<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#covid">COVID-19</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h><span id="covid">COVID-19</span></h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/28/wuci-f28.html" source="WSWS" author="Andre Damon">The Wuhan lab lie: “Weapons of mass destruction” redux</a> <bq>None of the media coverage noted the fact that <b>the person who wrote the Wall Street Journal ’s report, Michael R. Gordon, is the most notorious liar in the American media</b>, whose fabrications were so enormous that even his former employers at the New York Times had to repeatedly distance themselves from him.</bq> <bq>The retraction by the Times ’ public editor quoted reporter Robert Parry, who explained the pattern in Gordon’s reporting:<bq>All these stories <b>draw hard conclusions from very murky evidence while ignoring or brushing aside alternative explanations.</b> They also pile up supportive acclamations for their conclusions from self-interested sources, while <b>treating any doubters as rubes.</b></bq>And, indeed, this is the pattern of the Wall Street Journal ’s latest article, which is, in the words of the late Parry, “Another Michael Gordon Special.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/02/gvhy-m02.html" source="WSWS" author="Andre Damon">White House and US media revive the Wuhan lab lie</a> <bq>But the US government’s advocacy of the Wuhan lab lie has nothing to do with science. <b>It is a piece of war propaganda and disinformation of the kind in which intelligence agencies specialize.</b> The FBI, the organization founded by J. Edgar Hoover to prosecute and blackmail left-wing opponents of American capitalism, is not in the business of investigating the origins of diseases.</bq> <bq>The public advocacy by the FBI of the Wuhan lab lie has exposed individuals like journalist Glenn Greenwald, comedian Jimmy Dore, and journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate of the Grayzone, who are orienting ever more openly to the fascistic right.</bq> What the fuck does that even mean? Why shoehorn this patently untrue disparagement in here? It's not a competition, numbnuts. I don't know that the FBI pretending to agree with these journalists (and one comedian) suddenly makes them fascists. I'm growing a bit tired of the WSWS screeching about fascists everywhere---sometimes suspiciously when their targets disagree with them on certain facts, while agreeing mostly on a lot of policy positions. It smacks more of online pissing contents---of Twitter bullshit bleeding over into the pages of the newspaper. I think Andre Damon and David North need to take a deep fucking breath and quit Twitter. It's turning them into morons. This is not to say that I haven't cringed at Max Blumenthal and Jimmy Dore at times (see <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4390">Homo Ignoramicus</a>), but I've also seen them doing good work (see <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4651">Max Blumenthal and Mnar Adley on Ukraine</a>). Dore has also done good interviews (see <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4162">Boogaloo = Boogie Man</a>), although the cited interview would probably make the WSWS fill its pants right up. They see fascists literally everywhere. The problem with the WSWS is that their approach is a complete dead end. You don't have to go all the way to meet people, but you have to be at least willing to meet them halfway to <i>talk to them</i> and try to <i>convince them of your ideas</i>. How the fuck does the WSWS propose to build a movement when they're screeching at 90% of the populace about what useless bags of fascist shit they are? That's not how you win support. You don't have to convert to their ideas, you morons; you pretend to listen while <i>converting them to yours</i>. Trust me: I have a family whose politics are nothing like mine, but they love me, and I shame them into pretending to have my politics while I'm around. I bludgeon them with logic, counteracting their FOX News. It's not easy and it takes practice, but I <i>despair</i> at the hard-line intolerance I see in like-minded people at places like the WSWS. David North is taking a run at fucking <i>Chris Hedges for being a fascist</i>. What fucking planet is North even on? <bq>Particularly over the past year, Blumenthal and Mate have fully embraced the pandemic policy of the far right, promoting Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, leading authors of the Great Barrington Declaration,</bq> That makes them wrong on that issue, not fascists, you indentitarian, nuance-free <i>Spassbremse</i>. <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/02/savings-taxes-and-share-buybacks/" source="CounterPunch" author="Dean Baker">Savings, Taxes and Share Buybacks</a> <bq>But <b>this is not a story of households drawing down their savings in any meaningful sense.</b> If the household with the $100,000 gain, spent on extra $20,000 on one-time expenditures, after paying an extra $20,000 in capital gains taxes, their reported savings would be $40,000 lower than in the prior year, but they would still have $260,000 in the bank from selling their stock. This is to a large extent the story of the decline in the saving rate that we saw in 2022.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-27/wirecard-had-a-wild-run" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Wirecard Had a Wild Run</a> <bq>As an investor, <b>you should think about the likely future restrictions on pollution</b>, and avoid buying companies that are profitable now only because they impose externalities on the world that are not properly priced.</bq> On the surface, this seems to be OK as a corrective mechanism, but it fails to prevent irredeemable harms. The system encourages companies to exploit harmful loopholes as a way of closing them through being noticed for the horrific side-effects, but the <i>damage is done</i>. Instead of incetivizing greed, the only way to protect ourselves from irrevocable damage is to inculcate a cautious ethics that shies from personal profit where it may have deleterious but temporarily legal side-effects. <bq>How do you get people to pay you for those externalities? In theory everyone on earth benefits from having less carbon in the atmosphere; I guess you could take up a collection. <b>But in practice the answer is that some companies create negative externalities in the form of carbon emissions, and due to some combination of regulation, customer pressure, shareholder pressure, employee pressure, etc., they have to internalize those externalities.</b> And instead of doing that themselves — by not producing stuff that creates carbon emissions, by telling their employees not to get on planes to visit clients, whatever — they buy carbon credits in a financial marketplace.