Register said.”

““Every acre of habitat left in the Rio Grande Valley is irreplaceable,” said Jordahl. “We can’t afford to lose more of it to a useless, medieval wall that won’t do a thing to stop immigration or smuggling. President Biden’s cynical decision to destroy a wildlife refuge and seal the beautiful Rio Grande behind a grotesque border wall must be stopped.””

The United States Has Its Fingerprints All Over the Chaos in Haiti by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“Haiti’s current turmoil is largely presented as just another misfortune plaguing a seemingly cursed nation, getting to this point has involved a series of typically underpublicized decisions by Washington and its partners. The other is that the entire saga is a perfect illustration of how little-known US foreign policy decisions stack on top of one another until military intervention seems like the only possible choice.”

“Once Moïse was dead, the US government and the “international community” it leads steadfastly backed acting prime minister Ariel Henry, who only holds the office because he was chosen by the United States and its European allies, not Haitians themselves. Since then, he has postponed an election he knew he would lose, meted out repression , and generally clung to power without a constitutional mandate, popular legitimacy, or a full parliament, with the terms of its last elected officials having expired this year.”

“[…] more than 650 Haitian organizations and figures — including its major political parties, labor unions, human rights and activist groups, churches, and even businesses — backed the August 2021 Montana Accord, which laid out the timeline and structure for a two-year-long democratic transition; a way out, in other words, from the current impasse. The US government has simply ignored it, choosing instead to offer unquestioning support to the hated Henry.”

“For years, Haiti was one of a number of poor Caribbean countries benefiting from Venezuela’s Petrocaribe program set up under the late president Hugo Chávez, which allowed them to purchase cheap oil on an extremely low-interest, twenty-five-year-long payment plan. The collapse in oil prices in the first half of the 2010s that dented the Venezuelan economy undermined the program, and then it was killed entirely by the Donald Trump administration’s sanctions,”

The Priority Must Be To Put Bush, Blair and Cheney Behind Bars Before Trump by Jonathan Cook (Mint Press News)

“There is, of course, no arrest warrant for either Blair or Cheney, even though in the hierarchy of war crimes, their roles are almost certainly worse. Putin at least has an argument that his invasion was provoked by NATO’s efforts to move weapons ever closer to Russia’s border, undermining Moscow’s nuclear deterrent. By contrast, no one ever refers to the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq as “unprovoked,” even though it undoubtedly was.”

“Why does every BBC interviewer of Ken Loach feel the need, whatever the topic, to raise entirely evidence-free smears tying him to antisemitism, while no BBC interviewer ever raises with Tony Blair the easily proved war crimes he committed invading Iraq?”

“Blair, like Cheney, is still every bit as much of a swamp creature, a peddler of concealed corporate interests – from the oil industry and arms makers to the parasitic bankers that feed off the asset-stripping the other two excel in – as he was when he invaded Iraq.”

“Image-laundering is a staple of our political systems. It is why most of the billionaire-owned media have continued to treat Biden deferentially, dismissing his glaring cognitive difficulties simply as evidence of a lifelong stutter, even as the president is regularly caught on video not only going off-script but losing any sense of where he is or what he should be doing.”

“Trump found a replacement for the safety net. He exploited the paradox at the heart of his brand by presenting himself as the insider-outsider, the rich man fighting for poor, white America, the billionaire taking on the media owned by and enriching his best friends. He sold himself as the opposition to the swamp he feeds off.”

Why Our Popular Mass Movements Fail by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“The “techno-optimists” who preached that new digital media was a revolutionary and democratizing force did not foresee that authoritarian governments, corporations and internal security services could harness these digital platforms and turn them into engines of wholesale surveillance, censorship and vehicles for propaganda and disinformation. The social media platforms that made popular protests possible were turned against us.”

Some couldn’t. Whether they were implicated or just useful idiots had no impact on the result.

“This “riot porn” delighted the media, many of those who engaged in it and, not coincidentally, the ruling class which used it to justify further repression and demonize protest movements. An absence of political theory led activists to use popular culture, such as the film “V for Vendetta,” as reference points. The far more effective and crippling tools of grassroots educational campaigns, strikes and boycotts were often ignored or sidelined.”

“Revolutions always begin, he writes, by making impossible demands that if the government met, would mean the end of the old configurations of power. But most importantly, despotic regimes always first collapse internally. Once sections of the ruling apparatus — police, security services, judiciary, media, government bureaucrats — will no longer attack, arrest, jail or shoot demonstrators, once they no longer obey orders, the old, discredited regime becomes paralyzed and terminal.”

“As Bevins writes, a “generation of individuals raised to view everything as if it were a business enterprise was de-radicalized, came to view this global order as ‘natural,’ and became unable to imagine what it takes to carry out a true revolution.””

“In order to understand what might happen after any given protest explosion, you must not only pay attention to who is waiting in the wings to fill a power vacuum. You have to pay attention to who has the power to define the uprising itself.””

“The lack of hierarchical structures in recent mass movements, done to prevent a leadership cult and make sure all voices are heard, while noble in its aspirations, make movements easy prey. By the time Zuccotti Park had hundreds of people attending General Assemblies, for example, the diffusion of voices and opinions meant paralysis.”

Warfare Dressed as Water Policy by Andrew Ross (Boston Review)

“This summer [2023], Palestine’s ongoing water crisis reached dangerous new heights. Next to the surge in settler activity, anxiety about the lack of domestic water supply was the most common topic on people’s lips. And for many strapped households like Ramzy’s, the safety of what they could obtain to drink was often not a priority.”

“While Palestinians have gone thirsty, Israelis had more than enough water to go around. The daily supply to Israelis and Jewish settlers is three to five times greater than to the average Palestinian household, whose consumption is almost 30 percent below the minimum amount recommended by the World Health Organization.”

“Since they are all connected to Israel’s water network, the settlements have access to unlimited and highly subsidized resources; they can always fill their swimming pools and irrigate their vineyards, even during the region’s scorching summers.”

“In the public mind, “apartheid” suggests the maintenance of repressive rule through a racial hierarchy upheld by Israeli law. Yet the occupation’s daily business of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and land grabbing proceeds at a pace and on a scale that far exceeds this. Emboldened by the new far-right government, settlers are now on a tear. Aided and abetted by the Netanyahu administration’s soldiers and administrators, they are snatching up territory all across the West Bank without regard for the already flimsy laws meant to prevent them from doing so.”

“These springs—around three hundred in number—used to be managed communally, both for household and agricultural use, and some still are. But for more than a decade now, settlers have been seizing the springs for their own use, or for recreational tourism exclusive to Israelis. In places where this groundwater is still accessible, outlier settlements have dug deeper wells to supply their own residents, diminishing the surface flow available to Palestinians to a trickle.”

“In late July, soldiers were filmed filling a village spring with concrete. Blocking spring access—in addition to shooting holes in residents’ water tanks and cisterns—is one of the means that Israel is using to force residents out of Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in a vast semi-desert area to the south of Hebron.”

““At first,” he explained, “they allowed their sheep to roam onto our land, and began to steal our own sheep and burn our animals’ fodder. Then they sent their kids to cause trouble. Our own youth got arrested for resisting by the soldiers and locked up, for which they received heavy fines.” He acknowledged that “the combination of arrests and fines proved to be the decisive tactic in the end.” We spoke to him after their school was demolished by soldiers—“the PA did nothing to help us,” he said—and his community was forced to move further up the valley into the township where their livelihoods as shepherds were much harder to sustain. With their departure, there is now nothing to stop settlers from taking control of the wells and diverting the water.”

