This is the first time in history that the U.S. now has absolute proof
that Russian systems can penetrate the most advanced U.S. defenses.
Recall, that reportedly Ukraine was armed with the latest Pac-3
missiles, not the older Pac-2s,
etc. This has dire consequences for all European security as it proves
that Russian missiles can now penetrate any NATO base in Poland and
elsewhere with full impunity. In fact, these are the types of tectonic
moments that create generational doctrinal
shifts and change the calculus of defense postures entirely.
militarywatchmagazine | On May 16 as part of a complex series of strikes on the Ukrainian
capital Kiev the Russian Air Force employed the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal
hypersonic ballistic missile to neutralise a unit from an American
Patriot air defence system, destroying its a radar and a control centre
and reportedly at least one of its launchers. According to Russian
sources, the Ukrainian crew operating the Patriot were aware a strike
was incoming, but had only a limited warning time due to the Kinzhal
missile’s very high speed - limiting opportunities for the missile
system to change position or reload. The Patriot system targeted was one
of two delivered, with Germany and the United States having each
supplied a single unit. The unit reportedly fired 32 surface to air
missiles at the Kinzhal on approach, which at approximately $3 million
each amounted to a $96 million barrage to attempt to destroy a missile
with an estimated cost of under $2 million. The very high cost and
limited number of the Patriot’s interceptors was a key argument for not sending the systems to Ukraine, with their effectiveness also having been brought to question not only due to the system’s highly troubled combat record, but also to the advanced capabilities
of new Russian missiles such as the Kinzhal, Iskander and Zicron. These
are considered nearly impossible to intercept particularly in their
terminal stages. The delivery of Patriots was nevertheless seen as
necessary due to the near collapse of Ukrainian air defences, as warnings have been given
with growing frequency by both Western and Ukrainian sources that the
arsenal of S-300 and BuK missile systems protecting the country has
become critically depleted.
Destruction of the Patriot systems comes less than a month after the first systems were delivered in April, and follows a warning in December from Russian President Vladimir Putin that the destruction of the systems was an absolute certainty should
they be deployed in Ukraine. He assured that with Washington “now
saying that they can put a Patriot [in Ukraine]. Okay, let them do it.
We will crack the Patriot [like a nut] too, and something will need to
be installed in its place, new systems need to be developed - this is a
complex and lengthy process” - indicating that NATO had no newer
generations of long range air defence systems available to replace the
Patriot once its vulnerability was demonstrated. “Our adversaries
proceed from the idea that this is supposedly a defensive weapon. All
right, we'll keep that in mind. And an antidote can always be found,"
Putin added. The United States notably reassured Russia in
December that Patriot systems would not be manned by American
personnel, which was interpreted by some sources as an effective green
light to proceed with strikes. With Ukrainian personnel expected to take until 2024
to learn to operate Patriots, they are thought to have been manned by
contractors from NATO member states who are already acquainted with the
systems.
responsiblestatecraft | There might be a massive new Ukraine aid budget debate on the
horizon, as Uncle Sam is depleting the last one at a record pace and
Pentagon stockpiles are, by all accounts, running low.
According to a new report by Defense One,
some $36.4 billion of the $48.9 billion allocated for Ukraine-related
military aid since February 2022 has been delivered, contracted, or
“otherwise committed.” There is only $11.3 billion left, and it will
“run out in four months.”
The most recent allocation ($1.2 billion last week)
came under the U.S. Security Assistance Initiative, which means the
additional air defense systems, artillery rounds, and ammunition that
have been promised will be farmed out to U.S. defense contractors and
won’t be ready for shipment right away. Alternatively, aid has come via
the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which sends Ukraine weapons
directly from the Pentagon’s stockpiles. According to the Department of Defense,
there have been 37 such drawdowns totaling over $21 billion in weapons
and supplies since August 2021 when the U.S. first responded to Russian
forces massing along the border with Ukraine.
But now reports indicate that American stockpiles of HIMARS, Javelins, Stinger missiles, and 155 mm artillery rounds have been shrinking since late last year, and arms manufacturers are now scrambling to keep up.
This has led the U.S. to go out on an ammo-raising spree, gathering
pledges from allies and partners. Some, like South Korea, have resisted
but found a way to comply. According to the Wall Street Journal,
Washington has sent Ukraine more than one million rounds of 155 mm
caliber ammunition, and allies and partners have contributed more on top
of that. Moreover, NATO and European partners are being pressed to send
whatever they have from their own stockpiles for Ukraine’s anticipated
counteroffensive.
