Links and Notes for December 29th, 2023

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
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Public Policy & Politics

Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland. There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation − for those who want to live − will be the only option. Danny Danon, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I’m talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.””

“The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.”

““Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.””

“It is hard not to be cynical about the “humanitarian interventionists” — Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power — who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the “ Responsibility to Protect ” but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the “humanitarian interventions” they championed, from Bosnia to Libya, come close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay.”

“The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.”

““The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the U.N. solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes. “What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state.”

The Mess They Made of 2023 by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“To this cohort of Americans — animated by the idea that their opposition to Donald Trump grants them unchecked moral authority — preserving democratic rule means ensuring, by any means necessary, the people vote the right way . In other words, democracy is so sacred that it must be protected from the voters. Authoritarianism is so dangerous that it must be proactively employed to stop potential authoritarians….”

“I was cheered to find the editorial writers at the Republican–American using the term “liberal authoritarianism,” as they do elsewhere in the piece. I had thought this phrase was limited to commentators such as your columnist and publications such as Consortium News . This is important, it seems to me. When a provincial daily owned by the same family for 113 years exhibits so clear a grasp of the American dynamic as it is in 2023, it follows that more people than you may think have a perfectly clear idea of what is driving the dissolution and decay they see all around them.”

“The narrative now emerging in Washington — I read this in The New York Times the other day — is that, yes, Washington’s open support for the genocide in Gaza has left it drastically isolated but that the world is with America in the Ukraine case. What nonsense. The great majority of humanity, as measured by population or a count of nations, stands as opposed to the U.S. for provoking and backing the proxy war in Ukraine as it does for its support of Israel’s barbarity.”

“Ours is an era ruled by unthinking ideologues. We have seen these past 12 months that there is no reference to law or — as the Israel–Gaza abomination reveals all too starkly — any notion of humanity or common decency.”

“When the U.S. and its allies send the Kyiv regime cluster bombs and depleted uranium in defense of “freedom” and “democracy,” it is the foreign policy analogue of the Colorado Supreme Court breaking the law in the name of the law, just as the Waterbury Republican–American had it last week.”

“Ideology and hubris, not very distant cousins to one another, have been evident features of U.S. foreign policy for may years. This year put us on notice that they now rule without challenge. A frightened elite lacking in all vision can neither find its way out of the messes it has made nor retreat to allow voices to those with dynamic perspectives nor restore the moral superiority it has squandered—such as this last may have been.”

To Retrieve History by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“The Times ’s reliably Russophobic correspondent, Carlotta Gall, is now down to quoting Lyudmyla Denisova, who was fired as the Kyiv regime’s senior human rights official last year because her accounts of Russian soldiers raping infants were so ridiculous as to discredit the Kyiv regime’s propaganda op. Gall’s report also relies on the Reckoning Project—without telling readers what this outfit is. Let me finish the work Gall left undone: The Reckoning Project is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. It is, pulling back the curtain, a Central Intelligence Agency front.”

“[…] given how open Russian officials have been about this program, I do not see that we can summarily dismiss their many-times-repeated explanation when they say the intent was to keep children—a lot of them living in orphanages or on the street—out of harm’s way. This is not, after all, the Israel Defense Forces.”

“[…] the greatest of these interred truths is that the Russian military intervention was provoked—systematically, with intent, over a period of many years. The war began when Russian forces crossed the Russian–Ukrainian border two years ago come February: With this lie, eight years of the Kyiv regime’s shelling of its own people is also buried. Three decades during which Moscow attempted to negotiate a post–Cold War security settlement along its western flank with Europe: Those years are buried. The draft treaties Russia sent Westward in December 2021: You will never hear of them again.”

“It is strong language, but I will use it: These months of barbarity, with more to come, mark out Israel as a failed state. It is a chaotic entity that depends on violence toward others for its existence, and the violence depends on an irresponsible sponsor. It is inherently, institutionally discriminatory and adopts the apartheid system from white South Africa.”

“If ever an emperor had no clothes, it is apartheid Israel as it parades across the West as the innocent victim of “terrorists” who have no cause.”

“Atop all this sits a president whose obvious mental incompetence is spoken of only when the topic cannot be avoided and most of the time apologetically. Joe Biden is just short of his “I am not a crook” moment, and corporate media now take to saying this for him. Since he seems to be incapable of competing for his own reelection, the corporate press and the broadcasters are apparently prepared to campaign for him.”

“There is the famous line from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, quoted so often it is cliché, but there seems no avoiding it given its merciless pertinence to our condition: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.””

“Events, for anyone wishing to escape the eternal present just mentioned, must be represented as they are, for what they are, and for what they mean. I suppose I advocate simple vigilance as I propose this, and good enough. Plain, clear language is our best friend in this.”

Israel guns for war with Lebanon and Iran by Thomas Scripps (WSWS)

“Conforming the threat of a wider war, to the north a full-scale conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon is on a hair trigger. Israel’s forces are in a “state of very high readiness” and escalating strikes on Lebanon’s southern territory, in a trade of fire with Hezbollah forces. More than 150 people have been killed on the Lebanese side of the border since October 7, including over a dozen civilians, three of them journalists. Three more, one a Hezbollah member, were killed Tuesday by an Israeli airstrike on Bint Jbeil. Nine soldiers and four civilians have been killed in Israel by return fire.”

“The ultimate target is Iran, in service to the broader imperialist war aims of Israel’s US patron. Referring to the seven theatres in which the IDF is waging its war, Gallant declared, “Iran is the driving force in the convergence of the arenas. It transfers resources, ideology, knowledge and training to its proxies.””

“Iran has stayed out of direct involvement so far, but if its commanders are being targeted, it will have trouble continuing along a path of restraint.”

Eurasismus – Russlands Strategie für die multipolare Welt by Leon Brosowski (NachDenkSeiten)

“Mackinders nächstes bedeutendes Werk war „Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction“ von 1919, in welchem er den Westmächten auf der Pariser Friedenskonferenz die Bildung von Pufferstaaten in Osteuropa, also zwischen Deutschland und Russland, empfahl, um das die Macht der angelsächsischen (nun gewannen auch die USA an Bedeutung) Staaten gefährdende Bündnis zu verhindern. Man folgte seinem Rat.”

“Hier sieht man endgültig den harmonischen Übergang von Mackinder zu Spykmann. Die NATO ist das perfekte Mittel zur Kontrolle des europäischen „Rimland“ und sorgt dafür, dass es keine Verbindung eingeht mit dem „Herzland“, also Russland, was das Aufkommen eines starken Eurasiens verhindert. Nach dieser Logik bestand das Hauptinteresse der USA darin, die Länder an den Rändern Eurasiens zu kontrollieren und von Russland zu trennen, und genau das ist die Containment-Politik, die Truman 1947 ausrief. Die Mackinder-Spykman-Geopolitik wurde im Weiteren vor allem von US-Strategen wie Henry Kissinger und Zbigniew Brzeziński bewundert und politisch umgesetzt.”

“Selbst Gorbatschow kritisierte Kosyrew, Jelzins Außenminister von 1990 bis 1996, dafür, Russland zu einem Außenposten des State Department zu machen. Dieser Stimmungswandel führte dazu, dass 1998 alle Vorschläge Jelzins für einen neuen Ministerpräsidenten vom Parlament abgelehnt wurden und er sich dazu gezwungen sah, Primakow vorzuschlagen, den die Duma annahm”

“Er begann auf Basis einer intensiven Diplomatie und unter ständiger Betonung der Notwendigkeit von Multipolarität, welche die von den USA angestrebte Hegemonie ausschloss, Beziehungen zu China, Indien sowie dem Iran aufzubauen.”

“[…] der spontane Entschluss Primakows, als Reaktion auf die völkerrechtswidrige Bombardierung Jugoslawiens durch die NATO 1999, einen Besuch in den USA noch auf dem Flug nach Washington abzusagen und umzukehren; eine symbolische Handlung, die die eurasische „Primakow-Doktrin“, wie Lawrow die Außenpolitik dieser Zeit später nannte , verkörpert wie keine andere – Achtung des Völkerrechts, Unteilbarkeit von Sicherheit, gemeinsame Konfliktlösung sowie zunehmende strategische und wirtschaftliche Integration in Eurasien als Speerspitze für Multipolarität und Frieden.”

“Nach dem 11. September 2001 kam es jedoch zu einem Wandel. Putin wandte sich explizit dem Westen zu, bot den USA umfangreiche sicherheitspolitische und geheimdienstliche Kooperation bezüglich Afghanistan und dem islamistischen Terrorismus an, akzeptierte die NATO-Erweiterung, gewährte den USA die Einrichtung von Militärstützpunkten in zentralasiatischen Ex-Sowjetrepubliken bei gleichzeitiger Abtretung von russischen Militäreinrichtungen im Ausland, hielt sich mit Kritik am Rückzug der USA aus dem ABM-Vertrag zurück und sprach davon, dass er darauf hinarbeiten würde, Russland selbst zu einem Mitglied der Nato zu machen.”

“Raketenabwehrschirms in Osteuropa sowie ihre Förderung der Machtwechsel in Georgien und der Ukraine 2004 und 2005, was dazu führte, dass Regierungen an die Macht kamen, die einen NATO-Beitritt der Länder anstrebten, was für Russland eine rote Linie darstellte und mehrfach kommuniziert wurde – vor allem, nachdem Putin klar wurde, dass eine strategische Partnerschaft auf Augenhöhe mit der NATO nicht möglich war – ließ den Bruch aber immer tiefer werden. Seinem Frust verlieh Putin schließlich in seiner berühmten Rede auf der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz 2007 Ausdruck.”

Mass graves, grave questions: Britain’s secret Srebrenica role by Kit Klarenberg (The Grayzone)

“[…] the exploitation of Srebrenica to justify further warfare is not limited to Washington. British officials are particularly keen promoters of this argument, with the hawkish intelligence operative turned parliamentarian Alicia Kearns providing the latest example. Today, Britain is the only country other than Bosnia and Herzegovina to officially commemorate the killings an act of genocide. Since the late 1990s, London has also been home to many NGOs that have promoted the claim that Srebrenica constituted an act of genocide.”

“That account is corroborated by the UN Secretary General’s report on Srebrenica’s capture. It notes members of a Muslim delegation dispatched to peace talks on a British warship in September 1993 were openly told by Izetbegovic: “NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people.””

“None of the trials produced evidence that an order was ever given at any command level to massacre Srebrenica’s male population. When the ICTY convicted General Radislav Krstic on charges of genocide, the tribunal conceded that the commander of the multi-ethnic VRS corps which seized Srebrenica was not only unaware of and uninvolved in alleged war crimes, but explicitly ordered his soldiers not to harm civilians.”

“[…] it is beyond dispute that British officials consistently blocked proposals to undo a UN embargo on arms shipments to Muslim forces during the war, apparently due to what then-U.S. President Bill Clinton reportedly described as London’s desire for “a painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe.” Despite thousands of dead Muslims, that wish has gone unfulfilled. For those who hoped to Balkanize the continent’s last remaining major multiethnic state, however, the war was an unqualified success.”

‘Nothing Will Stop Us’ by Ralph Nader (Scheer Post)

“A few days ago, the first protests by labor union members occurred in Oakland, California. Union activists could turn their attention to why, for years, union leaders put billions of dollars into riskier lower-interest Israeli bonds rather than U.S. Treasuries or bond funds investing in America. Like U.S. weapon deliveries, purchases of Israeli bonds by states, cities and unions have surged since October 7th.”

“Congress is poised to send $14.3 billion to Israeli militarism – a “genocide tax” on U.S. taxpayers – without public hearings. While growing public opinion in the U.S. is against unconditional backing of the Israeli regime, it has not changed a single vote in Congress. Someday, more organized support for America’s national interest will.”

Who knows when that will happen, though?

Israel’s War on Children is a Symptom of a Civilization Built on Trauma by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Israel is the only nation on earth that systematically prosecutes minors in military courts. Kids as young as 12-years-old are routinely taken from their beds in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers. They are blindfolded, bound and shackled; interrogated without any lawyer or guardian present and coerced, often with violence, to sign confessions in a language they can’t speak or read. The most common charge is throwing stones which can carry a sentence of twenty years. The prisons these children are then sent to are dens of physical, psychological and sexual abuse with UNICEF concluding ill-treatment in the Israeli Military Detention System to be “widespread, systematic and institutionalized throughout the process.” Over 1 million Palestinians have endured this hell since 1967.”

“Another 52,000 Gazans have been wounded including over 1,000 kids who have lost at least one limb. 85% of this population is now homeless with hundreds of thousands being pushed into so-called “Safe Zones” on the Egyptian border; desolate tent cities with no water, no food and no bathrooms, and with rates of malnutrition and infectious disease reaching downright catastrophic heights, death by safe zone may very well come to surpass the body count produced by American ordinances.”

“The IDF’s solution to another generation of children traumatized by their reign of terror is to murder every last one of them and this horrific final solution is very possible thanks to American tax dollars and another generation of westerners numb to injustice after years of being groomed for blind obedience by big government and big tech.”

“This needs to stop and we in the west are the ones who need to stop it. A ceasefire isn’t enough. Israel plays the victim like a psychotic parent with Munchausen’s-by-proxy, but it is Palestine that will never know peace until that state and any other like it is smashed to smithereens. To ask anything less would be to ask a violated child to grow up in the same household as their rapist. The children of Palestine desperately need to heal, and traumatized children cannot heal in the shadow of their abusers.”

I would be careful with that equivalency. States can and have to heal like this, cheek by jowl. South Africa is an example. The antebellum South in the U.S as well. It’s not all sunshine and roses, but it’s better than it was. It’s not good, but it’s possible. It’s the only solution, despite the uncomfortable drawbacks of lashing ex-oppressor to ex-oppressed.

“I want to kill the people who did this to me. I want to kill the people who will do it again. I want to burn those buildings to the ground. I want to do horrible things to make that broken little girl inside me feel safe. And I don’t want to do these things because I’m sick or indoctrinated by radical extremism. I want these things because that child they tried to strangle is still in there and she has every right to revenge, and so do the children of Gaza.”

Eloquent. Evocative.

“I could kill a thousand priests with my bare hands, and it wouldn’t make me feel any safer. It would only make it easier for the priests of this world to convince their sheep that Queer kids like me are wolves that need to be slaughtered. Revenge isn’t enough. The systems designed to debase the children of this world, from the Vatican to the Knesset, do not deserve to get off that easy.”

“We, the adults broken by a society with no use for the individuals that we were born to be, need to remember that we were children once too and we need to stand in solidarity with the children of Gaza and show them that you do not need to destroy yourself to fight back. Together, we must struggle to dismantle every institution that relies on the suffering of children to thrive and yes that means destroying the Zionist state of Israel, the American Empire and the church of the Westphalian nation state that oversees it all.”

‘Our country has lost its moral compass’ by Arundhati Roy (The Hindu Frontline)

“If the current regime returns to power next year, in 2026 the exercise of delimitation is likely to disempower all of South India by reducing the number of MPs we send to Parliament. Delimitation is not the only threat we face. Federalism, the lifeblood of our diverse country is under the hammer too. As the central government gives itself sweeping powers, we are witnessing the sorry sight of proudly elected chief ministers of opposition-ruled States having to literally beg for their States’ share of public funds.”

“Our country has lost its moral compass. The most heinous crimes, the most horrible declarations calling for genocide and ethnic cleansing are greeted with applause and political reward. While wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, throwing crumbs to the poor manages to garner support to the very powers that are further impoverishing them.”

This describes so many countries that tout themselves as enlightened, civilized, and democratic. Not least the U.S.

“As we watch the structures of our democracy being systematically dismantled, and our land of incredible diversity being shoe-horned into a spurious, narrow idea of one-size-fits-all nationalism, at least those who call themselves intellectuals should know that our country too, could explode.”

India? Or the U.S.?

“On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homelands like a school bully distributes marbles.) How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilisations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today.”

“In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.””

It’s not that Israel isn’t to blame for its ideology and actions, but that it is no way unique in its beliefs and behavior. Liberal U.S. Americans love Winston Churchill. He’s an inveterate racist, an immoral, amoral human being.

“Palestine still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions, in virtual Bantustans, where they are subjected to collective punishments, 24-hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalized on a daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine. And when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity.”

This is from a speech from over 20 years ago.

“The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers. But can we ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they have arrived at this destination? September 11, 1922 to September 11, 2002—80 years is a long time to have been waging war. Is there some advice the world can give the people of Palestine? Should they just take Golda Meir’s suggestion and make a real effort not to exist?””

‘Yes, please,’ is apparently the answer that the “civilized” world gives.

“Today the young are on the streets, led from the front by Jews as well as Palestinians, raging about what their government, the US government, is doing. Universities, including the most elite campuses, are on the boil. Capitalism is moving fast to shut them down. Donors are threatening to withhold funds, thereby deciding what American students may or may not say, and how they may or may not think. A shot to the heart of the foundational principles of a so-called liberal education. Gone is any pretense of post-colonialism, multiculturalism, international law, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Gone is any pretence of Free Speech or public morality.”

“A “war” that lawyers and scholars of international law say meets all the legal criterion of a genocide is taking place in which the perpetrators have cast themselves as victims, the colonisers who run an apartheid state have cast themselves as the oppressed. In the US, to question this is to be charged with anti-Semitism, even if those questioning it are Jewish themselves. It’s mind-bending. Even Israel—where dissident Israeli citizens like Gideon Levy are the most knowledgeable and incisive critics of Israeli actions—does not police speech in the way the US does (although that is rapidly changing, too). In the US, to speak of Intifada—uprising, resistance—in this case against genocide, against your own erasure—is considered to be a call for the genocide of Jews. The only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent.”

“Yesterday’s news is that Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, once among India’s top universities, has issued new rules of conduct for students. A fine of Rs.20,000 for any student who stages a dharna or hunger strike. And Rs 10,000 for “anti-national slogans”. There is no list yet about what those slogans are—but we can be reasonably sure that calling for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslims will not be on it. So, the battle in Palestine is ours, too.”

“No amount of commentary about the cruelty, no amount of condemnation of the excesses committed by either side—and no amount of false equivalence about the scale of these atrocities—will lead to a solution. It is the occupation that is breeding this monstrosity. It is doing violence to both perpetrators and victims. The victims are dead. The perpetrators will have to live with what they have done. So will their children. For generations.”

“The solution cannot be a militaristic one. It can only be a political one in which both Israelis and Palestinians live together or side by side in dignity, with equal rights. The world must intervene. The occupation must end. Palestinians must have a viable homeland. And Palestinian refugees must have the right to return.

“If not, then the moral architecture of Western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even this provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.”

Shelter for whom, though?

Biden Administration’s Flawed Response to Yemen Attacks Increases Possibility of Regional War by Mitchell Plitnick (Scheer Post)

“if Ansar Allah persists, as they are likely to, those measures will not make the waters safe enough for major shipping companies to continue their operations. Already, at least a dozen have curtailed their operations in the Red Sea, including such shipping giants as Maersk and HMM. So, if the increased Western naval presence does not deter Ansar Allah, the next step would be an attack on the mainland of Yemen.”

“It’s a mark of American blindness that even under such circumstances, where Egypt has such an immediate and pressing interest in stopping the Ansar Allah interference with shipping, it still would not join the American operation. The United States simply does not see the extent to which it is alienating and infuriating the entire Arab world with its support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

“The Israeli government has said it would pay for damage to ships from Ansar Allah attacks, but it has not yet offered to cover other costs like surcharges and insurance. And this is only the beginning. These costs can rise much more, especially if the Red Sea becomes a combat zone and if Israeli shipping is challenged elsewhere.”

“Ansar Allah is not stupid. They rose from a small group in Yemen to now being effective rulers and are even now negotiating with Saudi Arabia on a permanent settlement of the conflict that will leave them in charge. They have essentially won that war despite going up against Saudi Arabia and the United States. The current action is partly motivated by their bargaining with the Saudis. Saudi Arabia wants to end the fighting with Yemen and move toward a more stable relationship with its new rulers, just as it has been pursuing a more stable and less confrontational tone with its adversary, Iran.”

“The Biden administration seems to have no idea just how much rage there is in every Arab state over Israel’s actions and the U.S. support for them. They seem to think the only reactions that matter are those of the dictators and diplomats they meet with. But those dictators and diplomats know better, and so does Ansar Allah.”

But yeah, imagine how much worse it would be under Trump.

The War on Hospitals by Joelle M. Abi-Rached (Boston Review)

“Hamas’s attacks on October 7 would predictably generate a violent military reaction from Israel. But this Israeli campaign in Gaza, a strip of land where more than 80 percent of its population lived in poverty even before October 7, has been of a different character entirely than any previous ones. This onslaught has featured direct attacks on hospitals and the intentional undermining of the entire health care system: shelling, the killing and arresting of health care personnel, the direct and indirect killing of hundreds of patients, underprovision or complete lack of proper medical care, and unwarranted suffering for thousands of patients due to shortages in basic medications, water, food, and fuel. The attacks have made clear that the repression of Palestinian rights now has a new feature: the systematic destruction of the very institutions that sustain life.”

“When the American Medical Association (AMA) met in mid-November to draft a call for a ceasefire and the protection of civilians and medical professionals, the effort was shut down . But in 2022 the AMA published a call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine—and didn’t mince words. “The AMA is outraged by the senseless injury and death the Russian army has inflicted on the Ukrainian people,” the AMA president said . “For those who survive these unprovoked attacks, the physical, emotional, and psychological health of Ukrainians will be felt for years.” And while in a November 9 statement the AMA said that it “supports efforts to deliver humanitarian aid and medical supplies to those facing a humanitarian crisis” (note the anonymous “those”), no mention has been made of the unfolding “public health catastrophe” in Gaza that the WHO has been warning about.”

“Perhaps the most astounding silence has come from the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Both released prompt statements in October condemning the “recent attacks and acts of terror in Israel,” but have kept silent regarding the tremendous psychological trauma that decades of occupation, and now indiscriminate bombardment, have unleashed on Gaza’s children and adolescents. How can one comprehend this dissonance if not in terms of a double standard?”

“Gaza’s main hospitals, concentrated in the north of the strip, had been the target of indiscriminate attacks and bombardments, including the deliberate use of white phosphorus artillery shells. White phosphorus, banned under international law, is a substance that inflicts horrific skin burns that are difficult to heal or treat in conflict-ridden areas; it damages vital organs causing lifelong injuries (physical and psychological) and triggers extensive fires.”

“A WHO delegation described Gaza’s main hospital as a “death zone.” They were shocked by what they saw: a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital, only 25 staff left to care for 291 seriously ill patients, premature babies in “extremely critical conditions,” no water, no food, no medical supplies, and no fuel. Patients’ wounds were festering due to an acute shortage of antibiotics.”

“[…] surgeons have reported horrific procedures in which they must amputate children’s limbs and dress burns with no anesthetics, using vinegar in lieu of antiseptics, the light of their cell phone screens to see, and ketamine to knock out patients before operating on them.”

“By bombing Gaza’s last operational wheat mill and restricting access to humanitarian aid, the UN has warned that these deliberate destructions “threaten to make the continuation of Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.” But it also suggests that Israel has embraced a common war tactic of rogue states such as Syria or Russia.”

Wait, what? You can’t name Empire as a primary purveyor of such tactics? It’s always gotta be Russia? Just Russia? U.S. liberal reporters are gonna be U.S. liberal reporters. There’s just certain things they can’t say. I guess she’s already proud enough that she’s allowed to criticize Israel—no sense getting fired for going after Empire, too.

“While the 1907 Hague Conventions contained some provisions on the protection of civilian hospitals, they were first mentioned explicitly only in the Fourth Geneva Convention, whose articles were adopted in 1949. It is worth noting that it was the indiscriminate Allied bombing of German hospitals during World War II, as well as the United States’ dropping of napalm-filled bombs on Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that prompted international legislation on the protection of civilian infrastructures, including hospitals.”

“Long before Russia’s targeted bombing of health care facilities in Ukraine in 2022, MSF frequently reported the deliberate targeting of its clinics and hospitals in Afghanistan, Syria, Gaza, and Yemen. The Syrian regime and its Russian ally have perfected their ruthless attacks on physicians, hospitals, and clinics, killing, destroying, and pulverizing health care personnel and facilities as a way to punish and deter civilian populations. While Russia has been the worst offender, if we compare the number of attacks on health care by population, Israel far surpasses all other countries.”

I would like to see the evidence for this, and the sources. The U.S. and NATO are suspiciously absent, despite having utterly flattened at least four countries in just the last two and a half decades. To my knowledge, Russia had a considerably lighter footprint in Afghanistan than the U.S. did—and Syria has never been in any country but its own. And who’s attacking Yemen? Are we allowed to talk about Saudi Arabia? Or are they still under the aegis of Empire?

The Cost of Bearing Witness by Chris Hedges (Substack)

““Blood was everywhere, along with bits of kids’ toys, cans from the supermarket, smashed fruit, broken bicycles and shattered perfume bottles,” he writes. “The place looked like a charcoal drawing of a town scorched by a dragon.””

“Refaat, whose doctorate was on the metaphysical poet John Donne, wrote a poem in November, called “If I Must Die,” which became his last will and testament. It has been translated into numerous languages. A reading of the poem by the actor Brian Cox has been viewed almost 30 million times.”

“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made,
flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.”

“I see death approaching, hear its steps growing louder. Just be done with it, I think. It’s the 11th day of the conflict, but all the days have merged into one: the same bombardment, the same fear, the same smell. On the news, I read the names of the dead on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. I wait for my name to appear.”

“Rulla had been right. Huda and Hatem’s building had been hit only an hour earlier. The bodies of their daughter and grandchild had already been retrieved; the only known survivor was Wissam, one of their other daughters, who had been taken to the ICU. Wissam had gone straight into surgery, where both of her legs and her right hand had been amputated. Her graduation ceremony from art college had taken place only the day before. She has to spend the rest of her life without legs, with one hand.”

“In the evening, I went to see Wissam in the hospital; she was barely awake. After half an hour, she asked me: “Khalo [Uncle], I’m dreaming, right?”

“I said, “We are all in a dream.”

““My dream is terrifying! Why?”

““All our dreams are terrifying.”

“After 10 minutes of silence, she said, “Don’t lie to me, Khalo. In my dream, I don’t have legs. It’s true, isn’t it? I have no legs?”

““But you said it’s a dream.”

““I don’t like this dream, Khalo.””

“The electricity is cut. Food, fuel and water begin to run out. The wounded are operated on without anesthesia. There are no painkillers or sedatives. He visits his niece Wissam, racked with pain, in al-Shifa Hospital who asks him for a lethal injection. She says Allah will forgive her.

““But he will not forgive me, Wissam.”

““I am going to ask him to, on your behalf,” she says.”

““We picked up pieces of mutilated bodies and gathered them on a blanket; you find a leg here, a hand there, while the rest looks like minced meat,” he writes. “In the past week, many Gazans have started writing their names on their hands and legs, in pen or permanent marker, so they can be identified when death comes. This might seem macabre, but it makes perfect sense: We want to be remembered; we want our stories to be told; we seek dignity. At the very least, our names will be on our graves. The smell of unretrieved bodies under the ruins of a house hit last week remains in the air. The more time passes, the stronger the smell.””

“A man rides a horse toward me with the body of a dead teenager slung over the saddle in front. It seems it’s his son, perhaps. It looks like a scene from a historical movie, only the horse is weak and barely able to move. He is back from no battle. He is no knight. His eyes are full of tears as he holds the little riding crop in one hand and the bridle in the other. I have an impulse to photograph him but then feel suddenly sick at the idea. He salutes no one. He barely looks up. He is too consumed with his own loss.”

““Scores of bodies are strewn along both sides of the road,” he writes. “Rotting, it seems, into the ground. The smell is horrendous. A hand reaches out toward us from the window of a burned-out car, as if asking for something, from me specifically. I see what looks like two headless bodies in a car — limbs and precious body parts just thrown away and left to fester.””

““Though I’ve lived in many cities around the world, and visited many more, that tiny ramshackle abode was the only place I ever felt at home’” he goes on. “Friends and colleagues always asked: Why don’t you live in Europe or America? You have the opportunity. My students chimed in: Why did you return to Gaza? My answer was always the same: ‘Because in Gaza, in an alleyway in the Saftawi neighborhood of Jabalya, there stands a little house that cannot be found anywhere else in the world.’ If on doomsday God were to ask me where I would like to be sent, I wouldn’t hesitate in saying, ‘Home.’ Now there is no home.””

“Atef, Refaat and those like them, who speak to us at the risk of death, echo this Biblical injunction. They speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world — the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileged, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel lobby groups — who are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza. The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete.

“Evil has not changed down the millenia. Neither has goodness.”

Democrats Disprove Claims They Will Covertly Rig Election By Rigging It In Plain Sight (Babylon Bee)

““We are being entirely transparent about our election interference,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows after announcing former President Donald Trump will not be allowed on the 2024 primary ballot. “Any wild allegations of covert efforts to rig elections are simply preposterous. As anyone can clearly see, the steps we are taking to interfere with and rig the outcome of our elections are being done in plain sight. This is a win for democracy.””

“At publishing time, top Democrat powerbrokers were reportedly also preparing to begin operations in every state to rule all Republican voters ineligible to vote in any elections in order to save democracy.”

They’re Calling Ethnic Cleansing “Voluntary Migration” Now by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“The plot to relocate Palestinians from territories desired by Israel is also far from new. In a 2002 article for The Guardian titled “A new exodus for the Middle East?”, Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that the agenda to “transfer” Palestinians to other countries has existed for as long as modern Zionism:”

“The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century. And driving it was an iron logic: There could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants, who opposed its emergence and would constitute an active or potential fifth column in its midst. This logic was understood, and enunciated, before and during 1948, by Zionist, Arab and British leaders and officials.

“As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the prophet and founder of Zionism, wrote in his diary in anticipation of the establishment of the Jewish state: ‘We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country … The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.’”

“This is a very, very old agenda, being presented as something brand new that is only just occurring to Israeli officials just now. They didn’t just come up with this. It’s been fantasized about for as long as Israel was a twinkle in its founding fathers’ eyes.

“This is the real objective in Gaza. Not the “elimination of Hamas” (whatever the hell you want to pretend that would look like in practice), but the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

“Hamas is not the target in Gaza. Hamas is just the excuse.”

Journalism & Media

Democracy Dies in Daylight by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Papers like the Post insisted since 2016 that Trump’s sole currency is racism, so it was a shock to see Kagan write, “Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump,” or, “On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.” Where was that before? Was there an agreement in places like the Post op-ed page to avoid analyzing Trump in conventional political terms until it was too late to be useful, i.e. until after his voters had been alienated through hysterics about “deplorables” and white supremacists?”

Washington Post Op-Ed Argues That Colleges Should ‘Restrict’ Speech To Fight Antisemitism by Emma Camp (Reason)

““What values do university presidents think are most important to prepare leaders in a democracy?” Finkelstein writes. “The ability to shout intemperate slogans or the ability to engage in reasoned dialogue with people who have moral and political differences?””

Hey bitch! Not everyone has access to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to get their voice heard. What she really wants is for only people that already agree with her to get a platform.

Anyone else can engage in reasoned dialogue, right? Somewhere quiet. Where no-one’s listening.

Bitch, you only respond when someone shouts it you and you’re unable to suppress it from being heard by other people. Now, you’re crying in public. Fuck, I can’t take all of this crying in public.

OMG, I invented a reason for why I’m deeply offended by certain words and now I can’t even think straight. Oh woe is me. Sack up. Jesus. I’m never seen so much bellyaching and crying to mommy being taken seriously. There are students running to Congresspeople because somebody said a bad word to them in their dorm hallway. And they get a press conference to talk about how everyone hates them and no-one cares how they think or feel.

Bitch, you got a press conference with Congress! How much more do people have to be listening to you? WTF is this world coming to?

“Finkelstein concludes her essay by asking, “Isn’t it time for university presidents to rethink the role that open expression and academic freedom play in the educational mission of their institutions?”

“Here, Finkelstein is right. They should—but in order to recommit to free expression, not censorship.”

Look, it wouldn’t matter if it were just a few fringe kooks calling for this. But these are people from elite institutions, writing in elite media, supported by the elite rulers.

CNN And Washington Post Busted For Pro-Israel Propaganda Shenanigans by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“The biggest misconception about propaganda is that it is something that happens to other people, and is done by other countries. Westerners like to think of themselves as free-thinking people whose worldviews are formed by facts and truth, contrasting themselves with nations like North Korea and China where populations are viewed as being subjected to conformity-enforcing propaganda. They believe that if propaganda does occur in the west, it comes here from nations like Russia trying to corrupt our minds and weaken our trust in our institutions, or if the propaganda is domestic in origin it only affects people in other political parties.

“In reality the typical western mind has been marinating in domestic propaganda throughout its entire life, and its worldview has been manufactured for it by powerful manipulators who benefit from its intellectual compliance with their interests. […]

“If we’re ever to have a healthy civilization, we’re going to have to wake up from the propaganda-induced coma we’ve been placed in so we can begin pushing against the cage walls we’ve been indoctrinated our whole lives into ignoring and start using the power of our numbers to force real change in the systems which govern our world.”

Tireless Busybodies Again Target Substack by Racket News (Matt Taibbi)

“The logic of defending Nazi speech then and now is obvious, and has nothing to do with indulging Nazis. David Goldberger led the ACLU’s legal team in the Skokie case and as he put it, “The power to censor Nazis includes the power to censor protesters of all stripes and to prevent the press from publishing embarrassing facts and criticism that government officials label as ‘fake news.’””

I guess!? But that’s the mealy-mouthed version. It’s not a selfish reason, that I don’t want my own precious, important voice to be suppressed, but more from two directions: science and justice. They’re somewhat related.

How just is it for some people to be able to speak freely and others not? The common argument is because someone could be offended by or “harmed” by that speech. Shut the fuck up. No-one is harmed by speech. Stick and stones.

It’s not right for some to be able to say whatever they want when others can’t. It’s also not scientifically reasonable, as you’re assuming before you’ve heard it which speech you’d like to deny. I assume you’re going to deny certain topics or certain symbols or certain ideas?

How do you tell the difference between irony and earnestness? Research and hatred? You can’t. You shouldn’t even try. Just be happy you don’t have to see it.

Most of these people sound like real pills. The douche that Taibbi is talking about found 16 nazi sites on a site hosting 17.000 sites.

If you deny all Nazi web sites, how are you going to be able to show people how stupid Nazis are? They’ll grow mythic instead. The Goddamned example hasn’t even been updated in a year. How popular even is it?

“As an aside: a big reason people read Substack is because of the terribleness of magazines like The Atlantic, which is edited by a guy, Jeffrey Goldberg, who won a pile of awards for blowing the WMD story in spectacular fashion for years on end, making him a walking, talking symbol of the failing-upward dynamic in corporate media. If that magazine wants people to read Substack less, it might consider not filling its pages with exposés about the Alfa Server fantasies or plaintive defenses of the Steele dossier or other transparent propaganda, instead of demanding deplatforming here.”

“People like Katz aren’t worried about the negligible impact of a couple of volleyball teams’ worth of creepy accounts amid tens of thousands. They’re fighting for a principle which does matter, namely making sure there isn’t even one small platform allowed to make its own decisions about content. It’s incredible how determined they are to bring everyone under the same heel. Of course, leverage is limited. Katz is threatening that he and others might take their acts elsewhere if demands aren’t met. The loss of such dazzling content would of course be an ordeal to bear, but one guesses that with effort, Substack would find a way to recover.

“Where do these people come from, and how did they come to be so entitled? Are parents still doing their laundry? It’s amazing, in addition to being infuriating.”

The Children’s Crusade by Scott Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“As Biden understands, only children and the terminally passionate indulge in ceasefire fantasies. Nations have citizens to protect from terrorists, and that includes the United States. This was pretty much universally understood, until the nation at issue was Israel, whereupon the rules reversed.”

The perennial victim. Everyone’s allowed to declare a war on terror but poor Israel.

“Loosely translated, not only do they believe that they are morally righteous, but that Biden will lose their morally righteous cohort on election day unless he flips on Israel and backs the terrorists to avoid further death in Gaza because that’s how Hamas and, sadly, Gazans set the stage.”

I like how he pretends to care about Gazans here. WITH US OR AGAINST US. Just another well-educated American made stupid by capitalism, war, and propaganda. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are if you’re not only convinced by these arguments, but manage to write them down without realizing how immoral and hypocritical they are.

“Staffers, of course, are fully entitled to their views, right or wrong, mature or infantile. What they are not entitled to is to bite the hand that feeds them.”

If someone disagrees with him these days, their views are “infantile”. That is, whoever disagrees with him is deemed incapable of thought sophisticated enough to understand where he’s coming from. What other explanation could there be?

“If they cannot support their patron or his position, they are fully entitled to resign their staff posts and walk away. They aren’t slaves to Biden or his policies. But what they are not entitled to do is use the credibility they gain from being Biden’s staff to attack him, to undermine him.”

Oh, absolutely they’re allowed to do that, if he lets them. Some people even welcome differing opinions in their midst, instead of the siloed amen-concert that Greenfield seems to have taken up with. Biden is free to fire them for insubordination, but the deal is they can say whatever they want—as Americans—but they risk losing their jobs, as employees. I wonder whether Greenfield thinks they should all be thrown into a gulag for wrongthink?

Labor

During the 2023 Writers Strike, This Book Helped Me Understand the Depravities of Hollywood by Alex N. Press (Jacobin)

“The ways of speaking, the hustle and dog-eat-dog scumbaggery, the lying and gossiping and artless bragging and plagiarism on which Hollywood runs — they’re all in Budd’s book. Read a Hollywood Reporter or Deadline column and you’ll hear Sammy Glick, even if the columnist doesn’t know it.”

Climate Change

'Top CO2 facts' – How much and how little CO2 is 'plant food.' by potholer54 (YouTube)

This guy has been doing the Lord’s work for a while, debunking the most widely distributed myths about climate change. A lot of the stuff he looks at is outright fraud. Some of it is honest misinterpretation by people who are way out of their depth. But a lot of it deliberately mislabeling charts.

He fixed up one of the charts to reflect the data in the study from which was purported to have come.

temperature rise since 1800

Look at that hockey stick. Looks perfectly natural. There’s no plausible explanation for it. Maybe we’re measuring temperature incorrectly?

Is nuclear power really that slow and expensive as they say? by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

As expensive as they say? Answer: no. It is 2x-3x more expensive than any other type. But that could come down.

As slow as they say? Answer: no. Red tape slows things down a lot.

A lot of the information we have is averaged over the whole world. In Asia, nuclear-power plants are built much more efficiently, both in terms of cost and time.

See also her previous videos on nuclear waste and the whether nuclear power can be considered “green”.

Nuclear waste is not the problem you've been made to believe it is by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

Is Nuclear Energy Green? by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube)

Absolutamente (Reddit)

I don't want self-driving cars

Art & Literature

English still rules the world, but that’s not necessarily OK. Is it time to curb its power? by Michele Gazzola (The Guardian )

“English is a major language of culture, and it is the third most spoken language in the world as a native language, after Chinese and Spanish. Native speakers of English number about 373m (roughly 5% of the world population), mostly concentrated in six advanced industrialised democracies (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US) […]”

“The most important challenge is that of fairness or “ linguistic justice ”. A common language is a bit like a telephone network: the more people know a language, the more useful it becomes to communicate. The question of fairness arises because individuals face very different costs to access the network and are on an unequal footing when using it. Those who learn English as a second language incur learning costs, while native speakers can communicate with all network members without incurring such costs.”

“In English-speaking countries, by contrast, foreign language teaching has long been in decline because younger generations feel less need to learn other people’s languages, turning to other subjects instead. This trend translates into considerable savings for the education systems of English-speaking countries, which can then be allocated to other productive public investments.”

That’s going to bite you in the ass because learning languages makes your smarter, more empathetic.

“In most professional contexts, a person is more effective and persuasive when using their native language.”

“A team led by Tatsuya Amano at the University of Queensland recently published a study of 900 researchers in environmental sciences revealing that non-native English-speaking researchers require as much as twice the time needed by native speakers to read, write or review publications in English.”

Philosophy & Sociology

How the 1619 Project Distorted History by James Oakes (Jacobin)

“[…] the first enslaved Africans were brought to North America by Spanish colonizers in Florida, decades before 1619. One of the reasons the Handlin-Degler debate receded is that, as US historians stepped outside their provincial boundaries, they realized that the Atlantic slave trade had been in operation for more than a century by the time the first Africans were brought to Virginia. Thus, the particular year — 1619 — may have diminished precisely because historians have focused more on the larger significance of African slavery in the broader Atlantic world.”

“The 1619 Project is, to begin with, written from a black nationalist perspective that systemically erases all evidence that white Americans were ever important allies of the black freedom struggle. Second, it is written with an eye toward justifying reparations, leading to the dubious proposition that all white people are and have always been the beneficiaries of slavery and racism. This second proposition is based in turn on a third, that slavery “fueled” America’s exceptional economic development.”

“Christopher Lasch once pointed out that all-explanatory principles explain nothing, yet here was the New York Times , serving up a relentlessly monocausal explanation for virtually all of US history, presented without embarrassment. “Nearly everything” important about the United States, Silverstein declared, is the product of slavery and racism:”

“[…] the 1619 Project’s description of labor organization on cotton plantations scarcely bears a passing resemblance to historical reality.”

“The prosperity of the South in the 1850s bypassed most Southern whites. That prosperity was built on slaves, fertile land, and an expanding global demand for cotton, the antebellum production of which peaked in 1859. By then, good land and slaves were increasingly beyond the reach of the bulk of the white population. Slave prices more than doubled in the 1850s, and only the wealthy or those with substantial lines of credit could afford to purchase them. Decades of soil depletion and degradation had reduced the amount of cheap, fertile land for new plantations. A growing underclass of white poor found themselves reduced to working as farm tenants, sharecroppers, or hired laborers for the farmers and planters who did own slaves.”

“Preventing slavery’s further expansion was the centerpiece of what I call the “antislavery project,” to which virtually all antislavery politicians were committed, including Abraham Lincoln . Radicals called it the “cordon of freedom.” The federal government would no longer support the expansion of slavery, admit new slave states, protect the rights of slaveholders on the high seas, or deploy the armed forces to help recapture fugitive slaves.”

“[…] as the slaveholders launched their rebellion, the nonslaveholders resisted and voted against secession. The ensuing war exposed the failure of Southern slave society, as 450,000 Southerners joined the Union Army.”

“[…] that equilibrium was shattered in 1850 when California came into the Union as a free state. The slaveholders had secured a new fugitive slave law, but they could not enforce it. They managed to repeal the Missouri Compromise, but they could not get Kansas admitted as a slave state. Nor could they get the federal government to build a Southern rail route to the Pacific, or get Southern California to split off into a new slave state, or annex Cuba or Nicaragua.”

“It was a deeply, profoundly repressive system, but it wasn’t slavery. Sharecroppers were legally free. Adult men shopped their services from landlord to landlord, contracting their family’s labor power, compelled to work not by the direct domination of a master but by the force of economic necessity imposed by the indirect mechanisms of a labor market.”

“The problem of slavery is not that it was a forerunner of modern capitalism. It wasn’t. The problem is not that slavery “fueled” the economic growth of the North. It didn’t. The problem, all along, was capitalism itself. And once the problem of slavery was resolved by the Civil War and emancipation, there remained, and still remains, the problem of capitalism.”

Peter Sloterdijk & Slavoj Žižek | Festival INDIGO 2023 by Cukrarna (YouTube)

At 01:30:00, Žižek says,

“How often—that’s the problem today, with political correctness and so on—are they aware the extent to which their apparent criticism of racism and so on and, especially, feminism is secretly patronizing? For example, I spoke with Africans there […] who told me that, for them, the most refined form of Western liberal racism is, when there are big crimes in Africa, like the Rwanda slaughter, immediately, the western-left reaction was: this is just an effect of colonialism. No? He said ‘F&%k you! You don’t even allow us to be bad. Even when we are evil, it must be an effect.‘

“Or you know what is another form of racism here? When some immigrants or whoever, and I’m open towards them, bla bla, do something horrible…it’s always ‘they’re not guilty. It’s how we treat them.‘ … there are conditions. Yeah, but so are we! The implicit presupposition of that is that there are primitive people who are conditioned by circumstances, but we whites should be blamed because we are nonetheless, in some sense, free. You know, that’s why I never trust this white-people’s self-humiliation, you know? Like, we shouldn’t assert our identity. If Indians dance their dance, it’s freedom. If you in a German village or me here in Slovenia, dance, it’s neofascism or whatever. You know what? Apparently, I humiliate myself, but secretly I adopt the universal position. My self-humiliation is false. It’s the same with #metoo, with all that stuff. Do #metoo ideologists even know, do they even talk to real women about their problems?”

That is, we only assign agency to ourselves, because we are … better. The other benighted souls are capable only of following and reacting to what we’ve done to them.

Sure, but you also have to wicked honest about what’s actually still happening in some of those countries. You can blame Israel 100% for their crimes, while still acknowledging that the had and continue to have help. The warlords in so many countries are home-grown and they are exhibitors of native agency (rather than only foreign agency being allowed), but many of their actions are enabled and enhanced by external support.

So, yes, current events should have overriding importance, rather than arguing about who did what when 20, 30, 40 years ago. It can be important as context, but the ongoing crimes belong to those perpetrating them. And the solutions to those crimes will come from evaluating the situation as it is, not how it could have been or should have been in the past. What the situation used to be between Ukraine and Russia 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago doesn’t matter. Ditto for Israel and Palestine. What the situation is now is more relevant.

At 01:35:25 he says

“If I were a rich billionaire who wants to destroy the left, I would support cancel culture. Why? Because the way it works: it’s permanent self-division. ‘I suspect isn’t what you said already…anti-feminist…’ It sabotages—blocks—any possibility of a larger coalition of solidarity. This is my problem.”

“I’m friendly with with the ex-vice president of Bolivia Alvaro Garcia Dilera. Bolivia. The left was there 12 years in power. The standard of ordinary people almost doubled. And they did it in such intelligent way that they didn’t scare the capital. That’s why, you remember two years ago there was a coup d’état. Then new elections which Morales forces won again. So I’m totally opposed to Cuba, Chavez, Venezuela, Nicaragua: they screwed it up. In Bolivia, they didn’t.

“So I see just particular hopes here and there. I’m very sorry: that’s why I like to define myself as a war communist. I think we are approaching some kind of a new emergency states. And what Europe is doing now—the world even more—is you know treat it like okay let’s change a little bit more 5% here tax so just that our life goes on the way it does. We are still doing small things in order to do nothing.

“By war communism—brutal term that I use with all the irony of course—I mean we have to prepare—with hope that it will not happen—to more global cooperation. It will be necessary. Imagine a stronger pandemic. Imagine stronger ecological catastrophes and so on. We will have to collaborate, otherwise we will really enter new feudalism—what Yanis Varoufakis, with whom I otherwise often don’t agree—predicts.

“I think to conclude […] that the problem today is not even any longer liberal capitalism or something else. Liberal capitalism is already gradually disintegrated. It is either something new or something where the world is moving spontaneously, which is much worse than [the] capitalism that we knew. My God, the third ‘Ich habe gesprochen.’ [from Winnitou/Karl May]”

“All these terms. You know what I hate in the left—I hope we agree—whenever they see something they don’t like, they call it fascism. Without any serious analysis, it’s a Schimpfwort, which prevents you to think.”

At 01:48:30

“[…] link between early development of Chinese Communist Party and fascism, there was a meeting just before Sun-ya Tsen—the founder of Chinese Republic blah blah modern China—
met with young Mao Tse Dong—and this was 1945 Italy blah blah happened—and their conclusion was that we need West, but not in the individual way. The only thing that we can take from the West politically is fascism. We should learn to apply that kind of industrial development, but covered by a strong authority.

“I find this fascinating and there is a whole school now—not in China, that would be prohibited—who claim that that’s what in a soft way Deng Xiao Peng did: he turned China from a communist country to a new version of fascist country. By this I mean patriotic ideology plus industrialization and so on.”

He tells a few jokes: about being in a gulag, where the food is terrible, but on Sundays, you get a special treat: a second plate!

Another joke is about a woman who is sleeping with her lover while her husband is out drinking. The lover hears a key in the door and wants to stop, to run away. The wife tells him to relax, that he’ll be so drunk that he won’t even notice. They lie there while the husband stumbles into the room, undresses and falls into bed. The wife is in between him and her lover. After a minute, the husbands asks ‘either I’m so drunk that I’m seeing six feet in the bed, or there are three people in this bed!’ His wife coolly answers that he’s drunk, if he would just get up and look at the bed from the doorway, he would see that there are only four feet in the bed.

At 01:54:00 he says

“I have a long analysis of of my good friend uh Japanese Eco-Marxist Kohei Saito, who tries to argue for kind of a ecological self-limitation and so on. And second thing, I […] I’m just saying but you know how [much] nature was destroyed by humans even before modernity? Look at Iceland. I was there. They told me when the stupid Vikings arrived there in 7th, 8th Century it was full of forests. In 30, 40 years, it was gone—building the stupid Viking boats or whatever. So don’t so many already previous civilizations they ruined so many things. I know today, it’s something more special and so on, but you know what disturbs me with this new eco-feminists? They think that it is possible to slow down to some more balanced development and so on and so on. No. I think once we are in modernity we cannot step out it’s lost.”

At 01:51:20 he says,

“[…] would you agree with this beautiful […] temporal paradox formulated by some very good action theorist: yes, we decide for reasons but, retroactively, our decision creates reasons. We are never in this neutral position […] it’s like falling in love: I like your hair, whatever, but that’s why I fall in love with you. But only after I am in love, I see reasons.

“[…] you […] called something democratic non-totalitarian societies where information is available and you can decide and enact. Do you think we live in such a society? We don’t. Maybe even less than in some totalitarianisms where people nonetheless—you cannot say it publicly, but they know the truth. In China, they know they are controlled, they’re much less in illusion than us. Or, to repeat my old formula, the worst kind of unfreedom is the unfreedom which you experience as freedom.”

Technology

4-year campaign backdoored iPhones using possibly the most advanced exploit ever by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)

“The mass backdooring campaign, which according to Russian officials also infected the iPhones of thousands of people working inside diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia, according to Russian government officials, came to light in June. Over a span of at least four years, Kaspersky said, the infections were delivered in iMessage texts that installed malware through a complex exploit chain without requiring the receiver to take any action.”

“The most intriguing new detail is the targeting of the heretofore-unknown hardware feature, which proved to be pivotal to the Operation Triangulation campaign. A zero-day in the feature allowed the attackers to bypass advanced hardware-based memory protections designed to safeguard device system integrity even after an attacker gained the ability to tamper with memory of the underlying kernel. On most other platforms, once attackers successfully exploit a kernel vulnerability they have full control of the compromised system.

“On Apple devices equipped with these protections, such attackers are still unable to perform key post-exploitation techniques such as injecting malicious code into other processes, or modifying kernel code or sensitive kernel data. This powerful protection was bypassed by exploiting a vulnerability in the secret function. The protection, which has rarely been defeated in exploits found to date, is also present in Apple’s M1 and M2 CPUs.”

“If we try to describe this feature and how attackers use it, it all comes down to this: attackers are able to write the desired data to the desired physical address with [the] bypass of [a] hardware-based memory protection by writing the data, destination address and hash of data to unknown, not used by the firmware, hardware registers of the chip. Our guess is that this unknown hardware feature was most likely intended to be used for debugging or testing purposes by Apple engineers or the factory, or was included by mistake. Since this feature is not used by the firmware, we have no idea how attackers would know how to use it.”

“A separate alert from the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, alleged Apple cooperated with the NSA in the campaign. An Apple representative has denied the claim. Kaspersky researchers, meanwhile, have said they have no evidence corroborating the claim of involvement by either the NSA or Apple.”

It’s quite suspicious, though. Who but Apple employees would know about the undocumented registers? And who but the NSA has the know-how and manpower to pull this off? It’s directed at Russia. It’s hard to plausibly blame Russia, even for Eric Berger, Bruce, Schneier or the anyone else who always blames everyone but the U.S. or Israel.

“It began by exploiting CVE-2023-41990, a vulnerability in Apple’s implementation of the TrueType font. This initial chain link, which used techniques including return oriented programming and jump oriented programming to bypass modern exploit defenses, allowed the attackers to remotely execute code, albeit with minimum system privileges.”

“[…] is a further reminder that even in the face of innovative defenses like the one protecting the iPhone kernel, ever more sophisticated attacks continue to find ways to defeat them.”

LLMs & AI

AI and Lossy Bottlenecks by Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)

“That’s a lossy bottleneck. Your wants and desires are rich and multifaceted. The array of culinary outcomes are equally rich and multifaceted. But there’s no scalable way to connect the two. People are forced to use multiple-choice systems like menus to simplify decision-making, and they lose so much information in the process.”

Do they, though? Or is this a blessing that combats the surfeit of choice, the vapor lock you get when there are too many options? What he describes sounds like a nightmare, but then I’m not a narcissist who thinks he knows how to prepare a meal better than the chef at a restaurant.

“Imagine walking into a restaurant and knowing that the kitchen has already started work on a meal optimized for your tastes, or being presented with a personalized list of choices.”

That sounds awful. Where’s the serendipity? Imagine being in the elite. This isn’t coming for anyone but rich people.

“It’s still early days for these technologies, but once they get working, the possibilities are nearly endless. Lossy bottlenecks are everywhere.”

But what about having materials on hand? Supply chain? What about waste? Does that also not matter, you know, as long as rich people get exactly what their little hearts desire every second of every day—and are still unhappy.

“An AI system with access to, for example, a student’s coursework, exams and teacher feedback as well as detailed information about possible jobs could provide much richer assessments of which employment matches do and don’t make sense.”

Holy fucking even worse discrimination, Batman!

“AI could hugely reduce the costs of customization by learning your style,”

All so unnecessary. People already wear what they’re told to wear.

“AI systems that observe each user’s interaction styles and know what that person wants out of a given piece of software could take this personalization far deeper, completely redesigning interfaces to suit individual needs.”

Says the guy who’s never had to write documentation. Customization is the devil.

“For example, you could have an AI device in your pocket—your future phone, for instance—that knows your views and wishes and continually votes in your name on an otherwise overwhelming number of issues large and small.”

What could possibly go wrong? Oh, yeah. Selling your votes could also be automated. This is not a recipe for more and better democracy, but who cares? No-one.

“[…] it could eliminate the problems stemming from elected representatives who reflect only the views of the majority that elected them—and sometimes not even them.”

C’mon Schneier. Lobbyists?

Terrible AI Arguments (and, No, AIs Will Not be Recursively Self-Improving on Computer-Like Time Scales) by Tim Sommers (3 Quarks Daily)

“Hinton says “training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand.” There’s no support for the claim that the only way to be good at predicting the next word in a sentence is to understand what is being said. LMMs prove that, they don’t undermine it. Further, if anything, prior experience suggests the opposite. Calculators are not better at math than most people because they “understand” numbers.”

“While we may not know what’s going on in an LLM from moment to moment, we know what, in general, […] is going on. And we have no reason to believe that that process could give rise to understanding, no matter how well the chatbot functions or how much data it is fed.”

“Being smart, no matter how smart, doesn’t mean you know everything and can do anything, despite what certain people might believe. A smart AI may not even know how computers or LLM work. Most smart humans don’t know much about how they, or computers, work.”

“Does this AI have a lab to research it self-improve in? Or does it just think about self-improvements and, thereby, make them happen? Mindfulness?”

“The issue of increased storage capacity takes us to the question of how an AI with no senses or limbs not only designs, but makes stuff. Does it just talk people into making stuff for it? How does it interact with the physical world? And, by the way, how does it access its own mind?”

“Even if the AI operates on computer rather than human time-scales, it still has to obey, if nothing else, natural laws. It can’t just create new physical infrastructure instantly out of nothing on computer like time-scale. And how can it indefinitely make itself smarter without upgrading its physical infrastructure?”

“I think this reasoning is so bad that I can’t believe that all of the smart people making these arguments really believe them either. So, why do they make them? Now that, I worry about.”

Programming

Why are Apple silicon VMs so different? by Howard Oakley (The Eclectic Light Company)

“In the early days of virtualisation, two distinct types were distinguished. Type 1 runs a hypervisor (the core of the virtualiser) direct on the computer’s hardware. Type 2, also known as hosted, runs a primary host operating system on the hardware, and hypervisors then run on top of, or in close conjunction with, that to deliver the same range of services to guest operating systems.”

“[…] starting with a hypervisor and expecting others to build a complete virtualiser wasn’t feasible, nor was it likely to result in the high performance that Apple and users expected. What Apple did instead was to build device support into macOS, in the form of Virtio drivers.”

“In the Virtio model, providing such support is the task of the operating system, not the virtualiser. For vendors like VMware and Parallels this reduces not only the cost of development, but also the commercial value of their products; there’s no scope for either of them to engineer better or faster graphics support, as that’s determined by features provided in both guest and host operating systems, via Virtio or an equivalent. That puts Apple in charge of what hardware and features are supported by virtualisation on Apple silicon, and the difficulties that have arisen over Apple ID access for VMs. On the other hand, it guarantees optimum performance in VMs.”

“The reward for Apple is flexibility in the future of macOS. Running older versions of macOS in a VM enables users to run Intel-only apps long after Rosetta 2 support is dropped from the current macOS, and for newer Apple silicon Macs to run software that’s incompatible with their minimum version of macOS. Using either Linux or macOS, developers can distribute Docker-like lightweight VM packages, something already done by Cirrus Labs’ Tart.”

The Web is Fantastic by Robb Knight

“The real web, the small web, the indie web is amazing. Don’t give Facebook and the rest of these clowns your content. Don’t give them the time or your attention. Get a blog, a website, a Mastodon account, something you control , and share links to cool things you find. Make a list of your favourite blogs or websites or photos of cats. Write about a pizza you had that was delicious. Share a recipe. Go down a rabbit hole for hours on end adding weird stuff to your site. Just do it somewhere you control because the real web is fantastic.”

Of Rats and Ratchets by Alex Kladov (matklad)

“Let’s say you lack documentation, and want to ensure that every file in the code-base has a top-level comment explaining the relevant context. A good way to approach this problem is to write a test that reads every file in the project, computes the set of poorly documented files, and xors that against the hard-coded naughty list. This test is then committed to the project with the naughty list encompassing all the existing files. Although no new docs are added, the ratchet is in place — all new files are guaranteed to be documented. And its easier to move a notch up the ratchet by documenting a single file and crossing it out from the naughty list.”

“Not everything can be automated though. For things which can’t be, the best trick I’ve found is writing them down. Just agreeing that X is a team practice is not enough, even if it might work for the first six months. Only when X is written down in a markdown document inside a repository it might becomes a durable practice. But beware — document what is, rather than what should be. If there’s a clear disagreement between what the docs say the world is, and the actual world, the ratcheting effect of the written word disappears. If there’s a large diff between reality and documentation, don’t hesitate to remove conflicting parts of the documentation. Having a ratchet that enforces a tiny set of properties is much more valuable than aspirations to enforce everything.”

Fun

Afterlife 3 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

“St. Peter: Lord, we really need a better system.
God: This was the funniest one I could think of.”

Happiness 3 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

“Boredom, malaise, ennui. All these philosophical arguments against a happiness machine are just bad intuition pumps that are reducible to
“you’d be unhappy with a happiness machine if the happiness machine didn’t work.””

Video Games

Space Junk by Martin Dolan (The Baffler)

“[…] compared to what Starfield does well (writing, level design, and not much else), the developers’ insistence on including so much busywork is baffling. BGS celebrates their games having choices as something essential in of itself, rather than ensuring that those choices actually matter. It’s a fixation on having stuff to do versus actual scripted sequences. On quantity over quality. The illusion of scale.”

“Starfield ’s clunk and clutter and throwback sense of techno-optimism seem like less of a deliberate artistic choice than a distraction from what video games of the past ten years have been doing wrong. That as the tech gets better and better, the stars are the limit for what gaming can become. But that doesn’t mean those worlds will be worth exploring.”