Links and Notes for April 5th, 2024

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

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Public Policy & Politics

Netanyahu and Israel have zero respect for anyone else

Do you remember, way back in 2012, when Netanyahu went before the U.N. with this laughable prop and expected everyone to believe that it depicted some sort of Iranian roadmap for building a nuclear weapon? This is exactly how much he—and other people in charge of Israel—care about anyone else’s opinion. This is exactly how much they think of the rest of us: not worth more than two minutes of work for an international presentation. Why bother putting more effort into something that goes toward convincing people whose opinions don’t matter?

Bibi’s been angling for war with Iran for decades now. He’s not going to stop, not now, when he’s so close to achieving whatever it is he thinks he’s trying to achieve.

„Der Westen bekämpft Russland, als ob es keine Atomwaffen hätte“ – Interview mit Dmitri Trenin by Éva Péli (NachDenkSeiten)

“Die Aussicht auf einen russischen militärischen Sieg – und gleichzeitig eine geopolitische Niederlage für den Westen – wurde real. Währenddessen bekamen die Europäer Angst vor Donald Trumps möglichem Einzug ins Weiße Haus.”

“Anders als in der Zeit des Kalten Krieges ist die Angst des Westens vor den Folgen seines Handelns heute deutlich geringer geworden. Ein Beispiel dafür ist Emmanuel Macrons Äußerung über die mögliche Entsendung von NATO-Truppen in die Ukraine. Die Ideologie des liberalen Globalismus hat Pragmatismus und Realismus besiegt. Das ist gefährlich für die Welt. Hinzu kommt, dass der Liberalismus in vielen Fällen totalitäre Züge annimmt.”

Genau. Keine Respekt vor den Waffen Russlands. Unfassbar wie sie mit allen unseren Leben spielen.

“Die Qualität der europäischen Eliten im Allgemeinen und der Staatsoberhäupter im Besonderen (siehe Großbritannien, Frankreich, Deutschland) ist viel geringer als während des Kalten Krieges. Die (falsche und gefährliche) Vorstellung, Russland könne in einem konventionellen Krieg besiegt werden, hat sich unter den westlichen Eliten verbreitet.”

“Früher sagte man „Barbaren vor dem Tor“, heute spricht man von „Dschungeln, die den Garten bedrohen“. Die Bedeutung ist jedoch dieselbe.”

“Ein langwieriger Krieg ist nicht in Russlands Interesse. Die gemeinsamen Ressourcen des Westens sind größer als die von Russland. Daher könnte Russland in eine Lage geraten, in der es entweder gemäß seiner Militärdoktrin Atomwaffen einsetzen oder mit schlimmen Folgen für das Land kapitulieren muss.”

“Es wird angenommen, dass es keine Ziele und keine Opfer gibt, die den Einsatz von Atomwaffen rechtfertigen würden – und daher können konventionelle Waffen ohne Einschränkung eingesetzt werden. Die USA sind zu dem Schluss gekommen, dass Russland eher kapitulieren würde als einen Atomschlag zu führen.”

Denk mal darüber nach: NATO kann Russland erst angreifen, weil NATO Russland nicht befürchtet bzw. nicht weil es gerechtfertigt wäre sondern, weil NATO kann von denen nehmen was es lange begehrt hat.

“Die ständige Eskalation des Krieges durch die NATO-Staaten erhöht jedoch die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass Moskau seine von Anfang an an den Tag gelegte Zurückhaltung aufgibt und zu Schlägen gegen Ziele in den Gebieten der am aktivsten am Krieg beteiligten NATO-Staaten übergeht.”

“Die antirussische Einigkeit der westlichen Länder ist ein Erfolg der US-amerikanischen Strategie. Ab Mitte der 2000er-Jahre, unmittelbar nach der US-amerikanischen Aggression gegen den Irak, begann Washington, die europäischen Eliten von „Dissidenten“, die sich der US-Politik widersetzten, zu „säubern“. Infolgedessen wurden die Nachfolger von Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder und Präsident Jaques Chirac sehr viel mehr zu proamerikanischen Politikern.”

“Ab etwa 2006 begann die regelrechte Dämonisierung Russlands und Putins persönlich. Diejenigen, die sich dieser Gehirnwäsche nicht unterwarfen, wurden aus der „anständigen Gesellschaft“ ausgeschlossen. 20 Jahre später haben die USA das Ergebnis erreicht, das sie anstrebten.”

“Wenn diese Bemühungen fruchtbar sind, wird sich Russland schließlich von einer peripheren Provinz im westlichen Weltsystem in eines der Zentren einer neuen Weltstruktur verwandeln, in der chinesische, indische, islamische, afrikanische und andere Zivilisationen, einschließlich der westlichen und der russischen, gleichberechtigt koexistieren und interagieren werden.”

Over the U.S.‘s dead body. (Über die Leiche USAs)

“In einer bestimmten Situation zwischen Russland und dem Westen sollte man sich darüber im Klaren sein, was für jede Seite auf dem Spiel steht. Für die USA geht es um ihr Prestige, ihre globalen Ambitionen und die Beziehungen zu ihren Verbündeten. Für Russland geht es um die Existenz des Staates selbst. Ich erinnere nochmal an Putins Worte aus einem früheren Interview mit dem US-amerikanischen Fernsehen: „Wozu brauchen wir Frieden, wenn es Russland nicht mehr geben wird?“ Ich persönlich nehme das ernst.”

“Seitdem habe ich meine Position nicht nur nicht geändert, sondern zunehmend davor gewarnt, dass das derzeitige Angstdefizit in den USA und insbesondere in Europa die Welt in eine Katastrophe führen könnte. Die Eskalationsschritte des Westens haben uns in den letzten zwei Jahren deutlich näher an den Abgrund gebracht. Die Situation ist sehr gefährlich.”

“Ich halte Angst nicht für eine „gute“ Grundlage für den Frieden. Die Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen, insbesondere der letzten 80 Jahre, zeigt jedoch, dass die Großmächte, sofern sie nicht in einem stabilen Bündnis oder einer Partnerschaft miteinander stehen, gezwungen sind, ihre Sicherheit auf die Fähigkeit zu gründen, entweder einen potenziellen Gegner am Sieg zu hindern oder ihn zu vernichten, selbst um den Preis ihrer eigenen Zerstörung. Es gibt natürlich noch einen dritten Weg: Kapitulation mit anschließender Unterwerfung oder Selbstauflösung. Für Russland ist dieser Weg inakzeptabel. Angst ist also eine schlechte Grundlage, aber die Alternative zum Gleichgewicht durch Angst bedeutet entweder die allgemeine Vernichtung oder die Selbstliquidierung eines der Rivalen.”

“Putin hat soeben ein noch größeres Problem aufgeworfen: die Bildung einer neuen Elite, einer Dienstleistungselite, die an die Stelle der Geldelite der postsowjetischen Ära treten soll, die auf ihre eigenen egoistischen Interessen ausgerichtet ist. Meiner Meinung nach tragen die Transformationsprozesse, die derzeit in Russland stattfinden, dazu bei, dass sich die Qualität der obersten Führungsschicht des Landes im Vergleich zu der vor 25 oder 35 Jahren verbessert.”

30x Aber der Putin = eines von vielen Beispielen perfekter Meinungsmache by Albrecht Müller (NachDenkSeiten)

“Wir im Westen glauben, in demokratischen Verhältnissen zu leben. Und dort im Osten da gäb‘s die Diktatur, so die übliche Einlassung. Tatsächlich wird hierzulande der Kern und Nachweis demokratischer Verhältnisse, die demokratische Meinungsbildung, täglich mit Füßen getreten.”

“Die Frankfurter Allgemeine kann eine solche Osterausgabe verteilen, ohne dass reihenweise Abos gekündigt werden. Bei anderen Medien ist die Lage nicht anders. Was wir uns täglich von der Tagesschau und von ZDF Heute bieten lassen, ohne dass in Hamburg und Mainz die Scheiben klirren, ist bemerkenswert. – Alles o. k. Schlaft weiter. Aber quatscht nicht weiter von demokratischen Verhältnissen.”

„Putin will uns spalten“ – der neue Lieblingssatz der eigentlichen Spalter by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Wer die Bundesregierung kritisiert und die Mehrheitsmeinung der Berliner Blase hinterfragt, hat es nicht einfach. Wer widerspricht, wird gerne je nach Themengebiet als „Querdenker“, „Putin-Versteher“, „rechtsoffen“ oder sogar „Antisemit“ tituliert. Früher waren die Hüter der Wahrheit ein wenig origineller.”

Law and Order Is Republicrat for Fascism by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“This nation’s last big crime wave peaked somewhere between the early seventies and the early nineties after the American Empire lost the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement failed to cure systemic racism, and Richard Nixon exposed the highest echelons of Babylonian power to be little more than an elaborate organized crime outfit. Long story short, America lost its faith in the system and sadly that faith was what passed for a moral center in this country. So, the shit got wild and here we go again after the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Pandemic, and two consecutive presidencies defined by Nixonian grade dysfunction.”

“[…] the media is chumming us all with sensational stories of a Mad Max-style dystopia. It’s Law and Order Two: Electric Boogaloo. But here’s the rub; nobody is actually asking for a sequel. Even amidst this synergistic propaganda deluge, most major polls show crime trailing behind the shit that causes it, like inflation, recession, and shitty leadership, on the list of demands for both Democrats and Republicans. In other words, average Americans don’t want law and order. They would much rather watch the Temple of Emptiness burn like their savings. But American power desperately wants us to want law and order to save their hides from the fire the way they did the last time around.”

“[…] the powerful still believe that they cured that plague with a crimewave of their own called mass incarceration. The violence never ended, it just got monopolized by the police state.”

“[…] an entire generation of Black, brown, and Queer people were essentially kidnapped under the auspices of the War on Drugs and Broken Windows before being sold into virtual slavery to a modern-day gulag archipelago that would make Josef Stalin thick with envy.”

“The spree in federal legislation that began with Nixon’s War on Drugs and peaked with the Clinton Crime Bill that Joe Biden midwifed back when he still had all his marbles, turned American law enforcement into a colossal army of heavily armored goons with near unlimited power and state-of-the-art battlefield technology. There is a word for this, for the wholesale militarization of every facet of civilian society for the purpose of preserving the glory of a failed state. That word is called fascism, and while it may seem like Donald Trump is the only man running for president who is proud of this slur, both parties are thoroughly invested in the American swastika known as law and order.”

“Fascism isn’t really an ideology, it’s just a very ceremonial list of excuses to put a collapsing power on life support by using the state to monopolize an unstoppable crimewave.”

“[…] the best way to fight crime, all crime, is to teach people that they don’t need laws to have order, they just need values.”

Easier said than done—and it depends on which values, but I generally agree…and it’s nicely put. It sounds inspirational.

“This is how we win, dearest motherfuckers. This is how we kill American fascism without firing a single shot. Live free and let the tyrants shoot themselves.”

Debunking Israel’s ‘Human Shield’ Defense in Gaza Massacre by Empire Files / Abby Martin on May 20, 2021 (YouTube)

“Israel claims they were human shields, so there’s nothing to condemn. It’s not their fault. It’s the fault of Hamas. Nothing to answer for. No pressure to stop. No accountability. We’re just supposed to take their word for it. This is repeated without question by corporate media. For example, when Israel leveled the building housing Associated Press (AP) offices, claiming it was a secret base for Hamas, they provided no evidence whatsoever, even in secret to the U.S State Department. But CNN, instead of grilling Israel about the claim, instead grilled the Associated Press about turning a blind eye to Hamas. The human-shield narrative is really the only defense Israel and the U.S have for excusing these brutal crimes against humanity. Here’s the thing: claiming civilians you kill are human shields is not some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Why is it up to Israel to determine if their actions are war crimes or not?”

The Secret Reason The U.S. Is Allowing Venezuela To Sell Oil Again by Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp (YouTube)

Lee posits and interesting and convincing theory that the only pressure that works on the U.S. is to threaten to sell oil in a currency other than the U.S. dollar, i.e., outside of the petro-dollar system.

Germany, France and Poland pledge to escalate war with Russia at Berlin summit by Johannes Stern, Alex Lantier (WSWS)

“Scholz laid out the three governments’ war agenda, pledging to jointly buy weapons for Ukraine on the world market, set up armament factories in Ukraine, deliver long-range artillery to Ukraine and send more military trainers to Ukraine. He pledged to raise European Union (EU) financial support for Ukraine by a further €5 billion. Scholz pledged to use interest income on Russian funds from oil sales to Europe that are frozen in euro zone banks to pay for this—itself an enormous act of international theft.”

“On March 13, in an interview for state television, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented on Macron’s remarks on deploying ground troops: “From a military-technical point of view, we are of course ready. … As for governments who claim they have no more red lines with Russia, they must know that in this case, Russia will not have any more red lines with them, either.””

Exclusive: Inside Yemen's Capture of Israel's Galaxy Leader Ship by MintPressNews (YouTube)

This is a quite informative interview with Brigadier Mujib Shamsan, Head of Military Spokesman Committee from Yemen. Mnar Adley’s comments and coverage in English, but at least half of the video is in Arabic.

Bang-and-Whimper by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

“The Woke-Marxist college kids are wailing over the actions of Israel in Gaza — as they will for anyone within their dumb-ass equation of victims-and-oppressors, especially involving brown and white people. It is a brutal operation in Gaza, for sure, but so was the Hamas act-of-war on October 7 that many want to forget about now. They still hold and torture hostages, you know.”

Let’s see how Captain Kunstler is doing. Well, he’s an upstate hater of all that is downstate, but he sees eye-to-eye with Scott Greenfield, whom Kunstler would no doubt refer to a “Jew lawyer” in a moment of weakness or if he were in his cups. Kunstler himself is also Jewish, which goes a ways toward explaining his blind devotion to Israel, but is still a bit mysterious, if you’ve read other things he’s written. Still, a lot of the more interesting stuff he’s written is quite a ways in the past now. He’s been on a different track for a while now.

They both acknowledge the “brutal occupation”, but also don’t think that one thing has anything to do with the other. Hamas does hold hostages, but there is no evidence at all that they are torturing them. Those that have been returned report that they’ve been treated as well as is possible within the strict confines of the mass-bombing and starvation campaign in Gaza. But Kunstler and Greenfield think that anyone who’s against Israel’s policies is a whiny idiot who’s too young and stupid to have an opinion worth respecting. The only people worth listening to are those who know you’ve got to “torture some folks”, as Obama once said.

Am I being unfair? Let’s see what else he has to say.

“I doubt that Israel wants to exterminate the Gazans, but at this point they would probably like to export them to other nations that share their Arab culture.”

Yup. Just “export” them to “other nations”. That would be ethnic cleansing. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up, Jim. He goes on to rehash that hoary old chestnut that the Palestinians won’t be happy until Israel has been wiped from the map—as if the Palestinians have anything approaching any leverage in this situation. He doesn’t seem to notice the irony that his preferred solution is to, while accusing the Palestinians of being interested in a genocide that they have to hope of perpetrating, to wholeheartedly support the genocide of the Palestinians as the only via solution for Israel, given that he’s accepted the calculus that it’s either one side or the other, in which case, then the Jews should have Israel, as far as Jim is concerned.

Anything else, Jim?

“They might have turned their 40 kilometers of Mediterranean beach-front into a world-beating resort, but instead they spent billions in international aid building a tunnel network and purchasing arms to wage war against Israel.”

Oh, yes, this one! Scott Greenfield also likes this one: that the Palestinians were utterly free to build a paradise but instead used all of their energy to work toward their only goal of eliminating all Jews. That is, they neglected their own society and people, all for the overarching goal of eliminating all Jews from Israel. Pure fantasy. It utterly ignores what he stated at the top, which is the “brutal occupation”, which prevents anything from happening in Palestine that isn’t approved by Israel. And Israel approves of nothing. This argument is so spectacularly ignorant, mean-spirited, and self-serving that it takes your breath a way, just a bit.

“And what if Mr. Netanyahu launches a peremptory attack against southern Lebanon to destroy those bases?”

Well, one thing’s for sure, Jim. I know that you will think that it’s everyone’s fault but Israel’s when the world fries. Jim is nothing if not a good Republican, though. He’s 100% for Israel, against Hamas, but also against the war in Ukraine. To whit:

“[…] the stark reality is that Russia is in control of the tactical situation on the ground. The WEF syndicate’s project — fronted by NATO — to weaken Russia and eventually loot its resources is a flop.”

So why do I read Jim still? Well, you have to peek over the fence every once in a while and he’s still capable of quite cogent analysis when he’s not being a raging anti-Muslim, anti-woke racist.

“The hidden truth now is that the USA war blob needs to cut its losses in Ukraine and wants to bug out. The trouble is: how to do that in a way that does not amount to another gross American strategic humiliation? That’s Russia’s problem, too: how to adroitly work the conclusion of this fiasco in a way that doesn’t humiliate the USA to the degree that we resort to some new act of geopolitical insanity in compensation.”

I’ve heard the argument that Lina Khan at the FTC is really good and making good guidelines. Fair enough. She’s not an elected official. She could work for any administration. The argument is, of course, that Trump wouldn’t hire her, so we therefore need to get Biden back in there, so that she can continue her good work. This is ridiculous. We have to put up with Biden so we can have a working FTC? That’s the argument?

That’s getting toward the bottom of the barrel of the “lesser evil” argument: in order to get fewer hospital mergers, you have to elect a drooling, senile warmonger who generally does kowtow to big business, but seems to have hired Lina Khan by mistake, so you also not only have to hope that he doesn’t forget who she is and fire her, or change his mind because of a spectacular donation (and fire her), or engulf the world in conflagration because his foreign policy is maniacal, immoral, and full-on empire.

At the New York Times, there were so many people who supported—despite the complete lack of evidence—calling what China is doing to the Uyghers “genocide”. This was utterly uncontroversial. It still is. People will casually drop references to the Uygher genocide as if it weren’t mostly a fever-dream acted out fervently and in public by Adrian Zenz. Now, though, the same people at the same newspaper are doing their damnedest to ignore the overwhelming evidence for a genocide that’s being perpetrated by a state that they support.

It’s a funny old world. I wonder what it’s like to not notice when you’re just a shockingly hypocritical mouthpiece for state interests? As I wonder what that’s like, I’m forced to wonder what thing I’m wildly und completely unknowingly hypocritical about. I think that there’s nothing in this category. But then, I would, wouldn’t I? Like, by definition?

The situation in China with the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang province is somewhat analogous to that of Israel with Palestinians. That is, at least when you hear the governments talking about them. China maintains that there are dangerous Uyghur terrorist movements that is must keep a lid on. Israel maintains the same thing. Both of them have a point. They both could take the blame for having engendered those terror movements. Israel has done far more to directly suppress Palestinians than China has done to suppress Uyghurs. China has re-education facilities—concentration camps, in the NYT parlance—that teach Han culture and Mandarin. You know, like Migros Klubschule.

For their part, Israelis flatten everything that moves. They seem to be getting very eager to get to the light at the end of the tunnel. Many of them think they see it. Who knows? They might be right.

Loyal NYT readers will continue to condemn China for genocide while remaining unable to say the same word for what Israel is doing. Those readers have opinions, but no principles.

As for BDS? Everyone who’s anyone agrees that you’re allowed to boycott as long as it’s not effective.

Idiot Republicans Are Saying Genocide Joe Has ‘Abandoned Israel’ by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)

“[…] the only reason Republicans have begun trying to frame Biden as anti-Israel is because only through fiction and fantasy can America’s two mainstream parties pretend there are any significant differences between them. They’re both insanely supportive of Israel and its crimes. They both support war, militarism, imperialism, capitalism and oligarchy. The only areas in which there’s any meaningful disagreement between them are the issues that don’t inconvenience the powerful in any way like whether or not you’re allowed to have an abortion or whether it’s good or bad to be mean to trans people — and even those issues are only used to keep everyone’s interest and attention locked into mainstream politics and diverted from revolutionary sentiment.”

“So they make up these moronic fictional battlegrounds to fight on, because that’s the only way they can actually have anything to fight about. Joe Biden is a Hamas agent. Donald Trump is a Kremlin agent. Joe Biden is controlled by “the CCP”. Donald Trump is going to be another Hitler instead of another shitty Republican. The Democrats want to steal your guns and make your son wear a dress. The Republicans want to dismantle NATO and let Vladimir Putin take over the world.”

“Before you know it you’d have them arguing about things like whether it would be best to ramp up nuclear aggressions with China first or prioritize taking out Russia, and people would start to notice that neither of these parties have the interests of normal human beings at heart.”

Journalism & Media

The Dumbest Cover Story Ever by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“The New York essay perfectly captures the lunatic nihilism American academics have fanned into a mass movement by granting the most idiotic forms of teenage self-absorption the status of wisdom and insight. This has had disastrous consequences, both for society and its ballooning population of over-encouraged young pseudo-intellectuals like Chu.”

“These concepts are not hard, no matter how much post-modernist gibberish terminology you pile on to make them seem complicated. People want access to IVF treatments because they’re grownups who want to have children. They’re less excited about “significant medical interventions in biological sex” when the choice is being made by minors and enabled by activists and school officials whose collective medical and psychiatric knowledge could fit in a bee’s anus.

“We don’t let pre-teens drive, we don’t hand them chainsaws on the way to school, and hesitation about doling out extremely powerful drugs with permanent side effects falls in the same category […]”

“[…] patriarchal bigotry is what causes young women to object when a 6’4” man switches pools to race against them.”

What causes them to object is a little more complicated than that.

He’s being sarcastic, but I think he’s also got the wrong take on it, because he—as well as most people on this subject—aren’t questioning enough of the precepts we have around sport.

The main thing there is that people want to win. They want to get things easier rather than harder. They don’t just compete for the love of it. They want to win. They engage in arbitrage to gain the best advantage. We’re hearing about trans-women swimming with women because that’s the direction in which they win. We don’t hear about trans-men swimming as men because they don’t win there.

Biology and testosterone provide a significant advantage, all other things being more-or-less equal. Because of this, we’ve classically split sports into male and female categories. Why, though? Because it’s no fun to play when you have no chance of winning or participating in anything approaching a coherent manner. Also, no-one wants to watch it.

When people want to watch something, that means that there’s money in it. When there’s money in it, there’s a chance for security and profit and fame. You have to put time into it, though. If you put that time in, but don’t get any money or security from it, no way to support yourself, then you won’t do it.

If there were no separate men and women’s sports, simple biology would lead to us having only men competing in sports because women wouldn’t be able to afford to do so. Or very few would be able to. And if very few can, then the odds are that the support system required to produce them wouldn’t arise and there would be fewer and fewer of them.

So that’s the context of sports. It’s broadly categorized so that it’s rewarding to participate in and entertaining to watch.

If you have a swimmer who’s 7 seconds faster than the next swimmer, then it might be initially exciting to watch. If you found out that that swimmer doped, then you’d be less excited. So what if that person has benefitted from exactly the biological advantage that caused us to split the world of sports into two broad categories in the first place? People are not going to be excited to hear about how that person found a loophole.

And they didn’t find the loophole on purpose! They might be a lifelong avid swimmer and a lifelong woman-in-a-man’s body. They should get to be a woman if they want. We should support that. Is it their fault that they now have what looks for all the world like an unfair advantage? No. Do they still have an unfair advantage? Yes. This breaks the contract.

People participate and watch because a sport has generally been engineered to alleviate unfair advantages. Boxing has weight classes. Chess has classes.

Maybe now that we have more trans-people—or they are being acknowledged more—we have to revisit the relatively coarse categorization we’ve benefitted from by just splitting into two groups: boys and girls. Maybe we have to consider what their relative capabilities are, like they do in boxing or chess.

“One of the reasons absurd hypotheses end up taken seriously is because of all the tiptoeing and frightened reverence that goes on around people who’ve completed procedures they themselves chose and say makes them feel whole. Why this inspires fear of offense, I have no idea, but it does. You couldn’t sell most Manhattan editors on the story of a black ex-con father’s journey to find a job with benefits, but New York sure sold “My Penis: A Love Story” as if they had an exclusive of Shackleton’s voyage.

“Enough with the whispering! If someone wants to chop his dick off and graze in the pastures of allyship, we should take their word that’s a happy choice and treat that person like any other writer capable of publishing something that sucks. And this article really sucks. Do we have to salute every dumb thing America’s intellectuals send up the flagpole? Is the smart set’s cowardice really going to go on forever?”

The First Amendment Takes a Beating in the Supreme Court by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“That a line about “the First Amendment hamstringing the government” was uttered by one Supreme Court Justice is astonishing enough. Listening as none of the other eight pointed out that the entire purpose of the First Amendment is to “hamstring” government from interfering in speech was like watching someone drive a tank back and forth over Old Yeller. I needed a bite-stick by the end of the hearing.”

Supreme Court justices are just as trapped in the narrative as most people. They drift their Overton Window until they’re saying things like the statement above. Some speech is not allowed. It reminds me of the XKCD cartoon, where the guy says “not now. Somebody is wrong on the Internet.” They think that there are some things that have to be corrected online, that there are some things that are not allowed to stand uncensored. That it is the duty of the government to help people to the right opinion if they should stray. This is madness.

This, especially knowing that Ketanji Brown Jackson almost certainly assiduously follows media that have spent the last several years being spectacularly and provably wrong on nearly everything—Russiagate, COVID measures, Ukraine, Gaza, etc.—but she is almost certainly not thinking of those highly damaging and poisonous media sources when she asks “What would you have the government do?”

Nothing. It’s not only not the government’s job to censor discourse, it’s expressly prohibited by the First Amendment. Period.

Requiem for The New York Times by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“We were regaled with all the perks of elitism: Harvard. Summers in Maine. Vacationing in Italy and France. Snorkeling in a coral reef at a Philippine resort. Living in Hampstead in London. The country house in New Paltz. Taking a barge down the Canal du Midi. Visits to the Prado. Opera at The Met.”

It’s all completely unwitting. Soccer camp in Italy (Lago di Garda). People don’t even realize when they’re extraordinarily privileged. They are trained to focus on what’s missing.

“Ben fell victim to what the historian Ellen Schrecker in “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America ” calls “the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.” “In order to eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture,” she writes.”

In the fervor to defeat communism, the anti-communists won. A complete lack of principle made it easy.

Labor

Why Biden Is Getting His Butt Kicked on the Economy by Les Leopold (Scheer Post)

“[…] there’s a big difference between finding a new job because you want to and scrambling to find a job because you’ve been laid off. If your factory shuts down in rural Pennsylvania, for example, finding a new job could feel like hell on earth as you, and a thousand of your former co-workers, scramble for the last jobs at the Dollar Store or Walmart.

“You’re not about to reward those in power for the pain and suffering caused by being laid off due to no fault of your own.”

Economy & Finance

Your greed is hurting the economy

Tf2 be like (Reddit)

The post has since been redacted—whatever that means for a meme post—but the original comment I saw read,

“how can I, an incredibly wealthy bellend, invest large amounts of money to run it into the ground for short term profits?”

Don’t Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans’ Tech by Jennifer Huddleston (Reason)

“This might sound like a boon for users. But in the long term, this sort of rule threatens to thwart future innovation by locking tech companies into government-determined feature sets that can be updated or improved only with regulatory approval. Rules like this turn bureaucrats into product designers.”

There was no other interpretation for Reason to have on this. They will never acknowledge that we’ve been mired in the opposite problem—E-waste that we can ill-afford—for a long time now, with no way out of it. The EU prioritized limiting E-Waste over innovation in cables. That’s a choice. Reason is going to prioritize innovation over limiting E-Waste. That’s also a choice.

Some crypto repositories are giving out options on their coins before release in exchange for contributions to their codebase. So what happens? Thousands of people start spamming hundreds of open-source crypto repositories—probably with botnets and scripts—in the hopes that they’ll get lucky and someone will accidentally give them free stuff in exchange for their “contribution”. So, these projects are inundated with a tsunami of spam pull-requests, taking away their time from building their project.

This happened as well when everyone found out that resume-filtering robots liked to see GitHub activity. So people dutifully started spamming senseless and trivial pull-requests—often containing a single commit that added a single newline into a README file somewhere—in order to boost their participation numbers. The robot couldn’t tell the difference. These people probably made most of these changes with scripts too.

These people are all using the goodwill of the open-source Internet—the backbone of everything we use online—for their own personal gain. They don’t care how much extra effort for other people they generate, or how much time they waste, because none of it accrues to them. They might get a minuscule advantage out of it, so it’s worth doing—and it probably barely costs them anything. This is the parasitic attitude engendered by the “I’ve got mine Jack” style of capitalism that rules everything right now. Hustle, grift, gig. Fake it ’til you make it.

The system teaches people to get what they think they deserve, by any means necessary, at anyone’s expense, as long as you don’t discriminate, as long as the victim is invisible. The system puts so many people into an insecure situation—engendering a feeling of precarity—that they can’t see past the end of their nose and just do whatever they can to “get by”, as they see it. If the system took better care of people, they’d be artists and poets and musicians instead of hustling grifters that ruin everything. We can’t have nice things.

For the First Time in History, the Fed Is Reporting Billions in Losses Weekly; It’s Still Paying High Interest Income to the Mega Banks on Wall Street by Pam & Russ Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“We’re talking about real cash losses it is experiencing from earning approximately 2 percent interest on the $6.97 trillion of debt securities it holds on its balance sheet from its Quantitative Easing (QE) operations while it continues to pay out 5.4 percent interest to the mega banks on Wall Street (and other Fed member banks) for the reserves they hold with the Fed; 5.3 percent interest it pays on reverse repo operations with the Fed; and a whopping 6 percent dividend to member shareholder banks with assets of $10 billion or less and the lesser of 6 percent or the yield on the 10-year Treasury note at the most recent auction prior to the dividend payment to banks with assets larger than $10 billion. (This morning the 10-year Treasury is yielding 4.41 percent.)”

“The loss of remittances from the Fed means the U.S. government will go deeper into debt, putting a heavier tax burden on the U.S. taxpayer and raising the risk of another credit rating agency downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt.”

On price sensitivity:

I was looking for The Three-body Problem at my library, but they only have the audiobook versions, in several languages. Lately, if the New York Public Library even has the content I’m looking for at all, it will be in Spanish—and usually in audiobook form. This is kind of weird and a little disappointing, but I guess they have to serve the market that they have?

I then looked at Amazon (I have a Kindle, for shame) and it’s about CHF18 for all three books. I balked at first, because I don’t think that a Kindle book is permanent. But we’re talking about paying to rent the book for a few years. What’s so bad about that? Of course, the rent isn’t going to the author. The rent is going to the company that hosts and distributes the version that I’m reading.

It’s not the money, though, is it? Of course not. I would go watch a movie for CHF20 and wouldn’t have anything left of it but the memory. Maybe it’s just the expectation that, when you buy a book, no-one can take it away from you. Instead, you’re paying for access, but not ownership. I dunno if that’s so terrible. The main downside is that the access can be capped at any time, I guess. But it’s not that I really want to retain copies of these books. I almost never look at them again anyway.

The Beauty Parlor’s Full of Sailors and the Circus is in Town by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

“When the Treasury holds an auction on a new issue of bonds (needed to pay off the interest on old bonds) and nobody shows up to buy because they doubt its ability to pay interest on the new paper, our country’s debt becomes worthless. As a last resort, the Federal Reserve swoops in and buys that worthless paper by creating “money” on its computer. That “money” goes out into the economy. The Fed pretends to get paid interest. It’s all fakery, a swindle.”

The Real Tax Gap by Eric Boehm (Reason)

““The top 1 percent of earners, defined as those with incomes over $682,577, paid nearly 46 percent of all income taxes” in 2021, according to federal tax data crunched by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF), which advocates for lower taxes. That’s the highest percentage of taxes paid by the top 1 percent of earners in any year since 1980.”

OK.

“Other wealthier Americans are also contributing heavily. “The top 10 percent of earners bore responsibility for 76 percent of all income taxes paid, and the top 25 percent paid 89 percent of all income taxes,” the NTUF report found. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of all earners paid just 2.3 percent of federal income taxes in 2021.”

Mr. Boehm’s conclusion is that “[…] the tax code has grown significantly more progressive during the same period.”

Another conclusion that fits the facts better is that the top 10% have taken all of the income for themselves. I mean, right? That explains it better than his fantasy that, despite the progressive percentage rate dropping, the tax code is magically still getting more progressive. No. The reason the top 10% pay 76% of all taxes is because no-one else is making enough money to pay taxes. It’s fu$&ing incredible that someone could write an article like this without considering that solution to the puzzle he poses.

Smelly Criminals by Jonathan Pie (YouTube)

“Rough sleeping is not a lifestyle choice for those sleeping rough. It is a choice of this government. It’s been a choice ever since David Cameron declared that we were all in it together before implementing a brutal and sustained assault on the poorest, most vulnerable people in his so-called big society. And whilst we have obscene levels of destitution and hardship in this country, with record numbers sleeping rough on the streets, a near billionaire resides in number 10. Nasty, evil fuckers.”

Tech Employees Want to Diversify by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“The advantage is that, while selling your stock for cash and then reinvesting the cash in an index fund is a taxable transaction, contributing your stock to a partnership in exchange for a share of that partnership is not. And if you do it right, you can make the partnership’s holdings look a lot like an index fund. (Not tax advice! It is not in fact quite as simple as this, though this is the right general idea.)”

“Known as an exchange fund or a swap fund, the product is familiar to the super rich. Now, share-price rallies at companies such as Meta Platforms Inc. and Nvidia Corp. are creating an opportunity to offer the structure to moderately wealthy techies as well, says Srikanth Narayan, founder of San Francisco-based Cache.”

Wonderful. Just the kind of people who needed more attention.

“The intuition here is that, often, when a company is taken over, its debt becomes riskier: If you are a bondholder of some reasonably stable public company, and then it gets bought in a leveraged buyout and loaded up with more debt, you will be sad; your debt will lose value. The deal that you originally struck with the company has changed, and you’ll want to get out.”

Sinkende Inflation, sinkende Preise? by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Die prozentualen Angaben beziehen sich immer – sofern es nicht ausdrücklich anders benannt ist – auf den Vorjahresmonat. Sie geben also stets nur die Preisänderung zu diesem Stichtag an. Das kann zu Fehlinterpretationen führen. So sind beispielsweise aktuell in der Tat die Haushaltspreise für Erdgas im Vergleich zum Vorjahresmonat um 2,5 Prozentpunkte gesunken. Der Vorjahresmonat gehörte jedoch beim Erdgas lt. Statistischem Bundesamt zu den historisch teuersten Monaten. Nimmt man nicht den Februar 2023, sondern den Januar 2020 als Basis, so ist das Erdgas nicht um 2,5 Prozent billiger, sondern um 91,5 Prozent teurer geworden – der Preis hat sich also in etwas mehr als vier Jahren fast verdoppelt. So entsteht die paradoxe Situation, dass sowohl die Aussage „Gas wird billiger“ als auch „Gas ist fast doppelt so teuer“ vollkommen korrekt sind. Es kommt halt immer auf den Bezug an.”

“[…] die Preise für Nahrungsmittel und alkoholfreie Getränke sogar um 32 Prozent im Vergleich zum Januar 2020 gestiegen, während sie im Vergleich zum Vorjahresmonat sogar um 0,7 Prozent gesunken sind.”

“Die Aussage, „Nahrungsmittel erstmals billiger“, ist also streng genommen falsch. Korrekt wäre die Aussage: „Nahrungsmittel erstmals seit längerer Zeit etwas billiger als im Vorjahresmonat“. Doch wer würde so eine Überschrift lesen wollen? Und vor allem: Wo wäre bei dieser Überschrift die positive Nachricht?”

“In der Tat sind die Preise seit dem Peak im August 2022 sogar wieder etwas gefallen, was dann mit einem „Rückgang der Erzeugerpreise“ als Beleg für die Richtigkeit der Sanktionspolitik gefeiert wurde. Das ist natürlich absurd, waren die Preise zu diesem Zeitpunkt doch doppelt so hoch wie vor den Sanktionen.”

“Wenn Sie selbst Ihr Einkommen in den letzten vier Jahren jährlich um zwei Prozent netto steigern konnten, dann ist Ihr Einkommen insgesamt gegenüber dem Jahr 2020 um 6,12 Prozent gestiegen. Im gleichen Zeitraum sind die Verbraucherpreise (also der gesamte Warenkorb) jedoch um 18,1 Prozent gestiegen. Lebensmittel sind um 32 Prozent, Erdgas um 91,5 Prozent, Strom um 28,6 Prozent, Benzin und Diesel um 44 Prozent, Restaurantbesuche um 26,4 Prozent und sogar die Bestattungsdienstleistungen sind um 17 Prozent im Preis gestiegen.”

“Für alle anderen hat der Preisschock zu einem sehr deutlichen Rückgang der Kaufkraft geführt. Wir sind also ärmer geworden und das kann auch jede noch so selektive Interpretation der Verbraucherpreisstatistik nicht kaschieren.”

“Der Preisschock der letzten Jahre ist damit jedoch nicht ausgeglichen. Die Preise sind ja weiterhin hoch. Um den Preisschock wirklich auszugleichen, müsste die Inflation nicht sinken, sondern es müsste über Jahre hinweg eine hohe Deflation kommen. Das wird nicht passieren. Wir befinden uns nun nach dem Preisschock vor allem bei den Energiekosten in einer Hochpreisära. Dumm nur, dass unsere Einkommen nicht im gleichen Maße gestiegen sind.”

Anatomy of a credit card rewards program by Patrick McKenzie (Bits about Money)

“(In industry, we sometimes distinguish interchange—which mostly goes to the issuing bank—and scheme fees—which mostly go to the credit card brand itself—but as interchange is much larger, let’s just call them both interchange for simplicity.)”

“Interchange is generally a percentage fee based on the final transaction size plus optionally a per-transaction fee. You can just look up the rates, but I strongly recommend you don’t, as you will be reduced to gibbering madness. (It took many smart people many years of work before Stripe could deterministically predict almost all interchange it was charged in advance of actually getting billed for it.)”

“In the United States, card acceptance is expensive and the rewards economy is robust. In Japan, card acceptance is expensive and the rewards economy is fairly muted due to—ahem—effective collusion by issuers. In Europe, card acceptance is cheap by regulatory fiat and so rewards are far less common (or commonly lucrative) than in the U.S.”

“[…] as a percentage of Average Daily Balance (ADB), even after rewards expense, interchange gets very sharply more lucrative at the top of the credit score distribution (740+, which is roughly 10% of accounts). The difference is actually larger than you see here , since credit lines and ADB also increase with credit score, for predictable reasons. (Rich people consume more than poor people on an absolute basis, film at eleven.)”

“[…] calculation of net purchases needs to be fairly robust against adversarial collaboration of users and merchants or the issuer gets turned into a money pump within a matter of days and will not likely be able to detect or reverse this condition for at least several weeks. This has happened many, many times. Credit card issuers, when they screw this up, lose millions of dollars”

“Money is fungible, money is fungible, money is fungible, but many people don’t actually orient their lives as if this were true, and so the financial industry meets them where they are and then charges them for the privilege. This user values a dollar more when it is a books-dollar than when it is a food-dollar.”

“[…] a source of advantage for frequent flyer miles as a pseudocurrency is that they can turn very-low-marginal-cost inputs, unsold seats, into very-high-perceived-marginal-benefit outputs, “free vacations”. Books-dollars may very well be worth more than a dollar”

“Very many of your users will do what you want them to, and use the card in a perfectly-acceptable-but-not-exactly-optimal fashion, and you will have a blended cost very near 1% for them. And very many of your users will do exactly what you most don’t want, and use the card only to buy books.”

“These users will even band into tribes, find each other on the Internet, and swap tips for exploiting poor, defenseless credit card program managers like yourself. The tribal elders will eventually run businesses, with names like The Points Guy , which eventually get quietly acquired by very sophisticated private equity firms. Those PE firms are betting that you continue paying generous per-signup affiliate commissions to Internet properties which send you new card users.”

“Redditors are frequently sophisticated with their spreadsheets; many of them could clearly earn three orders of magnitude more from the financial industry if they stopped thinking that the right way to monetize spreadsheet skill was in gaming credit card signup bonuses.”

“The Redditors think failure modes for the bank sound like pudding guy . Pudding guy, was, of course, one of the highest-ROI ad buys in the history of capitalism.”

Probably true.

The Supreme Court May Give Us Another 2008 Financial Crisis by Katya Schwenk (Jacobin)

“Bank of America — and the banking lobby — argue that the National Bank Act of 1864, the federal legislation underpinning the US banking system, exempts national banks like Bank of America — institutions chartered by the federal government — from New York’s interest law. They say the National Bank Act exempts national banks from all kinds of state banking regulations.”

God forbid anyone pass more recent legislation. It’s like private communism. National banks functioning like the state itself.

““I remember how frustrating it was to have a well-crafted state predatory lending law in North Carolina and then to experience banks fleeing to accommodative national regulators to evade it,” Rust said.”

Climate Change

2,000 senior women win “biggest victory possible” in landmark climate case by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)

“The ECHR ruled that the Swiss government had violated these women’s rights to respect for private and family life under the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to comply with climate duties or to address “critical gaps” in climate policies. Throughout the proceedings, Swiss authorities acknowledged missing climate targets, including by not properly supervising greenhouse gas emissions in sectors like building and transport, and not regulating emissions in other sectors such as agricultural and financial.”

“In a partly dissenting opinion, ECHR judge Tim Eicke warned that there could be a downside to the ECHR ruling creating “a new right” to “effective protection by the State authorities from serious adverse effects on their life, health, well-being, and quality of life arising from the harmful effects and risks caused by climate change.” Climate litigation attempting to force states to act could end up bogging down government, Eicke said, proving “an unwelcome and unnecessary distraction for the national and international authorities, both executive and legislative, in that it detracts attention from the ongoing legislative and negotiating efforts being undertaken as we speak to address the—generally accepted—need for urgent action.””

Bullshit. Just…bullshit. No-one is taking urgent action. Switzerland missed targets and actually increased per-capita CO2 share over the last 30 years, unlike other European countries, which have actually reduced it.

People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities—Until They Live in One by Andrew Kersley (Wired)

“[…] a testament to how much our cities, and by extension, our lives are designed around cars. In the US, between 50 and 60 percent of the downtowns of many cities are dedicated to parking alone. While in the UK that figure tends to be smaller, designing streets to be accessible to a never-ending stream of traffic has been the central concern of most urban planning since the Second World War. It’s what led to the huge sprawl of identikit suburban housing on the outskirts of cities like London, each sporting its own driveway and ample road access.”

Medicine & Disease

This stage of the pandemic was insane

Art & Literature

Make better documents. by Anil Dash

“[…] it’s extraordinary how common it is for people to have a slide that is 1/3 really carefully-crafted points that took a long time to devise and 2/3 an image that has zero purpose and was added at the last minute. Don’t undermine your work with an unnecessary compulsion to fill up space just because a template suggests that you should.”

The 15 Greatest Documentaries by The Cinema Cartography (YouTube)

I’ve seen a few of these and have added a few more to my watch-list.

Bring Me Anything But Jokes by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“That is what Letterboxd is. It’s a site whose premise (anyone can post reviews of movies, and the interesting and perceptive ones will rise to the top) is ruined by the social mandates shared by anyone under 55 years old (I need to take every possible opportunity to show the world how clever I am, how good I am, that I’m a star!)”

“Like all social networking behavior, this isn’t the product of feckless individual users, but rather a structural outcome of the site’s systems. People want very badly to have the top review (because they crave attention), and the shortest reviews are always going to earn the most likes, network-wide, because it takes so little time and effort to read them. And Letterboxd lives on the same internet we all live on, where the basic concept of how you’re supposed to comport yourself was dictated by a few thousand annoying people on Twitter in like 2010.”

“It leaves me completely unclear as to whether the podcast episode was a success or an intentional failure or an unintentional failure and, worse, whether Pandya himself thinks it was a success or not. This happens more and more often now, where I just genuinely cannot tell what level of irony people are operating at and so the basic work of language breaks down completely.

“[…] Whenever I write about this stuff people accuse me of wanting some facile “New Sincerity” or whatever, but I would honestly just like to know what the fuck people who communicate for a living are talking about.”

“If you want to treat Letterboxd as your own personal HBO special, in perpetuity, I ask that you please consider whether you would be better off keeping that in the group text so that the rest of us can actually talk about movies. Perhaps there can be a time and a place for jokes other than “all the time” and “everyplace.” And maybe someday we can all escape a curse that I know many other people must chafe against as much as I do − that 21st century affliction of always living under the suffocating weight of other people’s insecurity.”

The Grind Never Stops in Radu Jude’s Latest Film by Alex N. Press (Jacobin)

“She goes from one shabby apartment to another, filming the borderline-destitute disabled workers as they audition, hoping for the 500 euros that come with the role. Their desperation is palpable, the anxiety radiating off the thin walls. Some of the workers’ families plead with Angela to put in a good word, but the decision is up to the Austrians; after all, she’s just another worker being exploited by the wage differential between her country and that of the corporate overlords.”

“Claustrophobia threatened as I watched her listen to pounding club music and heavy metal, sucking down energy drinks to try to keep from falling asleep at the wheel. (“I can’t go on like this,” she tells a doorman at one point, to which he responds, “That’s what you think.”)”

“(one story she tells, about a porn star who had to pull up PornHub on his phone mid-scene to stay hard, is especially memorable).”

Interview with Lisa Duggan: Ayn Rand Had a Fragile Ego, Incoherent Ideas, and Bad Taste by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)

“[…] they’re set up through Ayn Rand’s fantasies of heroic, sexy, entrepreneurial supremacy. She’s a gateway drug. Her work is filled with a sense of aspiration to superiority, a sense of “me against the world” that appeals to adolescents a lot. So it’s a big machine for converting adolescents to a set of feelings and fantasies that then fold into conservative, right-wing, and pro-capitalist politics.”

“Her opposition was not just practical, but strongly felt. Because solidarity is not just an alliance, it’s a feeling. It’s a way of connecting with others and their struggles. It’s not merely a shared set of interests; it’s also an emotional experience. For example, when you witness a teachers’ strike and you are moved to tears, the emotion you feel in that moment”

“She also became anti-communist. Her opposition was not just practical, but strongly felt. Because solidarity is not just an alliance, it’s a feeling. It’s a way of connecting with others and their struggles. It’s not merely a shared set of interests; it’s also an emotional experience. For example, when you witness a teachers’ strike and you are moved to tears, the emotion you feel in that moment is solidarity. This is the feeling she opposed.”

“They continue to pursue higher education or job opportunities, even when prospects are bleak. They take on precarious jobs, believing that eventually they will achieve security and improvement. Berlant skillfully examines the emotional traces that sustain individuals in the face of overwhelming odds and evidence to the contrary. To Berlant, cruel optimism is the belief of a better future despite the absence of actual flourishing. She views this optimism as cruel to those who embrace it. This is a consequence of policy.”

“I would use the term “optimistic cruelty” to talk about the twentieth-century layering in of Ayn Rand’s feelings as they applied to the rise and triumph of a certain kind of capitalism. But at this point I’m not sure I would call it optimistic anymore. It’s a much grimmer and darker vision that advocates of Ayn Rand have today, whether they’re in the Trump administration or in Silicon Valley. They are no longer investing in a vision of ultimate good and triumph, but rather openly taking everything while it burns to the ground.”

“[…] people read and they recognize the way that a kind of civilizational domination has been eroticized as part of the project of empire. She incorporates this discourse into her stories, creating romance plots with characters who embody this eroticized civilizational discourse. There’s always a little soft BDSM going on.”

“She is so deeply embedded in our cultural context and drawing so deeply from the discourses and narratives that are at the core of the culture that we live in that I don’t want to single her out by diagnosing her.”

“Gore Vidal wrote in 1961, “Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night. Caesars are stirring in the Forum. There are storm warnings ahead.””

“With regards to religious morality, she argued that altruism and compassion were immoral because they encouraged the weak and incompetent to have more power and resources, and then they would mess it up for all of us.”

“That’s another example of her misunderstanding. Capitalism is a collectivist and corporate enterprise. It’s a class project. She really didn’t understand that. She failed to grasp that capitalism is inherently a collaborative effort between the state and capitalists, which is a defining characteristic of its history. Instead she perpetuated the fantasy that capitalism is driven by brilliant and superior individuals who are not hindered by mediocre people.”

“[…] what happens in the end is Howard Roark blows up a public housing project because it isn’t built according to his specifications, and everyone is supposed to cheer. And these are progressives! These are New York anti-Trump liberals, and the author of this document is a European social democrat. They are ignoring the context. I actually went around and talked to people outside the production. I went multiple times, and what I observed is that they simply overlook the context because it is so deeply familiar to them. It is culturally ingrained. They don’t even recognize the brutality, cruelty, inequality, and racism that are present in the story. Instead, they focus on the romantic plot and individual creative achievements, and they’re not even registering the larger context.”

“I think that is, in a sense, the problem of liberalism. Even when it’s advocated by people who are not elite, there’s a dropping away of the political-economic context to focus on one particular kind of struggle without considering the broader context.”

“[…] she was such a black-and-white thinker that she could only understand capitalism as being corrupted by those corporations. So she saw capitalism as failing and being corrupted by its managerialism, its collaborations with the state, but in order to see capitalism as corrupted, she also had to have a fantasy version of the history of capitalism. Because, of course, capitalism has never been independent of the state. The creation of the very context of markets and the set of relations that allow capitalism to function has always been embedded in the state.”

“The idea that there’s a laissez-faire version of capitalism without the state is complete malarkey. And most of the actual neoliberals knew that. They had a rhetoric of laissez-faire, but themselves, they knew what they needed to do was restructure markets and states, not eliminate them, even though their public rhetoric was “be free of the state.””

“[…] she sees the productive laborers, who construct the buildings and implement the plans devised by the brilliant architect, as no different than oxen. They’re people who perform the labor in a relatively mechanical way that has been set out by the brilliant individual, the superior entrepreneur.”

“And so reproductive labor is a similarly brute animal. It’s like growing a plant, right? You’re no different than the soil. She doesn’t see reproduction as creative or productive labor, either. She just sees it as like a brute bare life.”

“She once told a Native American West Point cadet, “It is always going to transpire that when a superior technological culture meets up with an inferior one, the superior will prevail.””

She’s like the tech bros. She would never have said “morally superior” because she didn’t even recognize that as a category. It was meaningless to her. Superior was necessarily moral. Q.E.D.

“According to film scholars, these creative outsiders manufactured an American dream fantasy machine, a machine that idealized the United States by erasing its settler-colonial origins, imperial aspirations, and stark capitalist inequalities.”

“Lisa Duggan Well, I mean, she just thought that people weren’t letting her do what she wanted to do. [Laughs] And later she was such a thorn in the director King Vidor’s side on the set of The Fountainhead because she wanted to control all the speeches and so forth. Her idea of what was quality ultimately made the film fail, at which point she became very angry and blamed them when she’s the one who made it so boring. So she thought the business culture ruined Hollywood by not allowing the creative individual (her) to impose her middlebrow taste on the popular movie. So the contradictions there are so legion. It doesn’t ultimately add up and make any sense because the sole logic is the logic of narcissism.

“Daniel Denvir On one hand, capitalist morality is fundamentally about blaming people’s condition on poor personal choices. But when Rand doesn’t get exactly what she wants in Hollywood, she immediately blames the inferiority of actually existing American capitalism for all of her own career troubles.

“Lisa Duggan For not being really capitalist, as she might put it. Everybody fails her and disappoints her because they don’t live up to her superior values. It’s the logic of narcissism, and there’s no other consistency in the way that these contradictory positions hang together. It’s not rational. It’s not like the fantasy of pure neoliberal or capitalist rationality. To the extent that she’s a sociopath or a malignant narcissist, that’s what capitalism is. She’s reflecting the history of empire, colonialism, and capitalism as being narcissistic and sociopathic. It’s not her individual diagnosis.”

“The people who are buying her books and being recruited into this would overwhelmingly be among the inferior masses. But they don’t see themselves that way because her version of individualism allows them to exceptionalize themselves from the masses and make an aspirational identification with the sexy entrepreneurial hero. The millionaire or billionaire — they have a chance to be that. And if they were to accept solidarity with the mass losers, they would be sacrificing their chance to rise out by their own efforts.”

Talking about the plot of the book Anthem:

“Technology is forbidden because if one person has invented the light bulb, they try to suppress it because it would jeopardize the livelihoods of candlemakers. And, you know, Ayn Rand can be funny. She can be really funny alongside her didactic and boring moments. Anthem is funny, and the guy who invents the light bulb is her hero.”

This is how capitalism works, too. It reminds me of how in Čapek’s War with the Newts, where humanity is incapable of continuing to supply the newts with explosives, weapons, and food because it would have ruined the industries that had grown up around providing those goods.

“[…] she lacked the analytical ability to discern the various strands within the movement. Instead, she formed her opinions based on emotional reactions to phenomena and then expressed them without much depth of understanding. Her sources mainly consisted of anecdotal encounters, TIME magazine articles, or television broadcasts.”

She would definitely have a podcast if she were alive today. Duggan just described nearly everyone creating “content” these days.

“Daniel Denvir Which both require the domination of nature. I was speaking with Silvia Federici the other day about how the people who are to be dominated are associated with nature.

“Lisa Duggan Yes. And they should both be exploitable. The earth and the inferior others are exploitable resources. And if we say we can’t exploit the earth, then that means we can’t exploit the natural resources of this labor pool. Then the entire structure will come down. And she wasn’t wrong about that. She was just wrong about hating it.”

“It’s really all about the affect. It’s about the feeling. It’s not about the ideas. Her ideas are cartoonish, and while some people become fans of her ideas, it’s the feeling attached to the ideas that sucks people in. It’s the contempt, dismissal, and indifference that has the influence. And that’s what Trump has. He’s not an Aryan idea, he doesn’t actually look like Howard Roark, but he thinks he does, or he wants to.”

“Trump imagines himself to be an Ayn Rand hero. And that’s the power of her vision, that there is such a wide swath of people with overlapping and sometimes conflicting political and policy views who can imagine themselves in her scenarios. And the end result of that is primarily this affective, cruel, greedy meanness that is the takeaway from bonding with an Ayn Rand novel.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

I too would have defined a philosopher as someone who loves knowledge. However, according to Writing Is a Bad Habit by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet),

“I gather philia, the third form of love which I’m not dwelling on much here, can also often connote lack: thus the recent analysis of the original usage of the term philosophos, as we find it in a fragment of Heraclitus, to mean not so much “lover of wisdom” as “wannabe wise person”, i.e., someone who is emphatically not wise but would very much like to be so”

I recently heard a story from a good friend about having been in a Japanese-style restaurant in New Jersey, where there was an older, seasoned sushi chef. Nothing fancy; just simple and delicious. There was no thought of expansion, no need to expand the menu—it just was what it was. It was good. It was quality. The thousandth time was definitely better than the first, but only marginally better than the 500th time. And maybe exactly the same as the 999th. Consistency, joy in the task, peace.

Writing something well (like code) for the thousandth time should be granted the same reverence as the first. Ömer’s story about the sushi chef. If you grant everything that reverence, then everything you do will be that good. Things might be better than they need to be sometimes, but they’ll also be good when they need to be.

The system we know trims the fat down to the bone, excising unnecessary quality—it pains me to even write that expression. Of course you want to make something only as good as it needs to be, but you have to be careful about losing your ability to make good things. If you don’t practice quality all the time, you won’t be able to deliver when it matters. It’s better to overdeliver and err on the side of caution.

Would it be more efficient if the sushi chef made mediocre sushi for those people who can’t tell the difference? Maybe? What about if there were a dozen choices, so each customer could choose which level of quality they wanted or could afford? That would be worse. It just would. It would be a colossal shame. Think of the customer who is exposed to something so much better than they’d expected. It’s worth it.

What happens when you have an experience like my friend’s at the sushi place? It’s nigh-religious and incredibly satisfying. It’s also utterly outside of the transactional system within which we are allowed to live.

Figure out what you think about the world. This will be a combination of what you believe and what you know, what you can prove. Figure out what you can prove, and with which facts, with which sources. The gap between what you believe and what you could possibly know if your faith.

What you could possibly know is that which you’ve experienced firsthand. You have to be able to trust your senses, right? Or maybe not. At any rate, anything you’ve learned secondhand is taken on at least a little bit of faith. You’re trusting an external source.

Think about whether you’re comfortable with that gap, with the size and composition of it. This is your faith gap.

Figure out what the parts of the world that are important to you thinks it knows, what that part of the world believes. Try to learn why the world believes it. Determine the gap between your belief system and that world’s belief system. Think about whether you’re comfortable with the size and composition of it. This is your heresy gap.

Is the gap between what you can prove and what you believe too large for your liking? What could you do to reduce the faith gap? What about the heresy gap? Is it smaller than you’d like? Do you keep it artificially smaller for certain reasons? Are you going along to get along?

What would be the consequences of changing those gaps? Sometimes those consequences will be that you personally will lose something, like a job, comfort, security, friends, money, or opportunity. The artificial gap you maintain so that you maximize these for yourself, despite what you know is the hypocrisy gap.

When someone hears something they don’t like and tries to cancel the speaker for having said it, even when they know it has a kernel of truth to it, it’s like someone suing their doctor for telling them that they have cancer.

I consider myself to have ended up espousing socialism or communism by starting from the principles of empathy, justice, and focus on society rather than ego. Where the current theme is to focus on ego and hope that a useful society results, I come from the other direction. Why? Because I don’t think I should get something to the detriment of anyone else. If it’s good for me, why should I get it when someone else cannot? Especially if my getting it prevents them from having it?
 
We’ve come quite far, if we’re honest. But also, if we’re honest, there is still so far to go. If we achieve some thing—get to some basecamp—then it may prevent us from achieving something better—the next basecamp higher—because people think that the problem has been solved. Working iteratively can be productive, but also counterproductive. Nothing is as simple as it looks. It’s enough to inspire vapor lock.
 
We must think of the priorities of what we are trying to accomplish. Rich-people goals should be far down the list. By definition, they already have more than they need. Why should we take care of them first? The standard argument that it’s because we assume that, since they’re rich, they must have done something useful, is just woeful bullshit.

Immortality Is Closer Than You Think: AI, War, Religion, Consciousness & Elon Musk | Bryan Johnson by Tom Bilyeu (YouTube)

Bryan Johnson is a fool, but he’s exactly the kind of fool who will build a religion. He’s wealthy and, therefore, respected by other wealthy people. He’s kind of dumb, so he won’t see that he’s founding a religion or, even if he does, he won’t see that it’s a terrible idea. He’s very arrogant, in that he believes that he—personally—should live forever and deserves to be optimized. He sells this to himself by pretending that he’s doing it for everyone who comes after him—you know, like Jesus Christ.

The host is a reasonable interlocutor, at times disagreeing quite cogently and strenuously, all of which Johnson doesn’t seem to notice—or takes as confirmation of his already firmly held beliefs. On the other hand, he says “I love Sam Harris,” but a couple of good friends of mine also persist in not seeing how irrational his precepts and thinking are.[3] I only just realized that the guy is wearing a backwards baseball cap. And a gold chain. I’m changing my mind about Tom.

Look at these guys:

Impact Theory Quiz Show

Four of the five cubbyholes are filled with batman memorabilia. I bet that Tom just loves Christopher’s Nolan’s philosophical films.

At about 21:00, Johnson says

“This is why I tried to be the example myself. I approached this and I said I’m not a holy being, you know, like somehow above the primal instincts that we all have. So I know if I have in my house bad food I’m probably going to eat it. And I know if I put myself in certain situations, I’m probably going to make bad decisions. And so this is why I said I’m going to willingly build an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. And so, then, when I squawk inside, and I’m like ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to do something else,‘ I’m bound by the algorithm.

“I mean this is a story as old as you know Ullyses being tied to the mask, right? Like, he knew he wanted to hear the siren song, but he told his mates to tie him to the mask so that when he could hear it, he couldn’t say anything. He put wax in their ears so that they couldn’t hear him give the command to release him. And so I was doing the same thing.”

Wait, what? So, what he’s actually selling is a wholesale capitulation to human foibles, proposing to use technology to build better people? He manipulates his addictive personality to become addicted to doing what’s on the AI’s list. He proposes this as a solution. I imagine it will only work with authoritarianism, but religion is good at that. This doesn’t sound like a good solution to anyone with a modicum of self-control or free will. Now, if he were arguing that none of has free will anyway, so might as well choose our master, that would be different.

He also gets the Ulysses part wrong. From Episode 11: Sirens (Ulysses Guide)

“In The Odyssey, Odysseus plugs his crew’s ears with wax to prevent them from hearing the sirens’ song; Odysseus himself, clever enough to have his cake and eat it too, ties himself to his mast so that he can enjoy the sirens’ song while preventing himself from steering the ship toward the temptresses.”

When he says “I was doing the same thing”, he doesn’t even know which part of the metaphor he’s referring to. He’s just using a classical metaphor to make himself sound smart.

For somebody who’s supposedly living his best, healthiest life, he certainly looks a bit … oily and wan.

I’m really wondering why anyone is listening to this guy about anything, when he’s self-described as having poor impulse control and doesn’t seem to do anything but spout generic platitudes. It’s not terrible or dumb, but saying that when something societally shattering happens, we’ll have to rethink how we build society.

I would argue that, since our society is capable of producing what it deems to be winners—billionaires, by our current definition—that think that they’re worth listening to, that we’re already long since due for a moment of reflection, to consider how we’d rather run things. He, as do most other people in his privileged position, is only worried now that his completely unearned post at the top of the heap might be endangered by things changing too quickly or too out-of-control. This is no different than fossil-fuel companies wanting to keep things the way they are until they’re ready to dominate in the next phase as well. This is the hidden bit that often goes unconsidered: capitalism doesn’t work because those who win the first rounds make sure that no-one but them can win subsequent rounds. Why should fools like this be able to tell us their opinions? Because they won the first rounds and now get to decide for everybody.

At 29:00, this fool repeats the exact same talking points as Mo Gawdat, in saying that let’s assume that the AIs are going to take over, then it doesn’t matter when that will be, in 1 year, 10, years, 100 years, 1000 years, we still have to think about how we would address that now, which is a weird argument to make. It propels the question to the top of the priority list, when mankind has much more pressing issues to address. You might argue that, if AI develops far enough, it could help us address those issues, but that’s bullshit. We know what the solutions are. We just don’t have the political will to apply them. Mostly because of the structure of a society that pukes up guys like this to the top of the heap. AI can’t help humans be better. Guys like this dream of replacing humanity with something less messy. There’s not room for me in that world, so I don’t struggle to make it real.

It continues in this vein, with people discussing philosophical topics without having read any other literature about how people in the last several millennia have thought about “problems” like humans not thinking about the long-term future. He has gotten wealthy in a world that encourages most people not to be able to think about anything but how to survive—which follows a path that funnels most of the value they produce to people like Bryan Johnson—so there’s no surprise that people think in the short term.

The beauty is that even the host talks about “reading about Mao’s China” or “Stalin’s Russia” without at all thinking that the empire he’s living in is a far, far more advanced and strangulating version of those regimes. Stalin never threw as large a proportion of its population into prison. Mao’s grip on his state was never as strong as the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank).

Fool #1 says that “COVID was an unmitigated disaster for everyone,” which is categorically untrue. It was an absolute boon for most of the people in Johnson’s cohort. He just doesn’t want to die. Why not? Who cares? Because “I think it’s possible that we could be steps away from the most extraordinary existence to ever happen in the galaxy, that our consciousness could be more expansive than we have imagination to contemplate.” GTFO dude. You are trying to start a cult. Good for you. Ohne mich. This is just a silly thing to say. It’s just religion.

They agree that solutions are impossible because, quite frankly, they can more easily conceive of an end to the world through AI than they can conceive of an end to—or even evolution of—capitalism, as it is now. People have always—and will always—plunder from one another, they think. It’s partially, I think, because they’re in a country and intellectual environment—if we can call it that—that is just so dogmatized and antisocial that they can’t imagine anyone not wanting to just take as much for themselves as they can. They can’t imagine socialism. Most people who say the things they say end up discussing some form of socialism. These people are sociopaths, though, so they just think about how to control other people like they were levers on a board.

They just assume that “human nature” is something that two bros can agree on as a static concept. From there, it’s easy to conclude that “AI is our only hope of us transcending human nature” and “AI is your only hope of transcending that muck.” From there, it literally went straight into a vitamin-supplement commercial. I shit you not. Like, incredible. I suppose it’s interesting to see how much you can sound like you know what you’re talking about as long as no-one listening knows anything either. Like, their descriptions of climate change and its possible effects are childish. They both agree that technology is the only thing that can save humanity. They don’t waste a second discussing whether a society based on AI would even be human anymore. They also totally use the “obesity is due to weak will” argument a lot more than you’d think. I suppose maybe both of them have lost a lot of weight? Which is why they think everyone else is irreparably weak? Are we really listening to people who hate themseves for wanting to eat a hot dog?

The next section is about long-termism arguments. Is a future life worth more than a current one? Bla. bla. bla. Seriously, I’m glad that I took at a look at some tech-bro rumination—and that’s being generous—just to get a feel for how superficially they treat the rest of history and thought. Why would you bother? It’s a lot of reading that no-one wants to do—and stuff written in the past was written with (A) less history having happened (so it’s obsolete right?) and (B) wasn’t something that your own brilliant self thought of.

At the same time, though, they repeatedly talk about how limited their minds are, how they’re incapable of overcoming even a piece of what they deem “human nature”. And they never consider the possibility that maybe not everyone is like that. They just assume that if they can’t do it, no-one can. And they reason they can’t do it is not because they’re limited—it’s because humanity is limited. This allows them to define themselves at the top of the food chain while still considering giving up all agency to a machine. They see technology as the only solution to their weaknesses. In order to protect their egos, they redefine their own weaknesses as humanity’s weaknesses.

Honestly, the commercial breaks advertising vitamin supplements and Oracle tools are the best summary of this video that you come up with. That lets you watch the guy who can’t stop praising his own brilliance because he “owes everything he has to ‘first-principles thinking’. It’s very powerful.” just stand there and shill as hard as he can for the most basic products.

From here, his guest talks about “zeroeth thinking”, which is like “first-principles thinking” but better. FFS. That’s what AIs will do for us, he says. Just a cascade of “zeroeth-principle thinking” inventions that humans could never have come up with. Like five-legged cats, I suppose.

Johnson likes to (A) state his ideas as questions that he then answers immediately and (B) make statements and then call them “incredibly insightful”, “extraordinary”, and “life-changing”. He talks about what it feels like to learn something—as if that’s groundbreaking. He’s basically describing that he had a euphoric dream and that’s why he’s founding this religion. Just like every other religion, you putz. This is now so woo-ey that it’s getting difficult to keep going.

His host responds with “I wish I was [sic] smart enough to understand zeroeth thinking.” He then says he doesn’t understand enough about Einstein’s work, but then goes on to paraphrase it. He never wonders whether maybe somebody actually does understand Einstein’s work well enough to judge. He’ll never interview those people. Instead, he’ll talk to other people who also haven’t read a book.

Every time Bryan says something, the host Tom responds with “let me paraphrase this” … and then does it. Then Bryan talks about his “favorite part of the book”—his own book—that talks about these “level zero” “breakthroughs” that have contributed to mathematics (which I’m honestly not convinced he actually understands).

These bros think they are “disrupting” human behavior. I don’t think that this just a scam, though. I feels like on, but they’re being scammed as well. They seem to really believe what they’re saying, with all of the limits on their understanding that they acknowledge but simultaneously deem unsolvable without outside intervention (i.e., by an AI).

“Tom: I don’t know. That’s where my intellect begins to break down.”

That pretty much sums up this whole video.

“Bryan: That’s when I determined that I was going to solve death.”

OMG. LMAO. 😂😂😂

“Bryan: I’m trying my very best to be the voice of reason, of wisdom, and of insight from the 15th century.”

OMG. He’s Buck Rogers.

I’m starting to like this guy. But only if he’s fucking with us. This is the kind of cult that might be created inadvertently. This is like Sacha Baron Cohen playing Ali G.

“Consciousness is extraordinary. I love to exist. So much. I don’t know what it’s like to be dead. I can find out at some point.”

The hits keep coming. He’s really letting his inner guru hang out. And the hits keep coming. He’s starting to remind me of Robert Edward Grant: King of Gobbledygook, but with an ever-more-annoying lisp. at 1:58:00, they say:

“Tom:I so take for granted that being dead is exactly like it was before I was born. Do you have an intuition that they are different?
Bryan: I mean…that’s zero. Zero is nothingness. So we were zero. And the idea is you become a zero. And then at some time in between a zero and a zero, you become something.
Tom: You said you have no idea what it’s like to be dead.
Bryan: Yeah. Which is a zero.
Tom: But if you think of before you were alive?
Bryan: Yeah?
Tom: That doesn’t scratch that itch for you?
Bryan: It’s unknowable to me. On either side of the spectrum, it’s zero. Zero is both … zero is nothingness and zero is infinity.
Tom: [long, cogitative pause] I don’t know that I can track that.
Bryan: It’s infinite in both directions.
Tom: It’s just absence.
Bryan: I mean, you’re going from zero to positive, you’re from zero to negative. Zero’s on the scale of infinite-ness [sic].”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that these guys were high and sitting in a dorm room as first-year students.

This is all told in somber voices, with serious faces, taking themselves and their recorded and broadcast discussion so seriously. I mean, I’m glad that they’re considering philosophical topics. I’m happy that they’re happy. But this is a very influential billionaire and an influential podcaster who are basically starting a cult based on bad philosophy. Which is how all religions start, but it’s just so boring. There’s nothing here to learn that you couldn’t have learned from much more erudite people in a far more comprehensive way. Their superficial treatment of these topics is delivered in a way that suggests to people new to the subject that this is the first time anyone’s ever considered these things and that they’ve actually solved something. Cult.

At 02:23:00, Bryan describes how people who disagree with him are doing so just out of knee-jerk reactions. Because they’re obviously wrong in their criticism. Because he’s right. You see?

“I don’t feel any need whatsoever for internal consistency. […] That’s the knee-jerk reaction that … a new idea landed in their inbox and their mind wanted to violently crush it and lower my status and power in the world by insulting me in the comments section.”

At 02:30:00, Tom deadpan asks,

“I’ll give you an example. Your ear—your left ear?—your left ear is at the age of a 62-year-old, if I remember correctly. And you can’t find a way to fix it. That does not seem like a reality that we can engineer our way out of.”

It’s a bit low-tech, but what about a hearing aid?

“Tom: Will we ever be able to make men taller. I mean, that’s like, dude, the more I get into, like, modern dating and stuff. It’s crazy. That shit matters. I wish it didn’t, but it like, you just get filtered out.
Bryan: [Laughing a bit uncomfortably, to his credit] I mean, I don’t know why we’d say no. What would we say no to. What are the limitations that we can’t overcome? And why are there limitations? I think is the more relevant question.”

What? I mean, seriously, what?

“Tom: So, there’s the fantasy that AI’s gonna solve it all, so sure. Like, I did an episode, not too long ago, I was literally shocked to find out that you can actually enlarge a penis. I was like: WHAT? My wife said ‘absolutely not,’ which I was very said by, because I was like, if this shit’s real, I’m going ham. She was like, ‘no, absolutely not.’ She reacted so violently negative that, uh, I was saddened, is the honest answer.
Bryan: Why?
Tom: Why was I saddened?
Bryan: Why was she…?
Tom: Well, from the perspective of, I … my penis is nothing to write home about, I’ll just be very honest with you. But it fits perfectly with the person that I’m married to. So, she is not enthusiastic about … more.
Bryan; Does she have data? Did she A/B test?
Tom: She has A/B tested. Yeah. For what it’s worth, if it were possible, I would have one I could throw over my shoulder. I’ll just very honest. That’s sounds awesome.”

I CANNOT TELL WHETHER THEY ARE FUCKING WITH ME.

They seem to be dead-ass serious in this discussion and they think this is just completely normal intellectual conversation to tack onto everything else. If Brace Belden of TrueAnon (Wikipedia) said it, I’d know he was just taking the piss, but these guys seem to be serious. I’m not sure they’re capable of irony. Or satire.

At 02;53:00, they say,

“Bryan: I’m looking into founding a ‘don’t die’ nation state. […] It’d be amazing if I could do a, say, 20 million-person nation state inside of a year.
Tom: Are you doing a nation state? Or are you doing a network state, á la Balaji Srinivasan (Wikipedia)?
Tom: Yes. Both.”

I can’t even with these two. Keshet was right, though! The discussion just keeps getting wilder and wilder. I was kind of wondering when they’d get around to the “chain” (which I’m totally assuming means “blockchain”).

The conversation continues in this vein. While I am generally interested in the ideas that they’re discussing, I don’t really like what they bring to the table. For example, I think it’s interesting to think about longevity, but they just assume that longer is better. They don’t talk about what the purpose of “don’t die” is, other than very, very superficially—and as a foregone conclusion. This allows them to focus exclusively on how to keep the body alive for longer—and not really talk about what you’re doing with all of that time. Like, are you doing it to learn? Or to be able to contribute to humanity? With 20 minutes left (at about 02:46:00), Tom asks … yeah, but what is a good life? But the answer is pretty superficial, with Bryan dodging the question by noting that a good life is different for people who will never die.

I’m utterly unsurprised to hear Tom giving Bryan a “Mensa hand-job”. At 02:57:00, he says,

“Tom: It isn’t like the only way you can be moral is to believe in religion—and this is one thing I meant to bring up earlier and give it a chance—all of the things that you’re saying, I’m presuming that people who have your level of intellect—you’re north of 130 for sure, you might be north of 150—dude, most people just can’t hang. They need that propagation medium of religion for them to orient to the world to know, ‘oh, I don’t do this thing because God told me not to.‘ Religion—as far as I can tell—is the only thing that works for hyper-intelligent people and for people that are…that struggle.
Bryan: [murmors of approval]”

I don’t think I’ll ever watch either of these guys again, not voluntarily.

Neo-Utilitarians Are Utter Philistines by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“The paradigm instance of what had replaced thought, one could already see, was the clickable scroll-down list: the full automation in question was going to include not just the automation of machine language, but of human language too. Or rather, these were going to fuse into one and the same thing.”

Now they’re doing music and art. It creates mediocrity, but sometimes that’s all you need. And it’s far better than what you’d create on your own. If still not quite…right. So, yes, if your sights are low, then the tools are helpful. You won’t create anything absolutely amazing, but amazing relative to what you could have created without it. It’s a tool. Some people can’t chop anything with a chainsaw. Other people can just slice through a log. And others can carve a bear statue. I don’t think that this tool will allow anyone to carve a bear statue anytime soon, but there are people slicing through logs where they wouldn’t have been able to without the tool.

“There was that one tech-bro, for example, who said that novels are a waste of time because they do not have sufficient per-page “information density” to justify the effort. There was that other tech-bro who said it’s not so important what happens to films from before 1995 or so, in the uncertain future of digital archiving, since they were far too slow and nothing really happens in them anyway.”

“SBF himself made the ultimate contribution to this rich new genre when he observed that Shakespeare is unlikely to be as “good” as everyone says he is, since there were so few people in the 16th century and it is therefore highly improbable that that century, rather than, say, this one, should have hosted history’s greatest English stylist.”

“Finance capitalists, it turns out, absolutely love to hear articulate people explain to them new and theoretically sound ways to convert their wealth, after the manner of the potlatch, into even more status or an even clearer conscience. Yea, not since Descartes whispered his Papist plots in Queen Christina’s ear, and caused her to abdicate to Rome, 1 have philosophers had so much influence in public life.”

“Have you not noticed this new cohort of cocky lads, who so proudly speak the language of the calculus of expected utility, who will not hesitate to tell you when it’s time to update your priors, or which path is most likely to help you max out your utils?”

“I mean, I like Bentham and Mill well enough —in fact Bentham is the sort of absolute freak who cannot fail to win my heart—, and I would not begrudge anyone their commitment to the tradition these men founded, were it not accompanied today by a scorched-earth revolutionary fervency that sincerely believes this single school of thought is rich enough by itself to go it alone indefinitely into the future, and that we can therefore dispense with any idea of philosophy as living tradition , involving, in part, like all traditions, due reverence to ancestors.”

“Anti-historicism comes in waves in philosophy, which of course the presentists themselves will not know or care about, given that the previous waves necessarily happened in the past.”

“The novatores of today are for their part not effortlessly learnèd, but only effortless; they make no effort at all to take the measure of how much they don’t know. One worries, moreover, that the technological moment at which they have appeared practically ensures that theirs will be the last and final wave. It’s presentism from here on out. Philosophy has come together with the culture that sustains it, rather than sticking to its traditional and far more noble role of standing apart from its culture and considering it with a critical eye. This is the culture, namely, of non-stop content, of the daily production of hundreds of exabytes of data around the world, of data-mongering and of generalized post-literacy.”

“Intellectuals spend their time reading Ptolemy’s Almagest and Le Chanson de Roland and stuff like that, and they just keep reading and reading until they’ve read so much that eventually, if things work out as hoped, they manage to come up with a compelling and at least partially original narrative account of some dimension or other of the human condition.”

“[…] if you don’t even recognize this as a respectable model of the work of the intellectual, it might be because you are yourself, like the PMCs, not an intellectual at all, but some sort of desk-clerk.”

Technology

Enshittification Made Tech Platforms Shitty and Now It’s Coming for Your Industry / Cory Doctorow by Chuck Mertz (This is Hell!)

“What actually gives rise to enshittification is that the companies that we buy things from not fearing that they will be punished if they do the things that they wanted to do all along. The way that we make those companies treat us better is by making them afraid of us again, not by rewarding them for good behavior, but by effectively punishing them for bad behavior.”

At 39:00, Doctorow exaggerates a bit when he mentions that the Apple Plus came out during the Reagan administration. This is true, but when he said it, it was as if to suggest that Apple’s always been as big and powerful as it is now. Apple had some serious doldrums, from which it rescued itself with the iPhone, then the iPad, then the App Store.

It wasn’t alone. IBM and Microsoft also did a “the news of our deaths have been exaggerated,” in the last few decades. This is very likely due to them exerting monopoly control—in Microsoft’s case, this was proven in court—but they really were foundering. I remember a time when there was no way you would accuse Apple of being a monopoly. It was a niche company. They may have rescued themselves with Chinese slave labor, but that doesn’t mean that the Apple that made the Apple Plus computer was at-all the same company that it is today. That’s just ludicrous and disingenuous.

I know Doctorow hates Apple like poison, but he should keep it a bit more level-headed if he wants to be taken seriously. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard him expose himself as quite technologically out-of-touch. He’s a tech / sci-fi writer, but he doesn’t really know how most of these devices work or what their relative strengths or complexities are.

Access to data isn’t a grant to exploit it by Cory Dransfeldt

“These models demand more data, more energy, more computational power — endless demands in a farcical pursuit of endless growth. They want free access to data with the benefits accrued to only the companies operating the models. You should be able to share something without a nameless AI company gobbling it up to train a new model.”

“Art should be able to be safely shared without it being fed into a blender that’ll create uncredited imitations rife with artifacts.”

“A need for data doesn’t entitle any of these companies to it.”

LLMs & AI

Your AI Product Needs Evals by Hamel Husain

“Like software engineering, success with AI hinges on how fast you can iterate. You must have processes and tools for:”

1. Evaluating quality (ex: tests).
2. Debugging issues (ex: logging & inspecting data).
3. Changing the behavior or the system (prompt eng, fine-tuning, writing code)

“Many people focus exclusively on #3 above, which prevents them from improving their LLM products beyond a demo. Doing all three activities well creates a virtuous cycle differentiating great from mediocre AI products (see the diagram below for a visualization of this cycle).

“If you streamline your evaluation process, all other activities become easy. This is very similar to how tests in software engineering pay massive dividends in the long term despite requiring up-front investment.”

The stock market climbed last year on the hope of AI. It will crash this year for the same reason.

How word vectors encode meaning by 3Blue1Brown (YouTube)

Undersea cables are the unseen backbone of the global internet by Robin Chataut (The Conversation)

“The process of laying undersea cables starts with thorough seabed surveys to chart a map in order to avoid natural hazards and minimize environmental impact. Following this step, cable-laying ships equipped with giant spools of fiber-optic cable navigate the predetermined route.”

Programming

React Compiler & React 19 − forget about memoization soon? by Nadia Makarevich (Developer Way)

“In React 19, we’ll see a bunch of new features, but we’ll have to wait a bit longer for the Compiler. It’s not clear right now how long, but according to another tweet from a different React core team member, it might happen by the end of this year.”

“The journey started in 2021, two years ago. Rolling out something as fundamental as this on a codebase as large as Meta is probably very complicated. So the jump from the middle of the timeline to the end might take another 2 years.”

How to split JavaScript strings into sentences, words or graphemes with “Intl.Segmenter” by Stefan Judis

“The Intl.Segmenter object enables locale-sensitive text segmentation, enabling you to get meaningful items (graphemes, words or sentences) from a string.”

You can use it as follows:

const segmenterDe = new Intl.Segmenter('de', { 
  granularity: 'word'
});
const segmentsDe = segmenterDe.segment('Was geht ab, Freunde?');

See the linked article for a dynamic playground to test it out. The API is relatively straightforward. Also, it is supported everywhere for quite some time now.

See also ECMAScript proposal: RegExp flag /v makes character classes and character class escapes more powerful by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer (2ality), which writes:

“The proposed new regular expression flag /v (.unicodeSets) enables three features:”

1. Support for multi-code-point graphemes (such as some emojis) for character classes and Unicode property escapes (\p{}).
2. Character classes can be nested and combined via the set operations subtraction and intersection.
3. The flag also improves case-insensitive matching for negated character classes.

“Given that the syntax had to be changed to enable nested character classes and set operations, a new flag was the best solution. /v can be viewed as an upgrade for flag /u: The two flags are mutually exclusive.”

Template engine with streaming capability by Laurent Renard (Lorenzo Fox) and Template engine with streaming capability − part 2/2 by Laurent Renard (Lorenzo Fox)

This relatively new blog continues to build from-scratch tools that combine streaming, generative APIs to create powerful and orthogonal facilities without using any external libraries. The previous articles in the series built a reactive framework whereas this article kicks off a templating functionality.

By the end of the second article,

“We went through three different techniques to optimise the template engine, and we now have very good performance on the test case. Performance is not the only criterion: after all, EJS is downloaded 13 million times a week, yet it performs poorly compared to Pug and tpl-stream(the library we built). Given its popularity, we can assume that the EJS’s performance is good enough for the vast majority of people and use cases.

“tpl-stream is very flexible, as it stands on Javascript tagged templates. It has no build step involved, and a small (yet fairly easy to read) code base […]”

Basic Things by Alex Kladov (GitHub)

“Common failure modes here:”

1. There’s no place where to put new developer documentation at all. As a result, no docs are getting written, and, by the time you do need docs, the knowledge is lost.
2. There’s only highly structured, carefully reviewed developer documentation. Contributing docs requires a lot of efforts, and many small things go undocumented.
3. There’s only unstructured append-only pile of isolated documents. Things are mostly documented, often two or there times, but any new team member has to do the wheat from the chaff thing anew.

“This is a recurring theme—you should be organized, you should not be organized. Some things have large fan-out and should be guarded with careful review. Other things benefit from just being there and a lightweight process. You need to create places for both kinds of things, and a clear decision rule about what goes where.”

“Forks work better in general as they automatically namespace everyone ’ s branches, […]”

I suppose that’s one way of thinking about it. This seems to lean heavily toward open-source contributions to open-source projects, something he didn’t outline at the top.

“More generally, code review is the highest priority task—there’s no reason to work on new code if there’s already some finished code which is just blocked on your review.”

That’s another interesting blanket statement. I very much dislike these high-handed diktat-by-procedure statements that force me to change my own selected priorities. Are you working on some code? Drop everything because someone else broke the build or requested a review. What the hell, man.

“Do you even need a project-specific style guide? I think you do—cutting down mental energy for trivial decisions is helpful. If you need a result variable, and half of the functions call it res and another half of the functions call it result, making this choice is just distracting.”

“Ensure that there’s a style tzar — building consensus around specific style choices is very hard, better to delegate the entire responsibility to one person who can make good enough choices. Style usually is not about what’s better, it’s about removing needless options in a semi-arbitrary ways.”

“Another second order effect is that NRSR [Not Rocket Science Rule] puts a pressure to optimize your build and test infrastructure. If you don’t have an option to merge the code when an unrelated flaky test fails, you won’t have flaky tests.”

Yeah, that’s fun. Russian roulette, with unlucky people having to fix everyone else’s half-broken shit as the top priority. I’m not a fan of using tools to enforce priorities, especially ones that might take a long time to fix. It removes agency from developers. Not enough test coverage? Too bad. No merge to main. Never. No excuses. I’d rather have guidelines and use developer discipline to enforce them than to constricted by an unyielding algorithm.

“One anti-pattern here is when the build system spills over to CI. When, to figure out what the set of checks even is, you need to read .github/workflows/*.yml to compile a list of commands. That’s accidental complexity! Sprawling yamls are a bad entry point. Put all the logic into the build system and let the CI drive that, and not vice verse.”

“[…] releasing software is also just code, which you can write in your primary language. The right tool for the job is often the tool you are already using . It pays off to explicitly attack the problem of glue from the start, and to pick/write a library that makes writing subprocess wrangling logic easy.”

He’s assuming Javascript, or some other non-compiled language for the tooling. That statement doesn’t really work if you write your build-script tooling in C# or Java.

“There’s an explicit support for free-form automation, which is implemented in the same language as the bulk of the project.”

Unless you wrote project in a compiled language, you dope. If you’re going to make such a general list of software-development recommendations, then you should be aware of the restrictions you’re implicitly imposing. Please just list them at the top. I’m appreciative of the article, of course—that’s why I’m writing about it and citing it—but I wish he’s been a bit more precise.

“Testing should be data oriented—the job of a particular software is to take some data in, transform it, and spit different data out. Overall testing strategy requires: some way to specify/generate input data, some way to assert desired properties of output data, and a way to run many individual checks very fast.”

“Zero tolerance for flaky tests. Strict not rocket science rules gives this by construction — if you can’t merge your pull request because someone else’s test is flaky, that flaky test immediately becomes your problem.”

True, but it ignores that tests sometime become flaky. That is, tests are rarely flaky on check-in, in my experience. They become flaky when the runtime is upgraded, a dependency is changed or added, or test data changes. Sometimes it happens when the timing changes. That makes “no flaky tests evar” a roulette wheel.

“Introduce a snapshot testing library early.”

“[…] any large project has a certain amount of very important macro metrics.”

These are called nonfunctional requirements. There’s a ton of literature on that. Instead of making up a new term like “macro metrics”, you should probably just use the term of art common in the industry.

“The release process is orthogonal from software being production ready. You can release stuff before it is ready (provided that you add a short disclaimer to the readme). So, it pays off to add proper release process early one, such that, when the time comes to actually release software, it comes down to removing disclaimers and writing the announcement post, as all technical work has been done ages ago.”

“It is much easier to start with a state where almost nothing works, but there’s a solid release (with an empty set of features), and ramp up from there, than to hack with reckless abandon without thinking much about eventual release […]”

Fun

I like doing the Connections puzzle in the New York Times. I don’t read any articles in the silly thing, but my partner and I enjoy the word puzzles. Connections is 16 words in a 4 × 4 grid. You have to reconstruct the four original sets. From easiest to hardest, it’s yellow, green, blue, and purple. Purple is usually something like “____ suffix” or “words found in colors” or something pretty difficult.

At one point, I started keeping the yellow and green matches in my head so I would focus only on the eight remaining words—and be able to suss out which ones are the purple or blue ones from there. What I was aiming for was to guess the sets in reverse order of difficulty.

Puzzle #269
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨

Puzzle #277
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨

My partner made me knock off this nonsense after a few days of it—because it was annoying. 🤷🏼‍♂️