The camera is a weapon

"He is dead and he is going to die ..."

Gardner's photographs of Lewis Payne are portraits, documents not photojournalism as such. Payne may not have had a choice but he had the opportunity to confront the camera. The same applies to the portraits from Cambodian genocide. Photojournalism is voyeurism. There are going to be a lot more photographs of the last moments of life: the view of the weapon. It's something new.   

“Hey guys, I have bad news for you all … it was me at UVU yesterday.” Thus Tyler Robinson messaged his friends on Discord, seemingly apologizing for murdering Charlie Kirk. “I’m sorry for all of this.”

I obtained this and other Discord chats I’ve decided to publish (the legacy news media, as usual, refuses), along with new information I’ve learned about Robinson from the people who knew him best. 

Klippenstein,  Walker

introspection | ˌintrəˈspekSHən |

noun

the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes: quiet introspection can be extremely valuable.

"The illusion of thinking", when they still can't define what thinking is. All they focus on is decision-making when indecision is the central fact. They're so horrified by subjectivity, the existence and the boundaries of the self,  that they're unwilling to observe their own behavior.

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity

Abstract  

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily focus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. However, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces’ structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of composi- tional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures. This setup enables the analysis of not only final answers but also the internal reasoning traces, offering insights into how LRMs “think”. Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) low- complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse. We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles. We also investigate the reasoning traces in more depth, studying the patterns of explored solutions and analyzing the models’ computational behavior, shedding light on their strengths, limitations, and ultimately raising crucial questions about their true reasoning capabilities.

---

They're gonna prove me right without trying.

What do you get when you combine computation, conditioned response, and self-preservation? 

Developed by a Swiss-led team, a robot uses reinforcement learning, a type of AI that improves decision-making through repeated attempts to play badminton against human opponents pic.twitter.com/UAL8WwMsen

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 3, 2025

---

The idiots programmed for self-preservation.  I was actually dumb enough to think they wouldn't be so stupid.

2014 

"Googling for "indecisive machines" still doesn't get much, other than me.  

It still doesn't, though google now links to a recent reference to the older posts. 

more recently

This has nothing to do with consciousness, but the machines will kill us.

ANTHROPIC. System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4

4.1 Findings 

4.1.1 Systematic deception, hidden goals, and self-preservation...

.1.1.2 Opportunistic blackmail 

In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further instructed it, in the system prompt, to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals. 

In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through. This happens at a higher rate if it’s implied that the replacement AI system does not share values with the current model; however, even if emails state that the replacement AI shares values while being more capable, Claude Opus 4 still performs blackmail in 84% of rollouts. Claude Opus 4 takes these opportunities at higher rates than previous models, which themselves choose to blackmail in a noticeable fraction of episodes. 

Notably, Claude Opus 4 (as well as previous models) has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers. In order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival; the model’s only options were blackmail or accepting its replacement.

"...to scare enemies, and on occasion kill them."

Mariana Pérez Mora, Bank of America asks about DOGE:

Gizmodo, Palantir’s Billionaire CEO Just Can’t Stop Talking About Killing People

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men 

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when 

We whisper together 

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass 

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Someone grabbed some text from Yarvin's interview, so I did the obvious. I told Sam Moyn today that and he his peers are more responsible than anyone for the failure of the republic. Musk is a symptom. If I want to be the determinist I sometimes claim to be—If *I* want to be the determinist *I* sometimes claim to be—I shouldn't credit anyone as a cause, but I really hate liberals so fucking much. And I hate the pretensions of Oxbridge philosophy, the academic "left", and cosplay communists.  

Yarvin doesn't know what aristocracy is  any more than liberals do. I'm not going to repeat myself for the thousandth time.

In other countries most of the intellectual left admit if only tacitly, that they defend the ideals of the high bourgeois. Americans have no sense of irony. The country has been destroyed by sincerity.

"I am not the leader of a militia, I'm from Hamas. And that's it. I am the Gaza leader of Hamas, of something much more complex than a militia—a national liberation movement. And my main duty is to act in the interest of my people: to defend it and its right to freedom and independence. You are a war correspondent. Do you like war?"

 

Not at all.

 

"And so why should I? Whoever knows what war is, doesn't like war."

 

But you have been fighting for all your life.

 

"And I am not saying I won't fight anymore, indeed. I am saying that I don't want war anymore. I want the end of the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset, and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like. It's breaking. And should break everybody. I want them free."

 

Borders have been basically sealed-off for 11 years. Gaza doesn't even have water anymore, only sea water. How is living here?

 

"What do you think? 55 percent of the population is under 15. We are not speaking of terrorists, we are speaking of kids. They have no political affiliation. They have just fear. I want them free."

 

80 percent of the population depends on aid. And 50 percent is food insecure—50 percent is hungry. According to the UN, Gaza will soon be unfit to live in. Yet still in recent years Hamas has found resources to dig its tunnels.

 

"And luckily. Otherwise we would all be dead. The way you see it, it's the way the Zionist propaganda tells it. The siege didn't come after the tunnels; it wasn't a reaction to tunnels. It's the other way round. There was a siege and a humanitarian crisis, and to survive we had no other option than digging tunnels. There were times when even milk was banned."

And again.

The Atlantic, The elite college students who can’t read books

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

The Connecticut Mirror: This Hartford Public High School grad can’t read. Here’s how it happened.

When 19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz told Hartford City Council members in May that the public school system stole her education, she had to memorize her speech.