So where does this leave us? It would seem that defense contractors
need additional money and capacity to backfill the stores. Without more,
Ukraine with be under-supplied for both its counteroffensive and
whatever follows it. Meanwhile, American stockpiles are waning, which
hurts readiness.
One congressional aide “who closely tracks the issue” told POLITICO this week
that the money to draw down existing U.S. stockpiles will expire in
July. According to the report, which speculated when and how big the
next aid package will be, “that would mean the flow of equipment could
be disrupted if Kyiv has to wait an extended period for a new tranche of
funding.” Would it be included in the appropriations process, or a
supplemental? “I expect there will need to be a supplemental at some
point,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) told POLITICO. “It’s also clear
that it’s taken far too long to get munitions and tanks delivered to the
Ukrainians.”
But as Sam Skove points out in his Defense One report, there is the nagging issue of Republican members of Congress who have said they would not support another “blank check” to Ukraine and
would expect not only greater oversight but also an articulation of a
diplomatic strategy for ending the war before they would support another
multi-billion-dollar package. Their position not only reflects a need
for a full accounting for where the money is going, but also concern
that the American economy right now cannot afford what has become the
most expensive U.S.-war-that-is-not-a-U.S.-war in history.
MoA | In the 1990s and early 2000s Biden supported bankruptcy reform that made it more difficult, especially for the poor, to get rid of debt:
[Biden] had pushed for two earlier bankruptcy reform bills
in 2000 and 2001, both of which failed. But in 2005, BAPCPA made it
through, successfully erecting all kinds of roadblocks for Americans
struggling with debt, and doing so just before the financial crisis of
2008. Since BAPCPA passed, Chapter 13 filings went from representing
just 24 percent of all bankruptcy filings per year to 39 percent in
2017.
In 1984 he proposed
freezing Social Security benefits — that is, ending cost-of-living
adjustments that boost benefits to keep up with inflation. In January
1995 he gave a speech endorsing a balanced budget amendment (an utterly lunatic policy)
and boasted about his previous record of proposing "that we freeze
every single solitary program in the government, anything the government
had to do with, every single solitary one, that we not spend a penny
more, not even accounting for inflation, than we spent the year before."
In November 1995 he did so again,
boasting that "I tried with Senator Grassley back in the '80s to freeze
all government spending, including Social Security, including
everything."
There are other non-progressive laws and several wars that had
Biden's support. In the current fight over the debt ceiling the
Republicans demand cuts to several welfare bills. It is certainly not
obvious that Biden is against those. He may well be using the debt
ceiling fight to push for politics he favors but which a majority of
Democrats would otherwise oppose.
Talks have been held in the White House with Senate and House
majority and minority leaders. There were no serious results because the
Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer held Biden back from making concessions to the Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy:
The California Republican had vented to his colleagues just
hours before the meeting that the current format of negotiations — with
all four party leaders in a room with the president — wasn’t fruitful.
Speaking to his conference on Tuesday morning, McCarthy said the five of
them had achieved little in their first sitdown last week, arguing that
Schumer had prevented Biden from fully engaging with the speaker and McConnell, according to two people familiar with his remarks. Whenever Biden did seem to agree with Republicans, McCarthy said Schumer would try to cut him off.
The talks will now continue without the Senate leadership:
Leaders agreed to narrow a bicameral negotiation down to
Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Biden, hoping fewer players might be more
productive in reaching a bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling. Even
then, it looks like a longshot to some Senate Democrats.
That setting will give Biden the opportunity to make 'concessions'
that are favored by his rich donors but opposed by a majority of people
who voted for him. He will then sell those by presenting them as the
only possible step to take. Maggie Thatcher's "There is no alternative!"
will again succeed.
The current due date for a debt ceiling deal is Friday:
Reflecting the growing sense of urgency, the White House
announced Tuesday that the president will cut short his trip to Asia and
now plans return to Washington on Sunday in order to resume
negotiations with Republicans as soon as possible.
Biden will depart Wednesday for a trip to Japan but will no longer
make stops in Papua New Guinea and Australia before returning stateside.
1. Russia launches drones towards Patriot system in kiev
2. Patriot radar picks up swarm of drones approaching kiev
3. Patriot is activated and launches its full set of missiles (32)
4. Patriot radar activation gives away its exact location to Russian receptors
5. Russia launches Khinzal missile at the now exposed Patriot system
6. Boom!
The total cost of the Kinzhal strike on the Patriot
system. About $158,000,000 for the missiles. A radar was clearly hit.
