Links and Notes for November 10th, 2023

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

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

COVID-19

Why is there an epidemic crisis of congenital syphilis in the United States? by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Congenital syphilis (CS), a bacterial infection in pregnant women caused by the spirochete Treponema pallidum that is passed on to her fetus, has risen tenfold over the last decade, said the top US public health agency this week. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released data that showed in 2022 there had been 3,761 such cases (102 cases per 100,000) reported through the public health departments across the country, up from only 335 cases back in 2012.

“These figures are astounding when one stops to think that the condition had been almost eliminated two decades ago, when rates of CS had dropped to a low of around 8 for every 100,000 births. It is a clear demonstration of the complete collapse of the public health system in the country, when a preventable disease, easy to diagnose and with a well-established cure readily available, is allowed to spread unchecked.”

“The defunding of the public health infrastructure in the US across this period, along with the opioid epidemic and deaths of despair, has coincided with the surge in the epidemic of syphilis. One can only surmise that the malign neglect seen during the COVID pandemic was already the modus operandi with regard to any serious public health crisis affecting the working class.”

“Dr. Thomas Moore, an infectious disease consultant and professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, told the Lancet, “The inability to ramp up production to meet the demand is largely due to the lack of interest in antibiotic production by pharmaceutical companies, which are pursuing drugs that have a bigger payoff.””

Economy & Finance

A Lack of Money Means a Lack of Freedom by Ben Burgis (Jacobin)

“[…] the person who can’t afford a ticket is being interfered with in just the same way as the person denied access to the plane by the national security state. Unequal distribution of wealth just is the unequal distribution of freedom from interference.”

“I think equality is an important value in its own right. (So did Cohen.) I also think the capacities for human flourishing emphasized by enthusiasts for “positive freedom” are important. And I’ve argued repeatedly in the past that freedom from interference, while important, is ultimately a less fundamental kind of freedom than the freedom from domination (“republican freedom”) emphasized by past generations of the labor and socialist movements.”

“If freedom from interference is only diminished when someone is stopped from doing something they have a moral right to do, we can only decide whether taking away private property from its current owners diminishes those owners’ freedom after we’ve decided whether they had a moral right to that property in the first place — and we’ll have to make that determination on the basis of “grounds other than freedom.“”

“If we would agree that the freedom of the citizens of this society is being diminished when they’re prevented from doing these things without the right tickets, Cohen argues, we should equally agree that when a capitalist state enforces a distribution of money that leaves some citizens in poverty, it’s diminishing the freedom of the poor. Money, Cohen thinks, isn’t a “thing” at all — not really. If you exchange a dollar for four quarters, you have different things in your possession than you did before, but you still have the same amount of money. Money is a form of social power. Like the tickets in the hypothetical moneyless society, the basic defining function of money is to cancel out interference.”

“Crucially, though, Cohen cautions that a more general objection to either capitalist property rights or the massive levels of income inequality they generate can’t be derived from his point about interference. “All forms of society grant freedoms to, and impose unfreedoms on, people,” he writes, “and no society, therefore, can be condemned just because certain people lack certain freedoms in it.””

“If we accept that not all limitations of freedom from interference are unjust, but we also think freedom from interference is extremely important, what principle should we use to decide how much of it everyone gets? In some cases, like freedom of speech, a plausible answer might be that it shouldn’t be limited at all. Everyone should be able to express any opinion. But that answer doesn’t work in the example we started with. Airplanes have limited numbers of seats; air travel uses a lot of fuel. We can’t just let everyone board every flight. So it looks like some unfreedom is unavoidable, and we have to decide how to distribute it.”

“A plausible answer to how much freedom everyone should be granted when “all of it” isn’t on the table is that everyone should get the maximum degree of freedom compatible with everyone else enjoying just as much of it.”

“There’s a complicated debate to be had about how close we can get to perfect income inequality without unacceptable losses to other values we care about. Even worker cooperatives might vote to offer some of their members higher incomes than others as an incentive to take jobs no one might want otherwise, for example, and there are all sorts of reasons a socialist society might have to make similar tradeoffs.”

American Big Tech Has Enslaved Us | Aaron Bastani Meets Yanis Varoufakis by Novara Media (YouTube)

This is an interesting interview about Varoufakis’s latest book, in which he posits many interesting hypotheses. I like that he makes hypotheses and puts them out there. They are well-informed and it’s very possible to disagree with him, but I like how the interviewer compliments him on his “elegant hypothesis” to make sure that we don’t get the impression that he thinks it wasn’t worth making in the first place. You can respect and idea and how it was generated, while still noting that it’s wrong because it either doesn’t provide any useful insights, or ends up applying an incomplete or counterproductive solution, or is missing information and could be even better.

I wonder why people don’t feel that the economy is working for them, no matter how much those who benefit immensely from it are telling them that it’s never been better?

Inequality distribution

Public Policy & Politics

A couple of weeks ago, there were elections in kanton Zürich for the two legislative houses. The topics shown below were the ones of most concern to the voting public.

Wahlen 2023 − Die grössten Sorgen der Bevölkerung

Krankenkassenprämien						Health insurance costs				21%		18%
Klimawandel									Climate change						22%		16%
Zuwanderung, Ausländer						Immigration, foreigners				20%		 9%
Versorgungs- und Energiesicherheit 			Supply and energy security			13%		13%
Soziale Sicherheit, Lebenshaltungskosten	Social safety net, cost-of-living	11%		12%
Reform Altersvorsorge					  	Social Security reform				11%		12%
Gute Beziehungen zur EU						Good relationship with the EU		 7%		12%
Wohnungspreise							  	Rents are too damn high			 	 9%		 5%
Unabhängigkeit, Souveränität				Independence, sovereignty			 9%		 4%
Natur- und Landschaftsschutz				Nature conservancy					 6%		 6%
Wirtschaft, Wettbewerbsfähigkeit			Economy, competitiveness			 7%		 4%
Kriminalität, Sicherheit					Crime, security						 5%		 5%
Freiheitsrechte, Meinungsfreiheit		  	Freedom of expression				 5%		 4%
Gleichstellung der Geschlechter				Gender equality						 5%		 3%
Steuerbelastung, Staatsausgaben				Tax burden, government spending		 4%		 4%
Landesverteidigung						  	National defense					 3%		 2%
Arbeitslosigkeit, Lohndruck					Unemployement, wage pressure		 1%		 2%

Kanton Zürich Issues 2023

UN Report Details Rampant US Human Rights Violations at Home and Abroad by Marjorie Cohn (Scheer Post)

“The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) enshrines the rights to life, to vote, and to freedom of expression and assembly; and the prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. It forbids discrimination in the enjoyment of civil and political rights based on race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status (which includes sexual orientation).”

How to Decimate a City by Alana Semuels (The Atlantic)

“Syracuse has the highest rates of both black and Hispanic concentrations of poverty in the nation. People who live in high-poverty neighborhoods “shoulder the ‘double disadvantage’ of having poverty-level family income while living in a neighborhood dominated by poor families and the social problems that follow,” Jargowsky writes.”

“Over the past decade, the concentration of poverty in Syracuse and other American cities has increased, even as the nation has become wealthier and pulled itself out of a damaging recession.”

Yeah, well, the way the economy has healed is very, very uneven. The “nation” has become wealthier is a very controversial way of describing what has happened, one that is overly generous to those who benefitted the most. For many, the recession continues unabated.

““We see a lot of generational poverty here,” Rebecca Heberle, who runs the local Head Start program for PEACE Inc., a nonprofit in Syracuse, told me. “People face so many challenges—their power has been turned off, they have infestations, they need money for food, formula, diapers, a bus pass.””

“In the early 1950s, a small group of builders proposed that the city obtain “slum land,” clear it, and get it ready for development—for private industry to do so would be too costly, they said, according to DiMento, who authored a paper on so-called urban renewal in Syracuse.”

Piracy, just like in Gaza. Same as it ever was. Want it, don’t wanna pay for it, have your friend in local government seize it, then give it to you. It’s so common, it’s banal. Ms. Arendt called it long ago.

“That this construction would destroy a close-knit black community, with a freeway running through the heart of town, essentially separating Syracuse in two, did not seem of much concern to local leaders. They wanted state and federal funding, and were willing to follow whatever plans were proposed to get it.”

“Although whites were moving out of Syracuse, black families still largely could not get loans to buy homes, and were often prohibited from renting in certain neighborhoods. A 1937 map of the city from the Homeowner’s Loan Corporation shows predominantly black areas marked in red, signaling residents in those areas were high risk for loans.”

“In some of the highest-poverty census tracts in Syracuse, for example, the unemployment rate is above 30 percent. In Syracuse’s schools, which are 28 percent white, almost 80 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. School districts in suburban areas are majority white, and in the 17 other school districts in the county, only 21 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced lunch. Only about 50 percent of students in the city graduate from high school, compared with 98 percent for one of the wealthier suburbs.”

“Businesses and residents in the suburbs are vociferously opposed to any option that doesn’t include rebuilding the highway. But a group of planners and residents called Rethink 81 are urging the region to think more imaginatively about planning decisions that will have a long-term effect on the community. I-81 should never have been built, they say, and the city should not make a similar mistake again. “We believe that too much of the city was sacrificed to make way for I-81 in the 1960s,” the group says, in a proposal. “Whatever option is chosen, it must not encroach further on the city or require the removal of even more of the city’s infrastructure and historic assets.””

Letter to the Children of Gaza by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“You have never been in a plane. You have never left Gaza. You know only the densely packed streets and alleys. The concrete hovels. You know only the security barriers and fences patrolled by soldiers that surround Gaza. Planes, for you, are terrifying. Fighter jets. Attack helicopters. Drones. They circle above you. They drop missiles and bombs. Deafening explosions. The ground shakes. Buildings fall. The dead. The screams. The muffled calls for help from beneath the rubble. It does not stop. Night and day. Trapped under the piles of smashed concrete. Your playmates. Your schoolmates. Your neighbors. Gone in seconds. You see the chalky faces and limp bodies when they are dug out. I am a reporter. It is my job to see this. You are a child. You should never see this.”

“I tried to tell your story. I tried to tell the world that when you are cruel to people, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, when you deny people freedom and dignity, when you humiliate and trap them in an open-air prison, when you kill them as if they were beasts, they become very angry. They do to others what was done to them. I told it over and over. I told it for seven years. Few listened. And now this.”