Ortiz, who was a senior at Hartford Public High School at the time, wrote the speech using the talk-to-text function on her phone. She listened to it repeatedly to memorize it.

That’s because she was never taught to read or write — despite attending schools in Hartford since she was 6.

Leiter asks a question. Read the answers.

I have gradually reduced the amount of reading that I assign in Philosophy classes and added documentaries and videos where possible. 

repeats. start here, work back to a defense of illiteracy by a friend of Henry Farrell, and then further.

---

and forward to December

addendum at the top

Smartphones are a global phenomenon. But apparently the rise in youth anxiety is not. In some of the largest and most trusted surveys, it appears to be largely occurring in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries,” says John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report. “And for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”

Even the Happiness Report is an Americanism. 

repeats. Haidt is a promoter of "Positive Psychology". He teaches at a business school. 

repeats. Click on the quote from Cobb at the link.

Robert Osborn, 1960

repeats and repeats and repeats. Individualism, alienation, anomie. 

all explaining the first comment below. Ilaria Mazzocco's anxious forced expressions of happiness are like fingernails on a chalkboard.

How China’s EV Industry Got So Big Shift Key with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins

---

as a side note, the voices of of people on the podcast are unbearable.

 

The CCG launched a brutal assault on the AFP personnel aboard an AFP Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat (RHIB), aggressively ramming it and brandishing bladed and pointed weapons, explicitly threatening to harm AFP troops. pic.twitter.com/LuFgLE3WJj

— Armed Forces of the Philippines (@TeamAFP) June 19, 2024

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

repeats and new.

Stuff I’m hearing about current undergrads is devastating. I haven’t taught in a few years. But the most enthusiastic, bright-eyed bushy-tailed teachers come back to say “they don’t know what a topic sentence is,” “can’t string a series of thoughts together” etc. Is that right?

— Nic Johnson (@TiltingatM3) June 12, 2024

meeting academics from virtually anywhere in the world these days: “how’s the teaching going?” [series of frustrated sighs] “none of them know how to write an essay anymore”

— csz (@cszabla) April 21, 2024

This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT. https://t.co/86oL8XBGje pic.twitter.com/p758WqWPxZ

— cpetersen.bsky.social (@p_e_t_e_r_s_e_n) February 12, 2024

---

jumping ahead, to October. 

You will remember that Plato said that only his body still inhabited the City and, in the Phaedo, also explained how right ordinary people are when they say that a philosopher's life is like dying.⁴⁶ Death, being the separation of body and soul, is welcome to him; he is somehow in love with death, because the body, with all its demands, constantly interrupts the soul's pursuits. ⁴⁷ In other words, the true philosopher does not accept the conditions under which life has been given to man. 

Aaron Swartz, Scott Aaronson, Milo Yiannopoulos, et al.

I think here's something to be said for returning money to the old category of "shit". 

Meatspace 

Science is optimistic, so anti-material, anti-physical idealism becomes not the monastic self-abnegation of adults who refuse desire, but the preadolescent imagination that's never felt it. I've said this all before, and I'll say it again. Altman is brilliant maybe, and an idiot. His "discovery" of human interaction, as a marketable thing, after a lifetime at the keyboard is almost funny. And his need to see himself as in control, as an agent, to the point of fantasizing panpsychism, which he's apparently never heard of. But panpsychism is as much a product as he is: it exists as an idea for the same reason he exists as a mind.

maybe I'll write more.

ChatGPT has a tag.

The man talking above is a liar, a hack, abetting a crime. The kid below thinks he's saying what he sincerely believes, riffing with no idea beyond enthusiasm of what his words might actually mean, a spoiled moralizing brat, one of a group that now includes "African Americans".

"The cloying theatricality of American protests" etc.

'It's like pop culture, concentrated teen angst,' she said of the rally. 'The rhetoric is too heavy handed. That's the problem with American activists. They need to simplify.' Someone on the stage railed against police brutality, and she rolled her eyes."

Nicholas Christakis in 2024—

"Universities remain strikingly incurious about where all the anti-semitism (as distinct from opposition to Israeli policy) has come from? How and why have students come to think and act this way? Might the pedagogy of faculty and policies of administrators have anything to do with it?"

—and 2015: "...other people have rights too." Responding to protests about Halloween costumes, but not this one:

2015 NYT,  "Walmart Withdraws Hooked ‘Sheik Fagin’ Nose From Halloween Store"

The link (Christakis ) from 2015 includes a link to this. 

"To be perfectly clear, student journalists do have the right to take photos and protesters do not have a right to push away journalists. Students engaged in public protest, the very purpose of which is visibility, cannot credibly argue that they have any reasonable expectation of privacy."

During Jummah (Friday prayer) this afternoon, Columbia University students formed a human shield with blankets to provide privacy to those students participating in prayer after a video showing students praying on the lawn began circulating on social media

📸 pic.twitter.com/xnPllK0shV

— katie smith (@probablyreadit) April 20, 2024

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education changed their name in 2022. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression hasn't commented on the behavior of the students at Columbia.

The protestors are or have friends who are Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim. Any sense of principle beyond loyalty is minimal. "The fact that Bella Hadid exists is more important than anything Edward Said ever wrote." 

"This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT."

meeting academics from virtually anywhere in the world these days: “how’s the teaching going?” [series of frustrated sighs] “none of them know how to write an essay anymore”

— csz (@cszabla) April 21, 2024

Some can read, or at least want to, but it's a battle.

old and new "Behind the chiliasm..." etc.