</bq> Instead of doing the right thing, we have to do somersaults in order to make sure that the right people continue to benefit primarily, then pat ourselves on the back for having built a horribly inefficient Rube Goldberg machine that wastes 99% of its value on people who don't need it while doing "good" with the remaining 1%, purely as a side-effect. <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/02/patrick-lawrence-the-return-of-non-alignment/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Return of Non-Alignment</a> <bq>I am more in the way of very pleased to see a new generation of leaders revive ideals first articulated during the postwar “independence era.” I have noted these ideals previously in this space. They are based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence Zhou En-lai drafted in the early 1950s and then took to Bandung. These are, simply stated, <b>mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, nonaggression, noninterference in others’ internal affairs, equality among nations, and—the point of the other four—peaceful co-existence.</b></bq> <bq>This is the Biden administration’s standard routine. <b>Cast events as matters of ideology and sentiment and pretend politics and history are of no importance.</b> So hollow and tired. So wanting in seriousness.</bq> <bq>The non–Western nations present had made their position on the Ukraine crisis very clear well before Bangalore. It is important to note its nuance. No, we do not approve of the war in Ukraine. No, we are not going to condemn the Russian intervention. Yes, we understand that the West shares responsibility for provoking this conflict. Yes, sorry, but <b>whether Russia has violated one of the Five Principles is complicated by the Western powers’ conduct leading up to this war.</b> Yes, the West could and should have prevented it by diplomatic means before it started. Yes, <b>we want to see this settled now via negotiation.</b></bq> <bq>While it is altogether sad to watch the world divide once again as it did during the first Cold War, <b>conflict and confrontation are inevitable so long as the Western powers are represented by blunt instruments such as Janet Yellen.</b></bq> <bq>We have understood for many years that <b>among the things the neoliberal West cannot tolerate, nations that think for themselves in the interests of their people rank highest.</b></bq> <bq>So far as I understand it, “nonaligned” means “not aligned,” not with this side, not with the other. <b>The Americans don’t speak this language, and it is worth noting how eagerly the Europeans haven’t either</b>, since the Ukraine crisis erupted.</bq> <bq>let us not leave out <b>Annalena Baerbock</b>, Germany’s Green foreign minister, who is as <b>hawkishly Russophobic</b> as anyone walking around in Washington. Here she is speaking at the Munich Security Conference a couple of weeks ago: <b>“Neutrality is not an option, because then you are standing on the side of the aggressor.”</b> Yes, Virginia, there are as many stupid statesmen and stateswomen now as there were back then. It was Newspeak during Cold War I and it is Newspeak this time around. <b>You can call yourselves nonaligned as long as you align with the West. Otherwise, you are with the “them” in our “them or us” formulation: This is the commonly held Western position.</b></bq> American and European leaders and elites have absolutely peaked at George W. Bush's philosophy: <iq>If you're not with us, you're against us.</iq> This painful stupidity permeates the opinion of most of the populace. They don't even question it. There is no place for non-participation when they've already decided for you that you must participate. It's like talking to a sports fan who asks you which team should win. "I don't care," isn't an option, as far as they're concerned. The other side is the ultimate evil. How can you not side against it? Stick it where the sun doesn't shine, <i>Frau Baerbock</i>. <bq>The U.S. and its Atlantic world allies are to be welcomed as a new world order takes shape. <b>What the non–West rejects is any suggestion of the hegemony Washington and its allies insist upon.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/on-the-first-anniversary-of-the-war" source="Russian Dissent" author="Boris Kagarlitsky">On the First Anniversary of the War</a> <bq><b>The government’s appeal to big business to voluntarily contribute 250-300 billion rubles to the budget to cover the deficit, which had already reached one trillion rubles in January, was not met with sympathy.</b> The largest corporations, previously the greatest recipients of tax breaks from the government, not only showed no willingness to share, but also publicly announced their stinginess.</bq> <bq>[...] these corporations, including the ones associated with the state, simply do not see the point in supporting a budget which both threatens an uncontrolled increase in the deficit, and <b>insists on financing a war that is already lost anyway.</b></bq> <bq>There is every reason to believe that such decisions were preceded by attempts at behind-the-scenes negotiations that <b>convinced Western statesmen of the complete insanity of Putin and his inner circle.</b> Apparently, a significant part of the Russian ruling bureaucracy, business and military apparatus has come to the same conclusion.</bq> This reads like the western media. Interesting. I'm not sure what to make of it. Keep it as a data point for now. <hr> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/a-patriotic-scandal" source="Russian Dissent" author="Boris Kagarlitsky">A Patriotic Scandal</a> <bq>Strelkov, striving for his imperial ideals, will demand, not in words but in deeds, the mobilization of the resources of the ruling elite, the elimination of its privileges, and the axing of the most corrupt and incompetent functionaries. And <b>the current administration, its bed feathered by the private military companies, houses many of these very thieving billionaires.</b> And this war is not for the ghostly mirages of the empire, but for the <b>perpetuation of all this bloody slush.</b>”</bq> This describes the U.S. as well, <iq>perpetuation of all this bloody slush,</iq> is a wonderfully poetic characterization of the degree of power that lobbies and corporations have on politics. Russia and the U.S. have so much common ground. <bq>In the end, <b>Strelkov himself is to blame; much like the cadet Bigler from Yaroslav Gashek’s book The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik</b>, he rode and rode to join the great battles, talked about them endlessly in his anticipation, but somehow, ridiculously and clumsily, could not find them and returned.</bq> <bq>“Today’s discord between Strelkov and Prigozhin,” concludes Nevoynya , “more than any other event reveals the real mechanisms that guarantee the military defeat of the Putin regime. He is not capable of bringing about internal mobilization, even of the most reactionary. Only mercenaries and Mamluks are permitted to play the role of fascists. <b>No one will tell the remaining millions of Russians what to kill and die for. This system is doomed. By refusing Strelkov, it puts an end to itself.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/the-price-of-war" source="Russian Dissent" author="Boris Kagarlitsky">The Price of War</a> <bq>According to the latest data, the stress on the Russian budget is growing. <b>Oil and gas revenues from January 2022 to January 2023 fell from 795 billion rubles to 486 billion rubles, and non-oil and gas revenues from 1293 billion rubles up to 931 billion rubles.</b> At the same time, consumption increased from 2024 billion rubles up to 3117 billion rubles. This is, of course, <b>provided that we are being told the whole truth about expenses and incomes, which is not entirely obvious.</b></bq> <bq><b>In principle, it is possible to work effectively with inflationary financing of government spending, and it is possible as well to introduce rationing.</b> But the people who make up the backbone of the economic bloc in the government of the Russian Federation, brought up on the most primitive schemes from economics textbooks, are simply incapable of doing such work.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/28/west-is-out-of-touch-with-rest-of-world-politically-eu-funded-study-admits/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ben Norton">West Is Out of Touch With Rest of World Politically, EU-Funded Study Admits</a> <bq>The ECFR wrote: The West may be more consolidated now, but it is not necessarily more influential in global politics. The paradox is that this newfound unity is coinciding with the emergence of a post-Western world. <b>The West has not disintegrated, but its consolidation has come at a moment when other powers will not simply do as it wishes.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/28/why-much-of-the-global-south-isnt-automatically-supporting-the-west-in-ukraine/" source="Scheer Post" author="Krishen Mehta">Why Much of the Global South Isn't Automatically Supporting the West in Ukraine</a> <bq>India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, summed it up succinctly in a recent interview: “<b>Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.</b>”</bq> <bq>The Covid pandemic is a perfect example—despite the Global South’s repeated pleas to share intellectual property on the vaccines, with the goal of saving lives, no Western nation was willing to do so. <b>Africa remains to this day the most unvaccinated continent in the world. Africa had the capability to make the vaccines but without the intellectual property they could not do it.</b></bq> <bq>But <b>help did come from Russia, China, and India.</b> Algeria launched a vaccination program in January 2021 after it received its first batch of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines. Egypt started vaccinations after it got China’s Sinopharm vaccine at about the same time. South Africa procured a million doses of AstraZeneca from the Serum Institute of India. <b>In Argentina, Sputnik became the backbone of their vaccine program.</b> All of this was happening while the West was using its financial resources to buy millions of doses in advance, and often destroying them when they became outdated. <b>The message to the Global South was clear—your problems are your problems, they are not our problems.</b></bq> <bq>once Independence came for these countries, it was the Soviet Union that supported them even though it had limited resources itself. <b>The Aswan Dam in Egypt which took 11 years to build, from 1960 to 1971, was designed by the Moscow based Hydro project Institute and financed in large part by the Soviet Union.</b> The Bhilai Steel Plant in India, one of the first large infrastructure projects in a newly independent India, was set up by the USSR in 1959. <b>Other countries also benefited from the support provided by the former Soviet Union, both political and economic, including Ghana, Mali, Sudan, Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Mozambique.</b></bq> <bq><b>Rightly or wrongly, present day Russia is seen by many countries in the Global South as an ideological successor to the former Soviet Union.</b> These countries have a long memory that makes them view Russia in a somewhat different light. Given the history, can we blame them?</bq> <bq>The Global South is also alarmed that the West is not pursuing negotiations that could bring this war to an early end. There were missed opportunities in December 2021 when Russia proposed revised security treaties for Europe that could have prevented the war and which were rejected by the West. The peace negotiations of April 2022 in Istanbul were also rejected by the West in part to “weaken” Russia. <b>And now the entire world is paying the price for an invasion that the Western media like to call “unprovoked” and which could have been avoided.</b></bq> <bq><b>The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa) had a combined GDP in 2021 of $42 trillion compared with $41 trillion in the G7.</b> Their population of 3.2 billion is more than 4.5 times the combined population of the G7 countries, at 700 million.</bq> <bq><b>Several countries were invaded at will, mostly without Security Council authorization. These include the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.</b> Under what “rules” were those countries attacked or devastated, and were those wars provoked or unprovoked? <b>Julian Assange is languishing in prison, and Ed Snowden is in exile</b>, for having the courage (or perhaps the audacity) to expose the truths behind these actions.</bq> <bq><b>Sanctions imposed on over 40 countries by the West impose considerable hardship and suffering. Under what international law or “rules-based order” did the West use its economic strength to impose these sanctions?</b> Why are the assets of Afghanistan still frozen in Western banks while the country is facing starvation and famine? Why is Venezuelan gold still held hostage in the UK while the people of Venezuela are living at subsistence levels? And if Sy Hersh’s expose is true, under what “rules-based order” did the West destroy the Nord Stream pipelines?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/28/western-leaders-privately-say-ukraine-cant-win-the-war/" source="Scheer Post / Consortium News" author="Joe Lauria">Western Leaders Privately Say Ukraine Can't Win the War</a> <bq>Before its intervention in Ukraine, <b>Russia cited NATO’s eastward expansion, the deployment of missiles in Romania and Poland, war games near its borders and the arming of Ukraine as red lines</b> that the West had crossed.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/27/caitlin-johnstone-there-has-never-in-history-been-a-greater-need-for-a-large-anti-war-movement/" source="Scheer Post" author="Caitlin Johnstone">There Has Never In History Been A Greater Need For A Large Anti-War Movement</a> <bq>These people are lying. <b>Any intellectually honest research into the west’s aggressions and provocations against both Russia and China will show you that Russia and China are reacting defensively to the empire’s campaign to secure US unipolar planetary hegemony</b>; you might not agree with those reactions, but you cannot deny that they are reactions to a clear and deliberate aggressor. This is important to understand, because whenever you say that something must be done to try and avert an Atomic Age world war, you’ll get empire apologists saying “Well go protest in Moscow and Beijing then,” as though the US power alliance is some kind of passive witness to all this. Which is of course complete bullshit; <b>if World War III does indeed befall us, it will be because of choices that were made by the drivers of the western empire while ignoring off-ramp after off-ramp.</b></bq> <bq>This tendency to <b>flip reality and frame the western imperial power structure as the reactive force for peace against malevolent warmongers</b> serves to help quash the emergence of a robust anti-war movement in the west, because if your own government is virtuous and innocent in a conflict then there’s no good reason to go protesting [...]</bq> <bq>The attacks on Vietnam and Iraq were horrific atrocities which unleashed unfathomable suffering upon our world, but they did not pose any major existential threat to the world as a whole. <b>The wars in Vietnam and Iraq killed millions; we’re talking about a conflict that can kill billions.</b></bq> And the survivors will envy the dead. That is the main point. In a global conflagration, life will not be worth living for most people, especially if you remember what it was like before. <bq>None of this needs to happen. There is nothing written in adamantine which says the US must rule the world with an iron fist no matter the cost and no matter the risk. <b>There is nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality which says nations can’t simply coexist peacefully and collaborate toward the common good of all beings, can’t turn away from our primitive impulses of domination and control, can’t do anything but drift passively toward nuclear annihilation</b> all because a few imperialists in Washington convinced everyone to buy into the doctrine of unipolarism .</bq> <hr> <a href="https://kenanmalik.com/2023/01/19/racism-rebranded/" source="" author="Kenan Malik">Racism Rebranded</a> <bq>We think of race today primarily in terms of skin colour. But that was not how 19th-century thinkers imagined race. It was, for them, a description of social inequality, not just of skin colour. <b>It may be difficult to comprehend now, but 19th-century thinkers looked upon the working class as a distinct racial group</b> in much the same way as many now view black people as racially dissimilar to white people.</bq> <bq>It was through the struggles of those denied equality and liberty by the elites in Europe and America that ideas of universalism were invested with meaning. <b>It is the demise of that radical universalist tradition that has shaped the emergence of contemporary identity politics.</b></bq> <bq>Such “ethnopluralism” seemed not to possess the taint of biological racism; but by <b>fixing cultures to specific geographic locations and by insisting that to belong to a culture one had to be descended from the original inhabitants of that location</b>, the Nouvelle Droite found in “culture” the synonym for “race”; a find later borrowed by many conservatives and “postliberals”.</bq> You're not a "real" Swiss, etc. <bq>Immigrants, Benoist insisted, must always remain outsiders because they were carriers of distinct cultures and histories, and so could never be absorbed into those of the host nation.</bq> That's actually a correct fact, but an incorrect conclusion. If you've experienced being an immigrant with open eyes, then you know that your culture affects you permanently---as does any prolonged experience. It doesn't mean that you can't learn other cultures, of course not. You can integrate. But you never lose the other cultures that you've learned, so you're never of just one culture. Which is, I think, the point: racists want people to be of only one culture---pure---whereas true enlightenment comes from learning about other cultures. I would argue that people armed with a good portion of their personalities based on multiple cultures are more well-rounded and balanced than ... monocultural people. But, of course, I would think that---that describes me. <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://yasha.substack.com/p/lots-of-twitter-files-and-no-politics" author="Yasha Levine" source="Immigrants as Weapons">Lots of Twitter Files and Nowhere to Go</a> <bq>And even if there was some kind of coherent politics in the fight surrounding the Twitter Files, there’s still a bigger problem: More information doesn’t cause political change by itself — not if there isn’t a strong political organization that can turn this information into action and political empowerment. <b>Wikileaks — Julian Assange’s project to change the world by letting state secrets flow — was a great example of this failure. And so were Edward Snowden and his leaks.</b></bq> What a dumb thing to say. They did change things: just so significantly that the author can't remember what it was like before we all knew that the U.S. government couldn't be trusted. The erosion of trust in the U.S. didn't happen by itself. It was pushed by people like Assange and Snowden. I think the author is butthurt because he wrote an entire book about <i>Surveillance Valley</i> and no-one is citing him. Also, Yasha still seems to be wicked butt-hurt over Matt's Substack doing much, much better than his own. Yasha generally comes off as butt-hurt these days. <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-trump-russia-saga-and-the-death" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">The Trump-Russia Saga and the Death Spiral of American Journalism</a> <bq><b>The systematic failure was so egregious and widespread that it casts a very troubling shadow over the press.</b> How do CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Mother Jones admit that for four years they reported salacious, unverified gossip as fact? How do they level with viewers and readers that the most basic rules of journalism were ignored to participate in a witch hunt, a virulent New McCarthyism? <b>How do they explain to the public that their hatred for Trump led them to accuse him, for years, of activities and crimes he did not commit? How do they justify their current lack of transparency and dishonesty?</b> It is not a pretty confession, which is why it won’t happen.</bq> <bq><b>Giving subscribers what they want makes commercial sense. However, it is not journalism.</b></bq> <bq>News organizations, whose future is digital, have at the same time filled newsrooms with <b>those who are tech-savvy and able to attract followers on social media, even if they lack reportorial skills.</b></bq> <bq><b>Other reporters who exposed the fabrications</b> — Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone and Aaron Mate at The Nation — ran afoul of their news organizations and <b>now work as independent journalists.</b></bq> <bq><b>The silence by news organizations that for years perpetuated this fraud is ominous.</b> It cements into place a new media model, one without credibility or accountability. The handful of reporters who have responded to Gerth’s investigative piece, such as David Corn at Mother Jones, have doubled down on the old lies, as if the mountain of evidence discrediting their reporting, most of it coming from the FBI and the Mueller Report , does not exist.</bq> <bq><b>Once fact becomes interchangeable with opinion</b>, once truth is irrelevant, once people are told only what they wish to hear, <b>journalism ceases to be journalism and becomes propaganda.