Old people’s brains have been entirely cooked by the slop feeds that Meta produces. No parent worth their salt would trust these people to protect their kids. The EU should follow suit.

the law may infringe on the rights of young people and reduce their ability to participate in society

Since when is being spoon fed the worst advertising and content created by awful people looking to make a quick buck “participating in society”?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/29/meta-australia-social-media-ban-response

What China has done in industry after industry is to flatten the supply curve by subsidizing hordes of producers. This spurs innovation, increases output and crushes margins. Value is not being destroyed; it’s accruing to consumers as lower prices, higher quality and/or more innovative products and services.

If you are looking for returns in the financial statements of China’s subsidized companies, you are doing it wrong. If China’s subsidized industries are generating massive profits, policymakers should be investigated for corruption. 

A piece well worth reading about China’s economic policies if only for the fact that their flattening of supply curves is the only thing that is really fighting climate change.

Renaming half a street

An interesting article to read about how the city botched renaming the Manteuffelstraße to Audrey-Lord-Straße. I cycle past this street every day and I don’t think it’s a bad change. Unfortunately, they’ve done it in such a bad way that it’ll poison every person who hears about it against the very concept of government:

  • They failed to notify the people living there until after the change had already passed (incompetent!).
  • They decided to only rename part of the street (insane!).
  • Renaming part of the street forces the street numbers to be re-allocated (insane!).

„Im Nachhinein ist das eine ­gute Frage“, sagt Werner Heck von der ­Bezirksverordnetenversammlung (BVV) Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.

Werner Heck‘s statements are a good argument here for abolishing the entire concept of the BVV. If they couldn’t even be bothered to check-in on the implementation of one of their more material and prestigious measures, then what are they good for?

Heck sagt, es sei „nicht optimal“ gewesen, dass die involvierten Verwaltungsabteilungen „nicht miteinander gesprochen“ hätten.

This makes it clear that it is not uncommon for the Berlin administration to do things without talking to other departments. This is the way you would work, if you’re mentally entirely dead and checked out.

Das Bezirksamt erklärt, das „komplexe Verfahren“ solle künftig ressortübergreifend organisiert werden.

This sounds ‘good’ to the average German but it will in no way prevent these kind of problems from happening because the issue is not one of process or tactics, but one of culture.

All of these were unforced errors and you can ask yourself maybe they were actually intended to make a mockery of the entire process by a civil service that is politically opposed or too lazy to do any real work.

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/menschen/wenn-die-umbenennung-von-strassen-in-berlin-schief-geht-ich-kann-mir-nicht-mal-eine-pizza-bestellen-110102184.html

Project Power

I think “Project-Power” from this newsletter by Adam Tooze is going to be a useful concept going forward:

A project in this sense is the historically specific, intentional mobilization of multiple resources around a significant objective on whose success and failure important things depend.

I’m struck mostly by how bad the German government is at this. Every part of the country seems to be fully paralysed.

