Links and Notes for November 3rd, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Gaza and the World by Victor Grossman (CounterPunch)

“The Black preacher Nat Turner’s brief rebellion against slavery in 1831 in Virginia began with the bloody killing of over 50 white men, women and children – slave owners and their families. Horrible! Did that justify tightening the chains of that “peculiar institution” in the South?”

Norman Finkelstein cites this too, just as a historical example of people doing terrible things to free themselves from a terrible situation. It’s illegal, but understandable. The Nat Turner Rebellion participants committed horrific acts against civilians, although they were technically their direct oppressors.

In the case of Hamas, the civilians they killed were not directly oppressing them. Instead they benefitted from living in an ostensible democracy that lived a life of luxury while imprisoning the people who killed them.

Was it therefore justified? Of course not. That way lies madness. We can’t hold an entire country responsible for the acts of a few. That’s collective punishment. It was wrong when Osama bin Laden claimed the argument; it’s wrong when Hamas claims it; it’s wrong when Israel does.

“Nor can I erase from memory that blood-chilling episode in Pontecorvo’s film “The Battle of Algiers” when a revolutionary, who helped place secreted bombs in public places, is asked by a Frenchman: “Isn’t it cowardly to use your women’s baskets to carry bombs, which have taken so many innocent lives?” And gets the deadly response: “Isn’t it even more cowardly to attack defenseless villages with napalm bombs that kill many thousands of times more? Obviously, planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets.””

“I think of my own Jewish roots. I learned of the Auschwitz horror when I was 17, and was moved to tears when I heard that the Red Army had finally freed the site. Like so many, I took two words to heart: “Never again!” And I meant them for people everywhere, of all nationalities, Jews, Poles and even, when I moved near them, the people of Dresden. I knew there were good people in every country – and a great need for solidarity among them all, and against those greedy ones, also in every country, who were indifferent to the number of corpses, now increasing fearfully in so many places.”

Israel Wants Either an Apartheid State or an Ethnic Cleansing Process, Both Crimes Under International Law by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“1.4 million Palestinians out of 2.3 million were internally displaced, with 671,000 taking shelter in 150 UNRWA facilities. Most of the dead by Israeli bombs and tank shells have been civilians. The ratio of dead between combatants (few) and civilians (many) is startling, far beyond what takes place in a war (in contrast, of the 1,400 Israelis killed on October 7 by Hamas and other factions, 48.4 percent were soldiers).”

“Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory are already “one state” and second, that it is an apartheid state with the Palestinians in a second-class category. Advocates of the “one-state solution” argue that the reality of a singular state now requires equal citizenship for all who live in Israel/Palestine. The current Israeli political class refuses to accept the idea of a democratic and secular one-state, because they are wedded to an ethno-nationalist project of a “Jewish State” that erases the possibility of full citizenship for Palestinian Christians and Muslims.”

“the fact of apartheid is already a crime under the 2002 Rome Statute that created the ICC. Both the “one-state reality akin to apartheid” and the “three-state solution” of ethnic cleansing are serious crimes that require investigation. Will Khan ask the judges of the ICC to frame arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his colleagues?”

Israeli Rabbi Describes Settler Rampages Across West Bank by Jeremy Appel (CounterPunch)

““Unfortunately, 99.9% of Israelis are currently incapable, in the midst of our immense pain and anger, of distinguishing between Palestinian terrorists and terrorized Palestinians,” he said.”

That’s up from 98% before October 7th, I guess? I’m just making a bad joke. I actually think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it probably does feel that way.

“A Palestinian from Ramallah was “beaten with an inch of his life [and] urinated on,” Ascherman said. “[Settlers] tried to force a stick up his anus. They jumped on him to break his spine,” he said.”

Something is deeply broken with some of these settlers. These are the actions of a psychopath. Talk about being no more than animals. I suppose there are a lot of people in the U.S. who wonder whether those settlers are former NYC cops (just thinking of Abner Louima here).

“After Cain murders his brother Abel out of jealousy, as was read on Oct. 14, Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Expanding on commentary of 19th century German rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Ascherman said that when we see our brothers “standing in our way, causing us trouble, as we see the Palestinians standing in our way, it becomes so easy to justify murder.””

Does it make it easy, though? I’ve never had any trouble not murdering. There seem to be so many people who have no trouble not murdering people with whom they disagree vehemently.

“On Oct. 21, Jewish congregants read about Noah’s ark. When Noah comes out his ark following the flood, he gets drunk and asks God how he could have caused such destruction to the world. God’s response: “Now you come to me?” At no point in the 60 years he took to build the ark did Noah express any reticence about the flood’s impact on everyone living outside the ark.”

You can drink the tap water in these 50 countries — maybe by Frank Jacobs (Big Think)

“[…] the complex and costly infrastructure that consistently delivers clean tap water is still well beyond the means of most societies.”

“[…] fewer than one billion people have a tap at home that issues potable water. If you’re one of them, count yourself lucky. Most people have to boil the water from their taps or depend on public wells and streams to get the water they need. Up to two billion people have no consistent access to safe drinking water.”

“Compare that to the volume of bottled water the average American drinks each year, which has shot up from 1.6 gallons (6 liters) in 1976 to 34 gallons (139 liters) in 2014. The reason? Partly marketing and snobbery, no doubt. In taste tests, people routinely rate tap water higher if it’s presented in a bottle.”

“the Safe Drinking Water Act might need updating. Until that happens, many Americans may be routinely exposed to substandard tap water and opt for bottled water instead — despite the fact that bottled water can be up to 3,750 times more expensive than tap water.”

Deeper Into Depravity by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

““Nothing human disgusts me” is a line I remember well from The Night of the Iguana, the 1961 play by the superbly human Tennessee Williams. I hold to this thought (even while reading the foreign pages of The New York Times). What has happened to the people in the videos must disgust us. But what they suffer as victims could happen to all but the strongest among us. They are appalling specimens of humanity, but they are human. As we find our way to some morally, intellectually defensible high ground during the atrocities we witness daily, we need to bear this in mind.”

“Those videos were not shot in isolation. They reflect a culture of racism, xenophobia, hatred, and—we see this now—sadism that has taken pride in itself for many years. These sentiments are instruments of the state, carefully cultivated. You may remember the videos shot at the time of the al–Aqsa crisis two years ago. Young Israelis in sparkling school uniforms or stylish clothes leapt up and down in a sort of frenzy in the streets of Jerusalem while shouting, “Death to all Arabs.” I read those images looking back and forward: They were the flowers of the Israeli state’s century of official indoctrination and a prelude to the videos coming out now.”

“For most Israelis, he observed, it is down to violence now. A headline in Monday’s editions of The Times, recording these changing desires and expectations: “I Don’t Have That Empathy. It’s Not Me Anymore.” This is the voice of a nation that has demolished itself in its attempts to destroy others.”

““We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness,” Netanyahu said in a much-remarked speech to the nation last Wednesday, “and light shall triumph over darkness.” This is the utterance of a destroyer—of people, of hope—a man who cannot find his way out of the Old Testament and nonsensically demands we live in it with him, a man who simply should not be leading anything in the 21 st century.”

“[…] we Americans, are urged daily to support the depravity into which this man leads Israel ever more deeply. Netanyahu’s depravity, Israel’s, must be ours, too. We are urged now to openly endorse war crimes and a genocide. And so we, too, are in consequence letting an apartheid state’s intentionally terrorizing campaign against Palestinians accelerate our none-too-sturdy nation into the kind of internal collapse Toynbee described as the dynamic of decline.”

Europeans leap into this abyss, as well.

“These implicit defenses of systematic savagery must be dressed up, of course. And so America plunges into the disgracefully cynical argument that to oppose the Israeli operation in Gaza is anti–Semitic. The Chinese put their hands up to contribute to a ceasefire and talks toward an enduring settlement of one or another kind, but China is anti–Semitic because it has not condemned the Hamas assault.”

“If you oppose the Israelis’ genocide operation and merely call for a ceasefire, some museum functionary is frightened that her life is under threat? I view this as more than a vulgar misuse of history and a contemptuous use of the victim card. This reflects a nation that no longer knows how to make sense of itself.”

“Nobody in power has the creativity, imagination, or confidence to confront the present as the consequence of this error and begin acting to correct it. And so Israel will continue to pull us in the wrong direction—or further in the wrong direction, I ought to say. I hope I am not around if ever Americans start in with the sadistic videos.”

Oh dear, Patrick, how can you not know? They already make them; all the time. Just consider the media in general and most talk shows, which exhibit more or less this level of cruelty. There are, of course, many other, cruder videos to find online, in the dozens of social-media networks where people proudly publish such things, all the time. The cruelty of some of the Israeli people is not especially horrific. U.S. president Biden and much of his administration have very clearly said that they couldn’t care less about Palestinian children dying. These are videos. These are horrific. That they think this way is much more consequential than if a bunch of middle-class Israelis do.

The World Does Not Need Illegal Sanctions. The World Needs Peace and Development. by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“That more Palestinian children have died in these three weeks due to the Israeli bombing than have died in total in conflict zones across the world since 2019 is shocking. No child should die so cruelly before they can flourish. Neither due to this incessant bombardment, nor by the hunger induced by unilateral sanctions.”

“That these countries use their veto power to exercise their own narrow political agenda rather than to defend the UN Charter further delegitimizes the UNSC. Pressure by powerful countries – particularly the United States – has limited the UNSC’s ability to appear as a neutral arbiter.”

To put it mildly.

“We have seen a retreat in terms of meeting the SDG goals: only one-third of countries in the world would have halved their national poverty rates between 2015 and 2030 and nearly one in three (2.3 billion people) will remain moderately or severely food insecure. These basic developments are squandered by $2.3 trillion expenditure on weapons, more than 75% of that spending done by the United States and its NATO allies.”

What to Know about Robert Roberson on Texas Death Row for a Crime that Never Occurred by Innocence Project Staff (The Innocence Project)

“At trial, one nurse claimed she saw signs of sexual abuse in Nikki’s case, though no doctors or other medical professionals involved in Nikki’s care observed any such signs and testing from a sexual assault kit produced no substantiating evidence. The nurse, who presented herself as a “Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner” (SANE), was, in fact, not SANE-certified and offered her personal views on pedophiles in her testimony, further stoking the unfounded claims of child abuse against Mr. Roberson.”

Jesus Christ. What an absolute shitshow. Some people are just stupid monsters, doing such an incredible amount of damage, without a care in the world.. They’re just riding their little hobby-horses, no matter the topic at hand. Indistinguishable from evil.

The Dehumanization of War by Kelly Denton-Borhaug (Scheer Post)

“Sakue struggled to survive in Hiroshima’s post-apocalyptic, postwar landscape, while her older sister soon fell into despair and threw herself in front of a train. When the American soldiers of the occupying army arrived, Sakue remembered that they constructed an airstrip in front of the shack where she was living. “There were skeletons all over the area,” she said, “so when they built the airstrip, the bones were crushed into dust.””

“In recent years, I’ve traveled to Japan numerous times with university students to study the legacy of the first and only use of atomic weapons as World War II ended.”

First and only use to deliberately murder people, yes. They’ve been used thousands of times since. On the atolls, people were just forced out of their homes, rather than murdered.

“[…] most Americans hold war’s ultimate horror at arm’s length, while rationalizing the way our country and so many others on this planet all too regularly lurch into such conflicts as the only right and just way to address human greed, tyranny, and fear.”

“Almost 80 years after those first atomic blasts, Americans have yet to seriously reckon with how easily we learned to rationalize such structural violence.”

We don’t care about any of the violence we perpetrate, especially the less bombastic, but arguably more deadly versions. Not having useful health care kills more people and robs more person-years than direct and obvious violence, like gun violence—which the U.S. has in spades, as well.

“In the case of the Pacific front in World War II, violence begat ever greater violence and the hunger for it grew ever deeper and more insatiable until there was a veritable “frenzy of violence” on both sides in the final year of that war. More than half of all American deaths occurred in that single year and that was when the kamikaze , or suicide plane, became “the consummate symbol of the pure spirit of the Japanese” to “turn back the demonic onslaught.””

“Meanwhile, the Americans abandoned precision bombing and initiated the full-scale firebombing of Japanese cities. The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 burned to death more than 100,000 civilians in a single night. More than 60 cities were similarly targeted, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese in a final paroxysm of violence that preceded Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Israel Bombed My Home and Killed My Relatives. I’m Not Going to Be Silenced. by Mariam Abudaqa (Jacobin)

“The reasons they gave are not valid. They said I belong to a terrorist organization called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. We are not against Jews, or Christians or Muslims. We are against the occupation, and therefore what happened to me is bizarre. I’ve been to many other countries, and I never saw this kind of treatment. I am a feminist and I fight for women’s rights. People in the West speak incessantly about women’s rights and children’s rights, but I guess that just doesn’t apply for us Palestinians. They canceled my visa, and thankfully when I got a lawyer, I won the case.”

France is a shitshow. Prove me wrong. Do better, France.

“What are they waiting for us to do? To give up and hand over the flag? For Israel to keep murdering us and for us to keep watching them do it? This is not right. Hamas is part of the Palestinian people, but not all Palestinian people are part of Hamas. Look at the people dying in the West Bank — in Nablus and Jenin or under the blockade of Gaza. All our people are living the agony of occupation, poverty, unemployment, and siege.”

“In seventy-five years, what has international law done for us? The whole world sees that what is going on is unjust, that international law applies elsewhere in the world but not in Palestine. There is no meaning to international law if this is allowed to happen in Gaza. When thousands of Palestinians are getting murdered with white phosphorus and under thousands of bombs, they still tell you that we’re the terrorists.”

“The truth is coming out though. The attack on Gaza is shattering the status quo. The world sees what “solving” the Palestinian problem means to Western governments: erasing it. But our people will keep holding on. What is happening to us is being exposed. We do not need them to send us money or aid in exchange for being murdered and the violence against us. We want our freedom, and we want what international law says is our right.”

The World Has Never Cared About Gaza’s Suffering by Ahmed Nehad (Scheer Post)

“Before October 6, blood, pain, and suffering in Palestine were of no interest to the world. They were too mundane, too “normal” to be acknowledged. Never mind that “normal” meant a Gaza that had been smothered by a 17-year Israeli blockade and a 56-year occupation. Never mind that it meant a Gaza where Israeli military invasions had become almost routine; with civilians laid to rest after every attack, and with entire neighborhoods leveled—tens of thousands of homes, mosques, churches, hospitals, cultural centers, and educational institutions crumbling to rubble every couple of years.”

“In Gaza, “normal” was the meager four to 12 hours of electricity a day. Hospitals had become destinations of last resort because, in this “normal,” there were just 1.4 beds for every thousand residents. It was “normal” for families to starve, for essential medicines to run out, for graduates to stare at bleak futures, and for the vast majority to survive on mere aid.”

“The very same world that had remained nonchalant about the everyday horrors in Gaza and in all of occupied Palestine was now interested and invested.”

“For the past 20 days, the world has appeared fixated on one haunting question. It has seemingly resolved that the answer is to obliterate Gaza from the map. But one question lingers globally: How do we do it? How do we annihilate Gaza?”

“We will recover our dead from beneath the debris, knowing that even with aid, thousands more are destined to perish. Grief will consume many in the wake of lost homes, cherished memories, and shattered dreams. Epidemics of ancient diseases will claim lives amid the ruins of our graveyard of a city. Others will suffer from the aftereffects of the lethal gases and chemicals from phosphorus bombs, missiles, and other arsenals—weaponry Israel is conveniently field-testing in Gaza for its future endeavors.”

“A mere handful might endure, conveniently turning into subjects of study for Western academia who seek to soothe their consciences by championing justice from the safe confines of their ivory towers, having borne witness to our annihilation.”

“A cease-fire. Now. Grant us the luxury of one last hug. Our end is nigh, rest assured.”

When the Journalists are Gone, the Stories Will Disappear by Zoe Alexandra and Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“Text messages from beneath the shattered concrete cry for help. Some of them are dug out, but many die, their bodies buried deep underneath the buildings that have been hit by powerful bombs. Half of the population of Gaza is beneath the age of 18, and half of the dead are young people – children, really, who have no idea about why they are being hit so hard by a government led by a man who says he wants to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah. “We are the people of light,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, “and they are the people of darkness.” Underneath the concrete, Netanyahu’s cruel vision comes true.”

Dr. Finkelstein responds to Bernie Sanders by Norman Finkelstein (YouTube)

He ends by rightly calling Bernie a monster for his extremely one-side and callous response. Bernie is basically dead to him, although he’s admired him in the past. I have to concur. Bernie’s response seems to be completely ignorant of not only the history and the present, but also the nearly unavoidable future implied by his stance.

The video interview ENTREVISTA: Roger Waters Fala sobre Música, Carreira, Política, Guerras, e Mais by Glenn Greenwald (Rumble) was really quite good. It’s in English, despite the title being in Brazilian.

When Banks Become Cops by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“Algos are bludgeons, and easily pick up on activity outside the “norm” of banking. The problem is that there are a great many perfectly lawful and, indeed, entirely normal transactions that are “out of character” unless you ask why. Algos do not ask questions. Buying a used car from someone on Craig’s List? You’ll need cash to complete the transaction. There’s nothing unusual about buying a used car. People do so all the time. But they don’t do so everyday, and so the algo raises a red flag over an unexplained cash transaction and you’re suddenly a potential criminal. Banks won’t take that chance.”

“In a world driven by algos, explanations don’t matter. But that’s the only way to make sure that no bad dude launders money, and so what if a few good people go hungry?”

From a comment by Rxc:

“This is Artificial Intelligence in action. It is not the cute version that is currently being sold, but it has been around for quite a while. Insurance companies also use credit scores to determine how much to charge you, based on AIs that suck up every bit of data that they can associate with you, and feed it thru an algorithm to produce a score.”

A Woman Intentionally Crashed Her Car Into What She Thought Was a Jewish School… by Eugene Volokh (Reason)

“A woman intentionally crashed her car Into what she thought was a Jewish school because she was angry about the Israel-Hamas war, Indianapolis police said.

“Ruba Almaghtheh, 34, told officers she had been watching the news and “couldn’t breathe anymore,” and referenced the Palestinian people.

“Police said she had passed the Israelite School of Universal and Practical Knowledge several times, calling it the “Israel school,” and told officers, “Yes, I did it on purpose.” …

“However, the building Almaghtheh crashed into is not, in fact, a Jewish school. The Anti-Defamation League says the Israelite School of Universal and Practical Knowledge is in fact an extremist organization that is anti-Israel and antisemitic.”

No-one was injured, so we can laugh heartily at this utter idiocy in action. The woman was overwhelmed. This is once again proof that the world is too much for most people. Literally, in this woman’s case. She’s probably not even anti-semitic in any way that’s a danger to anyone. She’s just too frail for this world. She became so overwhelmed that she attacked a building with her car.

Ukraine Has Lost the War by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“The diagnosis of stalemate relies on a misunderstanding of the different strategic approaches to the war by the two armies. The Economist illustrates the stalemate by saying that “Five months into its counter-offensive, Ukraine has managed to advance by just 17 kilometers. Russia fought for ten months around Bakhmut in the east “to take a town six by six kilometers”.

“But that measures the results by territory taken. That is Ukraine’s goal because they are trying to recapture land that Russia has taken and push Russia back out of its borders. But Russia is not fighting for territory but for victory over the Ukrainian armed forces. Victory for Russia, for now, is measured, not in territory, but in the attrition of Ukrainian men, equipment and artillery.”

“Zaluzhny opposes Zelensky’s strategy of spending lives on Avdiivka as he opposed his strategy of spending lives on Bakhmut. But Zelensky is not listening. That may be why Zaluzhny took his message to Zelensky’s patrons. The attritional war now focused on Avdiivka could lead to the running out of men and the loss of pivotal land that could signal the beginning of the realization that Ukraine has lost the war.”

Getting Called A Nazi For Opposing A Genocide by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“All that death and destruction [in Ukraine], for absolutely nothing. The only ones who benefitted from that nightmare were the war profiteers who raked in vast fortunes and the empire managers who used it to advance their geostrategic agendas in Eurasia. Those of us who called for peace negotiations were objectively correct, and those who shouted us down and accused us of treasonous Kremlin loyalism were objectively wrong.

“Those calling you an anti-semitic baby-cooking terrorist lover for supporting a ceasefire are wrong in exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons. All the arguments being made against peace right now will only end up serving the rich and powerful, at the cost of unfathomable oceans of human suffering.”

“You get peace by making peace. That’s how you do it. You stop shooting, you sit down, you have conversations and you make deals. The deals won’t feel perfect, because they won’t be, but they will be better than slaughtering children by the thousands for no justifiable reason and killing off parts of our own humanity in the process. You set your intention toward peace and harmony, and you start walking in that direction, one step at a time.

“It really is that simple. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying for the benefit of the rich and powerful.”

An Infinite Distance by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“According to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Russia killed 504 Ukrainian children in the first 20 months of the war. Israel has already killed at least 7 times more children than Russia in just 3 weeks of its war on Gaza, fully supported by Biden.”

“Greg Grandin: “Our foreign policy spectrum now runs from Jake Sullivan imagining himself fighting off the Red Dawn and Vivek Ramaswamy thinking of organizing a Red Wedding.””

“According to the Times of Israel the proposed new law, introduced by Netanyahu’s Interior Minister Moshe Arbel, “would allow Israel to strip individuals of citizenship if they express solidarity with terror groups or incite terror during times of war. The law would give the interior minister special war-time powers allowing them to remove the citizenship of individuals deemed to be supporting or encouraging terrorism. Rather than go to the courts, the minister would only need the approval of the justice minister”.”

“A new bill introduced into the French senate will criminalize the criticism of Zionism: “An insult committed against the State of Israel is punishable by two years of imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros.” Macron will soon be constructing his own Bastille.”

““From the river to the sea” is a longtime slogan of the Palestine resistance movement and is an expression of the perspective of freeing the Palestinian people from Zionist oppression over the entire land area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which comprises the West Bank, Gaza and the present-day state of Israel.”

It bears repeating that you can’t put words into people’s mouths. There is an inordinate amount of evidence supporting the provenance of the definition above. There is no need to accept the idiotic and hateful definition ascribed to the expression by people who are solely interested in suppressing speech and opinions that make them uncomfortable.

Dismantle Israel And The Entire US Empire by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

““Israel has a right to defend itself” means “Genocide all non-Zionists.” If pro-Israel people get to decide that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call to genocide Jews, then it’s only fair that pro-Palestine people get to decide what pro-Israel people’s slogans mean as well.”

Rashida Tlaib censure vote sets precedent for criminalizing opposition to Gaza genocide by Patrick Martin (WSWS)

“In calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, Tlaib is doing no more than giving expression to the sentiments not only of her constituents but of the majority of the American population.

“The White House is free to send bombs to slaughter Palestinian children—without even reporting how many—and members of Congress like Senator Lindsey Graham are free to advocate a “total war” against what he calls “the most extremist population on Earth.” But verbal criticism of what is clearly a genocide and a massive violation of international law is impermissible.”

Party! Party! by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

“So far, the collapse of suburbia has happened in slow motion, but the pace is quickening now and it’ll get supercharged when the bond markets go down, as they must, considering the country’s catastrophic fiscal circumstances. […]

“All this is apprehended to some degree by the increasingly frightened public, though they have a hard time articulating it within any of the popular frameworks presented by politics, religion, or what appears lately to be extremely corrupt science. The people see what’s coming but they can’t make sense of it, and the stress makes a great many of them insane. Without a way to construct a coherent view of reality, or tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, they behave accordingly: anything goes and nothing matters.”

Gaza’s Trail of Tears by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“What Americans are witnessing in Gaza is a reiteration of our own history in real-time: Dispossess indigenous people, violently crush their resistance, blame any retaliatory “massacres” as an excuse to use overwhelming military power to wipe out their entire populations, confine the survivors to “reservations” on marginal sites, then invade even that land when gold, timber, oil or water is found, justifying the theft by citing your own stature as a superior society, which will put the looted land and resources to the highest use possible…”

“In a single week, Israel dropped almost as many bombs on Gaza as the U.S. did in Afghanistan in one year, the heaviest year of bombing. Gaza is 141 square miles. Afghanistan is 252,071 square miles.”

“If you know your airstrikes are going to kill civilians and they do, in fact, kill civilians and you continue launching them hour after hour, day after day, week after week, with the same bloody results, you can’t write these deaths off as collateral damage, accidental deaths, or cases of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’re predictable and intentional.”

“Two weeks ago, Biden was chest-thumping that the US “is the most powerful nation the world – not the world – the history of the world.” Now he pretends to be powerless to restrain Israel as it commits war crimes with US weapons. Pretty rapid decline into impotence….”

“The Palestinian historian, Sami Abou Shahadeh, who is the leader of the Balad/Tajamou’ Party, was detained by Israel police for attending an anti-war demonstration: “I have been released after 7 hours of detention for the “crime” of being a Palestinian citizen calling to end the war. By contrast, if I were a Jewish citizen calling for a genocide of Palestinians I could become a minister. This should be a wake-up call for Western governments that keep encouraging this racism by taking about ‘shared values’ with Israel.””

“Beyond the censure, more than 60 Democrats, including such luminaries as Katie Porter, Steny Hoyer, Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff, signed a letter condemning Tlaib for using the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” declaring it “genocidal,” despite the fact that it wasn’t considered anti-semitic even by the ADL as recently as last year. These same Democrats called for a ceasefire, but only for Hamas rockets, which don’t seem to have killed any Israeli citizens since October 8th, and not IDF airstrikes, which have killed more than 10,800 people, mostly women and children.”

“Adam Johnson: “I understand why many assume a “humanitarian pause” and ceasefire are interchangeable, on an intuitive level it makes sense. But they’re not and the main reason we know they’re not is the White House and pro-Israel groups are pushing one while threatening to punish anyone uttering the other.””

“The U.S. Navy has sent a nuclear-powered submarine to the Middle East. The USS Florida (SSGN-728), which can carry more than 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles.”

“Countries that have cut diplomatic ties with Israel over the bombing of Gaza: Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Jordan, Bahrain, Honduras, Turkey, Chad, and South Africa.”

“Calhoun said that a camp in Khan Younis with 50,000 displaced people had 4 toilets. There was no water and children with burns all over their bodies were discharged because there were no medical supplies.”

Hillary Clinton Lost Because She’s Deeply Unpopular by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“If you’re filled with fury, why don’t you blame the woman who was by far the most individually responsible and the people who enabled her? If you think that the election was so important, why didn’t you support a candidate who could beat Trump? If you’re mad at people who expressed principled objections to the center-right because they “treated the election like a game,” can you please explain how voting for a deeply-flawed candidate because she was a woman and it was her turn is not treating it like a game? If you think that people who care about, you know, resisting the total control of capital over both political parties amounts to “positioning themselves against Hillary,” why does it never penetrate that the things they said about Hillary’s electability were proven absolutely, totally, indisputably correct? Why aren’t you mad at the right people?”

“ the Rust Belt voters who actually handed Trump victory weren’t motivated by Bernie’s loss, they were motivated by the economic policies Hillary’s political movement gleefully pursued for decades, happily and knowingly trading the support of such voters for the fealty of the rich. It is astonishing that people still won’t deal with the basic facts of Clinton’s culpability in her own failure. Seven years later, they just can’t blame her for anything.”

“[…] the reality is that Hillary Clinton was always a bad choice for a presidential nominee, she suffered from bad unfavorables her entire career, she presided over an immensely dopey campaign that focused on celebrity glitz while the country was gripped with economic anxiety, and she deserved to lose. The trouble is that Yglesias has direct professional incentive to never notice any of that − he has, we’ve been told, a direct line to the Biden White House, and you don’t get such influence by telling Democratic leadership what they don’t want to hear.”

Journalism & Media

Are We Having a Moral Panic Over Misinformation? by Joanna Thompson (Undark)

“Misinformation is most commonly defined as anything that is factually inaccurate, but not intended to deceive: in other words, people being wrong. However, it is often talked about in the same breath as disinformation — inaccurate information spread maliciously — and propaganda — information imbued with biased rhetoric designed to sway people politically.”

Propaganda is political disinformation.

“Take, for example, a weather forecast that claims a particular day will have a high of 55 degrees Fahrenheit. If that day comes and temperatures rise to 57 degrees, does the forecast qualify as misinformation?”

No. It’s a prediction. It’s accuracy is by its very nature probabilistic. This isn’t that difficult.

“What about a newspaper story that inaccurately reports the color of someone’s shirt?”

Yes, it’s misinformation, but hopefully irrelevant. If it’s deliberately wrong, like the skin color of a suspect, then it’s disinformation. Again, I’m not seeing why you need to found an institute to label these things. If the color of the shirt is politically relevant, then it’s propaganda.

“And in the age of yellow journalism around the turn of the 20th century, many reporters made up stories out of whole cloth.”

Nice job! It is literally misinformation to suggest that reporters making up stories out of whole cloth is a feature unique to a prior benighted century rather than the defining characteristic of this one.

“Standards for journalism and books have, on the whole, improved since the yellow journalism days. But casual conversation isn’t held to the same rigorous standards.”

rigorous standards? What fucking planet are you on?

'You're just scum' — Haley blasts Ramaswamy over his attack on her daughter's TikTok by CNBC Television (YouTube)

Ramaswamy: I wanna laugh at why Nikki Haley didn’t answer your question, which is about looking families in the eye. [sic] In the last debate, she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok. Well, her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first. [shots fired!]
Haley: Leave my daughter out of your voice! [sic; who talks like this?]
Ramaswamy: …before [grief-shaming?] your own daughter. The next generation of Americans are [sic] using it. And that’s actually the point.
Crowd: Booooooo…
Ramaswamy: You have her supporters propping her up. That’s fine. Here’s the truth.
Haley: [shaking head] You’re just scum.
Ramaswamy: The easy answer [wagging finger] is actually to say that we’re just gonna ban one app. We have to go further. We have to ban any U.S. company actually transferring U.S. data to the Chinese.
Haley: [continues to look sullen on second camera]

Tell me this isn’t perfect kayfabe (Wikipedia). It’s a bit hard for me to tell, but I think that Ramaswamy is playing the heel here. Listen to that crowd booing. You can almost see them standing and shaking their fists.

This is an actual debate, featuring actual adult human-beings who are running for the office of the president of the United States, the center of the current global empire. This is a joke.

In the other party, there’s this awesome statement of batshittery.

“RFK, Jr., founder of the Children’s Health Defense [sic] Network: “Israel is a bulwark for us… it’s almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. If Israel disappears, Russia, China, and BRICS+ countries will control 90% of the oil in the world and that would be cataclysmic for US national security.””

So many excellent choices. The U.S. enjoys a bountiful harvest of candidates.

Art & Literature

Notes on Dance by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“I was in a restaurant in the Marais, listening to my friend tell me about Robert Wilson telling him about women in Bali who ritually process the grief of a baby’s death, and I swear to you, at that moment all the grief in the world was channeled directly into me. All the grief, and all the wonder at the mystery and power of art.”

We are not the same. I don’t even know what that could possibly feel like. It’s a very poetic description, but I can’t even get close to understanding what the hell he’s talking about.

“Broadway musicals circa 1985 would indeed have been radically avant-garde, were they not meant to be consumed, en masse and on the level, by a public that does not want its unconscious depths to be churned, but is perfectly happy with a little “razzle-dazzle”.”

“I think Nabokov could have made his own peace with evolutionary theory in a way that would have permitted him to retain this beautiful phrase, if only he had read Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and appreciated that we are simply constrained to apprehend nature through the lens of purposiveness, even if this does not license us to attribute concrete purposes to its workings.”

“Call them what you will, the art-forms Breton designated as “primitive” are just as cool as it gets. Attending to them is essential for understanding the range of human experience, especially those dimensions of experience that lie deeper than language; especially those dimensions of experience that might enable us to mount a last human stand against marketization and “attention-fracking”, which is the latest and most powerful weapon by which algorithms process taste and sensibility into data.”

“For the moment, it seems, only the political right knows how to tap into its exuberance, while the left is busy seeking out new things to prohibit. Emma Goldman’s line about not wanting to be part of the revolution if she can’t dance is often dismissed as a rare slip into sentimentality on her part, and is certainly over-cited on bumper-stickers and social-media profile-banners. But it seems to me her real concern is about who is going to take political responsibility for exuberance.”

Philosophy & Sociology

You Can’t Just Say “Oh, That Doesn’t Matter” About Every Single Political Question by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“I wrote a piece that (glancingly) discussed the cancellation of Halloween celebrations at public schools. A number of commenters and emailers fixated on that element and said, who cares, it’s just school Halloween parties. But of course the whole point of that essay was to explain why it matters far beyond school parties, to argue that our fixation on trying to make every opportunity available to every child is in fact quietly destructive. Maybe I made that point well, maybe I made the point poorly, but it is an argument, one that you have to actually argue with rather than simply dismissing as irrelevant.”

“I have lately been complaining about safetyism and its embodiment in “trunk or treat,” where parents have replaced traditional house-to-house trick or treating with gathering in a parking lot and giving candy out from the trunk of a car. Why? Because, they say, ordinary trick or treating is just too dangerous! Except that trick or treating is not dangerous, not remotely. The number of violent incidents that children have historically faced while trick or treating, compared to their numbers, is infinitesimal. Parents can parent how they want, but they can’t promulgate a blatantly false narrative about stranger danger. You know what people say to me? Not “your statistics are wrong,” but “that doesn’t matter.” Who cares? Why do you care? But safetyism clearly has immense consequences for our society. It’s transformed American life. Yes, it matters!”

“The dominance of poptimism and the full-throated embrace of the lowbrow even in previously-highbrow publications, shutting out traditional artforms and contributing the the vast sameness that permeates our entire cultural industry? Who cares, doesn’t matter, why bother. Our entire educational system abandoning rigor and rejecting grades or any other form of assessment, so that we have no tools to inspire hard work and no way to know how our students are doing? Who cares, doesn’t matter, why bother. Activists and nonprofits are creating a false impression of mainstream left priorities and tactics? Who cares, doesn’t matter, why bother. Nothing means anything; nothing has consequences.”

“[…] any time I refer to anything that happens on Twitter, ever, I get a lot of performative eye-rolling from readers. If I speak in general terms, they say I haven’t provided evidence. If I screencap specific individual tweets, they say “oh those are just a few random people.” And it’s transparently the case that they do so because they don’t want to grapple with the specific point I’m making, or they don’t want to deal with the irrefutable power that distributed opinion has in our society, or both. But as Niels Bohr supposedly said about his lucky horseshoe, the power of cultural change works whether you believe in it or not.”

How to drive a stake through your own good heart by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

“[…] if we all spent a little more time meditating on the inevitable perversion of all incentives and the perpetual struggle to build and maintain systems that work, that would be great. But ol’ Chucky Goodhart’s observation has a lot more to give us. Goodhart’s Law doesn’t just explain how bad actors fool institutions. It also explains how good actors fool themselves . That is, we think we’re Goodharting each other, but we’re often Goodharting ourselves.”

“If you give points for attendance, for example, students will show up, sit in the back, and shop for shoes online during class. If you give points for participation, students will dutifully contribute nonsense. (“What I found most interesting about War and Peace was the war parts, but the peace parts were also pretty good.”)”

“[…] it’s usually possible to finagle a good grade in a class without actually learning much. We act as if those students have stolen something from their teachers, when really they’ve only stolen from themselves, spending a whole lot of money and time in order to avoid getting educated.”

“That’s what you have to recognize if you want to bust out of your personal Goodhart hell. People will cheer for you even as you’re Goodharting yourself: “Way to go jumping through those hoops!” “Congratulations on being the best at playing the game!” “You made the number go up, wahoo!” I have wasted a good chunk of my life chasing exactly that kind of praise. I thought I was winning, but the only way to win Goodhart’s game is to walk away.”

Bingo.

Everyone Can’t Do Everything by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“[…] the whole DEI thing only really applies to majority imposition on minority rights − the fact that Halloween is a secular holiday enjoyed by the vast majority of children perversely makes it more of a target for exclusion, not less. I suspect that this sort of thing is really a matter of fretful liberal bureaucrats who feel like they need to Do Something and found this Thing To Do.”

“Canceling holidays is a different animal than specific children learning about their inevitable human limits, but the stated moral logic of these administrative actions stem from the same bad impulse − the thinking that says that if any kids can’t do something, this is an emotional setback they can’t overcome, rather than a simple reality of life. The basic human experience of not partaking in something other people enjoy becomes instead an error that has to be corrected. In our culture, if any individual kid can’t do something that other kids can do, that’s treated as injustice.”

“The trouble is that we’ve created a larger cultural expectation that every child can grow to be absolutely anything, when that isn’t true. And while disability is involved in that, it’s really just one part of a broader addiction to telling our kids that they can have whatever they want.”

“[…] my time working in K-12 schools had left me shaking my head, again and again, at how relentlessly the “you can be anything you dream” ideology was pushed on kids. Everywhere you looked, there was another poster insisting that If You Believe, You Will Achieve! and related cliches. It was as close to a secular civic religion as I have encountered in 21st-century American life.”

“The first problem is that the kind of people who get up in front of crowds and say “I never gave up on my dreams, and I made it!” don’t understand survivorship bias − all the people who never gave up but nevertheless never make it don’t get invited to stand up in front of crowds and make speeches. The second is that, once we have misapprehended the nature of success in that way, the insistence that we should never give up becomes immensely cruel; it keeps people stuck pursuing kinds of success they will never achieve, and it tells them that if they eventually give up, that failure is their own fault.”

“[…] the activist-led effort to treat all autistic people as fully autonomous and self-directed people leaves the most disabled at the mercy of people who would exploit and harm them. There’s also the broad and vexing question of what accommodations can and should be extended to people given their various disabilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act’s standard of requiring any reasonable accommodation is an elegant and just one, but of course what exactly is reasonable will remain permanently controversial.”

“It’s additionally true that, at present, it seems unlikely that a person with Down Syndrome will ever become a research physicist. The thing I’ve been trying to make clear to people for the past three years is that we’re all limited in this way, ultimately, that none of us have truly limitless potential. I am very happy to tell you that I have had exactly zero chance of becoming a research physicist in my life; that’s just not a future that ever fit within my own very-real limitations. As long as we entertain the fiction that such limitations don’t exist, we’re harming our young people.”

Slavoj Žižek on Israel Palestine by PoliticsJOE (YouTube)

At about 28:00, he says that, Gandhi wasn’t trying to end racism in South Africa—he was just trying to get Indians counted as whites, not blacks. Very different to being against racism.

At 43:00, he discusses Germany’s complicated relationship to Israel: instead of Germany having to give up some of its territory to Jews, they gave away someone else’s territory—and all of Europe was good with that.

Technology

The Future of Sex? | Sex Robots And Us by BBC Three (YouTube)

So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers… (The AI Episode) by Joshua Michael Schrei (The Emerald)

At about 1:05:00,

“Modernity is humanity seeing what it can get away with.”

At about 1:10:00,

“In the stories, the young initiate who wants to access formidable powers, has to do what?

“Wait.

“You’ve seen the movies, you heard the stories, right? Of the master making the potential disciple wait outside the temple gate?

“You want access to the great powers? You’ve got to earn it.

“And the first way to earn it, before any physical trials, before any tests that take the would-be apprentice to the brink, the first way to earn it is—to wait.

“You’ve got to know how to wait.

“You know what the very first step of mystery-school initiation often is?

“Silence.

“The ability to sit with what is, without altering it, for a long period of time.”

This is, of course, wholly incompatible with our society, especially with the self-proclaimed elites who want to lead us off the precipice in their fervent hope that they will benefit in some short-term and frivolous way that is considered valuable by the short-term and frivolous society that somehow manages to buoy them on the backs of people so much more useful than they.

Patience is a virtue.

There’s a whole, incredibly soothing section where he convinces me that I’m a duck. Immagonna just leave it at that. I didn’t hate it.

At 01:32:00, he talks about the scene in the Matrix where Neo “learns” Kung Fu.

“It’s an awesome scene, right? And, of course, anyone who’s studied Kung-Fu—or any other somatic art—also knows that it’s a laughable scene because, simply, that’s not how bodies learn. Bodies learn through the time it takes to weave things into tissues. Bodies learn as patterns seep into the seven datus, the seven layers. Learning, knowledge, is an endeavor of bone marrow, and blood, and sweat, and breath, and proprioceptive weaving, over time.”

After doing some “like causes like” examples (e.g., if you want it to rain, than you ritually pour water, … um, … OK), at 01:39:00, he says,

“This daemonic power is not neutral. It is not a neutral intelligence that is being called up. By choosing which aspects of the living web of intelligence are the valuable intelligences and which are not, it is already value-laden. By centering rational empiricism, it is already value-laden. By removing intelligence from a body, it is already deeply value-laden. That is a value statement. By making it irreligious, aspiritual, it is already value-laden. AI is a biased God. Talking to ChatGPT, for example, is nothing like talking to an Aboriginal elder. It’s more like talking to a Stanford computer-science grad with an incredible analytic capability and very few real-life social skills. We are taking the narrow, world-naive, uninitiated, unembodied intelligence of the eager, neoliberal, Stanford grad and magnifying it on a global scale. Just what the world needs, right? All the biases inherent in the Western, scientific, analytic view of creation that has already taken us to the brink of eco-collapse, magnified 10,000 times.”

Goddamn, we need more philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and linguists helping us run the world.

At 1:43:00,

“[…] morality can’t be programmed in. Ethics can’t be programmed in. It can’t be programmed into machines or into human beings. For all the current necessity that there is for ethical regulations, moratoriums, waiting periods, before the rush to market—these are still surface measures. When will we realize that trying to add ethics, […] to a system that is by nature hubristic, that is by nature at odds with the Gods, isn’t a viable long-term solution. Within the soulless fragmentation of late-stage capitalism, in which all things are pillaged and sold, and it’s everyone for themselves, all of the time.”

We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus by Charles Stross (Charlie's Diary)

“There are very rich people trying to manipulate investment markets into giving them even more money, using shadow puppets they dreamed up on the basis of half-remembered fictions they read in their teens. They are inadvertently driving state-level policy making on subjects like privacy protection, data mining, face recognition, and generative language models, on the basis of assumptions about how society should be organized that are frankly misguided and crankish, because there’s no crank like a writer idly dreaming up fun thought experiments in fictional form.”

“Meanwhile our public infrastructure is rotting, national assets are being sold off and looted by private equity companies, their social networks are spreading hatred and lies in order to farm advertising clicks, and other billionaires are using those networks to either buy political clout or suck up ever more money from the savings of the poor.

“Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

“It’s because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They’re rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires.”

Our World Is Coming To An End | Aaron Bastani Meets Slavoj Žižek | Downstream by Novara Media (YouTube)

At 00:02:35. on never having gotten drunk,

“You know why? Because I’m really a Stalinist, not just superficial. You know what’s my idea? The world is a dangerous place. If you get drunk, you want to embrace people, you get kind, and then you don’t recognize the attack and cannot defend yourself. No, we must stay sober—paranoia—to see where the attack is coming from.”

The rest of the interview is pretty good, with a lot of points I’ve heard him make before. At around 01:03:00, he talks about Ukraine and how we wouldn’t be at the point of talking about a stalemate if we hadn’t provided them with weapons.

This is a point he’s made before, but it ignores a vast swath of history and he doesn’t express it very well, I feel. After many repetitions, I’m starting to understand where he’s coming from—he sounded unhinged at first—but I still feel he’s deeply screwed up the analysis on this one, and is just doubling down.

He can’t help but view the Russians as an evil with which one cannot negotiate. He’s damaged goods in that sense. He talks of Russia as the Israelis talk of Palestinians, as Americans talk of anyone non-American.

What he should be saying is that, given that we’ve already ignored Russia’s concerns over the decades, given that we drove NATO right up to its borders, given that we organized a coup in Ukraine, given that we propped up a corrupt president in Ukraine and supported the worst elements of their society, given that we lied to Russia about adhering in any way to the Minsk accords, given that we did everything we possibly could to provoke Russia into committing a war crime, then, yes, we should actually put our money where our mouth is and now help defend the country that we fucked up / helped fuck up so badly that it’s ended up where it is now.

But it would be nice for him to at least once admit that none of this had to happen. I don’t think I’ve once heard him say that Ukraine would have been far better off if the U.S. had never approached it. I don’t think I’ve once heard him admit that Ukraine would have gotten a much better deal at the start of this war.

He still says,

“Are we aware that Ukraine at least didn’t lose only because of our help. To have this position now—kind of a WWI stalemate—it’s precisely because we were helping Ukraine. So, at least retroactively, at those who are pro-peace should acknowledge that we are in this position to say, at least Ukraine have a chance to survive only because we were helping Ukraine.”

Not once does he acknowledge how many people died for his being able to say something like that. And it’s not even true. Ukraine is in a much-worse bargaining position than it was two years ago.

He still sounds like a raving lunatic on this topic. I can’t see any daylight between his position and that of any war-hawk American, other than an improved eloquence.

What he’s saying is, given how badly we’ve fucked up Ukraine using them as the tip of NATO’s spear, this is the best they can hope for. Not once does he consider that Ukraine would have been much better off if it had never been used as NATO’s spear in the first place. I’ve never heard him mention NATO’s role in this. I can’t imagine he’s ignorant of it. He just doesn’t seem to think it’s relevant. Or he doesn’t care because he’s so busy doubling down on his original bad take from a year-and-a-half ago that was based on his knee-jerk Russophobia. He’s never once talked about how bad it’s been for any country, especially Ukraine, to be friends with NATO, as a proxy of the United States.

They continue the discussion later, at 01:11:00,

“Aaron: you mentioned Russia/Ukraine. What’s the correct position for a leftist on Russia/Ukraine? I read an amazing piece in Time Magazine, the average person on the front line for Ukraine now is 43 years old. There’s clearly a military stalemate.
Žižek: It’s extremely difficult, I think. […] I think that Ukraine needs our support at least to maintain this stalemate. I think it’s too risky to say okay it’s a stalemate, let’s stop supporting Ukraine.
Aaron: But that’s a permanent war. So it should be like Syria?
Žižek: Yeah, but what is the alternative? If you simply stopped supporting Ukraine…
Aaron: Oh, I’m not suggesting that. But you’re saying, rather than a negotiated settlement—which, I agree, wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on—fine. But what you’re proposing is a sort-of permanent, low-level war between Russia and Ukraine forever [sic]. Which is maybe the best you can hope for, I don’t know.
Žižek: That’s what I am tempted to suggest. It’s a very sad position.”

After this part, Žižek goes into how crazy it is that Ukraine is outlawing leftists because they suspect them of being pro-Russia, which he calls madness. It’s not, though, it’s just consolidating power by outlawing any critical voices by accusing them of something the public will be happy to crucify them for. It’s an old story, and I’m surprised that Žižek doesn’t see it for what it is. It’s just stupid power-mongering propaganda, no different than when the Nazis used it by calling people Jew-lovers, no different than when U.S. presidential candidates call each other “soft on China” or “soft on Russia”.

It’s great that they agree that the settlement wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on—they think Russia wouldn’t hold to it, because they’re so steeped in propaganda about how duplicitous Russia is. But it’s actually the U.S. and its proxy NATO that can’t seem to honor agreements they’ve signed that they soon after find inconvenient.

The best they can hope for, for Ukraine, is a forever war that keeps eating up its males until there are none left. A lack of fantasy, on their part, I think. Also, a shocking lack of empathy.

Žižek simply can’t acknowledge the obvious: that’s it’s only a temporary stalemate. Ukraine is running out of people. What’s the next step? To continue to defend Ukraine long after there is no Ukraine? To replace soldiers with NATO soldiers from the U.S. and Europe in a sort of “Ship of Theseus” army? He, of all people, should appreciate the irony that his position is currently, “we will have to destroy Ukraine in order to save it.” The country effectively doesn’t exist now, but might be able to get back to somewhere reasonable, after several decades. They were doing poorly before the war, relative to neighbors.

Now what? He says to just. Keep. Going. He sounds like a neocon. He’s formulating it as “continue increasing support Ukraine up until boots on the ground for NATO” vs. “dropping Ukraine like a hot rock”. What about “use our power for a negotiated settlement rather than supporting the pointless slaughter of the rest of the Ukrainian population?” Push back on him more.

Of course, Ukraine will lose land in this negotiated settlement. Tough shit. That’s reality. You can’t make it go away by pursuing a fantasy outcome in which Russia suddenly loses because of a deus ex machina, like in a fucking movie (or “fil-im”, as Žižek would say it). What’s the end game? Nuke Russia to convince them to back off? What the fuck is the strategy here, Žižek? You’re being ludicrously obstinate on this point because you don’t want to accept what’s right before your eyes. Some of us saw it almost two years ago, when this whole shitshow started. We predicted exactly this situation, at best. At worst, Russia would have taken more of Ukraine. There is no good solution, and certainly not one where Zelensky is fucking Luke Skywalker.

The longer this goes on, the shittier Ukraine’s position. Throw in the towel. You can’t win in the way you think you can. Cut your losses. This attitude of his is madness—and maddening. He seems incapable of being realistic.

They end by talking about immigration and how we need to stop it, but from the viewpoint of: We should be helping create environments on the planet from which people don’t want to flee, rather than creating environments from the which they do. Žižek cites a more right-wing colleague from Germany who told him that he thinks we shouldn’t be spending money on ferries or accommodations in Germany, that we should spend that money in Tunisia, or wherever, to make their country worth living in.

Of course, that this comes from a right-wing person is probably wildly hypocritical, as they probably support God knows how many policies that lead directly to the enshitification of exactly the countries from which these people are moving, but that doesn’t mean what he’s saying there isn’t correct. He’s right, in this case. If we can’t stop ourselves from stealing the wealth of other countries, we should at least spend the money we do spend on their suffering people by trying to fix some of the problems we causing by raping their countries. The West profits immensely from most of the countries that produce the most immigrants, either through arms sales to the dictators that they prop up there, or from agricultural catastrophes engendered by the rapacious marketing policies of supranational global conglomerates whose profits flow directly to the west and its elites.

Aaron tells a story his father told him,

My father’s Iranian, […] I remember saying to him, ‘Oh, look at these Afghans, they’re going to Iceland.‘

And he said, ‘listen to me, son. No Afghan wants to go to Iceland. You’re born in this naturally fertile country, amazing history, beautiful weather—less so the last 40 or 50 years—but historically, it was a very fertile, peaceful place. And you end up in a place—not to besmirch Iceland—you go to a place where you don’t see the sun for three months. No Afghan grows up as a child and says, you know what? I don’t wanna see the sun for three months and I wanna live in -10ºC for six months.‘ That’s a really powerful point and I think that a lot of European liberals, progressives, don’t understand that. There’s this kind of strange—it’s not racism—it’s a European superiority where they say ‘well of course they want to come here. We’re better!’ Many of them are coming because of war, sanctions, occupation, capitalist underdevelopment … but that seems completely absent from that conversation.

It’s like the people who talk about the “volunteer homeless”. Those people are choosing to be homeless only because being in a shelter is worse. It’s the best of the terribly shitty options that they have available. They don’t “choose homelessness” because they’re fulfilling some sort of childhood dream.

At 01:33:00, Žižek concurs, saying,

“I would totally agree with your father I. don’t know how but the problem should be solved there in those lands—okay we shouldn’t now invade Iran. but we should at least reflect on how we also screwed it up with our politics.”

We screwed it up with our piracy. We continue to do so. Empire has no principle preventing its raping and pillaging. Pure and simple. Sauber und glatt.

Jesse Singal on Youth Gender Medicine by Heterodox UCLA (YouTube)

At 00:17:10, he says,

“I’ve been criticized quite harshly for writing and speaking about this the way I do, which is, from my point of view, somewhat biased. I feel like I treat it the way I treat any of the other scientific controversies I’ve written about, including in my book. But in some liberal circles, it’s very difficult to talk about this and to treat it as a scientific controversy.”

At 00:17:40, he says,

“I do want to make one point about empathy and compassion and other touchy-feely stuff. I really vehemently reject the idea that you need to be trans or gender non-conforming to participate in this conversation for all the same reasons I don’t think you need to be black to write about or study racial inequality.

“I don’t think you need to be Israeli or Palestinian or Jewish or Muslim to write about or study that conflict there’s unfortunately been a lurch toward a very crude form of identitarianism in some liberal intellectual circles and I just don’t think this viewpoint deserves much respect. I think it’s profoundly anti-intellectual.

“We need to judge people on the basis of their ideas, not their identity, partly because when […] no one who says listen to people black people or listen to trans people they don’t mean that—they mean listen to the subset of that group
who believes what I believe”

At 00:20:44, he says,

“This is another argument I just don’t really respect, the argument that we can’t discuss X because people we don’t like might use X to make arguments we disagree with just doesn’t really work if you play it out.

“There are so many examples of why it doesn’t work that I I feel like I shouldn’t need to run through them, but if I criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, do you know who also criticizes Israel? Nazis. Does that mean we can’t? No one here thinks you can’t criticize Israel because Nazis also criticize Israel. Or if I criticize the federal government, you know who else criticizes the federal government? Far-right militias. It just—this doesn’t work—you’re not giving aid and comfort to a group just because you make an argument that happens to align with what some of them say in some circumstances.”

At 00:23:00, he says,

“It’s like, there was a group of folks who lost gay marriage very badly—and this is another issue that sort of brings back that strand of social conservatism, frankly—these are figures who are not in this to get to the bottom of the scientific controversy or to figure out how to best help trans and gender non-conforming kids.

“They’re in this controversy because they despise liberals or they’re genuinely uncomfortable with certain forms of what I think we would view as societal progress, or because they simply sense political opportunity.

“So, if you’re going to write about and discuss this issue, I just think you need to acknowledge the presence of some folks who have different agendas and who are exacerbating the tension and the toxicity with those agendas.”

At 00:33:20, he says,

“In fact, there has been a recent surge of coverage casting totally appropriate, well-founded doubt on a supposed breakthrough treatment for Alzheimer’s. If someone responded to that coverage by saying, well, surely you don’t care about Alzheimer’s sufferers or their families. If you did, you wouldn’t have critiqued this new medication, that person would be laughed out of the room because that’s a ridiculous argument.

“Yet, somehow this ridiculous argument is accepted here if you criticize youth-gender medicine, you must not care about trans kids or you must must want them to die or suffer other horrible outcomes.

“I think the sheer moral force of this argument, and the personal and professional consequences of being labeled a transphobe in the liberal settings that produce most journalism and academic research, has led to a stalling out of a critical conversation in the United States that should be occurring in journalism and academia”

Programming

Why I Won’t Use Next.js by Kent C. Dodds (EpicWeb)

“Your tool choice matters much less than your skill at using the tool to accomplish your desired outcome (a great user experience).”

I agree with the initial statement, but do not agree that a great user experience is the primary goal of almost any project—unless you have nothing else of value to provide.

“I’ve been using Remix since it was first released in 2020. I loved it so much I joined the company a year later to help get the community going and 10 months later I left to work on EpicWeb.dev full time where I teach people what they need to know to build full stack applications.”

10 months! must have been a great place to work.

A new approach to container and wrapper classes by Kevin Powell (YouTube)

This was fantastic. Really a tight tutorial, with just enough “mistakes” to show how he built it up. Not over-engineered at all. It’s just as complex as needed, and no more. Responsive without media queries. Complexity hidden in the CSS. Even the CSS is reasonably legible. You could maybe use an extra variable to clean it up, but otherwise, great.

Fun

Zelensky Cancels Elections To Focus On Fighting For Democracy (Babylon Bee)

Biden Checks His Latest Poll Numbers To See If Israel Still Has Right To Defend Itself (Babylon Bee)

Is the web actually evaporating? by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“In my experience, very few publications can keep up with the speed of a fandom’s native reporting. A newsroom just can’t outrun an unwell teenager with 40 sock puppet accounts and no concept of editorial standards.”