ted byfield

2026-04-11 what counts as a concentration camp

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:50:00 GMT

(Orig to FB)

Andrea Pitzer’s video piece What counts as a concentration camp? isn’t too long (24 mins) and is really interesting — in part for how it’s edited, which feels like the video equivalent of a rough cut of an academic essay. Like most tendentious exercises in applied neoplatonism, the debate about whether Trump & Co are building “concentration camps” is tiresome, artificial, and unnecessary; and arguments that they aren’t are starting to smell increasingly suspect. Pitzer’s history of CCs, One Long Night, is very good, and it’s hardly the first of its kind. Sid Mintz’s history of plantations, Sweetness and Power, traces a similar trajectory of how that form was developed through experimentation over centuries. There is no fixed, clearly bounded model of a CC. On the contrary, as Pitzer argues, CCs are best understood as a process.

There was a time (and, arguably, reason) to assert that certain words and phrases — notably concentration camp and genocide — had particular origins and associations that discourages using them widely. Under Netanyahu and Co, Israel has pissed away the last vestiges of that exceptionalism; and those of Israel’s supporters who’ve failed to responsibly criticize its excesses have relinquished any right to claim some sort of ownership of those terms. Those claims, well past their sell-by date, appear under a new sign, as efforts to control discussion and debate — and, as such, are part and parcel with efforts to intimidate, silence, and persecute effective critics of Israel’s policies and practices.

2026-04-08 luftgründer

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:57:00 GMT

Luftgründer, lit. “air-founder”: (1) a Silly Valley–style aspirational “Founder” with unrealistic expectations about the sheer mass of effort it takes to maintain anything — say, like a government. (2) A more accurate name for “libertarian.”

Context here, prompted by the NYT purporting to out [Adam Back as Satoshi](https: //www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-identity-adam-back.html)(?!?!).

2026-04-07 forensic dystopianism

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:10:00 GMT

Another phrase I’m surprised hasn’t been thoroughly hashed out: “forensic dystopianism.” I’m not a fan of Substack at all, but so many people are; and I’ve wasted too much time on self-marginalizing high-minded refusals — so that’s the name I chose to dump my occasional thoughts over there.

2026-04-07-klaus gnomi

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:12:00 GMT

Apparently, pretty much no one has ever typed the phrase “Klaus Gnomi” before, so here it is and I’ll reserve it — maybe for a pet name, maybe a Halloween costume, maybe a stage name, TBD.

Also, since I’m here and it’s 2026, here’s an AI slop rendering of Klaus Gnomi:

2026-04-06 now the whole earth is a bit more whole

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:05:00 GMT

Give this moment the time it deserves

2026-04-06-the fog of war is very thick

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:09:00 GMT

(Orig to FB)

This war is opaque to a degree I would never have thought possible. I’m amazed by that, but even more amazed by how few people seem to recognize that fact as such. The clearest expression of it I’ve seen is scattered people half-joking that Iran has become a more reliable source that the US government.

This opacity is understandable in Iran, a country run by religious fanatics. It’s harder to understand in Israel, which — even under attack — seems like it should be a more open society. It both is and isn’t surprising that various Gulf States have gone so quiet. But it’s much harder to understand in the US, because Trump & Co have only had a year to bludgeon our institutions into submission.

Basically, we have no idea what’s going on. Even very basic info about events, casualties, the scale and location of accumulating destruction, the conditions of our own and others’ armed forces, and the war’s impact on cities and peoples have all been relegated to the rumor mills of social media.

It’s as if “the media” we took for granted for most of the last century has ceased to exist. And if the nearly universal failure to note that disappearance is any indication, it has ceased to exist where it matters most — in the public’s mind.

small notes

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

2026-03-31: meet Proton Meet

2026-03-31: people are injecting “cadaveric adipose tissue” a/k/a corpse fat

2026-03-31: “neurodivergent supremacy” (🎩 Gizmodo)

2026-03-31: Scot Nakagawa, “How Democracies Win” (paint me skeptical)

2026-03-31: Aaron Regunberg, “What Are Your Obligations When Your Country Is the Villain?”

2026-03-31: Guardian review of the UK series Boom Box

2026-03-31: Blind Willie Johnson’s lyricless “Dark Was the Night”

2026-03-31: one of those elusive songs: Sade’s “Killer Blow,” on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack

2026-03-31: AJAM MC, Demilitarize the Indian Ocean (🎩 CH1)

2026-03-29: Comic Strip of the Day (CSotD)

2026-03-29: The elusive SNL “Bel Airabs” skit

2026-03-28: Todd Field’s Tár according to Wolfson, Millman, and Kearns (all 🎩 MB)

2026-03-28: Ben Wolfson reads Philip Larkin (from 2005! — 🎩 MB)

2026-03-27: [Trump gave Iran a sanctions regime against the US](Trump just helped Iran to impose a sanctions regime on the US.)

2026-03-27: Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute

2026-03-27: Sarah Schulman’s list of useful Iran-related resources for 27 March

2026-03-27: Track AIPAC

2026-03-27: Naghmeh Sohrabi, “The Catastrophe That Has Befallen All of Us” (🎩 JK)

2026-03-27: Error 417 Expectation Failed, the newsletter

2026-03-26: Will Davies: the UK’s “Labour-Conservative-Liberal Democrat cartel”

2026-03-25: Richard Seymour, “The illusions of Machtpolitik” (🎩 JG)

2026-03-24: Pankaj Mishra, “The Authority of Thought” (🎩 RW)

2026-03-22: RIP Agosto Machado

2026-03-20: Bari Weiss shuts down CBS News Radio

2026-03-20: “NATO Mission Iraq posture adjusted” (translation: we’re outta here!)

2026-03-20: Christian Kerez car parks in Bahrain facing demolition (more)

2026-03-20: the vile Lis Smith argues “We Don’t Need More Lawyers in Congress” (NYT 🎩 PA)

2026-03-20: Mack Hagood, Oral Residue: A Zombie Media Theory Rises Again

2026-03-19: Why Some Catholics Want Peter Thiel Burned at the Stake

2026-03-19: the Scully Effect

2026-03-19: “the city owns no roads, land, or buildings”

2026-03-19: How can Canadians unite in their own defence?

2026-03-19: The 49MB web page (🎩 IRR)

2026-03-19: Rough Trade’s 50th anniversary: Essential: Post-punk

2026-03-18: neological things updated: rereification (credit: Eric Hoffsten)

2026-03-18: Snowflake Cortex AI escapes sandbox and executes malware

2026-03-18: Fotopoulos on “Iran, the Western Left, and the ambiguity of allies”

2026-03-18: How to shoot a screen using a board of keys (MacOS)

2026-03-17: still kinda horrifying after 25 years: Jon Haddock’s isometric historical events

2026-03-17: every name the money touched

2026-03-17: Iran Resources

2026-03-17: Renee Reizman, “Mail Art Takes On the World’

2026-03-17: Charles P. Pierce, “The Next Democratic President Better Be Merciless”

2026-03-17: T. J. Clark, “A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle”

2026-03-17: A Russian esoteric sect goes west

2026-03-17: Cade Diehm, ”Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark?“

2026-03-17: Brian Reffin Smith, “On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All”

2026-03-17: Natan Dubovitsky’s (a/k/a Vladislav Surkov’s) short story “Without Sky” (🎩 FS)

2026-03-17: Why do cultural execs go mad?

2026-03-17: gone (almost) phishin’

2026-03-17: couldn’t see that coming… “crappy luxury”

2026-03-17: U+237C ⍼ RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW

2026-03-16: Sirantos Fotopoulos: two ways to disappear a people

2026-03-16: Perry Anderson, “Arms and Rights” in NLR (2005)

2026-03-16: dark money lobbying for age-verifying OSes

2026-03-16: Hamid Dabashi’s unsentimental take on Euro philosophy: “ethically bankrupt”

2026-03-16: Trump insider thinks Israel May use nukes (I agree)

2026-03-13: jigsaw puzzles invented by a cartographer (and by a woman earlier, ofc)

2026-03-13: the whole zodiac is off

2026-03-13: the Great Wall of Memes

2026-03-12: [Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence](decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence)

2026-03-11: “I built a spy satellite simulator in a browser”

2026-03-10: support the Bivens Act — for starters

2026-03-10: RIP Tony Hoare

2026-03-09: Post-War Prosperity to “Lifeboat Economics”? (🎩 RP)

2026-03-09: a tribute to Sylvère Lotringer (2022, 🎩 MW)

2026-03-09: “second hand zero-day” is not a phrase we want to see

2026-03-07: S&P “stealth correction”

2026-03-07: Claude solved a graph theory problem so Knuth rethinks AI (🎩 DM)

2026-03-07: the new Swiss non-exploitative LLM, Apertus (🎩 DM)

2026-03-06: Ervand Abrahamian, “Iran Under Fire”

2026-03-03: Apple’s Pages UI 2009–2026 just gets worse and worse

2026-03-03: “The law firms opposed the motions to withdraw the motion to dismiss.”

2026-03-02: Who loses from the Anthropic fight? Maybe Elon Musk and Alex Karp

2026-03-02: The Man in Seat 61 is said to be an A+ source for train travel

2026-03-02: “forensic dystopianism”

2026-03-01: In edus, AI isn’t the real threat. It’s just the mirror

2026-03-01: Russian vs Ukrainian army modernization

2026-03-01: the parlance of hyper-online misanthropes

2026-02

2026-02-25: the 80% bill

2026-02-24: NBER working paper, “Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence” (🎩 TU)

2026-02-24: autocorrect the autocrats with the Times New Resistance font

2026-02-24: Varvara Nedeoglo’s “La petite mort des filles russes en terre libre” in TQR

2026-02-24: x86 CPU made in CSS (🎩 IRR)

2026-02-23: Byte magazine visual archive (🎩 KH)

2026-02-22: Poseidon taking chocolate from Mexico to Europe

2026-02-22: a bluntly old-school cover-up in the UK

2026-02-22: amazing explanation for why Trump sent a hospital ship to Greenland

2026-02-22: Kenneth Lonergan’s 3’6” director / extended cut of Margaret (2011) (🎩 JH)

2026-02-22: the actor Stellan Skarsgård was a teen pop sensation

2026-02-22: Wesley Willis’s outsider Chicago landscapes (🎩 MM)

2026-02-22: the wit and wisdom of Artforum

2026-02-22: Telegraph (India) reviews Amitava Kumar’s Social Life of Indian Trains

2026-02-22: Letters to the Grauniad about men shoving women

2026-02-22: Rodney Graham’s inverted portraits of trees

2026-02-21: How the LA Review of Books destroyed itself

2026-02-20: Institute for the Study of War’s Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment

2026-02-20: Toney Karon asks if a proper World Cup is even possible in the US in 2026

2026-02-19: Marcin Wichary blog on software craft and quality

2026-02-19: Epstein Helper

2026-02-19: Mamdani unpolicing advisor Alex Vitale’s review of David Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan

2026-02-18: Paul Krugman: “Now Trumpists Are Menacing Economists”

2026-02-16: worth reading: defunding is what’s ‘really’ killing the humanities (🎩 EW)

2026-02-13: a miners / Sandinista football jersey mystery 🎩SS)

2026-02-12: Will Manidis takes down Schumer’s “something big”

2026-02-12: Gary Marcus takes down Schumer’s “something big”

2026-02-11: RIP Byte mag illustrator Robert Tinney

2026-02-11: Mamdani hired 39 people out of 80K applicants

2026-02-11: How liminalism became our defining aesthetic

2026-02-11: updated! images

2026-02-10: Lit Crit in the Age of AI (🎩BB)

2026-02-10: “most of us barely noticed there was also a sports event” (🎩RW)

2026-02-10: The Journey and Return of Elizabeth Fisher (🎩JP)

2026-02-10: For Cubans, surrender is not an option 🎩BB)

2026-02-10: Dominic Pettman on the first lady and historian of the robocene

2026-02-10: “How Close did we Come to Teaching Jeffrey Epstein?”

2026-02-09: RFK Jr’s heroin voice

2026-02-09: Jim Biglan, artist (🎩 CH1)

2026-02-09: 👉🏼 The Journey and Return of Elizabeth Fisher (🎩 JP)

2026-02-08: “trauma-ridden vessels who least resist inhuman economic forces”

2026-02-08: “the most overwrought AI legal filings you will ever gaze upon”

2026-02-07: Epstein / Kubrick/ Led Zeppelin / Baldessari

2026-02-07: Why your university has so many administrators

2026-02-06: Marco Rubio was the acting archivist of the United States?!

2026-02-05: Joohn Choe’s predictions for how the next election will unfold

2026-02-05: Turkish m-reduplication

2026-02-05: anti-phonetic alphabet ca. 2000 (🎩 ST)

2026-02-04: The Moral Stupefaction of the American Public (🎩DL)

2026-02-02: Simone 0914 Flagship Store (🎩 FiG)

2026-02-02: Neural review of Marina Hassapopoulou, Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (U Minn Press, 2024)

2026-02-02: ABC — Australian one — on the neoliberal Atlas Network

2026-02-02: the missing chapter from Alvy Ray Smith’s The Pixel

2026-01

2026-01-28: The Intercept’s guide to ICE patches

2026-01-28: older man who watches construction, gives unsolicited advice: umarall

2026-01-28: Linux running in a PDF

2026-01-27: a very smart approach to AI in education

2026-01-27: CERFI – Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry

2026-01-26: Ruminations on that DHS Penguin Tweet

2026-01-24: Bellingcat’s online forensic toolkit

2026-01-24: Chronicle of Higher Ed reviews new Bryan Alexander book Peak Higher Ed

2026-01-24: Steven Heller interviews graphic novelist Jarrett Dapier about Chicago Public Schools Persepolis ban

2026-01-23: best indy / community radio stations in the US

2026-01-23: poli-sci syllabus sourced from random internet posts

2026-01-23: AI bots are incompatible with democracy

2026-01-23: satisfying lost-and-found story of a Harry Bertoia sculpture

2026-01-22: F/LOSS CLI tool for “optimizing” Macs (incl. TouchID for sudo!): mole

2026-01-21: “the real reasons new yorkers’ groceries cost so much” (🎩JK)

2026-01-21: Redditor says MMS patch brought Verizon down (🎩IRR)

2026-01-21: End of an era: Gmail dropping POP3 support (🎩IRR)

2026-01-20: sage, nomad, demon — just not an assistant (🎩RL)

2026-01-20: # ASCII characters are not pixels

2026-01-19: Scavenged Luxury on Tumblr (🎩TM)

2026-01-19: same actress, same play for forty years

2026-01-19: poetics of the periodic table

2026-01-18: interview with the graffiti artist Sluto

2026-01-18: David French on the normative vs prerogative states

2026-01-14: “Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump”

2026-01-14: The China Syndrome and American decline

2026-01-13: Times Square FB group

2026-01-11: gently brutal NYRB review of Douthat’s doorstop

2026-01-10: historian of Venezuela AMA on FB

2026-01-10: automating medieval manuscript transcription

2026-01-09: VZ: The cash waterfall is upstream of sovereignty itself

2026-01-08: neatocal for planning an entire year

2026-01-08: alleged Berlin group manifesto: deDOTindymediaDOTorg/nodeSLASH565575

2025-12-23: RAM price skyockets thanks to OpenAI

2025-12-16: Jaro on Longfellow-ZK

2025-12-15: private equity is setting rural America on fire

2025-12-10: AAUP on AI

2025-12-07: Cyber Ciani

2025-12-03: Dictionary of Non-notable Artists

2025-12-01: the best font ever

2025-11-29: Poor Theory (🎩 SXW)

2025-11-26: Hyman Rickover’s rules for govt management

2025-11-26: how’d I miss a walking city block?

2025-11-26: epic list of journal RSS feeds on Github

2025-11-23: framework for combining geospatial resources

2025-11-22: Github > allaboutrss

2025-11-20: a much-needed homage to Martha Wilson

2025-11-18: Seemingly legit tool for sandboxing attachments

2025-11-14: first AI-orchestrated cyber espionage

2025-11-09: # The Rise of Parasitic AI

2025-11-08: Sam Altman’s pants are totally on fire

2025-11-07: Wordle in 1973

2025-11-07: oldversion.com

2025-11-06: Altman’s Long Goodbye movie poster

2025-11-06: news.kagi.com

2025-11-06: high-quality Mamdani t-shirt

2025-11-06: visual/video search engine for Reddit

2025-11-03: Tony Karon’s blog

2025-11-03: Chi-town saying no to predatory stadium financing

2025-10-31: [Cop Sculpture](1993–94 > Cop Sculpture) is on IG

2025-10-31: wtfjusthappenedtoday

2025-10-31: “Human Only Public License” (🎩 US)

2025-10-10: Bill Ayers on “sewer socialism” and free buses (🎩 JB)

2025-10-06: Dollar General Carl Schmitt, Curtis Yarvin, has “think realistically about how to flee the country”

2025-09-26: Complete History of the Soviet Union, Arranged to the Melody of Tetris

2025-09-26: De l’émancipation des toons

2025-09-26: “raw, unfiltered takes from everyday people on the topics that matter most”

2025-09-25: Jacobin as “the politics of demoralization in service of the Dem Party”

2025-09-25: Teen Vogue on rapture ideology

2025-09-25: a pretty sharp AI video about MAGA

2025-09-15: kitsch is central to MAGA (🎩 AO)

2025-09-14: bsky thread on climate disruption narratives

2025-09-12: chopstick sleeve exhibition

2025-09-12: Kirk was killed by a meme

2025-09-12: FARK bans misogyny

2025-09-06: “Nothing comes without its world” (🎩 CS)

2025-09-05: Counterfacto, a tool for analyzing Xitter search results “to highlight counterfactual statements on certain topics”

2025-09-03: Western Cell Division, “Opening Gaps and Filling Them Up…WESTERN CELL DIVISION and You” (Baltimore, MD: Dialectical Immaterialism Press, 1987)

2025-08-13: David Dayen sheds more light on the fund-raising machines that dominate the Democratic Party — this time in California

2025-08-11: a great Michael Tomasky column on Trump, Putin, UA, and UE

2025-08-10: Charlie Stross thread on a proposed interstellar travel design (🎩 KD)

2025-08-08: Al-Jazeera on Trump’s “fascist anti-psychiatry”

2025-08-08: Glyn Morgan’s belated review of Arthur Goldhammer’s 2012 novel Shooting War

2025-08-08: the Ursus Books (NYC) mailing list never fails to amaze (signup link)

2025-08-08: “GIRLS OWN THE VOID”: Nina Power on the supergenius Audrey Wollen (2017) 2025-08-08: https://archive.ph/20250808131031/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/rationalists-ai-lighthaven.html mentions this [techno-volkish wannabe anthem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB3uTV5Pyz0

2025-08-08: A+ explanation of the sinking market for US bonds

2025-05-30: high school graduation hit with fake ticket DOS attack

2025-05-25: “I Was Targeted by a Hostile Crypto Spambot Swarm That Revealed How X’s Algorithm Has Been Truly Broken”

2025-05-14: the Big Boy graveyard on Google Maps or scene from The Matrix?

2025-05-14: [a letter from concerned Palantir alumni to the tech workers of Silicon Valley](https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25930212/the-scouring-of-the-shire.pdf

2025-05-14: Apparently, Robert Macfarlane (not sure which one) said “Despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline.”

2025-05-14: big props to The Verge’s for using “supposed” and “putative” to describe Trump’s minions who were named without qualification or process to replace people who were illegally fired

2025-05-08: find who owns a publisher from a book’s barcode (🎩 NTT)

2025-05-08: poem “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper”

2025-05-07: this guy says John Fetterman’s always been a mess (🎩 RP)

2025-05-01: an exoplanet whose “atmosphere is thick with clouds of vaporized metal, and it rains liquid sapphires and rubies” (🎩CT)

2025-05-01: click whither: [a random website generator](https://randomgenerate.io/random-website-generator

2025-04-30: “five nuns fled a northern Italian convent after the abbess was sacked amid ‘grave vicissitudes’”

2025-04-08: Dan Goodin quoting Matthew Green and Matt Blaze is a pretty good working definition of trust

2025-04-08: “YOU HAVE NO REAL FRIENDS AND WILL DIE ALONE”

2025-04-08: “the tariffs are another tool for Trump to compel loyalty from industries in the US”

2025-04-06: amazing rundown of Trump’s penchant for cheating at golf

2025-04-06: Russia: “an ideology without principles’? (🎩 FC)

2025-04-03: Perry Anderson on “Regime Change in the West”(of which McKenzie Wark says, “It takes forever to get Marxists to embrace a new concept, and then they never ant to give it up.”)

2025-04-03: Public Domain Review — one of the best things on the net — on perfect animals

2025-04-02: Princeton has a better idea than hiding: selling bonds

2025-04-01: Facebook seems to be f*ing with Heather Cox Richardson’s daily posts(additional report by Mark Lemley)

2025-04-01: Laura Kipnis on the history “weaponization” of federal funding

2025-03-30: The Rutgers faculty senate did what faculty senates everywhere should have been doing — passing resolutions demanding positive, collective action from the admin

2025-03-30: The architect Kazys Varnelis drops an excellent neologism: Ghiblification

2025-03-29: # John Zorn’s Hermetic Cartography

2025-03-29: # Dean Blundell on Canada cutting ties with the US

2025-03-29: a powerful statement about Vance and the 1968 Broken Arrow B-52 crash in Greenland

2025-03-27: Rolux’s Vectorisation(s) Du cinéma (2020)

2025-03-26: Interesting syllabus “about the representation of the city across media and disciplines” by Fabrizio Gallianti

2025-03-25: “Turd Reich” images for download

2025-03-24: Letter to USC on edu transparency re natsec risks posed by Chinese nationals in STEM

2025-03-23: For those of a certain age, this clock design is a work of unsurpassed candor, wit, and genius. For others, its meaning will be lost, like tears in the rain.

2025-03-23: a brilliant takedown some new book called In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

2025-03-21: Michael Ignatieff, who headed up CEU in Budapest, on what US edus should do 2025-03-21: I was sure that Tesla coined the fabulous word “embrittlement,” but it was far more popular in 1967 and 1983

2025-03-16: I’m probably more familiar with arbitration than most people from spending several years following ICANN, but even so the International Centre for Dispute Resolution’s “Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal,” sounded a bit dystopian.

2025-03-13: MFA Houston’s page for Alexey Titarenko’s photographs

2025-03-11: Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young’s Music and Light Box on display in NYC Mar 27 – Apr 12

2025-03-11: Columbia’s own James Schamus on Trump’s attacks on the university

2025-03-11: every US citizen should read Malcolm Nance on Trump’s plans for Canada

2025-03-11: AFA-CWA’s promo video for its C.H.A.O.S. approach to striking is 🏆 (background here)

2025-03-11: Starship 8 blowing up in the Bahamas is gorgeous — Musk should do it more often

2025-03-10: I didn’t realize the great Onethingwell started up the stopped again

2025-03-10: this still isn’t happiness

2025-03-10: This [U Chicago AAUP statement is good.](https://uchicagoaaup.wordpress.com/***2025-03-10:*** This U Chicago AAUP statement is good. But they had to publish it on Wordpress because faculty can’t speak as the university in the same way that administrators can — which is strange when you think about it.) But they had to publish it on Wordpress because, apparently, faculty can’t speak as the university in the same way that administrators can — which is strange when you think about it.

2025-03-09: FB’s explicitly blocking access to Gil Durán’s Nerd Reich because it “addresses topics like the ‘Network State’ concept and critiques of tech industry figures

2025-03-09: Mike Masnick on “Why Techdirt Is Now a Democracy Blog”

2025-03-09: Nina Burleigh (a/k/a American Freakshow) on [MAGA’s Heart of Darkness](https://www.americanfreakshow.news/p/magas-heart-of-darkness

2025-03-07: “the empathy exploit” is quite a phrase

2025-03-06: Timeline of Technological Buffoonery in the DOGE Era

2025-03-06: “We think it perspicacious to note” that if CRMEP’s philosophy students want to win this fight — and they should — they’ll need to find better copy-writers.

2025-03-06: “life-size chocolate Guernica” should be a mid-’90s punk band, not an actual life-size chocolate Guernica

2025-03-06: “# “Space focused on technology, new media and artistic research”

2025-03-04: Columbia U (my alma mater and neighbor for deacdes) keeps on screwing up its handling of the pro-Palestinian protests

2025-03-04: Dictionary.com doesn’t know how to pronounce the singular word interstice

2025-03-03: not enough people understand that Musk’s goal is to exterminate multitudes — and Trump is cool with that because that’d make him a Great Man

2025-03-03: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Journal of Architectural Education pulls its call for an issue about Palestine (2025-03-10: the board resigned en bloc — good for them!)

2025-03-03: Gregg Gonsalves gets warmer than most — the Trump admin wants to destroy universties — but his analysis still focuses on science, which is a mistake.

2025-02-27: Steve Vladeck notes Big Law partners worry “they could jeopardize their economic future by protecting the rule of law” 🎻 🔬 😭 🌊

2025-02-26: a super obit for a fascinating guy, Chistopher “Sandy” Jencks (🎩 LF)

2025-02-26: an awful squib about N5N1 killing sand hill cranes in southern Indiana

2025-02-26: on Christian support for Trump and liberal denialism (🎩 Mike McG)

2025-02-24: 40% of the glaciers in Central Europe melted between 2000 and 2023

2025-02-24: Peter Sellers’s 1975 ads for TWA are brilliant (this one especially), but the meta-ad he made is next-next-next-next level

2025-02-24: Wankpanzer vs Pinto according to a hobbyist stats blog that looks great

2025-02-22: CPAC as gonzo politics

2025-02-22: Paul Prudence has a really sharp aesthetic

2025-02-22: Kagi, the privacy-oriented subscription search engine, is doing some interesting things

2025-02-22: ABC: “US cyber agency puts election security staffers who worked with the states on leave” — I don’t understand why this get so little attention

2025-02-22: I wrote a Bsky thread about Trump’s attacks on higher ed

2025-02-21: WiReD has a razor-sharp take on the fashion shift among broligarchs: “everyone missed that they were dressing for the job they really wanted”: emperors.

2025-02-21: Ithaca’s Lavender Hill Commune, “home away from home in the 1970s for many displaced members of what is now known as the LGBTQ+ community, has been officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places.”

2025-02-21: Marc Greif on the threat of fascism: “The risk of overreaction is trivial compared to the risks of accommodation.”