“[…] the fouling of this beautiful valley water source also reflects a pattern of class domination within Palestinian society itself, illustrated here by the disregard of the newly affluent hilltop people for the peasantry below. While all Palestinians endure the water shortages imposed on them by the Israeli government, they do not suffer equally.”

“That is why, for Israel, holding a monopoly over the water supply was such a key part of the Oslo Accords. In the fateful agreement regarding the West Bank’s water resources, Israel committed to “sharing” only 15 percent of the supply, a quota that has not budged over the decades. But Israel has never delivered the agreed share and, even though the PA is willing to pay to receive more, Mekorot will not renegotiate. Profit takes a back seat to the project of expropriation.”

“Water deprivation is already a military asset in the “battle for Area C,” the portion of land administered by Israel which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank’s land but houses only 5 percent of its population. The strategy is to parch these residents and push them into either Area A or Area B, where they will be within the domain of the increasingly repressive PA and the crony capitalists it enables.”

The Undiscovered Country by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“My mind goes to an observation Bertrand Russell offered in “Free Thought and Official Propaganda,” a lecture he delivered in London 101 years ago. “But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically,” the great English rationalist told his audience. “It is not desired that ordinary people think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative problems.””

“The question is whether we have concluded, with our downcast eyes and in our rampant discouragement, that we are doomed never again authentically to connect with one another—always from here on out to bowl alone.”

“Lots of people seem to think that our condition now is permanent, and, O.K., its totalized aspects make it seem that way. But there is no grounding for this. Think of Soviet citizens and how we thought of Soviet citizens up to the very end. Think of the extraordinary political, social, and community consciousness manifest in the 1930s. Those people were our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents. Think of the 1960s scene: Those people were we, or our parents.”

“I wonder whether the mess amid which we live can get much worse. I am thinking here not only of what may amount to the worst presidency of my lifetime, and I was alive when Nixon slept in the White House. I consider the corrosion of our most important institutions, above all our judicial system, even more ominous. Joe Biden will fade at some point. The repairs our institutions require will prove a very long-term project.”

Murder And Rape For The Cause by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

I don’t even have anything to cite from this article because it’s so insipid, but I just wanted to keep in my notes that, once again, an ordinarily useful writer and thinker simply cannot keep his shit together or think of justice when his team’s been attacked. Greenfield is Jewish. He loves Israel. He cannot stand to hear a single bad word about anything that Israel does. Every time there is a larger altercation, he comes down rabidly on the side of Israel against Palestinians. The Palestinians are animals, heedlessly slaughtering innocent Israelis, who’ve done nothing to deserve even reprobation, to say nothing of violence. Read his responses to the comments on the post. Those are the comments he’s even allowed to appear, after moderation. It’s a shame, because he writes so much that is useful about law and justice and oppression in the U.S. On the topic of Israel, he’s an utter fool, a complete and unquestioning tool for the oppressor.

Look, two wrongs don’t make a right. Palestinians and their militant wing Hamas are humans and are thus capable of shocking cruelty and savagery when they get the chance—especially against what they consider to be an utterly demonic enemy. They also don’t recognize civilians as illegitimate targets. But neither does Israel. And they get a lot more chances to prove their savagery. If, like Greenfield, you only pay attention, or care, when the opposing team does it, then, … yeah, you’re going to look like a total asshole who can’t read a newspaper—who thinks that Israel heard about Palestine for the very first time on the morning of October 7th, 2023—and then sound off in an utterly unhinged way.

Fauda Recommendation from Netflix

This recommendation popped up just this evening, about a day after what might have been the start of the next Intifada. Netflix thinks that I should watch a movie or series about heroic Israeli secret agents who are hunting nefarious Palestinian terrorists. Cool, Netflix. Nice to see where your loyalties lie.

The satirical site, which often claims that it takes the piss out of everyone, published the only possible thing that it could have published: “White House Issues Condemnation Of Attack Biden Funded”

Babylon Bee on Israel

I was confused for a second because I couldn’t figure out that the Bee was accusing Biden of having funded the Palestinians. In my world, this is ludicrous—the Biden administration funds Israel nearly infinitely more. In the Babylon Bee’s world, where Biden is wrong about everything, he is a massive supporter of Palestine and probably delights in dead Israelis.

This is, again, what it looks like to be so partisan as to not be able to think straight. Biden would, of course, go on to make subsequent statements that make this accusation seem even more ridiculous. It was ridiculous from the beginning, though, again, if you can muster the energy to read a Wikipedia page or two.

Palestinian Resistance in Gaza Launches Historic Surprise Attack Against Israel by People's Dispatch (Scheer Post)

“As per reports, Hamas claims to have launched over 5,000 rockets across Israeli territory from Gaza. The rockets were reported to have hit as far north as Tel Aviv. The attack also included Hamas fighters pushing through the land and sea routes and penetrating into Israeli territory.

“The offensive is viewed as the biggest escalation since 2021 in the ongoing violence between Israel and the Gaza Strip, which has been under a total Israeli land, air, and sea blockade since 2005. It is also reported to be the first time ever that Gazan fighters were able to conduct an armed operation into Israel on such a massive scale.”

I wonder what happened to the Iron Dome? Was it overwhelmed? I thought that couldn’t happen? Not with the paltry rockets that Hamas has? Or did they get bigger/better ones?

“Israel has responded with airstrikes against Gaza and close to 200 Palestinians have already been killed.[3]”

“Israeli violence and oppression against Palestinians has increased substantially with deadly raids becoming increasingly regular. Prior to the attacks, Israeli forces had already killed over 224 Palestinians, including 38 children, already this year. Of the total, 187 were killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and 37 in Gaza. This figure had already surpassed the record high of 178 killings in the whole of 2022.”

Netanyahu regime staggered by Palestinian uprising by Alex Lantier (WSWS)

“The World Socialist Web Site condemns the vicious and obscenely hypocritical statements of President Joe Biden and leaders of the European Union denouncing the Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” while supporting without any reservations Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.”

“Pledging “rock-solid and unwavering” support for Israeli military operations against Gaza, Biden said: “The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, and I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the government and people of Israel. Terrorism is never justified. Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.””

OMG 😱 they’re so delighted to be able to wholeheartedly endorse the further tightening of the noose that they’ve been funding for years, but this time, because of the (unprovoked, of course!) Palestinian attack, they feel like they can also reclaim the moral high ground, without doing any work at all. This is such a slam dunk that of course all the EU and US leaders are going to take it. They don’t give a shit about anybody but themselves, but pretending to care about Israelis is not only lucrative, but more than occasionally politically necessary. No-one ever lost an election for not caring about Palestinians. Quite the contrary.

Check out Baerbock, one of the truly worst, most ruthless, and most disgusting women in politics since … Hillary Clinton? Margaret Thatcher? Condaleeza Rice? Susan Rice? Samantha Power?

“German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock declared: “The odious violence of Hamas against civilians in Israel is unprecedented and unjustifiable. This terrorism must stop immediately. Israel has our full solidarity.””

Unprecedented! Not only unprovoked, but unprecedented! This, from a fucking German! A German is saying that Palestinian violence is unprecedented. You can’t make this shit up. She is the foreign minister—the top diplomat—of that once progressive country.

“The hypocrisy of these statements is staggering. As always, the sympathies of the imperialist powers are with the oppressors. Any manifestation of resistance by the oppressed is greeted with frenzied denunciations. The media ignores the fact that the Israeli government is led by a criminal, whose coalition is dominated by fascistic racists, and is engaged in efforts to suppress the constitution.”