And a launcher. That is not the entire system, of course. The cost of a
Patriot system is 1.1 billion. 400,000,000
for the system. 690,000,000 for the missiles. How much damage did the
Kinzhals do to the "system'. Probably $200,000,000 worth (conservative
guess). So... total cost close to $400,000,000 -- IN JUST 2 MINUTES. A
lot of money and the US is heading for a debt
crisis. As I have argued, Putin calls the war with Ukraine an SMO
because he reckons that the real war is beyond -- WWIII--hybrid
military, economic, cultural. The longer Ukraine keeps on fighting in
America's loincloth as we say here in Japan, the weaker
America becomes with its balls in the wind.
After all, a good deal
of evidence suggests that the administration’s real—if only
semi-acknowledged—objective is to topple Russia’s government. The
draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were
designed to crash its economy. As the New York Times reported, these sanctions have
ignited questions in Washington and in European capitals over whether
cascading events in Russia could lead to “regime change,” or rulership
collapse, which President Biden and European leaders are careful to
avoid mentioning.
By repeatedly labeling Putin a “war criminal” and a murderous
dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his
predecessors deployed against Noriega, Milošević, Qaddafi, and Saddam
Hussein) has circumscribed Washington’s diplomatic options, rendering
regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome.
I counted 30 Patriot PAC-3 MSE launches here.
The FY2024 costs of these per missile is about $$5,275,000
That was $158,250,000 fired in about two minutes. And as we see, the battery or something else likely got blown up. So it failed in its mission. pic.twitter.com/9rwPnHkNGu
Diplomacy requires an
understanding of an adversary’s interests and motives and an ability to
make judicious compromises. But by assuming a Manichaean view of world
politics, as has become Washington’s reflexive posture, “compromise, the
virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes the treason of the new,” as the
foreign policy scholar Hans Morgenthau put it, “for the mutual
accommodation of conflicting claims . . . amounts to surrender when the
moral standards themselves are the stakes of the conflict.”
Washington, then, will not entertain an end to the conflict until
Russia is handed a decisive defeat. Echoing previous comments by Biden,
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal
is to weaken Russia militarily. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has
repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is
not serious about peace. For its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will
settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory
occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro
Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on
Russia to induce its political collapse.
Of course, the same momentum pushing toward a war in pursuit of
overweening ends catapults Washington into pursuing a war employing
unlimited means, an impulse encapsulated in the formula, endlessly
invoked by Washington policymakers and politicians: “Whatever it takes,
for as long as it takes.” As the United States and its NATO allies pour
ever more sophisticated weapons onto the battlefield, Moscow will likely
be compelled (from military necessity, if not from popular domestic
pressure) to interdict the lines of communication that convey these
weapons shipments to Ukraine’s forces, which could lead to a direct
clash with NATO forces. More importantly, as Russian casualties
inevitably mount, animosity toward the West will intensify. A strategy
guided by “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes” vastly increases
the risk of accidents and escalation.
The proxy war embraced by Washington today would
have been shunned by the Washington of the Cold War. And some of the
very misapprehensions that have contributed to the start of this war
make it far more dangerous than Washington acknowledges. America’s NATO
expansion strategy and its pursuit of nuclear primacy both emerge from
its self-appointed role as “the indispensable nation.” The menace Russia
perceives in that role—and therefore what it sees as being at stake in
this war—further multiply the danger. Meanwhile, nuclear
deterrence—which demands careful, cool, and even cooperative monitoring
and adjustment between potential adversaries—has been rendered wobbly
both by U.S. strategy and by the hostility and suspicion created by this
heated proxy war. Rarely have what Morgenthau praised as the virtues of
the old diplomacy been more needed; rarely have they been more abjured.
Neither Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war
aims in full. Notwithstanding its proclaimed annexation of the Luhansk,
Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson administrative districts, Moscow is
unlikely to establish complete control over them. Ukraine is similarly
unlikely to recapture all of its pre-2014 territory lost to Moscow.
Barring either side’s complete collapse, the war can end only with
compromise.
Reaching such an accord would be extremely difficult. Russia would
need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute
significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine. For its
part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk
and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised
by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would
grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional
Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas. More painfully, Kyiv would need to
concede Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a
land bridge between the peninsula and Russia. A peace settlement would
need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic
relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union
(to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its
rules). Most important of all—given that the specter of Ukraine’s NATO
membership was the precipitating cause of the war—Kyiv would need to
forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality.
Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s
goal of recovering the “entire territory” occupied by Russia since 2014,
and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that
Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the
war. Make no mistake, such an accord would need to make allowances for
Russia’s security interests in what it has long called its “near-abroad”
(that is, its sphere of influence)—and, in so doing, would require the
imposition of limits on Kyiv’s freedom of action in its foreign and
defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty).
Such a compromise, guided by the ethos of the old diplomacy, would be
anathema to Washington’s ambitions and professed values. Here, again,
the lessons, real and otherwise, of the Cuban Missile Crisis apply. To
enhance his reputation for toughness, Kennedy and his closest advisers
spread the story that they forced Moscow to back down and unilaterally
withdraw its missiles in the face of steely American resolve. In fact,
Kennedy—shaken by the apocalyptic potentialities of the crisis that he
had largely provoked—secretly acceded to Moscow’s offer to withdraw its
missiles from Cuba in exchange for Washington’s withdrawing its missiles
from Turkey and Italy. The Cuban Missile Crisis was therefore resolved
not by steadfastness but by compromise.
But because that quid pro quo was successfully hidden from a
generation of foreign policy makers and strategists, from the American
public, and even from Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own vice president,
JFK and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the
face of what the United States construes as aggression, together with
the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering
that aggression, define a successful national security strategy. These
false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis were one of the main reasons
that Johnson was impelled to confront supposed Communist aggression in
Vietnam, regardless of the costs and risks. The same false lessons have
informed a host of Washington’s interventions and regime-change wars
ever since—and now help frame the dichotomy of “appeasement” and
“resistance” that defines Washington’s response to the war in Ukraine—a
response that, in its embrace of Wilsonian belligerence, eschews
compromise and discrimination based on power, interest, and
circumstance.
Even more repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole
superpower would be the conditions required to reach a comprehensive
European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. That
settlement, also guided by the old diplomacy, would need to resemble the
vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and
Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War. It would need to
resemble Gorbachev’s notion of a “common European home” and Charles
de Gaulle’s vision of a European community “from the Atlantic to the
Urals.” And it would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what
de Gaulle labeled it): an instrument to further the primacy of a
superpower across the Atlantic.
thelastamericanvagabond | For those who have not closed their eyes to the integration of
leading unreconstructed Nazis, Italian Fascist, and Japanese fascists
into the Anglo-American intelligence complex after World War Two this
celebration is bitter sweet to say the least.
As Cynthia Chung demonstrated in her book The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,
between 1958-1973, every single head of NATO’s central European command
were former Nazi SS officers. And as Swiss historian Daniele Ganser
demonstrated in his NATO’s Secret Armies,
the Cold War served as the excuse to build a vast paramilitary complex
using fascists from Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, and Germany in order
to carry out a multi-faceted war on the people of Europe through the
organization of terrorist organizations like The Red Brigade and the
targeting assassinations of nationalist leaders unwilling to adapt to a
new depopulation-oriented world order.
Sadly, this devil’s pact
was not something that simply occurred in the wild days of the Cold War,
but continues virulently to this day on a number of levels.
Modern Nazi Revivalist Movements
For example, modern expressions of fascism can be seen in the renewal of swastika-tattooed, black sun of the occult loving, wolfsangel-wearing Azov,
C14, Svoboda and Aidar neo-Nazis in Ukraine today, on top of a whole
re-writing of WWII history which has taken an accelerated dive into
unreality during the 30 years since the Soviet Union collapsed.
Across the spectrum of post Warsaw Pact members absorbed into NATO,
such as Lithuania, Estonia, Albania, Slovakia, and Latvia, Nazi
collaborators of WWII have been glorified with statues, public plaques,
monuments, and even schools, parks, and streets named after Nazis.
Celebrating Nazi collaborators while tearing down pro-Soviet monuments
has nearly become a pre-condition for any nation wishing to join NATO.
In
Estonia, which joined NATO in 2004, the defense ministry-funded Erna
Society has celebrated the Nazi Erna Saboteur group that worked with the
Waffen SS in WWII with the Erna advance Guard being raised to official national heroes. In Albania, Prime Minister Edi Rama rehabilitated Nazi collaborator Midhat Frasheri, who deported thousands of Kosovo Jews to death camps.