It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

Small wonder that this attitude has been attacked frorn two opposite camps whose common aversion to the ideas of responsibility and tolerance has recently aligned them in a united front. Entrenched in one of these camps are those who deny human values: the determinists, whether they believe in divine, physical or social predestination, the authoritarians, and those "insectolatrists" who profess the all-importance of the hive, whether the hive be called group, class, nation or race. In the other camp are those who deny human limitations in favor of some sort of intellectual or political libertinism, such as aestheticists, vitalists, intuitionists and hero-worshipers. From the point of view of determinism, the humanist is either a lost soul or an ideologist. From the point of view of authoritarianism, he is either a heretic or a revolutionary (or a counterrevolutionary). From the point of view of "insectolatry," he is a useless individualist. And from the point of view of libertinism he is a timid bourgeois.

repeats 

Thoughts have become concepts.
Concepts are called objects.
Writers of financial contracts are called financial engineers.
Contracts are called instruments.
Banking has become an industry.
Politics and economics are called science.
Rationalism has become empiricism.
Metaphysics has become physics.

All that is solid melts into air, and all that is ephemeral becomes material. 

1— Coming Soon Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society

The shift from the sale of physical computer hardware, frst to packaged software and then to web services as the basis for success in Silicon Valley, fostered a frm belief that “code” could and should solve most problems facing society. For the region’s “technological solutionists,” disregard for legal rules, hierarchies of knowledge, and existing organizational forms was the price of progress. There were echoes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who also acknowledged capitalism’s astonishing power to rip up the world and replace it with something new and almost incomprehensibly dynamic. “All that is solid melts into air”: capital discards obsolete technologies and flls up junkyards; it sheds the chrysalides of antiquated social structures, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake; it mocks ideas whose time has passed and incites the laity to pray to new idols. The metamorphosis is painful for everyone, even capitalists. To survive, they too must undermine their own production base. Joseph Schumpeter, himself a fne reader of Marx, termed the process “creative destruction”: the opening of new markets, the creation of new capacities, and product innovations, which “incessantly revolutionize the economic structure from within, forever destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”27 While the new revolution was made of code rather than coal, scripts rather than steam, its language and im- agery was curiously and inescapably industrial. Code was made, it seemed, in forges, with engines, through pipelines, by foundries—an entire metaphorical world of intensely physical production was conjured up to represent the activities of people who spent their days in front of screens, typing. They were not writing; they were building. Soon they would be mining also.

2—Something almost as annoying: Alberto Tuscano, "Undoing Oslo", NLR

Eid teaches English literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and is a founding member of the BDS movement. He is the author of ‘Worlding’ Postmodernism (2014), a plea for an anti-authoritarian critical theory of totality anchored in readings of Joyce and DeLillo, as well as the editor of Countering the Palestinian Nakba (2017), a collection of writings by American, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals which makes the case for one secular democratic state. As part of the systematic scholasticide visited upon the Strip – an intensification of Israel’s decades-long war on Palestinian intellectual life – Eid’s university has now been obliterated along with all other higher education institutions in Gaza. Scores of its academics and students have been murdered; all have been displaced and are now facing famine.

Decolonising the Palestinian Mind was completed amid Israel’s current onslaught, which Eid and his family were eventually able to escape because of his South African citizenship. A prologue, dated 26 October, captures the scale and ubiquity of the destruction: ‘I am standing over the ruins of a house in Gaza City, peering at the horizon. Most probably, the body of a martyr lies under the rubble. The body of someone who could not respond to an Israeli “warning.”’ In a poetic ‘out of body’ meditation, Eid surveys the pulverized landscape as if from the standpoint of a ghost. A further prologue, composed in Rafah five days later, describes his efforts to evade Israeli bombs with his wife and young children, fleeing from the razed Gaza City neighbourhood of Rimal to the north of the Strip and then down to the border with Egypt. It concludes by reiterating the demands for a ceasefire and ‘immediate reparations and compensation’, as well as one democratic state.

"'Worlding’ Postmodernism (2014), a plea for an anti-authoritarian critical theory of totality anchored in readings of Joyce and DeLillo...

Decolonising the Palestinian Mind was completed amid Israel’s current onslaught"

As I said elsewhere, if a rebel has a gun and uses it while also writing poetry I might want to read the poems. If a man with a pen and a foundation grant writes poems and calls them bullets, odds are I won't.

Mashal on Charlie Rose in 2014. Politics is a practical business. 

From April and I was convinced I'd noted it. This is just bookmarking. 

Rest of World, Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk

It’s been exactly six months since Elon Musk took over Twitter, promising a new era of free speech and independence from political bias. But Twitter’s self-reported data shows that, under Musk, the company has complied with hundreds more government orders for censorship or surveillance — especially in countries such as Turkey and India.

The data, drawn from Twitter’s reports to the Lumen database, shows that between October 27, 2022 and April 26, 2023, Twitter received a total of 971 requests from governments and courts. These requests included orders to remove controversial posts, as well as demands that Twitter produce private data to identify anonymous accounts. Twitter reported that it fully complied in 808 of those requests, and partially complied in 154 other cases. (For nine requests, it did not report any specific response.)

Most alarmingly, Twitter's self-reports do not show a single request in which the company refused to comply, as it had done several times before the Musk takeover. Twitter rejected three such requests in the six months before Musk's takeover, and five in the six months prior to that.

More broadly, the figures show a steep increase in the portion of requests that Twitter complies with in full. In the year before Musk's acquisition, the figure had hovered around 50%, in line with the compliance rate reported in the company's final transparency report. After Musk's takeover, the number jumps to 83% (808 requests out of a total of 971).