2025-02-21: In a time of unprecedented crisis, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries [is promoting his “vividly illustrated book — the perfect holiday gift to inspire the whole family!”](https://bsky.app/profile/unraveledpress.com/post/3linkppo6ls2j

2025-02-20: this Xitter thread is unusually dense with smart observations (e.g., fascism is “a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place,” and “the only mode of moral argumentation you ever see from a reactionary is whataboutism”)

2025-02-20: A phrase we’ll see more of, I wager: “the shallow state”

2025-02-12: Lucian Truscott offers a preview of blue-on-blue violence

2025-02-12: Chris Newfield gives a masterclass on why the proposed change in NIH funding would be a systemic catastrophe for US higher ed

2025-02-12: Jeff Sharlet explains why faculty must be open with students about that threat

2025-02-12: Trump wants to cancel 50% of the office space leased by the federal government

2025-02-10: Feb 10 is the anniversary of the first (reported) collision involving an active and a dead satellite

2025-02-10: Why doomscroll when you can eduscroll? a 🏆 to aizk for their brrrrrilliant TikTok-like interface for Wikipedia

2025-02-10: Microsoft’s copilot “loves the creativity” of my shocktwerps neologism for Musk’s übermunchkins

2025-02-10: 404media, an excellent news outlet, on “AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications”

2025-02-10: “First they came for the cokeheads and I did not speak out because I was not a cokehead…”

2025-02-10: “far center” seems like a useful political category, and this piece on that op-ed pest Pamela Paul is hilarious ~

2025-02-05: Yessssssss a Facebook skullpaper meme generator!

2025-02-05: Gil Duran’s Nerd Reich on the blueprint for Musk’s coup

2025-02-05: Canada’s tariff list included “Unmanned aircraft…Designed for the carriage of passengers” (8806.10.00), “Fitted cases for church bells” (4202.99.10), Catgut (4206.00.10), Burial shrouds (6307.90.10), “Pointe shoes or block toe shoes, for professional dancers employed by full-time dance companies which meet Canada Council standards of professionalism or for ballet students in full-time attendance at a ballet school which meets Canada Council curriculum standards” (6403.59.10), and sugar tongs (8215.10.10)

2025-02-05: Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West “spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take”, called “Bullshit Machines”

2025-02-05: Newly minted AG Pam Bondi issued a rule that requires spies to be caught doing “more traditional espionage” (tiny cameras and hand-cranked radios?), which is literally like saying that thieves have to be caught wearing a black-and-white striped shirt and carrying a canvas bag ovr their shoulder

2025-02-01: James Fallows offer the kind of high-level, well-informed context for the DC plane crash we need more of

2025-02-01: Someone named Danyelle Thomas on people who “were counting on a status quo election where [they] could make a morally superior protest vote without serious consequence” and “expected enough voters to do the heavy lifting of a pragmatic choice that would defeat Cheeto Christ Stupid Czar while [they] get to say [they] voted morally”

2025-02-01: Today in Tabs on Krugman on Krugman leaving the NYT

2025-02-01: the PPRuNe (Professional Pilots Rumor Network) thread devoted to the DC crash

2025-01-29: Really interesting Bsky thread](https://bsky.app/profile/dorsaamir.bsky.social/post/3lglw6iefus2g) on the whether the Müller-Lyer illusion is culturally informed

2025-01-29: “During 1965–66, Mad magazine attempted a French edition and hired [Melvin] Van Peebles as editor-in-chief during its run of only five issues.” (Wikipedia)

2025-01-29: Paul Krugman’s piece of how and why he left the NYT is, in a quite way, a jaw-dropping account of how that paper has degenerated into, basically, Fox News for the NPR set (🎩 Ina B)

2025-01-29: Over at Aaron Rupar’s excellent newsletter Public Notice, David R. Lurie (who describes himself as an “occasional writer about the law and related matters”) shows us what proper journalism looks and sounds like

2025-01-29: “Raging Misogynist” Now Federal Government H.R.’s Top Lawyer” is [quite a headline

2025-01-24: Why do “AIs” default to the condescending voice middle-school textbook Q&As, like this Anne Franke bot?

2025-01-24: I don’t understand how this is possible, but I also don’t understand how it would be impossible — Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day substack will become more relevant to more people with every day that passes

2025-01-24: a new issue of The Diagram is out!

2025-01-16: Matt Stoller’s Jan 13 issue of his anti/trust-related newsletter “Big” has a jaw-dropping list of the regulatory issues “Meta” faces (does anyone really believe in that name?), i.e., why Zuck is groveling up a storm at Mar-a-Lago

2025-01-16: Jim Henson’s muppets weren’t always so peace-loving

2025-01-16: Steamed buns (yes, those ones) are helping Chinese weapons engineers “turn the angry king of explosives into a beautiful queen”

2025-01-16: a site with zillions of links to English-language literary magazines, with short excerpts of pieces recently ran (🎩SB)

2025-01-11: Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber Matthew Livelsberger’s two “minifestoes,” less than a page each, basically advocate exterminating half the US population (guess which half!)

2025-01-11: Dennis Cooper has put together a pretty epic set of images on his blog

2025-01-11: my love of primates doing human stuff transcends all words, but this might just be the greatest monkey video ever

2025-01-11: Paolo Gerbaudo has coined one of the most useful phrases I’ve seen in a long time: “vintage theory”

2025-01-11: Meta’s internal MAGA memo uses a slippery phrase we’ll be seeing more of, I think: “cognitive diversity”

2025-01-11: Robert Luxemburg’s unnverving video “UNTITLED (2025-01-08)…”

2025-01-11: Will Stancil’s Bluesky thread on our “massive information infrastructure which privileges conspiracy theories, demagoguery, bigotry, lies, and hysteria” is well worth reading (as is his whole feed)

2025-01-04: Via the amazing FIG Projects on Facebook, an intriguing site on Housing Standardization

2025-01-04: “Meet The Blind Birder Reimagining Accessibility In The Outdoors” (Science Friday)

2025-01-04: Trillium Domes geodesic dome kits and plans

2025-01-04: The Map Room blog’s list of notable map books published in 2024

2025-01-04: Melton and Wallace, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception (2mb PDF)

2025-01-04: Simon Meier-Vieracker, “Uncreative Academic Writing,” in Schreiber and Ohly, KI:Text Diskurse über KI-Textgeneratoren / AI:Text: AI Text Generator Discourses (De Gruyter 2024)

2025-01-04: Internet Archive’s “Classic TV Commercials” repo

2025-01-04: Joe Frank on the net

2025-01-04: OSINT Dojo resources for open-source intelligence

2025-01-04: Bellingcat’s auto-archiver for archiving links to vids, images, and social media from Google Sheets

2025-01-04: “A curated directory of 1000+ Mac menu bar apps”

2025-01-04: Internet Archive’s snapshot of my father’s crazy-but-smart solution for funding healthcare

2025-01-04: Achille Mbembe and Milo Rau on “The Paranoia of the Western Mind” 2025-01-04: “The Cagots of France,” persecuted for centuries then utterly forgotten (La Piccioletta Barca)

2025-01-04: MIT Tech review on how to pitch them

2024-12-13: Nathan Newman](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nathan-Newman-6) on “The Crisis of Elite Indifference to Corporate Mass Murder,” complete with a “modest proposal” (i.e., a parody) to “[l]icense no more than ten CEO murders per year.”

2024-12-13: The Grauniad’s piece on synthesizing “mirror microbes” is moderately terrifying.

2024-12-13: As usual, Astra Taylor is right.

2024-12-13: This new book on diagrams in anthropological discourse is both interesting and ‘‘interesting’’ — the kind of coy, artsy rhetorical style feel verrry late ’80s / early ’90s, and not in a good way.

2024-12-13: NYU declared Andrew Ross, one of its finest faculty members, persona non grata after he was arrested at a pro-Pal demo.

image stream

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

See also:

2026-03-18 sirantos fotopoulos on israel and iran

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:31:00 GMT

These two short essaylets by Sirantos Fotopoulos are probably the sharpest, densest commentaries I’ve seen yet on Israel and Iran. I know nothing about him except a few short bios. Triple Ampersand says he’s a “political activist based near Seattle, Washington and has worked on a variety of political campaigns over the past 20 years including with Ralph Nader and current Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson. He regularly posts at: facebook.com/sirantos.fotopoulos.” What. a. gift.

(1) 15 March 2026

There are two ways to make a population disappear from political discourse, and the Western anti-imperialist Left has, with a consistency that cannot entirely be attributed to accident, managed to deploy both of them simultaneously against the people of Iran. The first is the campist method: you absorb the country into a geopolitical schema so totalising that its actual inhabitants — their strikes, their insurrections, their feminist movements, their dead — become noise in a signal about imperial rivalry, inconvenient data points that complicate the preferred conclusion and are therefore, with a discipline that any intelligence agency might envy, quietly omitted. The second is the liberal method: you make the suffering so visible, so aestheticised, so available for consumption as a spectacle of violated humanity, that the people doing the suffering are transformed from political agents with demands and analyses and a specific class position into a kind of permanent victim-class, objects of indignation rather than subjects of history, whose liberation is always being prepared by someone else and perpetually deferred. Both methods arrive, by different routes and with different vocabularies, at the same destination: a politics in which the Iranian working class and feminist movement cannot appear as what they actually are — the protagonists of their own emancipation, in direct and chosen antagonism with a specific capitalist state formation, requiring from their allies not pity and not geopolitical calculation but the elementary recognition that their struggle is real, their analysis is serious, and their dead deserve to be counted.

This is a failure of political legibility — and that failure is not incidental to the theoretical traditions I am examining but structural, load-bearing, produced with something approaching deliberate craft. A framework that cannot integrate rights discourse with class analysis cannot see an uprising whole. It sees either a human rights violation — which is the liberal register, innocent of class, innocent of the question of whose interests the repressive apparatus serves, whose accumulation it protects — or it sees a geopolitical maneuver, a piece repositioned on the board of imperial rivalry, whose relationship to the actual human beings conducting it is treated as essentially incidental, a matter of atmospherics rather than substance. What it cannot see, in either mode, is the thing that is actually there: a working-class and a feminist movement in direct, chosen, conscious antagonism with a specific capitalist state formation, demanding simultaneously the end of theocratic repression and the transformation of the class relations the theocracy was constructed to protect. This is not a complicated thing to see. It requires only that one look — and that one be willing to accept what looking reveals.

Nicos Poulantzas developed an account of the capitalist state not as a unified instrument of class will descending from above, not as a simple executive committee managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie, but as a condensation of class forces — a terrain of struggle on which different fractions of capital and different class alliances produce, at each conjuncture, the specific form of state power that corresponds to their relative strength and their specific accumulation requirements. The state, in his analysis, is not a thing that a class possesses. It is a relation — a crystallisation of the balance of forces at a given historical moment, traversed by contradictions, capable of producing outcomes that no single class fully intended and that can only be explained by examining the specific configuration of forces that produced them. This is a theoretical instrument of considerable practical consequence, and its consequences are as uncomfortable for the campist Left as for the liberal rights tradition, which is perhaps why both have preferred to ignore it.

For what Poulantzas makes immediately and irrefutably visible is that you cannot read a state’s relationship to the classes it governs from its geopolitical alignment alone. A state’s posture toward American hegemony tells you something about one dimension of its existence — its position in the global system, the specific fractions of capital whose interests are served by that posture — but it tells you nothing necessary, nothing logically entailed, about its relationship to the workers and women and political dissidents living under its authority. The Revolutionary Guards simultaneously resist American hegemony in the region and operate one of the most significant accumulation regimes in Iranian economic life, extracting surplus from industries spanning construction, telecommunications, energy, and finance, disciplines that surplus through the suppression of independent labour organisation, and uses the apparatus of the state to protect that extraction from challenge. The Bonyad networks — massive, state-affiliated foundations in Iran, controlling roughly 20% of the country’s GDP — simultaneously represent a form of anti-Western economic nationalism and function as instruments of patronage, extraction, and the systematic disciplining of class forces that might otherwise cohere into an organised challenge to the existing order. These are not contradictions requiring explanation. They are, on the Poulantzian analysis, precisely what you would expect: the unified expression of a specific class formation whose interests include both the maintenance of geopolitical sovereignty against external pressure and the suppression of the Iranian working class’s capacity for autonomous political action against internal challenge. To treat the anti-imperial posture as evidence of progressive class character is not an error of emphasis. It is a categorical confusion — the conflation of two independent variables that Poulantzas demonstrated were independent.

But it is precisely here that the liberal rights tradition must also be brought before the same analytical tribunal, because it arrives with its own evasions, and those evasions are, if anything, more difficult to dislodge because they wear the costume of moral seriousness. The liberal human rights framework — the framework of reports and resolutions and special rapporteurs and solemn declarations — is, on the Poulantzian analysis, a politics that has systematically refused to ask the most important question available to it. It can register, with admirable precision and genuine moral courage, the torture in the cells of Evin Prison. It can document the floggings, catalogue the executions, name the prisoners, count the dead. And then, having done all of this, it arrives at conclusions about individual violations and institutional remedies that leave entirely intact the class relations that produced the prison, the accumulation regime the prison protects, and the condensation of class forces that makes the Islamic Republic’s specific form of state violence not an aberration but a structural necessity. A rights politics that cannot ask — in Poulantzas’s terms — which class forces are condensed in the repressive apparatus, which fractions of capital require that apparatus to function as it does, and what transformation of the balance of class forces would be necessary to make it function differently, is a politics that can produce testimony but not transformation. And testimony, however necessary — however indispensable as a record of what was done and to whom — is not the same thing as a politics capable of ending what it describes.

The task, then, is not the synthesis that eclectics propose — not the genial combining of the two traditions in the hope that their respective blind spots will politely cancel each other out, that the class analyst and the human rights lawyer will pool their deficiencies and arrive at adequacy. It is something more rigorous and less comfortable: the recognition, forced by the Poulantzian analysis, that a rights politics without class analysis is systematically incapable of addressing the structural conditions that produce the violations it documents, and that a class analysis without rights discourse is systematically incapable of specifying the concrete harms inflicted on concrete bodies by the condensation of class forces it describes. The flogging of a dissident in an Iranian prison is simultaneously a rights violation that any adequate moral framework must register and a moment in the reproduction of a specific class relation — the enforcement of the Islamic Republic’s accumulation regime against those who challenge it — that any adequate political framework must analyse as such. Poulantzas gives you the second. He does not give you the first. The task is to insist on both, not by averaging them but by showing that each is incomplete without the other and that their integration produces an analysis qualitatively different from, and more adequate than, either tradition operating in isolation.

The concept I want to place at the center of this integrated framework is political legibility — the condition under which a social struggle becomes visible, nameable, and therefore claimable as an object of solidarity within a given political framework. Legibility, as I am using the term, is not empirical visibility. The Women Life Freedom uprising was visible to anyone with a mobile phone and an uninterrupted internet connection, for as long as the connection lasted before the state severed it. The 2025 protests were visible in flashes before the blackout descended and the killing proceeded in the darkness that the Islamic Republic had constructed specifically to enable it. Visibility is not the problem. The problem is interpretability — whether a given framework possesses categories adequate to what it is seeing, categories in which the struggle can appear as what it actually is rather than as something more convenient, more manageable, more compatible with conclusions already reached before the first shot was fired. The campist framework, lacking the Poulantzian distinction between geopolitical alignment and class character, cannot read a genuine popular insurrection against a state it has positioned on the correct side of its map — it can only recode it as provocation, as manipulation, as the long arm of the American intelligence and military apparatus reaching into the streets of Tehran. The liberal rights framework, lacking the Poulantzian account of the state as a condensation of class forces, can read the dissident insurrection as a human rights event but cannot read it as a class event — cannot see the Iranian working woman removing her headscarf as anything more than a victim asserting her dignity, when she is simultaneously, and more importantly, a political agent challenging a specific configuration of class power whose stake in her subordination is material, structural, and fully analysable.

Against both these forms of illegibility — the campist erasure that cannot see the insurrection at all, and the liberal spectacularisation that can see only its surface — I want to propose what might be called immanent or innate solidarity: solidarity whose grounds are found within the actual, specific, historically constituted relations and struggles of a given conjuncture, grounded at every point in the Poulantzian question of which class forces are condensed in which state apparatuses and what transformation of their balance the struggle in question is capable of producing. Immanent solidarity takes seriously the specific class character of the state being resisted — the Revolutionary Guards as accumulation regime, the Bonyad networks as disciplinary apparatus, the morality police as the enforcement arm of a specific configuration of patriarchal and class power — not as background color but as the central analytical question, the thing that determines both what kind of transformation the struggle might produce and what kind of solidarity would actually serve it rather than merely expressing the solidarity’s authors’ moral preferences. It takes seriously the specific forms of harm the repression produces as symptoms of specific class interests and specific accumulation requirements. And it takes seriously the specific conjunctural position of the struggle — its transformative potential at this moment, in this configuration of forces — without subordinating that assessment to a predetermined hierarchy of contradictions that relieves the analyst of the obligation to actually think.

The question of prioritisation cannot be wished away, and a theory that pretends otherwise is practicing a dishonesty of its own. Political actors operate under constraints of attention, organisational capacity, and resources that make the claim of equal solidarity with all struggles at all times a rhetorical gesture rather than a political commitment. Some form of political judgment about where to direct solidarity, and when, and how, is inescapable — and the question is not whether to make such judgments but on what analytical basis. The campist answer — subordinate solidarity to geopolitical alignment, treat the state’s posture toward Washington as the measure of its progressive character — has been demonstrated by the nearly five decades of Iranian history to produce a politics useless to the people it claims to represent and actively harmful to the movements it purports to support, precisely because it commits the confusion that Poulantzas spent his career systematically dismantling. The liberal answer — measure the severity of rights violations against a universal standard abstracted from structural position — produces a politics of perpetual emergency, capable of moral clarity about individual cases while remaining, by design, incapable of the structural analysis that would allow it to ask whether its interventions strengthen or weaken the class forces capable of transformation. The answer that the Poulantzian framework makes available is conjunctural: the assessment, at each specific historical moment, of which configuration of class forces creates the conditions for a genuine rupture in existing relations of domination, and what solidarity practice would most effectively support and extend the capacity of the subordinate forces to press that rupture toward transformation. This is not a formula. It is a demand for the actual exercise of political thought — thought that takes its categories from the analysis of the conjuncture rather than from the prior commitments of the analyst.

There is a further demand embedded in this conjunctural method that the campist tradition has been particularly, one might say constitutionally, resistant to acknowledging: the demand for revision. A conjunctural assessment describes a configuration of class forces at a specific historical moment, and it is obligated to update when that configuration changes — or when the evidence reveals that it was never what the assessment claimed. The Iranian working class and feminist movement have, across the Green Movement of 2009, the uprisings of 2017 and 2019, the Women Life Freedom movement of 2022, and the nationwide protests of 2026 suppressed under a communications blackout while thousands were killed, demonstrated with whatever clarity history is capable of demonstrating anything that their struggle represents precisely the kind of conjunctural event that the Poulantzian analysis demands be taken seriously — not because it is sympathetic, not because its participants are admirable, though they are, with an extraordinariness that shames the comfort of their Western commentators, but because it represents a working-class and feminist challenge to a specific condensation of class forces whose transformation would have consequences for the balance of power across the region and beyond. The campist Left has failed this analysis not because the evidence was unavailable but because making it would have required revising conclusions that function not as political assessments but as dogma — and dogma, by its very definition, is the place where thinking stops and repetition begins.

The Iranian working class and feminist movement have provided, across forty-seven years of extraordinary courage sustained against extraordinary and meticulously documented violence, a remarkably precise answer to the question of what they actually require from their putative allies on the Western Left. They do not require to be instrumentalised — absorbed into someone else’s geopolitical narrative as evidence of imperial aggression or, in the liberal mode, aestheticised as evidence of universal human dignity violated and then filed away. They do not require the solidarity of people who discover them only when they become useful to a predetermined argument and misplace them when the argument moves on. They do not require to be told, by people whose understanding of the Islamic Republic derives from position papers rather than from living under it, what their struggle is really about, which foreign intelligence service is really directing it, and what theoretical conclusions they ought to draw from their own experience. What they require — what the Poulantzian analysis makes clear they are fully entitled to require — is to be seen as what they actually are: political agents engaged in a struggle against a specific condensation of class forces, with their own analysis of that condensation refined across decades of inhabiting it, their own demands about its transformation, and their own claim, requiring no external authorisation from any Western theoretical tradition, on the solidarity of anyone who takes seriously the proposition that the liberation of the working class is the act of the working class itself. A Left that cannot offer this recognition has not made a theoretical error, though the theoretical errors are real, are serious, and have been described above in some detail. It has made a political choice — to organise its solidarity around its own ideological convenience rather than around the interests of the people whose liberation it spends a remarkable amount of time discussing in their absence. And the people in the prisons, the people in the streets, the people who conducted their struggle under communications blackouts while the Western Left was debating the finer points of anti-imperialist doctrine in conditions of complete personal safety — they are living, and dying, with the consequences of that choice, and have been for longer than most of those making it have been paying attention.

(2) 17 March 2026

In the 1980s the Islamic Republic of Iran — which had come to power branding Israel “the Little Satan,” the imperialist outpost of American domination, the Zionist entity that Khomeini declared must be erased from the map — was purchasing, through back channels and shell companies, American-made fighter jet components, tank parts, advanced missile systems, artillery ammunition, and helicopter spare parts. The seller was Israel. The transaction was, in the strictest theological and ideological sense of the Iranian revolutionary government, an act of collaboration with the enemy of God and mankind. And Khomeini, when informed by one of his generals that the arms they desperately needed were Israeli in origin, paused for exactly two seconds and said, in effect: if you don’t have to ask who sold it, don’t ask.

That anecdote, recounted by Trita Parsi, who interviewed Khomeini’s close adviser directly remains the most rigorous accounting of this clandestine triangle. The anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist identity of the regime was not an incidental rhetorical flourish. It was the regime’s founding legitimating claim, the substance of its mandate. And Khomeini dissolved it in two seconds.

The Israeli side is no less extraordinary. Israel’s strategic doctrine — the so-called “periphery doctrine” — held that the Jewish state’s security depended on cultivating alliances with non-Arab states at the margins of the Arab world: Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia. This made a certain cold-blooded geopolitical sense during the Shah’s era, when Tehran and Jerusalem shared intelligence services, oil pipelines, and a common dread of pan-Arab nationalism. But by 1980, the Iranian partner in that peripheral alliance had just declared Israel a satanic abomination, had severed diplomatic relations, and was conducting, at full volume, a political theology in which the liberation of Jerusalem was a sacred obligation. Israel’s response to this was to sell that same regime tens of millions of dollars in arms in 1981 alone, rising to an estimated half a billion dollars annually by the mid-1980s, financed in substantial part by Iranian oil. Ariel Sharon — the then Defense Minister of the Jewish state — went on American network television in 1982 and openly admitted it, justifying it on the grounds that Israel wanted to bring Iran back into the Western sphere of influence. He said this while the Iranian government was funding movements committed to Israel’s destruction and while Israeli citizens were being told that Khomeinism represented an existential civilizational threat.

What this reveals, beneath the surface absurdity, is something clarifying about how states actually operate versus how they narrate their operation. The performance of ideology — the “Death to Israel” chants, the Little Satan rhetoric, the Israeli security cabinet language about the Iranian menace — is not simply lying, though it contains lies in generous measure. It is the production of a political reality that serves domestic legitimation needs, coalition maintenance, and regional positioning, and it operates on a track that runs parallel to, rather than intersecting with, the track on which actual material transactions occur. The ideology is for the population. The arms deals are for the state. The genius of the arrangement — if genius is the right word for something so morally squalid — is that the population and the state can both be correct, simultaneously, about entirely contradictory things, and neither track need acknowledge the other’s existence.

When the Israeli arms sales began leaking into the Iranian press, at least one person who had disclosed the information was killed. The theocratic state did not merely suppress the information — it liquidated the act of disclosure. This is not the behavior of a government embarrassed by a compromise. It is the behavior of a government that understands, with perfect clarity, that its legitimating ideology cannot survive contact with its own operational reality, and that the distance between the two must be maintained by whatever means necessary, up to and including the elimination of the witnesses.

On the Israeli side, the suppression took a different and perhaps more institutionally revealing form. The covert operation managing the transactions had to be relocated when it became apparent that even the Reagan administration’s comfortable tolerance for Israeli embargo violations had limits. A network of private arms dealers, shell companies, South American cargo airlines, and Mediterranean transit points was constructed not primarily to evade Iranian scrutiny — Iran was the willing buyer — but to maintain deniability within the Western alliance system and to manage the optics of a self-declared Jewish state arming the government that had just called for its destruction. As Parsi noted, the Israelis were acutely aware that their strategic utility to Tehran rested on their unique access to American weapons. They were selling weapons in violation of American sanctions to a regime that America considered a terrorist state, while simultaneously presenting themselves to Washington as its most reliable regional partner. The audacity of this arrangement was profound.

And then there is the true irony, which resists easy moral resolution: Israel’s arms sales to Iran were partly motivated by the desire to protect the tens of thousands of Jews still living inside the Islamic Republic. The same government calling for Israel’s eradication was, in effect, holding Iranian Jews as a tacit bargaining chip, and Israel was purchasing their relative safety with weapons that the regime then used to prosecute a war in Iraq which half a million people died. The humanitarian rationale, the strategic rationale, and the commercial rationale collapsed into a single transaction.

What this says about the relationship between declared enmity and operational reality in Middle Eastern geopolitics — and, by extension, in geopolitics generally — is worth stating with some precision. Declared enmity is a resource. It can be produced, maintained, and deployed in ways that are entirely compatible with material cooperation, provided both parties share an interest in keeping the two tracks separate. Iran needed the weapons more than it needed the theology of anti-Zionism to be operationally consistent. Israel needed the strategic buffer against Saddam and access to oil more than it needed the public performance of confronting Khomeinism. Both states were willing to sustain their respective ideological performances for their respective domestic audiences while conducting, in parallel, the business that the ideology declared impossible. The mullahs chanted death to Israel while their air force flew on Israeli-supplied parts. The Knesset debated the Iranian threat while the Defense Ministry sent monthly weapons lists to Tehran. Both performances were sincere yet fraudulent. This combination is not a paradox — it is the normal operating condition of states that require their populations to believe things that would make governance impossible if true.

The tragedy is that this relationship, which Parsi has described as a “missed opportunity,” was in fact not missed so much as structurally precluded from the beginning. The very mechanism that made the arms trade possible — the parallel tracks, the ideological suppression, the execution of the person who broke the silence — made genuine diplomatic normalization impossible. You cannot build a sustainable relationship on a foundation that requires both parties to publicly deny the relationship exists. The arms trade was real. The enmity was also real, or became real, because it had been so loudly and consistently performed that it eventually constituted the actual political reality it had begun as cover for.