In
Lithuania, the pro-Nazi Lithuanian Activist Front leader Juozas Lukša
who carried out atrocities in Kaunas was honored as a national hero by
an act of Parliament which passed a resolution dubbing “the year 2021 as the year of Juozas Luksa-Daumantas”. In Slovakia,
the ‘Our Slovakia Peoples Party’ led by neo-Nazi Marián Kotleba moved
from the fringe to mainstream wining 10% of parliamentary seats in 2019.
Finland
has become a new member of NATO which will possibly be joined by
Sweden, both of whom share deep unresolved pro-Nazi traditions which are
slowly coming to the surface once more as I outlined in Nazi Skeletons in Finland and Sweden’s Closets.
Eugenics
has become once more a governing pseudo science of a fascist elite
class of social engineers seeking to breed out undesired traits in the
population while reducing the overall population levels to manageable
numbers — using the same formulas adopted by Hitler and his
collaborators in the 1930s -1940s.
The fact is that a certain
something wasn’t resolved on the 9th of May, 1945 which has a lot to do
with the slow re-emergence of a new form of fascism during the second
half of the 20th century and the renewed danger of a global dictatorship
which the world faces again today.
mcluhangalaxy | “We have never stopped interfering drastically with ourselves by every
technology we could latch onto,” Marshall McLuhan said in 1966. “We have
absolutely disrupted our lives over and over again. Unimpeded, the
logic of this sort of world is stasis.”
McLuhan believed deeply in man’s need to comfort his self from the
onslaught of a world that seemed hostile from birth, and while
masturbation is the act of physically imitating creation, it is in
creating false media environments that man has found the greatest
comfort for his psyche.
Were McLuhan alive today, he would perhaps take great interest in two
particular aspects of modern society. The first of these aspects is the
increasingly violent nature of our world, in both the physical world
and its various media counterparts.
“When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity, you are a
nobody, therefore you get very tough,” he said in 1977. “You have to
prove you are somebody, and so you become very violent…ordinary people
find the need for violence as they lose their identities.”
What does this say about a world where violence, both real and
imagined, increases at a rate matched only by the proliferation of new
media? I believe it says that media is responsible for a world that is
increasingly violent, but not in a manner that censoring sex and
violence is capable of curbing. The nature of media is that which it is
given by man, and we have given it the nature of removing from us our
natural selves. We relinquish aspects of our identity so that we might
take shelter in the constructs that we have created to shield us from
the harsh frontiers we encounter. At each new threshold, collective
identity is lost, and with each new loss comes an increase in our
capacity for violence.
If Marshal McLuhan had lived to see his 100th year in 2011, he might
have marveled less at our technology than at our hunger for nostalgia.
It was an area of particular interest for the author and media scholar,
who said that one result of the electronic age would be a loss of
private identity owing to the discarnate being that one becomes when
broadcast electronically. Lacking a physical body in the electronic
sphere, one’s relationship to the world around them changes.
“One of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia, revivals
of clothing, dances, music and shows,” he said. “We live by the revival,
it tells us who we are, or were.”
ET | Censorship
is the cudgel that is out there. Censorship and cancellation are the
two cudgels that are being used against us. It’s absolutely remarkable
how easily we’ve gone from free speech to asking, “How can I make my way
around the censorship that’s here?” We have skipped over the outrage
phase, which might have led us to a more vigorous protection. Granted, a
lot of boiling frog-type dynamics were built into the censorship
regime.
But
if you’ve been looking for the last 20 years at our press, September
11th brought a quantum leap in this need to marshal people into
categories and to prohibit certain things and certain words and certain
positions from entering into the public sphere. In 2001, Susan Sontag,
one of the great American intellectuals, wrote about having some
questions about the way the new war on terror was being pursued, and she
was hooted down.
We’re
beginning to see that a lot of this hooting down is not as spontaneous
as many of us would like to believe. With the recent Twitter Files, and
the case that the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana are trying
now, we’re finding out that this was anything but spontaneous. There
were a number of government actors working in concert with private
actors to achieve a censorship that, frankly, for those of us of a
certain age, is unimaginable.
You
used to be able to say, “I have the First Amendment. Screw you. I’m
going to say what I’m going to say.” We’ve gone from that to, “I have to
be on guard because someone’s always watching me.” We went down this
hole fairly quickly, and it’s very troubling.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is the treason of the experts, I suppose.