The attacks are an act of desperation, of course. They knew exactly what would happen in response. I’m not sure whether they were just trying to tip Israel’s hand, to force them to actually do something so awful that even a reprehensible c*#% link Baerbock would have to shut the f*#% up and sit down while the adults do the talking.

“On Saturday night, in a bloodcurdling address to the nation, Netanyahu told “residents of Gaza” to “get out now, because we will operate everywhere and with full force.” Since his government blockades Gaza and does not let anyone leave, this is a declaration that Netanyahu sees Gaza’s entire population as a legitimate target. Asserting that “Hamas wants to murder us all,” Netanyahu pledged to “fight them to the bitter end” and that cities where Hamas operates would turn into “cities of ruin.””

Netanyahu will target civilians. He and his predecessors always have. The western world doesn’t care at all. The money continues to flow.

Of course, no-one will actually pay any attention to what the “enemy” has to say about why it’s doing what it’s doing. Putin knows the feeling. We fail to listen to our own detriment. This is not about capitulation to violence, but in learning what it would take to avoid it and to determine whether that price is too high. If we categorically refuse to even learn what the price might be, we are dishonorable, reckless, and exceedingly stupid hypocrites.

Here is a part of Hamas’s declaration.

““As the Israeli occupation maintains its siege of the Gaza Strip and continues its crimes against our Palestinian people, while showing utmost disregard for international laws and resolutions amid US and Western support and international silence, we have decided to put an end to all of that. We announce a military operation against the Israeli occupation, which comes in response to the continued Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and violations at the Al-Aqsa mosque.””

They are referring of course to the multiple attacks inside a mosque carried out by Israeli police over the last couple of years. Most recently, people swept through, spitting on people. On Biden’s watch, by the way. Utterly vile, but a neat tactic for provoking a violent response without actually striking first.

If history is any guide, Gaza is truly going to get curb-stomped, probably worse than they’ve ever been before. As noted in Violence Begets Violence by Raouf Halaby (CounterPunch)

“Hamas and its supporters will no doubt claim Saturday’s attack on Israel to be a victory. And in truth, taking on one of the mightiest armies in the world is beyond belief. Breaking out of their open-air prison and with slingshots (Kalashnikovs, motorcycles, and a bulldozer), as compared to Israel’s infinite military might, the fifth strongest military in the world with proven air, land, and sea prowess, will be celebrated by Hamas and across the Near East as a victory.

“At best, it is a pyrrhic victory, one for which Palestinian citizens in Gaza and the West Bank, as happened in the past, will pay dearly. Since 2008 Israel has launched four major wars on Gaza, each of which was more brutal than the preceding one. I fear that the current Israeli avenging war, unlike the previous ones, will exact a very heavy price on the 376 square-mile enclave, the world’s largest open-air prison in which 2.3 million Palestinians exist.”

Spanish-Russian journalist Pablo González still in “Polish Guantanamo” 18 months after arrest by Alice Summers (WSWS)

“The journalist has now been left to languish in a Polish jail for more than a year and a half by the far-right Polish government, Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government and all the NATO powers. He has not been found guilty of any crime, or ever faced a criminal trial. No date has even been set for him to face the charges in court.”

“His conditions resemble those “enemy combatants” detained by Washington at the notorious Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. He spends 23 hours per day in isolation in a five-metre cell, with one hour of walking across a 10-metre patio. Every time he is taken out of the cell, he is searched and handcuffed. Upon entering, he is frisked again. Since his detention, he has only been able to receive a visit from his wife twice, the last time in November. Both visits took place in the presence of a jailer and an agent of the Polish intelligence services.”

These are the good guys, right? This is NATO. This is how the supposedly “end of history” moral force for good and decency against all that is unjust treats people with whom it disagrees. It locks them away, worse than it would treat animals. It doesn’t bother with legal means. It doesn’t have to. It can do whatever it wants.

This is why you shouldn’t be shocked to see these exact same people supporting Israel’s air-strafing and -bombing of Gaza when Hamas gets uppity for the first time in 21 years.

They’re Repeating The Word ‘Unprovoked’ Again, This Time In Defense Of Israel by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

““The United States unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians,” reads a statement from the White House.”

““The unprovoked terror attack today and the murders of innocent Israeli citizens are a stark reminder of the brutality of Hamas and Iran-backed extremists,” reads a statement by congressman and house speaker contender Jim Jordan.”

That’s from a Republican. Here’s the leading light of the Democrats:

““I forcefully condemn these cowardly, horrifying, unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas,” tweeted congressman John Fetterman.”

You have to wonder whether they actually believe this, or if they’re actively evil.

“When you lay them all out together it starts to sound highly suspicious, like someone always referring to his car as “my car, which I did not steal,” or always introducing his spouse as “my wife, whom I do not beat.””

The previously unprovoked attack in the western press was the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“As Noam Chomsky quipped last year, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”

“And the same is of course true of the latest Hamas offensive. There are all kinds of arguments you could legitimately make about it, but one argument you definitely cannot defend is that it was unprovoked.”

“After the news broke about the Hamas offensive I tweeted, “Here come days and days of western news media slyly reversing the aggressor-defender relationship and reporting as though the violence began with the Hamas offensive, spontaneously out of nowhere.””

Palestinians Speak the Language of Violence Israel Taught Them by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“This is not to defend the war crimes by either side. It is not to rejoice in the attacks. I have seen enough violence in the Israeli occupied territories, where I covered the conflict for seven years, to loathe violence. But this is the familiar denouement to all settler-colonial projects. Regimes implanted and maintained by violence engender violence. […] The Palestinians, like all colonized people, have a right to armed resistance under international law.”

“What does Israel, or the world community, expect? How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years, reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level, deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity, use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns and infantry units to randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response? Israel is currently carrying out waves of aerial assaults on Gaza, preparing a ground invasion and has cut the power to Gaza, which usually only operates two to four hours per day.

“Many of the resistance fighters who infiltrated into Israel undoubtedly knew they would be killed. But like resistance fighters in other wars of liberation they decided that if they could not choose how they would live, they would choose how they would die.”

“The next stage of this struggle will be a massive campaign of industrial slaughter in Gaza by Israel, which has already begun. Israel is convinced greater levels of violence will finally crush Palestinian aspirations. Israel is mistaken. The terror Israel inflicts is the terror it will get.”

Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks by Summer Said, Benoit Faucon, Stephen Kalin (WSJ)

“Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.”

Sure, sure, I bet they did. The WSJ being super-helpful to get the war against the real enemy going in earnest.

All This Death Is The Fault Of The Western Press by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix)

“Whenever something like this happens warmongers always seize on the emotional frenzy of the moment to shove through insane acts of warmongering and scream vitriol at anyone who questions them. Then later when all the facts are in people slowly start to realize that something went very wrong, and that they were deceived.

“After 9/11 anyone who didn’t support multiple full-scale ground invasions of sovereign nations was a terrorist sympathizer and a Saddam apologist.”

“The western press are largely to blame for all this. If they’d just told the truth instead of running “Palestinian child walks into bullet” headlines this whole time and telling everyone that boycotting Israel is genocide, political pressure could’ve long ago been brought about to force a peaceful and just resolution to this mess.”

“Instead they hid all those abuses from the public for generations, creating an environment where peaceful resolutions are impossible and giving rise to Palestinian factions which understandably see violent force as the only viable answer.

“This is their fault. They created this mess with a mountain of lies and obfuscation, and now those lies are being paid for with rivers of blood. The western press are war criminals. They’ve committed crimes against humanity.”