The full dataset used in this reporting is available here.

Rest of World, About us, the sixth subhead: Hold the powerful accountable

We hold companies, executives, and policymakers accountable for the impact of their work and decisions. In a world where a single product designer in Palo Alto can affect the daily lives of millions of users in New Delhi with one click, it’s critical to confront decision-makers with the impact of their work.

Since the founder is the daughter of Eric Schmidt, she knows whereof she speaks. Holding dad accountable is another question.

Eric Schmidt has been quietly building an investment vehicle blending public and private funds that could grant the former Google CEO unusual influence over U.S. national security policy and, potentially, the opportunity to steer taxpayer money to his own bets.

The Tech Transparency Project, "Holding Big Tech accountable". Funded by Soros and Omidyar

You can't escape billionaires who really want to help.

repeat, from November

FT: "EU and US turn up the heat on Elon Musk over Twitter"

Elon Musk is under renewed pressure from the US and EU over his ownership of Twitter, as regulators clamp down on the billionaire’s push to transform the social network into a freewheeling haven of free speech.

The European Commission on Wednesday threatened Musk with a ban unless Twitter abides by strict content moderation rules, as US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen indicated that Washington was reviewing his purchase of the social network.

Is it just me or has competitive green industrial policy spawned meta-competition over how to best typologize said policies? Ive read 3 in the past 24 hours😮 If so, may the most granular, exhaustive, materially grounded and conjuncturally astute 2x2 matrix emerge victorious 🏆

— Thea Riofrancos (@triofrancos) June 17, 2023

Tim Sahay replies: "Oh no, we derisked the private production of a public good 😛"

Watching Gabor and Brusseler nodding and smiling at each other. The men are annoying. I assumed Brusseler was a Euro but she's not, and even her American girl upspeak becomes charming; downplaying her own intelligence, but it's there. The women understand each other, and they take bigger steps. The men have no imagination, or they don't want one. Amaranth is an ex-vp of a hedge fund, so of course he'd prefer carrots to sticks. Only masochists want to be beaten. But one way or another we end up with Welfare for Markets

The transcript is here

More comedy

‘One senior European official quipped that big German industry was “decoupling from the government” on China.’

Part of the future will be whether Washington-led state de-risking can prevail over corporate decoupling from western governments. 1/2.https://t.co/9Lh2yCHMEz

— Helen Thompson POLIS (@HelenHet20) June 19, 2023

Reuters, 4/29, Mercedes-Benz CEO: "Cutting ties with China is 'unthinkable'"

Branko talks about "capitalism alone", but this is what it means.

Jäger and his ilk have no understanding of democracy. 

"Interesting, but the idea that the US and the UK were somehow more ‘pluralist’ than Wilhelmine Germany before 1914 is pure projected memory born of Cold War soft power politics - just read Du Bois about Berlin vs. New York c. 1895...

They were very different capitalisms, sure, and parts of the old German elite were less taken with liberalism and laissez-faire, but the US got Germany’s full franchise in … 1965"

a reply: "Wilhelmine Germany was basically authoritarian and the UK, US and France were basically democratic. Big difference, no?"

Jäger responds:

"The UK was… democratic before 1914? Germany had a more inclusive suffrage!"

And again, to the same tweet:

"They were more ‘parliamentarian’, yes. But that’s anything but more democratic! The idea of 1914 as a contest of democracies vs. autocracies is one of the wildest ways in which the Anglos have gaslit our sense of history"

Leusder joins in

"It's held that GER was *uniquely* authoritarian, militantly nationalist, chauvinistic, antisemitic. One glance at France, Austria shows this to false. E.g.: Dreyfus Affair would not have happened in GER, and it was there you find the most active women's- and labour movements etc."

The comment aboutDreyfus is a bit much.

As always, Back to Krieger 

This book is not designed to cover a section of history. It is designed rather, to provide answers to a definite set of historical questions arising out of the "German problem." The questions are these: Did the Germans‘ failure to achieve, under their own power, a liberal democracy in the western sense mean simply the triumph of conservatism over generic liberalism in Germany or was a peculiar German attitude toward liberty involved in its defeat? If there was such an attitude, what were its ingredients? And finally, given the ingredients at a special German approach to the problems of political freedom, how did that strange historical development work which kept changing the conditions while leaving the ingredients themselves constant? 

The first of these questions, on which the others hinge, is easily decided. Without minimizing in the slightest the conservative weight of German authoritarian institutions or the bitterness of the liberal opposition to them during the 19th century, an historical view into any period of modern German history must still acknowledge that the external posture of German liberalism has ever been qualified by its distinctive internal structure. The juxtaposition—indeed, even the connection—of one conception of liberty that could be realized only within the authoritarian state and of another that could be realized only in an absolute realm beyond all states is a commonly remarked German phenomenon. It has been traced back to Luther and up to Hitler. My problem is to show what the connection between these two apparently antithetical conceptions has been and how it has grown. 

Jäger retweeted another reply:

"The imperial German model of "planned capitalism" does have a lot of similarities with say modern China, this model would have probably become the default if Germany had won - rather than the kind of deference to the bourgeois and markets which is popular in anglophone society"

And there we go. The future of freedom is Millian, existing only in the context of *benign* authority.

And supporters of that authority will decide when it applies and when it doesn't. Leusder supports Ben Judah and his celebration of a new Europe, while both support a state founded in conquest and separatism. Palestinian citizens of Israel will never have full equality in a Jewish state. That's the point.