Mr. Harrington:
Yes. If you have been lucky enough to have a mentor in your life, what
is a mentor? A mentor is someone who leads you along, who suggests, who
looks at you and says, “What skills does this young person have that
they are not aware of ?” They do an inquiry into that person and suggest
and lead along, and then say implicitly, “How can I help this young
person be the best version of themselves as I see it?” That is what an
expert does. They do not impose a reality on anyone.
They
are very aware of the power they have through their social title, but
more often through their moral force. They realize that it’s a sacred
thing that they have, and that it needs to be treated with the care that
you treat treasures in your life, and that you don’t abuse it. They
need to be very rigorous and be able to look at and check some of their
ego impulses, and then ask, “Am I using this power to satisfy my ego
gratification, more than I am to help the people that I say I am
helping?”
It
seems that that line has been crossed. There’s a lot of ego
gratification that is interfering with what should be a real sober
taking of responsibility for a gift of power. Power is a gift in a
democratic society. It’s not something you own, and it’s not something
there to make people obey you. It’s a gift you have that hopefully you
can use in constructive ways that preserve the dignity of those who
don’t have as much power as you do.
With
the term treason of the experts, I’m playing with history a bit here
with the title. It’s from a famous book that was written by Julien Benda
after the First World War. He was an intellectual. As you know, the
First World War was one of the great cataclysms in the history of the
world, with violence that few people had ever seen.
When
you go back and study it, you can look at what the violence was about,
and the cynicism with which the violence was employed. Leaders marched
their hundreds of thousands of troops so that they could get a tiny
strip of land. It was an open auctioning of soldiers to be fed into the
machine.
Benda
wrote this book in 1927 called, “La Trahison des Clercs,” the Treason
of the Clerisy. What he’s playing with is that in the world after the
late 19th century, the church clerisy began to recede as an important
element in society, to be superseded by the intellectual. The
independent intellectual was made possible through newspapers and the
publishing industry. The new clerisy, as he’s suggesting, are the free
intellectuals.
He
suggests that the role of the free intellectual is to always be
rigorous and to always place themselves above their passions to the best
extent they can and say, “What’s really going on here?” He wrote a
devastating critique in the mid-1920s in which he takes on both the
French intellectuals and the German intellectuals. He said, “They
betrayed our trust. They acted as cheerleaders. They sent young men off
to war to get destroyed, and became cheerleaders of gross propaganda.”
He said, “Come on. We’ve got to reassume the responsibility that goes
with having been granted a credential or a moment in power.” The first
thing I thought about when this began three years ago was World War I.
Mr. Jekielek:
This being Covid?
Mr. Harrington:
Covid. The Covid triennial that we’re in now. In March of 2020, and
you’ll see it in the first essay in the book where I say, “What’s going
on here?” My mind immediately went to World War I. There were big forces
that were pushing us in ways that didn’t add up. There were hidden
hands in places making us do things that simply were not justified at
the level of pure rational analysis. I was very grateful that I had
studied a bit of World War I.
There’s
another wonderful book where you can see some of the madness. It’s by
Stefan Zweig, who was a wonderful intellectual back in that time. He
talks about what happened in 1914 in Vienna. He thought, “We’ve reached
the highest civilization that the world has ever seen.” He was a
Viennese Jew. His friends had been integrated into Viennese life, and
they were leading Viennese life in many ways.
All
of a sudden, they were saying, “Don’t you want to go off to the
trenches? Shouldn’t you be going off to the trenches? Shouldn’t you be
excited? I’m going to go. Isn’t it wonderful?” He began to say, “What’s
going on in this world that I thought was civilized?” I had the very
same reaction in March of 2020.
Mr. Jekielek:
Some people think that this is being done for their own good. It’s not
that there are nefarious forces with their own agendas. A lot of these
folks genuinely believe in this incredibly dystopian vision of the
world, that this is really the right thing to do, and that it will be
good for me and good for you. There is a line that I flagged in the
book, “Ever more open disdain for the intelligence of the citizenry.”
There’s hubris here. That’s particularly infuriating, isn’t it?
Mr. Harrington:
Absolutely. It’s condescension, and I’ve always had a very thin skin for
people being condescending to me. One of the nice things that my
parents did in general was they talked to us as sentient beings almost
from the beginning. It’s one of the things I’ve sought to do with both
my children and with my students.
The
condescending idea is that you need to dole it out and say, “If I told
you, you might not understand. I’m coming from a place of complexity
that you can’t understand. You’ll just have to trust me.” This is very
insulting to people, and it’s antidemocratic. That’s just a fact.