Highlights for Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

In modern justice and on the part of those who dispense it there is a shame in punishing, which does not always preclude zeal. This sense of shame is constantly growing: the psychologists and the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics proliferate on the wound it leaves.
Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64, every crime and even every offence now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization. Today the judge – magistrate or juror – certainly does more than ‘judge’.
But we can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use ‘lenient’ methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue – the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.
The very excess of the violence employed is one of the elements of its glory: the fact that the guilty man should moan and cry out under the blows is not a shameful side-effect, it is the very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force.
It was as if the sovereign power did not see, in this emulation of atrocity, a challenge that it itself threw down and which might one day be taken up: accustomed as it was to ‘seeing blood flow’, the people soon learnt that ‘it could be revenged only with blood’ (Lachère).
In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities.
The right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society. But it now finds itself recombined with elements so strong that it becomes almost more to be feared. The malefactor has been saved from a threat that is by its very nature excessive, but he is exposed to a penalty that seems to be without bounds. It is a return to a terrible ‘super-power’.
the injury that a crime inflicts upon the social body is the disorder that it introduces into it: the scandal that it gives rise to, the example that it gives, the incitement to repeat it if it is not punished, the possibility of becoming widespread that it bears within it.
Nothing so weakens the machinery of the law than the hope of going unpunished;
Let us hear once more what Servan has to say: the ideas of crime and punishment must be strongly linked and ‘follow one another without interruption … When you have thus formed the chain of ideas in the heads of your citizens, you will then be able to pride yourselves on guiding them and being their masters. A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain; this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires’ (Servan, 35).
If incorrigibles there be, one must be determined to eliminate them. But, for all the others, punishment can function only if it comes to an end.
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
Why would society eliminate a life and a body that it could appropriate? It would be more useful to make him ‘serve the state in a slavery that would be more or less extended according to the nature of his crime’;
Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony.
it was a change of scale, but it was also a new type of control.
‘The order and inspection that must be maintained require that all workers be assembled under the same roof, so that the partner who is entrusted with the management of the manufactory may prevent and remedy abuses that may arise among the workers and arrest their progress at the outset’ (Dauphin, 199).
By walking up and down the central aisle of the workshop, it was possible to carry out a supervision that was both general and individual: to observe the worker’s presence and application, and the quality of his work; to compare workers with one another, to classify them according to skill and speed; to follow the successive stages of the production process.
This obligatory syntax is what the military theoreticians of the eighteenth century called ‘manoeuvre’. The traditional recipe gives place to explicit and obligatory prescriptions. Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex. One is as far as possible from those forms of subjection that demanded of the body only signs or products, forms of expression or the result of labour. The regulation imposed by power is at the same time the law of construction of the operation.
In becoming the target for new mechanisms of power, the body is offered up to new forms of knowledge. It is the body of exercise, rather than of speculative physics; a body manipulated by authority, rather than imbued with animal spirits; a body of useful training and not of rational mechanics, but one in which, by virtue of that very fact, a number of natural requirements and functional constraints are beginning to emerge.
How can one capitalize the time of individuals, accumulate it in each of them, in their bodies, in their forces or in their abilities, in a way that is susceptible of use and control?
It is this disciplinary time that was gradually imposed on pedagogical practice – specializing the time of training and detaching it from the adult time, from the time of mastery; arranging different stages, separated from one another by graded examinations; drawing up programmes, each of which must take place during a particular stage and which involves exercises of increasing difficulty; qualifying individuals according to the way in which they progress through these series.
the special productive power of the combined working-day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power is due to cooperation itself (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 311–12)
Thus a new demand appears to which discipline must respond: to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed. Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine.
While jurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.
These mechanisms can only be seen as unimportant if one forgets the role of this instrumentation, minor but flawless, in the progressive objectification and the ever more subtle partitioning of individual behaviour.
the ‘admonitors’ were placed in charge of those ‘who talk or hum when studying their lessons and those who will not write and who waste their time in play’
It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network ‘holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised.
In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another.
They did not receive directly the image of the sovereign power; they only felt its effects – in replica, as it were – on their bodies, which had become precisely legible and docile.
And it is this inversion of visibility in the functioning of the disciplines that was to assure the exercise of power even in its lowest manifestations. We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.
It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.
It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work.
The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.
When, in the seventeenth century, the provincial schools or the Christian elementary schools were founded, the justifications given for them were above all negative: those poor who were unable to bring up their children left them ‘in ignorance of their obligations: given the difficulties they have in earning a living, and themselves having been badly brought up
‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.
it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.
The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity.
What, then, is the use of penal labour? Not profit; nor even the formation of a useful skill; but the constitution of a power relation, an empty economic form, a schema of individual submission and of adjustment to a production apparatus.
It was the most direct way of expressing ‘the intelligence of discipline in stone’ (Lucas, I, 69); of making architecture transparent to the administration of power;12 of making it possible to substitute for force or other violent constraints the gentle efficiency of total surveillance;
all this made it possible to canalize and to recover by a whole series of intermediaries the enormous profits from a sexual pleasure that an ever-more insistent everyday moralization condemned to semi-clandestinity and naturally made expensive; in setting up a price for pleasure, in creating a profit from repressed sexuality and in collecting this profit, the delinquent milieu was in complicity with a self-interested puritanism: an illicit fiscal agent operating over illegal practices.
The political use of delinquents – as informers and agents provocateurs – was a fact well before the nineteenth century.17 But, after the Revolution, this practice acquired quite different dimensions: the infiltration of political parties and workers’ associations, the recruitment of thugs against strikers and rioters, the organization of a sub-police – working directly with the legal police and capable if necessary of becoming a sort of parallel army – a whole extra-legal functioning of power was partly assured by the mass of reserve labour constituted by the delinquents: a clandestine police force and standby army at the disposal of the state.
Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison.
But he brought with him, at least potentially, a horizon of illegalities that had, until quite recently, represented a threat: this ruined petty bourgeois, of good education, would, a generation earlier, have been a revolutionary, a Jacobin, a regicide;19 had he been a contemporary of Robespierre, his rejection of the law would have taken a directly political form.
The criminal fait divers, by its everyday redundancy, makes acceptable the system of judicial and police supervisions that partition society; it recounts from day to day a sort of internal battle against the faceless enemy; in this war, it constitutes the daily bulletin of alarm or victory.
The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the last hundred years or more an enormous mass of ‘crime stories’ in which delinquency appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place.
In short, one should have a master, be caught up and situated within a hierarchy; one exists only when fixed in definite relations of domination
They were in a sense technicians of behaviour: engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality.
In this panoptic society of which incarceration is the omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside the law; he is, from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offence.
The carceral ‘naturalizes’ the legal power to punish, as it ‘legalizes’ the technical power to discipline.
resistance is to be found not in the prison as penal sanction, but in the prison with all its determinations, links and extra-judicial results; in the prison as the relay in a general network of disciplines and surveillances; in the prison as it functions in a panoptic régime.
The case of the Italian Mafia transplanted to the United States and used both to extract illicit profits and for political ends is a fine example of the colonization of an illegality of popular origin.