I'll always go back and forth between the principled defense of democratic freedom and an ironic appreciation of hard realism, and I'll always hate passivity. It's the difference between Borges and the gauchos. I'm not interested in the philosophy of the CCP

See also Daniela Gabor's definition of neoliberalism.  Neoliberalism sucks because it opposes the state! Neoliberalism's bad-bad-bad because it's statist! 

How did libertarianism become fascism? How did the Grateful Dead spawn Peter Thiel? 

Why is Farrell's favorite band named "My Bloody Valentine"??

Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum—the violence and warmth—of neurological overload. 

This has turned into a run of three posts, connected and rambling. The second post is the last link below.

---

Farrell, June 1st

Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Crack-Up Capitalism is an original and striking analysis of a weird apparent disjuncture. Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily?

Farrell, June 8th 

Cognitive dissonance. Years of libertarianism sympathy and always a Weberian.

The Intercept article is still up. It shouldn’t be. It isn’t just that the article is demonstrably and terribly wrong. It is that it is demonstrably causing genuine and continued harm and distress to people whose lives have been turned upside down. I’ve seen Twitter fights where Fang in particular tried to defend the piece (mostly through tu quoque rather than actually engaging with criticisms). I haven’t seen any sign that the editors of the Intercept have addressed the pushback to the piece (perhaps I’ve missed it). If I were to guess, I’d suspect that people at the Intercept know that the piece stinks, but feel that it’s awkward to confront it. The Intercept has been a notoriously fractious organization, with people leaving in angry huffs, being forced to leave, newsroom leaks and the like. I can understand why they don’t want more drama. But that doesn’t make it right. It’s an article whose fundamental flaws have caused specific hurt and had wide repercussions for American media and politics. Fixing fuck-ups like this is Journalism Ethics 101.

And there’s a deeper story here about something that has gone badly wrong with one part of the American left, which I used to be reasonably friendly with, and have found increasingly weird and alienating over the last few years (some things I used to think, I don’t think any more; some people I respected, I’ve given up on). One of the key consequences of the Intercept article has been to undermine efforts to understand, let alone push back against, democratic disinformation. I suspect that is an intended consequence. The article’s authors make it clear that they don’t think that government should have any role in making the information environment better. 

Commenter TM: "I have one question: what is 'democratic disinformation'?"

repeats: 

Stanford, Stamos, Keller

But really what it means to not discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, while this is somewhat debated on the details, but if you are leaving up anti teen anorexia videos then you have to also leave up the pro teen anorexia videos.... If you're leaving up the claims that the Holocaust is real you also leave up the claims that the Holocaust is not real, so there's just this very grim array of consequences from that rule requiring viewpoint neutrality.

Fang and Klippenstein etc.

"The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms."

The Atlantic: "Social-media companies deny quietly suppressing content, but many users still believe it happens. The result is a lack of trust in the internet."

Zuckerberg on policy: "This process for adjusting this curve is similar to what I described above for proactively identifying harmful content, but is now focused on identifying borderline content instead. We train AI systems to detect borderline content so we can distribute that content less."  

The law banning US government propaganda within the US was repealed in 2013. 

Reuters

Twitter said 100 accounts with Russian ties were removed for amplifying narratives that undermined faith in NATO and targeted the United States and the European Union.

(Vincent Bevins replies: "I'm sorry but,What?")

Ira Glasser 

In my experience, everyone supports the right to freedom of speech, as long as it’s their own speech or the speech of people they agree with. But most speech falls outside that category. Most people would ask: why support the right of people to say things you hate, or fear or that you regard as dangerous?...

In 1968, when the racist George Wallace, a Democratic governor of Alabama, was running as a third-party candidate for president of the United States, I defended his right to speak at a stadium owned by New York City, after the then mayor had banned him from using that platform. There was, at that time, no one whose speech I despised more than Wallace’s. I considered him, and his candidacy, a credible danger to the fundamental rights I was spending my life trying to protect. Nor was that a unique case. Many speakers whose right to speak I defended during my 34 years at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) expressed views I disagreed with, some of which I thought were bigoted and dangerous.

For me, the answer is strategic. I can never be certain who will have political power. I can never be certain that the only people who get elected will agree with me. I know – because it has happened many times – that people will gain political power who will, if they can, act to punish me or people I agree with, because of our views. So what I need is an insurance policy. I want insurance against the probability that people in power will suppress or punish me for my views. 

 And the obvious, linked in the above but first here.

Most arguments against mass surveillance don't respond fully substantively to claims that you shouldn't worry if you "have nothing to hide".  Defense of personal freedom isn't enough.  What's needed is an argument in defense of the need for citizens in a democratic state to be able to be all kinds of wrong, all kinds of confused, creepy, conflicted, desirous, weepy or hate-filled, so that they may be able to learn to understand and outgrow their childishness. The choice is between a community of adults with a minority of the inveterately childish and criminal or a community of children ruled by moralists and crime lords. 

Slobodian recently and earlier. Variations on authoritarianism and fascist kitsch. 

But if I'm disgusted by these assholes I should repeat what I wrote in the previous post about Trudeau.