By 1992, when Saddam had been defeated in Kuwait and the Soviet Union had dissolved, the geopolitical conditions that had pushed Israel and Iran into their clandestine embrace evaporated entirely, and what remained was the ideology that both sides had been performing for a decade. Israel pivoted toward Arab normalization and the Oslo process. Iran pivoted deeper into Islamist regional projection — Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the so-called axis of resistance. The arms trade left no institutional memory that could be drawn on, because both sides had been so diligent in ensuring it left no institutional memory. The cover-up was so successful that it covered up the possibility of anything else.

Which brings us, with a grim and rather clarifying logic, to the present moment — to the sustained Israeli military campaign now underway against Iran, to the strikes on Iranian territory, to the killing of senior Revolutionary Guard commanders and, today, the assassination of Ali Larijani, to the systematic degradation of Iranian air defense infrastructure, to what amounts, in effect, to an open war between the two states that once cooperated on a clandestine arms relationship.

The historical irony here carries a diagnostic weight. The Israeli weapons sold to Iran in the 1980s helped the Islamic Republic survive its most existential military crisis — the Iraqi invasion that might, had it succeeded, have strangled the theocracy in its infancy. In a very concrete sense, Israel helped build the regional power it is now attempting to dismantle. The Hawk missiles, the F-4 components, the artillery shells that kept the Iranian military operational during the grinding war of attrition against Saddam — these contributed to the survival of a state that would spend the subsequent four decades constructing the very threat matrix that Israel now cites as justification for preemptive war. There is a word for this, and it is not irony. It is blowback, and it arrives, as it always does, with accrued interest.

But the deeper point — the one that the current war forces into view with particular sharpness — is what the arms relationship of the 1980s reveals about the nature of the conflict now. If two states can conduct a half-billion-dollar annual arms trade while simultaneously maintaining a public theology of mutual annihilation, then the ideology on both sides was never, in any straightforward sense, the cause of the conflict. It was the instrument. The actual drivers — oil, strategic depth, nuclear ambition, the architecture of regional hegemony, the question of which state would emerge as the dominant power between the Levant and Central Asia — these were always material, always reducible to the logic of competing state interests dressed in whatever theological or civilizational costume the moment required.

This matters now because the current Israeli campaign is being framed, on all sides, in the language of existential necessity — of a civilizational struggle between democratic Israel and theocratic Iran, between modernity and medievalism, between the open society and the closed fist of religious absolutism. The civilizational framing is, to put it with appropriate bluntness, selective — and the selectivity is not accidental.

What the 1980s relationship ultimately demonstrates is that the conflict between Israel and Iran has never been, at its core, about what either government says it is about. It is about power — specifically, about which state controls the strategic architecture of the Middle East, about nuclear capability and deterrence posture, about the survival of the Iranian theocracy as a functioning regional projector of force, and about Israel’s determination to prevent the emergence of any regional peer competitor capable of threatening its military supremacy. These are the only concerns that have been operationally consistent across the entire history of the relationship, from the Shah’s oil pipelines to Khomeini’s missile purchases to the current campaign of open war.

The people who will pay the price for the resolution of these concerns, as they always do, are not the strategic planners in Jerusalem or the Revolutionary Guard commanders in their hardened facilities. They are the Iranian civilians living under a regime they cannot remove, who are now absorbing the material consequences of a war between states that spent a decade negotiating weapon sales while calling each other Satan.

And yet, if there is any salvageable principle to be extracted from this decades-long carnival of cynicism, it is precisely the one that neither government has ever been willing to entertain — that the populations conscripted into this performance have interests that are not only distinct from those of their respective states, but actively opposed to them. The Iranian worker who has watched the Revolutionary Guard consume the national wealth in the service of a regional empire he never voted for, the Iranian woman who has spent forty years negotiating the distance between her own body and the theocracy’s claim upon it, the Israeli citizen who has been told, with remarkable consistency, that permanent war is the price of permanent security and who is only now beginning to ask who exactly is collecting that price and where it goes — these people are not, in any meaningful sense, each other’s enemies.

They are the shared victims of governing classes whose power depends, structurally and absolutely, on the maintenance of a mutual enmity that the arms trade of the 1980s demonstrated was never more than a management tool. The liberation that is actually worth the name — not the liberation delivered by F-35s and targeted assassinations, not the liberation promised by a theocracy to a region it intends to dominate — is the liberation that begins when people on both sides of a manufactured frontier recognize that the madmen running their respective countries have been, for decades, running the same con on all of them simultaneously. That recognition has no air force. It has no Revolutionary Guard. What it has, and what no amount of ordnance has yet succeeded in destroying, is the stubborn, unglamorous, and entirely serious insistence of ordinary people that their lives belong to them and not to those who treat war as a game.

2026-03-11 kessler syndrome

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:58:00 GMT

A friend writes:

A hundred years from now when humanity is locked out of all space access for the next ten thousand years due to Kessler Syndrome, and people ask “why did Americans launch a million vanity satellites in the 21st century?” and the answer turns out to be “billionaires were mad about pronouns in bio.”

The film Gravity can be read as an allegory for how culture works, and actor–network theory is just another name for Rube Goldberg.

2026-03-09 leonard cohen mark rowland interview 1988

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:36:00 GMT

OCRed version of Mark Rowland’s fascinating interview with Leonard Cohen, published in the July 1988 issue of Musician magazine.

LEONARD COHEN: NERVOUS BREAKTHROUGH

By Mark Rowland

(Musician magazine, July 1988)

“I THINK IF I HAD ONE OF THOSE GOOD VOICES, I WOULD HAVE DONE IT COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY,” LEONARD COHEN RUMINATES. “I PROBABLY WOULD HAVE SUNG THE SONGS I REALLY LIKE RATHER THAN BE A WRITER. WHEN I WAS A KID I ALWAYS HAD THIS FANTASY OF SINGING WITH A BAND. WE’D HAVE GET-TOGETHERS AND I’D SING ‘RACING WITH THE MOON,’ STUFF LIKE THAT. I JUST DON’T THINK ONE WOULD HAVE BOTHERED TO WRITE IF ONE COULD HAVE REALLY LIFTED ONE’S VOICE IN SONG. BUT THAT WASN’T MY VOICE. THIS IS MY VOICE.”

Leonard Cohen has written two novels, eight volumes of poetry and nine albums, the latest of which, I’m Your Man, is as sophisticated and drolly incisive as pop songwriting gets. Ask any fan about Cohen, though, and invariably the first point of reference is the man’s way with a song. The pitch is deep if not particularly resonant, dynamic shifts are seemingly verboten, his phrasing deceptively flat. On “Tower of Song,” a tune from the new album, Leonard even makes a crack about it: “I was born like this, I had no choice,” he explains in that distinctive warble. “I was born with the gift of a golden voice.”

But he’s not entirely kidding, either, or at any rate he shouldn’t be. For Cohen’s voice is very much the witting instrument of his songs — dark, knowing, romantic, bummed. He’s the reigning auteur of folk noir, the godfather of doom ‘n’ gloom. Over in England, where pop ennui has become something of a cottage industry, Cohen is treated with near-regal respect. Popsters from Nick Cave to Echo & the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch credit his inspiration; the Sisters of Mercy even took their name from one of his early songs. Cohen’s last record, Various Positions, sold 300,000 copies in Europe. In the U.S., it was not even released.

Of course existential despair has never been a hot ticket in America; to an audience that admires R.E.M., Cohen’s elegant lyrical turns probably don’t count for much. But dismissing him as a terminal groaner (and unless you’re a member of his substantial cult following, chances are good you’ve thought along those lines) only underscores Cohen’s constancy. At 53, Leonard still dresses in black, his shoes are shined and his pinstriped jacket well-tailored. He has style, in other words. Not the sort that cops Grammy awards or Top 40 airplay, as Cohen has survived 20 years in pop music without either. But it’s an honest style, singular and uncompromised — which may be why he’s managed to survive at all.

He grew up in Montreal; his father was an engineer and sometime clothier who died when Leonard was nine. At McGill University he began writing poetry and played in a country and western trio, the Buckskin Boys. He also became part of a literary “underground” that, as Cohen recalls, “didn’t have any subversive intentions because even that would be beneath it.” With the help of a grant, Cohen began traveling through Europe, eventually settling on the Greek island of Hydra. He stayed seven years, wrote two highly-regarded novels, The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1965) — the latter itself the subject of a book by the Canadian critic Dennis Lee — and lived with Marianne Jenson, later celebrated in one of Cohen’s more popular songs (“So Long, Marianne”), and the mother of Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen.

“It was a very intense group of people who were passing through the island at that time,” Cohen remembers. “People who were going to make their mark on the culture — Axel, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, the Swedish poet Goran Tönnström. A very curious meeting of people, and that was very much a part of why I stayed.”

It was a scene Cohen finally abandoned, however, along with his romance and his career as a novelist. He returned to the United States with the idea of becoming a country singer, eventually settling near Nashville. Before that happened, though, “Suzanne” was covered by Judy Collins, and he was signed to Columbia by that label’s great talent scout, John Hammond. Songs of Leonard Cohen was an immediate success, several of its selections later comprising the soundtrack to Robert Altman’s classic film McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

With his minimalist melodies, chiaroscuro croak and a poetic sensibility that suggested fin-de-siècle fatigue, Cohen seemed to have as much in common with the late-’60s counterculture as an undertaker at a carnival. But they clicked. Partly it was Cohen’s stance, so determinedly unfashionable (“to change my name or go for an image would have felt sneaky, underhanded — that was Hollywood”) as to be irresistible for a culture hooked on novelty. Part was the power of truths, however unpleasant, to insinuate and endure. With Songs from a Room (1969) and Songs of Love and Hate (1971), he became a mordant prototype for a new breed of confessional, and increasingly popular, singer/songwriters.

But as the ’60s waned, so, ironically, did Cohen’s appeal. Another lengthy romantic liaison (Cohen has never married) produced two children, Adam and Lorca, and for a time a measure of personal stability. But Cohen’s music foundered. Always fascinated by religion, some of his themes grew mystical to the point of becoming opaque. “I thought I was one of those men that sang about his predicament, and that somehow everybody would connect with it,” Cohen admits. “But I lost my way and began involving myself with speculations that I knew deep down were not really public concerns. The world was no longer attracting me. It wasn’t very entertaining.

The record industry seemed to feel the same way about Cohen. Despite continued success in Europe, his albums went out of print here, and he didn’t tour the U.S. for 10 years. A few months ago, Columbia Records tried to airbrush its past policy of benign neglect by presenting Cohen with its Crystal Globe award, representing over five-million sales by an artist outside their native country. Accepting the award at a sparsely-attended ceremony, Cohen remarked that he had “always been deeply touched by the modesty of [Columbia’s] interest in my work.” Even when surrounded by corporate hype, Cohen is a very reliable witness.

“I don’t care whether they like me or not, or whether they think I’m a great poet or not. I shiver every time they use the word ‘poet,’” he notes dryly. “It means I’ve never been shut down. \ [But] I consider it a friendly gesture that they remembered that I had sold these records. And if they think I’ve produced a record that can sell, I don’t want to say anything that’s going to change their minds.”

The surprise success last year of Jennifer Warnes’ album of Cohen songs, Famous Blue Raincoat, hasn’t hurt his commercial prospects, and with the release of /’m Your Man, Cohen’s songwriting career may be finally coming full circle. Meticulously crafted, and for once not so’s you’d notice, the songs mesh the direct lyricism of his earliest work along with the toughened emotional fiber of a guy who’s been around the block a few times since. It’s a black comedy, and an entertaining one; “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” “Everybody Knows” and “I Can’t Forget” even have what you might call hooks. Were it not for the polished production values, occasional oud lick, or those angelic female harmonies — by now a Cohen trademark — you’d think he was finally making his country-western debut.

Cohen likes the record too, but mostly he’s glad it’s finished; as the following interview indicates, its three-year gestation was unusually tortured, even for him. Tortured enough at least to lead Cohen to re-examine his life, his worth as an artist and his place in the world. Now he’s a happier man. “But I think that’s because I just heard that the record went to number one in Norway,” he admits. “Then I heard it was going toward number one in Spain, and I began to reach higher states of ecstasy and bliss.”

We conversed one evening in Cohen’s Los Angeles apartment, a few days before his octet departed on a 65-concert tour of Europe. It was a clean, well-lighted place, though virtually devoid of furniture. Whether rummaging through his refrigerator or his own fertile mind, Cohen graciously shared the discoveries — an ear of corn, a forgotten poem, grape leaves, funny stories. For all his reputation as a bard of despair, his manner seemed elfin, his bleakest observations peppered with self-deprecating humor. Leonard Cohen is an artist, all right, and something else at least as valuable: He’s a character.

MUSICIAN: Do you think your music is coming back in vogue?

COHEN: People like the stuff again; I guess that means it’s a good time. Other musicians are treating me like Beethoven. Younger groups are recording my songs, some of them in subterranean caves in Iceland. I’m always gratified when extremist groups are attracted by my work.

I look at it more or less like it’s the Middle Ages, or the Dark Ages. There’s a flame here or there. Someone lifts a torch. Sometimes it’s in Warsaw, sometimes Reykjavik. It takes a certain amount of perseverance.

MUSICIAN: Is that a problem for you?

COHEN: I did not go into this for the short haul. I understood that about myself a long time ago. And then, you’re not even aware as the years go by. It’s not that one wakes up every morning and says, “I must reconsecrate myself in this great mission…” Also, P’’ve had examples in my life of men who’ve grown older in the harness and kept producing remarkable work. My friend Irving Layton, who is probably the best Canadian poet alive today, is on maybe his fiftieth book. That’s inspiring. There’s no concession to old age.

MUSICIAN: You’re referring to writers and poets. In terms of pop singer/songwriters, though, you haven’t had many role models.

COHEN: That’s true. But I’ve been sustained by people responding to my work though the marketplace does not celebrate it. So I never got the sense that “it’s over.” Maybe I should have — there was ample evidence from certain points of view.

MUSICIAN: Most of your following is in Europe. Do you think your songs, your world view, attracts or plays to what’s considered a more European sensibility?

COHEN: I think the public world in Europe is not as powerful as the public world here, so there’s still an inner space that’s not so much under assault. There’s still some remnant of nineteenth-century culture. In America there is no vacuum. Everything is public and the commercial institutions are now the landscaping of this public world. There’s nowhere else for you to exist. There’s a few libraries, a few second-hand record stores — the archives. But unless you are in the system here, you don’t exist. I’m not on the side of the cultivation of inner space, though. I don’t have anything vested in the position my life has given me. I’m happy to make a living. I don’t consider myself scorned, and I never design my songs to be outside the mainstream.

MUSICIAN: But you have often positioned yourself as an outsider, particularly when you arrived on the pop scene in the late ’60s.

COHEN: I always find it interesting when people designate me as a figure of the ’60s, because I certainly never bought the [’60s] point of view, and I’m on record in book after book. I think there’s one called The Energy of Slaves which came out in ’73 and ends with this line: “Welcome to this book of slaves

which I wrote during your exile, you lucky son-of-a-bitch, while I had to contend with all the flabby liars of the Aquarian Age.”

**MUSICIAN: But in the late ’60s you were in a community of folk singers who played together, sang each other’s songs—

COHEN: And everybody went for the money. Everybody. The thing died very, very quickly; the merchants took over. Nobody resisted. My purity is based on the fact that nobody offered me much money. I suppose that had I moved into more popular realms, I might have surrendered some of the characteristics of my nature that are now described as virtues.

MUSICIAN: That must have made you feel a little odd.

COHEN: It made me feel a little poor. [laughter]**

MUSICIAN: Do you feel limited by your voice?

COHEN: There’s no question; there are lots of things I wouldn’t try. But I don’t think that has anything to do with delivering a song. A song, a message, a laundry list, a salutation — there’s a way to deliver the thing so that it touches the person you’re speaking to. Now there are lots of good singers who couldn’t do my stuff — couldn’t penetrate it, would have no interest in it. I can do my songs better than most people. Very rarely someone like Jennifer Warnes comes along, who has all the emotional equipment and can bring musical qualities to the song that I can’t even approach. This superb sound that issues from her throat. Now maybe that can get in the way of a song too.

Most music criticism is in the nineteenth century. It’s so far behind, say, the criticism of painting. It’s still based on nineteenth-century art — cows beside a stream and trees and “I know what I like.” There’s no concession to the fact that Dylan might be a more sophisticated singer than Whitney Houston, that he’s probably the most sophisticated singer we’ve had in a generation. Or that Tom Waits’ whole personage is incredibly classy and chic, much more so than anybody around, mostly.

MUSICIAN: Is that something you take to heart?

COHEN: Well, I’m actually talking about myself. People talk about me being a primitive, they use “folk singer” as a way to put people down, things like that. I’m a folk singer, okay, but I mean, some folk singer wrote the melody to “Greensleeves.” How primitive was that? Nobody is identifying our popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan’s a Picasso — that exuberance, range, an assimilation of the whole history of music.

**MUSICIAN: What’s great about the best folk and country music is the clarity, the removal of anything extraneous from the point, And listening to I’m Your Man, I hear that in your own writing again, those succinct narrative and musical qualities,

COHEN: That’s what I’ve been working on for the last few years. I think “The Book of Mercy” (from Various Positions) was the final statement of the mystical, religious being. I don’t have to talk about religion anymore — it’s gone underground. I don’t think popular music is a good place to explore a lot of those ideas.

The song that is going to survive in this landscape today has got to have a certain kind of power, of strength. You don’t put your philosopher at the head of the army. This is a time for a very strategic position — to the marketplace, and to the whole psychic landscape. Muscle is indicated, a kind of phalanx. A lot of other things have to be put behind the front line. If your heart has really been threatened with cynicism — one’s own, I’m talking about, not CBS’. [laughter] With the greed, the skepticism, the general devaluation of all spiritual currency that faces us today, a position has to be taken that is appropriate in the face of this real assault.

MUSICIAN: You found yourself having a change of heart?

COHEN: I found myself getting wiped out, over and over again. I found myself breaking down, in not very pleasant ways.**

I wasn’t making [songs] as strong, I wasn’t paying enough attention to the foundation, the casting. I had good ideas, and sometimes I made a frail thing whose frailty was so alarming that it could endure, like the song “If It Be Your Will.” It has its own disarming life and can survive in this landscape. But mostly, no, they can’t.

MUSICIAN: Are you speaking in terms of music, or the craft of writing those songs?

COHEN: I’m speaking in terms of a position that embraces those things but also embraces the mode that we order our food in a restaurant and approach our friends and our lovers, just the style of operation today.

MUSICIAN: This may be something of a stretch, but do you think that your attitude in the ’60s, which was then something of a corrective to the excesses of the era, ultimately became corrupting and disfiguring for yourself?

COHEN: Well, my retrospective chops are pretty rusty; I don’t have that kind of mind. I remember that I was enflamed in the ’60s, as so many of us were. My appetites were enflamed: to love, to create, my greed, one really wanted the whole thing. And I remember feeling at a certain point that this was not working. You’d wander around the East Village in New York, there’d be a paper called the East Village Other which seemed to indicate there was some kind of community. Only you’d walk the street and there’d be no evidence of any such thing. The evidence started to accumulate that nothing was happening. Someone observed that whoever marries the spirit of their generation will be a widow in the next. I never married the spirit of my generation because it wasn’t that attractive to me. And I’ve since moved further and further from any possible matrimonial commitment. As you get older, I think you get less willing to buy the latest version of reality. Mostly, I’m on the front line of my own tiny life.

MUSICIAN: It’s remarkable that you’d written two well-received novels before becoming a professional songwriter. After that much struggle, why did you abandon a career as a novelist?

COHEN: Many times in the last few years I’ve thought I should have stayed with writing. Then maybe life would have been a little easier. I would have shipwrecked less dramatically. From my point of view.

MUSICIAN: You think it’s a less difficult life emotionally?

COHEN: As I remember it, for the writing of books you have to be in one place. The regime is just completely different. It usually involves a certain type of stability. You tend to gather things around you when you write a novel. You need a woman in your life. It’s good to have some kids around, ‘cause there’s always food. It’s nice to have a place that is clean and orderly, where this light comes in.

MUSICIAN: You had gathered these things?

COHEN: I had those things and then I decided to be a songwriter. I don’t know what it was, something to do with money. Although I was being affirmed in certain circles, I couldn’t pay the rent. I’d always written songs, so it was more like an emphasis changed rather than a venue. But I still don’t know how I got so deeply into it. It started to engross me — and also, I had enormous success at the beginning. That’s always a trap; you think, “I can repeat that.” This seems like a wonderful way to live. Everywhere you go people seem delighted to have you around. It seems to be more lively.

But…it wasn’t. I found myself mostly alone and that all the flaws of my nature were aggravated and written large. And I found myself mostly alone in cities that I didn’t know very well, trying to find a date for dinner.

That’s really what I found. What I left, which was an intimate relationship and a beautiful house on a Greek island, was obviously something I couldn’t stand either. So I don’t know, but it certainly didn’t work out very happily over the years. It’s taken me a long time to come out of the shipwreck of 10 or 15 years of broken families and hotel rooms. And some kind of shining idea that my voice was important, that I had a meaning in the cosmos. Well, after enough lonely nights you don’t care whether you have a meaning in the cosmos or not.

But you don’t know what to change to. When we’re young and we’re standing in front of this buffet table, you can pick and choose from the vast range of generality. The older you get the more specific your life becomes, and you can’t say, “I could be a forest ranger” or “I could be a brain surgeon.” When all the while you’re this songwriter living in L.A. It takes a long time to know it, and to say, “Well, okay, that’s what I’m gonna be.” Or even, “That’s who I am. Now I’m going to be a good one.”

Now I know what I am. I’m not a novelist. I’m not the light of my generation. I’m not the spokesman for new sensibility. I’m a songwriter living in L.A., and this is my new record.

MUSICIAN: It sounds like there were times you felt pretty close to going under.

COHEN: It’s just a matter of how prone you are to real mental disorder. It’s true that certain suffering is educational. It’s true that experience is important. That artists have an unstable psychic nature and sometimes it’s valuable. All these things that you’ve heard about writing, about the artist, are true. But a lot of people spend most of their life in acute pain. And it breaks some people. I was no stranger to depression and many distressed kinds of states, but at a certain point it really wasn’t funny. And at that point you have to start being what the Christians call “born again.” You’ve got to recreate your personality so that you can live a life appropriate to your station and predicament. And having illusions makes it very difficult to create an appropriate self.

MUSICIAN: I’d imagine it’s also a catch-22, since so much of your best music seemed to spring from that sense of despair.

COHEN: I can’t tell you how many letters and phone calls I’ve gotten over the years from people in mental hospitals who say, “You know where we are, and the fact that you’re on the outside and we’re inside gives us great hope.” It’s tricky, because I have been in real dangerous places, and I don’t like them.

MUSICIAN: Where you worry that you can’t trust yourself?

COHEN: Where you worry about jumping out of the window. You worry whether you’re gonna get from one moment to the other. I don’t want to spend much time there. I know my voice can speak from time to time to people who have been there. Whether I’ve helped somebody or bound them to their predicament, I don’t know. Affliction and suffering are mysterious.

MUSICIAN: But you speak as if you’ve had a more recent change of heart, or will.

COHEN: For the moment I seem to have. I think it may be because my record is number one in Norway. [laughter] I’m not sure; it might be that.

I listen to the radio, and I like all kinds of music, you know. But I do like to hear from people who have been there, that’s just my personal taste. Now, Hank Williams has been there.

MUSICIAN: Yeah, he died there.

COHEN: You want to hear a guy’s story, and if the guy’s really seen a few things, the story is quite interesting. Or even if he comes to the point where he wants to sing about the moon in June, there’s something in his voice…when you hear Fats Domino singing, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” whatever that’s about, I mean, it’s deep.

MUSICIAN: Do you always know what your songs are about?

COHEN: There’s a lot of songs that lose their meaning, you forget. I’m finding that out now, rehearsing the band. There are some songs I just can’t get behind. Some are surprising me, songs I really thought I could sing, like “Bird on a Wire.” I’m not sure it’s necessary to say, “I swear by this song and by all I’ve done wrong that I will make it all up to thee.” Either I’ve done that, or there’s no point in making that promise again if I haven’t. It’s very hard to get behind certain lines. The new songs I’m not having any trouble with.

MUSICIAN: It’s been three years since your last album. How did this one come about?

COHEN: Well, I hope I don’t have to write a record like this again. I’ve always been slow, but this was very slow and tricky and it broke down a lot. And I had to leave it many times and I spent a lot of money and my judgments were all wrong. In the middle of the recording I realized that the lyrics were all wrong, and they’d already taken a year or two to write.

For instance, “I Can’t Forget” has that limpid kind of language that doesn’t twist your arm at all. It’s a dead, flat language that I like. But that song started off as a song about the exodus of the Hebrew people from Egypt. As a metaphor for the journey of the soul from bondage into freedom. It started out, “I was born in chains but I was taken out of Egypt / I was bound to a burden but the burden it was raise / Lord I can no longer keep this secret / Blessed is the name, the name be praised.”

It went on like that for a long, long time, and I went into the studio and tried to sing this song about how “I was born in chains and I was taken…” But I wasn’t born in chains and I wasn’t taken out of Egypt, and not only that, but I was on the edge of what was going to become a very serious nervous breakdown. So I hadn’t had the burden lifted and the whole thing was a lie! It was wishful thinking.

And this song, “Taken Out of Egypt,” took months and months to write. Nobody believes me when I say these things, but I have the notebooks, and I don’t fill them in an evening. And there were many of them. So it wasn’t as if I had an endless supply of songs: I had to start over. And I was saying to myself, “What is my life?” and that’s when I started writing that lyric: “T stumble out of bed / I got ready for the struggle / I smoked a cigarette / And I tightened up my gut /I said this can’t be me / Must be my double / And I can’t forget / I can’t forget / I can’t forget / But I don’t remember what.” That was really true.

MUSICIAN: That’s quite a switch. The first version is such a big-screen technicolor production.

COHEN: Yeah: “I was led to the edge of a mighty sea of sorrow / Pursued by the armies of a dark and cruel regime / But the waters parted and my soul crossed over / Out of Egypt, out of Pharoah’s dream.” Pretty good — it’s DeMille! [laughs]

MUSICIAN: It must have been hard to let go of all that imagery.

COHEN: This happened with almost every one of the songs. “First We Take Manhattan” began as a song called “In Old Berlin,” which was an inquiry into the nature of evil. “I’m Your Man,” that started off as a song about “waiting for the miracle.” It had some funny lines in it like “waiting for the miracle, there’s nothing left to do / I haven’t been this happy since the end of World War II.” But I couldn’t sing it. I wasn’t waiting for the miracle, or maybe I was and I didn’t like the victimized position. Then it became a song called “I’ve Cried Enough for You,” where I was talking to myself, you know, “I’ve never seen the sky so blue the grass so green the day so new / I can’t believe it but it must be true / I’ve cried enough for you.” And that didn’t work.