It’s become fashionable in tech circles to say that all legislation is bad. This is a dangerous and wildly ignorant way of thinking. Without legislation, many people would not survive and the very things that we depend on for a good life would not exist.

The Verge gets this right in their endorsement because they’re some of the smartest people in tech reporting.

https://www.theverge.com/24282022/kamala-harris-endorsement-presidential-election-2024

Reckoning with the Greens

After some occasional brushes with party politics and reading up on the minimal political agency that we foreigners get here, I dove in. The rise of right-wing sentiment seemed to be a good reason to become a member of the Greens just like I imagine it did for a number of people. Much good that did do if you see the continued rise of that sentiment and this Green government all but enabling right-wing parties with their politics of austerity.

I rescinded my Green Party membership a couple of months ago because of irreconcilable disagreements with their politics. Also because I don’t think they’re effective even at the things they want to do. That move put me way ahead of the Green youth wings many of whom recently exited the party for similar reasons and with a lot of fanfare.

Politics

A lot of my beef with the Greens (though by no means all of it) is for their hypocrisy when it comes to the Palestine question.

I don’t really have a stake in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I know more Israelis than Palestinians and get along with them fine. I’m opposed against theocratic movements and governments of all backgrounds. Still, in this conflict it is obviously apparent what is right and what is wrong and it has been obvious for decades.

This topic is too big to treat in whole and I hope there will be hundreds of reckonings of the past year in German politics at some point. I’ll just post my receipts and explain why they made the Green Party morally repugnant to me.

Cem Özdemir

Özdemir quotes Golda Meir at an Israel Solidarity event

I saw Özdemir in this video with many other high ranking German politicians quote Golda Meir saying: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” This is a vile bit of racism that should be unacceptable but to which nobody batted an eye back then.

Özdemir now is the mostly useless minister for agriculture in this Green government and his political views have not improved.

Baerbock

https://twitter.com/Strack_C/status/1735629355668173297

Baerbock sat here next to the person responsible for spreading IDF propaganda in Germany which you can understand consists mostly of lies and excuses for war crimes. Her fans will make lots of excuses for this but the optics of being this chummy with such a vile human being do not become any less terrible.

Baerbock now is the foreign minister in the current German government where her already questionable and empty platform of “feminist foreign policy” has devolved to the point where she is making passionate pleas in favour of war crimes in German parliament.

https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/1846186196419924294

Parliament

https://twitter.com/hahauenstein/status/1771455044098871704

The Green parliamentary fraction invited and posed with Daniel Ryan Spaulding, a comedian who’s made a name for himself now with increasingly racist anti-Palestinian bits.

Habeck

Habeck, the only functional politician in the German government, posted this sermon relatively quickly after the attacks. It has been much praised by mainstream Germany but every Palestinian and Arab listening to it will hear: “You are second class citizens. Your grievances are not real. You do not belong here.”

I didn’t think back then it was smart to put out a message alienating a sizeable minority in your country. I think I’ve been proven right.

Party

What the of the Green Party members themselves?

Inside the party itself on this topic I’ve seen mostly silence and a significant number of statements that would not be out of place in the AfD.

The Green youth wings who left the party did so because of (valid) political disagreements with the party establishment but none of them even once mentioned Palestine in the exit statements.

Party Membership

I don’t think party membership is a thing for most people. There are power dynamics at play which are the same in the Greens as they are everywhere else. In every party there are two classes of members:

  • Career politicians who have decades of experience and relationships in the party. They run everything.
  • Ordinary members who are there to volunteer at the local levels and support the party materially with their time or money.

These two classes have almost no interaction with each other. The mechanisms of inner party democracy (and pretty much any functional organisation) are setup in such a way that ordinary members can’t bother the people doing the “actual work”.

So what is the point of being a member if you don’t have time or money to give?

I would answer that for me there is no point in party membership. I don’t get anything out of it. I may keep voting for the Greens (for lack of better alternatives) and support them in one way or another, but I don’t need to be a member to do either of those things.

Maybe being a party member will be worth it for others who have more to give or who stand to get more out of it. That is a calculation that everybody needs to make for themselves.