“If there’s just a lot of violence and then it goes back to more or less the status quo, Israeli intelligence probably did just massively faceplant and miss extensive preparations for an attack which included training for air and sea assaults. If new agendas are rolled out that wouldn’t have been consented to without the attack, chances are much higher it was allowed; the more far-reaching the agendas, the greater the likelihood.”

“[…] if the US-led world order requires more and more violence and nuclear brinkmanship to maintain, what specifically is the argument for maintaining it in the first place? Does it not at some point begin to cease looking like “order” at all, and instead like a tyrannical empire trying to rule the world no matter how much death and destruction is necessary to subjugate it?”

The US will send a carrier strike group to the Eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel by Tara Copp (AP News)

The AP is delighted to jump in. Why would you need a carrier strike group to fight a population that is completely hemmed in? Israel has Palestine completely under control. These attacks do not indicate any change in the balance of power whatsoever.

Alan Mcleod on Palestinian/Israeli historical territory

This diagram is also missing the last 15 years of land and resource appropriation. Land is one thing: control over water, food supplies, and electricity doesn’t show up on a map, but is even more controlling. Those green patches are places where Palestinians are allowed to be, but not live.

This looks a bit like the progression of the U.S. conquest of Native American land. It’s no wonder the U.S. is all-in on supporting Israel in their noble endeavor.

From hubris to humiliation: The 10 hours that shocked Israel by Marwan Bishara (Al Jazeera)

“The Palestinian blitzkrieg is a military failure and a political catastrophe for Israel of colossal proportions.”

“A few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a boastful speech at the United Nations, announcing the establishment of a new Middle East centred around Israel and its new Arab partners, the Palestinians, whom he totally omitted from his fantasy regional map, dealt him and Israel a fatal blow, politically and strategically.”

“Israel’s military establishment will no doubt try to recover the strategic and military initiative from Hamas by immediately dealing it a major military blow. As it has done in the past, it will undertake severe bombardment and assassination campaigns, leading to great suffering and countless casualties among the Palestinians. And as it has happened in the past again and again, this will not destroy the Palestinian resistance.”

The only solution is much-closer-to-complete genocide, as the U.S. has done with the Native Americans. You never hear about terrorism coming from the “reservations” because the U.S. has them under much better control. There are also many, many fewer of them, relative to the surrounding population. They don’t live cheek-by-jowl with them—Palestinians are an essential part of the workforce in Israel.

The Root of Violence Is Oppression. (Jewish Voice for Peace)

“The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago. Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence. Reality is shaped by when you start the clock.

“For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy with violent expulsions and home demolitions, mass killings, military raids on refugee camps, unrelenting siege and daily humiliation. In recent weeks, Israeli forces repeatedly stormed the holiest Muslim sites in Jerusalem.”

“For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.”

The bombings will resume until morale improves.

Clueless on Gaza by Ted Rall

“Gazans faced a choice.

“They could obey Israel and its supporters. They could suffer, chafe under occupation, dodge bombs and bullets, starve, watch their friends and neighbors die, with no end in sight as the world keeps ignoring them.

“They could stage protest marches that no important media outlet would cover, write firm-but-polite letters to the editor no one would publish and post to social media accounts no one would read. As they engaged in peaceful protest, they would keep starving and dying.

“Or they could confront the Israelis with violence.

“You can argue that violence is never the answer. You can claim that you’d be docile, that you’d live under blockade and occupation, never taking up arms or cheering those who do.

“Go on, judge the Gazans. We both know you’d do the same exact thing if you were them.”

A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer one by Haviv Rettig Gur (Times of Israel)

“Hamas did everything it could to shock Israelis, to humiliate and horrify, kidnapping children, desecrating corpses, and then crowing about it to the world.

“And Israelis watched it all, minute by agonizing minute. And they agreed. Their weakness had become clear, unavoidable.

“And very, very dangerous.”

“And it will soon learn the scale of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot.

“A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.

“Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.”

This is both true and a rallying cry. It’s also amazing that the author is expecting us to believe that either the current or any previous Israeli leadership has lost any sleep about the humanitarian fallout. I mean, I’m sure that there has been some restraint from just outright murdering every Palestinian that crosses their paths, but, from out here, in the real world, it doesn’t really look like much restraint is considered at all. If there’s any concern about humanitarian fallout, it’s lost in a rounding error.

Israel has been exposed as weaker than it projected and it will react in the same way that the U.S. did, when a similar thing happened to it over 22 years ago. The younger people of Israel face the same choice that we Americans did at that time: seek understanding, wonder what those scarred wizened visages meant by “chickens coming home to roost”, or double down, look inward, and lash out.

It’s quite obvious what Israel, led by Netanyahu, will do. It remains to be seen how much of the population of Israel follows, in their heart of hearts. Most Americans followed. Some questioned. Those who questioned didn’t matter. Their opinions never do. There is no solace in being right when the world burns for so many others.

Tribalism Versus International Law in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Juan Cole (Scheer Post)

“Israel’s seizure of the Palestinian West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 was therefore illegal. Its annexation of Palestinian East Jerusalem was illegal, and was branded such by the United Nations Security Council.

“The laws of military occupation envision a time-limited occupation during the shooting war. Since the Hague Regulations of 1907 occupiers have been forbidden to alter the lifeways of the people who are occupied. They may not expel them arbitrarily from their homes. And they may not send their own citizens into the occupied territory to settle it. These actions were proscribed in the Geneva Convention of 1949 and in the Rome Statute.

“These actions were made illegal in international law to forestall a repetition of Nazi Germany’s policies in Poland, where Berlin made a concerted attempt to remove Poles and replace them with Germans so as to “aryanize” the territory and make it part of Germany.

“Israel has violated all of these provisions of international law, in a concerted and deliberate manner for over half a century. It has been actively and consistently aided in doing so by the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Canada and other industrialized democracies […]”

“[…] the principle of proportionality — you can’t launch a full-scale war because of a minor skirmish for instance. You may not deliberately target or recklessly endanger the lives of innocent noncombatants. These are war crimes.”

“[…] although Hamas has the right to mount resistance to being unlawfully occupied by a foreign power, it doesn’t have the right to shoot down 260 attendees at a music festival, to take grandmothers and children hostage, or to fire thousands of unguided rockets at populated areas. Since these munitions have no guidance systems, shooting them off inevitably recklessly endangers noncombatant civilians, as witness the large number of Israeli casualties, with hundreds dead and thousands wounded.

“With the exception of attacks on Israeli military personnel and bases, most of the actions taken by Hamas since Saturday have been war crimes, for which its leaders should be tried at the International Criminal Court.

“At the same time, disproportionate use of force by the Israeli military, indiscriminate bombardment of inhabited apartment buildings, and reckless endangerment of large numbers of Palestinian noncombatants by directing fire at densely inhabited neighborhoods, are all potential war crimes on the Israeli side. However, there is no prospect that any Israeli official will ever be held accountable for war crimes in any international tribunal, because the US and other patrons of Tel Aviv will intervene to prevent it. Indeed, it is unlikely that Israeli war crimes will so much as be described in that way by any North Atlantic leader.

“Unless international law is given some teeth by the international community, these episodes of violence will continue to break out from time to time, and the tribes will gnash their teeth, and more people will be killed or deprived of their right to live a normal life.”

A Population With Nothing To Lose by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Ultimately this is just Palestinians doing what they feel they need to do out of total desperation, because they feel backed into a corner with no other options. And they feel backed into a corner with no other options because that does appear to be the case. There are a lot of people I could blame for their being in those circumstances, but the very last on that list would be the victims of the abuse themselves.”

Yes, by all means, the Palestinians are not to blame. The Palestinians are not Hamas only in the complicated way that Americans are not their military, or their government. When you talk to people, it feels true—but it’s also not true, in that they don’t denounce it.