Cause what I was really trying to say was, “I’ll do anything for you.” But it took two or three more writings and recordings of the song to get to “I’m Your Man,” which is just a perfect little song. It was hard to get to those truths.

MUSICIAN: It sounds like this album was like your personal psychologist, where you go in and say, ‘This is what I’m feeling,” and the therapist says okay but keep talking, and ultimately, you discover that your real feelings are completely the opposite.

COHEN: Right, right. The true position is not a Sunday school position. It is not the platform you thought you had developed to present yourself as the guy you want people to know about. But the thing is, it is the way a guy feels when he’s trying to get a girl back. [laughter]

MUSICIAN: All these songs started out as grand themes, and ended up as something very basic.

COHEN: Yes, as I myself was a grand theme when I started the record a few years ago, and that grand theme evaporated.

MUSICIAN: Are you sad to lose that?

COHEN: I’m happy I lost it! The whole idea of a grand theme made my life very unhappy.

This mad period started with Various Positions. I remember writing this song “Hallelujah”; I filled two notebooks with the song, and I remember being on the floor of the Royalton Hotel, on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor and saying, “I can’t finish this song.” After I wrote the one version [for Various Positions], I wrote another lyric which I’m doing now, which goes like this: “Maybe I’ve been here before / I know this room, I’ve walked this floor / I used to live alone before I knew you. / I see a flag on the marble arch / But love is not a victory march / It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah. / There was a time when you let me know / What’s really going on below / But now you never show it to me do you? / I remember when I moved in you / And the holy dove was moving too / And every breath we drew was hallelujah. / Maybe there’s a God above / But all I ever learned of love / Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. / It’s not a cry you hear tonight / It’s not a mystic who’s seen the light / It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” That was the prototype of the defeat.

I won’t tell you how many times I did “Ain’t No Cure for Love.” That started out as a song—

MUSICIAN: About the SALT Treaty?

COHEN: Actually, one of the things on my mind was that I was very pissed off at Band-Aid, this moment in musical history where everyone took care of “we gave at the office.” It was very nice, but first of all, I hadn’t been asked by anybody to sing. [smiles] So the song started off “from the heart of man to the heart of God the ladder’s been removed / And there ain’t no band-aid big enough to cover up this wound.” That idea.

I’ve always had this very scroogie point of view. When people demonstrate against nuclear weapons, I think, “These people think that if they eliminate nuclear weapons, they eliminate death.” It promotes something like “eternal peace.” But we’re not going to live forever; maybe I think, basically, that nothing really changes. I’m not attached to that opinion, though. I don’t even care if it’s true. When you’re banging your head against the dirty carpet of the Royalton Hotel trying to find the rhyme for “orange,” you don’t care about these things.

But I had this idea that “there ain’t no cure for love” in every sense of the matter. If you do have [love] it’s a kind of wound, and if you don’t have it, it’s worse. And this is what Christ is about: Christ had to die because there ain’t no cure for love. You can’t change this world. And Christ, especially, understood this. So I wrote the whole song on those terms.

MUSICIAN: What terms?

COHEN: Theological terms. And then I thought, “I’m never gonna get behind this, either.” But Jenny heard part of the song and she liked it. So I started writing a lyric that would have these ideas somewhere way, way, way back and no one would have to bother about them but me. It’d just be this love song about a guy who’d lost a girl.

“Take This Waltz” was written deep into the nervous breakdown. It took me 150 hours to do the translation of the poem [by Federico Garcia Lorca]. It was hard to adapt so you could sing it in 3/4. The official translation — well, you couldn’t sing that. So I had to get permission from the [Lorca] estate to do my own translation. And I was sorry that they gave it to me because when I started the thing, I didn’t realize I had taken my first step on a walk to China.

MUSICIAN: You must read Spanish pretty well.

COHEN: No, I don’t. I met a Costa Rican girl who helped me with it, and I had other translations that people had done, but they weren’t rhymed. His poem is rhymed. Then I went to Paris to record it, then I broke down and went to a monastery in New Mexico for two months. I thought, “I don’t have to do a record anymore, I’ll be a monk!” It’s good to have these places to go. When I came out I started the record again.

**MUSICIAN: I think I’m beginning to understand the meaning of “Tower of Song.”

COHEN: I was sitting at this table when I began that song, in 1985. I’ve got lots of verses. I wanted to make a definitive statement about this heroic enterprise of the craft.

MUSICIAN: And at the end you’re just kind of locked in a room. [laughter]

COHEN: Right. That’s when it became clear to me that I was in the “Tower of Song.”

MUSICIAN: You’ve mentioned every song on the album except “Jazz Police,” which, musically at least, is really an anomaly.

COHEN: I met a young musician in Montreal, Jeff Fisher. He arranged “First We Take Manhattan,” which had that Sergio Leone quality that I wanted — otherwise the song would have been laughed out of the world. I said to him, “Why don’t you write something? Let’s do a rap song.” I had this song, “Jazz Police,” from going around with the fusion group Passenger. There was this standing joke that if I caught them playing augmented fifths, or even sevenths, I’d call them on it, because I’ve always gone for a certain kind of sound. So I was the ‘jazz police.” The lyric, I’m not sure what it was about. The idea was to take a premise and let it collapse into a joke, or an absurdity. But — I hated it. I hated the whole thing and I think I still do. I was going to let it go, but then all these other songs started breaking down, and it moved back on the menu.**

It caught the mood of this whole period I’m describing, though — this kind of fragmented absurdity. I was living that, so I let it stay, and also, I didn’t have much to choose from.

MUSICIAN: The vault was empty?

COHEN: The vault was empty. To put together another couple of songs for this record — it would have been another year! And I realized things were hospitable for me in Europe. If I waited, I’d be starting from scratch again.

This is as tough as it’s ever been for me, just in terms of working. I had a pretty rough time with Beautiful Losers, but I didn’t know it. I broke down after it was over.

MUSICIAN: When you say “broke down,” what do you mean?

COHEN: Well, when I finished Beautiful Losers I was living on Hydra. I went to another island and when I wanted to come back I hired a boatman to get me to another, bigger boat that was headed that way. It was about 110 degrees, very hot sun. The fisherman said to me, “You’d better come in under the tarp.” I said no. He said, “‘Sea Wolf,’ huh?” When I got back to Hydra I couldn’t get up the stairs to my house. They got a donkey and took me up. I went to bed and I couldn’t eat for 10 or 15 days. They finally called a doctor and I was hallucinating and going crazy and went down to 116 pounds and, you know, a breakdown of some kind. But that seemed right: I’d been working pretty hard and taking speed. I’d had a sunstroke, obviously. And I’d just finished this book.

The day the storks came to the island was the day I recovered. They stop over and land on their way to Africa, or maybe coming back from Africa; they nest on the highest buildings, which are usually churches. So there’s a curious feeling; they come in and sit on the churches and leave the next morning. They just spend one night. And the morning they left I recovered, I stood up and I addressed the people of my family and it was a miracle. The miracle of the storks. [laughter] So that wasn’t like this: This took two years of disintegration and then putting it back together in some way. But I think I recovered because my song went to number one in Norway…

MUSICIAN: That wasn’t too long ago.

COHEN: No, I’m newly recovered.

MUSICIAN: For someone who’s Jewish, your music often seems obsessed with Catholicism. Why?

COHEN: I grew up in a Catholic city, and all through Quebec the church is very strong. And I had an Irish-Catholic nanny; because my father was sick and my mother was usually at the hospital taking care of him, I was brought up part Catholic in a certain way. The figure of Christ touched me very early in my life. My radical Catholic friends were very angry at me for this Christological infatuation. Because they had really been oppressed by the church. To me it was romance. And there were many georeligious ideas I could speculate on. For one thing, I could see Christianity as the great missionary arm of Judaism. So I felt a certain patronizing interest in this version of the thing. I didn’t have to believe it.

But I was talking today to a friend of mine, and it came to me that Christ’s image is just the perfect symbol for our civilization. It’s a perfect event for us — you have to die to survive. Because the personality is crucified in our society. That’s why so many people collapse, why the mental hospitals are full. Nobody can survive with the personality that they want, which is the hero of their own drama. That hero dies, it’s massacred, and the self that is reborn remembers that crucifixion. And we’re doing that every day. This Christian myth at the center of our society is very good. It’s workable.

MUSICIAN: It’s interesting that you moved from Montreal to Greece, since the Greek Orthodox church is kind of the link between the Roman Catholic liturgy and Judaism.

COHEN: There are many things about Greece; the most important is the climate. I came from Montreal, I had never been warm before. I remember laying on a rock after I’d been there two months and feeling some interior sliver of ice melt from inside my bones. I thought, God… the universe is benign. I was drawn mostly by the sun.

MUSICIAN: I understand that somehow during the course of your travels you ended up in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

COHEN: I don’t know why I did any of these things. I do remember that Fidel Castro used to be laughed at in America. He’d make these five-hour speeches — apparently he speaks beautifully — and he’d say, “They’re going to invade us,” and people thought that was a big joke. But I thought they were going to invade them.

So I went down there and immediately found myself accurately described as a “bourgeois individualist poet.” I said, “That’s right. Suits me to a tee.” I wrote a poem in one of my early books: “The only tourist in Havana turns his thoughts homeward.”

I was walking on the beach in the middle of one night and was suddenly surrounded by about 11 guys with Czechoslovakian submachine guns; I was an American who didn’t speak Spanish, and they thought I was the first guy off the landing boat. I was the first guy arrested. It was a bit tricky to sort this thing out. But they happened to be very gracious. Wherever they took me, by the end of the night we were drinking toasts to each other and “the friendship of the people,” and they let me go.

A little later it hit the newspapers in North America that the airport had been bombed. I’m in this little seedy hotel in Havana and somebody knocks on my door and says, “You have to go down to the Canadian consulate right away.” They don’t like the look of me there because I really do look like a Cuban revolutionary — I had a beard and wore khakis. Finally I’m brought in to one of the secretaries of the consulate — I’m pretending to be pretty tough. And he says to me, “Mr. Cohen, your mother is very worried about you.”

MUSICIAN: Speaking of missions, you also collaborated on an album with Phil Spector [Death of a Ladies’ Man]. What was that like?

COHEN: Phil didn’t like to go out very much at the time [1975], but he came to the Troubadour when I played there. He liked it very much so he invited me to his house. Then he locked all the doors. He wouldn’t let me leave. So I said, “Well, let’s do something interesting, ‘cause it’s mighty boring here, Phil.”

It was like one of these classic Hollywood moments: We sat down at the piano and started writing songs. And over the next month we wrote some very good ones. The execution on the album was all wrong, though. I think Bill Medley should have sung them, or somebody else produced them, or something. The recording was a nightmare. I hear Phil is very calm these days, very happy. And he’s a delightful man in any case, one on one. But in the studio he was different. It was very stressful when he’d approach you at three in the morning with a bottle of Manischewitz in one hand and a .45 in the other. And he’d put his arm around my shoulder and shove the .45 under my neck and he’d say, “I love you, Leonard.”

There were a few moments like that. It’s a good story, isn’t it? In retrospect.

MUSICIAN: Now that they’re teenagers, what do your kids think of your music?

COHEN: I just spoke to my son — he’s 15 — on the telephone and he said, “Dad, I’ve just been listening to Various Positions and I want you to know I really respect your writing.” It was pretty nice. I gave him a cassette of I’m Your Man before it came out and both my children recited all the lyrics to me.

MUSICIAN: So they’re fans.

COHEN: They’re very judicious. They understand I’m not Depeche Mode, but I think they take the measure of it. My son has started to write lyrics, so he knows what some of the problems are.

MUSICIAN: Does he want to be a musician?

COHEN: I don’t think so, but he happens to be gifted in that realm, so there’ll always be that temptation. He’s a very good singer — I mean, a real singer. His pitch is good, he could do it.

MUSICIAN: He could sing your songs.

COHEN: He could, but I don’t think he’s interested in the business, in a career in showbiz. I never was. I never thought I was in showbiz until I had the revelation that I was a songwriter living in L.A.

MUSICIAN: And now you’re getting adjusted to it?

COHEN: Yeah, I like it.

2026-03-07 Russian techno-aesethetic manifesto of the day

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:17:00 GMT

Originally posted to FB (and, I’m sure, more). Machine-translated English (by Kagi) followed by the original Russian:

Alexei Shulgin

Art Within the Interface. A Curator-Operator Manifesto

The Vertical Explosion: Meaning in Service of Code

Reels are not just videos; they are a tectonic shift in the visual paradigm. We are witnessing the birth of a new language, where an extreme concentration of meaning is packed into the rigid corset of a 15-second timeframe. This is art born from the dictates of the 9:16 format. On one hand, it’s an incredible energy, the “cinéma vérité” of our time, capturing the nerve of reality. On the other, it’s the triumph of the interface, where every edit and every sound effect is dictated by the logic of attention retention. This is beauty emerging from digital noise, where an author’s statement fights for survival in an endless stream of content.

The Collector as a Filter in an Ocean of Data

The history of art has always been a history of separation: distinguishing the important from the trash. But today, the figure of the collector is radically transforming. By clicking the “bookmark” icon, you cease to be a mere spectator. You become a digital curator and, simultaneously, a database operator. In an era of information overload, collecting Reels is an act of resistance against entropy. By extracting “gems” from the chaos, the user legitimizes new talents, turning a random click into a conscious gesture of recognition. This is a new mission of patronage: to save aesthetics and meaning from the jaws of the algorithm.

Bookmarks: A Personal Archive Co-Authored with a Neural Network

Your collections of Reels are a unique symbiosis of human intuition and software protocol. This is a space where your deeply subjective taste enters into a chemical reaction with recommendation systems. Your collection is not just a file repository; it is a dynamic self-portrait, co-created with AI. It reflects your hidden desires, cultural codes, and the evolution of your perception. It is a living archive that is simultaneously your mirror and the result of the platform’s manipulation. We don’t collect videos—we collect states of our “self” in the digital space.

The Museification of the Stream: A Dialogue with the Algorithm

A museum exhibition of Reels can be seen as an attempt to extract them from the wild element of the smartphone and place them in the sterile tranquility of the “white cube.” It proposes to see in this “fast media” a full-fledged artistic medium.

Искусство внутри интерфейса. Манифест куратора-оператора

Вертикальный взрыв: Смыслы на службе у кода

Рилсы — это не просто видео, это тектонический сдвиг визуальной парадигмы. Мы видим рождение нового языка, где предельная концентрация смыслов упакована в жесткий корсет 15-секундного тайминга. Это искусство, рожденное из диктата формата 9:16. С одной стороны — это невероятная энергия, «синема-верите» нашего времени, фиксирующая нерв реальности. С другой — это триумф интерфейса, где каждый монтажная склейка и каждый звуковой эффект продиктованы логикой удержания внимания. Это красота, возникающий из цифрового шума, где авторское высказывание борется за выживание в бесконечном потоке контента.

Коллекционер как фильтр в океане данных

История искусства всегда была историей сепарации: отделения важного от мусора. Но сегодня фигура коллекционера радикально трансформируется. Нажимая на иконку «закладки», вы перестаете быть просто зрителем. Вы становитесь цифровым куратором и одновременно оператором базы данных. В эпоху избытка информации коллекционирование рилсов — это акт сопротивления энтропии. Вычленяя «жемчужины» из хаоса, пользователь легитимизирует новые таланты, превращая случайный клик в осознанный жест признания. Это новая меценатская миссия: спасти эстетику и смысл из пасти алгоритма.

Закладки: Личный архив в соавторстве с нейросетью

Ваши коллекции рилсов — это уникальный симбиоз человеческой интуиции и программного протокола. Это пространство, где ваш глубоко субъективный вкус вступает в химическую реакцию с рекомендательными системами. Ваша коллекция — это не просто склад файлов, это динамичный автопортрет, созданный в соавторстве с ИИ. Она отражает ваши скрытые желания, культурные коды и эволюцию восприятия. Это живой архив, который одновременно является и вашим зеркалом, и результатом манипуляции платформы. Мы коллекционируем не ролики — мы коллекционируем состояния своего «Я» в цифровом пространстве.

Музеефикация потока: Диалог с алгоритмом

Музейную выставку рилсов можно рассматривать как попытку извлечь их из стихии смартфона и поместить в стерильный покой «белого куба». Она предлагает увидеть в этом «быстром медиа» полноценный художественн.

2026-02-23 the worst pandering to the worse

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:06:00 GMT

Todd Alcott posted this with the caption: “Open the palace gates, Charles.”

So far I’ve liked pretty much every meme-ish type thing involving this photo of The Former Prince Known as Andrew except for one: that stunt involving putting it in the Louvre (video here). I don’t know quite how to define or demarcate this clearly, but my gut feeling is increasingly that “interventions” in museums are a bad idea and should be discouraged, even by self-styled radicals of whatever strips. It’s not that the institutions, what they do, what they have, or what they represent is so great — they aren’t. The problem is that, in aggregate, people are worse. Yesterday (so to speak) these interventions were almost done all by tiny handful of sophisticates, today it’s a growing stream of provocateurs, and tomorrow it’ll be armies of idiot influencers. It’s OK to just say no. Am I being arbitrary? Yes. Incoherent? Yes. Inconsistent? Yes. Elitist? Yes. Sue me. At least museums still cling to some image of the best of humanity; the influencing biz is an arms race of the worst pandering to the worse.

2026-02-23 one sick sailor

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:46:00 GMT

The US has nearly twenty nuclear subs, each of which spends about 65% of the year at sea. To give you an idea of the magnitude of distance their travels add up to, the US Department of Energy bragged last year that, since Hyman Rickover spearheaded nuclear power for naval uses — “naval reactors maintains an outstanding record of over 177 million miles safely steamed on nuclear power.” I think something like 75% of that has been submarines. Submariners are about as “top gun” as navy personnel get, and the mind-numbing circumstances they face — extremely stressful work, unbearably close quarters, submerged for weeks or even months at a stretch, and relying on extensive recycling of water and air — ensure that they’re among the most medically scrutinized and managed across all the US armed forces. Got it?

OK, so: How often have you ever heard about submarine personnel with a health emergency needing a medevac to a nearby port for treatment? Never. So has it never happened? Of course it has. So what’s the difference this time? Is it definitely and only that this happened on Trump’s watch — and that it happened to happen near Greenland? And is the definite and only reason we know about it the fact that Trump ‘truthed’ some bizarre fantasy involving sending an entire hospital ship to Greenland? So is the “real” explanation definitely and only that, faced with a trivially awkward international situation that could easily have been kept quiet — a single sick sailor — this matter rose to the level of the president’s office, amnd that it presented such him with such a dliemma that he felt compelled to actively disseminate a plainly ridiculous cover story for sending an entire hospital shit to pick up a sailor? One sailor? Even if it’s the CO (basically, the “captain”), there’s an entire hierarchy of senior staff rigorously trained to maintain clear, effective control under the most extreme circumstances.

Paint me skeptical. Even if you exaggerate every aspect that to account for Trump’s madness, Hegseth’s stupidity, Gabbard’s whatever (as DNI she’s head of the NSA, which plays several key roles in nuclear sub operations), and more, this story just doesn’t add up neatly. My guess: something much more serious happened on that submarine. If, as I think, the claim that it’s “really” just one sick sailor is itself a cover story, it doesn’t seem like it’d be covering for a systemic failure of the ship. Instead, the focus seems to involve the crew. 🧐 🤔 And I think Trump gave away the game at the beginning, as he always does: I think there may be many sick people — US sailors — in Greenland.

What kind of “sick” is anyone’s guess.

2026-02-22 an epidemic of pseudo-suicides

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:21:00 GMT

IBT asks Who Is Kyle Bassinga? Missing Atlanta Man Found Hanging From Tree in Cobb County Park

There’s an epidemic of young African-American men being lynched across the south, and another, intimately related one of police denying it. One conventional response would be to speculate about whether police are knowingly, deliberately lying and covering up or, instead, their purported “caution” is an impersonal manifestation of structural racism. I reject that kind of framing, because I don’t think the subjective state of those who contribute to oppression is matters very much. There are all kinds of reasons for that:

focus: we should center the victim’s state not the perp’s
method: we can’t know someone’s mens rea
process: outcomes outweigh techniques
appeal: there’s always another forum that’ll hew to convention

But the one that matters most is consequence: a regime that focuses on mens rea creates incentives to not “know.” That feedback loop contributes heavily to the endless rivers of passive “mistakes were made” language, all the smarmy “I was only kidding” pseudo-denials, the trollish bad-faith appropriations of progressive language, and so on.

When it comes to criminality, the spaces of subjectivity are heavily weighted toward those whose crimes mesh neatly with the structural and systemic violence of the state and para-state. That’s why we should disregard it.

That may sound abstract but, I assure you, it’s very concrete. Why? Because it demands that we treat the failures of the police, whether passively negligent or deliberately malfeasant, as crimes as grave as what they claim to investigate. And that, my friends, is a Big Fucking Deal.

2026-02-20 two thoughts on ethics

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:28:00 GMT

Two related snippets I wrote this morning:

(1) On the question of whether the US has laws against misconduct in office, the charge on which former prince Andrew was arrested (🎩 BRS, link):

We don’t have such laws. Why? The short version is that law in the ‘old world’ was culturally rooted in monarchism and tended to preserve a principles-based orientation, whereas in the ‘new world’ juridical thought lost that orientation and became more rules-based. Our growing inability to enforce our laws, or indeed any laws, is a sort of rococo phase of that tendency: rather than comply with laws in principle, we play word games to redefine them, fence them in, and sidestep any restraints.

(2) On AI (🎩TU, link):

The best summary I’ve seen is this (🎩 DM): AI slop is less a criticism of the tools than it is of the people being sloppy with them. The cure? Be less sloppy. How? Teach people to be less sloppy, nurture and reward being less sloppy, and discourage / deter being sloppy. People will object but that’s impossible! No, it’s not impossible, it’s ethics. If we’ve given up on ethics, we might as well just give up. And that has nothing to do with AI per se.

2026-02-19 question of the day

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:35:00 GMT

From U.S. District Judge Sunshine Sykes’s 18 feb 2026 ruling in Lazaro Maldonado Bautista et al. v. Ernesto Santacruz Jr et al. (see. e.g., Reuters)

The US is supposed to be a nation of laws grounded, ultimately, in the Constitution. The government has been taken over by a group of people who don’t just break laws — they’re aggressively and systematically violating the most basic Constitutional principles, procedures, and protections. So how should the nation address this group? Normal judicial procedure isn’t enough, because — again — they aren’t merely breaking this or that law, they’re deliberately demolishing the foundations of law itself. You can define this group however you like — maybe Trump, maybe his family, maybe a few members of his Cabinet, maybe ICE, maybe DOGE, maybe some oligarchy, it doesn’t matter. What matters is this: If you acknowledge (1) that such a group exists, and (2) that their actions transcend simple law-breaking to become a form of activity far more dangerous, how should the nation address this group?

2026-02-15 when does policy become conspiracy?

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 10:12:00 GMT

NPR reports “the State Department has ordered certain public libraries nationwide to cease processing passport applications, disrupting a long-standing service that librarians say their communities have come to rely on.”

This move fits hand-in-glove with the SAVE Act, of course. The point isn’t that every precinct will demand that every person show a passport. Instead, it’s the kind of thing will introduce enough noise into the system that Trump’s DOJ can “curate” where to intervene in order to achieve the desired outcomes: GOP domination.

Has anyone made a serious effort to analyze how policy coordination (which we expect from government) mutates into conspiracies? I doubt it. I can’t imagine any field where those categories would be seen as commensurate. What policy wonk or serious poli-sci type would say policy ≈ conspiracy? Or, coming from the other direction, what “conspiracy theorist” (gawd I’ve hated that category for decades) does serious policy or, even better, administrative law?! 😹

So this mutation, from effective governance to organized criminality, will be missing the kind of theoretical attention we desperately need. Not OECD-style quant studies “measuring” this on imaginary axes, I mean: describe, define, and explain the boundaries between policy and conspiracy. My guess: no one’s doing this.

The reason for that failure is pretty simple, imo: Academia won’t reward that inquiry but it will definitely punish it. How? What field would you do this in — history, poli sci, sociology? What divisions would allow it — public policy or law? What research path could take anyone from “policy” to “conspiracy” without every responsible mentor warning them away? What job openings would allow it? What search committee would invite it? What funders would encourage it? Nope nope nope nope.

These aren’t abstract questions for me, I’ve been pondering them from the early ’90s when I wanted to do a PhD on how the idea of the “conspiracy” emerged and became the dominant default mode of popular political critique. I’ll never forget when I went to my old mentor David Damrosch with that idea. He loved it but said — this is verbatim — “they will never let you do it…” I was like WTAF?! He laughed and said: it’s a PhD — you only get to do 5 years, not 500! 😹

And yet here we are: Trump & Co have transformed much of the federal government into an extortion racket, and they’re pursuing coordinated strategies, tactics, and plans to subvert the midterm elections and buy more time to end the US’s “actually existing” democracy.

The social formation that has a serious theoretical stake in this — the US left — won’t say much either, but for different reasons: it *can’t because of how it’s dis/organized.

(1) The extreme vs moderate distinction: The left more or less measures itself by one’s commitment to viewing society as a whole as corrupt. if you cynically think it’s all just capitalism, you probably see yourself (as Musk put it) “extremely hardcore” — and won’t bother much with policy. If you optimistically see society as flawed but redeemable, you probably see yourself as progressive — more likely to engage with policy, less likely to think (let alone talk) about “conspiracies.”

(2) The theory vs practice distinction: If you’re an academic, you’d do well to avoid anything that could give others grounds to mock or malign you, like talking about “conspiracies”; and if you’re a pragmatic advocate or organizer, you’ll avoid them for different but equally solid reasons.

There are other distinctions, too: general vs specific, gender, period vs theory, class, cultural register, etc, etc. Each, in their own way, contributes to a cultural / social / political context where it’s very hard to think about how policy morphs into conspiracy. It’d be easier than it would have been when I was starting out, except (wait for it…) US academia is falling apart because a criminally conspiratorial government is trying to subvert and destroy it.

So, since the experts won’t help us out here, here’s the question: What “bright lines,” as law and policy types like to say, can we use to structure questions about how policy becomes conspiracy?

This question isn’t “academic” or “theoretical” at all. It couldn’t be more concrete or practical. And if we can’t answer it, we’ve lost. I might even argue that failure is the loss.

2026-02-11-the mycology to epidemiology to media theory to public policy pipeline

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 08:02:00 GMT

There’s been yet another spate of mushroom poisonings in California, and the NYT’s coverage seems a bit, let’s say, AI slop–esque:

Of those poisoned, 60 percent spoke Spanish as their primary language. The outbreak has also affected people who speak English, Mandarin Chinese, Mixteco, Russian and Ukrainian.

The department has made fliers warning about the dangers of the mushrooms in several languages and is asking people to post them in community spaces, such as stores and libraries.

Those who are accustomed to foraging in their home countries may mistake poisonous mushrooms in California for ones that are safe where they are from, the department said.

That would be quite the epidemiological coincidence, wouldn’t it? Native speakers of, say, Ukrainian, Mixtec, and Mandarin all making the same mycological mistake at more or less the same times. 🤨 🧐

There’s a better hypothesis, which I pointed at a few years ago: social media. People aren’t mistaking death caps because they “resemble mushrooms found in grocery stores,” they‘re being influenced, directly or indirectly, by sketchy videos — maybe machine-translated, as so much English-language content is for so many people in the world — that proffer nonsense about how to make Amanita-genus mushrooms edible.

Are there laws against generating content that ‘stochastically’ leads people to harm themselves and each other? Presumably this and that jurisdiction might have a few things on the books that could be tortured into some elaborate and tenuous basis for prosecution. But what are the chances that (1) a spate of seemingly unrelated poisonings (2) would result in a fruitful investigation, (3) culprits would then be identified (4) who are apprehended and (5) charged then (6) tried and convicted by a jury then (7) given an effective sentenced by a judge and (8) forced to serve it (9) without getting off on appeal? Nil. And we haven’t even touched the “free speech” dimension.

Bruno Latour opened his book We Have Never Been Modern with a remarkable passage that gestures at a certain kind of conceptual chaos that permeates “media”:

On page four of my daily newspaper, I learn that the measurements taken above the Antarctic are not good this year: the hole in the ozone layer is growing ominously larger. Reading on, I turn from upper-atmosphere chemists to Chief Executive Officers of Atochem and Monsanto, companies that are modifying their assembly lines in order to replace the innocent chlorofluorocarbons, accused of crimes against the ecosphere. A few paragraphs later, I come across heads of state of major industrialized countries who are getting involved with chemistry, refrigerators, aerosols and inert gases. But at the end of the article, I discover that the meteorologists don’t agree with the chemists ; they’re talking about cyclical fluctuations unrelated to human activity. So now the industrialists don’t know what to do. The heads of state are also holding back. Should we wait? Is it already too late? Toward the bottom of the page, Third World countries and ecologists add their grain of salt and talk about international treaties, moratoriums, the rights of future generations, and the right to development.

The same article mixes together chemical reactions and political reactions. A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics, the most distant sky and some factory in the Lyon suburbs, dangers on a global scale and the impending local elections or the next board meeting. The horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors — none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story.

On page six, I learn that the Paris AIDS virus contaminated the culture medium in Professor Gallo’s laboratory; that Mr Chirac and Mr Reagan had, however, solemnly sworn not to go back over the history of that discovery; that the chemical industry is not moving fast enough to market medications which militant patient organizations are vocally demanding; that the epidemic is spreading in sub-Saharan Africa. Once again, heads of state, chemists, biologists, desperate patients and industrialists find themselves caught up in a single uncertain story mixing biology and society.

On page eight, there is a story about computers and chips controlled by the Japanese; on page nine, about the right to keep frozen embryos; on page ten, about a forest burning, its columns of smoke carrying off rare species that some naturalists would like to protect; on page eleven, there are whales wearing collars fitted with radio tracking devices; also on page eleven, there is a slag heap in northern France, a symbol of the exploitation of workers, that has just been classified as an ecological preserve because of the rare flora it has been fostering! On page twelve, the Pope, French bishops, Monsanto, the Fallopian tubes, and Texas fundamentalists gather in a strange cohort around a single contraceptive. On page fourteen, the number of lines on high-definition television bring together Mr Delors, Thomson, the EEC, commissions on standardization, the Japanese again, and television film producers. Change the screen standard by a few lines, and billions of francs, millions of television sets, thousands of hours of film, hundreds of engineers and dozens of CEOs go down the drain.

Latour wrote that around 1991, just months before the commercialization of the internet supercharged this kind of illogic, fueling an almost Moore’s Law–like acceleration in the production of sense and nonsense. And here we are

a world

in which

warehouses literally full of GPUs are springing up like mushrooms after a hot summer rain

the surreal opening of Vernor Vinge’s near-term sci-fi novel Rainbows End

In effect, we’ve constructed a Rube Goldberg of systems — cultural, technical, social, mediating. forensic, judicial —

Decades ago, when Financial Times was my daily, I was fortunate to tune in to a basic distinction in their global coverage — between the rules-based approach to accounting of US-style accounting and the principles-based approach that more and more of the world is adopting (Wikipedia is pretty OK on this).

2026-02-09-go and see come and see

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 10:51:00 GMT

Still from Klimov’s 1985 film Come and See

NYT, “A Raid in a Small Town Brings Trump’s Deportations to Deep-Red Idaho” (dek: “Wilder, Idaho, prided itself on comity. Then federal agents stormed a racetrack outside of town in October, and the reverberations are still shaking the community”; alt link here):

Nikki Ramirez-Smith, an immigration lawyer in nearby Nampa, began receiving panicked calls.

When I answered, it was someone crying,” she said. “The only thing I could understand at first was, ‘They’re here. It’s ICE.’”

Eventually, everyone there was herded to the end of the track. Most adults, including parents caring for toddlers, and many teenagers had their hands bound. Mr. Carter said he saw federal officers pointing guns at people simply for asking questions, and young teenagers being zip-tied, including Mr. Carter’s 14-year-old daughter.

People like to post memes with, like a nazi pointing a gun at a kid and an ICE agent pointing a gun at a kid and say SEE?!?!?! Yes, I see a meme that asks nothing of the viewer but delivers that sweet, sweet caveman grunt IT SAME ME RIGHT. Who doesn’t love that feeling? I sure do. If you do too, maybe try something a bit more demanding like watching Klimov’s film Come and See, Pasolini’s Salò, or maybe something about the Troubles in Ireland, like Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (it’s even got a young Cillian Murphy!) or Steve McQueen’s Hunger. Finding them used to take grit, but now they appear at the click of a button. Even if you’ve seen them before maybe try again. As the waters of fascism rise around us, those scenes — villagers hiding in the morning fog on an island in a bog, the insipid and inbred riche making teenagers bay and bray, gauntlets of cops beating naked prisoners — will bring what more and more people are experiencing right now, all around us, among us, in those cryptic spaces and places we told ourselves were hidden but never really were.

And with this your daily reminder: If you aren’t yet thinking and speaking openly about how the Trump regime can and must be brought to justice, you’re starting to look an awful lot like one of those Good Germans. They were very real and utterly imaginary, an apparent paradox that US culture is starting to grasp more clearly. But it isn’t really a paradox. We see the tides that brought in so many of them rising around us. They’re the sophisticates who scoffed at warnings that Trump & Co would build camps but won’t own up to their mistakes, the centrists who drift along dreaming that institutions heal themselves and last forever, the concerned who quote the only line they know from Santaya or Niemöller or Arendt or Gramsci. Most of all they’re the ones who think the pens of “future historians” will defeat the swords of the present.

2026-02-04 a brief history of coalie

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:50:00 GMT

Kate Yoder at Grist has exhumed a brief history of “Coalie,” a US Dept of Interior’s new-not-entirely-new mascot for “Beautiful, Clean Coal.”

As it happens, I just started Benson Bobrick’s Labyrinths of Iron: Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War (NYC: Morrow, 1981), which so far is great: a bit florid maybe, but the scope of his research is amazing, and his writing is quick, vivid, and surprising to the point of astonishing. Everyone know Blake’s phrase “dark, satanic mills,” which has become an obstacle to having any realistic sense of just how monstrous the second Industrial Revolution was. Bobrick’s Chapter 3, “At the Brink of Chaos,” does a solid job not just of fixing that but of pursuing it back in time:

Three thousand years before Christ incessant copper and tin mining had exhausted the forests of Egypt’s Fertile Crescent, leading one modern historian to conclude: “The price of maintaining a culture built on metals is high: it means, eventually, complete collapse. The depletion of the timber range upsets the natural balance, and the land that began as an arboreal abode for foraging men and beasts finishes as a useless wasteland scourged by the sun and scoured by floods, with an interesting past but no future. To eat the apple of metallurgical knowledge is a sure way to close the gates of Paradise.” By the mid-sixteenth century this process was being repeated in Europe. Georgius Agricola, in his account of metal mining in Germany, foresaw the full extent of the threatening disaster: “…when the woods and groves are felled, there are exterminated the beasts and birds, very many of which furnish pleasant and agreeable food for man. Further, when the ores are washed, the water which has been used poisons the brooks and streams, and either destroys the fish or drives them away.”

And into the future as well:

Indeed, it is a large question whether this is not, after all, the critical fact in our story: that as life above came to resemble life below, modeled on the mine, it became possible for people to reconcile themselves to living in the Underworld. With our late twentieth-century toxic wastes, vehicular fumes, and threatened nuclear fallout, we still maintain this sad psychological adaptation, though its original cause has by now almost vanished from memory.

Reading this lends new depth to Marx and Engles’s famous line all that was solid melts into air. I’m still looking for an economic way to express my twentieth-century corollary about the rise of aviation and its impact: all that was air becomes solid will have to do for now.

So… Coalie. Coalie? Debates about coal (to the extent there even are any) end up like most such things in US culture: straddling an arbitrary divide between two artificial tropes, in this case sooty Appalachian coal miners and a radiantly clean future. As of 2025, there were about 35,000 coal miners in the US, which is about halfway between gun suicides (27,000) and car deaths (41,000) — clearly not a number the US bothers itself with much.

The Grist article traces how “Coalie” morphed from a tongue-in-cheek mascot whose intent was to make the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (read that name twice) a bit more accessible. Under Trump, like so many government employees, Coalie is being repurposed to push the retrograde, revanchist fantasies of an ambecile whose cultural-cognitive framework froze around the same time Coal Miner’s Daughter was in movie theaters — that is, a time by which coal mining had already become as much nostalgic fiction as practical fact. That compound nostalgia — Making America Great Again by pining for the last time we tried to Make It Morning in America Again — might account in part for how elusive it all feels this time around.

Coalie’s quick evolution, from 2018’s pre-gendered lump of coal with googly eyes to 2026’s man with two qualities — insipid, watery eyes and safety wear — tells parts of that story in the same way many “funny little men” (or FLMs) do: by melding workers with the products they make and by investing those products with NPC-like vitality.

It should come as no surprise that there’s a counter-history to that capitalist confusion, featuring public service mascots who advance ideas rather than objects: Reddy Kilowatt (1926), Smokey the Bear (1944), Mr. ZIP (1964), Officer Yuk (1971), Vince and Larry the crash-test dummies (1985), and so on. That’s all a pretty crude formulation of the problem, but that’s better than nothing. And considering the mind-bending cultural impact of mascots and other FLMs have had for several generations, that’s how much attention they’ve gotten: nill. That fact is curious in itself, as are the reasons for it — which, as Ambrose Bierce might have said, I shall attend to shortly.

2026-02-03-redaction aesthetics

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 12:22:00 GMT

(Orig to FB on 2025-12-19)

So…about that Epstein-related 120-page grand-jury document that was entirely redacted. The US has been through this, and we know how to do it — so please share this widely.

In the early 1970s, two government whistleblowers, Victor Marchetti (CIA) and John D. Marks (State Dept) wrote a book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. The story of the legal scuffles around it are a bit byzantine, but the outlines are pretty simple:

For the first time ever, I believe, the federal government asserted complete prior restraint. The CIA convinced a court to issue a permanent injunction against Marchetti “requiring that anything [he wrote or said], ‘factual, fictional or otherwise,’ on the subject of intelligence must first be censored by the CIA” (1974, 1st ed., xiii).

When Alfred A. Knopf signed the book, they sued the government to lift the injunction, causing the CIA to scale back its demands considerably, to around 350 sections. Each section was then adjudicated specifically. Knopf won most of them, but what they did next was brilliant — and should be seen as a high point in the history of book design. Passages the CIA won were left entirely blank: as you read the book, the text just stops, sometimes for pages. But passages the CIA lost were set in boldface.

The way forward here is to sue Bondi specifically over every. single. word. — including every if, and, and but. No court would agree to such a ridiculous waste of time, so the first thing they’d likely do is tell the DoJ to get serious and choose wisely.

The key here is that there’s a great deal to be learned from the process of prying these documents open. As we start to see less redacted versions of these documents, the changes will give us a clearer sense of what Trump, Bondi, and their minions are trying to hide. And that, in turn, will provider a better roadmap for journalists and other investigators to bring these scoundrels and conspirators to justice.

I’m way too young to have worked on Marks and Marchetti, but a few decades later I had the privilege of working for the New Press on a series of books by the National Secuity Archive. Like Marchetti and Marks, those books took an entirely novel approach to publishing materials — about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Iran–Contra, and US South Africa policy — that the US government had worked hard to suppress. Those books presented facsimiles of the original cables, memos, and reports along with critical introductions. At the time, that design-oriented approach was unheard-of, but it was a clear intimation of what we’ve since come to expect: direct access to documents. I mention this now because just last week, Bill Burr, a key figure at the Archive, passed away (link in comments).

2026-01-27-how to punish ice

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:41:00 GMT

Sooner or later, the US is going to face a serious choice: either (1) we accept that ICE agents were “just following orders” and therefore can’t be punished, or (2) we punish them for following orders. You can dress that up with whatever sophistries you like, but that’s what it boils down to. If we don’t punish them, you can be sure this will become a new normal — maybe here, maybe there, maybe soon, maybe later, but it will.

Only by making it plainly clear with concrete consequences can the US ensure that people will think twice before trying this again. Centrists and liberals — people whose politics are an ouroboros of learned helplessness — will argue *but if we do X, they’ll do Y!” ICE has already done Y: they’ve impose a dirty war on the US, complete with death squads and (as more people will learn soon) torture centers.

The fundamental aim of legal proceedings against ICE agents should not simply be to punish individuals, it should be to systemically ensure that evil is never repeated.

Investigating, charging, and prosecuting these people on an individual basis will not work and, frankly, would be a staggering waste of public resources. And affording them the presumption of innocence and due process — the precise things they violently denied to so many others — would be a waste of time of goodwill. Instead, we should treat short-term employment by ICE under Trump as (1) ipso facto incriminating and (2) an aggravating factor in any criminal proceedings, like the use of a weapon. But that’s not an analogy, it’s exactly how they’re abusing their protected status as federal employees.

At a bare minimum, everyone who was gained employment by ICE under Trump should face these civil penalties:

they should be stripped of all job-related benefits (e.g., no pension)
all compensation should be aggressively clawed back (bonuses, pay, and expenses)

Those two measures will address a fundamental principle, that the public should not be forced, as it’s said, to pay for the bullets used to execute it.

A more forward-looking measure aimed at containing the damage would be:

a lifetime ban on employment in any position related to public law enforcement or private security
treatment of short-term ICE employment as the equivalent of a serious felony conviction

Violations of that prohibition should be treated not just as crimes but as felonies; and it should be standard practice to investigate as well any employer that violated it.

We should assume for now that DHS, CBP, and ICE}s leadership will actively seek to destroy as many records as possible in order to insulate themselves, their employees, and their political project. For that reason, criminal proceedings — whether by public or private parties — against short-term ICE employees cannot be vulnerable to the absence of specific records. Instead, the normal assumptions and procedures of criminal prosecution should be inverted. Defendants should be assumed as a class to be guilty and given the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence — for example, through the production of location-based records that prove they were not present at a specific action, even, or setting.

Serious voices (or at least voices claiming to be serious) will argue that this approach is anathema — because it violates the Constitution, because it offends all sense of decency and decorum, because it will breed resentment and cause a backlash, and so on. These arguments all forget that the defendants (1) actively and aggressively violated the Constitution, (2) showed contempt for any standard of decency, and (3) are already fueled by resentment and engaged in a backlash. Scrupulously granting them all the normal protections afforded by the Constitution and the US legal system won’t change that, but it will — like the scrupulously cautious handling of J6, which turned out to be an utter failure — ensure that the risk becomes more serious.

2026-01-27 Alex Pretti and guns

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:05:00 GMT

My respect for the people of the Twin Cities knows no bounds, so this is in no way intended to cast any doubt on what they’ve achieved at a terrible cost, but we may be telling ourselves the wrong story here. I think Trump & Co are pulling back in large part because Alex Pretti was armed. That fact has forced the administration into a contradiction too incoherent even for them. They can’t victim-blame Pretti without acknowledging his gun: if it wasn’t a factor then ICE had no reason to murder him, but if it was a factor then their talking heads have to explain how and why. The alternative would be to argue that carrying a gun has no effect at all — which would put the lie to the right’s fetishistic fantasy.

And there’s no contradiction at all between crediting the people of the Twin Cities and this analysis. Pretti was a nurse whose beliefs led to his commitment to veterans, a strong 2A supporter, and Midwesterner through and through: born in Chicago, raised in Green Bay, studied and worked in Minneapolis. The subtext of his life seems to have been, at his core, a rejection of victimhood. He should be honored on those terms, and one way to honor it is to seriously address the role that guns played in his life, in his death, and in their consequences.

2026-01-27 do trees cause forests

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:29:00 GMT

Corey Robin asked on FB:

I realize I’m swimming in other people’s seas here, but I need a life preserver, or two, if I’m going to survive my passage through a strait in Stuart Hall’s essay, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.”

About two-thirds of the way into the essay, Hall finally starts explaining his terms, though he does so by invoking metaphors, which is something, I should confess, that always triggers me (see my many complaints about the film The Big Short: if you’re going to explain complicated financial instruments, using metaphors really doesn’t help.)

After writing that articulation “is a metaphor used ‘to indicate relations of linkage and effectivity between different levels of all sorts of things,” Hall says that “the unity formed by this combination or articulation is always, necessarily, a ‘complex structure’: a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities.” And then he’s off to Althusser.

So here’s my question, and why I’m raising this point from Hall. In Sven Beckert’s book on capitalism, there is always this move, in dealing with non-capitalist forms, to say that capitalism destroys those forms, capitalism incorporates, and even exacerbates, those forms, capitalism creates those forms. Using the language of Hall, we’d say capitalism is a complex structure in which non-capitalist things are related to capitalist things as much through their differences as through their similarities.

While this all has an abstract plausibility, at the level of theory, it just takes a book like Beckert’s to see how fantastically maddening it is as history. Everything becomes part of capitalism, either by destroying what’s not capitalist, by incorporating what’s not capitalist, by creating what’s not capitalist. Find a non-capitalist entity, and it’ll either serve as a temporary refuge or resistance from capitalism, get overwhelmed and replaced by capitalism, or be incorporated into capitalism and even be exaggerated in its non-capitalistic elements, by capitalism, for capitalism.

What notion of causality is at work here? How can we evaluate whether it’s actually true? Yes, Hall cautions that “the mechanisms which connect dissimilar features must be shown—since no ‘necessary correspondence’ or expressive homology can be assumed as given.” But anyone who’s written anything in empirically informed social theory knows that it’s not terribly difficult to draw a picture in which mechanisms connecting dissimilar features are portrayed. That doesn’t make it accurate, or correct, or true.

My take:

This is really interesting, and remarkably articulate — so much so that it misses the forest for the trees, imo. The spirit of modern leftism lies precisely in its attraction to ever-more diffuse forms and relations of involvement, the intuition that there are always (more) mechanisms that we don’t understand that shape their context. The central dialectic of leftism has been and remains the struggle to articulate that ‘moreness,’ which is always relational, always N+1. That elusive quality is itself the dream that fuels the left’s ethics, and articulating it through word and deed (hence woolly words like “practices”) is how transgression becomes the norm. And that’s also the downfall of a ‘pure’ leftishness, because the results becomes increasingly incoherent. So, yeah, sure, go ahead and ask what the causal mechanism is, but understand that much of what the left has achieved over the last few centuries has been — again, precisely — to continually transform the meaning and bounds of “causality” itself.

2026-01-26 postmature antifascists

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:27:00 GMT

I sent this to nettime in response to a pointer to an opinon piece in The Guardian, “America feels like a country on the brink of an authoritarian takeover,” by Francine Prose.

Just a few minutes ago I wrote:

The same fools who enabled this catastrophe with their interminable [arendtsplaining](neological things) and pedantic denialism expect us to attend to their interminable babbling about how wrong they were. They should step aside and give their bully pulpits to people who were right when it mattered.

These postmature antifascists, as I like to call them, are a dime a dozen and best ignored. Francine Prose is a reasonably distinguished person, deeply intelligent and clearly of good faith — she plays on our team, so to speak. But anyone who’d write now that the US “feels like a country on the brink of an authoritarian takeover” should be read with some skepticism, because the US is far past that brink.

We’ve watched the prestigious institutions of one sector after another — national governments abroad and government entities at home, national and even transnational corporations, mighty universities, major media outlets, pillars of civil society, and on and on — quailing before Trump & Co. It’s perfectly understandable why they’d do so, and even a rational choice; I’m not one of those left-identified bombasts who naively believes the president of Harvard should risk the entire university’s existence for the fleeting glory of “speaking truth to power.” But even so, to spend the last year watching this happen and then argue the US is “on the brink”? WTF criteria would the country need for even the most prudent person to say we’ve gone over the brink?!

Prose’s own words are “our country is on the brink,” but The Guardian’s editors changed that to “feels like” for their headline out of journalistic caution. But that subtle shift, from fact to subjective impression, is in keeping with Prose’s own piece. It spends more time on the space cynical sysadmins used call PEBKAC, for Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. If you read her essay, most of it‘s concerned with phones screens, snow, media, robins, etc — novelistic detail that puts us in the shoes, and chair, of a Serious Person.

My comment above about pedantic denialists was prompted by a piece by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic — “Yes, It’s Fascism,” with the subhead “Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.” He too spends much of his time maundering on about his subjective process, then he conjures up one of those ‘best practice’–style lists cribbed from a melange of Authorities on Authoritarianism — Snyder, Eco, Paxton, etc — of criteria needed for anointing something Officially Fascist. He introduces the list with a choice bit of rhetoric that doffs its hat to some sort of ‘methodology’ but ultimately affirms his own capricious authority: “Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.” A decade too late, but who’s counting?

Well, I am, actually. Not so much the exact number of years have passes since I argued that Trump would need be forcibly removed from the White House (ten), but more the qualitative sense of time that permeates people’s thinking and enables their passivity. When you say we’re on the brink, you’re saying it hasn’t “really” happened yet, which justifies passivity. Arguing it isn’t “really” fascism achieves the same effect by slightly different means, by focusing on discernment. Saying of something evil that “this is what _______ looks like” — fascism, authoritarianism, whatever, it doesn’t matter because it’s all just content for a mad lib — does it as well, but with a semiotic twist: it may or may not not actually be _____ but it “looks like” it. And, of course, protestation like “this isn’t who we are” and “we’re better than this” do the same, but in still other ways. The list of these rhetorical sleights of hand could go on and on.

I have to make clear that the people saying these things should be assumed to be acting in good faith, caring for the public interest, and all those other warm-fuzzy things. I don’t mean to speak poorly of them as individuals. But as a class they’re pretty problematic, because the sum total of their efforts is to postpone the venerable question what is to be done? And in much the same way that they are, by their own admission, postmature antifascists, we should assume that, given the chance, they’d be among the first to prematurely declare victory over the fascists — because that’s when liberals would have to ask the much rougher question what is to be done with these fascists?

2026-01-24 things fall apart

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 13:29:00 GMT

You can learn a lot about how things are made when you look at how they fall apart. That applies not just to objects but also to institutions — for example, governments, media, universities. As the intellectual historian Peter Galison argued in his brilliant essay “An Accident of History”) aviation accidents are — or at least are inseperable from — institutional history. I’m glad he’s made this available on the net, because its original publication (in Galison and Alex Roland, eds., Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century: Archimedes New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, [Boston: Springer Dordecht, 2000, pp. 3–43) was, let’s say, a bit obscure.

Photos of an F-111 “Aardvark’ fighter jet after striking a pelican.

2026-01-20 viruses are people too

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:10:00 GMT

(Orig to FB)

If you’ve spent enough time with medieval scholastics like Thomas Aquinas — and, like, no one has — you’ll begin to understand how important they were. Until then, the emphasis in most retrojectively “western” philosophy had been exemplary in the sense of archetypes. The scholastics brought a more systematic approach, mainly in two ways: OT1H by fleshing out the details, so to speak, OT2H by exploring limit cases — questions that were so extreme that they stress-tested the foundations on which they were built. This is how modern law works in the US (and note well: scholasticism reached a historical point when it stopped working), and — not coincidentally — it’s also how a lot of humor works. Like the Onion, for example. The idea of granting personhood to viruses is both completely ridiculous and also the logical conclusion of a major stream in leftist thinking. If trees are “people,” if rivers have “rights,” and so on, you can kick the can down the road, but sooner or later you’ll have to ask ans answer whether viruses are “people,” have “rights,” and so on. And, in truth, when the biological research establishment insists that we need to preserve specimens of the riskiest viruses — poxes, hemorrhagic fevers, and the rest — for research purposes, we’re farther down that road than we want to admit.

2026-01-19 making an example of the twin cities

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 19:50:00 GMT

(original to FB)

Trump & Co’s theory was that if they made an example of the Twin Cities, the rest of the country would cower in fear, but that isn’t working out at all. They can’t do this to the whole country, or even to more than a few mid-sized cities at a time. And with each repetition, the country learns more about these pathetic fascists and how to fight them. There aren’t many more escalatory steps Trump & Co can take before they open fire on an unarmed crowd, and I think they’ll do that soon. They probably hope that will be the opening gun of a civil war, but instead it’ll decisively mark the end of Trumpism — and the beginning of bringing this scum to justice.

2026-01-16-lowering the bar in FL etc

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:11:00 GMT

This is much more serious than 99% of the daily provocations the left-leaning half of the US consumes daily with relish and ketchup.

tl;dr: The Florida Supreme Court just amended a rule requiring that “law school graduates will no longer need to graduate from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association” (USA Today). The ruling “create[s] the opportunity for additional entities to carry out an accrediting and gatekeeping function on behalf of the Court.”

USAT helpfully notes in its dek (i.e., subheadline) that “[t]he Sunshine State isn’t the first to move away from the American Bar Association.” True, it’s the second — after Texas, a bastion of liberty whose legal system is led by that gangster Ken Paxton, which did the same thing last week (following a “tentative opinion” in September). Ohio and Tennessee are also known to be considering the same rule change. Notice any patterns? It’s safe to assume that other states, maybe many other states, are now or will soon be considering similar rule changes now too.