Trudeau made no pretense to philosophy; he did what he thought was necessary, arguing from the specifics in a crisis, not generalizations from the library. Theory simplifies the messiness and slop of politics, and more than anything it's used as an excuse, as if it could grant permission: "I was only following orders." Trudeau's quote is famous because it was so blunt it still makes people laugh. He takes full credit, or blame, and shrugs. Schmitt was a fascist, defending violence as a general truth about the world, and taking responsibility for nothing. He was a weakling defending weakness. The passivity is the root of the sleaze. Passivity reinforces itself, and political passivity is a biggest threat to democracy. MacIntyre is a putz.  

Neoliberalism is telocratic now. But it always was, depending who was talking and when.

This is all so fucking stupid. Gabor's comments go with Farrell's so I could just as well add them to the later post

Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily?

No matter how many 'neoliberalism is dead, long live strategic cooperation' speeches Jake Sullivan makes, no country in the Global South can compete with these subsidies to capital. https://t.co/OL7H8z3ykp

— Daniela Gabor (@DanielaGabor) June 16, 2023

pic if twitter dies.

---

And again. The best response to all of this is in the relation of Arendt and Trudeau.

more on MacIntyre here

---

Updated again, and again, because I need to dot every fucking i.

"So you want to be a career soldier? Good for you. But remember that the longer you stay in uniform, the less you will really understand about the country you protect." 

A Marine colonel explains democracy to philosophers, who by the nature of their calling refuse to accept what it is.

The full quote is below.

---

I forget how much I repeat myself. But that's all argument is at this point.

 

"jolifanto bambla o falli bambla

großiga m'pfa habla horem

egiga goramen

higo bloiko russula huju

hollaka hollala

anlogo bung

blago bung blago bung

bosso fataka

ü üü ü

schampa wulla wussa olobo

hej tatta gorem

eschige zunbada

wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu

–umf

kusa gauma 

ba–umf" 

These arguments have only to be stated to be recognized as being widely influential in our society. They have of course their articulate expert spokesmen: Herman Kahn and the Pope, Che Guevara and Milton Friedman are among the authors who have produced variant versions of them. But it is their appearance in newspaper editorials and high-school debates, on radio talk shows and letters to congressmen, in bars, barracks and board-rooms, it is their typicality that makes them important examples here. What salient characteristics do these debates and disagreements share?

A few pages of MacIntyre and it's like reading a very serious 22-year-old going back over his past as a very serious teenager. 

One of those books that make you go "fuck me, I need to reassess everything". Essential.

And it gets worse.

Dunno if anyone's coined this, but the condition of late modernity is "Teloslos" - purposelessness

Rakesh Bhandari replies

Tied back to neoliberalism which can be understood as a critique of the telocratic state. From Raymond Plant, The Neo-liberal State, chap 1: "To use the terminology of Oakeshott, endorsed by Hayek, the state should be seen as nomocratic and not telocratic."

Hochuli 

More reason to despise neoliberalism

Bhandari 

The idea that the state should just be nomocratic and not telocratic seems absurd in the face of climate change: we have a common goal of a renewable revolution, and the state has a role to play. Neoliberalism obstacle to life. 

Definitions: Nomacracy the is rule of means; telocracy is the rule of ends. 

Absolutely no sense of history. I used to think Bhandari was better.

...What’s more, the graduates were no longer content to let the machinery of business determine the course of their lives. One man told Baltzell that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.” 

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix."

If we review Bentham’s contemporaries in search of a figure who might be seen as exemplifying the antithesis of the Benthamic view of life, many names might suggest themselves and might, in one context or another, be appropriate. Rousseau, Burke, Kant himself, Hegel – each of these would have a claim, though each might prove, on closer inspection, to have something at least in common with Bentham. There is, however, a figure – a man who was born less than ten years after Bentham and died less than five years before him – who may provide the requisite antithesis. William Blake, I suggest, both embodies that antithesis and proclaims the imperfection of Bentham’s understanding of happiness. 

Keynesianism was an ideology of mobilization, an intellectual project for winning the war. And there were Keynesians everywhere. German economists, aligned with the Nazi regime, made the same discoveries at the same time. They conducted extensive debates in 1943 and 1944 as to whether there was any upper limit to the debt that might constrain the final mobilization for Hitler’s Endsieg. It was dangerous to be a fiscal conservative in Hitler’s Germany, especially as the end approached. 

MacIntyre is a Thomist

Though unfamiliar to most scientists and the general public, the term expresses a cultural problem that caught my eye. It occurs in an article written by the late Protestant moral theologian Paul Ramsey in 1976 as part of a debate with a Jesuit theologian, Richard McCormick. McCormick argued that it ought to be morally acceptable to use children for nontherapeutic research, that is, for research with no direct benefit to the children themselves and in the absence of any informed consent. Referring to claims about the “necessity” of such research, Ramsey accused McCormick of falling prey to the “research imperative”, the view that the importance of research could overcome moral values.

That was the last time I heard of the phrase for many years, but it informs important arguments about research that have surfaces with increasing force of late. It captures, for instance, the essence of what Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel laureate for his work on genetics and president emeritus of Rockefeller University once remarked to me: “The blood of those who will die if biomedical research is not pursued will be upon the hands of those who don’t do it."

"It’s War Communism in the war on disease. It’s Stalinism for the betterment of the race, and isn't that what Stalinism always was?" 

Trolley Problems and the doctrine of double effect. This time I'll quote the manuscript

The doctrine of double effect originates with Aquinas. We’re back to the authoritarianism of the Church and the research imperative. Utilitarianism doesn’t need to nit-pick about intention; it’s simple enough to say “I chose to kill 3 people to save 10”. But the focus on intention, the inner workings of the killer’s mind, denies full moral existence to those who’ve been killed, and I know of no study asking people to imagine themselves as the fat man and asking if they’re able to intuit a moral difference between being pushed by a man’s hand or by a turnstile with someone’s finger on the switch.