The
premise of democracy, as we understand it, and as it was formed in this
country in the late 18th century, was that the farmer, the worker, and
the lawyer were all citizens in the same measure. Granted, there would
be a natural pecking order in terms of certain skill sets that would
emerge. But in the public space, no one was inherently better or in a
place to tell someone else what they need to know and how they need to
live. It’s one of the great things about this country.
jacobin |David Moscrop: Well, speaking of grifts, let’s talk about Twitter.
The site was never a utopian online space, but it was previously at
least better than it is now. What’s driving its collapse beyond Elon
Musk purchasing it? Is there something better out there or something
better to come?
Cory Doctorow: I think we should thank Elon Musk for what he’s doing
because I think a lot of the decay of platforms and the abuses that
enable that decay is undertaken slowly and with the finest of lines, so
that it’s very hard to point at it and say that it’s happening. And
Musk, a bit like Donald Trump, instead of moving slowly and with a very
fine-tip pencil, he kind of grabs a crayon in his fist and he just
scrawls. This can help to bring attention to issues on which it would
otherwise be difficult to reach a consensus.
With Musk and with Trump, it’s much easier to identify the pathology
at play and do something about it — and actually get people to
understand what the struggle’s contours are and to join the struggle. I
think in a very weird way, we should be thankful to Musk and Trump for
this.
The pathology that I think that Musk is enacting in high speed is
something I call “enshitification.” Enshitification is a specific form
of monopoly decay that is endemic to digital platforms. And the platform
is the canonical form of the digital firm. It’s like a pure rentier
intermediary business where the firm has a set of users or buyers and it
has a set of business customers or sellers, and it intermediates
between them. And it does so in a low competition environment where
antitrust law or competition laws are not vigorously enforced.
To the extent that it has access to things like capital, it can
leverage its resources to buy potential competitors or use predatory
pricing to remove potential competitors from the market. Think about
Uber losing forty cents on the dollar for thirteen years to just
eliminate yellow cabs and starve public transit investment by making it
seem like there’s a viable alternative in rideshare vehicles. And we see
predatory pricing and predatory acquisition in many, many, many
domains.
Jeff Bezos is a grocer twice over. He runs a company called Amazon
Fresh that’s an all-digital grocer and he runs a company called Whole
Foods that’s an analog grocer. And if Amazon Fresh wants to gouge on the
price of eggs, he just clicks a mouse and the price of eggs changes on
the platform; he can even change the price for different customers or at
different times of the day. If Whole Foods wants to change the price of
eggs, they need teenagers on roller skates with pricing guns. And so,
the ability to play the shell game really quickly is curtailed in the
analog world.
The digital world does the same things that mediocre sociopath
monopolists did in the Gilded Age, but they do it faster and with
computers. And in some ways, this contributes to the kind of mythology
surrounding the digital world’s Gilded Age equivalents. They can compose
themselves as super geniuses because they’re just doing something fast
and with computers that makes it look like an amazing magic trick, even
though it’s just the same thing, but fast. And the way that this cycle
unfolds is you use this twiddling to allocate surpluses — that is, to
give goodies to end users so they come into the platform. This is things
like loss-leaders and subsidized shipping.
In the case of Facebook or Twitter, it’s “you tell us who you want to
hear from and we’ll tell you when they say something new.” That’s a
valuable proposition; that’s a cool and interesting technology. And then
you want to bring business customers onto the platform. And so, you’ve
got to withdraw some surplus from the end users. So, you start spying on
end users and using that to make algorithmic recommendations.
Just look at grocery stores in Canada. Loblaws is buying its competitors, engaged in predatory pricing,
and abusing both its suppliers and customers to extract monopoly rents
and leave everyone worse off. But there’s a thing that happens in the
digital world that’s different. Digital platforms have a high-speed
flexibility that is not really present in analog businesses.
John D. Rockefeller was doing all this stuff one hundred twenty years
ago, but if Rockefeller was like, “I secretly own this train line and I
use the fact that it’s the only way to get oil to market to exclude my
rivals, and I’m worried that there’s a ferry line coming that will offer
an alternate route that will be more efficient,” he can’t just click a
mouse and build another train line that offers the service more cheaply
until the ferry line goes out of business and then abandon the train
line. The non-digital example is capital intensive, and it demands
incredibly slow processes. With digital, you can do a thing that I call
“twiddling,” which is just changing the business logic really quickly.
consentfactory | To: Ella G. Irwin, Head of Trust and Safety, Twitter, Inc. cc: Elon Musk
Dear Ms. Irwin,
This open letter is further to our brief correspondence on May 3,
2023 (on Twitter) regarding Twitter’s censorship and defamation of my
@consent_factory Twitter account with fake “age-restricted adult
content” labels for approximately two years.
First, thank you for taking action to cease and desist from further
censorship and defamation. From what I can tell, it appears that Twitter
is removing or has removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels
from the @consent_factory Twitter account’s Tweets (or at least going
back to late 2021). I trust that these fake “age-restricted adult
content” labels will be removed from all of the account’s
Tweets in due course, and I appreciate your prompt attention to this
matter. Please accept my apology for claiming that you had lied about
taking action on this. I admit, after two years of being censored and
defamed, and having my complaints ignored by Twitter, I have become
rather skeptical regarding your company’s behavior and statements. That
said, it is clear now that you were not lying, and that you have taken
action to have the fake, defamatory labels in question removed, and I
apologize for publicly claiming otherwise.
Assuming the process is eventually completed and all of the fake,
defamatory “adult content” labels that Twitter has been censoring the
@consent_factory Twitter account with are in fact removed, I would
appreciate substantive answers to the following questions:
(1) Why and exactly how did Twitter start censoring and
defaming my Consent Factory account with these fake, defamatory “adult
content” labels? When I asked you to explain that in our correspondence, you replied:
Clearly, the account did not “post multiple tweets
containing sensitive content (nazi imagery) that resulted in the
sensitive content label being applied,” because Twitter has now removed
the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from those Tweets, which
contain the same “Nazi imagery” they originally contained. As I am sure
you have noted, the so-called “Nazi imagery” contained in those Tweets
was simply historical photos of the Nazi Germany era, which were used to
illustrate critical points I was making in opposition to totalitarianism,
and not at all any type of celebration or approval of totalitarianism
or fascism. Any rational adult, seeing those Tweets, could not possibly
mistake the anti-fascist/totalitarian intent behind them. Also, the fact
that the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels are being removed
gradually, in stages, rather than all at once, suggests that the
application of the fake labels (or “interstitials”)
in question was not the result of a blanket algorithm applied to the
account. Additionally, not every Tweet (or every Tweet containing an
image) by this account was censored with a fake “interstitial,” which
suggests that something other than a blanket algorithm was at work.
In any event, having been censored and defamed for two years by
Twitter, Inc., I think I am entitled to an actual explanation of how
this started, including documentation of any intra-company discussions
or “log” notes in connection with the decision to begin censoring and
defaming the account. Your substantive response to this request will
demonstrate that the “new” Twitter is, in fact, committed to
transparency, and free speech, and not just another element of the
“Censorship Industrial Complex,” as Michael Shellenberger and Matt
Taibbi dubbed it, before Mr. Musk cut off access to the “Twitter Files.”
(2) What, if any, other restrictions/visibility filtering
tactics have been applied to my @consent_factory Twitter account from
2020 to the present? Again, I would appreciate documentation of
any such “visibility filtering” or other “restrictions” and/or the
removal thereof. Having been censored and maliciously defamed by Twitter
for years, I believe I am entitled to know how my “visibility” is being
and/or has been “filtered.”
(3) What steps is Twitter, Inc. now taking to cease and
desist from the type of malicious defamation the company has been
engaging in to suppress political speech and damage the reputation and
income of writers, like me, and independent media outlets, like, for
example, OffGuardian? Twitter blocks links to all OffGuardian articles with a different fake, defamatory “interstitial” warning.
There is nothing “unsafe” about OffGuardian,
or any content published on the website that could possibly “lead to
real-world harm.” It is a small, independent news and commentary outlet.
Twitter, Inc. is using the fake “interstitial” warning above to
discourage users from visiting the site, and thus damaging OffGuardian’s
reputation and income. This is just one further example (i.e., in
addition to my case). Twitter’s continued use of fake, defamatory,
“interstitial” labels to suppress political views is relatively
widespread, as far as I can tell. Moreover, recent updates to Twitter’s Platform Use Guidelines
make it clear that Twitter intends to continue using these
“interstitials,” which is worrying, given the fact that the company has
been using them to deceive people, and to suppress political speech, and
to damage the reputations and incomes of small businesses and sole
proprietors.
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