Links and Notes for December 26th, 2025

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• Programming
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Why Russians haven’t risen up to stop the Ukraine war by Anna Matveeva (Responsible Statecraft)

“Nearly four years of war has profoundly transformed Russia. Fostered by state propaganda, many ordinary Russians have developed a sense of pride that Russia has survived in the face of Western hostility. This feeling has been fed by Western expressions of contempt toward the Russian people and Russian culture — insults that are assiduously quoted by the state-controlled Russian media.The Russian public struggles to see how the situation can be viewed from the other side and acknowledge that Western concerns may have grounds behind them; for example, the Kremlin’s attempts at meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections better explain the negative attitudes toward Russia in Washington, rather than pre-existing cultural prejudices.”

You had me going for a minute, but here comes Russiagate as a justification for the West’s animosity. Does this author really think that the Russian populace is too credible of its own state’s propaganda, but would benefit from believing that of the U.S. instead?

No, no, no, my dear Russic friends. Run the fuck away. That hand being held out hides a taser.

The West is coming to steal your shit and turn you into cheap labor and hot escorts. They hate you but will use you. They neither know nor care about your history or your culture. They couldn’t care less about justice or ethics. You are resources to be shoveled into their maws to convert, however inefficiently, into lucre.

There is nothing more to it than that.

The west doesn’t have friends. They’re not even friends amongst themselves. There is no mutual respect amongst them.

Fight or submit.

That’s all you got.

“Even though it was Russia that invaded Ukraine and that continues to attack the formerly ‘brotherly nation’, many in Russia view the war as defensive in nature and inevitable. A perception of external threat united much of the nation, and anti-Westernism became pervasive. Many Russians have become convinced that the West means Russia no good and, given an opportunity, would seek to inflict harm, unless it is strong enough to protect itself.”

They’re right! How do you not note that? That is the correct interpretation of the current situation. It has been like this since 1917.

Also not noted: that the Russian people are yoked to a war in the same way that the U.S. people are yoked to each and every one of their wars.

“The Russian economy, the most heavily sanctioned globally, experienced sustained growth for three consecutive years. Despite inflation, there is a widespread mood of optimism about the future. The war has stimulated innovation. State and private manufacturers drive technological advancement, similar to what occurred during World War II when Katyusha rockets and T-34 tanks were created. While not all inventions may be groundbreaking, they are numerous and heavily publicized.”

“The Russian development model constitutes another key identity pillar. Large state obligations, public investment, affordable utilities, and low taxes are the customary norms that Russian citizens anticipate and that form the components of the social contract between them and the state. They believe that their counterparts in the West are disadvantaged in this regard.”

“Russia today is therefore a different country from the one that entered the war, with a greater sense of social cohesion and confidence in its own viability as a nation. In the long run, this may lead to profound changes in Russia’s identity. In the short term at least, it will sustain public willingness to continue the war.”

Should We Replace Elections with Lotteries? by Tim Sommers (3QuarksDaily)

“Arguably the leader of this movement, Alexander Guerrero, author of Lotacracy: Democracy Without Elections (2024), has gone further arguing we should eliminate voting in favor of a lottery system to appoint our political representatives. Here’s Guerrero describing his view and its advantages.”

“We would be better off using randomly chosen citizens, selected to serve on single-issue legislatures (each covering, say, transportation or education or agriculture), who would learn about the relevant issues in detail and engage with each other over an extended period of time to make policy decisions. Instead of a generalist legislature like Congress, we would have 30 single-issue legislatures, each with 300 randomly-chosen citizen legislators serving three-year terms. A true random selection of citizens age 18 and up could be established using mechanisms like those used for jury selection. Those selected wouldn’t be required to serve, but a significant salary, the promise to accommodate family and work requirements, and the sense that service is a civic duty and honor should encourage them.”

They Spread Corruption And Call It Peace by Indrajit Saramajiva (Indica)

“These people without shame work for the Empire that has no name, and corruption is precisely how they get paid. Everyone acts surprised, but why? Corruption is the name of the game.

“Corruption is the true operating-system of the Ruse-Based Order. What they call the Rules-Based Order™ is precisely the abrogation of international law and the substitution of rule by international corporations. It is, as Simplicius puts it, the Ruse-Based Order in full debased view. Now they’re just openly hijacking ships, bombing hospitals, and murdering journalists.”

German government abolishes basic welfare support by Mariana Arens (WSWS)

“The “New Basic Security” will in future be accompanied by harsh sanctions, cuts and tightened rules regarding what is deemed acceptable work that an unemployed person must accept or lose benefits. If an appointment at the job centre is missed, benefits are to be cut by 30 percent for three months, amounting to around €150 less per month. (The current basic social security rate for single adults is €563 per month). In the event of further missed appointments, benefits will be reduced in stages. After the third violation, they can be reduced to zero.”

“The defence budget will rise next year to €82.7 billion and, including the special funds, to €108 billion. The aim is to reach military spending of 3.5 percent of GDP (€153 billion) by 2029. When investments in war-ready infrastructure are included, the figure rises to as much as 5 percent.

“Yet there is supposedly no money for welfare and pensions. “We can no longer afford the welfare state,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) declared half a year ago. At the same time, his budget favours the banks, shareholders, and super-rich, who will benefit from tax cuts and subsidies. Thus, the corporate tax rate, which applies to corporations, companies, and banks, is being systematically reduced from the current 15 percent to just 10 percent over five years. Shortly after the Second World War, this tax stood at 65 percent, and in the post-war period until 2008 it was set at 25 percent.”

“At present, one in five children and one in four young adults in Germany is at risk of poverty. Food banks are registering a sharp rise in child poverty and have sounded the alarm: almost a third of food bank users is under 18 years of age. Old-age poverty is also increasing. Currently, one in five people over the age of 75 in Germany is affected by poverty.

“At the same time, unimaginable wealth is accumulating at the top of society. According to the government’s latest mandatory poverty report, published in early December, the richest 10 percent own more than half—54 percent—of total wealth, while the bottom half owns just 3 percent. Inequality is rising, and Germany has the highest density of billionaires in Europe.”

Germany has seen what the U.S. is doing and thought to itself, “this is good. We need to do that.”

The vultures have called the time of death of Germany and are now picking apart another corpse. Ah, who am I kidding? They’re not even going to wait until it’s actually dead. They’ve decided to pull the plug.

CN Live! S3E8 − PALESTINE 20 YEARS LATER − John Pilger & Ilan Pappé by Consortium News (YouTube)

This video screens the documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue (IMDb) for the first hour, then interviews the director and interviewer John Pilger, as well as one of the principals, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé.

This 20-year follow-up is from July 28. 2021, more than two years before the next wave of horror began. If you watch the documentary, and listen to the commentary from the two interviewees, you’ll realize that the horror only intensified but has been ongoing since 1974, when Pilger released his first films about the area.

“Acclaimed journalist and filmmaker John Pilger on the changes that have come over Palestine since the making of his film ‘Palestine is Still the Issue’, released in 1974 & 2002. We will start by screening the film.

“The past two decades have seen an extreme turn to the right in Israeli politics with grave consequences for Palestine and its quest for independence, including four major Israeli attacks against Gaza. Pilger and Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who appeared in the 2002 film, will discuss the worsening situation over the decades for Palestinians and where the future of Palestine and Israeli is headed.

“Pappé is the author of many books, including ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’, in which he documents that ethnic cleansing was a long-standing Zionist goal that was planned in detail by Ben-Gurion in the Red House headquarters outside Tel Aviv and included a much greater number of atrocities against Palestinians in the establishment of Israel in the late 1940s.

“Pappé says it was the start of a process of ethnic cleansing that continues until today.

““Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called “ethnic cleansing”. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East.“ ”

How Western Ignorance Has Been Plundering Africa by Bronwen Everill | Chuck Mertz (This is Hell!)

This was a fantastic interview with someone who doesn’t mince her words. She answered at least two, relatively long, winding questions that were designed to be answered with equivocation with “Yes. I think so.” Good for her.

“Like whatever the newest thing is in the West, that seems to be like, it’ll be the solution for whatever Africa’s supposed problems are, right? They’re seeing a nail, they’ve got a hammer. But actually on the ground, microfinance is a really good example because actually there’s lots of indigenous ways of thinking about credit and doing credit and thinking about entrepreneurship. And I laughed when I said, ‘you know, that like credit is microcredit that is gonna bring entrepreneurship to Africa because like, there’s just entrepreneurship everywhere. And the idea that the west has to incentivize entrepreneurship, that like otherwise people are gonna be lazy as a really persistent myth throughout the 18th century… 19th century… all the way up to today.”

We got the Protestant work-ethic and they don’t. Must be something to do with too much melanin. Not much you can do about that. The shiftlessness seems to be baked in.

Just leave them alone. Give them money. Stop telling them what to do with it. Stop propping up the worst people in the world there, just because they funnel all of the resources out of the country for nearly free. Just stop. It’s not their fault that the west has no morals, no compunctions, no notion of satiety, and an addiction to plunder. Just leave them alone.

The Global Economy Runs on Extraction by Laleh Khalili | Chuck Mertz (This is Hell!)

This was another fantastic interview with a woman who knows what she’s talking about and who is extremely talented in talking about it. She was a real pleasure to listen to.

“The crisis that we are seeing at this moment is in part because of the acceleration, of extraction. I think we’re living in a moment in time where inequality is growing faster than at any other time in history where. The top 1% of the population in the United States hold more than 60% of the country’s wealth, whereas the bottom 25% holds something like 4%. This incredible inequality has to be protected through a whole series of unpopular authoritarian measures and through the force of the gun. This world that we’re living in is a world that 20th century oil, capitalism, and today’s hyper-accelerated extractive economy has generated.”

The Destruction of Democracy to Christianize America by Matthew Boedy (This is Hell!)

I learned much more than I thought I wanted to know about Turning Point USA. It is a deeply Christian organization. It has these seven mountains that it wants to achieve for America to turn it into a Christian State.

“If you think about what Charlie Kirk did on these campus events, he prepared for weeks and months. Like he would do white board sessions and do mock debate sessions and would anticipate questions. And he had all this staff and research to do this. And then you bring the unprepared college student who happens to see it at lunch and wants to walk down and ask a question. And he just traps them in their own questions or interrupts them and frames his answer so he can get to the next question. It is not a debate because he never loses. He was one of the originators of this ‘Prove Me Wrong’. He was never ‘proven wrong’, right? He might cede a point here and there to get to his larger thing that he wants to say. But it is a debate style about victory and winning. And about showing that you win. While he personally was perhaps civil talking to someone on a microphone, Turning Point was recording all this and then putting it up on their YouTube page with the headline ‘Charlie Kirk burns another student’ or ‘Charlie Kirk embarrasses another lib’. One of the things he says at these rallies, especially the one in Utah in which he was killed, ‘bring the best libs that this place has to offer’. Because he wants them to come up front and he’ll invite them to the microphone first just to in some manners embarrass them. I don’t think that is healthy democracy, I think that is a younger version of Donald Trump.”

Journalism & Media

Der Skandal um Jacques Baud: Die EU, die „Gedankenverbrechen“ und die Drohungen der Bundesregierung by Tobias Riegel (NachDenkSeiten)

“Die Tragweite solcher Sanktionen wegen „falschen“ Meinungen ist immens: Die EU führt hier indirekt den Tatbestand des „Gedankenverbrechens“ ein. Und dieser Tatbestand wird dann nicht einmal vor einem Gericht verhandelt, sondern einfach so verkündet, ohne den „Delinquenten“ auch nur anzuhören.”

“Die Bundesregierung habe angekündigt, demnächst weitere Publizisten auf diese Liste setzen zu wollen, die aus ihrer Sicht „#Desinformation“ verbreiten würden. Deshalb sei es so wichtig, jetzt diesen Rückfall hinter elementare rechtsstaatliche Errungenschaften zu stoppen.”

“Der EU-Politiker Martin Sonneborn hat sich in diesem Beitrag gewohnt bissig und treffend zum Vorgang um Jacques Baud geäußert:”

“Ein rechtsstaatlicher Albtraum. Die Willkürverfügung eines nichtstaatlichen Gebildes – getroffen hinter willkürlich verschlossenen Türen, gestützt auf willkürlich geheimgehaltenes Raisonnement und erlassen von dem gesichts-, namen- und niveaulosen Willkürapparat, der die EU einhundertundzehn Jahre nach Kafkas ‹Der Prozess› geworden ist.”

“Regierungskritiker, die inhaltlich auf dem falschen Feld „unterwegs sind“ müssen also nun „damit rechnen, dass es auch ihnen passieren kann“. Eine unverhohlene Drohung, auf die man anscheinend auch noch stolz ist: Der Sprecher versucht nicht einmal, die Verantwortung für die Sanktionen gegen Baud auf Brüssel abzuwälzen.”

“Free speech and its enemies.” by Patrick Lawrence (The Floutist)

“Baud’s assets are now frozen in the E.U. and he cannot travel. He cannot access his bank accounts and various sources of income are blocked. As of now it is a criminal offense to transact with him—to sell him a house or groceries, to take in his shirts, to repair his car. “Although the regulation allows minimal subsistence payments,” Lapavitsas writes, “the effect is to paralyse a person economically and professionally.””

Ist Weltfrieden möglich? (Live-Mitschnitt vom Vortrag in Riesa) by Daniele Ganser (YouTube)

This is a nearly 2-hour talk he held in Germany on 30. April 2025. It’s in German. It’s absolutely excellent.

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

“There is a net beyond the net” by Hinternet Editorial Board (Hinternet)

“The only other book in this collection known to be annotated by the same hand is a copy of a 1394 edition of Henricus de Fonte Lucis’s Expositio simplex super Evangelium Ioannis. This work is mostly remembered for a curious proto-Calvinist argument about the impossibility of salvation by deed, in which the author presents a thought experiment about eating turnips. Suppose an angel comes to you and tells you that your soul will be saved only on the condition that at the time of death you will have eaten an even number of turnips; if the number is odd, you will be damned to hell. When this peculiar news arrives, you have been eating turnips your entire life, with no possibility of ever retrieving a precise number of them. What, the Scholastic author wonders, does one do? Stop eating turnips? Continue eating them, but anxiously? Or do you simply proceed as before, equanimitously, knowing that your condition really has not changed at all?”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

You and “You” (Digital Dopplegangers)

“In their classic paper The Extended Mind, Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue that tools and external systems can become genuine parts of our thinking, not substitutes for it, but extensions of it. Writing things down, relying on calendars, or using software to manage complexity does not necessarily weaken agency. From this view, offloading routine tasks is a sensible way to preserve attention for judgment and care. The concern is not that our cognitive boundaries are expanding, but that some of these extensions now operate continuously, even when we are no longer engaged. The issue is that when support tools begin to act on our behalf rather than alongside us, the line between augmentation and substitution quietly starts to blur.”

Taste Values Craft by Kyle Munkittrick (3QuarksDaily)

“Taste is the valuing of craft.

“That is, taste is the ability to assess and appreciate a work based on deep understanding of techniques and skills used in the work’s creation, whether it’s a car, a novel, an app, a song, or an outfit.

“In Jasmine Sun and Robin Sloan’s Utopia Debate “Can AI have taste?”, Sun argued that if the YouTube or Spotify algorithm ever gave you a good recommendation, then yes AI has taste, because it understood and recreated your taste.

“No. Algorithms understand your preferences. Taste is not your preferences. Preferences are, however, the thing most commonly conflated with taste.”

““Let people enjoy things!” is the barbarian’s retort. You’re a snob! Stop. I can point out the failures of craft without telling you that you shouldn’t like it or judging you if you do. This is the courage Sloan was talking about. Good taste can and often must contradict popular opinion.”

“A snob is someone with good taste who has made the same mistake as an amateur: confusing taste with preference. Snobs make one of two mistakes, both of which are abdications of the duties of good taste. The first is to judge a person for what they like and appreciate. No. Taste judges works, not people. Further, good taste teaches. No one is born with taste and no one has good taste in all things. The snob forgets this.”

“The virtue of taste demands we neither be snobs nor pretend things are good because they are liked.”

Technology & Engineering

Enshittification by Chuck Mertz | Cory Doctorow (This is Hell!)

Cory discusses his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. (Verso Books), summarizing the main points quite nicely. I’ve not read the book but I follow his blog Pluralistic, where he’s written a lot about it.

“Enshittification is not a theory about you shopping wrong or about fetishizing your consumption choices, nor is it even a theory about how the people who are doing this are bad. It is a theory about what happens when our policy makers create an enshittogenic environment. Whether the product is free or not, you are the product if they can get away with making you the product. A hospital that can’t fix its own ventilator did not get a free advertising supported ventilator. The reason they’re being charged 200 bucks for a technician to come out and type an unlock code after they make the repair is not because they didn’t pay enough for the ventilator. It’s because we have a law that makes it illegal for them to bypass that step.”

Programming

Nobody knows how large software products work by Sean Goedecke

“If a codebase is owned by a healthy engineering team, you often don’t need anybody to go and investigate − you can simply ask the team as a whole, and at least one engineer will know the answer off the top of their head, because they’re already familiar with that part of the code. When tech companies reorg teams, they often destroy this tacit knowledge.”

“In my experience, most engineers can write software, but few can reliably answer questions about it. I don’t know why this should be so.”

I know why: They either don’t write tests at all or they have inadequate semantic test coverage. If they had a working test harness, they could answer a question trivially by consulting existing tests, or by writing more tests to answer the question.

C# 14 Extension Members: Complete Guide to Properties, Operators, and Static Extensions by Laurent Kempe

“Perhaps the most powerful C# 14 capability is extension operators. You can now add user-defined operators to types you don’t control, enabling natural mathematical operations.”

When I first saw this, I thought it was kind of gimmick-y. But I just realized why it’s very nice that you can declare operators separately—optionally—from the type. Adding operators by default is a heavy decision in most APIs. You generally don’t do it except for the most obvious cases, like matrices, etc. where there is really only one possible way to implement the standard operators.

However, for a lot of other types, it would be convenient to have these operators but they might be annoying for some. This way, you can either add them in yourself—tailoring the implementation for your needs—or you can pull in a NuGet package that extend standard types with operators. This allows you to opt in to the operators.

With these new extensions, we’re probably going to see more lightweight types that are delivered in multiple NuGet packages, the satellite packages being extensions the enhance the base type for certain scenarios.

The author demonstrates such a custom operator, using tuples.

extension(Point point)
{
    public static Point operator +(Point point, (int dx, int dy) offset) =>
        new Point(point.X + offset.dx, point.Y + offset.dy);
}

// Usage:
Point translated = myPoint + (5, -3);

Fun

Winner got the best prize, ended great (Reddit)

I laughed out loud at the this little conversation in the comments.

This was a short video of a marriage proposal, enacted by an entire family during a Christmas game of speed and focus. The bride “won” the prize, which turned out to be her engagement ring. The groom was her final opponent. He was wearing white crocs.

She'll never see it coming

“Dude proposed in white crocs and got the girl.

“So romantic.”

“Damn it I’ve got camo printed crocs.”

“She’ll never see it coming.”