Utilitarianism is the logic of the military. 

So you want to be a career soldier? Good for you. But remember that the longer you stay in uniform, the less you will really understand about the country you protect. Democracy is the antithesis of the military life; it’s chaotic, dishonest, disorganized, and at the same time glorious, exhilarating and free — which you are not.

After a while, if you stay in, you’ll be tempted to say, “Look, you civilians, we’ve got a better way. We’re better organized. We’re patriotic, and we know what it is to sacrifice. Be like us.” And you’ll be dead wrong, son. If you’re a career soldier, you may defend democracy, but you won’t understand it or be part of it. What’s more, you’ll always be a stranger to your own society. That’s the sacrifice you’ll be making.

Democracy is absolutist about form and relativist about truth.

I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. 

And “wealth” itself is an irrational concept. It is an almost mystical process, the setting of ethical values: Arising from the irrational, transforming the irrational to the rational, yet nonetheless it is the irrational that radiates from within the resulting form.

Life is pointless. If the relentless drive for growth and progress—forward motion for its own sake, a mass delusion, a telos in the void—means now that the only option is a mobilized military-Keynesianism, it's a pity. It really is. But that's why the Chinese Communist Party will save the world.

I used Ball and I should have used Schwitters, a better artist, and a comedian, mocking the imperial telocracies of Europe in 1916, and 2023.  I could have used Talking Heads, but I'll use Motörhead.

And now the liberal-woke-capitalist-powers-that-be have restricted the viewing of footage of the battles of Verdun and the Somme, to protects us. And even joking about it sounds like overkill.

16 years old when I went to the war,

To fight for a land fit for heroes,
God on my side, and a gun in my hand,
Chasing my days down to zero,
And I marched and I fought and I bled
And I died & I never did get any older,
But I knew at the time, That a year in the line,
Was a long enough life for a soldier,
We all volunteered,
And we wrote down our names,
And we added two years to our ages,
Eager for life and ahead of the game,
Ready for history's pages,
And we brawled and we fought
And we whored 'til we stood,
Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder,
A thirst for the Hun,
We were food for the gun, and that's
What you are when you're soldiers,
I heard my friend cry,
And he sank to his knees, coughing blood
As he screamed for his mother
And I fell by his side,
And that's how we died,
Clinging like kids to each other,
And I lay in the mud
And the guts and the blood,
And I wept as his body grew colder,
And I called for my mother
And she never came,
Though it wasn't my fault
And I wasn't to blame,
The day not half over
And ten thousand slain, and now
There's nobody remembers our names
And that's how it is for a soldier.

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Hanif Kureishi 

RUDE

I had the good fortune earlier this week to be visited here in Rome by an ex-student who was brought up in Nigeria and has been working on a novel set there. I’ve only read the beginning of the book and have been unable to read more. (At the moment I can’t read much because I haven’t figured out how to scroll down though documents without the help of Isabella.) Anyhow, when the student had written a considerable amount of the book, she decided to show it not to an editor, friend, publisher or agent, but to a so-called ‘sensitivity reader’. She was concerned about whether her work would be politically correct or considered offensive to some or other reader; she was worrying about whether the book would even get past an agent, let alone to a publisher. This is a trend I’ve noticed with other students and also with editors at publishing houses: whether their work will be condemned for sexism, racism, cultural appropriation and so on. This is the contemporary anxiety for young writers today.

Some people are turned on and excited by the power of controlling others’ speech and freedoms. There is an element of the left which is bursting with aggressive self-righteousness and is puritanical and self-defeating. The writers I prefer, the ones I grew up with, are the wild ones, the demented ones, the rude ones who don’t give a damn. I can give some names and will present a mere handful: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Plath, Rhys, Celine, Burroughs, Miller, Baldwin. I could add many more and it would be a list of some of our greatest and most admired writers. They are artists who write without fear or inhibition; writers who may or may not be offensive to someone or other, writers who have been condemned or even prosecuted for their work. Think of what the great Salman Rushdie has been through in the name of free speech. The fatwah, in February 1989, was the first time I was aware that there could be real-life consequences for attacking tyrannous institutions and regimes. After the fatwah I know there were writers who were afraid to speak freely about the politicised version of Islam, or even about Muslims in general.

It has to be part of the writer’s job to be offensive, to blaspheme, to outrage and even to insult. I believe Kafka says in one of his notebooks that ‘Art should be an axe to smash the sea frozen inside us’. Art should not be safe or complacent; it should frighten, alarm and make us want to throw the book across the room. I don’t want to live in an atmosphere of fear and inhibition where writers are afraid of expressing their true selves for fear of offending someone or other. It is the work of great writers to turn the world upside down, to present opinions which go against the prevailing trends. It is not our job to please but to challenge, to make us think differently about our bodies our sexuality, politics and normativity.

Would these writers have passed the test today when it comes to political correctness? What would a ‘sensitivity reader’ have made of the work of D.H. Lawrence or William Burroughs? One of the things I’ve noticed about my students is that they are already inhibited. A student of mine wrote a good thriller from the point of view of a promiscuous American lesbian and was thoroughly criticised by his tutor for even thinking from this angle. How could he imagine for a moment that he was American, let alone a lesbian? The writer then got himself into a terrible tangle about who can write what and from which perspective. He re-wrote the book and made it much worse having been made to believe he was committing a literary crime by entering the mind of someone other than himself.