It’s similar with the Ukrainians vs. their government. It’s ostensibly democratic—only slightly more so than Palestine, which seems to have two governments? And one of them won’t allow elections? And the other, Hamas, was not accepted by the West as the actual winner of the election, even though Jimmy Carter himself said that the election was on the up-and-up?—but the people in Ukraine seem to have very little control over what their country does in their name.

I’m sure they’re not so thrilled about all of the conscription, just like Gazans are probably not exactly thrilled with the attacks currently bombing every they know to shreds.

“Sure glad Trump lost because otherwise a border wall would be getting built and kids would still be in cages and the Iran deal would still be dead and the military budget would still be inflating and Roe v Wade would’ve been killed. That psycho would probably have us on the brink of World War Three by now.”

The Violence in Palestine and Israel Is the Tragic Fruit of Brutal Oppression by Seraj Assi (Jacobin)

“The tragic scenes unfolding in Gaza and Israel are a chilling reminder that occupation and oppression bear a price. For the truth is that when you imprison two million people in 140 square miles, placing them under a merciless siege with no end in sight, with no way in or out, with drones and rockets buzzing overhead night and day, with constant surveillance and harassment, with scant control over their day-to-day lives — ultimately, the dispossessed will rebel.

“The violence was not unprovoked, as the mainstream media has depicted it. It has been brewing and festering in every corner of the country.

“In the West Bank, the Palestinian town of Jenin is still reeling from the devastation of a recent unsparing Israeli attack, which left the town a razed ghostland. The small town of Huwara has yet to recover from the deadly horrors unleashed by settlers on its residents.”

It’s not that Hamas didn’t commit war crimes. It’s more that the world shouldn’t be surprised that it did.

“During the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, settlers stormed into the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in Jerusalem, staging provocative tours, harassing and beating worshippers, and spitting on Christians.”

It doesn’t justify the rocket attacks, but it goes a good way towards explaining them. If you want the rocket attacks to stop, you should consider all of the options: you could turn the screws even tighter, to make sure that no-one can get rockets. Or you could see what you would need to do for people not to even want rockets. That ship has probably sailed, but it might not be bad, as a thought experiment.

“The ongoing explosion in violence is the ugly reality of Israeli apartheid, the culmination of decades of occupation of a stateless people deprived of basic human rights and freedoms. Unless the root causes are dismantled — the siege lifted, the apartheid system and occupation ended — violence will continue to tragically haunt Palestinians and Israelis for years to come.”

Malcom X on oppressors and the media

‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 3: Israeli Defense Minister Orders Full Siege of Gaza ‘ No Power, No Food, No Gas’ by Mondoweiss (Scheer Post)

“Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: “I ordered a full siege on the Gaza Strip. No power, no food, no gas, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.””

Flattened building Gaza, October 2023

Aerial firepower does such incredible damage. This reminds me of the lashing out of the City in the Hunger Games.

Has Israel signed the Geneva Convention? Does it care? Does anyone?

“In 2005, the Israeli army escaped from Gaza because of the intense resistance throughout the Strip. It evacuated its forces and quickly redeployed, circulating Gaza from all directions, thus the notorious siege of today.

“The Resistance back then was much weaker, less organized, and far less armed than it is now.

“If Israel takes charge of Gaza again, it will have to fight that same Palestinian Resistance daily and possibly for years to come.

“It is unclear what direction Netanyahu will choose. But either way, no matter what will happen in the coming days and weeks, Israel has, in many ways, lost the war.”

‘Genuinely Shocked They Aired It’: CNN Interview Cuts Through Pro-Israel Propaganda on Gaza by Julia Conley (Scheer Post)

“[…] what you have described is exactly what we already have, by 560 Israeli military checkpoints,” said Barghouti. “The whole West Bank has been divided into 224 small ghettos separated from each other, and the settlers are everywhere attacking Palestinians. “Can we stop what’s going on now? Yes, of course, all these Israelis who are now in Gaza can be released tomorrow… if Israel also accepts to release our 5,300 Palestinian prisoners who are in Israeli jails, including 1,260 Palestinians who are in jail without knowing why under the under the so-called “administrative detention.””

This Is Exactly What It Looks Like by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix)

“The Israel-Palestine issue is not complicated; an apartheid regime abuses and oppresses an indigenous ethnic group who don’t have the same rights as others. The only reason anyone thinks it’s complicated is because they assume if it were simple, the news would’ve told them so.”

“In reality the empire just supports who it supports because that’s where its interests happen to be advanced in each instance. Having Ukraine as a proxy advances US strategic interests against Russia and having Israel as a proxy advances US strategic interests against Iran and Syria. They’re not hypocritical at all; they’re perfectly consistent. They’re grabbing power and control in whatever way’s most convenient, in perfect alignment with their actual values.”

The True Face Of Israel by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix)

“I built a new house. There were people living where I wanted to build it so I just started building it on top of them. They tried to stop me so I had to kill them for being terrorists. If you disagree with my actions you’re basically a Nazi. I have a right to defend my house.”

This is a reasonable synopsis of how some settlers in Israel are acting. Their government defends them 100%.

“A nation that cannot exist without nonstop war is not a nation at all — it’s an ongoing military operation.”

That’s why the U.S. and Israel are such great friends. They understand empire.

Everyone Should Be Calling for a Cease-Fire in Palestine by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

Destroyed Karama neighborhood following the Israeli bombing on Gaza City, October 11, 2023

“This is collective punishment of a population for the actions of their government, an unambiguous crime under international law, and made even harsher by the Netanyahu government’s decision to heighten the already sixteen-year-long Israeli blockade of Gaza: “no fuel, electricity, or food supplies,” according to Gallant. To justify this unjustifiable policy, Gallant used shockingly — but at this point typically — racist language, that “we fight animals in human form and proceed accordingly.””

“For decades, Israeli policy has flouted international law, imposed crushing and seemingly endless misery on the people of Gaza and the West Bank, and condemned Palestinians to watch as the land of what’s meant to be their future state is openly stolen with impunity.”

“This isn’t a time for cheerleading. War is not a spectator sport, and besides the taking of innocent lives in Israel, the main effect of Hamas’s supposed “success” has been to trigger another round of Israeli force, which has already killed hundreds of Palestinians and looks set to kill many more, one that from all indications is going to be far more vicious and unrestrained than previous iterations — which is saying something.”

Those Who Support Israel Against Hamas Should also Back Ukraine Against Russia by Ilya Somin (Reason)

The opening paragraph expands on the illogical premise in the title, double down again and again.

“Hamas’ shocking terrorist attack against Israel has galvanized bipartisan support for Israel’s cause in the US. But many conservative Republicans who back Israel simultaneously oppose continued support for Ukraine in its struggle against the very similar assault by Russia. GOP Sen. Josh Hawley says “[a]ny funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.” This pro-Israel/anti-Ukraine stance is incoherent. The moral and strategic rationales for backing Israel also apply to Ukraine, in some cases with even greater force. Both states are liberal democracies threatened by authoritarian mass murderers who seek to destroy them. And Russian atrocities are strikingly similar to those of Hamas, except on a much larger scale. There is no good moral justification for supporting Israel’s cause that does not also apply to Ukraine’s. The strategic rationale for backing Israel also applies to Ukraine, with at least equal force.”

I didn’t highlight anything because I don’t agree with any of it. The only interesting bit is to consider what is missing from this person’s worldview? He’s a professor at George Mason University (Wikipedia). I have long since skipped over his content at Reason because he’s just so out there and illogical. I couldn’t resist this one, though.

I skimmed the rest of the article and it’s just woefully without nuance, with an analysis of what he considers to be acceptable viewpoints, all based on his wacky worldview that Israel is a shrinking violet of a democracy suffering before the colonial onslaught of the Palestinian hordes. He thinks that Ukraine/Russia is as simple as a crazed colonial power attacking an innocent democratic state that was just minding its own business.

Even with these premises, as divorced from reality as they are, I still have trouble following his line of reasoning—but I have to admit that I’m not trying very hard. It’s best just to back away slowly and leave Mr. Somin to his almost certainly very lucrative job as a foreign-policy expert in U.S. media.

Some Young Lives Matter More Than Others, Some Don’t Seem to Matter at All by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“The government of these two brave and accomplished American women never pressed for answers about their killings, never demanded that anyone be held to account. If they had, perhaps, the real story about what’s been going on in Israel and the Occupied Territories might have gotten a brief airing in the American media. Instead, the money and the weapons continued to flow into the hands of a regime that had demonstrated over and over again its willingness to use them against anyone who stood in its way, even women from the country that provided them.

“Now here we are again, having to ask ourselves how many children Biden’s shipment of weapons to Israel will kill? How many tiny limbs will be lost? How many small heads will be crushed in the rubble? Will we see the bodies our bombs have mutilated? Get a body count of the deaths our tax dollars have underwritten? What doctrine of just war decrees that the deaths of children justify the killing of more children?”

Palestinian Counter-Offensive Was Decades in the Making by BreakThrough News (YouTube)

Israeli Intelligence Suddenly Knows Exactly Where Hamas Is by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“When you live under an empire of lies you’ll be asked to believe a lot of very stupid things. The dumbest thing we’re being asked to believe this week is that Israel’s intelligence services are simultaneously so incompetent that Saturday’s Hamas attack took them completely by surprise, but also so competent that all the buildings they’re destroying with their relentless bombing campaign on Gaza are directed solely at Hamas.”

“If you want to support Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza then go ahead, and if you want to uncritically accept the official narrative about Saturday’s attack then you do you. But don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

‘Innocent Israelis’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“To assume the responsibilities that fall to us is to preserve some claim to innocence, it seems to me. To develop within ourselves a sense of empathy, or whatever is the opposite of indifference, is equally to retain or regain our innocence. Again, there is no defending the shootings at Re’im. But only those among the revelers who understood and assumed their responsibility for Israel’s conduct and all the Yoav Gallants running the apartheid state can fairly be counted innocent of what we must recognize as a criminal regime. There is an honorable movement of such people in Israel, let us not forget. It is hard to imagine any of its members partying on the Gaza border, but let us allow for the possibility. For the rest, they must be counted as complicit.”

“To consider the Re’im attack as an event in history, it seems to me there is something very off about a group of young and privileged Israelis having a carefree weekend in the sand hard by a land of daily, incessant suffering, a place where the innocence of its children and youth has been stolen by the state wherein the partiers do their partying. Something very off: By this I mean the revelers betrayed themselves as profoundly irresponsible, so it seems to me. Maybe unconsciously and maybe not, to me they displayed that indifference toward the lives of others for which many Israelis have unfortunately made themselves well-known.”

This is the least-generous interpretation possible, but it’s unfortunately got more truth in it than we’d like to admit. I would just like to add that Israelis are hardly unique in this regard. This is what people do. We become very accustomed to the situation.

The situation for Israel is that they are the chosen people, living in relative luxury, the world jealous of them. Perhaps I can empathize because this is the story that Americans are told, as well.

When you benefit greatly from a situation, when your quality of life is good, you can easily look away from the giant heap of skulls and bones on which your so-called civilization is built.[4]

There are untold places in the “civilized world” where the rich live cheek-by-jowl with wildly impoverished neighborhoods, places of to-the-rich completely incomprehensible and unimaginable suffering and desperation. Gated communities. Favelas. Slums of all kinds.

Of course, of course, Palestine is, by all accounts, much, much worse. It is, as Norman Finkelstein says, a “concentration camp”, an “open prison”. Nearly all residents were born into a concentration camp and have known nothing but prison their entire lives. The majority are younger than 18 years old.

Even if we don’t live cheek-by-jowl with the oppressed, we still benefit every day from them, casually, both in our own societies and in others.

• Is that a nice Nike running sweater you have on, made in a Bangladeshi sweatshop?
• Do you enjoy typing on your laptop, manufactured in China and/or Taiwan, under probably appalling conditions?
• Did you enjoy that Starbucks for which you paid an entire hour’s salary of the person who you completely ignored behind the counter, who will possibly sleep in their car that night?
• Was it made with beans that don’t grow within thousands of kilometers of you, harvested by excruciatingly poor people ripped off mercilessly by giant multinationals that make obscene profits every year?
• Did you have some chocolate with it?

We want desperately for Hamas and the Palestinians to be uniquely savage terrorists, alone in their ability to inflict unspeakable harm on innocents—so that we can help ourselves forget our complicity in these acts, done in our name, or for our ultimate benefit.

We need their attacks—and the attacks of all whom we deem enemies, but who are really just “other people who have stuff that we want to have for free”—to be “unprovoked”.

We can’t have done anything to have aroused their ire. We can’t be made to even consider changing anything about ourselves or our lifestyles that would prevent something like this from happening in the future. We are an unsullied people. There is nothing we have done that might be considered untoward that we should perhaps stop doing in order to prevent future attacks.

Those are the only justifications for any change in our behavior: it’s getting too expensive—or difficult—(to steal stuff from others), or it’s getting too dangerous (to steal stuff from others). We never consider the path of “stop stealing stuff from others so much” because it would (A) possibly change our quality of life in a way that our lords and masters—who benefit even massively more from this whole situation—have told us would be detrimental and (B) would mean that we would have to admit that we had been doing bad things (i.e., stealing stuff from other people). The life of a pirate involves a lot of self-delusion.

We want the Israelis to be even worse deniers of their privilege, to be uniquely deluded hypocrites and racists, so that we can absolve ourselves of our own failings in this regard, were we to even admit them. And why admit such trifles about our excellent selves, when the others are so, so much worse?

And disabuse yourself of the notion that religion has anything to do with it, other than as a convenient and well-established reason for hating and othering. Religion is just one of many ways of justifying why it’s OK for you to steal somebody else’s stuff, be it land, food, water, physical goods, safety, or well-being. The U.S. doesn’t really declare classically religious wars—-like based on a holy book—-but what is the difference between Jihad and the blind, hate-filled fervor with which the U.S. pursues it’s interests, claiming to be anti-communist or whatever the flavor of the week is.

We should be careful to not let our anger and indignation get the better of us, to make us say things that are patently wrong, or wildly hyperbolic, that would threaten to distract us from the fact that we’re all hypocrites. It’s a spectrum. Some people lean hard into it, for sure. But Israelis are not unique in their hatred of the other, in their ability to dance while others suffer.

Young Israelis know nothing but that there is a mysterious place on their border that their state has under control, and that they should live their best lives—because why not? It is what affluent, young people have always done. They are not unique in being wildly ignorant of or failing to be empathetic to those around them. Racism and discrimination doesn’t help.

They are heavily, heavily indoctrinated to believe that Palestinians—and Arabs in general—are sub-human animals, no more of consequence than a lizard or a goat, perhaps even less so, because animals can’t be terrorists.

Here’s a five-minute video that provides a bit of background.

Israel is a Racist, Supremacist State by Kei Pritsker (YouTube)

This is also not unique. Perhaps Israel is at the top of the list for racism, but the U.S.‘s foreign policy is also horrifically racist. Their soldiers used the epithet “sand niggers” for Arabs while deployed in the Middle East.

‘The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That (The Onion)

Dear Dove by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post)

Dear Dove by Mr. Fish

Germany’s 2024 budget: Armaments über alles by Max Linhof (WSWS)

“The nominal cuts of 6.4 percent or €30.5 billion, which are horrendous in themselves, do not take into account core inflation of 6.1 percent. If this is included, the overall cut in the budget is 11.8 percent.”

“With the planned €51.8 billion, the defence budget takes up almost 20 percent of the entire federal budget for 2024.

“But that is by no means all. In addition to the reported €51.8 billion, there are €19.2 billion from the Bundeswehr (armed forces) “special fund,” as well as billions more hidden in other budgets, such as expenditure for UN missions, Germany’s share in various EU armament expenditures such as the promised arms deliveries to Ukraine, which alone amounted to €17.1 billion from January 24, 2022 to July 31, 2023.”

“The health budget is being almost completely slashed. From €64.4 billion in 2022 to €24.5 billion in the current year and finally down to €16.2 billion next year.”

Holy shit!

Here’s the comparison between development of the military vs. the health budget over the last few years.

Health vs. Military Budget

What madness is this?

The hits keep coming. Here’s another graphic of the major pillars of the budget, relative to each other in size, and including percentage change from this year.

Germany's budget priorities

The military budget will be more than twice what Germany will spend on education, health, and living combined.

Florida executes man after US Supreme Court denies his intellectual disability claim by Kate Randall (WSWS)

“Zack suffered a litany of horrors in his childhood. His lawyers wrote in a court filing that his mother drank heavily throughout her pregnancy. He was hospitalized at the age of three for drinking about 10 ounces of vodka. He endured extensive physical and sexual abuse from his stepfather, including forcing him to drink alcohol, injecting him with drugs, running over him with a car and creating devices to electrically shock him if he wet the bed. Zack’s older sister killed their mother with an ax.”

But it’s cool, because he’s apparently not considered to be intellectually disadvantaged enough to get protection under the law. An intelligence test invented by shysters in the 19th century and continued to be used today has decided that he’s 9 points too smart to be retarded enough to not be able to be killed.

“The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) notes, “Unlike almost all other states, Florida rigidly required an IQ of 70 or below to demonstrate intellectual disability, with no allowance for the test’s margin of error.” Zack at one point scored 79 on an IQ (intelligence quotient) test. IQ tests have been demonstrated to be inaccurate in measuring intelligence.”

The average is 100. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of discussing anything more complex than whether you want your receipt with someone with an IQ of 100, then you should really brace yourself for what a conversation with a person who scores 79 would be like. This isn’t to say that the IQ test is accurate necessarily, but that it will give you a ballpark idea of what that person is going to be capable of. Zack’s statement, quoted in the article, seems literate enough, but I imagine that he had quite a bit of help with it.

Ron DeSantis is happily signing death warrants for severely mentally challenged individuals. Bill Clinton also happily signed death warrants for the same (Ricky Ray Rector (Wikipedia)), so maybe DeSantis is hoping to follow his example into the White House.

In Clinton’s case, the self-lobotomized Rector had no idea what was going on. He might as well have been Old Yeller. According to the Wikipedia link above,

“For his last meal, Rector requested and received a steak, fried chicken, cherry Kool-Aid, and pecan pie. As noted above, Rector left the pie on the side of the tray, telling the corrections officers who came to take him to the execution chamber that he was “saving it for later.””

Washington’s Illegal, Immoral Meddling in Syria Faces Mounting Problems by Ted Galen Carpenter (Antiwar.com)

“There is little question that the presence of U.S. troops and armed contractors (mercenaries) is utterly illegal under international law. The Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad, which is recognized by the United Nations and the vast majority of countries, never invited those forces to enter Syria. Moreover, Damascus has repeatedly demanded that they be withdrawn. U.S. leaders have flatly refused to do so, using the flimsy excuse that ISIS still poses a threat to regional peace despite its drastically depleted ranks.

“It is not a coincidence that northeastern Syria contains most of the country’s oil reserves […]”

Journalism & Media

The War on Trans is a War on Liberty by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Your average autistic person isn’t even nuts, they’re just someone wired to be incapable of falling for the bullshit of pointless social norms like the gender binary. This is an admirable trait that autistic people happen to share with children which I believe is the real reason why the very powerful people behind the anti-trans movement want them both to be singled out to be sufficiently governed.”

That is a bit of a muddled mess, but it’s interesting to think about people who are capable of questioning the social parameters that most people don’t even see, much less question. It’s like the Matrix.

“More than anything though, the anti-trans movement doesn’t want you to know that I am more like you than the statist fanatics who run their con job will ever be, and they don’t want you to know that if they can eviscerate my rights, and the rights of children and disabled people and any other individual, then they can eviscerate your rights too. Hate me if you want. That’s your right. I just thought you should know.”

Journalism Itself Is Locked Up In Belmarsh by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“To accept the persecution of Julian Assange is to accept the idea that all media everywhere must function as propaganda organs of the US government. It’s to take it as a given that any journalist anywhere in the world who decides to do real journalism and expose inconvenient facts about the powerful in the public interest should be jailed until they can be extradited to the United States for a show trial, and then left to rot in one of the most draconian prison systems on the planet.”

If You Buy Into The Anti-China Propaganda You’re Just A Stupid Asshole by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“If you support the persecution of Julian Assange, that means you believe all media everywhere should function as US propaganda organs. You believe all journalists everywhere have a responsibility to help the US empire keep its crimes hidden, and should be punished if they don’t.”

“This is why it matters so much that this war was provoked. It’s not some irrelevant geopolitical blame game to score propaganda points, it’s spotlighting an absolutely essential piece of information for the world to find its way out of this war. Russia will not stop fighting as long as the west is threatening its security concerns in the ways that provoked the invasion.

“You can’t just call for an end to aggressions while denying the existence of one of the aggressors. That’s not how peace negotiations work. The very first step is acknowledging reality. Only then can both aggressors, Russia and the western empire, begin working toward mutual de-escalation.”

Queen Warmonger Hillary Clinton Complains About “Men Starting Wars” by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“ If you’d have told me there was a Hillary Rodham Clinton Awards ceremony prior to my having read about it, I would have assumed it was an event where women receive trophies for killing large numbers of human beings with military violence.”

“Hillary Clinton is all the worst things about modern liberals and the Democratic Party. She is a blood-spattered psychopath who has dedicated her life to serving all the worst impulses of the human species — imperialism, militarism, capitalism, authoritarianism, and, yes, patriarchy — wearing a grinning plastic mask of civil rights and social justice to convince people to let her in the door. ”

Science & Nature

Bizarre year for sea ice notches another record by Scott K. Johnson (Ars Technica)

“The Arctic usually gets the bulk of public attention, but the status of Antarctic sea ice has been shocking all year. Antarctic sea ice is a different beast, ringing a polar continent rather than growing from the center of a polar sea, and a number of factors cause its behavior to be complex. After smashing the satellite-era record for minimum extent in February, Antarctic sea ice coverage continued to track well below the range of previous years through the Southern Hemisphere winter months. It maxed out just shy of 17 million square kilometers on September 10 at the end of winter—a full 1 million square kilometers below the previous record set in 1986.”

On the importance of staring directly into the sun by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

“In summary, Aristotle’s physics of motion can be seen, after translation into the language of classical physics, to yield a highly non trivial, but correct empirical approximation to the actual physical behavior of objects in motion in the circumscribed terrestrial domain for which the theory was created. […] The reason Aristotelian physics lasted so long is not because it became dogma: it is because it is a very good theory.”

“You open your eyes and see stuff, and although this requires lots of complicated calculations and several anatomical miracles, it doesn’t feel mysterious at all. You hear a song and remember the lyrics years later, and this seems totally natural. You and your spouse watch the same movie and have different opinions about it, and the explanation seems obvious: you’re right and they’re wrong. It’s so easy to accept the wild workings of the mind at face value, or to generate ad hoc explanations for them, that you might never realize you have no idea how any of this works.”

“It’s hard to overcome your illusions of explanatory depth, just like it’s hard to hold your breath for a long time—our urge to make sense of things and our urge to breathe are both there for good reason, and our brains don’t trust us to turn those urges off at will. It takes practice.”

The Langlands Program − Numberphile by Edward Frenkel (YouTube)

I don’t understand even half of what he’s saying, but I understand enough to know that he’s brilliant. Maybe if I watch it a couple more times—and while less distracted—I’ll really be able to see how he linked up all of these fields. Also, I very much dig his Russian-Jean-Claude-van-Damme vibe. He’s so enthusiastic!

Art & Literature

The Superette by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“[…] one must either evolve in accordance with one’s own innate Bildungstrieb, or one must stagnate and become as unreadable in one’s predictable repetitions as one admittedly risks being in one’s new experiments for which, it may turn out, one has no natural talent. You’ve got to take risks, I mean, and writers who just keep competently writing the same thing over and over again, a pattern I’ve seen all too often, are to my mind a far sorrier species than writers who try new things and fail.”

“[…] if we are producing a lot of words that don’t move through any gatekeeping process before they reach their readers, this is not necessarily because we are afraid of the gatekeepers, or because we believe we could not get through, or we innately know ourselves to be low-status drudges. It’s because we are simply so built as to have more words gushing out of us than could possibly be made to drip through the narrow funnel of traditional media.”

“The essay was in part an attempt for me to cast a critical eye on the various ways I, and those like me, were ignorant , and part of this ignorance was that we were members of what was ultimately a racially defined and implicitly racialized subculture, generally without being conscious of that hard fact.”

“[…] whatever Warrant, Night Ranger, et al., thought they were doing, what they were really doing was “performing whiteness”, without, at this point, any lingering musical debt at all to Robert Johnson.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Trauma is indeed like a Car Crash by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“Suppose you get injured in a car accident and suffer some sort of serious but not life-threatening injuries. Your body will have undergone trauma, in the old school physical sense − the sense from which we get the concept of the trauma center . What would you do? The sensible course of action would be to seek professional medical care. You would not, I hope, set about to learn how to treat that trauma from TikTok, while sitting in the burning car. You wouldn’t expect Discord to diagnose you accurately. You wouldn’t buy a workbook on recovering from a car accident put together by someone with dubious credentials. Instead you’d go see doctors and nurses and physical therapists; you’d secure the services of those who have been designated by society as having the expertise to provide care.”

“[…] everyone would understand that this medical process had a clear goal: to heal, to move on, to bring the trauma to a close. If you encountered a doctor who forcefully insisted that you would be, forever more, a car accident survivor before and above all other things, you’d find that deranged, not therapeutic. You would do the work to get healthy and you wouldn’t fight to maintain your self-definition as a traumatized person. You’d get healthy and then you would just be healthy.”

“Today, people perform trauma. They perform trauma because they’re rewarded for doing so with attention and sympathy. The desire to get those things is natural; the incentive structure that produces that behavior is toxic.”

“The point of addressing trauma is to get over it. Not to derive an identity from it, not to make it a free-floating excuse for selfishness or lack of accountability, not to get social media clout for having it, not to monetize it, not to make it an all-encompassing explanatory mechanism for every element of your life.”

“[…] there is no timetable for how quickly you have to heal, no wrong way to do it, and no shame in struggling as you do. But any social construct that compels you to want to remain in your trauma is pathological. Resistance to healing is pathological.”

“We’re just now starting to count all of the ways that the discourse of racial justice and LGBTQ rights and feminism and related concepts have been weaponized and misused, invoked in bad faith to destructive ends. People found that when they invoked those discourses, others were often unwilling to push back, for fear of being branded racist, or sexist, or homophobic, etc. We had created an incentive structure, and people responded to those incentives.”

“[…] the casualization of PTSD, to the point where self-diagnosis is the norm and the specific medical condition has collapsed into an entirely vague definition of “something I experienced hurt my feelings once”; a cultural expectation that entirely commonplace unhappy circumstances are massive challenges that the individual can’t be expected to survive, which of course becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; and a generation of young people who think that the way to be seen as interesting and valuable is to be performatively wounded, with a corresponding incentive to never get better.”

“[…] the use of trauma as a social signifier one can put on or take off as they choose will inevitably have negative consequences for efforts to address the very real and tragic suffering associated with trauma and PTSD. But to get this discourse healthy again, we have to be willing to say no to young people who are spreading bullshit about this topic. And it so immensely frustrating to me, watching our discourse about mental health deteriorate into an absurd branding exercise while so many people just go along for the ride, afraid to look like an old person complaining about the new fad.”

The “Is College Worth It?” Conversation Doesn’t Mean Much Without a Sense of What Teenagers Will Do Instead by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“I think a) we push so many people into college because the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal consensus destroyed middle class jobs in industry and manufacturing and we don’t have many alternatives and b) we shouldn’t push kids into college because most of those who have to be pushed will prove to lack the cognitive and soft skills necessary for them to capitalize on their degrees anyway.”

“The missing piece of the puzzle, in so much of the discussion about college costs, is the degree to which public funding for state colleges cratered amidst post-financial crisis austerity. And a humane society would ask why it’s allowed the burden of paying for college to be shifted to its young people, at the same time that its educational ideology machine has made college attendance a kind of secular sacrament.”

Sold a Story by Emily Hanford

This is a six-part podcast about how children are being taught how to read in the U.S.

• Sounding out words is
• Instead, you look at the pictures and the words you do know, and then you try to guess the word
• It’s a very “me”-focused way to learn. Not, “what does the author say?” but “what do you think the author would have said?”

I stopped documenting this because, while it had some good information, it was a very long podcast for what amounted to “sounding out words, as we’ve been doing since people have learned to read, is good, while the proposed replacement is a scam. The scam is used everywhere in the U.S. We’re all stunned.”

Technology

Log is the “Pro” in iPhone 15 Pro (Free LUTs!) by Stu Maschwitz (YouTube)

Log is the “Pro” in iPhone 15 Pro

Programming

How to Design a Practical Type System to Maximize Reliability, Maintainability, and Productivity in Software Development Projects / Part 1: What, Why, and How? by Christian Neumanns (Code Project)

“[…] good type system enables an IDE to provide better editing support. Some example are: Automatic bug reporting at edit -time Better code completion Safe and automatic refactorings, such as renaming types”

“Let’s now suppose that the buggy file path ( temp/secret:passwords.txt ) is not hard-coded, but read from a config file. In that case, the compiler can’t report a bug. The error in the config file should therefore be caught immediately when the path is read from the file (and not just later when the file is deleted).”

Interesting. The actual type is “filename”. The declared type is “string”. We have left some information on the table.

“A good type system doesn’t make unit tests dispensable. The slogan “If it compiles, it works!” is just wishful dreaming. No compiler in the world can detect bugs like using the wrong formula to compute the area of a circle. We need unit tests to detect bugs like that.”

“All data types in a software project should have the lowest possible cardinality.”