How could citizens know? It’s not easy. The Florida case was issued “per curiam, on its own motion,” meaning there was no real plaintiff or defendant. Bloomberg News reported that Tennessee “issued an order soliciting comments from the legal community and the public” last (wait for it…) in September. In Florida, the process was led by an SC-appointed “workgroup,” which was appointed last March after Trump’s DoJ (led by the Floridian lawyer Pam Bondi, of course) attacked the ABA for “subject[ing] law faculties and law students to unlawful race and sex discrimination under the guise of ‘diversity’ mandates,” and demanding that “that policy must be repealed immediately.” The ABA refused, which led the forces behind this to shift their focus to the state level. And the more states that do it, the more it’ll become ‘normal.’

The Florida “case” (which isn’t a real case) means that, from now now, the Florida SC will require nothing more than “(1) a programmatic accrediting agency recognized by the United States Department of Education to accredit programs in legal education…or (2) an institutional accrediting agency recognized by the United States Department of Education to accredit institutions of higher education, provided the institutional accrediting agency is also approved by the Court.”

Even that potpourri of legalese and academese can’t mask the underlying smell, though. Trump & Co have mostly demolished the federal DoE, utterly politicized what remains, and made clear that they plan to terminate it. Just not before its authority to “recognize” entities — a low bar, which can mean nothing more than acknowledging the existence of something — has been transferred to some other agency.

Now, I happen to love this kind of byzantine bureaucratic stuff, but most people don’t, so let me explain in clear terms what this all means. The fascists are trying to sideline the ABA’s from having any role in supervising legal education — and create “the opportunity for additional entities” to do it. The intended result would be to flood the zone with bullshit, except that in this case the zone is our judicial system. As anyone who’s driven across the country knows from the failing business of billboards, the US is already the Land of Better Call Saul. If this movement succeeds, it’ll become far, far worse: a country overrun by legally empowered microfascists — armed with AIs, botnets, and the other affordance our Broligarchy has given us.

So… Boring? AF, as the kids say. And yet it matters, vitally. Like all professional organizations, the ABA is structurally conservative, so it’s no great shakes. But it’s far, far better than a world where digital diploma mills are handing out JDs “certified” by a witches’ brew of MAGA spoor (think # Lindsey Halligan), Christian Dominionists, assorted influencers and cryptobros, and miskellaneous krackpot konspiracy types.

Links:

FL: [SC ruling](https: //www.documentcloud.org/documents/26484103-opinion-sc2025-2064/), [Tallahassee Democrat](https: //www.tallahassee.com/story/news/state/2026/01/15/florida-supreme-court-ends-aba-gatekeeper-role-for-law-schools/88197039007/), [Inside Higher Ed](https: //www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/01/16/following-texas-florida-drops-aba-oversight-lawyers)

TX: Sep 2025, Jan 2026

TN: [TN Bar Assoc](ttps: //www.tba.org/?pg=Articles&blAction=showEntry&blogEntry=131441)

2026-01-08 Trump and residential rackets

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:41:00 GMT

This stray news about Trump and residential housing is really curious, no? From WTFJHT:

Trump said he was “immediately taking steps” to ban large institutional investors from buying additional single-family homes, framing it as an effort to address housing affordability. Trump said “people live in homes, not corporations” and blamed high inflation under the Biden administration for pushing homeownership out of reach, but he didn’t specify what legal or regulatory mechanism would implement the ban. The White House also didn’t provide details, and it’s not clear whether such a restriction could be imposed without congressional action.

It seems clear this ‘policy’ would be an effort to get his arms around affordability, but if he follows though at all the implications would be staggering.

Alongside the destruction of federal funding for science, his wanton efforts to destroy the ACA (by pulling what amounts to a massive federal handout to private insurers, yes?), and the weird noises he suddenly started making about Raytheon — which we should see as a proxy for interventions in the mil-industrial complex — it’s clear that his legacy will be a complete restructuring of the US economy.

Some will come out on top, some not, and that will be defined through formal and informal policies. If political parties and forces aren’t thinking strategically on that level, they will lose.

2025-12-31 obey in advance

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 11:19:00 GMT

Heather Cox Richardson’s year-end wrap-up (below) is stunning, but it felt like it was missing something, so I added this on FB:

A hard-boiled summary of a completely fucking surreal year. Everyone spent half the year reciting the mantra “do not obey in advance,” but just listen to that wretched phrase: it’s a shrieking, howling train wreck of imperatives, ambiguities, negations, and contradictions, ideally suited to a cultural of rudderless liberal denialism. The only agency it gives you, dear reader, is to say no. What it doesn’t do is invite you to think of what you believe in, imagine what you want, and act in ways that will make that happen — to be, in marxy terms, the subject of history. So let me suggest that you spend 2026 thinking ahead about what we will need to do on two fronts. First, to punish these criminals for their intrinsic wrongs and deter would-be imitators (or did you think Miller, Vought, Bannon, Thiel, Karp, and their ilk would just creep off the historical stage?). And, second, to build a new generation of institutions that are far more strategic, effective, and responsive than the ones Trump destroyed and corrupted. Or, if you like, you can just go back to not obeying in advance. Nietzsche put it well: blessed are the drowsy, for they shall soon drop off.

December 30, 2025 (Tuesday)

The hallmark of the first year of President Donald J. Trump’s second term has been the attempt of the president and his cronies to dismantle the constitutional system set up by the framers of that document when they established the United States of America. It’s not simply that they have broken the laws. They have acted as if the laws, and the Constitution that underpins them, don’t exist.

As soon as the 2024 election results were clear, billionaire Elon Musk, who had supported Trump’s campaign both through his purchase of Twitter—now X—and with $290 mi ll i o nin c a s h, p os t e d o n soc ia l m e d ia : “ N o vu s O r d o S ec l or u m, ” L a t in f or “ N e w W or l d O r d er .” A lt h o ug hh e w o n w i t h l ess t han 50$ 2 trillion from the federal budget.

Musk and his operatives muscled their way into government offices and gained access to computer systems. With strokes of a keyboard they eliminated jobs and programs, including, as Musk put it, feeding “into the wood chipper” most of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government agency aimed at combating disease and malnutrition around the globe. That dismantling has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, recently concluded that while the Department of Government Efficiency did not actually reduce spending, it did cut almost 10% of federal employees, a key goal of Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025.

And, crucially, it put operatives in virtually all government departments and agencies, where they gained access to privileged information about Americans, including citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants.

Musk and DOGE also established the idea that the unelected officials in the Trump administration could do whatever they wished, without regard to the laws or the Constitution. The Constitution, judicial precedent, and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act all make it very clear that the power of the purse belongs to Congress. As the elected representatives of the American people, only members of the House of Representatives and the Senate can determine how the nation’s money is spent. Then the president must “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Democrats objected to the administration’s dramatic usurpation of the power of Congress, but Republicans did not complain. Most backed the administration’s claims it was eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Although Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, meaning that Trump should have been able to get any legislation he wanted, he continued to try to get around the Constitution by declaring nine “emergencies” that would permit him to act without congressional oversight. This reliance on emergencies reflected the ideas of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings were followed by right-wing leaders, including billionaire Peter Thiel and the man who influenced him, Curtis Yarvin. Schmitt argued that power belongs to the leader who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law.

Trump asserted this view on August 26, claiming “the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in these cities—I can do it.” As now–Vice President J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there’s just power.”

Under these so-called emergencies, Trump launched a tariff war in April, taking from Congress a right the Constitution reserves to it alone. When lawmakers moved to challenge those tariffs, House Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), declared the rest of the session a single day with regard to legislation that could challenge Trump’s declaration of an emergency so that a required number of days could not pass before a vote to end that emergency.

With momentum still seeming to be behind Trump, Republicans delivered an omnibus law in July that put into practice the ideology Republicans had promised for a generation. The measure that Trump called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” extended the 2017 tax cuts that benefited primarily the wealthy and corporations while cutting Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and support for the purchase of healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace. By passing it under the terms of budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered, the Republicans pushed it through without any Democratic votes. In the Senate, three Republicans voted against the bill, requiring Vance to cast the deciding vote.

Meanwhile, administration policies put money into the pockets of the rich, especially Trump, who leveraged tariff discussions to win permissions to build golf courses, invested in cryptocurrency, and received donations to various projects from people with business before the government. When Congress tried to exercise its duty of oversight, administration officials treated the members with contempt, refusing to appear or declining to answer questions, talking over them, or insulting them.

But despite the administration’s attempt to act extraconstitutionally and outside the law, the law began to assert itself. Beginning in February 2024, long before the election, Democratic attorneys general had begun to write lawsuits challenging the executive orders and policies Trump’s appointees had boasted would be coming. Judges began to decide against the administration in those lawsuits at the same time that Americans vocally objected to the dramatic cuts to the civil service, the breaching of privacy laws by DOGE staffers, and the end of government services they had never imagined losing.

Then, in March, the government rendered more than 230 immigrants, mostly Venezuelans and nearly half with legal status in the U.S., to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador after a federal judge told them not to. Among those sent was Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García, whom a judge had ordered not be returned to El Salvador out of concern for his safety. The administration’s consistent refusal to bring Ábrego García back, despite the orders of a federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court, helped to focus anger at the administration.

The slow pace of the law inspired the American people to speak out against the administration. Protests had begun with “Tesla Takedowns” to weaken Musk, and they continued to grow as people watched their public services and government agencies dismantled. On April 5 a coalition of civil rights organizations, women’s rights’ groups, labor unions, and protesters participated in “Hands Off” rallies around the country.

Meanwhile, sweeping deportation raids illustrated that Trump’s promise to deport “the worst of the worst” criminal undocumented immigrants he insisted were raping and murdering U.S. citizens was a lie. Masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol were arresting foreign students who had spoken out against U.S. policy on Israel/Palestine and all the undocumented immigrants they could find. By definition, this meant they were grabbing people who were well integrated into communities. Few had been charged or convicted of crimes.

Trump’s 79th birthday fell on the same day as the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army—June 14—and he planned a military parade around that event in Washington, D.C. Protesters organized their own events that day, announcing they wanted “No Kings” in the United States of America. Trump’s popularity was dropping.

In June, Trump sent federalized National Guard troops to Los Angeles along with Marines, against the wishes of Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom, allegedly to protect federal officials and buildings from violence by those protesting deportation raids. In September, Trump deployed National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, and in October, to Chicago.

Support for Trump’s policies continued to drop. And then, over Labor Day weekend, Trump disappeared for several days. Whatever had happened passed, but the president’s deteriorating health, both physical and mental, was an increasingly major story.

In September, the administration began the bombing of small boats apparently coming from Venezuela, declaring that the men on them were “narco-terrorists” that threatened the U.S. Once again, officials ignored the law, in this case the 1973 War Powers Act, to strike without input from Congress, killing more than 100 individuals on the president’s authority alone.*

But the momentum that had appeared to carry the Trump administration forward had stopped. In October, Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich highlighted that Yarvin thought nothing had gone far enough or fast enough and feared that the “second Trump revolution…is failing. It is failing because it deserves to fail. It is failing because it spends all its time patting itself on the back. It is failing because its true mission, which neither it nor (still less) its supporters understand, is still as far beyond its reach as algebra is beyond a cat.”

On Saturday, October 18, more than seven million people took to the streets in another “No Kings” day to demonstrate their opposition to the Trump administration. On Monday, October 20, Trump began to bulldoze the East Wing of the White House, the People’s House.

With disapproval of the president at near-historic levels, voters in the November elections strongly backed Democrats. They elected Democratic governors in Virginia and New Jersey by double-digit margins, with nearly every district moving away from the Republicans. Voters in New York City and Miami elected Democratic mayors, Miami for the first time in nearly 30 years. They broke Republican supermajorities in the Iowa and Mississippi state senates and, over the entire course of 2025, flipped 21% of the Republican-held seats on ballots during the year.

Meanwhile, the refusal of Attorney General Pam Bondi to release the Epstein files—materials from the FBI’s investigation into the activities of sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein—had created significant pressure on Congress to force the administration’s hand. Many MAGA Republicans had backed Trump in 2024 because of what they thought was a promise to release those files, and yet House speaker Johnson refused to allow the House to vote on a measure requiring their release.

A bipartisan team of representatives launched a discharge petition to bring such a measure to a vote, and they overrode his objection. On November 19, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, requiring the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files to the public no later than December 19. The vote was overwhelming—a significant break of Republicans from Trump.

The administration failed to meet that legal deadline. But even the material that the Department of Justice has released and that has emerged from additional reporting since then offers evidence that Trump was more deeply involved with Epstein and his activities than he has admitted. Just tonight, the Wall Street Journal revealed that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa sent young women to perform massages, manicures, and spa services at Epstein’s nearby house, where Epstein would expose himself and pressure them for sex, and that Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell used the spa to recruit women to give Epstein massages.

On December 22 a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to file a plan to return the men it sent to CECOT or to hold hearings to permit them to challenge their detention, insisting they have the right to due process.

On December 23 the Supreme Court issued a preliminary rejection of Trump’s justification for deploying National Guard troops in Illinois.

As we reach the end of 2025, it appears the law is catching up to an administration that began the year by acting as if the law and the Constitution didn’t exist.

More than that, though, over the course of 2025, the administration’s refusal to recognize the tenets of American democracy has roused the American people to defend that democracy.

It appears that as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when British colonists on the North American continent took the radical step of rejecting the idea not just of King George III but of all kings, and launched the experiment of government based on the rule of law created by the people themselves, the American people are reclaiming that history. — I added this paragraph on the morning of December 31. This is the first time I have added to a letter the following morning, but this was too important to leave out. It was in my notes but by the time I finished this morning I was so tired I overlooked it. My apologies.

2025-12-29 on chomsky and epstein

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:31:00 GMT

A friend (JD) asked and excellent question:

Are there any other public figures depicted in this saga whose fans feel the need to publicly explain away the obvious implications of such factual depictions?

My answer:

I guess it depend who you’re asking, dunnit? I don’t have much patience with the current left-esque priggishness, which fanatically casts the worst moments of someone’s life as the most representative. Kant was right that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made,” and that’s before the timber meets the long and winding road of life, so to speak. Every one goes wrong, many of us very wrong. It seems to me we need to find a more humane way to think about humanity — one that does a better job of learning from liberationist movements but treats our failures more gently. But only up to a point — and for me that point is marked by casual contempt for others’ lives and rights. When we was younger, Chomsky actively carved out a role as an advocate for others in that way, and we should remember that — but not in a way that excuses this. Epstein was within spitting distance of being an enslaver, and that’s a pretty bright f-g line that most of us, even seriously problematic people, somehow manage not to cross.

2025-09-21 where do you draw the line

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 09:50:00 GMT

[orig to FB]

Everyone seems surprised that a handful of mega corps are vulnerable to political control, as if the left hadn’t been warning about that for decades. But rather than look backward, let’s look forward and ask what is resistant to political control? If it isn’t journalism, big tech, law firms, universities, or media, what is it? Easy: people. So rather than ritually reenacting this faux betrayal each time some sector shows its true colors, try asking yourself questions like: Where do you draw the line? What are you willing to risk? What will you demand from “opposition” politicians? How will you protect everyone who depends on you?

current and recent things

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 20:20:00 GMT

2026

2026-04

2026-04-11 what counts as a concentration camp

on historical debates, the control of language, and Israel’s belligerence

2026-04-11: TLALOC no. 7. Leeds: Location Press, 1965

2026-04-11: Andrea Pitzer on “concentration camps” is an academic video essay

2026-04-11: UPDATED! IG > Isotypist

2026-04-11: Evangelicals “don’t have a theology; they have a dress code.”

2026-04-10: actually revolutionary: Mamdani’s free childcare all year round

2026-04-10: UPDATED! images

2026-04-09: Nils Gilman, “Electrostates vs. Petrostates” (paint me skeptical)

2026-04-08: Alejandra Caraballo, “The Last Bit of Normal”

2026-04-08: Wong and Warzel, “Here’s How the AI Crash Happens”

2026-04-08: Sam Biddle is digitizing 35mm military slides

2026-04-08: robo cartographic poster design

2026-04-08: buttons with knives in them so you can “escape”

2026-04-08: Pentagon book bosses Vatican around

2026-04-08: “film festivals made easy”

2026-04-08: Guardian: study abroad as human trafficking

2026-04-08: Artifacts, “Preserving the history of the avant-garde, the arts, and queer culture”

2026-04-08: Makau W. Mutua, “Is the Age of Human Rights Over?” (SSRN)

2026-04-08: Jacob Geller’s 45-minute video essay Fantasies of Nuremberg

2026-04-07: MoMA “Information” exhibition, Jul 2 – Sep 20, 1970

2026-04-07: nutshell history of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism

2026-04-07: Rick Perlstein finishes a thirty-year project

2026-04-07: macOS defaults list

2026-04-07 forensic dystopianism

planting a flag or two near that phrase

2026-04-07-klaus gnomi

exactly what it says on the tin

2026-04-06: Micah Sifry’s Pro-Democracy Media Network (backstory here)

2026-04-06: Is Trump About To Nuke Iran? (my $5 says yes)

2026-04-06 now the whole earth is a bit more whole

The first woman to ever see our planet in its entirety

2026-04-06: Apollo 8, Artemis 1 & 2 Orbit Comparison

2026-04-06-the fog of war is very thick

We have no idea what’s going on in his war

2026-04-06: “Gibsonio-Burroughsio-Virilionism” — moi!

2026-04-05: politicians’ stock trades

2026-04-05: hoof and mouth epidemic in Russia (RL, Xitter, Threads)

2026-04-04: “Two kinds of AI users are emerging”

2026-04-03: That saw about centuries, decades, weeks, and history — [who said it?](“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”)

2026-04-02: Rona Lorimer’s “Letter from Paris: Death of a Fascist” feels very old-skool

2026-04-02: Phyllis Hofberg’s FB photo album GOODNIGHT ⭐️

2026-04-02: Karen O’Rourke, “Maupassant, I told him, is the only passion of my life”

2026-04-01: YOLO Linux

2026-04-01: Guardian: how a satellite-smashing chain reaction could spiral out of control

2026-04-01: Jennifer Wenzel, “A year of ‘acting’ presidency” at Columbia U

2026-03

2026-03-31: Car Seats as Contraception

2026-03-31: meet Proton Meet

2026-03-31: people are injecting “cadaveric adipose tissue” a/k/a corpse fat

2026-03-31: “neurodivergent supremacy” (🎩 Gizmodo)

2026-03-31: Scot Nakagawa, “How Democracies Win” (paint me skeptical)

2026-03-31: Aaron Regunberg, “What Are Your Obligations When Your Country Is the Villain?”

2026-03-31: Guardian review of the UK series Boom Box

2026-03-31: Blind Willie Johnson’s lyricless “Dark Was the Night”

2026-03-31: one of those elusive songs: Sade’s “Killer Blow,” on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack

2026-03-31: AJAM MC, Demilitarize the Indian Ocean (🎩 CH1)

2026-03-29: Comic Strip of the Day (CSotD)

2026-03-29: The elusive SNL “Bel Airabs” skit

2026-03-28: Todd Field’s Tár according to Wolfson, Millman, and Kearns (all 🎩 MB)

2026-03-28: Ben Wolfson reads Philip Larkin (from 2005! — 🎩 MB)

2026-03-27: [Trump gave Iran a sanctions regime against the US](Trump just helped Iran to impose a sanctions regime on the US.)

2026-03-27: Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute

2026-03-27: Sarah Schulman’s list of useful Iran-related resources for 27 March

2026-03-27: Track AIPAC

2026-03-27: Naghmeh Sohrabi, “The Catastrophe That Has Befallen All of Us” (🎩 JK)

2026-03-27: Error 417 Expectation Failed, the newsletter

2026-03-26: Will Davies: the UK’s “Labour-Conservative-Liberal Democrat cartel”

2026-03-25: Richard Seymour, “The illusions of Machtpolitik” (🎩 JG)

2026-03-24: Pankaj Mishra, “The Authority of Thought” (🎩 RW)

2026-03-22: RIP Agosto Machado

2026-03-20: Bari Weiss shuts down CBS News Radio

2026-03-20: “NATO Mission Iraq posture adjusted” (translation: we’re outta here!)

2026-03-20: Christian Kerez car parks in Bahrain facing demolition (more)

2026-03-20: the vile Lis Smith argues “We Don’t Need More Lawyers in Congress” (NYT 🎩 PA)

2026-03-20: Mack Hagood, Oral Residue: A Zombie Media Theory Rises Again

2026-03-19: Why Some Catholics Want Peter Thiel Burned at the Stake

2026-03-19: the Scully Effect

2026-03-19: “the city owns no roads, land, or buildings”

2026-03-19: How can Canadians unite in their own defence?

2026-03-19: The 49MB web page (🎩 IRR)

2026-03-19: Rough Trade’s 50th anniversary: Essential: Post-punk

2026-03-18: neological things updated: rereification (credit: Eric Hoffsten)

2026-03-18: Snowflake Cortex AI escapes sandbox and executes malware

2026-03-18 sirantos fotopoulos on israel and iran

the sharpest, densest commentaries I’ve seen yet

2026-03-18: Fotopoulos on “Iran, the Western Left, and the ambiguity of allies”

2026-03-18: How to shoot a screen using a board of keys (MacOS)

2026-03-17: still kinda horrifying after 25 years: Jon Haddock’s isometric historical events

2026-03-17: every name the money touched

2026-03-17: Iran Resources

2026-03-17: Renee Reizman, “Mail Art Takes On the World’

2026-03-17: Charles P. Pierce, “The Next Democratic President Better Be Merciless”

2026-03-17: T. J. Clark, “A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle”

2026-03-17: A Russian esoteric sect goes west

2026-03-17: Cade Diehm, ”Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark?“

2026-03-17: Brian Reffin Smith, “On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All”

2026-03-17: Natan Dubovitsky’s (a/k/a Vladislav Surkov’s) short story “Without Sky” (🎩 FS)

2026-03-17: Why do cultural execs go mad?

2026-03-17: gone (almost) phishin’

2026-03-17: couldn’t see that coming… “crappy luxury”

2026-03-17: U+237C ⍼ RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW

2026-03-16: Sirantos Fotopoulos: two ways to disappear a people

2026-03-16: Perry Anderson, “Arms and Rights” in NLR (2005)

2026-03-16: dark money lobbying for age-verifying OSes

2026-03-16: Hamid Dabashi’s unsentimental take on Euro philosophy: “ethically bankrupt”

2026-03-16: Trump insider thinks Israel May use nukes (I agree)

2026-03-13: jigsaw puzzles invented by a cartographer (and by a woman earlier, ofc)

2026-03-13: the whole zodiac is off

2026-03-13: the Great Wall of Memes

2026-03-12: [Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence](decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence)

2026-03-11 kessler syndrome

actor–network theory is just another name for Rube Goldberg

2026-03-11: “I built a spy satellite simulator in a browser”

2026-03-10: support the Bivens Act — for starters

2026-03-10: RIP Tony Hoare

2026-03-09 leonard cohen mark rowland interview 1988

OCRed interview of Mark Rowland’s interview with LC (Musician mag, July 1988)

2026-03-09: Post-War Prosperity to “Lifeboat Economics”? (🎩 RP)

2026-03-09: a tribute to Sylvère Lotringer (2022, 🎩 MW)

2026-03-09: “second hand zero-day” is not a phrase we want to see

2026-03-07 Russian techno-aesethetic manifesto of the day

a short, sharp techno-aesthetic manifesto from A. Shulgin

2026-03-07: S&P “stealth correction”

2026-03-07: Claude solved a graph theory problem so Knuth rethinks AI (🎩 DM)

2026-03-07: the new Swiss non-exploitative LLM, Apertus (🎩 DM)

2026-03-06: Ervand Abrahamian, “Iran Under Fire”

2026-03-03: Apple’s Pages UI 2009–2026 just gets worse and worse

2026-03-03: “The law firms opposed the motions to withdraw the motion to dismiss.”

2026-03-02: Who loses from the Anthropic fight? Maybe Elon Musk and Alex Karp

2026-03-02: The Man in Seat 61 is said to be an A+ source for train travel

2026-03-02: “forensic dystopianism”

2026-03-01: In edus, AI isn’t the real threat. It’s just the mirror

2026-03-01: Russian vs Ukrainian army modernization

2026-03-01: the parlance of hyper-online misanthropes

2026-02

2026-02-25: the 80% bill

2026-02-24: NBER working paper, “Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence” (🎩 TU)

2026-02-24: autocorrect the autocrats with the Times New Resistance font

2026-02-24: Varvara Nedeoglo’s “La petite mort des filles russes en terre libre” in TQR

2026-02-24: x86 CPU made in CSS (🎩 IRR)

2026-02-23: Byte magazine visual archive (🎩 KH)

2026-02-23 the worst pandering to the worse

on hanging a photo of Andrew in the Louvre

2026-02-23 one sick sailor

covering the cover story of the submarine and Greenland

2026-02-22: Poseidon taking chocolate from Mexico to Europe

2026-02-22: a bluntly old-school cover-up in the UK

2026-02-22: amazing explanation for why Trump sent a hospital ship to Greenland

2026-02-22: Kenneth Lonergan’s 3’6” director / extended cut of Margaret (2011) (🎩 JH)

2026-02-22: the actor Stellan Skarsgård was a teen pop sensation

2026-02-22: Wesley Willis’s outsider Chicago landscapes (🎩 MM)

2026-02-22: the wit and wisdom of Artforum

2026-02-22: Telegraph (India) reviews Amitava Kumar’s Social Life of Indian Trains

2026-02-22 an epidemic of pseudo-suicides

when police say a lynching is a suicide

2026-02-22: Letters to the Grauniad about men shoving women

2026-02-22: Rodney Graham’s inverted portraits of trees

2026-02-21: How the LA Review of Books destroyed itself

2026-02-20 two thoughts on ethics

if we’ve given up on ethics, we might as well just give up

2026-02-20: Institute for the Study of War’s Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment

2026-02-20: Toney Karon asks if a proper World Cup is even possible in the US in 2026

2026-02-19: Marcin Wichary blog on software craft and quality

2026-02-19 question of the day

a group who systematically violate the Constitution has taken over — so now what?

2026-02-19: Epstein Helper

2026-02-19: Mamdani unpolicing advisor Alex Vitale’s review of David Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan

2026-02-18: Paul Krugman: “Now Trumpists Are Menacing Economists”

2026-02-16: worth reading: defunding is what’s ‘really’ killing the humanities (🎩 EW)

2026-02-15-when does policy become conspiracy

how to think when government becomes organized crime

2026-02-13: a miners / Sandinista football jersey mystery 🎩SS)

2026-02-12: Will Manidis takes down Schumer’s “something big”

2026-02-12: Gary Marcus takes down Schumer’s “something big”

2026-02-11: RIP Byte mag illustrator Robert Tinney

2026-02-11: Mamdani hired 39 people out of 80K applicants

2026-02-11: How liminalism became our defining aesthetic

2026-02-11: updated! images

2026-02-10: Lit Crit in the Age of AI (🎩BB)

2026-02-10: “most of us barely noticed there was also a sports event” (🎩RW)

2026-02-10: The Journey and Return of Elizabeth Fisher (🎩JP)

2026-02-10: For Cubans, surrender is not an option 🎩BB)

2026-02-10: Dominic Pettman on the first lady and historian of the robocene

2026-02-10: “How Close did we Come to Teaching Jeffrey Epstein?”

2026-02-09: RFK Jr’s heroin voice

2026-02-09: Jim Biglan, artist (🎩 CH1)

2026-02-09-go and see come and see

me on the NYT on ICE in Idaho

2026-02-09: 👉🏼 The Journey and Return of Elizabeth Fisher (🎩 JP)

2026-02-08: “trauma-ridden vessels who least resist inhuman economic forces”

2026-02-08: “the most overwrought AI legal filings you will ever gaze upon”

2026-02-07: Epstein / Kubrick/ Led Zeppelin / Baldessari

2026-02-07: Why your university has so many administrators

2026-02-06: Marco Rubio was the acting archivist of the United States?!

2026-02-05: Joohn Choe’s predictions for how the next election will unfold

2026-02-05: Turkish m-reduplication

2026-02-05: anti-phonetic alphabet ca. 2000 (🎩 ST)

2026-02-04: The Moral Stupefaction of the American Public (🎩DL)

2026-02-04 a brief history of coalie

how a tongue-in-cheek mascot became a brain-dead ideologue

2026-02-03-redaction aesthetics

a legal strategy for limiting redactions

2026-02-02: Simone 0914 Flagship Store (🎩 FiG)

2026-02-02: Neural review of Marina Hassapopoulou, Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (U Minn Press, 2024)

2026-02-02: ABC — Australian one — on the neoliberal Atlas Network

2026-02-02: the missing chapter from Alvy Ray Smith’s The Pixel

2026-01

2026-01-28: The Intercept’s guide to ICE patches

2026-01-28: older men who watch construction, gives unsolicited advice: umarell

2026-01-28: Linux running in a PDF

2026-01-27: a very smart approach to AI in education

2026-01-27-how to punish ice

closing the book on (and throwing it at) ICE

2026-01-27: CERFI – Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry

2026-01-27 Alex Pretti and guns

we need to address the role guns played in Pretti’s life, death, and the fallout

2026-01-27 do trees cause forests

me on Robin on Hall on etc

2026-01-26: Ruminations on that DHS Penguin Tweet

2026-01-26 postmature antifascists

we’re “on the brink” means it hasn’t “really” happened yet — but it has

2026-01-24: Bellingcat’s online forensic toolkit

2026-01-24: Chronicle of Higher Ed reviews new Bryan Alexander book Peak Higher Ed

2026-01-24: Steven Heller interviews graphic novelist Jarrett Dapier about Chicago Public Schools Persepolis ban

2026-01-24 things fall apart

learning from aviation accidents

2026-01-23: best indy / community radio stations in the US

2026-01-23: poli-sci syllabus sourced from random internet posts

2026-01-23: AI bots are incompatible with democracy

2026-01-23: satisfying lost-and-found story of a Harry Bertoia sculpture

2026-01-22: F/LOSS CLI tool for “optimizing” Macs (incl. TouchID for sudo!): mole

2026-01-21: “the real reasons new yorkers’ groceries cost so much” (🎩JK)

2026-01-21: Redditor says MMS patch brought Verizon down (🎩IRR)

2026-01-21: End of an era: Gmail dropping POP3 support (🎩IRR)

2026-01-20: sage, nomad, demon — just not an assistant (🎩RL)

2026-01-20: # ASCII characters are not pixels

2026-01-20 viruses are people too

history, humor, science, law — this one’s got it all

2026-01-19: Scavenged Luxury on Tumblr (🎩TM)

2026-01-19: same actress, same play for forty years

2026-01-19: poetics of the periodic table

2026-01-19 making an example of the twin cities

not working out too well for Trump & Co

2026-01-18: interview with the graffiti artist Sluto

2026-01-18: David French on the normative vs prerogative states

2026-01-16-lowering the bar in FL etc

FL SC says FU to ABA over JD EDU

2026-01-14: “Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump”

2026-01-14: The China Syndrome and American decline

2026-01-13: Times Square FB group

2026-01-11: gently brutal NYRB review of Douthat’s doorstop

2026-01-10: historian of Venezuela AMA on FB

2026-01-10: automating medieval manuscript transcription

2026-01-09: VZ: The cash waterfall is upstream of sovereignty itself

2026-01-08: neatocal for planning an entire year

2026-01-08: alleged Berlin group manifesto: deDOTindymediaDOTorg/nodeSLASH565575

2026-01-08 Trump and residential rackets

WTFJHT, DJT, PE, and RE

2025

2025-12

2025-12-31 obey in advance

not obeying is not enough

2025-12-29 on chomsky and epstein

a short Q&A on two men

2025-12-23: RAM price skyockets thanks to OpenAI

2025-12-16: Jaro on Longfellow-ZK

2025-12-15: private equity is setting rural America on fire

2025-12-10: AAUP on AI

2025-12-07: Cyber Ciani

2025-12-03: Dictionary of Non-notable Artists

2025-12-01: the best font ever

2025-11

2025-11-29: Poor Theory (🎩 SXW)

2025-11-26: Hyman Rickover’s rules for govt management

2025-11-26: how’d I miss a walking city block?

2025-11-26: epic list of journal RSS feeds on Github

2025-11-23: framework for combining geospatial resources

2025-11-22: Github > allaboutrss

2025-11-20: a much-needed homage to Martha Wilson

2025-11-18: Seemingly legit tool for sandboxing attachments

2025-11-14: first AI-orchestrated cyber espionage

2025-11-09: # The Rise of Parasitic AI

2025-11-08: Sam Altman’s pants are totally on fire

2025-11-07: Wordle in 1973

2025-11-07: oldversion.com

2025-11-06: Altman’s Long Goodbye movie poster

2025-11-06: news.kagi.com

2025-11-06: high-quality Mamdani t-shirt

2025-11-06: visual/video search engine for Reddit

2025-11-03: Tony Karon’s blog

2025-11-03: Chi-town saying no to predatory stadium financing

2025-10

2025-10-31: [Cop Sculpture](1993–94 > Cop Sculpture) is on IG

2025-10-31: wtfjusthappenedtoday

2025-10-31: “Human Only Public License” (🎩 US)

2025-10-11 TrumpRX etc

analysis and metanalysis of TrumpRX etc

2025-10-10: Bill Ayers on “sewer socialism” and free buses (🎩 JB)

2025-10-07 no more acab thanks

“ACAB” was never a good idea, but now it’s a bad one

2025-10-06: Dollar General Carl Schmitt, Curtis Yarvin, has “think realistically about how to flee the country”

2025-09

2025-09-26: Complete History of the Soviet Union, Arranged to the Melody of Tetris

2025-09-26: De l’émancipation des toons

2025-09-26: “raw, unfiltered takes from everyday people on the topics that matter most”

2025-09-25: Jacobin as “the politics of demoralization in service of the Dem Party”

2025-09-25: Teen Vogue on rapture ideology

2025-09-25: a pretty sharp AI video about MAGA

2025-09-21 where do you draw the line

a para on ethics

2025-09-15: kitsch is central to MAGA (🎩 AO)

2025-09-14: bsky thread on climate disruption narratives

2025-09-12: chopstick sleeve exhibition

2025-09-12: Kirk was killed by a meme

2025-09-12: FARK bans misogyny

2025-09-06: “Nothing comes without its world” (🎩 CS)

2025-09-05: Counterfacto, a tool for analyzing Xitter search results “to highlight counterfactual statements on certain topics”

2025-09-03: Western Cell Division, “Opening Gaps and Filling Them Up…WESTERN CELL DIVISION and You” (Baltimore, MD: Dialectical Immaterialism Press, 1987)

2025-08

2025-08-25 what isnt happening

a litany of what left-leaning society needs to do to counter Trump & Co

2025-08-13: David Dayen sheds more light on the fund-raising machines that dominate the Democratic Party — this time in California

2025-08-11: a great Michael Tomasky column on Trump, Putin, UA, and UE

2025-08-11 titles i through x

some context for Title IX

2025-08-11 learning to read corruption

gotta keep up with the times

2025-08-10: Charlie Stross thread on a proposed interstellar travel design (🎩 KD)

2025-08-08: Al-Jazeera on Trump’s “fascist anti-psychiatry”

2025-08-08: Glyn Morgan’s belated review of Arthur Goldhammer’s 2012 novel Shooting War

2025-08-08: the Ursus Books (NYC) mailing list never fails to amaze (signup link)

2025-08-08: “GIRLS OWN THE VOID”: Nina Power on the supergenius Audrey Wollen (2017)

2025-08-08: https://archive.ph/20250808131031/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/rationalists-ai-lighthaven.html mentions this [techno-volkish wannabe anthem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB3uTV5Pyz0

2025-08-08: A+ explanation of the sinking market for US bonds

2025-05

2025-05-30: high school graduation hit with fake ticket DOS attack

2025-05-25: “I Was Targeted by a Hostile Crypto Spambot Swarm That Revealed How X’s Algorithm Has Been Truly Broken”

2025-05-14: the Big Boy graveyard on Google Maps or scene from The Matrix?

2025-05-14: [a letter from concerned Palantir alumni to the tech workers of Silicon Valley](https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25930212/the-scouring-of-the-shire.pdf

2025-05-14: Apparently, Robert Macfarlane (not sure which one) said “Despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline.”

2025-05-08: find who owns a publisher from a book’s barcode (🎩 NTT)

2025-05-08: poem “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper”

2025-05-07: this guy says John Fetterman’s always been a mess (🎩 RP)

2025-05-01: an exoplanet whose “atmosphere is thick with clouds of vaporized metal, and it rains liquid sapphires and rubies” (🎩CT)

2025-05-01: click whither: [a random website generator](https://randomgenerate.io/random-website-generator (🎩CT)

2025-04

2025-04-30: “five nuns fled a northern Italian convent after the abbess was sacked amid ‘grave vicissitudes’”

2025-04-08: Dan Goodin quoting Matthew Green and Matt Blaze is a pretty good working definition of trust

2025-04-08: “YOU HAVE NO REAL FRIENDS AND WILL DIE ALONE”

2025-04-08: “the tariffs are another tool for Trump to compel loyalty from industries in the US”

2025-04-06: amazing rundown of Trump’s penchant for cheating at golf

2025-04-06: Russia: “an ideology without principles’? (🎩 FC)

2025-04-03: Perry Anderson on “Regime Change in the West”(of which McKenzie Wark says, “It takes forever to get Marxists to embrace a new concept, and then they never ant to give it up.”)

2025-04-03: Public Domain Review — one of the best things on the net — on perfect animals

2025-04-02: Princeton has a better idea than hiding: selling bonds

2025-04-01: Facebook seems to be f*ing with Heather Cox Richardson’s daily posts(additional report by Mark Lemley)

2025-04-01: Laura Kipnis on the history “weaponization” of federal funding

2025-03

2025-03-30: The Rutgers faculty senate did what faculty senates everywhere should have been doing — passing resolutions demanding positive, collective action from the admin

2025-03-30: The architect Kazys Varnelis drops an excellent neologism: Ghiblification

2025-03-29: # John Zorn’s Hermetic Cartography

2025-03-29: # Dean Blundell on Canada cutting ties with the US

2025-03-29: a powerful statement about Vance and the 1968 Broken Arrow B-52 crash in Greenland

2025-03-27: Rolux’s Vectorisation(s) Du cinéma (2020)

2025-03-26: Interesting syllabus “about the representation of the city across media and disciplines” by Fabrizio Gallianti

2025-03-25: “Turd Reich” images for download

2025-03-24: Letter to USC on edu transparency re natsec risks posed by Chinese nationals in STEM

2025-03-23: For those of a certain age, this clock design is a work of unsurpassed candor, wit, and genius. For others, its meaning will be lost, like tears in the rain.

2025-03-23: a brilliant takedown some new book called In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

2025-03-21: Michael Ignatieff, who headed up CEU in Budapest, on what US edus should do

2025-03-21: I was sure that Tesla coined the fabulous word “embrittlement,” but it was far more popular in 1967 and 1983

2025-03-13: MFA Houston’s page for Alexey Titarenko’s photographs

2025-03-11: Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young’s Music and Light Box on display in NYC Mar 27 – Apr 12

2025-03-11: Columbia’s own James Schamus on Trump’s attacks on the university

2025-03-11: every US citizen should read Malcolm Nance on Trump’s plans for Canada

2025-03-11: AFA-CWA’s promo video for its C.H.A.O.S. approach to striking is 🏆 (background here)

2025-03-11: Starship 8 blowing up in the Bahamas is gorgeous — Musk should do it more often

2025-03-10: I didn’t realize the great Onethingwell started up the stopped again

2025-03-10: this still isn’t happiness

2025-03-09: FB’s explicitly blocking access to Gil Durán’s Nerd Reich because it “addresses topics like the ‘Network State’ concept and critiques of tech industry figures

2025-03-09: Mike Masnick on “Why Techdirt Is Now a Democracy Blog”

2025-03-09: Nina Burleigh (a/k/a American Freakshow) on [MAGA’s Heart of Darkness](https://www.americanfreakshow.news/p/magas-heart-of-darkness

A helpful PDF that you can print out and leave on every Tesla you see!

2025-02

2025-03-07: “the empathy exploit” is quite a phrase

2025-03-06: Timeline of Technological Buffoonery in the DOGE Era

2025-03-06: “We think it perspicacious to note” that if CRMEP’s philosophy students want to win this fight — and they should — they’ll need to find better copy-writers.

2025-03-06: “life-size chocolate Guernica” should be a mid-’90s punk band, not an actual life-size chocolate Guernica

2025-03-06: “# “Space focused on technology, new media and artistic research”

2025-03-04: Columbia U (my alma mater and neighbor for deacdes) keeps on screwing up its handling of the pro-Palestinian protests

2025-03-04: Dictionary.com doesn’t know how to pronounce the singular word interstice

2025-03-03: not enough people understand that Musk’s goal is to exterminate multitudes — and Trump is cool with that because that’d make him a Great Man

2025-03-03: Gregg Gonsalves gets warmer than most — the Trump admin wants to destroy universties — but his analysis still focuses on science, which is a mistake.

2025-02

2025-02-27: Steve Vladeck notes Big Law partners worry “they could jeopardize their economic future by protecting the rule of law” 🎻 🔬 😭 🌊

2025-02-26: a super obit for a fascinating guy, Chistopher “Sandy” Jencks (🎩 LF)

2025-02-26: an awful squib about N5N1 killing sand hill cranes in southern Indiana

2025-02-26: on Christian support for Trump and liberal denialism (🎩 Mike McG)

2025-02-24: 40% of the glaciers in Central Europe melted between 2000 and 2023

2025-02-24: Peter Sellers’s 1975 ads for TWA are brilliant (this one especially), but the meta-ad he made is next-next-next-next level

2025-02-24: Wankpanzer vs Pinto according to a hobbyist stats blog that looks great

2025-02-22: CPAC as gonzo politics

2025-02-22: Paul Prudence has a really sharp aesthetic

2025-02-22: Kagi, the privacy-oriented subscription search engine, is doing some interesting things

2025-02-22: ABC: “US cyber agency puts election security staffers who worked with the states on leave” — I don’t understand why this get so little attention

2025-02-22: I wrote a Bsky thread about Trump’s attacks on higher ed

2025-02-21: WiReD has a razor-sharp take on the fashion shift among broligarchs: “everyone missed that they were dressing for the job they really wanted”: emperors.

2025-02-21: Marc Greif on the threat of fascism: “The risk of overreaction is trivial compared to the risks of accommodation.”

2025-02-20: A phrase we’ll see more of, I wager: “the shallow state”

2025-02-12: Lucian Truscott offers a preview of blue-on-blue violence

2025-02-12: Chris Newfield gives a masterclass on why the proposed change in NIH funding would be a systemic catastrophe for US higher ed

2025-02-12: Jeff Sharlet explains why faculty must be open with students about that threat

2025-02-12: Trump wants to cancel 50% of the office space leased by the federal government

2025-02-10: Feb 10 is the anniversary of the first (reported) collision involving an active and a dead satellite

2025-02-10: Why doomscroll when you can eduscroll? a 🏆 to aizk for their brrrrrilliant TikTok-like interface for Wikipedia

2025-02-10: Microsoft’s copilot “loves the creativity” of my shocktwerps neologism for Musk’s übermunchkins

2025-02-10: 404media, an excellent news outlet, on “AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications”

2025-02-10: “First they came for the cokeheads and I did not speak out because I was not a cokehead…”

2025-02-10: “far center” seems like a useful political category, and this piece on that op-ed pest Pamela Paul is hilarious ~

2025-02-05: Yessssssss a Facebook skullpaper meme generator!

2025-02-05: Gil Duran’s Nerd Reich on the blueprint for Musk’s coup

2025-01

2025-02-01: James Fallows offer the kind of high-level, well-informed context for the DC plane crash we need more of

2025-02-01: Today in Tabs on Krugman on Krugman leaving the NYT

2025-02-01: the PPRuNe (Professional Pilots Rumor Network) thread devoted to the DC crash

2025-01

2025-01-29: Really interesting Bsky thread](https://bsky.app/profile/dorsaamir.bsky.social/post/3lglw6iefus2g) on the whether the Müller-Lyer illusion is culturally informed

2025-01-29: “During 1965–66, Mad magazine attempted a French edition and hired [Melvin] Van Peebles as editor-in-chief during its run of only five issues.” (Wikipedia)

2025-01-29: “Raging Misogynist” Now Federal Government H.R.’s Top Lawyer” is [quite a headline

2025-01-24: Why do “AIs” default to the condescending voice middle-school textbook Q&As, like this Anne Franke bot?

2025-01-24: a new issue of The Diagram is out!

2025-01-16: Jim Henson’s muppets weren’t always so peace-loving

2025-01-16: Steamed buns (yes, those ones) are helping Chinese weapons engineers “turn the angry king of explosives into a beautiful queen”

2025-01-16: a site with zillions of links to English-language literary magazines, with short excerpts of pieces recently ran (🎩SB)

2025-01-11: Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber Matthew Livelsberger’s two “minifestoes,” less than a page each, basically advocate exterminating half the US population (guess which half!)

2025-01-11: Dennis Cooper has put together a pretty epic set of images on his blog

2025-01-11: my love of primates doing human stuff transcends all words, but this might just be the greatest monkey video ever

2025-01-11: Paolo Gerbaudo has coined one of the most useful phrases I’ve seen in a long time: “vintage theory”

2025-01-11: Meta’s internal MAGA memo uses a slippery phrase we’ll be seeing more of, I think: “cognitive diversity”

2025-01-11: Robert Luxemburg’s unnverving video “UNTITLED (2025-01-08)…”

2025-01-04: Via the amazing FIG Projects on Facebook, an intriguing site on Housing Standardization

2025-01-04: “Meet The Blind Birder Reimagining Accessibility In The Outdoors” (Science Friday)

2025-01-04: Trillium Domes geodesic dome kits and plans an unusually great Joy Division t-shirt

2025-01-04: The Map Room blog’s list of notable map books published in 2024

2025-01-04: Melton and Wallace, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception (2mb PDF)

2025-01-04: Internet Archive’s “Classic TV Commercials” repo

2025-01-04: Joe Frank on the net “A One-Woman Confessional: Eight Films by Cecilia Mangini”

2025-01-04: OSINT Dojo resources for open-source intelligence An epic list of “Awesome MacOS Software”

2025-01-04: Bellingcat’s auto-archiver for archiving links to vids, images, and social media from Google Sheets

2025-01-04: “A curated directory of 1000+ Mac menu bar apps”

2025-01-04: Internet Archive’s snapshot of my father’s crazy-but-smart solution for funding healthcare

2025-01-04: Achille Mbembe and Milo Rau on “The Paranoia of the Western Mind”

2025-01-04: “The Cagots of France,” persecuted for centuries then utterly forgotten (La Piccioletta Barca)

2025-01-04: MIT Tech review on how to pitch them

2024

2024-12

2024-12-13: The Grauniad’s piece on synthesizing “mirror microbes” is moderately terrifying.

2024-12-13: As usual, Astra Taylor is right.

2024-12-13: NYU declared Andrew Ross, one of its finest faculty members, persona non grata after he was arrested at a pro-Pal demo.

2025-10-11 TrumpRX

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 07:58:00 GMT

Michael Kinnucan wrote (on FB at least):

Among all the other news this week you may have missed the news that Trump has gotten Pfizer and some other big drug companies to lower drug prices for Americans. If you did miss it, don’t worry, because it is fake as hell, the latest chapter in a long history (stretching back to 2017) of Trump attempting or pretending to lower drug prices and being too stupid or corrupt to actually get it done. It’s barely worth explaining why this is fake (all you really need to know is that Pfizer’s stock went up to its highest point this year when the deal was announced), but briefly:

Trump’s deals are doing two things: (1) Requiring drug companies to sell drugs directly to consumers through a website called (sigh) TrumpRX at deeply discounted prices, and (2) requiring drug companies to sell to state Medicaid programs at a “most favored nation” price (the lowest price they offer in other markets). These two things are fake as hell because:

The TrumpRX thing will only be available to you if you don’t use insurance and pay the whole cost of the drug out of pocket. Sadly for you, even if the drug is deeply discounted, paying for it out of pocket is still very expensive, and you won’t do it. Instead you’ll use insurance, duh, that’s why you have it, and the drug will cost the same (and your insurance will be just as expensive) as always. Additionally, if you happen to be uninsured then the drug companies already have discount programs for you so this won’t be different from what already happens.

The Medicaid thing is fake because Medicaid, Our Nation’s Best Healthcare Program, already gets deeply discounted drug prices and it’s not clear that the new prices will be lower at all (probably not, because Pfizer’s stock went up).

This is mostly unremarkable (Trump lies constantly), but I want to make two observations:

“Americans pay too much for drug prices” is possibly the least complex policy problem in human history. The thing with pharmaceuticals is that they’re life-saving, so you can’t not buy them, but the government awards decades-long patent monopolies to for-profit companies for them, so the drug companies can charge whatever they want, and it turns out what they want is to charge a lot. It is literally that simple. If you want drugs to cost less then there is exactly one (1) thing you can do to effectuate that, which is to set limits on the prices for the drugs. Specifically you need to do what every other developed country does: Put together a little panel that takes a look at each drug as it comes on the market and says “hm this is a pretty cool new drug you can charge $50/ p i ll f or i t " or " e h, t hi s d r ug i s f in e b u tw e a l re a d y ha v e 30 o t h er d r ug s j u s tl ik e t hi s, yo u c an c ha r g e$ 8/pill for it,” or whatever the case may be. Some may say “well you say it’s simple but if we lowered drug prices then drug companies wouldn’t do as much life-saving R&D” (i.e. the complicated thing about solving high drug prices is that high drug prices are good actually), but I submit to you that if you feel that high drug prices are good you should convene the panel I mentioned earlier and then multiply all its numbers by 2, rather than incentivizing research through a messy bounty program involving lots of TV commercials and funded by the copays of cancer patients. But that’s all to one side—some people think (Pfizer thinks) high drug prices are good, but if you think high drug prices are bad then there is a clear unambiguous policy solution to that, universally adopted outside the US, and we should just do it. So every time Trump announces something that is not “a panel will set the prices” you can tell it’s fake.

Every time Trump does something on drug prices besides the Only Thing That Would Work to fix drug prices, I feel a little wave of relief, to be honest? Trump has been talking about this issue for a decade because he has good political instincts here: the situation with drug prices is that Americans pay three times what the rest of the world pays for drugs, Americans are aware that they’re getting fucked and hate drug companies, it would be completely straightforward to fully fix this problem if the political will existed to do so, but the US government hasn’t done so because drug companies have purchased a stable bipartisan majority in Congress. It’s one of those healthcare issues where the US really stands out as having a uniquely bad political system that systematically serves elites at the expense of the popular will. So, if you wanted to cement your status as a strongman who stands above special interests and gets stuff done for the little guy by draining the swamp, this would be the place to do it. And Trump knows that, that’s why his addled mind keeps returning to the issue. But he’s too… Stupid? Corrupt? Unserious? Easily flattered and manipulated? Sensitive to CNBC graphs? Easily bribed? To actually get it done, and so there’s been this years-long parade of fakery, proud press releases and pretend executive orders that do nothing. And so now Pfizer has given him a cute little website with his name on it, he feels great, art of the deal baby, and Pfizer’s happy too—its stock is up.

There are real limits to how far even a smart, savvy version of Trump could take his “populism”—he’s fundamentally a rich guy who loves tax cuts and hates working people, so he can’t actually solve people’s problems—but there are these issues like drug prices where, you know, you wouldn’t have to go very far to out-populist the Democrats on the issue of “should Pfizer be allowed to price-gouge cancer patients,” and it wouldn’t take many things like that to get his approval rating into positive territory. The fact that he hasn’t is just a piece of good luck for us.

This is very, very good. One detail: This new “TrumpRX” gimmick mirrors “Obamacare,” of course, because much of what Trump does — including running for president semis-seriously, as opposed to jerking off in public — is fueled by his virulent rage that a Black man made fun of him and told him what to do. As you surely know, “Obamacare” was coined by GOP operative to mock the ACA, then everyone adopted it — Dems / libs / lefts very much included, both out of chronically mediated laziness and, I suspect, as a dig. Two things: (1) Now it’s kinda hard to argue that Trump & Co shouldn’t call his gimmick “TrumpRX,” isn’t it? I’m not pointing fingers at anyone, but I do want to point out that it’s an unusually crisp example of the the kind of “hypocrisy” that whiny-bitch rightists are constantly moaning about, and that Trump has a feral, predatory talent for exploiting. But, far more important, (2) I think many of you will be able to see how this kind of problem — which is more like a dysfunctional family than politics — serves as a cog in the Democrats’ systemic inability to (I’ll be be blunt) tell the truth about Trump.

2025 10 07 no more acab thanks

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 09:32:00 GMT

A friend shared this image on FB, with the caption “Portland Protestors Baiting ICE Agents. With Donuts on Fishing Poles. Calling it ICE Fishing.” But rather than hector an lecture friends and allies in comments, I’m going to start sharing things I’m more iffy about. This is an old photo, maybe from Portland, but this definitely isn’t ICE. I don’t say that just to be pedantic, though. As blue-vs-green conflicts become more common — and they will — one side will always be worse than the other, but which one will be unpredictable and sometimes fluid. In this context, it’ll be a really good idea to lose the “ACAB”-style logic / rhetoric / imagery. And, more generally, my experience has always been that, in complicated conflicts, the people who are first to espouse hard-line, reductive morals are the last ones you should trust. It’s the people who always see things in shades of gray are the ones with abiding principles. But gray is metaphor; now it’ll be shades of blue and green.