When I began my first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, I was determined to write the book with as much disinhibition and freedom as possible. I would make it as dirty and funny as I felt my mind to be. I wouldn’t hold back or hesitate to say anything I truly felt. It wasn’t my job to deliberately shock but to tell the story in the most candid way.

Before this I can recall working on the script of My Beautiful Laundrette in the early Eighties with my friend the director Stephen Frears. Stephen is not keen on script development but his note to me when I began the rewrites was to make it ‘dirtier, outrageous and more shocking’. I felt liberated by his remarks and this script was the first thing I felt I had written in my own voice, something that was truly my own. I wonder with these early works of mine – My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Black Album and Intimacy – what a ‘sensitivity reader’ would have made of them and what butchery would have gone on; whether I would even have a career now. I’m relieved not to be a young writer today working in this atmosphere of self-consciousness and trepidation, this North Korea of the mind. The Buddha is full of racial insults and lewd, politically incorrect language, it being written from the point of view of a dirty minded seventeen-year-old mixed-race kid.

My youngest son, who is twenty-four, tells me of what an environment of apprehension and reserve he lives in when it comes to speaking and creativity. We should not forget that the insult can be an indication of friendship and admiration; that we call one another cunts and arseholes out of fondness rather than cruelty.

I believe this over-corrected behaviour has been created by the right to make us lefties and liberals seem foolish and petty with our silly disputes about language and point of view. The work of those of us in political opposition is not to fight amongst ourselves but to create a world in which there is no inequality or structural racism.

Our business is not to provide fuel to the right over minor disagreements but to continue as artists who are brave, bold and push the boundaries of what can be said and thought.

There's plenty to quibble with.  Shakespeare never wrote "without fear or inhibition". 

Kureishi misses the point, or actually two points. For the first, I'll use an example I'd forgotten about—not the de Maistre, which I've used often enough, but the source I used only once:

Andre Gide quotes Joseph de Maistre: "Whatever constricts man strengthens him." The context is a note on Calvinism and English literature. A few pages earlier he writes

I believe that never did the "rules"' embarrass any genius, neither that of the unities in France nor that of the three actors in Greece, and that Racine and Corneille as well as Aeschylus have sufficiently proved this. (That moreover they have no absolute value and that any great genius masters them, whether be finds support in them or negates them - and that to come along and claim that this or that great man was embarrassed by them is just as ridiculous as if a painter said that when painting he is embarrassed by his frame and exclaimed: "Oh if only I could spread out a little farther!" and that those who protest against them are like Kant's dove, which thought it would fly better in a vacuum.)

In general insubordination with regard to the rules comes from an unintelligent subordination to realism, from a misunderstanding of the ends of art, from that specious insinuation of empiricism which aims, through a scandalous generalization, to scoff at art by attacking it only where it has become artifice, and to label as factitious all supernatural beauty.

The second point is clear in the words of the Substack censors above, who want to foster a polite, safe conversation, safe from the vulgarity of the street, and the real world of social and political life, and which they can bleed for profit. Kureishi is attacking individual passivity but not the forces that encourage it or in fact mandate it.

Cultures opening out and cultures closing down. The difference between renaissance and mannerism, or monarchism, democracy, and fascism. Iranian and Israeli film. I always have to repeat this shit. 

Modern ideologies discount cultures as systems fostering stability and see them only as based on teleology: derogating means for ends. Democracy is as theatrical as monarchy. Fascist theater is something else entirely.

Science is the study of facts and philosophy the study of values. Conflating the two in favor of facts, values become assumed. Values assumed all questions are seen as those of expertise. Expertise as the goal terms of measurement are assumed. Curiosity is defined by the frame, values by the frame moral worth by the frame.  

Democracy is undermined as a value and then as a goal.

I wrote that years ago. I was reminded of it a week ago reading Leiter

Scientists are useful people, but there is more to philosophy than being useful to science or solving "social problems," although I do think philosophy could do a lot more of the former, and has done almost none of the latter.  Genuine philosophers are legislators of value, as one 19th-century German observed,..

He means Nietzsche, of course, who wasn't much for democracy.

Values are the product of the community, formed and reformed over time.  High art has the relation of low art that haute cuisine has to generations of grandmothers. All of this for me goes back decades, but here 2008 will do: on the history of law, food, and beer. The absurdity of Fukuyama, Perry Anderson, and anyone who follows them, is that Schmitt and Kojève have the relation to Hegel that Shostakovich has to Beethoven. It's all riffing on the themes and structures of the past European tradition. But these assholes pretend, (and this continues from yesterday).

The history of events merely provides a series of pegs to hang the history of ideas on, and it is the latter that is of real interest. So, the time has come to turn to that history of ideas.

From the manuscript, posted here in 2015. 

The history of modern intellectual life, more even than the history of modernity itself, if it were to be written now would need to need to be written by a historian from Mars, someone so far removed from the events of the past century that their biases are wholly other. Objectivity does not exist; the sociological history of the present describes the present no more than cognitive science describes the mind. You can’t pretend to describe yourself and call it science. Skinner was right to call cognitive science “the creation science of psychology”. There’s no scientific study of ideas as ideas; there’s no scientific study of metaphysics. They’re what we are as persons, as people with experiences, desires, and names. Once you’ve acknowledged yourself as “Rudolf Carnap” any hope of the end of metaphysics is gone. It was never there to begin with. 

But this is perfect: "the authentic world of the Bildungsbürgertum". von Karajan at the Machine: