Links and Notes for October 27th, 2023

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

COVID-19

Long COVID researcher Dr. Amy Proal discusses the ongoing dangers of the pandemic by WSWS (YouTube)

This is an excellent interview, highly informative, and sobering. Dr. Proal was overall quite excellent. She only misspoke at the end, where she said that a single nuclear submarine costs “trillions”, where she meant to say “billions”.

I’m so glad that Dr. Proal took the time to provide such an incredible wealth of important information in such a relatively short time. Very high signal to noise ratio in this interview.

A friend wrote to me recently, when I’d told him I’d gotten the latest COVID booster.

“there is another vaccination???”

I wrote back,

“The booster for this year. Rollup package for the 5 or 6 variants going around right now. I figured I’d get it because I’m obstinate and BELIEVE IN SCIENCE and I TRUST THE SYSTEM even though IT’S RUN BY CAPITALIST PIGS, we aren’t so bad yet that they’re KILLING IMPORTANT PEOPLE LIKE ME.”

Economy & Finance

Guilty: Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all counts after monthlong trial by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)

“Defense attorney Mark Cohen argued that Bankman-Fried made mistakes, but didn’t commit crimes. “Business decisions made in good faith are not grounds to convict,” Cohen said yesterday, according to Reuters. “Poor risk management is not a crime… bad business judgments are not a crime.”

“In a rebuttal today, prosecutor Danielle Sassoon reportedly “likened that argument to someone robbing a jewelry store and justifying their actions by saying there was no security guard.”

““That’s not a defense. That was a strategy,” Sassoon said. “The defendant knew what he was doing was wrong, and that’s why he never hired a risk officer.””

Public Policy & Politics

UN General Assembly October 14, 2014 Full Speech by Noam Chomsky on October 14, 2014 (YouTube)

Recognizing the Stranger by Isabella Hammad (The Paris Review)

“Aristotle describes anagnorisis as a movement from ignorance to knowledge. When a character realizes the truth of a situation they are in, or the truth of their own identity or someone else’s, the world of the text becomes momentarily intelligible to the protagonist and thus also to the audience. It’s anagnorisis when Darth Vader says to Luke Skywalker: I am your father. It’s anagnorisis when the coffin opens and Holly Martins sees not the face of Orson Welles but another, third man. The mysteries clarify. Everything we thought we knew has been turned on its head and yet it all makes sense.”

“The novel A Heart So White , by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, begins with the words “I did not want to know but I have since come to know.” Encased in this “I did not want to know” is an already-knowing. The reversal hastened by recognition functions only on account of an accumulation of knowledge, knowledge that has not been confronted. That’s why it’s re-cognition; ana-gnorisis: knowing again. In an interview, Marías said that while for some the novel “is a way of imparting knowledge,” for him “it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew. You say ‘yes.’ It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable.” To recognize something is, then, to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along but that perhaps you did not want to know.”

“We are at a moment when elementary democratic values the world over have eroded and in some places almost completely disappeared. I feel it as a kind of fracturing of intention. The big emancipatory dreams of progressive and anticolonial movements of the previous century seem to be in pieces, and some are trying to make something with these pieces, taking language from here and from there to keep our movements going.”

“How many Palestinians, asked Omar Barghouti, need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany? He makes a sound point. It’s important not to be naive, even though many Palestinians still devote their lives and careers to actively trying to induce epiphanies in other people.”

“The Palestinian struggle for freedom has outlasted the narrative shape of many other anticolonial liberation movements that concluded with independence during the twentieth century, and it is becoming more difficult to hold fast to the old narratives about the power of narrative.”

“El-Rifae ponders the analogous issue of women appealing to or trying to educate men about misogyny and patriarchal violence. “Rather than wondering about the efficacy of addressing men,” she asks, “can we think of breaking into their awareness as a by-product of us speaking to one another? Can we focus instead on our own networks, on thinking together, on resisting together, on supporting one another—openly?” Writing in English about Palestine, I often find myself asked if my aim is to educate “Westerners,” a suggestion I always find reductive and kind of undignified. But I like this idea of breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves.”

“It’s strange because I grew up with this photograph, but only many years later, once I was partway through writing my first book, did I actually look at it properly. I find this hard to believe about myself, that I could be so unperceptive, but it confirms the fact that received ideas or ideas from childhood can be hard to untie, even when faced with the evidence of your senses. I suddenly realized that Midhat is not outdoors, walking in the Bois du Boulogne. He is standing in front of a painted screen. The photograph was taken in a photography studio in Jerusalem in 1923.”

“The fact is, huge edifices do move in human history. Empires have fallen. The Berlin Wall fell, political apartheid in South Africa did end, and although in neither of these cases were these putative conclusions by any means the end of the story, they are testaments to the fact that, under the force of coordinated international and local action, Israeli apartheid will also end. The question is, when and how? Where in the narrative do we now stand?”

“Gramsci, borrowing from Romain Rolland, described this condition only slightly less concisely, as “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” It’s one thing to see shifts on an individual level, but quite another to see them on an institutional or governmental one. To induce a person’s change of heart is different from challenging the tremendous force of collective denial.”

“Think of the slave traders and economists of the nineteenth century who claimed that ending the enslavement of human beings was economically and politically unviable.”

It’s coming back, of course, because there is no principle blocking it. The U.S. has only the principle of the market, of “he who has the gold makes the rules”. A return to slavery under such conditions is inevitable. If you extrapolate from your principles and end up at slavery, try again; you’re missing at least one principle. Your shit is fucked up, as the kids say.

“We’ve seen evidence very recently that this is not impossible. In today’s crisis of climate destruction, there will be moments—maybe they are happening right now, maybe they happened recently—that will later be narrated as turning points, when the devastating knowledge hits home to a greater and greater number that we are treating the earth as a slave, and that this exploitation is profoundly unethical. We are still seeking a new language for this ethics.”

We are not “seeking a new language for this ethic.” We have this language. The author clearly speaks it, quite eloquently. The elites don’t speak it. They don’t have a principle forbidding the rape of communal resources for purely personal gain.

“Thus Said reverses the scene of recognition as I have described it. Rather than recognizing the stranger as familiar, and bringing a story to its close, Said asks us to recognize the familiar as stranger. He gestures at a way to dismantle the consoling fictions of fixed identity, which make it easier to herd into groups. This might be easier said than done, but it’s provocative—it points out how many narratives of self, when applied to a nation-state, might one day harden into self-centered intolerance.”

Letter from Israel by Oded Na’aman (Boston Review)

“There are many ambulances and police sirens; helicopters and fighter jets pass overhead, and there’s a constant sound of drones hovering over the city, to what purpose we do not know. Most stores are closed shut. Many restaurants and cafés have been transformed into supply centers from which food and equipment are delivered by volunteers across the country to soldiers, to survivors of the attack, and to residents from towns that have been evacuated.”

“Every day, Israeli families are begging politicians to free their children, cousins, siblings, parents, and grandparents, who are being held hostage. The politicians respond that victory is more important than freeing the hostages. That this is being said and that it is being accepted is yet another horror all unto itself.”

“What the majority of Israelis find impossible to accept is that many Palestinians see this land as their home—that those here are deeply committed to staying here and that those who are refugees aspire to return.”

Even though Israelis feel exactly the same way about that land.

“The conflict became even more acute when, in 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, thereby taking control of millions of Palestinians, many of whom had escaped as refugees to Jordan and Egypt in 1948. Israel wanted the land it conquered, not the Palestinians who lived on it.”

“[…] partial civil control over certain parts of the West Bank and Gaza was handed to the Palestinian Authority, a Fatah-controlled government body that, in many ways, serves as a contractor of the Israeli government.”

“Most importantly, Israelis perceived Israel’s use of force as restrained. Sometimes Israel’s purported restraint was a source of pride, other times a source of frustration.”

“The conclusion most Israelis draw from this situation is not that the use of force is limited in what it can achieve, but that we were mistaken to ever limit our use of force to begin with (another fantasy, another nightmare). Many find it difficult not to interpret the events of October 7 as a decisive confirmation of the longstanding Israeli suspicion that the Palestinians will slaughter us if they get the chance […]”

That’s exactly the tale that Empire wants you to believe. So it embellishes to make sure you don’t miss the point, to make sure you don’t come to your senses. To make sure you don’t stop believing and fearing. To make sure you don’t start asking questions.

“[…] ethnic cleansing and genocide are not only morally reprehensible; they are impossible. Palestinians will continue to exist in this land, and there is nothing Israel can do about it. I think most Jewish Israelis know this, but given what happened, they find it impossible to accept. The compromise that allowed for some bare form of Palestinian existence under Israel’s rule of force can no longer be sustained, but the idea that force is our only savior is as entrenched as it ever was in the Israeli psyche.”

“We must not view the massacre of October 7 as an act committed by all Palestinians or as an expression of innate hatred of Jews, and we must not conflate it with the Palestinian demand for freedom, which is just. And yet I confess that I too feel the widespread terror and panic that make such distinctions fall on deaf ears.”

“When terror and brutality are as rampant as they are now, they possess us. Resisting them feels as futile as resisting a force of nature—a giant wave, an avalanche, a blizzard. We are compelled to exercise force by the force that terrifies us. Yet this observation, that we do not possess force but are possessed by it, is significant. It might, in the words of Simone Weil, “interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.” “Where there is no room for reflection,” Weil writes, “there is none either for justice or prudence.””

“In war, Weil says, force takes hold of us and traps us inside the terror of death. It effaces even its own goals as well as the notion of it ever coming to an end. This is not easy to understand. There is a rift between those who look upon war from the outside and those who inhabit it. “To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end,” she writes.”

““Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.””

“Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they were easy to bear; actually, they continue because they have deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.”

She makes an important distinction: A slave is not necessarily unpaid; a slave is necessarily not free.

“We are inside war, inside terror, but we must envision the end of war and terror. We must ask ourselves how we can bring about a reality in which life is possible, and we must accept the unalterable fact that life will not be possible for us unless it be possible for those who share this place with us.”

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Political Future May Be Over by Ettingermentum (Jacobin)

“Netanyahu succeeds Shamir and becomes the leader of Likud in 1993. He’s a different kind of figure. He’s American-educated and lived in the United States for much of his life. He grew up in Philadelphia and worked at the Boston Consulting Group with Mitt Romney; he started his career as a foreign affairs guy who worked in the UN.”

“The regular far right of the party, which is very militaristic, is not a fan of the ultrareligious parties because the religious parties don’t serve in the military.”

“The ruling coalition starts polling below what they need to win, and the public is really turning away from Netanyahu. Then the Hamas attack happens, and the entire basis for the past thirteen years of Netanyahu’s rule, which transformed the country’s politics and foreign relations, is completely shattered in a single day.”

“Netanyahu, throughout his entire career, has said that the negotiated settlements are naive, counterproductive, unrealistic, utopian, and has hurt Israel more than it helped them. This has been his single through-line throughout his entire life, and it turns out his entire worldview was wrong.”

“So now people aren’t thinking, “Oh, we need to support him.” They’re thinking, “The guy who promised for decades that he could create security through his policies, the guy we’ve given a blank check to do whatever he wants for the past ten years, he’s proven to be wrong.” He’s just a corrupt asshole.”

“Even if there isn’t a rallying around Netanyahu, there’s general support for the security state and the repression and the military response. I saw a poll that said 65 percent of Israelis support a ground invasion.”

Can the Liberal Democratic Project Incorporate Israel? Will It Survive If It Can’t? by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“[…] people always say, you can’t have that. Why can’t you have that? Because the number of Palestinians in such a society would mean that Israel would no longer be a Jewish state. But if the rise in one ethnic population is threatening to a state’s identity, is that not inherently a premodern state? Does that not in and of itself suggest an incompatibility with modernity?”

The only thing allowed to define a so-called modern state is geography? That seems restrictive, but I’m willing to consider it.

“Is this not, really, skepticism about the broader project of liberal democracy? The belief that neither Israelis nor Palestinians, Jews or Arabs or anyone else, can morally be systematically removed from Palestine − as indeed the Geneva Conventions insist − means that we in the international community actually do have to be allies to both.”

“The concept of allyship in the social justice sense is incompatible with basic notions of intellectual freedom and political egalitarianism, yes, which is part of why higher education’s decade of capitulation to campus activists was such a mistake. But I suspect if I prodded Noah enough he’d acknowledge that, sooner or later, pluralism must come into conflict with support for an explicitly Jewish state.”

“For years, advocates for Palestinians have said that Israel can remain a Jewish state or a democratic one, but not both. And people tend to hate hearing that. But the notion has become a meme for a simple reason: it’s plainly true.”

“[…] the burden falls on Israel to take the biggest steps to ending this horrible scenario not in moral terms (which do not interest me) but in purely practical ones. Israel has the power to make immediate and serious change in the political composition of Palestine, particularly in terms of the integration of the territories into a legitimate democratic order, and for that reason the burden falls on them. Those are the wages of power. Yes, it is a burden that most average Israelis didn’t ask for. But there is no path to peace for them that does not involve shouldering it.”

“[…] the rights of the Native Americans did not depend on their indigenous nature, especially considering that like all people they came here from somewhere else. We shouldn’t have slaughtered them not because they had some sort of unique connection to the land that they were on but because they were human and in possession of rights. The same applies to Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs − they are there, they have the right to stay and to live in peace and prosperity. There is no lawyering our way out of this by pretending we know who was there first.”

Balticconnector – Chronologie einer geplatzten Verschwörungstheorie by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Der arme Kapitän wird sich gedacht haben, dass es das Beste ist, schnell weiterzufahren und so zu tun, als sei nichts geschehen. Offenbar war er sich der politischen Bedeutung des von ihm verursachten Schadens nicht bewusst.”

“Gestern mussten die Finnen vermelden, dass sie den Anker gefunden haben und es doch nicht die Russen waren. Immerhin hält man sich als „Ehrenrettung“ nun noch die Verschwörungstheorie offen, die Chinesen könnten den Anker mutwillig als Sabotageakt auf die schöne Pipeline fallengelassen haben. Und selbst dieser Blödsinn ist deutschen Medien nicht zu abwegig, um ihn aufzugreifen. Um von Nordstream abzulenken, kann anscheinend keine Geschichte zu abwegig sein.”

The Embargoes That Blocked Japanese Expansion and Led to War by Dwight Jon Zimmerman (Defense Media Network)

“In 1939, the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty between the United States and Japan. This led to an American embargo initially of airplanes, parts, machine tools, and aviation gasoline. The embargo was expanded in 1940 to include oil, iron and steel scrap, and other commodities. Sharing America’s concerns, Great Britain and the Netherlands joined in the economic embargo.”

“But for the West to lift the embargo, Japan had to retreat from China and abandon its expansionist policy – a surrender pill too bitter and humiliating for the far right to swallow. On Jan. 23, 1941, Japan sent ambassador Adm. Kichisaburo Nomura, respected in America, to the United States in a final effort to lift the embargo. It was a smoke screen. No one expected his mission to succeed.”

Dokumentiert: „Warum wir DIE LINKE verlassen“ – Austrittserklärung von Sahra Wagenknecht und neun weiteren Bundestagsabgeordneten by Redaktion (NachDenkSeiten)

“Die deutsche Außenpolitik munitioniert Kriege, statt sich um Friedenslösungen zu bemühen. International eskalieren Konflikte, die sich abzeichnende Blockbildung ist eine Bedrohung für den Weltfrieden und wird massive ökonomische Verwerfungen mit sich bringen. Gleichzeitig wird Widerspruch gegen diese politische Entwicklung in der öffentlichen Diskussion immer häufiger sanktioniert und an den Pranger gestellt. Aber Demokratie braucht Meinungsvielfalt und offene Debatten. Die Unfähigkeit der Regierung, mit den Krisen unserer Zeit umzugehen, und die Verengung des akzeptierten Meinungskorridors haben die AfD nach oben gespült.”

Vengeful Pathologies by Adam Shatz (London Review of Books)

“The motives behind Al-Aqsa Flood, as Hamas called its offensive, were hardly mysterious: to reassert the primacy of the Palestinian struggle at a time when it seemed to be falling off the agenda of the international community; to secure the release of political prisoners; to scuttle an Israeli-Saudi rapprochement; to further humiliate the impotent Palestinian Authority; to protest against the wave of settler violence in the West Bank, as well as the provocative visits of religious Jews and Israeli officials to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem; and, not least, to send a message to the Israelis that they are not invincible, that there is a price to pay for maintaining the status quo in Gaza.”

“The second phase, however, was very different. Joined by residents of Gaza, many of them leaving for the first time in their lives, Hamas’s fighters went on a killing spree. They turned the Tribe of Nova rave into a blood-drenched bacchanalia, another Bataclan. They hunted down families in their homes in kibbutzes. They executed not only Jews but Bedouins and immigrant workers. (Several of the victims were Jews who were well known for their solidarity work with Palestinians, notably Vivian Silver, an Israeli-Canadian who is now a hostage in Gaza.) As Vincent Lemire noted in Le Monde, it takes time to kill ‘civilians hidden in garages and parking lots or sheltering in safe rooms’. The diligence and patience of Hamas’s fighters were chilling.”

“In the West, few remember that when Palestinians from Gaza protested at the border in 2018-19 during the Great March of Return, Israeli forces killed 223 demonstrators. But Palestinians do, and the killing of unarmed demonstrators has only added to the allure of armed struggle.”

“Determined to overcome its humiliation by Hamas, the IDF has been no different from – and no more intelligent than – the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, or the Americans after 9/11. Israel’s disregard for Palestinian life has never been more callous or more flagrant, and it’s being fuelled by a discourse for which the adjective ‘genocidal’ no longer seems like hyperbole. In just the first six days of air strikes, Israel dropped more than six thousand bombs, and more than twice as many civilians have already died under bombardment as were killed on 7 October. These atrocities are not excesses or ‘collateral damage’: they occur by design.”

“The binary treatment of the war in the Western press is mirrored in the Arab world, and in much of the Global South, where the West’s support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression and its refusal to confront Israel’s aggression against Palestinians under occupation had already provoked accusations of hypocrisy. (These divisions recall the fractures of 1956, when people in the ‘developing world’ sided with Algeria’s struggle for self-determination, while Western countries backed Hungary’s resistance to Soviet invasion.)”

“To organise an effective movement, Fanon believed, anti-colonial fighters would have to overcome the temptations of primordial revenge, and develop what Martin Luther King, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, called a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’.”

“[…] the Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh told me in an email, is that we are at an inflection point in world history. Deep ongoing shifts over at least the past two decades that have been giving rise to right-wing and even fascist movements (and governments) were already building up, so I see Hamas’s slaughter of civilians as roughly equivalent to Sarajevo 1914 or maybe Kristallnacht 1938 in accelerating or unleashing much broader trends. On a ‘lesser scale’, I’m furious at Hamas for basically erasing all we fought for over decades, and aghast at those who can’t maintain the critical faculty to distinguish opposition to Israeli occupation and war crimes, and who turn a blind eye to what Hamas did in southern Israeli kibbutzim. Ethno-tribalism.”

“As the Palestinian writer Karim Kattan wrote in a moving essay for Le Monde , it seems to have become impossible for some of Palestine’s self-styled friends to ‘say: massacres like those that took place at the Tribe of Nova festival are an outrageous horror, and Israel is a ferocious colonial power.’”

“[…] a cult of force appears to have overtaken parts of the left, and short-circuited any empathy for Israeli civilians. But the radical left’s cult of force is less dangerous, because less consequential, than that of Israel and its backers, starting with the Biden administration.”

“Does Netanyahu imagine, then, that he can force Palestinians to give up their weapons, or their demands for statehood, by bombing them into submission? That has been tried, over and again; the invariable result has been a new and even more embittered generation of Palestinian militants.”

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

“A responsible American administration, one less susceptible to anxieties about an upcoming election and less beholden to the pro-Israel establishment, would have taken advantage of the current crisis to urge Israel to re-examine not just its security doctrine but its policies towards the sole population in the Arab world with whom it has shown no interest in forging a real peace: the Palestinians. Instead, Biden and Blinken have echoed Israel’s banalities about fighting evil, while conveniently forgetting Israel’s responsibility for the political impasse in which it finds itself.”

“Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are stuck with each other, unless Israel, the far stronger party, drives the Palestinians into exile for good. The only thing that can save the people of Israel and Palestine, and prevent another Nakba – a real possibility, while another Holocaust remains a traumatic hallucination – is a political solution that recognises both as equal citizens, and allows them to live in peace and freedom, whether in a single democratic state, two states, or a federation. So long as this solution is avoided, a continuing degradation, and an even greater catastrophe, are all but guaranteed.”

Exterminate All the Brutes by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares two decades later. But what we suffered – three to four hundred shells a day, four to five dead a day, and two dozen wounded a day − is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, than Sarajevo.”

“Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.”

“The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.”

“Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?”

“When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority.”

““Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.””

“Maybe we are fooled by our own lies, but most of the world sees us, and Israel, clearly. They understand our genocidal proclivities, rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They see that Palestinians, largely friendless, without power, forced to live in squalid refugee camps or the diaspora, denied their homeland and eternally persecuted, suffer the kind of fate once reserved for Jews.”

It’s Okay To Admit You Were Wrong About Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“I say this because there are probably a lot of pro-Israel people looking at what’s happening in Gaza and starting to feel a bit dissonant about it. Like maybe they’re on the wrong side of this thing after all.

“And I just want to reassure you that you can change your position on this. It’s perfectly fine and normal to do so.

“We all make mistakes. We all go through periods where aspects of our worldview are formed by inaccurate information that we were given by others. I know I have. So has everyone else.

“It’s okay to make mistakes, you just have a responsibility to learn from them and course-correct after you learn that you were mistaken. That’s what being a grown-up is all about.”

“It’s not a crime to be duped. It’s not evil to have been deceived. It would only be morally wrong if you kept persisting in your wrongness after you figured out that you are wrong.”

Israeli military announces plans to attack hospitals and schools by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“the statement over the weekend make unequivocally clear that targeting hospitals, schools and other places of refuge is the explicit policy of the Israeli government as part of its ethnic cleansing of Gaza. In its statement, the IDF claimed that moving the population of Gaza to the south is a “temporary measure” and that they would be allowed to return to their homes. “This is a temporary measure. Moving back to northern Gaza will be possible once the intense hostilities end.”

“It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the expulsion of the population of northern Gaza is part of an ethnic cleansing campaign by Israel and that the population will never be allowed to return.”

Yes. Obviously.

I have questions about the official announcement by the IDF:

• Were the Starship Troopers vibes deliberate?
• Why announce in English? Why not Arabic?
• Why are those pocket flaps so big?
• Couldn’t you get a shirt that fits?
• No medals? None? That’s actually a pretty boss move.

Honest Government Ad | Israel & Gaza 🇮🇱 🇵🇸 by thejuicemedia (YouTube)

Three truths:

1. Hamas’s attack on civilians in Israel is fucked and a violation of international law.
2. Israel’s collective punishment of civilians in Gaza is fucked and a violation of international law.
3. Both 1 and 2 are happening in the context of an occupation which is fucked and a violation of international law.

Failure to hold these three truths at the same time has been linked to uncritical exposure of the brain to bullshit propaganda.

Piers Morgan vs Pro-Palestinian Rapper Lowkey On Israel-Hamas War | The Full Interview by Piers Morgan Uncensored (YouTube)

Lowkey, Palestinian, rapper, and Mint Press journalist does a reasonable job of correcting Piers Morgan’s utter idiocy.

It’s a bit heated because Piers Morgan simply cannot accept that the story of what happened on October 7th isn’t 100% clear yet—not least because most of the information came from the Israeli military.

Piers Morgan kind of descends into a tizzy because Lowkey will not unequivocally condemn Hamas—once again the demand for performative condemnation—which he of course considers to be equivalent to being happy that Hamas killed a bunch of Israelis.

• Anyone who celebrates civilian deaths—whether they were responsible for them or not—are monstrous.
• Even if it turns out that the IDF killed half of their targets for them, celebrating their deaths is monstrous.
• Using those civilian deaths to build up cachet among supporters who think that killing civilians is OK is monstrous.

Lowkey could have answered better, but he handled himself incredibly well in the heat of the moment, l’esprit d’escalier always sounds better, and I’m not certain that a jackass like Piers Morgan—he is a jackass, despite his having had Lowkey on his show—would have accepted the nuance of that reasoning. Morgan had a question he wanted answered in the affirmative and he wasn’t going to quit until he’d gotten it.

Here’s Why U.S. Elites Support Israel No Matter What by BreakThrough News (YouTube)

“Israel is by far the biggest recipient [recipient of the most] U.S. foreign aid in the world. Despite constituting about 0.01% of the world population, they’ve receive about 30% of U.S. foreign aid since WWII.”

The Hannibal Directive: What Really Happened on October 7 by Mnar Adley (Mint Press News)

“On October 7, initial reports suggested that Hamas had killed 1,400 Israelis, conducted mass rapes and torture, and even beheaded babies. These claims were cited as justification for Israel’s deadly bombardment of Gaza.

“However, skepticism has emerged about the accuracy of these claims, as details remain unclear. The mainstream corporate media has largely adopted the narrative of the Israeli government, placing the blame squarely on Hamas. Nonetheless, emerging evidence from within the Israeli military and media has challenged that narrative.

“One critical point of contention is the official list of Israeli casualties. Israel released a list of its dead on October 23, revealing that over 48% of those listed were soldiers or armed police on active duty, not civilians. Additionally, it has become evident that members of armed settler militias were also among the casualties.”

“The Hannibal Directive was certainly used on October 7, when Hamas overran an Israeli military base at the Erez Crossing. Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld, the commander of the base, called in an airstrike on his own position, even as he and countless others were stationed there and still fighting Hamas. This was reported by Amos Harel in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.”

“Subsequently, the Israeli military distanced itself from these claims [about beheaded babies], CNN retracted the story, and the White House acknowledged a lack of evidence. Similarly, the case of Shani Louk, an Israeli tattoo artist initially reported by the Israeli government as having been raped and killed, took a different turn when her mother confirmed that she was safe in Gaza and was being treated in a hospital for a head injury.”

We Are Ruled By Sociopaths And Morons by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“The narrative managers are still struggling with the problem that when they announced that Palestinians had escaped from their concentration camp and killed a bunch of Israelis, an inconvenient number of people started asking “Wait, what were they doing in a concentration camp?””

“Israeli policies created Hamas. I don’t mean this in the usual “Netanyahu boosted Hamas to sabotage peace and undermine its more moderate rivals” sense, I mean it in the “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable” sense. If you stomp out every possible peaceful avenue of resistance, naturally you’re going to see the rise of factions which favor violent resistance.”

“I said when all this started that I believe the Hamas attack will ultimately be a net negative for Palestinians, but that I can’t in good conscience “condemn Hamas” because nobody can articulate a positive direction that Palestinians should be taking. The fact that all peaceful avenues of resistance have been cut off is not the fault of the Palestinians, and it’s not the fault of Hamas. It’s the fault of the Israeli government.”

“Hamas isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is an apartheid settler-colonialist project which cannot exist without endless violence, warfare and abuse.”

Is Gaza Burning? by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Israel spends more per capita on its military than any country except Qatar. Its annual expenditure of $24.5 billion is $6 billion more than the entire (pre-bombardment) Palestinian economy–70 percent of which was generated in the West Bank. The Gazan economy, on international life support for the last decade under the blockade, is now effectively dead.”

“Sanders voted for a blatantly unconstitutional Senate Resolution condemning students protesting against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, calling them anti-Semitic and “in solidarity with Hamas”. The resolution passed unanimously and only Rand Paul refused to co-sponsor it.”

“More than half of the hostages in Gaza have foreign passports, according to the IDF, which may partially explain why the Netanyahu government has been, to put it mildly, lethargic in doing much to secure their release, except for the relentless bombing of Gaza, which has already killed as many as 50 hostages.”

“Lula on Gaza: “This is the problem: it’s not a war, it’s a genocide that has already killed nearly 2000 children who have nothing to do with this. I don’t know how any human being is capable of waging a war knowing that the result will be more deaths of innocent children.” Has the Israeli ambassador shuttered the embassy in Brasilia yet?”

“Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been publicly flirting with Netanyahu for the past couple of years, seems to have reversed course, telling the Turkish parliament that Hamas was not a terrorist organization, but a “liberation group waging a battle to protect its land” and describing Israel’s airstrikes as a “mental illness.””

He’s right, of course, but … the guy who’s relentlessly bombing Kurds is throwing some serious rocks in his glass house over there.

“Tariq Ali: “Here’s an example of how it could be ended. In 1957 Israel occupied Gaza. The US president, General Eisenhower, ordered: ‘I want you out of Gaza.’ And then said, “If you don’t get out of Gaza, we will impose sanctions against Israel”. The Israelis left.””

Roaming Charges: That Oceanic Feeling by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Fishing boats that trawl the ocean floor with heaving nets release more than a gigaton of carbon dioxide every year, roughly much as the entire airline industry, according to a study published in Nature.”

“By 2035, the steel, cement and chemical industries will overtake both transportation and electricity generation to become the largest sources of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”

“41 percent of the land base in the continental US is consigned for the production of meat, dairy, and eggs.”

“Wild mammals account for only about 4% of biomass compared to livestock (62%) and humans (34%), and global poultry weighs more than twice that of wild birds.”

“One in three children worldwide–roughly 815 million–suffered lead poisoning, a condition linked to heart and kidney disorders, impaired intelligence, violent behavior and premature death. A recent paper in Lancet Planetary Health estimated that in 2019, 5.5 million people died because of cardiovascular disease caused by lead poisoning, about three times the number killed by lung cancer: “More than 90% of those born between 1950 and 1980 experienced [blood lead levels] in excess of 5 µg/dL, the threshold considered ‘safe’ for children. The legacy of early life lead exposure will stay in the United States for decades to come.””

“Half of the world’s economies (107 countries) are already five years past a peak in fossil power generation.”

“In both the US and Canada, methane leaks were roughly 50 percent higher than reported. In Mexico, they were double.”

“The US ranks 41st in the world in mass transit ridership at 1.66 million riders/km. But NYC (which would rank about ~11 globally at 4.6) makes up most of that. The rest of the US averages only 0.46m riders/km.”

“In 1840 the mean age at menarche in girls was 17 years. By 2000, this had fallen to 12 years in most developed countries.”

Biden and Congress – Ask the American People Before You Impose a Genocide Tax for Prosperous Israel by Ralph Nader (Scheer Post)

“Israel is among the top 20 global economies in terms of GDP per capita. Could the $14.3 billion be better spent on assisting the world’s 71 million impoverished internally displaced refugees, many created by undeclared, lawless, U.S. wars?”

“How did the Biden Administration come up with the outsized figure of $14.3 billion for a prosperous economic, technological, and military superpower having a greater social safety net for its people than the United States?”

As The Lights Go Out In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

Pile of Buffalo Skulls

“In America they killed all the buffalo just to take away food from the natives,
made mountains of their skulls and posed proudly in photos
like they posed proudly in front of burnt bodies after lynchings in the south.”

Look, man, lynchings are awful, but it’s person-on-person violence. What is going on in the mind of a person who kills so many buffalo that you can pile the cleaned skulls 30 feet high and stand on them? What the fuck is wrong with you?

There has been no time in history during which the U.S. had the moral high ground. Not really. The U.S. has never been a good nation.

Ukraine is a Very Special Kind of Democracy by Ted Rall

Ted-Rall 2023-11-03

“Biden: We have to defend Ukraine cuz Ukraine is a democracy.
Citizen: Ukraine isn’t a democracy. They’re under martial law.
Citizen: Opposition parties are banned. Opposition media are banned. All elections have been canceled. Opposition politicians are under arrest.
Citizen: Most Americans don’t want to send more money to the Ukrainian dictatorship. Yet, you’re doing anyway. How can you justify ignoring them?
Biden: What? you think this is a democracy?
Citizen: At least the U.S. and Ukraine have the same values.”

Only Israel, the United States, and Ukraine Refuse to Stand With Cuba by People's Dispatch (Scheer Post)

“On Thursday, November 2, 187 nations voted for a UN General Assembly resolution to end the cruel and illegal 60 plus year US blockade on Cuba. The only states to vote against the resolution were the US and Israel. Ukraine was the only state to abstain.”

Banner nations. They’re the only ones that understand where the world’s true evil lies—in socialism.

The Moral Complexities Of Bombing A Concentration Camp Full Of Children by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“They’re dropping bombs on a concentration camp full of kids. Even shitlibs and pseudo-leftists who get every other foreign policy issue wrong are managing to get this one right, it’s that obvious. Anyone getting this issue wrong can be permanently dismissed without any real loss.”

This is mostly true—except that you have to realize and accept that there are good, rescuable people out there who do not accept the reality of what has been going on in Israel for 50 years, and has increased drastically in severity in the last 18, since Gaza was closed down.

They simply do not accept that there is a concentration camp there.

They do not understand the term. If they think about it at all, they think that it means “extermination camp” (or “death camp”), whereas it’s a synonym for “internment camp”, which is what the U.S. generously called its own concentration camps when it stored dozens of thousands of its own citizens of Japanese origin there during WWII.

We are likewise trained to think of “gulags” as concentration camps—or even worse—when they are, by definition, much more like prisons because, while many were sentenced on sham charges before kangaroo courts, the Soviets at least bothered to sentence them before interning them.

People in a concentration camp have never even been tried or accused of anything other than being. Still, going through the motions of pretending to prosecute someone for a few minutes or hours before you come to the foregone conclusion doesn’t cover your ass in a just world. It seems to make a difference in this world, but ours is not a just world. By this logic, the Soviet gulags were concentration camps—but so are most American prisons, which are full of people who’ve been railroaded into prison, then leased out as slave labor.

Wikipedia redirects the search for “concentration camp” to internment. It defines “internment” as,

“[…] the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges[1] or intent to file charges.[2] The term is especially used for the confinement “of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects”.[3] Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime.”

People think that just because Gazans are shown walking around in rubble with clothes on, rather than as shirtless, emaciated, and half-frozen wraiths as in pictures from Dachau or Ausschwitz, that they couldn’t possibly be in concentration camps.

“A huge amount of western depravity hides behind the unexamined assumption that killing people with bombs is somehow less evil than killing them with bullets or blades. By waging nonstop foreign bombing campaigns, the west desensitized the public to the reality of what bombs do.”

It also some desensitized the public to the horrors of modern concentration camps—or even refugee camps.

Science & Nature

LIGO Has Surpassed The Quantum Limit. We Can Explain. by Michelle Starr (ScienceAlert)

“The technology works through the use of crystals that turn single stray photons in LIGO’s 4-kilometer-long vacuum tubes into two entangled photons with lower energy. These photons interact with the laser beams that shine down the tunnels to squeeze the laser light in the desired way. When gravitational waves rumble through, these laser beams are jiggled in such a way that the motion can be picked up at the other end. The new frequency-dependent squeezing technology works by alternating the way it squeezes light, so that both higher and lower frequencies are amplified.”

Art & Literature

Scary Movies for Anarchists to Watch at the End of the World by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Despite what some of my critics might tell you, I do not believe that science itself is evil but rampant progress without moral reason is. Humans are capable of great things; Kali knows they can shoot a horror flick. But many of these things become destructive when we divorce them from our place as a part of an ecosystem greater than ourselves. Humility is actually our greatest hope for survival. I can only hope that humans can endure the horrors it may take for us to rediscover this simple gift and allow it to govern us without a state to fuck it up. Maybe a few scary movies will help.”

Yngwie Malmsteen − Live with Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra (YouTube)

Japan: where speed-metal virtuosity goes to dielive forever. I love watching an earnest and serious Japanese orchestra playing along with the music I grew up with.

It’s 2017, Yngwie’s gotten chubby, he looks maybe a bit ridiculous in all of his stretched leather, gold rings, and gold watch—but he sounds amazing. You can really hear how appropriate most of his compositions were for an orchestra.

He’s flying the whole time, but at 55:30, he just goes extra nuts. After that, he finally takes his first break (!). After that, he plays two encores, ending with one of my absolute favorites, Far Beyond The Sun, which is technically ridiculous, after 65 minutes of solid soloing. The orchestral arrangement is fantastic. He’s like a machine. You can absolutely see the effort, but the hands. Do. Not. Stop. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times from the album. I can’t hear a single false note in this live performance. Yeah, I’d have been standing and cheering too.

The Yngwie Malmsteen Interview by Rick Beato (YouTube)

Classical Composer Reacts to Icarus' Dream Suite, Op. 4 (Yngwie Malmsteen) | The Daily Doug Ep. 122 by Doug Helvering (YouTube)

“This is in E^♭-minor, not G-minor, which is inherently more difficult to play. G-minor is not that bad. But E^♭-minor just ups the level of difficulty, mainly because the strings don’t have any open tunings, open strings in that key, that they can anchor off of, so every position has to be covered and hooded with their hands.”

On the one hand, I’m delighted to discover things like this but, on the other, I’m also in no position to determine whether he’s full of shit. I feel like it opens up a whole world of complexity that non-musicians just don’t have access to. We just listen to music and like it—and musicians see the matrix. This is why I love listening to Rick Beato and people like Doug Helvering, “it’s one of these full-diatonic progressions […] it’s a way to take a stroll through an entire chord collection of the key that you’re in.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Mimetic Collapse, Our Destiny by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“CT Jones wrote that piece because it’s a thing people write, Rolling Stone published it because it’s a thing publications publish, and people read it because it’s a thing people are known to think. These are not ideas so much as they are the impressions of where ideas once were, like the lines you find on your face the morning after you sleep on the wrong pillow.”

“If TikTok teens are indeed disdaining David Foster Wallace (who killed himself during the Bush administration) they aren’t doing so from any organic unhappiness within their actually-existing social world. Most people don’t read; men read less; men read even less fiction; young men read least of all; young men certainly are not reading 1,000-page experimentalist novels. That is not occurring.”

“Baudrillard was fond of using Disneyland as an example, given that the theme park is a lovingly-made, carefully-calibrated depiction of a reality that never existed. Another example you often hear is the 1950s diner, the joint that has the neon signs and the art deco styling and the mini jukeboxes at the tables. This classic bit of Americana is not, in fact, based on what diners were like in the 1950s; it’s someone’s idea of what 1950s diners were like, which then spread mimetically from the actual physical 1950s diners that had been built to films and television, which then acted as “proof” that the imaginary diners were real, creating a social expectation of what a diner looks like that diner owners then felt pressure to fulfill…. Eventually most people came to believe that this is what diners were like in the 1950s. The point, though, is not that this is an act of deception. The point is that the consumerist reality in which these restaurants exists obliterates any belief in a true or false depiction. (No one cares whether the classic 1950s diner actually depicts a historical truth, really.)”

“Baudrillard argues that there are four phases of the image − a faithful depiction of that which really is, an unfaithful depiction of that which really is, a depiction that covers up for the fact that there is nothing which is actually being depicted, and the simulacra, which exists in a human culture of such universal equivalency that no one has the grounding necessary to know what “reality” might even be outside of equivalencies, outside of depiction.”

“I absolutely cannot accept that people born after 9/11 have ever lived in those social conditions. I cannot believe that they are organically resentful of people they never meet in IRL social scenes they’ll never belong to. I think they just wanted to appear to be a particular kind of person online, found that the anti-litbro mask is a popular costume, and put it on.”

“I have a great deal of disdain for both the poptimist and the litbro narratives. But the issue at hand here is not their substance, but why they appear impossible to stamp out despite being wildly outdated. My sense is that they persist because they’re predigested narratives that insecure people can grab hold of in a critical culture that is no more capable of generating new ideas than the artwork it describes.”

“[…] poptimist essays get written, constantly, because we have exhausted our ability to produce new critical modes of being and because writers are an insecure species and thus largely content to try and step gingerly in the footsteps of everyone who’s already trod through the dirty snow.”

Also because it’s an easy paycheck because it’s anodyne fodder for the algorithmic gristmill. No-one ever got fired for slagging on an officially acceptable (and conveniently dead) target like DFW.

“[…] no one is under any obligation to humor your taste. Some people will always like what you don’t and dislike what you do. That’s life. The fact that you think this is injustice reflects what a batshit era we find ourselves in.”

“[…] if you want to keep treating it as a hate object, you have to actually read it; you see, you can’t have an opinion on a book you have not read. Personally, I’m sure I’d hate your favorite A Thing of Thing and Thing YA horseshit, if I read it. But I’m not gonna, so I can’t comment on that. If I do, though, and I think it sucks, I’ll tell you, and I’ll also tell you that The Brothers Karamazov is a triumph of human possibility. I have that right. Art is subjective. Get over it.”

Technology

Hackers can force iOS and macOS browsers to divulge passwords and much more by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)

“In order to construct iLeakage, we first reverse engineer the cache topology on Apple Silicon CPUs. We then overcome Apple’s timer limitations using a new speculation-based gadget, which allows us to distinguish individual cache hits from cache misses, despite having access to only low resolution timers. We also demonstrate a variant of this gadget that uses no timers, leveraging race conditions instead. After using our speculation-based gadget to construct eviction sets, we proceeded to analyze Safari’s side channel resilience. Here, we bypass Safari’s 35-bit addressing and the value poisoning countermeasures, creating a primitive that can speculatively read and leak any 64-bit pointer within Safari’s rendering process.”

“iLeakage is a practical attack that requires only minimal physical resources to carry out. The biggest challenge—and it’s considerable—is the high caliber of technical expertise required. An attacker needs to not only have years of experience exploiting speculative execution vulnerabilities in general but also have fully reverse-engineered A- and M-series chips to gain insights into the side channel they contain. There’s no indication that this vulnerability has ever been discovered before, let alone actively exploited in the wild.”

The Shapeshifting Crypto Wars by Susan Landau (LawFare Media)

“Understanding the meaning of the NCMEC numbers requires careful examination. Facebook found that over 90 percent of the reports the company filed with NCMEC in October and November 2021 were “the same as or visually similar to previously reported content.” Half of the reports were based on just six videos.”

“Each occurrence of a photo or video showing a child being sexually abused, even if it is a previous one shared hundreds of thousands of times, is harmful, for such showing increases the chance that an abused person will be recognized as having been the subject of CSAE.”

We humans are great: the more a person has involuntarily appeared in child pornography the more they’re judged for it? Am I reading that correctly?

“In a study Facebook conducted in 2020-2021, the company evaluated 150 accounts that the company reported to NCMEC for having uploaded CSAE content. Researchers found that more than 75 percent of those sharing CSAM “did not do so with … intent to hurt the child.” Instead, they were sharing the images either out of anger that the images existed or because of finding the images “humorous.“”

“In 2021 Thorn , an international organization devoted to preventing child sexual abuse, reported that 34 percent of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 saw such sharing as normal and that this was also true for 14 percent of children between ages 9 and 12. Draper pointed out that by empowering a child to report an overshared photo, law enforcement investigators would have a head start on investigating and thwarting this and related crimes.”

I suppose a nine-year-old can be taught to look both ways before crossing the street, but convincing them not to upload a nude photo of themselves is too much; better get law-enforcement involved. Maybe we just need a less prudish, light of other days society, where everyone has fake or real nudes or porn of themselves out there. Sure, someone’s jerking off to it, but who cares if you don’t know about it?

“[…] the fact that the trafficker must publicly advertise for customers provides law enforcement another route for investigation. But investigations are also often stymied by the in-country abuser being a family member or friend, making the child reluctant to speak to the police (this is also the case for so-called child sex tourism, in which people travel with the intent of engaging in sexual activity with children).”

This is horrible, but can we get some numbers on this?

“The substantial increase in offenses against children over the years […]”

I don’t believe you yet.

“The impact of false positives can be grueling on those accused. While for some types of criminal investigations, once the person is cleared, the taint may go away, that is often not the case for accusations of CSAE.”

That is a massive understatement. “grueling”: it can ruin your life.

“There is plenty of wiggle room in the phrase “capable of doing so.” In recent years, we have seen many governments, including well-respected democracies, ignore scientific reality in climate change, coronavirus protections, and other issues to score political points. But to pass a law requiring the use of a technology that doesn’t exist—and that many believe cannot be developed—is duplicitous and dangerous.”

“[…] both the EU and U.S. are pressing forward with legislation that, much like the Online Safety Act, is willing to sacrifice E2EE in the name of child safety. None of these bills explicitly prohibits E2EE. Instead, they present requirements effectively preventing the technology’s use without explicitly saying so.”

“[…] having a child’s phone report their activities to their parents would instill the notion that online surveillance is acceptable—surely not a lesson we want to teach children.”

That ship has absolutely sailed, unfortunately. That is exactly the lesson society has inculcated among two generations now. Privacy and free speech are boomer/gen-X things.

“The EU has documented instances in which spyware has been used to “destroy media freedom and freedom of expression” in Hungary and to silence government critics in Poland.”

JFC. What about Germany, the UK, France, or the U.S.? Do we not talk about their much-greater transgressions? Hungary and Poland at least point their surveillance mostly inward; the U.S. surveils the world.

“Think differently. Think long term. Think about protecting the privacy and security of all members of society—children and adults alike. By failing to consider the big picture, the U.K. Online Safety Act has taken a dangerous, short-term approach to a complex societal problem. The EU and U.S. have the chance to avoid the U.K.’s folly; they should do so.”

They absolutely will not. They don’t care about backlash because they are sham democracies.

Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)

“According to an email that the WSJ reviewed from Westfield High School principal Mary Asfendis, the school “believed” that the images had been deleted and were no longer in circulation among students.”

Hey, it also sounds like the school “believed” that the image even existed in the first place. Nobody reliable has ever claimed to have seen them—just teen boys, who are notoriously unreliable. Hell, I would claim I’d made naked pictures of girls in school, just to fuck with everybody. I mean, how could it be wrong to just say something like that? It’s not even really conceivable that it’s illegal to have a naked picture that you made and then you say it’s a girl in school. What if you were really good with a pencil, and you drew one of them? Is that illegal?

Get a fucking grip, people.

“It remains unclear how many students were harmed.”

No-one! No-one can even confirm that there are pictures, other than the say-so of a bunch of teenage boys. I’m not being a dick about this; read this summary,

“The school had not confirmed whether faculty had reviewed the images, seemingly only notifying the female students allegedly targeted when they were identified by boys claiming to have seen the images.”

Oh, man, am I glad that my anti-authoritarian self grew up in a world where you couldn’t get thrown out of school, to say nothing of being prosecuted, for saying that you’d seen salacious material about real-life people, just for fun. Talk about an entire society that can’t take a joke.

“Some of the girls targeted told the WSJ that they were not comfortable attending school with boys who created the images. They’re also afraid that the images may reappear at a future point and create more damage, either professionally, academically, or socially. Others have said the experience has changed how they think about posting online.”

“Not comfortable” … throw them out of school! “create more damage” … how can fake pictures of you create more damage? We have to create a world where people dismiss this kind of shit—it’s not going to stop. Maybe we should make naked, porn-posed pictures of everyone. “changed how they think about posting online” … good! You should be thinking about what the hell you’re posting online, you goddamned narcissist.

At the end of the article, we find out that the author has been citing the Wall Street Journal, which makes sense. That is a buttoned-down, “make rules for everyone but the white-collar criminals whose promotion is the only reason for its existence” type of newspaper.

The Futurist Summit: Lessons of the Last Decade by Washington Post Live (YouTube)

The interviewer is insufferable, but Meredith Whittaker (president of Signal) is a force of nature. At 08:00, she says,

“[…r]egulating AI, just non-traditionally. They did the classic move—withholding their labor—and they got terms that are actually staunching the bleeding of the use by the studios and big tech to place AI within their labor process that will degrade their labor, that will degrade artistic output, and will have a precedent-setting move of stopping the real harms, right now. I would look to the Writer’s Guild of America, I would look to SAG, I would look to your driver’s unions that are contesting the sort-of automated precarity of systems like Uber and Lyft, I would look to sort-of movements from below that are actually tackling the harms now, and not simply sitting around taking selfies with Elon Musk and calling it a regulatory agenda.”

Frances Haugen is also very, very good. At 09:50, she says,

“There is a skills escalator. You know, you come out of college, you come out of high school, and you have relatively low-complexity jobs. I had lunch with a friend a couple of days ago, and she’d been playing around with generative AI. And she’s like, ‘I’m never gonna hire a junior copywriter again! It’s like amazing!’ and I looked at her and I said ‘Amazing for you.’ Right? In a world where you’re a junior [list of jobs] … the jobs that allow you to become a more sophisticated contributor—they’re about to disappear.”

The dipshit interviewer responds with “clearly, yes, there is going to be huge impact on labor.”

No. You’re an idiot. What Haugen is pointing out is that the already pitiful “training program” that the U.S. has is going to become utterly broken. Businesses only ever put up with having less-skilled employees around because they were investing in them to become more-skilled employees. If AI replaces less-skilled employees, there will no longer be more-skilled employees either—because where will they come from? Jesus, lady. Could you be any more indoctrinated? Can’t you hear what Haugen is saying? Even if she were wrong, you should still, as the interviewer, engage her argument, rather than blowing right through to your predefined agenda. No wonder Whittaker keeps rolling her eyes.

The U.S. already doesn’t have training programs for so-called blue-collar jobs. Now it’s going to wipe out its ad-hoc training programs for white-collar jobs. At least places like Switzerland still have apprenticeship programs.

Whittaker is devastatingly insightful. She draws the distinction between an actually useful technology and the “bombast” surrounding it, delineating that the problem is the hyper-capitalist companies that own and drive the technology—“it’s the definition of metastatis”—rather than with the technology itself.

At 22:40. she says

“Just to clarify: ‘hype’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t do some things. Hype means that an entire ecology of narrative bombast has been predicated on … yeah, it can help you write an e-mail. If that’s a problem you want to solve with 20 billion GPUs, you can do it. But is that a world-changing problem to solve? And what is the actual material basis for what I would call these bombastic claims. […] Let’s get back down to reality and the actual the thing it [GPT] does before we make all of these predications based on that.”

The point of the bombast is to increase stock price.

The tools are useful, but the companies that own them are willing to lie about them in order to make them seem more useful to everyone. Eierlegende Wollmilchsau.

It’s like with vaccines. We’ve not had a single technology that has helped save more lives in the history of mankind. And yet, vaccines have never had a worse reputation than they do now. People don’t trust them, they don’t think they work, it’s a clusterfuck. All because of the way the hyper-capitalist system has benefitted from vaccines. Instead of imagining that we could get inexpensive, reliable vaccines for everyone, we accept that they will always become more expensive as the companies that control them tighten the noose. We accept that we never will wrest control of vaccines from these companies, so we write them off! The most effective medicine ever—and we choose to ignore them rather than to imagine controlling them ourselves.

It really is true that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The discussion on Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario (Hacker News) also has several good comments.

Minimalist Affordances: Making the right tradeoffs by Lea Verou

“Take hex colors for example. Quick, what color is #7A6652? Learning to mentally translate between hex color notation and actual visible colors takes years of practice. Hex notation was never designed for humans; it was designed for machines, as a compact way to represent the 3 bytes of RGB channels of earlier screens. Humans do not think of colors as combinations of lights. It’s not logical that to make brown you combine some red, a bit less green, and even less blue.”

“Another example, entirely outside of software, is music notation. You’ve likely learned it as a child, so it’s hard to remember what the learning experience was like, and if you regularly read music sheets, you may even believe it’s easy. But if we try to step back and examine it objectively, it’s highly unintuitive.”

Musical Notes and Rests

“There is not only an ordering here, but successive symbols even have a fixed ratio of 2. Yet absolutely nothing in their representation signifies this. Nothing in the depiction of ♩ indicates that it is longer than ♪, let alone that it is double the length. You just have to learn it. Heck, there’s nothing even indicating whether a symbol produces sound or not! Demanding a lot of knowledge in the head is not a problem in itself; it’s a common tradeoff when efficiency is higher priority than learnability. […] Was there really no possible depiction of these symbols that could communicate their purpose, order, and ratios?”

Programming

Domain Model first by Mark Seemann (Ploeh)

“An order is a document. You don’t want the customer’s address to be updatable after the fact. With a normalised relational model, if you change the customer’s address row in the future, it’s going to look as though the order went to that address instead of the address it actually went to.”

“All of this strongly suggests that this kind of data would be much easier to store and retrieve with a document database instead of a relational database. While that’s just one example, it strikes me as a common theme when discussing persistence. For most online transaction processing systems, relational database aren’t necessarily the best fit.”

“If you, on the other hand, start with the business problem and figure out how to model it in code, the best way to store the data may suggest itself. Document databases are often a good fit, as are event stores. I’ve never had need for a graph database, but perhaps that would be a better fit”

“If, however, the sole purpose of having a relational database is to support reporting, you may consider setting it up as a secondary system. Keep your online transactional data in another system, but regularly synchronize it to a relational database. If the only purpose of the relational database is to support reporting, you can treat it as a read-only system. This makes synchronization manageable.”

“Try to model a business problem without concern for storage and see where that leads you. Test-driven development is often a great technique for such a task. Then, once you have a good API, consider how to store the data. The Domain Model that you develop in that way may naturally suggest a good way to store and retrieve the data.”

Was Rust Worth It? by Jarrod Overson (Medium)

“Programming in Rust is like being in an emotionally abusive relationship. Rust screams at you all day, every day, often about things that you would have considered perfectly normal in another life. Eventually, you get used to the tantrums. They become routine. You learn to walk the tightrope to avoid triggering the compiler’s temper. And just like in real life, those behavior changes stick with you forever.

“Emotional abuse is not generally considered a healthy way to encourage change, but it does effect change nonetheless.

“I can’t write code in other languages without feeling uncomfortable when lines are out of order or when return values are unchecked. I also now get irrationally upset when I experience a runtime error.”

“[…] many developers break large projects down into smaller modules naturally, and you can’t publish a parent crate that has sub-crates that only exist within itself. You can’t even publish a crate that has local dev dependencies. You must choose between publishing random utility crates or restructuring your project to avoid this problem. This limitation feels arbitrary and unnecessary. You can clearly build projects structured like this, you just can’t publish them.”

“Rust added async-iness to the language after its inception. It feels like an afterthought, acts like an afterthought, and frequently gets in your way with errors that are hard to understand and resolve. When you search for solutions, you have to filter based on the various runtimes and their async flavors. Want to use an async library? There’s a chance you can’t use it outside of a specific async runtime.”

“Refactoring can be a slog: Rust’s rich type system is a blessing and a curse. Thinking in Rust types is a dream. Managing Rust’s types can be a nightmare. Your data and function signatures can have generic types, generic lifetimes, and trait constraints. Those constraints can have their own generic types and lifetimes.”

“But Rust has its warts. It’s hard to hire for, slow to learn, and too rigid to iterate quickly. It’s hard to troubleshoot memory and performance issues, especially with async code. Not all libraries are as good about safe code as others, and dev tooling leaves much to be desired. You start behind and have a lot working against you. If you can get past the hurdles, you’ll leave everyone in the dust. That’s a big if.”

ZFS for Dummies (Gamedev Guide)

“ZFS scrub checks every block in a pool against its known checksum to make sure that the data is valid. If you have vdevs with parity, ZFS scrub will also repair the data using healthy data from other disks. Scrubs should run on a schedule to make sure your systems stays healthy.”

“One of the best features of ZFS is ‘ZFS send’. It allows you send snapshots as a stream of data. This is a great way replicate a snapshot and it’s dataset to a file, another pool or even to another system via SSH. Amazing no!”

Fun

I was listening to a friend’s playlist on YouTube, which included Corey Hart’s Sunglasses at Night. The video features a lady cop, which is an absolute standard of 80s videos. She’s what I think of as “80s hot”, which got me to wondering whether our basic ideas of what is attractive are locked in based on what was considered attractive during our formative years. The Internet is awesome, so the Sunglasses at Night (Wikipedia) entry actually tells me that,

“[n]ear the end of the video, Hart is taken to the office of a female police officer (who releases Hart in the song’s end), played by Laurie Brown,[5] who later became the host of The NewMusic as well as a VJ on MuchMusic.”

The video has an entry at IMDb, Corey Hart: Sunglasses at Night (IMDb), which lists Laurie and her character, Laurie Brown: Police Officer (IMDb), which led me to a screen capture.

Laurie Brown: Police Officer in Corey Hart's Sunglasses at Night (1983)

The Internet can be an absolute dumpster fire, but the encyclopedia is alive and better than ever.

Video Games

Appalachia Radio With DJ Host Julie & Tales From The West Virginia Hills Holotapes by Southern Stacker (YouTube)

GTA: Vice City Full radio stations (YouTube)

My all-time favorite ended up being Radio Espantoso, which I will often shout along to as they’re announcing the station. When we used to drive north from New York City at 04:30 on a Saturday morning to visit the family 400km away, we would listen to 97.9 LA MEGA, which is a Spanish-language radio station with the strongest transmitter God ever wrought. We could hear it 150km from the city. NOVANTESETTEPUNTONUEVELAMEGA! haunts me.