“I hope one day we will meet. You will be an adult. I will be an old man, although to you I am already very old. In my dream for you I will find you free and safe and happy. No one will be trying to kill you. You will fly in airplanes filled with people, not bombs. You will not be trapped in a concentration camp. You will see the world. You will grow up and have children. You will become old. You will remember this suffering, but you will know it means you must help others who suffer. This is my hope. My prayer. We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough. We will go to Rafah. Many of us. Reporters. We will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much. But it is something. We will tell your story again. Maybe it will be enough to earn the right to ask for your forgiveness.”

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky cancels elections as US expands conflict with Russia in Middle East by Clara Weiss (WSWS)

“On Monday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose government has been touted by the NATO powers and their press as the spearhead of Western democracy, announced that the country’s presidential elections, due to be held next year, are canceled.”

“Since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has been in a state of martial law. All major opposition parties are banned, and opponents of the war and the government are routinely persecuted , arrested and “disappeared.””

“The escalating warfare inside the Ukrainian state apparatus and ruling class is unfolding as the war against Russia by US imperialism is expanding in both scope and intensity. In backing Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and provoking a wider war in the Middle East, and above all with Iran, the US is also opening up a new front in the war against Russia. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and NATO bombing of Libya in 2011, as well as the US military involvement in the ongoing civil war in Syria since 2011, were already aimed, at least in part, at undermining Russian influence in the Middle East and North Africa. Now, all of these wars are increasingly metastasizing into a full-blown global conflict and whatever has remained of the “democratic” mask of all the capitalist governments is falling off.”

Germany Is Weaponizing Its Historical Guilt to Demonize Israel’s Critics by Dave Braneck (Jacobin)

“Both in the context of the war in Gaza and the domestic discourse within Germany, antisemitism is equated with criticism of Israel; Germany officially defines manifestations of “hatred” toward Israel as antisemitic.”

“Scholz was unashamed to claim Israel is “guided by very humanitarian principles” and that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would certainly abide by international law. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock argues that Germany’s abstention in a vote on the United Nations’ proposed cease-fire was warranted due to a “lack of balance” in the resolution. She was met with widespread criticism in Germany for abstaining, rather than voting directly against the cessation of hostilities.”

“We’re also now seeing the mere assertion that Palestinians are people itself being deemed somehow antisemitic or supportive of Hamas. German press did not hesitate to attack Naomi Klein (who is Jewish) for calling Israeli violence “genocidal” and failing to condemn Hamas in the same tweet. Nor have they thought twice about branding Judith Butler (who is also Jewish) as an antisemitic “Israel-hater” for “relativizing” Hamas’s violence and for her role in postcolonial studies more broadly. That using the state of Israel as a monolithic stand-in for all Jews is itself pretty antisemitic hasn’t seemed to dawn on most Germans.”

“In prominent Green Party politician Habeck’s nearly ten-minute speech reiterating Germany’s support for Israel and calling out antisemitism, he directly references the crimes of his grandparents’ generation — before going on to argue that non-German citizens who praise Hamas could lose their residency status or face deportation. He failed to make it clear why exactly immigrants to Germany should have to atone for the crimes of his grandparents in the first place.”

“Berlin canceling Jewish-led demonstrations like “Jewish Berliners against violence in the Middle East” early in the war, on grounds of potential antisemitic messaging, illustrates just how dangerous this is. Jews that happen to be critical of Israel are silenced or painted as self-loathing in a vital moment for preventing the further escalation of the conflict.”

“Equating all Jews with Israel doesn’t just target the pro-Palestinian Jewish left — or openly ignore Israelis who are critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or against intensifying the atrocious violence in Gaza. It also tacitly encourages reprehensible acts like the attempted firebombing of a Berlin synagogue. A discourse that sees Israeli policy as a monolith standing for all Jews directly feeds the warped, dangerous — antisemitic — perception that attacking Jews or Jewish institutions is somehow resisting Israeli policy.”

“In Vice Chancellor Habeck’s speech on Germany’s perspective on the war, he criticized Muslim institutions for failing to distance themselves from Hamas and antisemitism — implying that unless otherwise noted, Muslims hate Jews and support terror. He went on to say that Muslims living in Germany “must clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as to not undermine their own right to tolerance.””

Holy shit, that’s a direct threat to Muslims. Incredible. This guy’s gone off the rails.

After Weeks of Israeli War Crimes, Rashida Tlaib Is the One Getting Censured by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“The Washington establishment has concocted a made-up narrative that a slogan about Palestinian liberation is actually a call for violence, worked themselves up into a lather about it, and used it to distract from not just actual widespread calls for violence coming from Washington and Tel Aviv, but the actual, literal violence being carried out by the Israeli government with US backing. After all, the more time and energy we spend debating a protest chant and what it means, the less we spend talking about the indiscriminate slaughter that is already deadlier than many horrific wars this century. Don’t fall for it.”

‘From The River To The Sea’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means by Maha Nassar (Forward)

“The reason was that they saw all of Palestine — from the river to the sea — as one indivisible homeland. They invoked the story of Solomon and the baby to explain their stance. Like the real mother in the parable, who begged Solomon to refrain from splitting her baby in half, Palestinian Arabs couldn’t stand to see their beloved country split in two. And they saw the Zionists’ eager reception of the plan as an ominous sign that they intended to conquer the whole of Palestine.”

“As for those Palestinians who managed to remain on their lands in the new Israeli state, they were eventually granted citizenship, but it was clearly subordinate to the status of Jewish Israelis. They were subject to military rule rather than civilian law, which meant they needed permits from the military governor to travel to work and school. They also encountered widespread prejudice from Israelis who saw them as a benighted, traditional underclass in need of the state’s benevolent modernization.”

“[…] although many people point to Hamas’s 1988 charter as evidence of its hostility to Jews, in fact the group long ago distanced itself from that initial document, seeking a more explicit anti-colonial stance. Moreover, its 2017 revised charter makes even clearer that its conflict is with Zionism, not with Jews.”

“[…] notwithstanding the extreme rhetoric of some leaders on both sides, a recent joint poll shows that only a small minority of Palestinians see “expulsion” as a solution to the conflict – 15% — which is incidentally the same percentage of Israelis who view this as the only solution.”

“Rather than just lecture Palestinians and their supporters about how certain phrases make them feel, supporters of Israel should get more curious about what Palestinians themselves want. There isn’t a single answer (there never is), but assuming you already know is no way to work towards a just and lasting peace.”

22 House Dems Join GOP in Voting to Censure Tlaib, Only Palestinian-American in Congress by Jake Johnson (Scheer Post)

““No government is beyond criticism,” Tlaib added. “The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is antisemitic sets a very dangerous precedent, and it’s being used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation.” In a statement responding to the censure vote, the progressive group Justice Democrats accused the House of taking out “its anti-Palestinian bigotry out on the only Palestinian American in Congress” and called out by name each of the Democratic members who voted yes.”

“Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid noted in a statement Wednesday that “the House did not censure Rep. Brian Mast for stating there is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian civilian and comparing all Palestinians to Nazis, nor Rep. Max Miller for saying Gaza should be turned into a ‘parking lot,’ nor Rep. Josh Gottheimer who was reported in two outlets to have blamed all Muslims for the attacks of October 7.””

““Representative Tlaib has repeatedly called for the recognition of the shared humanity of all Israelis and Palestinians,” Shahid added. “It is clear that while Israelis and Palestinians may be equal in the eyes of God, they are not in the eyes of the United States government. It’s now up to Democrats of conscience to dismantle the horrific hierarchy of human value that has taken hold at the highest places in our party and government.””

Biden’s Frankenstein by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Volodymyr Zelensky is pure cartoon creation—the greatest put-up job of our century, posing as a defender of democratic freedom while running a crypto–Nazi regime and, along with his generals and ministers, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars. But Ukraine—weak, broke, and losing the proxy war against Russia—is easily managed. Biden could unplug the electrodes from Zelensky’s temples any time he chose to do so. He won’t, but he could.”

“Dim and wanting in all subtlety, even Biden, Blinken and the rest of the regime’s national security crew are now aware that Biden’s open-door, open-wallet support for Bibi’s frenzied violence against Palestinians has turned into a political disaster from which it will be difficult to recover.”

“Think about where this will leave Washington out in the middle distance. It will be another case of U.S. support for South Africa before the apartheid regime gave up the ghost in 1990, or for Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe 10 years earlier. It will be embarrassing and costly.”

“Unnamed officials now acknowledge that Israel’s hysterical violence has nothing to do with self-defense and everything to do with preserving the Israeli Defense Force’s reputation for merciless retribution. I read these sorts of admissions as indications of dissatisfaction and disapproval, if not disgust.”

“Biden is stuck. This is the simple answer. He has—and far from alone is he in this—painted the U.S. into a corner with the Israelis. They know very well Israel is America’s true Frankenstein and that Washington cannot possibly cut the current. Please tone down the violence against innocents, and here is $3.8 billion in annual military aid, and a new $14.3 billion atop it, so you can keep on going: How else are Bibi and his fanatic ministers supposed to read this if not as a license to continue bombing and starving Palestinians?”

“These are the same people, let’s not forget, who think they can persuade Americans that they are prospering so long as they get “the messaging” right. If we get the messaging right, people will be O.K. watching a viciously racist nation exterminate another people.”

The Nothingness of a War Consciousness by Dennis Kucinich (Scheer Post)

“A Palestinian journalist mourns his colleague, who only a half hour earlier, was reporting on air. After work, he went home, a bomb hit, killing him and his 11-member family.”

“It is an unfathomable, beyond the Orwellian, to commit ethnic cleansing and call it defense, to preach democratic values while practicing apartheid, to claim wholesale theft of property a right, to take Palestinians, their homes, kill their children, destroy their family, their culture, their history and deem it the fulfillment of a prophecy ordained by God.”

“That this genocide is being visited upon the Palestinians by the descendants of those who suffered the utterly condemnable, indelible inhumanity of the Holocaust is incomprehensible. After all, who has suffered more than the Jews during the Holocaust? Entire families wiped out in a racist elimination plan.”

I, Too, Am American by Kevin Cooper (Scheer Post)

“To have my constitutional rights repeatedly violated, including admission by the governor’s legal affairs secretary saying I was wrongfully convicted, to be told that was ok, and that the state could plant evidence, tamper with evidence and witnesses, withhold material exculpatory evidence at least seven to eight times, destroy evidence, lie about evidence, have lies told about me, and all the other proven things that were and are still being done to me, tells me that I am not really “American” even though I was born and raised and live in America.”

“To have all the facts and truths and laws ignored by a certain few in order to continue to uphold this wrongful conviction tells us all that justice is just a word that is used by some to achieve the results that they want, and to do so by any means necessary. That is injustice.”

“I was wrongfully convicted for the murders of four white people; the lone surviving eyewitness at that time saw my face on TV and told the sheriff’s deputy next to him: “He’s not the guy that did it.” Nor did any of the other witnesses state that they saw a Black man. Several stated that they saw white people driving the victims’ stolen car away from their home on the night of the murders. Yet the racism and tunnel vision of those deputies side by side with the district attorney’s office would rather have me pay with my life for a crime that they wouldn’t solve because in AMERICA the easiest thing to do is to first accuse, then convict, a Black man for a crime against white people.”

Israel’s Final Solution for the Palestinians by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“There has always been a strain of Jewish fascist within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state. “The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.””

“It is a grave mistake not to take the blood curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription.”

“These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.”

“The goal is a “pure” Israel, cleansed of Palestinian contaminants. Gaza is to become a wasteland. The Palestinians in Gaza will be killed or forced into refugee camps over the border in Egypt. Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque − the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army − to be demolished.”

“The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will be a Jewish version of Iran.”

7 Million Displaced in the Democratic Republic of Congo as M23 Attacks Continue (Scheer Post)

“The country’s eastern provinces have been the worst-affected following a resurgence of attacks by the M23 rebel militia, internationally acknowledged to be a proxy force backed by neighboring Rwanda, in 2021. The DRC currently also has over 100 armed groups operating within its territory. According to the International Organization for Migration’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), 2.3 million people have been displaced in North Kivu, 1.6 million people in Ituri, 1.3 million in South Kivu, and over 350,000 people in the Tanganyika provinces.”

“The ongoing offensive of the M23— which is in blatant violation of the multiple ceasefires mediated by the EAC that it had supposedly agreed to— is taking place despite the fact that two separate multinational forces are currently deployed in the DRC. This includes the nearly two-decade long deployment of the UN in what has been the longest and most expensive peace-keeping operation in its history, and now the EACRF.”

“The DRC’s integration into the EAC, of which Rwanda and Uganda are fellow members, also raises significant questions regarding the exploitation of the country’s mineral resources, which have been subjected to extensive looting even after independence.”

The Horror, The Horror by Chris Hedges (Scheer Post)

“We sit in front of the monitors. We are silent. We know what this means. No power. No water. No internet. No medical supplies. Every infant in an incubator will die. Every dialysis patient will die. Everyone in the intensive care unit will die. Everyone who needs oxygen will die. Everyone who needs emergency surgery will die. And what will happen to the 50,000 people who, driven from their homes by the relentless bombing, have taken refuge on the hospital grounds? We know the answer to that as well. Many of them, too, will die.

“There are no words to express what we are witnessing. In the five weeks of horror this is one of the pinnacles of horror. The indifference of Europe is bad enough. The active complicity by the United States is unfathomable. Nothing justifies this. Nothing. And Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life. ”

“Israel and the United States are sending a chilling message to the rest of the world. International and humanitarian law, including the Geneva Convention, are meaningless pieces of paper. They did not apply in Iraq. They do not apply in Gaza. We will pulverize your neighborhoods and cities with bombs and missiles. We will wantonly murder your women, children, elderly and sick. We will set up blockades to engineer starvation and the spread of infectious diseases. You, the “lesser breeds” of the earth, do not matter. To us you are vermin to be extinguished. We have everything. If you try and take any of it away from us, we will kill you. And we will never be held accountable.”

“We are not hated for our values. We are hated because we have no values. We are hated because rules only apply to others. Not to us. We are hated because we have arrogated to ourselves the right to carry out indiscriminate slaughter. We are hated because we are heartless and cruel. We are hated because we are hypocrites, talking about protecting civilians, the rule of law and humanitarianism while extinguishing the lives of hundreds of people in Gaza a day”

“Ask yourself, if you were a Palestinian in Gaza and had access to a weapon what would you do? If Israel killed your family, how would you react? Why would you care about international or humanitarian law when you know it only applies to the oppressed, not the oppressors? If terror is the only language Israel uses to communicate, the only language it apparently understands, wouldn’t you speak back with terror?

“Israel’s orgy of death will not crush Hamas. Hamas is an idea. This idea is fed on the blood of martyrs. Israel is giving Hamas an abundant supply.”

Super-Genius Ben Shapiro Exposes Anti-Israel Lies (#3) by Norman Finkelstein (Substack)

“The 1917 Balfour Declaration states that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” whereas the Zionist movement lobbied the British to deploy the phrase “reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish State.” (emphases added; see Isaiah Friedman, “The Question of Palestine,” chapter 15) If the British opted for the preposition “in” rather than “of,” that’s because it had not “promised the Jews the entire area of Palestine.” Meanwhile, Mr. Shapiro skips over an obvious perplexity: shouldn’t the people of Palestine not the British have been deciding the fate of that territory? Here’s how Lord Balfour reasoned it:”

“The weak point of our position of course is that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination. If the present inhabitants were consulted they would unquestionably give an anti-Jewish verdict. Our justification for our policy is that we regard Palestine as being absolutely exceptional; that we consider the question of the Jews outside Palestine as one of world importance, and that we conceive the Jews to have an historic claim to a home in their ancient land; provided that home can be given them without either dispossessing or oppressing the present inhabitants.”

“Put simply, in the grand scheme of things Jews were more important than Arabs. But Balfour at least possessed the lucidity of mind to recognize the “present inhabitants” in Palestine. Mr. Shapiro doesn’t even notice their presence (see #2). He’s of the school that “There were no Indians.””

Unconstitutional Killings by Andrew P. Napolitano (Antiwar.com)

“If the country is at war – lawfully and constitutionally declared by Congress – obviously the president can use the U.S. military to kill the military of the opposing country. And if an attack on the U.S. is imminent, the president can strike the first blow against the military of the entity whose attack is just about to occur.

“There are no other constitutional circumstances under which a president may kill.

“When President Harry Truman targeted Japanese civilians as the Japanese government was within days of surrendering in World War II, he murdered them. Notwithstanding his unprosecuted war crimes, and with the government’s version of Pearl Harbor still fresh in many Americans’ minds, Truman was regarded as heroic for using nuclear bombs to cause the profoundly immoral, militarily useless and plainly criminal mass killings of the hated Japanese.”

Biden Visits Hitler’s Bunker, Sends for a Decorator: Israel and Ukraine Edition by Rob Urie (CounterPunch)

“In almost two years of attrition warfare, the Russians managed to keep the number of civilian deaths in Ukraine to 10,000. With upwards of 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed, the Russians are conspicuously engaged in a targeted state-vs-state battle. In the month since the Hamas attacks of October 7th, the Israelis have killed 10,569 civilians, and possibly a few hundred Hamas soldiers. What the Israelis are doing in Gaza isn’t warfare, it is the extermination of a civilian population. This fits the exterminationist impulse of the Zionist-Right in Israel. If the Biden administration believes that what Israel is doing in Gaza is in any way constructive, the world has a problem.”

“The US is now reportedly telling (substantially destroyed) Ukraine that it is time to negotiate with Russia. This is 10,000 Ukrainian civilian deaths, 400,000 Ukrainian military deaths, and at least two negotiated settlements between Ukraine and Russia that were put on ice by the Americans, too late. The same adult infants who ‘managed’ this fiasco from the American side are now in charge of US-Israel policy. The only possible worse scenario would have been to have Hillary Clinton— the butcher of Libya, in the White House.”

Israelis Keep Hurting Their Own PR Interests By Talking by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“This sort of thing has been happening for years. Israelis who’ve been marinating in a self-validating echo chamber of Zionist ideology which dehumanizes Palestinians and normalizes oppression and abuse don’t think twice about saying things that make Israel look bad on the world stage, because to them it’s just the standard status quo way of looking at things.”

“If he’d been a trained propagandist for the Israeli state he never would have made such comments on camera, but because he was just a Zionism-indocrinated member of the Israeli public he saw no reason to hold his tongue.”

“Israel’s allies keep trying to portray it as a rational actor and a positive force in the world, but if you listen to Israelis themselves you get a very different understanding of what this murderous apartheid state is actually about.

“As Maya Angelou said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Israelis Speak Candidly to Abby Martin About Palestinians by Empire Files (YouTube)

This 20-minute video features a series of person-in-the-street interviews with Jerusalem residents, expressing their opinion of the living situation in the West Bank, for themselves and the Palestinians. They express pretty strong opinions about the reality, advantages, and disadvantages of various racial characteristics and their relation to viability or qualification as human beings.

In particular, there are a few American transplants the positively do humanity and their origin country proud. It brought a tear of pride to my eye to see them having so successfully transplanted and adapted their native racism to a foreign environment.

Ronnie Barkan (Wikipedia) swam against the current, describing the reality of Israeli life and culture, although a bit more pessimistically than I would—but what do I know? He said that there was no left to speak of in Israel, that there were just the right-wing Zionists without conscience who wanted to eradicate or remove the Palestinians—and those Zionists who were still interested in reconciling what they considered to be their own basic morality with their desire to live in a racially pure country. For this, they were willing to give up land, whereas their counterparts were not. As Barkan puts it: they both want the same thing; they just differ on how big the country will be.

“Barkan has described himself as “among the group of the over-privileged in this struggle for Palestinian rights, acting against a system that has at its very core the Zionist principle of differentiation.” He describes the Israeli treatment of Palestinians as apartheid, identifies himself as “anti-Zionist,” and refers to Israel as “the Jewish-supremacist entity…founded on the basis of ethnic cleansing and ethnic segregation.””

The IDF is Coming Up Almost Empty in Search for Underground Hamas ‘Pentagon’ by Dave Lindorff (CounterPunch)

“The pointed declarations that Israeli and US “intelligence” had made both governments, in Jerusalem and Washington, “confident” that there was a Hamas “command and control center” operating in a Hamas-constructed bunker under the hospital connected to a network of reinforced tunnels leading into and out of the hospital, have not been borne out. Instead, what the so-called Israel Defense Force (IDF) has offered up is a cellar constructed 40 years ago under Israeli supervision in a “Building 2” addition, according to a Newsweek report and a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. This basement, put in place well before the founding of Hamas, was long known as it was included in the hospital addition plan and meant to serve as a laundry room.

“No Hamas-constructed access and escape tunnels have been reported as found so far; only an above-ground room in one of the main hospital buildings that allegedly was found to contain a small cache of arms such as 15 automatic weapons and grenades, and a computer allegedly containing images of Israeli hostages on its hard drive — both find said to be evidence that Hamas fighters were using the hospital, or at least to store weapons, and possibly to hold some hostages at some point, but hardly evidence of the hospital’s hiding the Hamas “command and control center” which Israel had been claiming, with certainty, to be the justification for its attack and takeover of the hospital and for the “collateral” deaths of hundreds of patients, medical personnel, and even premie babies on incubators that failed once deprived of electricity.”

Norm Finkelstein DESTROYS Jake Tapper and Hillary on Gaza by Bad Faith Podcast (YouTube)

“Why aren’t they just sending in inspectors to check whether the hospital is being used as a command-and-control center? Because everybody knows it’s nonsense. They say it [in] every single one of their operations. Al Shifa—the … Hamas has their command-and-control-center in Al Shifa, in the basement.”

This is an excellent discussion, well-worth watching. They dismantle the logic whereby the U.S., Europe, and Israel seek to position Hamas as a criminal organization for spending money on building tunnels, rather than bomb shelters. But the U.S. provides billions to Israel to build up its military. It is legally forbidden from doing so, however, as Israel is the occupying power. To the contrary, the U.S. would be within its legal rights to provide Hamas with billions in order to resist the occupation. In that case, Hamas would have money left over to build bomb shelters.

However, the bomb shelters wouldn’t help, would they? If Palestinians aren’t safe from bombing in churches, schools, mosques, and hospitals, then why would they be safe in bomb shelters? Bomb shelters are generally built to withstand shocks, but not direct hits—especially with the hardware that Israel has at its disposal. Bunkers can be built to withstand direct attacks, but not from so-called bunker-busters. What would stop Israel from targeting those bomb shelters, had they been built?

How to Defeat AIPAC and the Israel Lobby (w/ Ralph Nader) by Bad Faith Podcast (YouTube)

At 00:04:05, he says,

“Both he [Biden], Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense said they were sending unlimited arms shipments—following decades of continual arms shipments—“without limitation.” That means they are likely to violate two existing federal laws, which say that the U.S. is prohibited from giving arms to any government that abuses human rights in a systematic way, and it uses these weapons for offensive rather than defensive purposes. So they’re violating their own laws … that they swore to uphold. And now they wanna provide advanced arms to Israel without even notifying Congress.”

Col. Wilkerson on Israel-Gaza and the war in Ukraine by AcTVism Munich (YouTube)

At 20:30, he says,

“It’s making the United States appear to be a power that has lost its marbles, gone berserk in the world. The last 20 years of warfare did a lot to reinforce that, but now, this is doing much more to make it evident to the world that we won’t change, that we won’t do positive things in the world, we won’t bring our power to bear on people who are breaking the law, on people who are threatening things that we hold dear, on people who are doing humanitarian deads—or anti-humanitarian deeds—that go against everything we supposedly stand for, as long as they’re Jewish and Israeli. That’s the way the world looks at this increasingly.”

At 25:00, he says,

“We have no direction. We have no strategic approach to the world. We just manage our inbox.”

Journalism & Media

Putin-Loving Bigots Must Stop Whining About Defense Spending and the Economy by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes:”

“Voters… seem to be growing more one-dimensional. To take one widely discussed example, views of the economy… have become wildly partisan. Right now, self-identified Republicans mostly believe that unemployment, which is near a 50-year low, is actually near a 50-year high, and assess current economic conditions as being worse than they were in 1980, when both inflation and unemployment were much worse than they are now.”

“The U.S. Census Bureau’s Pulse Survey report, which is based on 72,839 responses to over a million questionnaires, just released estimates for Americans having trouble paying for basic household expenses in the previous seven days. The breakdown:”

• ”A little difficult”: 65,966,799
• “Somewhat difficult”: 50,244,137
• “Very difficult”: 43,975,466

“They must all be Republicans, buying QAnon tees instead of milk and bananas. Economic mystery solved!”

Why wouldn’t they think that media like the NYT is blowing smoke up their asses about how awesome Joe Biden is running their economy when they can’t feel it? Believing that the unemployment number is actually, really, truly under 4% doesn’t make your shitty, underpaid, and low-hour job any better. It doesn’t pay your rent. It doesn’t fix the brakes on your car. Paul Krugman is a rich shit, who can’t summon up a shred of empathy for people on the other side of the economic divide.

“Krugman was once the columnist who most dependably argued that America could afford any amount of social spending. Now, as Covid-era assistance programs like SNAP benefits, child care tax credits, the CHAP housing assistance program wind down, his angle is we can afford more investment in “large-scale conventional warfare,” whose era “isn’t over after all.” From the author of The Conscience of a Liberal:”

“Do we have a hugely bloated military budget? No doubt the Pentagon, like any large organization, wastes a lot of money. But recent events have made the case for spending at least as much as we currently do, and perhaps more.”

“Those complaining about spending in Ukraine should pipe down, Krugman added, because military spending as a share of GDP is smaller than in Ike’s day, and saying we can’t afford war is “effectively giving Vladimir Putin victory.” He has similar gripes with those on the “far left” who think “merchants of death” in the arms business inspire interventionist foreign policy. Such irrationality is borne of analyses that are “generations out of date,” he says, and naysayers should see how wonderfully both Javelin anti-tank missiles and Lockheed’s HIMARS rocket launchers are performing in Ukraine before criticizing Pentagon “bloat.””

“Now, increased military spending is being repackaged as progressive conceit, and the hesitant are not just giving succor to Vladimir Putin, they’re extremist “horseshoe theory” bigots — including me, apparently:”

“Horseshoe thinking persists because there are still some ways in which it seems to match experience. There really are personality types who veer between extremes, denouncing Goldman Sachs as a vampire squid one year, then resurfacing as a political propagandist for Elon Musk later.

“And the horseshoe theory has been given a big boost by recent events. As many have noted, the far left and the far right seem increasingly united in antisemitism. Funny how that always happens.”

These are all Krugman quotes. Jesus, what a petty, simplistic, stupid man he’s become. “Funny how that always happens.” Is this how 70-year–old, Nobel-prize-winning, New York Times columnists should be comporting themselves? We should expect more, but why bother? We won’t get it.

“Is there anything that hasn’t been described as bigotry on the Times op-ed page by now? We’ve had Trump obviously, but also the “religion of whiteness,” Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders calling himself “the son of a Polish immigrant,” France, Abraham Lincoln, and a long list of other things. Now we’re adding opposition to defense spending? Saying you can’t afford groceries? How wide is the circle of deplorable opinions going to get?”

“[…] having covered the 2008 crash and the ensuing presidential races, it was obvious resentments driving both the Trump and Sanders campaigns came in significant part from people tired of being told they hadn’t been screwed by Wall Street in the mortgage securities orgy. Similar slobbering editorial apologies for the politicians in both parties who bailed out the most culpable firms created clear additional political opportunities for populists. Because so few pundits have friends from truly broke-ass places, they didn’t believe that anger was out there, and were totally taken by surprise by the “burn it down” vote that showed up in 2016.”

The Russel Brand Conspiracy by Tony McKenna (CounterPunch)

“The allegations made against him by the Panorama program seem highly credible. They range from sexual harassment to rape. One victim alleged that Brand raped her against a wall of his house. This allegation pertains to 2012. The evidence to support the allegation consists of a text message she sent him telling him following the assault just how frightened she’d been, that ‘no means no’ to which he responded by saying he was ‘very sorry’. In addition, the rape crisis center she went to the next day logged her visit.”

I agree that the allegations seem credible. He has a reputation. However—and I am not a lawyer—all of the evidence the author listed is circumstantial. I am well-aware of how difficult it is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that sexual harassment or rape has taken place, but that doesn’t mean that we should lower our standards. Or does it? I think a lot of people think that it does—especially when it means that you can nail people that you find distasteful.

The Panorama program is a TV show, with a to-me unknown repute. I can’t say what weight I should give their evidence, in the first place. Let’s assume it’s all true, and is as the author laid out. His responding that he’s “very sorry” is not necessarily an admission of guilt, He may just have been sorry that he’d so wildly misinterpreted the situation.

Even the rape-crisis-center visit is circumstantial, no? What did she do there? Did she ask whether they thought she’d been raped? The center’s not just there to record rapes, but to counsel women who’ve been traumatized and to help them process their feelings. This process doesn’t always end in corroboration, does it?

If the center thinks that a person’s story doesn’t amount to rape, doesn’t it sometimes help the person work through what amount to bad decisions and help them avoid them in the future? What is counseling for, if not that?

Or is a center like this just considered a rubber-stamp machine to validate the rape claims of every single person who walks through the door? Doesn’t it do more damage to an already traumatized person to round up their experience to rape, turning them into a victim, a survivor, where they might have been able to leave the experience behind them instead? Who would this serve?

I can’t imagine that’s the case, so I have to assume that a visit to a rape crisis center implies only that the woman was far more traumatized the day after a “date” than she should have been, but cannot conclude that a rape has occurred. Circumstantial.

Perhaps with enough circumstantial evidence, it becomes damning evidence, but, again, I am not a lawyer. I’d hope it doesn’t work like that. One piece of evidence that, taken alone, amounts to nothing, can be combined with other pieces of similar evidence and, instead of adding several nothings and getting nothing, you get … something. You get “proof”.

“The accusation is a persuasive one, the victim’s account is supported by objective and documented evidence. But for the conspiracy theorist, such persuasive evidence does not speak to the likelihood of Brand’s guilt, instead it speaks to the power of the conspiracy set in motion against him.”

And for the conspiracy theorist intent on prosecution, circumstantial evidence becomes “credible” and “persuasive”, which gets rounded up to “damning” and “incriminating” and should end in a prison sentence.

I don’t claim to know anything about Brand’s specific case. I don’t really care. There are other, far more serious, things to think about, to be perfectly honest. It was just interesting to start skimming an article about how conspiracy theorists can’t be convinced by any evidence, in which the author is seemingly convinced by … any evidence, no matter how circumstantial. The author is clearly trying Brand here. Look at the photo he included of Brand, where he’s half-lying on a bed, gazing what seems to be lasciviously into the camera. I’m sure that wasn’t the first picture he found.

“In a well-researched and vigorous piece, the Guardian journalist George Monbiot scrutinizes these kinds of claims.”

Look, I like Monbiot’s book Heat, but in the thirteen intervening years since I’ve read it, I’ve found him to be increasingly unreadable. He’s unhinged and makes wild accusations, kind of like Russell Brand, to be honest. I consider neither one of them to be reliable sources because they see demons everywhere.

The author in question here wrote a 13-page piece about Russell Brand—and he can’t even spell his name correctly. How seriously should I even take this kind of tripe?

I wish these people could see the irony of them accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist, all the while writing long screeds about other conspiracy theorists’ inability to admit to the allegations against them, and while citing other conspiracy theorists. Ah, but one never thinks of oneself as a conspiracy theorist, nor of one’s sources. Hell, I’m probably guilty of this sometimes—or maybe even all the time! How would I know?! Hell, I might even be doing it right now.

What Would It Look Like If You Were Standing On The Wrong Side Of History? by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“[…] we live in a civilization that is dominated by narrative control. Powerful manipulators figured out a long time ago that because human consciousness is dominated by mental stories, if you can control the stories in their heads, you can control the humans. They do this via propaganda and spin, with the wealthiest and most powerful people having the ability to exert the most control over the dominant narratives in our society.”

Coercive Chinese censorship against Thailand by Victor Mair (Language Log)

“Watch the Wayback archived interview while you still can. The PRC will stop at nothing to prevent Taiwan from having a voice.”

This interview isn’t really worth listening to. It’s a bog-standard piece of propaganda issued by Thai PBS News (which I only noticed after I started listening to it). As I’m listening to it, making my breakfast, I think to myself: wow, this guy can talk about everyone’s involvement in the South China Sea and near Taiwan, except for the elephant in the room—the U.S., which sails and flies there nearly as much as China. I thought to myself: it doesn’t matter how clever a linguist you are, Victor, you’re still a bog-standard American war-hawk, at heart. So very few Americans are capable of crawling out from under the immense weight of American propaganda. They still “trust” sources like PBS News unquestioningly.

In the video, the Taiwanese diplomat gave Russia’s completely unprovoked attack on Ukraine as an example of what they fear might happen at some point to Taiwan, but being attacked by China. He’s probably right, even if he doesn’t know it. Videos like this one that he made are an important part of building up support to provoke China into an unprovoked military attack.

Interestingly, he talks about things that are very “Ukraine-like”, like “extending the conscript period”, which he mentioned not once, but twice. He spent long minutes talking about how essential it was for Taiwan to support Ukraine. Jesus, PBS News, spreading it on a bit thick, no? Building up the military to “safeguard peace and stability.” Sounds very American. Other than praising President Biden, Taiwan speaks as if the U.S. is completely uninvolved in Asia. This is not an honest or realistic take. Oh, wait, at the end, he mentions that “other countries in this region are posturing for a possible conflict, trying to strengthen their deployment or their military reform, increase of their military capabilities, in order to show us a deterrence against Chinese military ambition”. He’s almost literally quoting Antony Blinken here. He’s talking about Japan, for the most part, lauding its return to a militaristic stance. What could possibly go wrong? It’s like lauding Germany’s return to doubling its military budget. Japan is attempting the same.

He finally mentions the U.S. at the end,

“The United States has been working very hard in preventing a war in this region, and we appreciate that very much. ”

Sweet mother of God.

False Accusations Of Anti-Semitism Exploit A Healthy Impulse To Advance A Profoundly Sick One by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“Have you ever noticed that it’s never the actual anti-semites who get attacked as anti-semites? Nowadays it’s very seldom the assholes saying Jews rule the world and are the source of society’s ills who are inundated with such accusations; supporters of Israel tend to more or less leave them alone. The ones who get slandered as anti-semites are people like Jeremy Corbyn — leftists who’ve dedicated their entire lives to anti-racism, whose only actual offense is believing that Palestinians are human beings and should be treated as such.”

“Really what’s happening in Gaza right now isn’t about Jews or Judaism at all; it’s about using violent force to take land and resources away from an indigenous population, as history has seen happen time and time again in situations that had nothing to do with Jews. It’s a profoundly unhealthy impulse that’s been causing immense human suffering for centuries, and people who’ve noticed the same patterns in Israel that they’ve seen in all the other settler-colonial projects over the last 500 years are being shouted down and bullied into staying silent using some of the most unethical manipulations ever devised.”

UN Palestine Expert SHUTS DOWN Ignorant Liberal Journalist by Novara Media (YouTube)

I ordinarily don’t like videos that feature “SHUTS DOWN” or “DESTROYS” and this video is no different, even though the purported shutdown in the video is one with which I agree. Usually, the person being shut down is a blithering idiot. This case is no different.

Francesca Albanesi is the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian occupied territories. Guardian journalist Daniel Hurst asks her what her intent was of using the word “domination” in her report. He says it just kind of “jumped out at him”. He wonders whether she was recalling the “trope”. She responds that it’s not a trope, but that the real situation on the ground in Palestine, that domination is a legal term taken from the UN human-rights conventions. I’m honestly not sure, thought, whether she knows what a trope is (it’s not a common word, even for people well-advanced in English as a second language, who use it daily for work) and I’m also not sure she understood that he was luridly alluding to the possibility that she’d deliberately exaggerated the situation on the ground in Palestine and used the word “domination” as a dog-whistle for the trope that “Jews run the world.” It would have been a far-more impressive shutdown if she’d asked him,

“Are you seriously asking me whether I tried to sneak in a reference to Jews running the world into my official report? That, in fact, the Israeli state’s racism is nothing next to my own? Is that the question? What is the point of this question, if not that? Or are you just trying to score gotcha points, based on your own myopic and severely malnourished view of history in the area on which you seem to be reporting?”

TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“Baseless generational in-fighting, aging millennials who refuse to accept the new status quo of the internet, easily monetizable rage bait, lazy TikTok trend reporting, and bad faith political actors swirled together to create a perfect storm this week. We have invented a version of TikTok that simply does not exist and now many people in power are ready to tear apart the foundation of internet to prove it does.”

“The internet is an extremely chaotic living ecosystem and it’s constantly reacting to itself and all you accomplish by amplifying something like this is give more ammo to those who want to who want to take that away. You turn bizarre discourse into something bigger than it was ever meant to be. You pointlessly villainize normal people who aren’t public figures and don’t deserve this kind of scrutiny. And you help conservative political movements continue their culture war. You also just look like clueless boomer to anyone even slightly younger than you.”

Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America: Transcript in Full by Giulia Carbonaro (Newsweek)

People claim to have been reading this 20-year–old letter that used to be available at the Guardian before they took it down. Why would they remove a piece of historical documentation that they’d hosted for 20 years? Because people were drawing the wrong conclusions from it, and the Guardian had to somehow stop abetting that from happening, so it threw it down the memory hole. Newsweek has generously and courageously republished the letter.

I know I’ve read this thing before—probably around when it first came out—but I’d forgotten how long it is. I was quite pleasantly surprised for a few seconds to think that the younger generations, even though they were drawing facile conclusions, were at least reading again. But, alas, no. As outlined above by Ryan Broderick, not all that many young people are actually reading this thing, and those who claim to have, read only about the first 5%, up until bin Laden mentioned Palestine, skimmed that sentence, misinterpreted it, and started using bin Laden to support their viewpoint. Well done. I hope they at least got some fancy Internet Points for it.

There are so many sections and sub-sections—four levels!—that I wish that Al-Queda had taken an HTML course—or that someone would have bothered to convert the damn thing to Markdown from what is obviously formerly a Word document written by someone who doesn’t know how to use styles. I guess we have more in common with the terrorists than we’d like to think. Hey, maybe our utter inability to use the basic productivity features we’ve had at our disposal for decades is common ground.

There is a lot of religious gobbledegook that I suppose would be considered to be killer arguments (no pun intended) if you actually believe in that sort of thing. Otherwise, it’s pretty meaningess.

Every once in a while, a sentence like this one bubbles out of the froth,

“(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.”

But to pretend that that’s the point of the document is to cherry-pick, to be honest.

Why wouldn’t I assume that this was more important?

“Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all. If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.”

There is a danger in confirmation bias, in which you cherry-pick this one instead:

“(f) You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down.”

This is 100% accurate, but in an essay where bin Laden says a ton of things, some of them are bound to be true—or at least be something with which the reader can agree. I challenge anyone to claim truthfully that they disagree with absolutely everything in bin Laden’s document. That doesn’t mean you approve of 9–11 or terrorism. It just means that you know how to read and you know how to separate the message from the messenger.

Or what about this one?

“(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.”

I mean, I can agree with about 80% of it being absolutely correct, that it’s an effrontery that the U.S. empire subjugates muslim countries to guarantee its supply of cheap energy. But then there’s that part about the Jews that was wholly unnecessary, in my opinion, but which I feel might the most necessary part in the opinion of the author.

It’s like being at a bar and chatting with a fellow beer-drinker about the overbearing government. You might be in total agreement that they take all of our money and that we see nothing for it.

Him: Damned taxes are too high!
You: No kidding! And what do we get for it?
Him: Nuthin!
You: Pissin’ it away on foreign wars!
Him: That’s right! And for what? To protect a bunch of Jews!
You: …

Homer backing away

It’s like laughing at a good zinger by Donald Trump. While you’re laughing and acknowledging that he’s got quite a flair for nicknames, or whatever, you also have to acknowledge that he writes shit like this:

Donald Trump call to arms

“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day,
we pledge to you that we will root out the
Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left
Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of
our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections,
and will do anything possible, whether legally or
illegally, to destroy America, and the American
Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less
sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat
from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the
Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our
Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

He’s absolutely not alone in his idiocy. The words below are the actual words of an actual human being who graduated from Harvard and is now a multi-term U.S. Senator.

Tom Cotton Tweets

“Joe Biden wants to ban menthol cigarettes,
which are favored by black smokers.
Meanwhile, he wants to legalize weed for white
college kids and mail out free crack pipes.”

“The administration’s ban is paternalistic, it’s
hypocritical, and it creates a huge black
market for Mexican cartels and Hezbollah.

“And all because Mike Bloomberg told him to.”

That’s just mental illness, is what that is. That man needs help.

I’m sure I could find a statement that Cotton made with which I could agree, though. I bet I can find things that RFK, or Marianne Williamson, or Nikki Haley, or Tulsi Gabbard said that I can agree with wholeheartedly. It’s just that, if the conversation goes on just a little bit longer, I’m backing away into a hedge pretty quickly.

It’s the same with the bin Laden letter. He spends an inordinate amount of text explaining how, when attacking a democracy, it’s perfectly legitimate to use collective punishment because there are no innocents in a democracy. Each individual is equally responsible for the actions of their democratically elected government. This is patently ludicrous because it presupposes a power that no democracy or republic has ever granted to its populace.

Which citizens would bin Laden consider OK to eliminate? In a democracy, you can be a voting citizen and still not get anything you want. If a majority decide to oppress the Palestinians, but you’re wholeheartedly against it—too bad. You don’t get your way in a democracy. Does bin Laden claim that his great and good Allah approves of slaughtering those civilians who are already trying to get the right thing done? To what end? Not only is this evil, but it’s counterproductive. All you’d be doing is increasing the majority that’s already enacting policy against you. This is just stupid.

Bin Laden also makes the same logical mistake that so many others have made before him, and continue to make. In trying to argue for the righteousness of his cause, he compares himself to other war criminals like George Bush and Ariel Sharon—and then justifies his own war crimes as valid and legal because they got away with it, too. He essentially argues that anyone who refuses to condemn Bush and Sharon must also then approve of Bin Laden’s actions. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that Bin Laden is right, but that he’s just as wrong as those other idiots.

After all of these dialectic histrionics, he slowly starts to wrap things up with a bit of missionary work,

“It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honor, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their color, sex, or language.”

I wish this were practically true, but the Wahhabism that Bin Laden practiced was absolutely not blind to gender/sex. This is just bullshit. Perhaps Bin Laden is arguing from the purity of the message in the Quran that has been warped in its application to actually-existing Islam as it is practiced, but I’d be surprised. I just think he’s lying here because he really got going and people just can’t help themselves: he can’t just say everything else is bad and worthy of destruction; he can’t just quit while he’s ahead; he has to double-down and claim things about his religion that it doesn’t even espouse.

His next plea is to “[…] reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.” Ok, so usury is pretty bad, agreed. And gambling is generally pretty socially harmful, sure. But intoxicants? And … homosexuality? Dude, c’mon. How do you reconcile the statement above, where you wrote that “without regarding their color, sex, or language”, but then you write NO QUEERS. Seriously—that’s just stupid.

So much of this is just like that. He writes,

“It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind […]”

Hey, OK. There’s an argument to be made there. There are a lot of contenders, but the U.S. Empire has certainly done its damnedest to climb to the top of the heap. The only reason people might think that this is a facially ridiculous claim is because they have literally no idea what their country is up to.

But then, just as you’re trying to come up with reasons to disagree or to cautiously agree, he follows it up immediately with this,

“(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the lord and your Creator.”

That’s just ridiculous. Stop thinking for yourselves and let a thousand-year–old book make all of your decisions for you. Maybe you should shut up and sit down while the adults are talking, ok?

He brings a few examples of Western/U.S. depravity, but spends an inordinate amount of time on Bill Clinton’s oval-office blowjob.

Then, in the middle of a long list of highly debatable social detriments, he whips out this paean to climate change:

“(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.”

Yes! Correct!

“(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.”

Yes! … no, wait!?! What is with you and the Jews, man? Back. Away. Slowly.

I’m going to continue, but this thing is just way too long for a blog post. It really could have used some serious editing down, to punch it up and make sure it’s focused on its main points. I fear, though, that then it would have just been a three-paragraph tirade against the perennially beleaguered Jews, most of whom are just like the rest of us, just trying to go along to get along. Sure, they’ve got some raging assholes, but those are everywhere. Hell, I’m reading a long letter by a raging Muslim asshole right now, but I don’t think that means that all Muslims are raging assholes. I’m not an idiot.

“What happens in Guantanamo is a historical embarrassment to America and its values, and it screams into your faces − you hypocrites, “What is the value of your signature on any agreement or treaty?””

As with any essay by most people writing in a language that is not their native one, the prose falls apart more and more as the long essay goes on. By the last 20%, it’s only barely comprehensible. You can almost see the spittle dotting his lips as his fingers fly over the keyboard.

“[…] discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that the values and principles to you are something which you merely demand from others, not that which yourself must adhere to.”

I mean, I get what he means, but it’s barely legible.

The coda is long and filled with more citations from the Quran.

The US Has A Standing Policy Of Ignoring The Human Rights Violations Of Its Allies by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“You see this glaring inconsistency over and over again in US foreign policy, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or which party is in control. The criminality of US allies gets ignored, downplayed and frantically obfuscated, while the criminality of US enemies gets spotlighted, exaggerated, and pushed to the forefront of international attention.

“We’re seeing this inconsistency illustrated today by Hillary Clinton, who just published a think piece with The Atlantic war propaganda outlet forcefully defending Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza, after spending the last two years tweeting things like “If Russian leadership would rather not be accused of committing war crimes, they should stop bombing hospitals.””

“[…] for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. In a remarkable insight into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.”

It’s good to hear them admit it, but it’s utterly unsurprising. Their hypocrisy has been glaringly obvious for as long as I’ve been alive and for at least several decades before that.

She links to the following Tweet from October 27th, 2023 by Branko Marcetic (Twitter)

“A lot from this war will stick with me for a long time, but few moments encapsulate so much as Kirby’s fake-crying performance over Ukrainians vs. his shrug that, sorry, but innocent people are gonna die in Gaza, get over it.”

“The US empire stands for nothing, believes in nothing, and values nothing apart from its own power. Those who understand and align with this reality find themselves elevated to the highest echelons of power within the US empire, while those with normal human empathy centers in their brains find nothing but locked doors past a certain point in government.

“The US empire is a psychopathic killer wearing a plastic smiling mask of compassion and humanitarianism. But if you look closely it’s not hard to catch a glimpse of the snarling, blood-spattered face underneath.”

Science & Nature

China and Coal: If It Keeps Adding Wind and Solar, Who Will Use Coal? by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“[…] continuing to add wind and solar generation capacity at an incredibly fast pace. It is adding almost as much as the rest of the world combined, as this article notes. The pace at which it adds capacity shows no evidence of slowing and may in fact accelerate if Xi decides to incorporate clean energy in a stimulus package. As a result of its rapid adoption of clean energy, its greenhouse gas emissions may peak next year , well ahead of its 2030 target.”

“If the push for solar and wind energy is successful, there will be little demand for oil and gas from the land now being put up for lease. In that context, the leasing of land is an empty gesture to the oil and gas industry that will have little impact on future greenhouse gas emissions. (If it seems hard to imagine that major companies would put up tens of millions of dollars for leases that may never be used, consider that venture capitalists put up billions of dollars to finance We Work, a company whose great innovation was renting office space.)”

Wow. Congratulations on your fairy tale. I wish I could believe in it.

“This raises the question of why it continues to build coal-powered plants. If China’s wind and solar capacity is growing more than its demand for electricity, this would imply less need for energy from coal-power plants, not more. And, once you have wind and solar capacity in place, it is far cheaper to get energy from these sources than from a coal-powered plant.”

Coal is on-demand, wind and solar are not. Storage capacity lags tremendously. On-demand sources smooth the grid.

Carl Sagan on Man made Climate Change − 1990 (YouTube)

“Remote contingencies, if they’re serious enough, have to be prepared for. It’s classic military thinking. You prepare for the worst case. And so now I ask […] why doesn’t that same argument apply to global warming? You don’t think it’s 100% likely. Fine. You’re entitled to think that. If it’s only a small probability of it happening, since the consequences are so serious, don’t you have to make some serious investment to prevent it, or mitigate it. I think there’s a double-standard of argument working that I don’t think we should permit.”

The oligarchs aren’t sufficiently confident that they will be able to continue to pump money upwards toward themselves in the same manner that they have with military spending. There’s nothing in it for those who control the pursestrings, so it won’t get done.

Obesity drug Wegovy reduces cardiovascular risks for those at high risk by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)

“The results have bolstered excitement over semaglutide, with many saying it advances the drug as a new pharmaceutical weapon in the fight against cardiovascular diseases, in addition to diabetes, obesity, and overweight—shedding any lingering notions of it being merely a lifestyle drug. The trial may sway more insurance providers to cover the drug, which is pricey. Wegovy—sematglutide used for weight loss—has a list price in the US of $1,349 per month. People in the trial were on the drug for an average of around three years, which would carry a price tag of $48,564.”

“[B]olstered excitement”. Yeah, I get that the $50k-over-three-years price tag gave a lot of people in pharmaceuticals an absolute priapism.

Art & Literature

Alexander Bogdanov Was One of Russia’s Great Revolutionary Thinkers and a Sci-Fi Pioneer by James D. White (Jacobin)

“An important example of this was the conception that as society progressed, it ceased to be undifferentiated, but divided into two basic groups: those who gave orders and those who carried them out.”

“Bogdanov envisaged that with the increased mechanization of industry, machines would carry out routine operations, leaving the workers to perform mainly supervisory functions. In this way, the worker would acquire the characteristics of an organizer as well as of a person who carried out orders. Consequently, the age-old division of functions would be overcome.”

“Red Star, which was published in 1908, depicted a high-tech socialist civilization on Mars through the eyes of its narrator, a Russian scientist and revolutionary who is brought to the planet by a Martian emissary. It inspired later writers of science fiction, both in the Soviet Union and in the West.”

“When the tsarist regime collapsed in February 1917, he hoped that this would usher in a new democratic order in Russia. In the Bolsheviks, however, he saw the same authoritarian features that had characterized tsarism. The remedy, in Bogdanov’s view, was a “cultural revolution,” a movement that would at least school Russian society in democracy. In 1918, Bogdanov refused an invitation to join the new Soviet government, deeming it too authoritarian and lacking in “comradely cooperation.” Nevertheless, he made an important contribution to the Soviet system in 1921 by formulating the principles of Soviet economic planning.”

“Bogdanov is an outstanding figure in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and the early years of the Soviet state. As a socialist thinker his works are of abiding interest. Because he fell [a]foul of Lenin and became a nonperson from 1920 onward, his existence has been barely noticed by historians.”

Four Men by William T. Vollmann (Harper's Magazine)

“I lay in bed, wondering a rather tiresome wonder that I have never been able to get rid of: Why is it that in clean warm privacy I can watch snow clouds creep in over sunny brick buildings for as long as my money holds out, while other people sleep outside?”

“Am I my brother’s keeper? I preferred to say that I wasn’t; it kept my expenses down. But I could be pleasant enough without committing myself to rescuing anyone.”

“Of course, if someone (especially some stranger about whom I need not care) is homeless by choice, then I vote to respect his life unless he makes harmfully odious use of it, for instance by spreading feces and rats. Why not accept, or at least suspend disapproval of, Roland’s life (assuming that you define his impulsion as conscious choice instead of, say, mental illness), so long as he mitigates and conceals his social parasitism as well as any inside citizen? That way I can hand him twenty dollars and leave him to sleep outside. This is, I insist, not only convenient for me; it gives him what he claims to want.”

“I acted less than sane in my business negotiations, for grief is a witch-hag who rides in on bad winds.”

This reminds me of Wesley Willis’s Demons quote: “My demon is on my butt. My demon talks to me in profanity like a seller, and my demon tries to knock me down, and my demon tries to put me on a hell ride.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Abortion Rights Are a Revealed Preference by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“I suspect that for a lot of voters, particularly Republican women, abortion rights are a revealed preference in the exact same sense; they may be very passionate about the right to life, but when push comes to shove and they say they “just can’t be pregnant right now” − a term I was told by the former abortion clinic employee that they would often use − they vote with their feet. It’s important to say that there doesn’t have to be any conscious deception in either case, groceries or abortion. I’m sure pro-life women who get abortions are very sincere in their theoretical attachment to that moral position. But an actual pregnancy is about as far from theoretical as it gets.”

“[…] identity politics is about specific demographic slices of people, and as we can see from the prevalence of women who get abortions who are conflicted about abortion or even actively pro-life (which must be in the thousands, given the sheer volume of abortions that are performed in this country) all kinds of women can find themselves in the position of needing an abortion. Women of any economic class, any race, any religion, and yes, any political party. Meanwhile, I think a lot of men have an “in case of emergency, break glass” approach to reproductive rights; whether they’re philosophically friendly to a woman’s right to choose or not, if they get a woman pregnant and find that the pregnancy is very contrary to their self-interest, they’ll want abortion to be an option, and again this pragmatic need will often trump even explicit pro-life politics.”

Silicon Valley Fairy Dust by Sherry Turkle (Crooked Timber)

“The lack of commitment to truth in Silicon Valley companies is politically crucial because they are in a unique position to routinely dispense disinformation as information.”

“The idea of living in a state of continual surveillance became normalized. As Foucault taught us, with this kind of change, the idea of personhood changed as well: intimacy, privacy, and democracy are woven together in an intricate connection.”

“Online conversations make people feel less vulnerable than the face-to-face kind. As engagement at a remove has become a social norm, it has become more acceptable to stop taking the time to meet in person, even in professions where conversations was highly valued, such as teaching, consulting, and psychotherapy. In remote classrooms and meetings, in conversations-by-text, it’s easy to lose skills of listening, especially listening to people who don’t share your opinions. Democracy works best if you can talk across differences. It works best if you slow down to hear someone else’s point of view. We need these skills to reclaim our communities, our democracy, and our shared common purpose.”

“In real life, things go awry. We need to tolerate each other’s differences. Virtual reality is friction-free. The dissidents are removed from the system. People get used to that, and real life seems intimidating. Maybe that’s why so many internet pioneers are tempted by going to space or the metaverse. That sense of a clean slate. In real life, there is history.”

“Now, in fact, Lana had no lack of controversial opinions. But we can hear her convincing herself that they are not worth expressing because her medium would be online, and there is no way to talk “safely” there. This is Foucault brought down to earth. The politics of Facebook is a politics of tutelage in forgetting. Lana is learning to be a citizen in an authoritarian regime. Lana says she’ll worry about online privacy “if something bad happens.” But something bad has already happened. She has learned to self-censor. She does not see herself as someone with a voice. In this small example, we see how our narrowed sense of privacy undermines the habits of thought that nurture democracy.”

The Living Dead by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“It was only when my father died in 2016 that this deep truth of human existence hit me: there are two basic categories of people, the living and the dead, and the members of both categories are equally people. Some people are dead people, in other words.”

“Like a sensitive Austro-Hungarian clerk in some newly annexed village in the Balkans, where the inhabitants can’t stop fussing about dead husbands who keep coming back to give their widows trouble, and about the best methods for putting them down once and for all, I can’t help but be struck by the astounding wisdom of folk-superstitions. The folk are busy chattering about garlic and holy water, but what they’re really expressing is the great difficulty human society necessarily faces in finding a way to live in peace alongside the living dead.”

“It is significant, here, that the closest ancestor historians in the archives have to the “DOB” in vital-statistics documents, reliably recorded only since the nineteenth century, is, precisely, the church baptismal record. And this record is a transcription or a textual trace of a ritual that traditionally marked the true social birth of a person, some time after their biological birth.”

“Names were not given in order to mark out the irreducible individuality of the newborn, but rather to absorb the newborn into a preexisting community by designating him or her with the name of one of the saints. In this respect, as I’ve often noted, traditional Christian onomastics amounts, though no one wants to put it in these terms, to a sort of “soft reincarnation”. It is not that the same individual soul reappears after having gone through a previous biological death, but rather that every time a newborn George comes into the world, for example, he is so to speak a token of the type established by St. George.”

“[…] modernity is as weird as anything else, when you stop to think about it. It’s weird to celebrate the day of your biological birth, rather than the day of the quasi-divine being your forebears chose to slot you under. When you celebrate your birthday, what you’re really celebrating is the total victory of the administrative state over all other possible sources of order and meaning.”

“I strongly suspect such a scenario of uploaded individual consciousness is a straightforward theoretical impossibility, as I am not at all convinced by arguments for the substrate-neutrality of human consciousness. One reason I don’t think my consciousness, or Dave Chalmers’s, or anyone else’s, can ever be successfully uploaded is that I don’t have any idea what would be left of my conscious self under circumstances where it’s either disembodied, or it’s embodied in a physical substrate as different from the one I’m used to as, say, an assemblage of wires and silicon.”

“Personhood, in other words, pace Locke, pace Chalmers, pace Woody Allen, seems to have a lot more to do with our social roles than with what is going on in our heads. And our social roles turn out, upon reflection, to be significantly shaped by the technologies available for their fulfillment.”

“To have such “simulacra” available to us might well be nothing more than a cruel trick played on the bereaved. But whether this is what it is or not has much to do with the cultural context in which the bereaved live, in particular the cultural mechanisms for processing interaction with the living dead, and the cultural values that shape the representations we have of the living dead.”

“Why should a terminally ill 95-year-old biologically living person have the right to vote? We suppose this is because he has an interest, and a sort of stake, in the future well-being of society, whether he is around to appreciate this or not. But why then does that stake cease to exist in the period between biological death and the next round of elections? This is an arbitrary limit, and if technology can facilitate it, perhaps the next great horizon of politics will be the fight for universal suffrage for the deceased.”

I think your ability to shape the world should be related to the degree to which you understand what the likely effects of your voting decisions will be, and the degree to which those decisions affect you personally. So the dead are out because nothing affects them, by definition. Most living people are out because they literally have no idea what is going on around them, and they’re just voting the way the scream-y person on TV told them to.

“Because it is our actual world in which these new technologies are emerging, and our actual world is fundamentally an unjust and unequal one, the most likely scenario is that these transformations will turn out to be most beneficial for those who can pay for them.”

Obviously.

“Far from making our society more just and equal, the technological possibilities opening up towards new forms of postmortem personhood are more likely to become new vectors of inequality.”

This is just another way of saying that people aren’t afraid of technology, they’re afraid of how it will be used against them in the hands of capitalism.

“[…] in any case enduring agency beyond the DOD bookend is a fairly common thing in human society, and it only made sense to suppress it, or to refuse to acknowledge it, within the context of a particular technological regime of modern state administration. This regime left many people unsatisfied, and they kept fulfilling their obligations to the living dead anyway, and kept right on receiving visits from them.”

“[…] long kept members of traditional cultures in conflict with the modern state, as the latter insisted that the lives of the deceased had been fully “tied off” from an administrative point of view, while the former kept insisting on sneaking back into the graveyards and digging up the bones of their loved ones for another round of exchange across the permeable boundary death throws up between us.”

Ah, Freedom by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“You either think everyone who lives under the power of a government should have democratic representation in that government, or you don’t. A principle is a thing you believe all the time. For fifteen years I’ve defended the free speech rights of people I deplore. Some supposed defenders of free expression cracked in a day. You believe in it all the time, or you don’t believe in it at all. It’s up to you.”

Technology

Decoupling for Security by Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)

“The first is organizational decoupling: dividing private information among organizations such that none knows the totality of what is going on. The second is functional decoupling: splitting information among layers of software. Identifiers used to authenticate users, for example, should be kept separate from identifiers used to connect their devices to the network.”

1. Barath orders Bruce’s audiobook from Audible.
2. His bank does not know what he is buying, but it guarantees the payment.
3. A third party decrypts the order details but does not know who placed the order.
4. Audible delivers the audiobook and receives the payment.

1. Bruce’s browser sends a doubly encrypted request for the IP address of sigcomm.org.
2. A third-party proxy server decrypts one layer and passes on the request, replacing Bruce’s identity with an anonymous ID.
3. An Oblivious DNS server decrypts the request, looks up the IP address, and sends it back in an encrypted reply.
4. The proxy server forwards the encrypted reply to Bruce’s browser.
5. Bruce’s browser decrypts the response to obtain the IP address of sigcomm.org.

“Meetings that were once held in a private conference room are now happening in the cloud, and third parties like Zoom see it all: who, what, when, where. There’s no reason a videoconferencing company has to learn such sensitive information about every organization it provides services to. But that’s the way it works today, and we’ve all become used to it.”

In fairness, it was hard enough to get it running in the first place, but now that it’s robust, we can improve it. I suppose we could have always made privacy a requirement.

“To protect the “who,” functional decoupling within the service could authenticate users using cryptographic schemes that mask their identity, such as blind signatures, which Chaum invented decades ago for anonymizing purchases.”

“Cloud-storage companies have at various times harvested user data for AI training or to sell targeted ads. Some hoard it and offer paid access back to us or just sell it wholesale to data brokers. Even the best corporate stewards of our data are getting into the advertising game, and the decade-old feudal model of security —where a single company provides users with hardware, software, and a variety of local and cloud services—is breaking down.”

“Here we need to decouple data control from data hosting. The storage provider’s job is to host the data: to make it available from anywhere, instantly. The hosting company doesn’t need to control access to the data or even the software stack that runs on its machines. The cloud software that grants access should put control entirely in the end user’s hands.”

“Modern protocols for decoupled data storage, like Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid , provide this sort of security. Solid is a protocol for distributed personal data stores, called pods. By giving users control over both where their pod is located and who has access to the data within it—at a fine-grained level—Solid ensures that data is under user control even if the hosting provider or app developer goes rogue or has a breach.”

“By using multiparty relays, end-to-end encryption, and oblivious authentication, a decoupled meeting service such as Booth prevents tech giants and hackers from snooping on private discussions.”

“TEEs decouple who runs the chip (a cloud provider, such as Microsoft Azure) from who secures the chip (a processor vendor, such as Intel ) and from who controls the data being used in the computation (the customer or user). A TEE can keep the cloud provider from seeing what is being computed. The results of a computation are sent via a secure tunnel out of the enclave or encrypted and stored. A TEE can also generate a signed attestation that it actually ran the code that the customer wanted to run.”

“CPU-based TEEs are now widely available among cloud providers, and soon GPU-based TEEs—useful for AI applications—will be common as well.”

“Suppose Microsoft Azure is used to host a Solid pod, but it’s encrypted at rest and only decrypted within one of Azure’s secure enclaves. What can Microsoft or a hacker learn? The fact that Azure hosts both services does not give it much additional information, especially if data in motion is also encrypted to ensure that Microsoft doesn’t even know who is accessing that data. With all three modes decoupled, Azure sees an unknown user accessing an unknown blob of encrypted data to run unknown code within a secure enclave on Intel processors.”

“Decoupling isn’t a panacea. There will always be new, clever side-channel attacks. And most decoupling solutions assume a degree of noncollusion between independent companies or organizations. But that noncollusion is already an implicit assumption today: we trust that Google and Advanced Micro Devices will not conspire to break the security of the TEEs they deploy, for example, because the reputational harm from being found out would hurt their businesses.”

“The primary risk, real but also often overstated, is if a government secretly compels companies to introduce backdoors into their systems.”

Governments inserting backdoors is a thing that has provably happened, but Schneier has to write “overstated” because it was the U.S. that did it.

“Communications to and from the reporting agency’s servers should be decoupled by multiparty-relay protocols that build in blinding and encryption to conceal who is doing the communicating as well as the identity of the individual whose data is being analyzed.”

“Building this is easier said than done, of course. But it’s practical today, using widely available technologies. The barriers are more economic than technical.”

And systemic. Legislative capture and technological ignorance combined mean legislators don’t understand that this important, and won’t want to do anything about it, even if they did. And someone would just scream ‘yeah but kiddie porn!’ and it would die in committee.

“As more organizations apply AI, decoupling becomes ever more important. Most cloud AI offerings—whether large language models like ChatGPT , automated transcription services from video and voice companies, or big-data analytics—require the revelation of troves of private data to the cloud provider. Sometimes organizations seek to build a custom AI model, trained on their private data, that they will then use internally. Sometimes organizations use pretrained AI models on their private data. Either way, when an AI model is used, the cloud service learns all sorts of things: the content of the prompts or data input, access patterns of the organization’s users, and sometimes even business use cases and contexts. AI models typically require substantial data, and that means substantial risk.”

“Why hasn’t this design philosophy been adopted widely? It’s hard to say for sure, but we think it’s because the enabling technologies— multiparty relay protocols , secure fine-grained data stores and hardware-based TEEs —have matured only in the last few years. Also, security rarely drives business decisions, so even after the tech is available, adoption can lag.”

Hahahaha. How fucking naive, as usual. The system has all the data now, and benefits tremendously from it. Why should they lift a finger to change that? The control they have over insufficiently encrypted data is very nice. Far easier to use the media to hammer home the message that privacy isn’t important and keep access to that sweet, sweet data.

“We need a belt-and-suspenders strategy, with government policy that mandates decoupling-based best practices, a tech sector that implements this architecture, and public awareness of both the need for and the benefits of this better way forward.”

I’m not hopeful that any of this will happen. None of the people who’ve consolidated all of the power have an interest in this happening. Their interests are diametrically opposed to no longer being able to see everyone’s data all the time. They are not going to voluntarily give up power or voluntarily change their source of income.

Bill Gates: AI Is About To Completely Change How You Use Computers by S. Abbas Raza (3 Quarks Daily)

“In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.”

STFU Bill Gates.

I’m over here looking at a Kindle that can’t even remember which page I was on when I last had this book open, and you’re over there babbling about autonomous agents doing stuff for you. That software is being written by the same people, so I have zero hope that it will work any better than the crap we’ve already spent decades failing to make work in any way approaching actual usefulness.

Programming

Automerge-Repo: A “batteries-included” toolkit for building local-first applications | Automerge CRDT (GitHub)

“You can get to building your app straight away by taking advantage of default implementations that solve common problems such as how to send binary data over a WebSocket, how often to send synchronization messages, what network format to use, or how to store data in places like the browser’s IndexedDB or on the filesystem.”

“[…] there are some performance problems we’re working on: Documents with large histories (e.g. a collaboratively edited document with >60,000 edits) can be slow to sync. The sync protocol currently requires that a document it is syncing be loaded into memory. This means that a sync server can struggle to handle a lot of traffic on large documents.”

“There are still plenty of other difficult problems in local first software where we don’t have turnkey solutions: authentication and authorization, end-to-end encryption, schema changes, version control workflows etc. automerge-repo makes many things much easier, but it’s a frontier out here.”

dotnet/orleans: Cloud Native application framework for .NET (GitHub)

“Instantiation of grains is automatically performed on demand by the Orleans runtime. Grains which are not used for a while are automatically removed from memory to free up resources. This is possible because of their stable identity, which allows invoking grains whether they are already loaded into memory or not. This also allows for transparent recovery from failure because the caller does not need to know on which server a grain is instantiated on at any point in time. Grains have a managed lifecycle, with the Orleans runtime responsible for activating/deactivating, and placing/locating grains as needed. This allows the developer to write code as if all grains were always in-memory.”

“The Orleans runtime is what implements the programming model for applications. The main component of the runtime is the silo , which is responsible for hosting grains. Typically, a group of silos run as a cluster for scalability and fault-tolerance. When run as a cluster, silos coordinate with each other to distribute work, detect and recover from failures. The runtime enables grains hosted in the cluster to communicate with each other as if they are within a single process.”

“Orleans provides a simple persistence model which ensures that state is available to a grain before requests are processed and that consistency is maintained. Grains can have multiple named persistent data objects, for example, one called “profile” for a user’s profile and one called “inventory” for their inventory. This state can be stored in any storage system. For example, profile data may be stored in one database and inventory in another. While a grain is running, this state is kept in memory so that read requests can be served without accessing storage. When the grain updates its state, a state.WriteStateAsync() call ensures that the backing store is updated for durability and consistency.”

“Reminders are a durable scheduling mechanism for grains. They can be used to ensure that some action is completed at a future point even if the grain is not currently activated at that time. Timers are the non-durable counterpart to reminders and can be used for high-frequency events which do not require reliability.”

“The placement process in Orleans is fully configurable: developers can choose from a set of out-of-the-box placement policies such as random, prefer-local, and load-based, or custom logic can be configured. This allows for full flexibility in deciding where grains are created. For example, grains can be placed on a server close to resources which they need to operate on or other grains which they communicate with.”

“The cluster maintains a mapping of which grain implementations are available on which silos in the cluster and the versions of those implementations. This version information is used by the runtime in conjunction with placement strategies to make placement decisions when routing calls to grains.”

stale-while-revalidate (MDN)

The stale-while-revalidate response directive indicates that the cache could reuse a stale response while it revalidates it to a cache.

Cache-Control: max-age=604800, stale-while-revalidate=86400

In the example above, the response is fresh for 7 days (604800s). After 7 days it becomes stale, but the cache is allowed to reuse it for any requests that are made in the following day (86400s), provided that they revalidate the response in the background.

Revalidation will make the cache be fresh again, so it appears to clients that it was always fresh during that period — effectively hiding the latency penalty of revalidation from them.

If no request happened during that period, the cache became stale and the next request will revalidate normally.

Fun

Do You Say “Tennis Shoes”, “Gym Shoes”, or “Sneakers”? by Jason Kottke

sneakers-tennis-gym-shoes

TIL “sneakers” is an outlier.

Video Games

The Invincible | Launch Trailer 4K by 11 Bit Studios (YouTube)

“Rethink human’s dominion in The Invincible: a story-driven adventure set in a hard sci-fi world by Stanisław Lem. Discover planet Regis III as scientist Yasna, use atompunk tools looking for a missing crew and face unforeseen threats. Make choices in a philosophical story that’s driven by science.”

16 Y/O UNDERDOG vs. 7-TIME CHAMP − Classic Tetris World Championship 2018 Final Round by Classic Tetris (YouTube)

You can also watch the clutch 9 minutes here: TIL TikToks don’t even have titles by leebodog21 (TikTok).