2002 > The Blur Banff Project

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 17:29:00 GMT

In 2002, I was part of the planning group — along with Robert Ransick, Katie Salen, Marina Zurkow, and a few others — for the conference Blur 02: Power at Play in Digital Art and Culture, co-developed by NYC’s arts org Creative Time and the New School University. (Visible in the CT photo: Clay Shirky, Meg Hourihan, who went on to found the ur-blogging company Blogger), and Natalie Jeremijenko, among others.) At the time, my constellation of interests was pretty unusual — notably European arts activism and US telecoms policy — so I brought an unusual group of people to the conference, among them the activists Alan Toner and James Love. With Jamie J. King and Richie Hawtin (who then worked under the name Plastikman), we formed a group that sought to radically rethink the relationship between music and money at the dawn of P2P sharing. Sara Diamond, an important curator at the Banff Centre in Canada later invited us there to further develop and present the idea. Jamie Love’s documentation of the proposal and its later circuitous influence can be found here:

“The Blur Banff proposal” (2013)
“Blur 02 | Power at Play in Digital Art and Culture (April 11-13, 2002) User Experience” (at Blur, 2002)
“How should musicians be paid to create digital works?” (at Banff, 2002)
“An Essential Health Care Patent Pool” (Barcelona, 2002)

2025-08-25 what isn't happening

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 09:10:00 GMT

Rebecca Solnit writes (on FB at least):

Someone posted a piece whose premise is “why is no one doing anything?” To be slightly more polite, I’m turning my comment on it into a separate post. People who say “no one is doing anything” need to go to where people are doing things.

Lots of people are doing lots of things, and some of them started doing them the day after the election; the climate groups I’m part of starting planning well before the election, and I’m sure they’re not alone. The ACLU is super-busy. Lawyers are suing like crazy. Democratic state a.g.s are talking every morning about their collective lawsuits. Protestors are in the streets, maybe 5 million at No Kings, there’s lots of interference with ICE, 50501 was created expressly for this, Indivisible is growing by leaps and bounds, I’m seeing so many photographs of so many signs on overpasses, people are stepping up to help immigrants in all sorts of ways…

The piece that provoked me listed as our survival mechanisms “Freeze. Fawn. Flight,” a version of fight-or-flight that has been superseded. Because also among the repertoire of survival mechanisms is: tend and befriend (which might have emerged when more behavioral scientists studied more women). Tend and befriend when it’s larger groups is known as solidarity. I see people acting in solidarity all over and I post about it regularly in the hopes that fewer people will say “no one is doing anything.” But it’s an even more generous than a survival strategy, because in this crisis, many people who are not under threat are trying to tend and befriend those who are, sometimes taking serious risks to do so. Choose your stories carefully.

p.s. From the original 2000 paper on tend and befriend (link in comments): “The human stress response has been characterized, both physiologically and behaviorally, as “fight-or-flight.” Although fight-or-flight may characterize the primary physiological responses to stress for both males and females, we propose that, behaviorally, females’ responses are more marked by a pattern of “tend-and-befriend.” Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.”

Solnit is right and yet institutions are falling, one after the other, across every sector. The US left is in love with this kind of atomized activity, which is great except that Trump & Co are taking over centralized infrastructures. The left ALSO needs to rediscover popular frontism: mass, coordinated action — the kind where everyone shows up with the same sign, not whatever clever quip they thought up, as if they were going to a Halloween parade and their message was their costume. In particular, the left needs to start striking: wildcat strikes, general strikes, and any other kind of strike that shuts something down — a site, a street, a service, a system. Tactics like that will become especially important as Trump & Co move on to their next phase, attacking urban centers.

And Solnit is also wrong. The list of things that are not happening is even longer:

Are Democrats as in the Democratic Party developing effective political strategies for retaking the government at every level?
Are legal professionals planning how to root out and ruthlessly punish all this corruption and make sure these fascists never, ever come an anywhere near power again?
Are financial and legal professionals collaborating on how to trace and seize all the wealth being generated and extracted — crypto, fraud, insider trading, etc — amidst all this corruption?
Are media and legal professionals working together to put an end to the right’s poisonous media empires?
Are technologists and legal professionals working to identify the oceans of data that DOGE stole and to remediate the consequences?
Are scientists planning the next generation of institutions to replace NIH, NSF, etc with something even better?
Are scholars asserting their power in universities and organizing with students to challenge administrations that have run amok?
Are social scientists planning effective strategies for reforming institutions — educational, social, even parental — in order to fix this continent-wide factory for broken people? (If you think that sounds daft, you need to learn more about the history of progressive education — maybe start with Maria Montessori.)

If these things aren’t happening “at scale,” and they are not, the fascists will win — because they are doing these things.

image stream 6

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 10:15:00 GMT

See also:

image stream 1 (2025-02-23 – 2025-03-03)
image stream 2 (2025-03-03 – 2025-03-10)
image stream 3 (2025-03-11 – 2025-03-24)
image stream 4 (2025-03-24 – 2025-05-07)
image stream 5 (2025-05-08 – 2025-08-12)
(image stream 6: you are here)
image stream (current)

2025-08-11-titles I through X

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 10:24:00 GMT

(From https://www.facebook.com/tbyfield/posts/pfbid05DNM3vshQ3JsetFu5uZ2F2cTw9B3YQbHXqSTCXw4WkwAD4253ioV4KrXBM9Fbutul)*

I know a fair amount about how education has evolved in the US, but I never knew this: the Education Amendments of 1972 — signed into law by Nixon — were:

Title I — Higher Education Assistance

Expanded federal student aid programs, including grants and loans.
Strengthened funding for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Title II — Teacher Training

Provided grants to improve teacher education programs.

Title III — Library Resources

Funded libraries and educational materials for schools and universities.

Title IV — Vocational Education

Supported career and technical education programs.

Title V — Indian Education

Addressed educational needs of Native American students.

Title VI — Emergency School Aid

Funded desegregation efforts in public schools.

Title VII — Bilingual Education

Supported programs for students with limited English proficiency.

Title VIII — General Provisions

Administrative rules for implementing the law.

Title IX — Sex Discrimination Ban

The landmark section prohibiting sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs.

Title X — Miscellaneous

Additional provisions, including amendments to other education laws.

2025-08-11 learning to read corruption

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 09:50:00 GMT

Imma up this from a comment because it seems like a useful model for how to think about the evolution of corruption around Trump:

{{{ Tallahassee is a profoundly corrupt city, and most of that corruption centers on the nexus of city, state, and FL’s infamous real-estate sector. Anyone who manages to develop in the “College Town” area — those are scare quotes — is by definition seriously connected. So my guess is that they were, let’s say, “given to understand” it would behoove them not to stand in the way of a raid [ICE, in late May, at major construction sites]. That kind of corruption doesn’t rely on plain statements or ultimatums; it operates on ‘speculation,’ rumors over cocktails, and nuances in how people go about currying favor.

We can see that in how, over time, DeS has modulated the ways he panders to Trump: he gave up that in-your-face attention-seeking style, and is much more low-key about it these days. Partly because I think he understands what most people do not yet: he’ll never get what he wants from Trump, but nor can he afford to alienate him, so his plan now is to present himself as a reliable soldier to Trump’s soon-to-be heir, Vance. }}}

The point being that if corruption is the norm, we need to sharpen our skills in terms of how we read it. Constant, repetitive outrage doesn’t help us to understand it better; if anything, it just deadens us to it.

neological things

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 14:24:00 GMT

HASH, x. There is no definition for this word — nobody knows what hash is. — Ambrose Bierce

adhocumentation (2012-05-30; xitter)

adult supremacy (2021-03-28): self-explanatory

banalogy (2025-02-21)

Bildungshalftimeshow (2026-02-11): this

briconteur (n.d.): a raconteur who relies on bricolage

brogrom (2019-07-14): a pogrom by bros, as in: “ICE’s anti-‘immigrant’ brogroms are the next step in the Trump administration’s embrace of white supremacy.”

crowdwash (2011-01-06): a process by which a signal gets lost in mass “user-generated” noise (cf. Andrew Orlowski’s “googlewash”)

cut-and-patriotism (n.d., xitter)

“early Blade Runner” (2026-04-05): an effort to describe the current historical period

emdashical (2024-08-31): parenthetical for the 21st C

fanticipation (2024-04-04; 6k prior attestations, but that’s pretty good for such an obvious term)

forensic dystopianism (2026-03-02): seems self-explanatory — see note.

freudenschadist (n.d.): someone who systematically takes misery in others’ pleasures

Klaus Gnomi (2026-04-07-klaus-gnomi): not a neologism, strictly speaking, but apparently no one has ever typed that phrase before

koyaanisqatsification (2024-08-27): widespread adoption / imposition of a Koyaanisqaatsi aesthetic, i.e., jumbled-together sped-up time-lapse

Luftgründer, lit. “air-founder”: (1) a Silly Valley–style aspirational “Founder” with unrealistic expectations about the sheer mass of effort it takes to maintain anything — say, like a government. (2) A more accurate name for “libertarian.” (2026-04-08; see also here)

Magical Nihilism (n.d.): like Magical Realism but nihilistic

mass nihilization (2024-03-08) the process by which growing numbers of people accept or even embrace nihilism, with the strong implication that it was done to them

myhrvoldemort (2011-08-13): no idea, just like it

neologian (n.d.): a neologist who takes new words too seriously

nihilization (n.d.): the reduction of everything to nothing

notwithstanning (2026-03-28): admiration unrelated to obsessive fascination, as in “they loved her acting notwithstanning”

occam’s chainsaw (2023-10-24): like occam’s razor but for heavier jobs. Variation: occam’s guillotine (2021-04-02?)

oligarchocene (2025-08-08): like anthropocene but correctly identiifies the problem as corrupt wealthy people rather than humans or “capital”

outdystopiaed (2026-02-06): as in, “bro, she 💯 outdystopiaed you” (hat RP)

penultiworst (2022-12-20; xitter): next-to-worst

permadjunct (2014-03-24 on Xitter): perpetual adjunct position, formed by analogy to permatemp

postmature antifascist (2020-07-22): Arendtsplainers and other pedantic finger-waggers who argued that Trump wasn’t “really” a fascist (see, e.g., Jonathan Rauch). W. Sydney Robinson used the phrase just weeks later in a book review.

postor syndrome (2025-12-23)

preact (n.d.): to react before something has happened

progwashing (2024-09-02):

radical fleek (2025-08-07): when “radical chic” feels too nostalgic

reality government show (n.d.; xitter)

rereification (by Eric Hofftsten; 2026-03-18): maybe what you get when you pop reification in the microwave, or something like that (cf “hash”)

retreat capital (“RC”; 2010-04-23): when venture capital flees

retronaissance (2023-07-14): do as you will with it

ritual nazi-punching (2025-02-23): formed by analogy to ritual hippy-punching, but with NO known prior attestations!

“the road to hell is paved with high road” (2024-01-24) — not strictly a neologism but useful

shocktrope (n.d.): do as you will with it

shocktwerps (2025-02-02): DOGE employees

speed-run dialectics (2025-12-19)

splainable moment (n.d.,; xitter)

stand-up tragedian (2025-03-14)

statsplain (2017-09-02): splaining with statistics, usually by people who are unwilling to plainly state they believe that statistics offers the preeminent form of analysis

“there’s no then then” (n.d.); formed by analogy to “there’s no there there’

trollwellian (n.d.): do as you will with it

two-point-oh-somethings (2010-11-13; twitter)

tzsch (n.d.): UNIX shell for Nietzscheans

undecided edgelords (2024): fuck them

ur-splain (2017-10-25): the protean origin from which all splains derove

vizwashing (n.d.; xitter)

wonquel (n): a prequel that tells an origin story only hardcore nerds would have ever wondered about. Example: “Bartleby the Scrawler, a lighthearted wonquel, recounts how the young man learned to write.”

wordlview (2024-11-13): an understanding of the world based on plaing word gamed provided by hegemonic news sources

yolocracy (n.d., xitter)

zeitvibe (2024–08-11): low-key zeitgeist

2025-05-31 science is what scientists do

Sat, 31 May 2025 09:17:00 GMT

This list could be longer: China (esp. the Cultural revolution), Cambodia, and the massive purges across civil society and education in Turkey after that fake attempted “coup” several years ago — off the top of my head. Gleick’s point may be true (I think it is, of course), but it also combines the directionaless retrospection of the Sanatayana clichés with what I’ve started criticizing as “modelism.” Great, we have models — so what? What should be happening is the directly affected communities — scientists and adjacent workers involved in coordination, funding, publishing, supporting industries, etc, should be actively planning how to rebuild even better institutions. There’s no shortage of models for that, large and small: generation upon generation of scientific and techniocal societies, WW1-era standardization, WW2-era massive coordination (aviation, radar, optics, aerospace medicine are the ones I know a lot about), legends like Lockheed Martin’s skunkworks, the transnational scientific networks that enabled fields from meteorology to epidemiology, innovative entities like IAVI, ACT-UP and TAG, private-ish entities like Princeton’s IAS — the list goes on and on. Yes, Trump is doing incalculable damage, but the point of Sanatayana’s injunction shouldn’t be hand-wringing, it should be choosing the right lessons to learn from and then applying that learning. The scientific comunity is the longue-durée model for actively building rational, deliberate social and institutional structures with little or no regard for the comings and goings of politics. Now’s the time to shine.

2025-05-27 a bleak prospect

Tue, 27 May 2025 10:53:00 GMT

Catalist’s “What Happened in 2024?” is a bleak, bleak post mortem of the 2024 election. Blame the electorate’s racism, blame its sexism, blame its ageism, blame whatever you want — then ask yourself whether that factor will be less of a problem before the next elections. (No.) Diagnose the problem as this bumbling, or that delusional strategy, or some other disorganizational problem — then ask yourself whether that factor will be less of a problem before the next elections. (No.) Chalk it up to “genocide,” if you like. Is the current national Democratic Party moving on that issue? No. Are they doing what they need to before the next elections. (No.) Are there signs of aggressive, relevant new generations of leadership coming up? (No.) Do monthly one-day national protests contribute to solving these problems? (No.) I’m very tempted to state the problem this way: The Democratic Party is the #1 obstacle to progress in this country, and any argument or strategy that relies on them is doomed to fail. I’m not quite there yet, but not far off.

2025-05-27 biden and student debt

Tue, 27 May 2025 10:21:00 GMT

A friend shared a meme about student debt that pointed out something obvious but rarely noted. Many borrowers have long since paid off the principle and even quite a bit of interest; the debt they continue to struggle under is often just a result of the spread between sane and insane interest rates. My reply:

There are all kinds of legit age-related criticisms to be made about Biden, but it’s a fact that he was like a pit bull when it came to reducing educational debt — he would. not. let. go. Setback after setback, he chipped away at it. The problem was that he only chipped, when he could and should have waved his magic wand and said “SHAZAM! NO SUCH THING ANYMORE!” — especially after the Supreme Court issue that insane immunity ruling. And, if anything, this very issue really exemplifies the tragic aspect of his presidency: his age-related inability to communicate effectively — from his nostalgic faith in a long-gone public sphere that would clearly convey his policies, to his inner circle’s growing efforts to hide him away — he never got much credit for this, one of his main most consistent policies, and one that could and should have spoken clearly to younger generations.

2025-05-23 genocide, genocides, and Trump

Fri, 23 May 2025 11:55:00 GMT

Over the last year and a half, the US left in particular has made a fetish of genocide, partly for reasons that are both painfully real — the Netanyahu regime’s cynical, systematic, and indiscriminate annihilation of an entire region and all the people in it — and partly for imaginary, related to the evolution of leftism in the US, which in some ways increasingly feels like a sort of counter-MAGA. The basic point is that, like every other word in the world, genocide has different meanings and different ways of meaning, which depend on context at every scale, from the personal histories of those speaking and listening to international legal structures and processes. It’s my sense that the debates that have attended this tend to oscillate between three ways of talking about genocide: (1) legal definitions, (2) common-sense observations, and (3) emotional accusations. But there are other ways of talking about genocide that I think have gotten lost in the shuffle: (4) historical associations and (5) underlying logic.

Historical associations: Israel’s origins lie, in part, in the simple fact that the Nazis — actual WW2-era Germans, their sympathizers, and (if you’ve actually read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem you’ll know this) the disparate ways their various allies navigated and negotiated the Nazis’ obsession with the complete annihilation of Judaism as such. For those related to, or descended from, the survivors of that nightmare, “genocide” has a specific, often very intimate historical meaning. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (irony intended) to understand that accusing those people or some subset of them of genocide is, as they say, personal. True or false, right or wrong, it’s also deeply hurtful — and, ironically, in ways that lie at the very heart of New Leftism’s insights (“the personal is political,” “everything is political,” etc). In purely practical terms, insulting people from the get-go is not a winning persuasive strategy.

This is all a wind-up for the one I’m after here, (5), underlying logic. By that I mean something like Mein Kampf, Hitler’s half-biography, half-manifesto, which he published in the mid-1920s, long before he had the opportunity to implement his “vision.” To my understanding, it isn’t clear when exactly Hitler realized he could concretely set about annihilating Judaism, but it seems to have taken nearly a decade. In that sense, we can say that the underlying logic of the Shoah played out during that period. The development of the post-WW2 international legal order largely aimed at preventing another “great” war; but that was just one register where those aims played out. The understandable — and morally right — aim of ensuring that it would “never again” happen became one of the pillars of postwar cultural development.

Those of you who pay attention to anything I say — a few dozen people at most — may know about my perverse fascination with “Godwin’s Law.” It’s my view that it was immensely destructive, because it gave people a generic, often false, and math-sounding way to wave away the recognition that quite a few people, in everyday contexts, revealed subtle signs that their thinking was tacitly fascist-adjacent or even -sympathetic. And, lo and behold, in the past decade or so, it’s turned out — to the horror of many — that yes indeed, there really are fascists and even nazis everywhere. I’ll leave it to others to debate how many there are, how virulent they are, and all the rest, but the short version is there are a lot of them scattered across the US political spectrum — mostly on what in US terms we’d regard as the right-wing. Mostly.

This is cause for real concern because many people fear — correctly, I think — that the US is at risk of doing what Germany did in the lead-up to WW2: realizing the underlying logic of genocide. This is where it starts to get complicated, meta-complicated, and meta-meta-complicated, with accusations and counter-accusations about genocide in various stages of realization. Some argue that Israel is currently engaged in genocide; others see that description or accusation as a step in a very different genocidal project — the restoration of fascist or even nazi project, in the US in particular.

That brings us to Trump. During his first term, I routinely argued that his beliefs and actions were genocidal in their underlying logic. His dog’s breakfast of racist ideology, his 1970s-style libertine and libertarian “jokes” about caricatured “Jews,” and above all his impulse to politicize public-health policies — notably, his exploitation of Covid-related resources — all made it all too clear that he was perfectly willing to kill vast numbers of people in order to achieve his dreams of revanchist power. More than that, he was eager to do, because in his lizard-brain views the power to commit murder en masse was the hallmark of a Great Man.

In my view, that is one of the key frame we should use to understand his “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which will kick tens of millions of people off even the lowest rungs of the US health-care system. Yes it realizes decades-old rightist resentments against social-welfare programs, and yes it’s an integral part of his oligarchist dream of capturing as much wealth as possible regardless of the collective price the world will pay, and yes to a bunch of other nefarious projects. But current liberal discourse always reverts to describing things in terms of negation: unfair, unequal, incoherent, unsustainable, uneducated, insane, and so on. But all those descriptions fail in one key way: what they don’t do is clearly and affirmatively describe Trump’s aim of killing vast numbers of people as proof of his “greatness.”

2025-05-22 the silence of the lames

Thu, 22 May 2025 10:20:00 GMT

I hope everyone, whatever their stance on Gaza and Israel, measures the responses to the assassination of the two Israeli embassy officials. I don’t mean everyone should get lost in the specifics like the particular merits of this or that detailed argument offered by so-and-so, but the generalities: how much people say, how often, how clearly, how committed they are, how loud or strident their language is, etc. My hunch: the overwhelming majority of people who present themselves as profoundly committed to the Palestinian cause won’t say a word. If so, I think that silence says a lot.

It’s not that everyone must have opinions on every little thing ever, but assassinating diplomats in DC isn’t exactly every little thing ever. If I’m not mistaken, the previous instances of diplomats being assassinated in DC were Orlando Letelier in ’73 and one obscure Israeli military official in ’76. So: (1) the last ones were FIFTY YEARS AGO, and (2) 3 out of 4 victims were Israelis. Assassinating diplomats anywhere is BIG FUCKING DEAL, but in DC is it’s a REALLY BIG FUCKING DEAL.

There is no world, no “timeline” or “playbook” as fake-savvy people like to say, in which this event can remotely be construed as acceptable. Pick your favorite despotic regime from the last half-century (Cambodia, Equatorial Guinea, Belarus, whatever), pick your favorite extenuating circumstance (covert operative of a murderous secret service, corrupt officials caught in intrigues, whatever), it should NEVER, EVER happen anywhere, let alone in DC (and “not here” is an excellent application of American exceptionalism).

tl;dr: This isn’t a question where anyone gets to, you know, not really have an opinion or, whatever, not feel too strongly about it or wait-and-see. If someone has ever said “violence isn’t the solution” or “opposed military aid” (an implicit appeal to diplomacy), or made some argument involving the right’s use of “stochastic terrorism,” or argued that “we must speak out now,” their view on this event should be a predetermined and resounding NO — NEVER.

And that’s why I hope everyone, whatever their stance on Gaza and Israel, measures the responses to this assassination. Because — as I reluctantly come to believe more and more with every day that passes — what people don’t say matters more than what they do say. And if they don’t say anything, their silence says they don’t really GAF.

I’ll leave it to others to ask what they don’t really GAF about, but my guess is that if the diplomats were from another country — let’s say Sweden, Botswana, or Costa Rica — people would be more inclined to say, very plainly, that this is completely unacceptable. The obvious implication is that Israel’s conduct over the last year and a half — which many people very reasonably see as genocidal — makes it somehow “understandable.”

If I’m right, spend a few moments meditating on the implications of that. For example, generalizing it: how would you draw the line between Israelis whose assassination would be somehow “understandable” versus those that wouldn’t be? Or flip it: what would you think if two Palestinian diplomats had been assassinated by someone who later shouted a kahanist slogan? Or broadened it: what would you think if this kind of assassination became a semi-regular event in the US, like mass-shootings? Or if many more Israelis had been assassinated — say, a dozen or two?

tl;dr: This one’s a no-brainer. If you have the moral and ethical compass to call Israel’s actions genocidal, you have the moral and ethical compass to call assassinating diplomats absolutely unacceptable.

Like I said, though, I expect very few people will say that. And I think their silence says a lot.

2025-05-20 a modest book proposal

Tue, 20 May 2025 11:35:00 GMT

🎩 Rick Perlstein for this image. It’s a pity that we’re at a point, historically speaking, when — justified or not — we view everything through the lens of tragedy rather than comedy. (It seems to me that the idea of “queering” points us toward the exit from that, but I digress.) AI’s tendency to exaggerate, to get things right-sounding but wrong in fact, to generate statistical grotesques on every level — these are all the hallmarks not of tragedy but of comedy: parody, irony, and cartoonishness to the point of slapststickery. It’s basically a stochastic comedy of manners. And in that view, the idea of a book review inventing books to review is brilliant and damning to a degree that would give Swift a run for his money.

2025-05-18 cervantes owns the libs

Sun, 18 May 2025 09:32:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking about how much of the traffic I see on coming from my fellow liberalish types consists of posts, memes, etc that say THIS IS FASCISM!!! and the like. It’s a bit perplexing because (a) they’re correct, just a decade late, and (b) they seem to think that endlessly pointing out the plainly obvious accomplishes anything constructive. I love you all etc, but I have bad news: it doesn’t. And it gets worse: endlessly repeating the infantile gesture of naming something also serves to call that name into question. Kinda like the boy who cried wolf, but update it with some serious media theory and insights about cognition.

There’s a reason that, a decade ago, I started to routinely ask “Is it acceptable in polite society to describe the GOP as ‘fascist’ yet?” Note that I didn’t ask whether the GOP were fascist (they plainly were). Instead, the question was about polite society and its norms. And liberals are still struggling with that obstacle — struggling, to be blunt, like a bunch of churlish tweens. On the one hand, they get to feel the bad-boy frisson of transgression: calling people mean names!!! On the other hand, they’re doing that transgressive-y stuff instead of something that involves more concrete risks and impacts — say, organizing durable coalitions with others from different socio-political-cultural-economic strata.

Anyway, I was thinking about this this morning and remembered one of my fave things, from, Cervantes’s introduction to Don Quixote, Volume 2:

There was in Cordova another madman who used to balance a piece of marble or other such stone—and not a light one either — on his head, and when he came across an unsuspecting dog, he went up to it and let the stone fall straight down onto it. The dog would be inordinately vexed and would go barking and yelping for three blocks. It happened that among the dogs onto which he discharged his load was one belonging to a hatmaker, whose owner loved him very much. He dropped his stone, it hit the dog’s head, the dog raised a fuss, the owner saw and heard what was going on, took a yardstick and ran out to the madman and didn’t leave a whole bone in his body. With every thwack he said: “You dog of a thief! My pointer? Didn’t you see, you cruel creature, that my dog is a pointer?” And he repeated the word POINTER many times, and sent the madman away beaten up. The madman learned a lesson from this, and he didn’t go to the plaza for more than a month, but finally returned with his usual game and with a heavier weight. He would go up to a dog, and after examining it carefully, he wouldn’t let the stone fall, saying: “This is a pointer, watch out!” So, every dog he saw, whether they were Great Danes or lapdogs, he said they were pointers, and never let the stone fall again.

The analogy isn’t perfect, but I’ll leave it to my compadres on the left who devote their lives to demanding that kind of perfectionism. And, as it happens, the same intro has an excellent analogy for the left’s fetish, endlessly ferreting out and quibbling over details without ever acknowledging the implied demand for perfection:

In Seville there dwelled a madman who came up with the most amusing nonsense and hobby that any madman ever dreamed up. And it was that he fashioned a tube with a sharp end, and would catch a dog in the street, or anywhere else, and with his foot he would hold down one of the dog’s back legs, and he would lift the other leg with his hand, and would fit the tube as well as he could into the place where, when he blew into it, he made the dog as round as a ball. Keeping it in this position, he would give it a couple of little slaps on its belly and would let it go…