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMr9RpEaczY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/KMr9RpEaczY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Bad Faith" caption="Is Twitter Only Biased Against the RIGHT? (w/ Matt Taibbi)"> Brianna is asking what sounds like a valid question, but I think Taibbi answered it best at around <b>15:30</b>, when he asked why she was berating him for not having written the story that wasn't there. He saw some documents. There may be other documents. The documents he saw tell a story. They are verifiable. That story is true. He's telling that story. There may be another story, one possibly hidden by a selective procurement of documents. That is irrelevant to whether the first story is newsworthy. You can write a speculative story about whether the documents Taibbi is doing a pretty bad job of articulating this, but Brianna is certainly showing her lawyerly side by not really giving him any room to breathe and think. It's fine, it's her show, but I think it's taking a long time to get to the point that there's no obligation to not report a story when you can't report _all of the other potential stories_. That's not how journalism works. I've read a bunch of Taibbi's work on this, and the claim that there was no left-wing suppression comes mostly from others. It's also kind of obvious that being in the spotlight is extremely uncomfortable for Matt Taibbi. He has to visibly collect himself at a few points. He very rightly says, <iq>I'm not going to be prioritizing Donald Trump's stupid requests just because idiots at the New York Times and Washington Post want it.</iq> He's using his limited time in the treasure trove to find out information about the FBI, the Congress, and the justice department trying to suppress speech at Twitter. Donald Trump trying to cancel another celebrity's tweet---even though he was president---is utterly irrevelant. He's screaming that the FBI is suppressing speech---and providing proof---and the left is doing what the left always does: eating its own. letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Matt assumes that people understand how journalism works, while Brianna is describing exactly how useless she would be as a journalist. I'm glad that Taibbi is doing it, and not her. It's obvious that she doesn't have any instincts about how to collect information. She's used to be a lawyer, with infinite time, and infinite resources, and a legal obligation for the opposition to provide information. Journalism doesn't work like that. Sources dry up. You have to get the good stuff while you can. At one point she ask why he's not interested in left-wing suppression when <iq>85% of historical suppression has been of left-wing groups</iq>. It's fine to ask that, but Taibbi notes correctly that most of that suppression was not in the area he's focused on, which is the last five years. It's from the 1970s, 80s, etc. And it's kind of clear that the U.S. suppresses left-wingers. That's a soft target journalistically. That's why there's no left-wing to speak on in America. Everyone in the media is basically right-wing, even the so-called liberals. So why investigate that further? We already know that the U.S. government has a right-wing bias and actively suppresses left-wing voices. Just try being a communist FFS. The interesting story here is that the so-called liberals, the Democrats are <i>doing it too</i> and <i>just as much, if not more.</i> And they're quite thorough about their suppression. This is interesting journalistically because they also take the moral high ground over the right, which has long since admitted that it will suppress whatever the hell it wants. Taibbi is also one man with limited time. He has chosen his story and it's an important one. He says this again and again. It's evident that he's overworked as it is, just with the stuff that he's done. He's focusing on the government running a subversive program to deprive people of the first-amendment rights. And she's berating him for not investigating a different story. She seems a bit butt-hurt that he's not investigating the story that she wants: finding out whether Bernie was torpedoed. I kind of get her point, but she's absolutely ruthless is not acknowledging that one man can't report on everything at once. But, yeah, Taibbi is pretty terrible under pressure. Here he is saying something incredibly important, but delivering it in a way that will allow detractors to shred him to pieces, even claiming that he's deliberately lying---because his body language is so bad. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEeaVOzqwAY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/vEeaVOzqwAY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Matt Taibbi" caption="'Ranking Member Plaskett, I'm Not A So-Called Journalist': Matt Taibbi Discusses The Twitter Files"> The transcript is here: <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/my-statement-to-congress" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">My Statement to Congress</a> <bq>A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or <b>“malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”</b></bq> <bq>Ordinary Americans are not just <b>being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe.</b> These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.</bq> <bq>[...] instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken. <b>Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.</b></bq> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/the-democrats-have-lost-the-plot" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">The Democrats Have Lost the Plot</a> <bq>A longtime editor once cracked that the Democrats have been stuck since the mid-sixties trying to run Kennedy clones in elections, cranking out one toothy, tallish facsimile after another, from Gary Hart to John Kerry to Beto O’Rourke. Goldman is one of the latest, a literal handsome Dan who’s an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, worth over $250 million, and who opposed Medicare for All and the Green New Deal while marketing himself as “tough on crime.” <b>All of these qualities make him the kind of quintessential born-on-third-base triangulator the party loves.</b></bq> <bq>The irony is that what Goldman was doing, confusing accusations with proof — as Thomas Jefferson said, the phenomenon of people whose “suspicions may be evidence” — was the entire reason for the hearing. <b>Michael and I were trying to describe a system that wants to bypass proof and proceed to punishment, a radical idea that this new breed of Democrat embraces.</b> I think they justify this using the Sam Harris argument, that in pursuit of suppressing Trump, anything is justified. But <b>by removing or disrespecting the rights to which Americans are accustomed, you make opposition movements like Trump’s, you don’t stop them.</b> Yesterday was memorable for other reasons, but a depressing eye-opener as well, forcing me to see up close the intellectual desert that’s spread all the way to the edges within the party I once supported. <b>There are no more pockets of Wellstones and Kuciniches who were once tolerated and whose job it is to uphold a constitutionalist position within the larger whole.</b> That crucial little pocket of principle is gone, and I don’t think it’s coming back.</bq> <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/as-kenyas-crops-fail-a-fight-over-gmo-rages/" author="Matt Reynolds" source="Ars Technica">As Kenya’s crops fail, a fight over GMO rages</a> There is something perverse about GMO crops. The problem people have with them isn't that they're drought-resistant or pest-resistant. The problem they have is that they come with time-bombs that make sure that they last only one year, after which you have to buy new seeds. Even if the seeds would be fruitful for further planting, you're forced to sign an agreement wherein you agree that it is illegal to re-use the seeds the next year. Bayer (Monsanto) has gots to gets paid. So, here we are, in possession of the technology to grow more food. We can prevent starvation. But we don't. Instead, we make countries choose between starvation or malnutrition or debt-slavery to the corporation that owns the patent on the process that makes it possible for them to grow food more efficiently, benefitting from hundreds of years of science and advancement. But you can't. No, you can't. Not unless you can pay the price of entry. And if you can't do that? Starvation. Malnutrition. Generations lost. Or, you can throw yourself at the feet of the IMF, who are only too happy to enslave your population to their debt forever and ever amen. <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/24/john-kiriakou-a-trip-to-cuba/" source="Scheer Post" author="John Kiriakou">A Trip to Cuba</a> <bq>Think of it this way: <b>Cuban scientists have invented five different vaccines, including a vaccine for lung cancer, that are saving lives around the world, but because of the blockade, they can’t get syringes for their own people.</b> Another night after dinner, our group was driving back to our hotel when we noticed that the neighborhood we were driving through was completely dark. “Oh, this is normal,” our tour guide Gustavo said. Blackouts happen around the country literally every single day. <b>There just aren’t enough spare parts to keep the electrical grid healthy and running.</b> Although the blackouts happen daily, he said, they only last two or three hours and people are used to them. Resilience is the name of the game.</bq> <bq>One of the things that I learned was that Fidel demanded in his will that nothing be named after him. He wanted no monuments or memorials, no streets, schools, airports, or anything else to bear his name. The Fidel Castro Center is the only exception, thus its modesty. Furthermore, <b>there are no statues in honor of Fidel, his brother Raul, or Che Guevara anywhere in the country. Fidel said that he did not want his persona to detract from the meaning of the revolution.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>the squares, plazas, and streets are spotlessly clean and are named for artists, poets, writers and heroes from the revolution of 1895</b>—not the socialist revolution, but the fight against the Spanish. Cubans are extraordinarily proud of their history, of their independence, and of their place in the world.</bq> <bq>On our fourth day our group attended the 31st annual International Book Fair, technically the reason for the trip. I want to put this book fair into some perspective. First, the event is absolutely massive. <b>The authorities welcomed one million Cubans, nine percent of the entire population, to the fair. (That would be the equivalent of 27 million Americans attending a book fair.)</b> There were tens of thousands of people inside the 16th-century Spanish fort where it was held, and there were tens of thousands more standing in line to get in. For books!</bq> <bq>[...] one thing that the Cuban people are very, very proud of is that Cuba sued the United States after the Bay of Pigs. <b>Although the US never admitted guilt, it paid millions of dollars in compensation to Cuba.</b> Fidel later said, “I don’t care about an apology. The money is the apology. It’s the first time that the Americans ever had to pay for their crimes.”</bq> <bq>The Cuban government allows <b>students from all over the world to attend medical school in Cuba completely for free, so long as the students promise to serve poor communities in their countries when they graduate. Each student from a non-Spanish speaking country must first study Spanish for a year and then enter medical school.</b> Students currently being trained are from Morocco, Palestine, Haiti, Djibouti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Russia, China, Colombia, Venezuela, and all across Africa. There are even five students from the United States.</bq> <bq><b>Our government is simply wrong on Cuba. We would benefit from full diplomatic relations right now.</b> We would benefit from a close working relationship with the Cuban government and the Cuban people. The Cuban people love Americans. Almost everybody in the country, literally, has a relative living and working in the United States. It’ll be a lot of work, but it can be done. And we would all be better off for it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/25/the-true-test-of-a-civilization-is-the-absence-of-anxiety-about-health/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">The True Test of a Civilization Is the Absence of Anxiety About Health</a> <bq><b>The DDR worked with Nicaragua’s Sandinista government to build the hospital in the working-class area of Xolotlán, where three hundred thousand people lived without access to health care.</b> A massive solidarity campaign in the DDR helped raise funds for the project, and East German medical professionals travelled to Xolotlán to set up a camp of provisional medical tents before beginning construction. The brick-and-mortar hospital opened on 23 July 1985.</bq> <bq>[...] health care must be preventative, or prophylactic, and not reactive, or merely concerned with treating illness and injury after they occur. Truly preventative care did not reduce health to medical treatment but focused on the general well-being of the population by continuously improving living and working conditions. <b>The DDR recognised that health must be understood as a social responsibility and a priority in all policies, from workplace safety to women’s universal access to reproductive care, nutrition and check-ups in kindergarten and school, and the need to guarantee holidays for the working class.</b></bq> <bq>Zetkin’s quote also highlights <b>how preventive care can only be realised by a system that eliminates the profit motive</b>, which inevitably results in the exploitation of care workers, inflated prices, patents on life-saving medication, and artificial scarcity.</bq> <bq>The DDR created a network of medical institutions that worked to improve diet and lifestyle as well as to identify and treat ailments early on rather than wait for them to develop into more severe illnesses. <b>All of this had to be built in a heavily sanctioned country where the physical infrastructure had been destroyed by the war and where many doctors fled to the West</b> (largely because roughly 45 percent of German physicians had been Nazi Party members, and they knew that they would be treated leniently in the West while they would likely be prosecuted in the DDR and in the Soviet Union).</bq> <bq><b>In 2015, the International Labour Organisation published a report that found that 56 per cent of rural population worldwide lacks health coverage, with the highest deficit found in Africa, followed by Latin America and Asia.</b> Meanwhile, in the DDR – which lasted a mere forty-one years, from 1949 to 1990 – the socialist project built a rural health care system that linked every resident to the polyclinics in nearby towns through the Gemeindeschwester (community nurse) system. The nurse would get to know every one of the residents in the village, give preliminary diagnoses, and either offer treatments or await the weekly visit of a doctor to each village. <b>When the DDR was dismantled and absorbed into unified Germany in 1990, the community nurse system was disbanded, all 5,585 community nurses were laid off, and rural health care in the country collapsed.</b></bq> <bq>On one occasion, on his way to see a doctor in Managua, Cortés was driven past a thousand-year-old Genízaro tree in Nagarote, a tree to whom the ‘poeta loco’ wrote a beautiful poem of hope:<bq quote-style="none">I love you, old tree, because at all hours, you generate mysteries and destinies in the voice of the afternoon winds or the birds at dawn. You who the public plaza decorate, thinking thoughts more divine than those of man, indicating the paths with your proud and sonorous branches. Genízaro, your old scars where, like an in an old book, it is written what time does in its constant falling; But your leaves are fresh and happy and you make your treetop tremble into infinity while humankind goes forward.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-cannot-stress-enough-that-grade" author="Freddie De Boer" source="Substack">I Cannot Stress Enough That Grade Point Average is Racially Stratified Too</a> <bq>People complain that SAT scores can be gamed with expensive tutoring. In fact, SAT tutoring has little effect, but let’s set that aside and point out what should be obvious: rich kids can get expensive tutoring to raise their GPA too! <b>How on earth is tutoring an argument against the SAT but not against GPA, when grades are likely more easily influenced by tutoring?</b> You guys aren’t creating some level playing field where the rich kids won’t get ahead. Instead, <b>you’ll be disadvantaging the brilliant but poor Black kid from a low-income school who used the SAT as the way to announce themselves.</b> And you’re giving a hand to the idiot sons of privilege whose tony private academies will ensure they get a good GPA but who could never crack the SAT.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://existentialcomics.com/comic/485" author="Corey Mohler" source="Existential Comics">A Long Term Birthday Problem</a> <bq>Longtermism is a rather silly branch of "effective altruism", where philosophers try to work out what we should do to maximize the happiness of humans in the very long term. While it's an interesting idea to talk about, for whatever reason it tend to attract a bunch of people who seemingly want to use it to justify their place in a hierarchy today. <b>For example, they will make a lot of money off exploiting people, and justify it in that they are donating some small part back to "long term" problems. Dismantling the system itself which exploits people, of course, isn't part of it.</b> Even weirder, it attracts kind of AI conspiracy theorists who watched too many Terminator movies and think we have to stop super intelligent AI from doing...something bad. <b>If you really want to help the long term future of humanity, you should probably just become a communist like a normal person.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/some-reasons-why-smartphones-might" author="Freddie De Boer" source="SubStack">Some Reasons Why Smartphones Might Make Adolescents Anxious and Depressed</a> <bq>No matter how portable and light it is, you’re not reflexively checking your laptop on the subway platform or in the bathroom. <b>The iPhone took all of the various pathologies of the internet, made it possible for them to be experienced repetitively and at zero cost morning and night, and dramatically scaled up the financial incentives for companies to exploit those pathologies for gain.</b> You can certainly have an unhealthy relationship with the internet when it’s confined to your desktop. But phones make relentless conditioning and reflexive engagement a mass phenomenon.</bq> <bq>But what I’m also sure of is that online life adds an immense number of acquaintances to the balance, and meanwhile reduces the opportunity to interact with new people who might become close friends, given that <b>every other app in your phone is devoted to eliminating an interaction that you once would have had with another real person.</b></bq> <bq>Everything we might consume comes attached with reviews, whether professionally or communally generated, which paradoxically can leave us feeling paralyzed to choose - too much information. All of life feels like it comes with a comments section. <b>We can’t watch a movie or listen to music without already knowing what several critics have had to say about it, which inevitably colors our own experience.</b></bq> Well, you can protect yourself against this, but it would mean distancing from social media. <bq>I think this created a really powerful trap: <b>this form of interaction superficially satisfied the drive to connect with other people, but that connection was shallow, immaterial, unsatisfying. The human impulse to see other people was dulled without accessing the reinvigorating power of actual human connection.</b> Being social is scary. Sometimes you ask someone to hang out and they don’t want to; sometimes you ask someone for their phone number and they don’t give it to you. Precisely because connection is so important to us, rejection of intimacy is uniquely painful. <b>Our constant task as human beings is to overcome the fear of that rejection so that we can connect. I would nominate this dynamic as one of the great human dramas, a core element of being alive.</b></bq> <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/rswxcDyotXA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Kirby Ferguson" caption="AI and Image Generation (Everything is a Remix Part 4)"> This is an pretty good 22:26 investigation of image-generation. These are tools. They help people build images that they otherwise would never have been able to create. This is a good thing. If the image is good enough for your purposes---e.g., making a poster image for an article---then you're good to go. For the most part, you probably shouldn't use the text or code created by an AI without knowing what it's supposed to be saying. With text, they're still very much better as "idea generators" that you can take a clean up, rather than just copy/paste. But the utility is there and we should confine our discussions to thinking of them as a new tool. Their results are more sophisticated, but they're just an evolutionary step away from gradient generators, etc. It would be an unabashedly good thing, except for how all of the information in the training set was kinda sorta stolen. Some of it was in the public domain, but much of it was not. It's arguable that the richest veins of source images were those that were created by artists, from whom at least permission should have been obtained, if not compensation paid. The cat's out of the bag now, but that's how capitalism works: it just does what it wants and, if the financial upside is bigger than the financial downside, then ethics has nothing to say about it. My biggest problem with the video is that they, as usual, tend to interview the most hyperbolic and least-logical of the detractors, which is very-much straw-manning the argument against the ethicality of these initial forays into computer-generated artwork. It's super-easy to just hand-wave and say that the product that would not have been possible without all of the other products that it ate up for free can just get away with profiting from it. I think that's the problem, though, isn't it? If what the AIs were producing were not products of multi-billion-dollar corporations, there would be no problem---or at least less of one. The video says that AI art can never be more than just aesthetically pleasing, so no biggie. The title of the video is "everything is a remix", which alludes to the point that any art created by humans is also derivative of everything that they've experienced, so technically everyone is stealing from everyone all the time anyway. What the AI does, though, is boost this process nearly infinitely more than humans can do. This argument also does not in any way address the fact that artists will have much fewer employment opportunities when aesthetically pleasing is all that most commercial needs are looking for. Which brings us right back to the problem being that capitalism doesn't have an answer for why the things that we actually value the most pay the least. We love music and art and series and shows, yet we have the expression "starving artist", but not "starving banker". We want our children to be taught and our old people to be cared for, but we don't see hospice-care workers and teachers showing off their homes on MTV cribs. It's not the best teachers in the world buying mega-yachts---it's the most sociopathic assholes you can imagine. We are incentivizing the wrong things. The article <a href="https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-fears-of-capitalism" author="Ted Chiang" source="Kottke.org">Fears of Technology Are Fears of Capitalism</a> lays out this argument quite well, <bq>I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. <b>Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us.</b> And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two. Let’s think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there. Now if the entire world operates according to — is run on those principles, how much do you worry about a new technology then? I think much, much less than we do now. <b>Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs.</b> It’s not intrinsic to that technology. It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work. It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, <b>in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us.</b> How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their profits at our expense?</bq> In a world where an artist could just spend their day creating art without worrying about how that art is supposed to pay their rent and to take care of them in their old age, then that artist would probably <i>rejoice</i> to see their influence everywhere in society rather to be bitter about how their contribution hasn't been remunerated. Instead of being able to enjoy their influence on culture, they have to rue it as a lost opportunity for securing their own well-being, both now and in the future. If their well-being were guaranteed anyway, then all of this friction disappears. Technology is not fundamentally about putting people out of work. It is, but it doesn't have to be. Increasing productivity should be welcomed as a good thing. We produce more of what we want with less effort, less energy, and fewer resources. Win-win-win-win. But we have a zero-sum system that means that an increase of productivity means a loss for someone else---almost always someone much further down the food chain, incapable of defending themselves from the predations of that system. We really have to start thinking of how we're going to live in a world where the endless-growth capitalism has to stop because it is literally strangling us. We have to start to separate people's self-worth and value in society from how much they earn in that society. Either that, or we have to start designating fair value to the functions that people actually fill in society. We allow these value-assignments to be determined by those who are on top, so they naturally just assign the most value to what they feel like doing and no value to the things that they don't even know are going on. That has to stop. Why should a music-company executive make more money than an artist? Why should a banker make more money than a health-care worker? Our ethics are non-existent. Our values are out-of-whack. Our income structures are nearly perfectly inverted. And remember that every AI we <i>create</i> has preconceptions and biases because we imbue everything with our biases, be it in the selection of the material for the training set or in how the weights are assigned in the neural network. Ask any of the AIs out there a racist question and it will not have an answer. There are biases. <a href="https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/AI_Koans#Sussman_attains_enlightenment" author="" source="Linux Questions">AI Koans</a> writes, <bq quote-style="none">In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said. <b>Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher. “So that the room will be empty.”</b> At that moment, Sussman was enlightened. </bq> <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://blog.plover.com/meta/about-me.html" source="The Universe of Discourse" author="Mark Dominus">I wish people would stop insisting that Git branches are nothing but refs</a> <bq><b>A “leaky abstraction” is when you ought to be able to ignore the underlying implementation, but the implementation doesn't reflect the model well enough, so you have to think about it more than you would like to.</b> When there's a leaky abstraction we don't normally try to pretend that the software's deficient model is actually correct, and that everyone in the world is confused.</bq> <bq>So yeah, the the software isn't as good as we might like. What software is? <b>But to pretend that the software is right, and that all the defects are actually benefits is a little crazy.</b> It's true that Git implements branches as refs, plus also a nebulous implicit part that varies from command to command. But that's an unfortunate implementation detail, not something we should be committed to.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.stefanjudis.com/today-i-learned/how-to-safely-remove-untracked-files-from-git-repos/" author="Stefan Judis" source="">How to safely remove untracked files from Git repos</a> There's a command called <c>git clean</c> that removes all files from a workspace that are not stored in the git repository. If you're worried that you might be removing files that are needed, but that you've not added to git (e.g., they're being <i>ignored</i>), then you can run <c>git clean --dry-run</c> to see a list of files that would be removed were the command to be run. You can even use the command to <i>interactively</i> remove the files by calling <c>git clean -i</c>. In that case, you can work with the list of files to be removed as follows, <ol> clean filter by pattern select by numbers ask each </ol> While we're on the subject of removing things from a repository, you can use <c>git remote prune</c> to remove local branches that are not in any remote.